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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 4052114" data-attributes="member: 3146">Since this has devolved into "how does it work in 3.x?" territory, I'll ad my two cents:A lightly armored fighter works just fine in 3.x. A strength-free fighter who doesn't use sneak attack, on the other hand, does not.Core D&D 3.5 actually has five armor types that are potentially optimal for martial characters and two more that come close enough to be competitive through the first ten to fifteen levels:Mithral fullplate--good for a heavily armored fighter who wants the highest armor class the game has to offer to a non-dex monkey who doesn't put extraordinary effort into class-based or magical defenses.Adamantine fullplate--DR 3/- is actually a lot closer to the effectiveness of 2 points of AC than a lot of people realize. And it also comes with a substantial savings in attribute points, gold, and item slots since an adamantine fullplate wearer can max his AC with a 12 dex and spend the ability points somewhere else or buy cheaper gloves of dexterity, or, if he has a 12 dex naturally, eschew gloves of dexterity altogether.mithral breastplate--A tie for the best light armor. One point of armor check doesn't hurt too much and only needing a 20 dex to max it out enables either a lower starting dex or a lower gold investment than the mithral chain shirt.mithral chain shirt--a tie for the best light armor. A 22 dex is required to max it out though so some characters will prefer the mithral breastplate--especially at the levels where dex enhancing items are a lot pricier than the approximately 4000gp difference between the armors.Celestial Armor is also worth mentioning for lightly armored fighters but is only worth it for real dex monkeys.Ordinary fullplate is and, to a lesser degree, ordinary chain shirts, however are competitive with the more exotic armors at least for warrior types and at least until level 10+ or so. A cleric, paladin, or fighter with a 10 base dex, for instance is far better off spending his 10,000gp on +3 fullplate than mithral fullplate than ordinary mithral fullplate. Said character doesn't have enough dex to benefit from the higher max dex of the mithral fullplate and buying gloves of dex to get him there is not an efficient use of his resources. (Mithral fullplate and +4 gloves of dex=more money and lower armor class than ordinary +5 fullplate). Likewise, any lightly armored warrior without an 18+ dex doesn't really benefit very much from wearing a mithral chain shirt over an ordinary one. At levels 1-10, that's a lot of lightly armored warriors.The important thing to realize, however, is that when you're talking about the attainable armor class, for a lightly armored character or a heavily armored character, there is only a one point difference.Mithral fullplate: +8 armor, +3 dex=+11 ACMithral breastplate: +5 armor, +5 dex=+10 ACMithral chain shirt: +4 armor, +6 dex=+10ACWhen you take into account the fact that a lot of characters don't max out the dex bonus of their amor, you're still only talking one or two points of armor class difference since the mithral fullplate guy will often not max his max dex out either.(Oddly it also works this way at lower levels with ordinary armors:fullplate=+8 armor, +1 dex=+9 ACchain shirt=+4 armor, +4 dex=+8 ACthough the difference will be a little more pronounced since it is easy for a lot of characters to max the dex bonus of ordinary fullplate but lightly armored fighters will typically only have 3 points of dex or so.So, defensively, light armor is not really very much worse than heavy armor. It is worse, but not so much worse as to render it a suboptimal choice if other considerations (movement, evasion, etc) argue for it. The heavy armor/light armor discussion is certainly not resolved in favor of heavy armor in 3rd edition games.Offensively, is where it is important to distinguish between a lightly armored fighter type and a dex-based fighter type. A lightly amored fighter will probably have a slightly lower strength than the heavily armored one--all other things being equal. But it doesn't need to be crippling. The difference between a 16 strength and an 18 strength is noticable but it's the difference between effective and super-effective rather than between being awesome and being pathetic. If the lightly armored character advances strength with magic and/or ability points and possibly exploits other kinds of damage (divine might for a paladin or multiclass for example) the lightly armored character can be in the zone offensively with the heavily armored character.In 3.x, it's the character without sneak attack who tries to accomplish all that without strength that doesn't generally work out.</blockquote>

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