Help me convince my players to wear heavy armor.

[Satori]

You need to include more cool looking NPCs into your campaign that use wicked looking Full Plate. Give them an impossible AC and play up how immovable and impenetrable they are.

Alternatively, I like the idea of making Full Plate and/or Heavy Shields the equivalent of "Two Handed Weapons" in terms of using Combat Expertise.

i.e. You gain +2 AC per point of BAB you sacrifice.

This should ALSO apply for Fighting Defensively and/or Total Defense.

The way I see it, players will want to wear Full Plate and/or Tower Shields because they want to be REALLY hard to hit...therefore, give them what they want.

A 5th level fighter with Full Plate and a Tower Shield can have an AC of 32 (8 AC + 4 Shield + 10 for sacrificing 5 points of BAB with Combat Expertise) without any magical enhancements.

Is this a really high AC? For fifth level, YES! But is it overpowering? Not really. The PC will rarely ever get hit in melee, but his attacks will rarely hit either. He'll do what he was designed to do...stand there and survive the brunt of melee while the flimsier PCs shower death from behind.

To compete with that, a "Dex Based Fighter" would have to be unarmored and have an ungodly Dexterity...which just isn't achievable at 5th level.

Just a thought.

 

[airwalkrr]

Sorry, try again. It's clearly been stated, MANY times, by the developers (in the official FAQ, for instance) that the item creation guidelines are only GUIDELINES, and that the cost (or even possibility) of new items are purely up to the DM.

Thank you for saying it better than I could have and saving me the effort.

 

[Dykstrav]

Armor and hit dice

The first thing to consider is that your players are telling you what kind of game they want to play when they make their characters. The simplest way to deal with it is to discuss the type of campaign you want to play before you make characters. Share with them your images, communicate that you want heavily-armored fighters. In the same way that players wouldn't make elven swashbuckers or halfling rogues for a game set in an ancient Egypt-themed setting, they'll pick up on the general mood and tone you're going for and play to it. Perhaps you're wanting to play a hunt against giants in a frozen tundra- I'd expect to see some grim Norse-style fighters and barbarians with stout armor.

Your campaign, once ongoing, can encourage the use of heavy armor. Don't make vast areas where characters will have to use Climb and Swim alot, they won't care about the Armor Check penalty to those skills. Provide potions of hiding and potions of sneaking- suddenly the rogue or ranger won't care about the armor check penalty to his checks. There are armor properties to make these skill checks betetr, such as a suit of +1 chainmail of silent moves. Assuming that your rogue is possessed of a modicum of intelligence, he'll choose this any day over a suit of +1 studded leather. This alone might encourage the players to wear heavier armor.

Adventure design itself can lend a distinctive hand to encouraging heavy armor. The adventure takes the characters into a dungeon of narrow, twisting corridors between 5 and 10 feet wide. When monsters attack, the fighter bottlenecked on the front line is going to be alot more important than the rogue or monk being able to Tumble across the battlefield. Suddenly the wizard and archery-focused ranger will be glad that the fighter standing between them and a bloody death is wearing several pounds of steel. Just imagine a run-in with a troll like this: the fighter hacks away at the beast as the cleric heals him, the rogue takes shots with their corssbow and the wizard tosses acid arrows. Sure, not everyone is making the hits, but everyone is getting a chance to shine.

The lack of appeal that heavy armor currently has in the game is largely due to how the game itself is designed. As neophyte 1st-level characters, you can crank oout the Dex or spend your cash on a suit of scale mail. Either way, starting characters tend to hover somewhere in the 14-16 range for AC in my experience. They either don't have the Dex to bump it up or they can't afford cool armor or magical gear at first.

Some characters really shouldn't wear armor at all- sorcerers and wizards are the most obvious, but an armored monk or rogue also sticks out. It's really for these characters that the various AC buffing items come into play. In the real world, only the most wealthy of warriors could get the thickest, heaviest armor there was.

That all being said, I think the lack of heavy armor fundamentally boils down to the way the game is designed: as characters advance in level, BAB increases but not AC. This consistently makes characters easier to hit as the levels crank up. How has D&D always handled this? You get an extra hit die every level. You don't actually get any harder to hit, you just get harder to kill. This isn't particularly satisfying from a thematic or logical standpoint. Just because Tordek is now 10th level, he has less to fear from an orc waving a battleaxe around? Have you ever seen mighty heroes of fiction that aren't concerned about other people wanting to stick pointed things into their bodies? "Oh, kobolds with daggers? They could stab me approximately twelve times before I'd have to worry about dying." This sort of thinking and discussion takes place in gaming all the time, but far less often in fantasy literature, legends, or mythology.

If you're looking for a rules way to fix it, I'd really suggest you check out the armor as damage reduction in Unearthed Arcana.

 

[Gort]

Heh, there I was thinking that heavy armour was TOO prevalent among my characters. (usually fighters, barbarians and paladins)

Sure, you can ramble on about how high an AC you can achieve if you have 3 spellcasters all making magic gear for you to wear, but until magic gear comes along in large quantities, unless you're playing an extremely high-stats game, full-plate simply gives the best AC for the money. PLUS, you can dump DEX to only 12, which frees up a lot of points for elsewhere, like strength for hitting people!

Of course, if your game gives everyone 18 in every stat, they're going to wear light armour because it gives fewer penalties. But to begin with, full plate gives the best AC for the least expenditure of stat points, which SHOULD be precious.

Fighters should rarely sneak whatever armour they're wearing. It's a cross-class skill, so it's never going to be particularly high. Leave the sneaking to the rogues, your playtime is when you crash in the door or you pull the squishy rogue out of the horrible mess he's gotten himself into when he tries to sneak past monsters made entirely of eyes, or who have blindsense or whatever.