Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rogue Agent" data-source="post: 5924495" data-attributes="member: 6673496">Not entirely accurate. If your Dex modifier is -1, then studded leather gives you AC 12 and ringmail gives you AC 13.But, yes, for any neutral or positive Dex modifier studded leather is superior.This appears to be the general point: The higher your Dex modifier, the more you'll benefit from lighter armor. The lower you Dex modifier, the heavier the armor you'll want to wear.My read of the rules is that the goal is for most PCs to have an AC of 16 to 19, with magic pushing it up from there.With that being said, the speed penalty to heavy armor makes it look like a really bad deal. If the idea is to essentially achieve armor parity, then they should drop the speed penalty for heavy armors. (It's not particularly realistic in any case.)Yup. It gets into that <a href="http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2316/roleplaying-games/the-importance-of-choice" target="_blank">choice vs. calculation</a> thing. If all you're doing is trying to maximize your success along one axis, there is no real choice: There's only the calculation of how you can best achieve that success.The armor system we're seeing here seems to be primarily about making it so that different characters will have different calculations for the best armor (so that we see variation across multiple characters), but for any given character it boils down to pretty much pure calculation.The solution would be to force an actual choice. Speed might be one way of doing that: Granting a +2 bonus to the heavy armor ACs but leaving the -5 penalty to speed intact makes the choice for heavy armor meaningful.The question then becomes how you distinguish between light and medium armor. My gut says that medium armor should be the default and light armor should provide an incentive of some kind.Of course, this still leaves a calculation "problem" between the different armors within light/medium/heavy. But that's always been a problem in D&D: Theoretically the price differences are supposed to be significant, but they really aren't once you get past character creation.</blockquote>

Verification