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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4103898" data-attributes="member: 58197">No, it's a way of saying "You can try."  Because the PC can try it.  Often they'll try just for the heck of it.  Sometimes the circumstances are such that even with the -10, in this one bizarre situation, it's worth making the attempt.  And sometimes the player rolls a natural 20, it actually works, and everyone yells and cheers.That's a long way from saying "No, you can't even try."  It's also a long way from saying "Yes, you can use the ability as written with no penalty," and watching half your party morph into picadors when they discover that the mechanic is in some fashion Awesome in PC hands.(I might also allow the use of an action point to remove the -10, or at least cut it down to -5.)No RPG ever written has had rules to cover every contingency, not even 3.5E, although God knows it tried.  To take an example I've had to deal with more than once, what if the barbarian wants to grab hold of the tail of the dragon swooping down, claw his way up its back as it soars up into the air, and start whacking at the beast as it flies?  It's not grappling, because he's not trying to restrain or hinder the dragon, just hold onto it.  There's no Climb DC listed for "flying opponent."  Nowhere in the list of attack modifiers does it tell you the bonus or penalty for "standing on the enemy's back."  The DM is going to have to improvise something, because the rules simply don't tell you how to handle that maneuver.And there's a heavy cost to trying to create an exhaustive ruleset, which is that the core books become horribly bloated with rules to cover all kinds of weird corner cases.  Finding the rules you use on a regular basis becomes ever more frustrating as you skim past endless once-in-a-lifetime scenarios.  And when you do encounter a weird corner case, everything grinds to a halt as you go digging for that one rule, somewhere, that tells you what to do in this situation.Much better IMO to create a ruleset that covers the most common scenarios, preferably with rules that are light, quick, and easy to remember; and that then provides guidelines on improvising to fit unexpected situations.Well, frankly, that's stuff you should have thought of before you put 30 suits of plate armor on a bunch of orcs.  Full plate costs 1,500 gold pieces.  That's some pretty hefty cash to outfit thirty grunts.  I'd assume these were some kind of elite guards, 4th or 5th level.Possibly I should have made it clearer that all the stuff I described about the armor is what I would consider reasonable limitations.  If PCs want to try to make a buck off the orcs' full plate, that's fine, but just as they have the right to demand that orcs in full plate actually leave full plate behind when they die, I have the right to demand that they deal with all the difficulties that would logically ensue from taking it back to town for sale.Verisimilitude is a two-way street; plate armor (the nonmagical kind, at least) really does require extensive individual fitting, such armor made to fit orcs really would have to be pretty much melted down before it fit humans, and hauling thirty suits of full plate back to town really would be a non-trivial undertaking.  This isn't a video game, and there isn't an automated merchant ready to shell out one-half list price for every random thing.You want to sell the armor to an orcish warlord?  Go for it--but you have to find the warlord, and then you have to convince him to not just kill you and take the armor.  It won't be easy, but if you pull it off, you'll come away with a load of cash.  Could make for a pretty fun adventure, in fact.What all this boils down to is, if PCs want to do something weird and potentially disruptive to the game, I'm going to think about what obstacles might reasonably stand in their way.  I will announce those obstacles and let them decide whether it's worth it.  If they decide it is in fact worth it, so be it; I'll figure out a way to cope with any problems that result.  But by making them work for it, I ensure that if I am in fact putting in the effort to incorporate whatever-it-is into the game, it's for something the players are genuinely interested in.</blockquote>

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