Platemail sold here for CHEAP!!

[Zurai]

Only about a 10% bump for the best mundane armor in the game?

Plate isn't the best mundane armor in the game. Scale is.

 

[Obryn]

Looking too closely at D&D economics can lead to madness.

-O

 

[2eBladeSinger]

The obvious answer is: it's priced so that a PC can afford it. I think a better solution would have been to simply give starting PCs a suit of armor that they are able to use and then to have platemail priced more appropriately.

 

[Byronic]

It's silly and unrealistic to have Plate cost 50 gold, but what are you going to do? The lowest magical armour costs 360 gold, would you make the lowest plate armour you can get magical?

Personally I'd going to note to paladins that they're actually very expensive and are either inherited (like the book recommends), or something they got from the church or something like that.

Also have plate cost a crap bit more and not let people buy magical armour. And if people think it's unfair, I will remind them that the only one that can wear plate from the start are Paladins (except if they got a feat from the start, in which case fighters had the opportunity as well) and they could have bought them for 50 abstract gold from the start.

I think people forget something when balancing the cost of armour and such. The DM can easily have plate mail be one of the first magical items found. This means that platemail CAN cost more then 50 gold and not hurt paladins. Although you might want to hint that if they sell their magical platemail, you might give them a lot of cash but they wouldn't be finding any more for quite a few levels

 

[Tony Vargas]

Mechanically, armor is now balanced around proficiency (and the stat preqs of proficiency feats), skill check penalty, movement penalty, and the light/heavy classification, with the former adding your DEX or INT to AC and the latter not. Cost, aside from the cost of magic armor, is a minor consideration, and the cost of magic armor is the cost of a magic item of it's 'level.' +6 Full plate and +6 'cloth' cost the same (however many million gp), IIRC.

4e set out to make armor simpler and to make all armors worthwhile in some sense. They mostly succeeded.

The way it shakes out, though, Scale (which has no check penalty, and, with the specialization feat, no movement penalty, either); and plate, with the highest ACare genuinely good heavy armors, while Chainmail is just punishment for playing a 'leader.' 'Cloth' is prettymuch there for no one, since Leather has no preqs, so as soon as you find yourself with no feat choices better than a +2 AC (+3 paragon, +4 epic), you take it.. Hide is the best you can do in terms of AC for light armor, and pretty competative if your DEX or INT starts at 18 or 20 and goes up at every possible opportunity, but if you're not already proficient in it, requires a 13 STR & CON (and then a 15 CON to specialize), making it prettymuch an Archer-Ranger perk, as few wizards, warlocks or rogues have reason to boost /both/ STR & CON.

 

[SDOgre]

The obvious answer is: it's priced so that a PC can afford it. I think a better solution would have been to simply give starting PCs a suit of armor that they are able to use and then to have platemail priced more appropriately.

You sir are a genius.

That's the way it was in MERP.

 

[Verdande]

I think people forget something when balancing the cost of armour and such. The DM can easily have plate mail be one of the first magical items found. This means that platemail CAN cost more then 50 gold and not hurt paladins.

DM fiat doesn't really equal balance. If it did, you could make the argument that all weapons, armor, and magic items should cost the same because DMs can hand it out for free, and that you should rely on the balancing skills of the DM to sort it out instead of the actual price.

 

[Incenjucar]

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.

 

[mach1.9pants]

4E cost bear no relation to real world but are calculated directly on mechanical attributes. Although there are some aberrations (such as sling and hand crossbow...mechanically identical sling 1gp and h crossbow 25gp -rolleyes-).

 

[MarkB]

So everyone agrees that it was WAY overpriced in 3E?

I know the economy is different in this edition, but if you think it's fine the way it is now, then you must think it was all jacked up before. Right?

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.