Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aaron L" data-source="post: 6368473" data-attributes="member: 926">I love all of the illustrations in the PHB!  Simple wonderful, all of them.  Extremely nice, beautiful, naturalistic fantasy paintings.  It made me genuinely happy when I opened the book and saw how it was illustrated. No more "dungeonpunk" for every single illustration in the book.  While I don't have a problem with some of the pix in that style (it is set on whole other planets of magic and fantastic alien races, after all,) it got very tiring seeing every single person having spiky hair, wearing spiky armor, wielding wonky, oddly proportioned weapons, and carrying jagged, bizarrely shaped shields that looked like pieces from a broken jigsaw puzzle, which in no way could do their job of covering and protecting the bearer's body.  Shields were shaped the way they were for good reasons, and the reasons weren't fashion statements.That was one of the big things I wanted changed in 5th Edition (that wasn't rules related) and spoke out about here and on the WotC forums; that and weapon and shield weights, and shield materials.  There was never ever such a thing as a solid "steel shield," and a 15 pound shield would be so heavy as to be utterly useless. Unfortunately, they added a whole new ludicrousity to the rules in 5E; 40 pound heavy armor Ring Mail.  First off, Ring Mail is nothing but the product of lazy 19th century historians, who were notoriously arrogant and misguided about anything medieval.  They misidentified "chain" maille armor on the Bayeux Tapestry because some was drawn with bigger circles, and so decided it "must" be a different type of armor.  The speculated about it and came up with "big metal rings sewn on leather backing" despite there never being any kind of artifact fitting that description found anywhere, nor any description of anything matching it anywhere in the historical record.  So they then wrote about this armor they had invented for years, and that's where the early-to-mid 20th century wargamers, and later Gygax, got the description (Charles Ffoulkes, Arms and Armor, 1909, according to a note he made in the magic armor section of the DMG.)Unfortunately, it was nothing but lazy historians of the 1800s making stuff up.But even worse than including "ring mail" which might almost kind of work as a glorified studded leather, they made it heavy armor!  Fairly obviously because they needed the AC 14 Heavy Armor slot to fill, and someone pulled "ring mail" out of a hat.  Unfortunately, 40 pound ring mail heavy armor is ridiculous.  Chain "mail" as heavy armor is fine; that stuff is heavy, and covers the wearer head to toe.  People didn't stop wearing it because it didn't offer good protection, they stopped wearing it because they found stuff that was lighter and easier to wear.  But making "ring mail" a heavy armor is so ludicrous I burst out laughing the second I saw it in the book.I am replacing the AC 14 Heavy Armor with something far more appropriate to its position as a heavy armor.  As of now I am considering lamellar, but I'm not quite positive yet.  I have to do some more checking and researching.  But 40 pound "ring mail" heavy armor is not going to be a part of my D&D; the very idea is so utterly ridiculous as to stand out even amongst all of the other ridiculous weapon and armor weights of any edition of D&D.  And that is including 2nnd Edition's laughably stupid 15 pound two-handed swords.</blockquote>

Verification