Armor Penalty to Spot or Listen?

[Crothian]

Although I don't see anything wrong with adding house rules to helmets I'm not sure what this would accomplish besides realism. Let me explain.

Fighters and paladins being the most likely candidates to wear heavy armor have so few skill points and neither spot or listen is a class skill for them so they are not likely to have much of a spot or listen bonus anyway.

Characters with these skills as class skills are typicaly limited to medium, or light armor anyway and will more likely have skill ranks in one or the other. All this will do I think is make the tank of the party even more deaf and blind. If the party is realying on the rouge or ranger to notice danger these characters will still be able to do that anyway.

I'm not sure if it's official or unofficial, but I think the creators didn't want to make an issue of helmets so as to allow characters the choice of whether or not they wanted to wear one based solely on looks.

Improving defense vs criticals, or other AC bonuses based on certain situations doesn't sound too bad though for the differences in spot and listen.

From my games, I doubt I could get people to wear helmets with this rule. Spot and Listen checks are very important. We've even had people use Skill Focuses on them because they are cross class skills and very difficult to get.

 

[hong]

From my games, I doubt I could get people to wear helmets with this rule. Spot and Listen checks are very important. We've even had people use Skill Focuses on them because they are cross class skills and very difficult to get.

That's a bit odd. Surely you only really need one or two people with high Spot and Listen? Unless your players are breaking the cardinal rule, "never split the party"?

 

[Quickbeam]

That's a bit odd. Surely you only really need one or two people with high Spot and Listen? Unless your players are breaking the cardinal rule, "never split the party"?

We do that all the time, with understandably mixed results . Nonetheless, our group has gotten very good about trying to maintain the integrity of what each character would realistically choose for equipment, spells, skills and feats. There's no argument that Spot and Listen are vital skills for everyone to possess, but IMC those with massive helmets don't waste ranks on these skills as a sort of self-imposed penalty. I suppose this is very much like PCs in heavy armor not trying to acquire ranks in Hide or Move Silently as a means of offsetting their Armor Check Penalties.

There are some reasonable suggestions herein for the addition of Check Penalties being applied to characters wearing headgear. Find the set that best suite your game and run with it Exempt. Unfortunately, we don't currently integrate such penalties as an item noted on the character sheets -- we do however use negative modifiers for these skill checks where it seems reasonable. If the DM feels a PC's helmet might interfere with his/her chance of hearing or spotting something, then a circumstance penalty might be applied. In this sense there's not a permanent penalty attached to wearing headgear...which doesn't seem fair unless there's a equal permanent benefit.