Platemail sold here for CHEAP!!

[James McMurray]

You sir are a genius.

That's the way it was in MERP.

WFRP does that too, although none of the starting careers get anything as expensive as plate.

 

[ravenight]

Thing is this: The really nice Plate Armor would never get made as standard Plate in 4E because at that cost you may as well make it magical anyways.

Your classical "Oh man that's fancy!" plate mail that isn't magical is an Art Object.

This.

The argument, "historically-speaking, plate should be far more expensive" is meaningless because there was no magical hide or scale armor historically. The economy here is totally different. Likewise, the argument "there is barely any cost difference between scale and plate" is countered by the fact that plate is not clearly a preferable armor choice compared to scale.

If you want to run a low-magic campaign, then call the "plate armor" something else, like maybe "iron breastplate" and make the +1 armors into finer versions of non-magical armor, the +2 armors into even finer ones, etc.

 

[boolean]

Definitely. One of the recurring get-rich-quick schemes in 3.xe was the wizard using Fabricate to churn out (literally) tons of suits of full plate per month and glut the market with them.

So, oversupply led to a massive fall in price?

 

[Jack Colby]

Repeat after me: It's just a game.

 

[balard]

It's because the Fabricate trick.

 

[jlac]

Repeat after me: It's just a game.

I second that emotion. The fact that plate mail costs 50gp now will have no effect on my game, except that players can begin the game with it using starting funds...which is fine with me. Hell, it seems like they've changed the price in every edition. In every edition we barely notice whatever change occurred after a short time in play.

To me, the armor chart looks nicely balanced now. Very neat and orderly, much like the rest of the game. Its comforting.

 

[Green Knight]

I think it's also priced that low in case of resale. Say you kill... four Plate Armor wearing mercs. You now have four spare suits of Plate Armor. Assuming you get 20% of the normal price, you'd collect 40 gp instead of 1,200 gp. Big difference, there.

 

[OneWinged4ngel]

Its so first level characters could afford the best non-magical armor they are proficient in.

Which is, of course, stupid reasoning. Yay. They took the terrible 3rd ed armor system and, instead of fixing the glaring issues, decided to just make it out that they did it all on purpose, set up the sets by class, and say that there's *supposed* to be a downright best choice for you to pick out. A pattern that one sees throughout lots of 4e, really. They tend to avoid or justify old problems when they don't just outright axe features. It's like they're too lazy to actually try to *fix* things, so they narrow the system down and restrict choices to a point that any dimwit could do it. And then they STILL come up with stuff like Cascade of Blades. The worst part is that in the pursuit of this "easy balance," they're willing to axe any beneficial feature that stands in their way, as well as say "you're supposed to have a best way to build." Since when was that balance? Balance was when I had all the options, but I couldn't make the decision because all the options were similarly attractive, though unique. Not when I got to pick Mithral Breastplate again because it turns out that it's by far the best armor for my given class.

Of course, the argument could easily be made that there's good reason that they made the system far more restrictive, despite all the early evidence that it was going in the opposite direction (with things like ToB having easily the best multiclassing in 3rd edition, for example). Harder to homebrew, harder to make unique concepts... easier to sell you new supplements for every new character concept.

It's entirely possible that WotC wasn't just taking the lazy way out, they were just taking the greedy way out. Neither possibility makes me feel any better about the company, however.

Repeat after me: It's just a game.

Problem being, the game suffers blatantly obvious shortcomings when it comes to the primary purpose of the genre of games known as "pen and paper roleplaying games." The purpose of a roleplaying game isn't just to have a game that you can roleplay in. You can, quite literally, roleplay in ANY game. I can roleplay while playing the Warhammer Fantasy Miniatures game, but that doesn't mean that it's the same category of game as the Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing Game.

The purpose of the pen and paper roleplaying game is primarily serve the purpose of resolving and facilitating the story. That's what characterizes that classification of games. If a rule hinders or restricts storytelling, it's a bad rule. Making suspension of belief significantly harder and restricting creative freedom is a negative aspect.

It's just a game, and it's a game that has many flaws. It goes far beyond this. These little discrepancies build up very noticeably in 4e, even moreso than in 3rd.

I think it's also priced that low in case of resale. Say you kill... four Plate Armor wearing mercs. You now have four spare suits of Plate Armor. Assuming you get 20% of the normal price, you'd collect 40 gp instead of 1,200 gp. Big difference, there.

I can think of a dozen ways to solve that off the top of my head other than changing the price to a pittance in a grandstand deus ex machina. Why can't WotC?

 

[darkrose50]

I am considering making two lists of equipment prices. One for beginning characters who get 100 equipment points (equal to gold in the PHB), and one for the campaign setting where trade value will be listed (the default will be silver shillings if you were interested). In order to select an item such as plate armor for 50 equipment points one would need to have the proper feats, or class abilities.

 

[Mal Malenkirk]

Actually, I think the current price is closer to historical value.

I'm sure it wasn't their intent but still.

In relative value, a chainmail in the dark age was AFAIK much more epxensive than a plate armor was in the 1500s. Which is why amored riders weren't as common in those days than they were in the late middle age where even mercenary companies could afford plate.

I'm going from memory with this. A quick scan of the internet in support of those claim found the wikipedia page for armour, for what it's worth.

The cost of armour varied considerably with time and place as well as the type of armour, coverage it provided and the cost of decoration. In the 8th century a suit of Frankish mail had cost 12 oxen; by 1600 a horseman's armour cost 2 oxen[1]. A typical suit of full plate harness cost around 1 pound sterling in 14th century England[1] and a man-at-arms in the same period made 1 shilling per day and so his armour cost about 20 days pay.

Don't know how qualified the guys who wrote that page were, but it mesh with what I gathered.

20 days work worth is actually a lot ; in practice, you have to eat, pay the rent etc.

So armored plate wasn't cheap. But it was more like buying a car than a jet. (In which case it's probably the weapons that are overpriced!)

In the 8th century though...

Anyway, the point is the 4e pricing of Plate is a slap to the face of 3e, not history. For what it's worth, which isn't a lot. Who cares about history, right? Let's just buy a full plate, a bastard sword and let's go kill dragons.