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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Stalker0" data-source="post: 4096048" data-attributes="member: 5889">Thing is, that's actually very hard to do.How do you balance armor:1) By cost? Players will always spend their money to get the best protection they can afford. Eventually they will all get their plate mail once they have the money. Or else plate will be too expensive, and no one will get it. This balance can explain why npcs wouldn't have heavy armor though, and it certainly explains how you don't get a 1000 man army all in plate mail.2) By adding penalties? Fighter types in 3e quickly learned that AC is a lot more important in most cases than the armor check penalty on a balance check, or a bit of speed. So either you make those balance checks really important, screwing the fighter who no longer can take advantage of that heavy armor he wants, or limiting the checks....in which cases more armor is still better.3) By requiring training. This seems to be 4e's way to do it. The reason this didn't work in 3e is that multiclassing made it very easy to put up all the armor proficiencies you needed. Further, mithral usually meant that the proficiencies were not even required. In 4e, it doesn't look like multiclassing will get you armor profs, and I think mithral is gone.That means that plate mail is ALWAYS wanted, but only obtained by the special few that take the feats or have the profs to wear it.</blockquote>