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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatzimaus" data-source="post: 868935" data-attributes="member: 3051">ENCOURAGE light armor?  I almost never see anyone take anything BUT light armor.  Besides the chain shirt types, there are the Druidic types in leather, the sneaky guys in studded leather, and all the fighter types who try for a Mithril Breastplate.I see more fighter-types go entirely armorless than wear heavy armor.  Thanks to Bracers of Armor (especially with the rules that allow special enchantments), this isn't even a bad idea.The key to this is that Max DEX drops as fast as Armor AC increases, so if you have a 20+ DEX (and, thanks to items with a +6 Enhancement bonus you easily can) any armor above chain shirt is pretty much suboptimal.  Then there's the speed decrease, the Armor Check Penalty, and of course Arcane Failure.And that's another thing.  There's no core armor enchantment that changes either Max DEX, Armor Check Penalty, movement effects, or Arcane Failure, so there's no easy way to make Full Plate attractive to the high-DEX types.  The only core-book option here is Mithral, which is just way too good for its price.There's a few of these enchantments in the splatbooks, though.If anything, the system needs to be corrected the other direction.  Right now, there's no reason to take Banded, Splint, Half-Plate, or any Medium armor besides BP.IMC, we changed the equipment rules a bit:> The masterwork bonuses (+1 attack for weapons, +1 ACP for armor) stack with any magical effects.  Ditto for anything from a non-magical source, like exotic materials (Dragonscale, Mithral, etc.).  Some of these bonuses are pretty substantial.> Heavy Armor grants its wearer a DR of (H/5)/-, where H is the hardness of the material used (Steel is 10).  DR from armor stacks with all other sources and is subtracted first, so if you have Stoneskin on and your armor gives 2/-, reduce the attack by 2 before looking at the spell.> Medium Armor and Large/Tower Shields grant the wearer a DR of (H/10)/-.  Again, it stacks.> Add two armor enchantments, Lesser Mobility (+2 cost: +1 Max DEX, +2 ACP, -10% weight, -5% Arcane Failure) and Greater Mobility (+4 cost: +2 Max DEX, +5 ACP, -25% weight, -10% Arcane Failure).  Can't put both on the same item, although you can "upgrade" the Lesser to the Greater by paying the difference.So, under these rules Full Plate and a Large Shield made of steel gives a DR of 3/-.  Not much, and it's somewhat compensated for by how weapons are treated (the stacking rules help them more than they do armor), but it helps make these types attractive to the pure fighter-types.</blockquote>

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