The scoop has interesting bits indeed! I am fine with almost all of these things, or at least I can live with them:
- different ability bonuses to AC: cannot comment yet, sounds very odd but OTOH it could be an attempt at reducing the importance of Dex, which is the best stat in 3ed
- new penalties for lack of armor proficiency: while I'd have done a bigger penalty than -2, this isn't anyway better or worse than 3e, so it's ok for me
- Light/Medium armor: I don't think that going from 3 to 2 is a significant simplification, but it doesn't bother me; I'm a bit disappointed instead by the fact that there are only 6 basic armors... maybe that's just me but I always wished there were many more armors than the 12 basic ones of 3ed (not as many as basic weapons, but maybe half of that number would be great)
- donning times: in my own XP, these rules are among those we NEVER EVER needed to use... the 4e rules are better than 3e in this case because they set a minimum (5 min) and then basically let the DM decide for variants [this is NOT the kind of verisimilitude I want in a RPG]
- masterwork armors: I'd like masterwork stuff (special materials or special crafting methods) to be more present in the game than before, so I'm in favor of these additions; the names aren't that terrible for me, perhaps the only nitpick is that they seem a bit monothematic with the astral plane
So, the only thing I dislike seriously is the astral diamonds. Not because I don't want something like that to exist in our world, but because putting them among the
default currency sounds (to me!) truly lame.... it's evidently just an attempt at scaling up the currency for high-level heroes. That tells me that once again D&D cannot work without assuming that everything works by money even among the stars and the gods
