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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7002364" data-attributes="member: 4937">Elves and dwarves in their modern conception obviously owe a great deal to Tolkien.  But, the halfling/hobbit is entirely the creation of Tolkien.  All three have departed or evolved from the Tolkien conception.  But the elf and the dwarf have a mythic resonance in pre-Tolkien stories and even I think perhaps in our biology that I don't think halflings have.  It's bad enough that there seems be one elf or one dwarf for the species, but the Halfling seems even more narrow and a race (like the gnome) that in D&D has been historically in search of an archetype - both of which seeming to migrate most often into simply comic relief.   Of course, as I said this a self-admitted "peeve".  I'm not saying, "No halflings" as legitimate universal advice.As for padded armor, the problem with wanting to model armor realistically is that you have to consider its performance against different sorts of attacks.  As a point of fact, as I'm sure you know, most of the other armors on the table have a padded jack of some sort as component of their overall armor package.  We must assume that they are there in order to assume that they are as protective as the system makes them.  If we start talking about what is the AC of mail without an underlying padded layer, or how padded performs nearly as well as mail against certain weapon types, we have to stop having a single absolute AC and start having to have (as 1e AD&D had, or at least tried to have) a relative AC depending on the sort of attack directed against it.As one of the few people I've ever met that actually used the 1e era weapon vs AC modifiers, I think I'm qualified to offer as general advice and not merely a peeve, the level of complexity you introduce into the rules trying to model the protection of mail or padded versus the range of attacks they can receive is too great to throw on top of 3e's already increased complexity.  It might be possible however to throw it into 5e's reduced complexity, provided you wanted more gritty and realistic combat, but I don't know 5e well enough to be able to tell you whether in effect it would be worth it since 5e greatly simplifies armor and greatly reduces the value of armor relative to prior editions.  You've just got less wiggle room to play with the granularity and it might end up being fiddlliness without substance.</blockquote>

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