Sectioned Armor basics and Called Enhancement

[Jackinthegreen]

While making a versatile plate-wearer (read: sometimes doesn't want ACP), I came across a bit of an oddity with a certain type of armor and an enhancement available for it.

Sectioned Armor is a masterwork suit of Full Plate that can be stripped down partially into medium armor or fully into light armor. If anyone wants to look at its stats, check the 3.5 Planar Handbook.

The Called enhancement from Magic Item Compendium allows a character to use a Standard Action to fully don the armor, assuming he's not wearing any already.

The oddity between these is mainly how there's no listing for donning and removing Sectioned Armor, nor is there any advice on how much time it takes to don or remove pieces to make it lighter or heavier.

My thought is that adding Called onto Sectioned Armor should allow the character to don the individual pieces as he sees fit, as a standard action up until it's effectively Full Plate. This seems reasonable even though Called supposedly only dons the armor when there isn't any because the pieces are still part of the same suit.

The question comes up on how to remove the pieces, and I think I might have a solution to that. Because Sectioned Armor must be masterwork quality to begin with and already costs twice as much as regular Full Plate, it stands to reason that the sections can operate under the Quick Escape mechanism put forth in 3.0's Arms and Equipment guide. The wearer can use a standard action to spring a lock on the armor and immediately drop the full suit.

With Sectioned Armor, it doesn't seem much of a stretch to think each section could operate like that too, with some modifications. Dropping one section takes a standard action. Dropping two, however, should take a full-round action since the combination really ought to be a move+standard. Dropping the full rig would take a full round plus the wearer's swift action for his next turn.

Donning full Sectioned Armor, under the rules of Quick Escape, would take 8 minutes and require help for the full benefit. Because of how modular it is though, I'd wager a character proficient in the use of heavy armor could cut that down to 6 minutes, without help. With help it would take three minutes to fully don. Essentially it takes 1.5x as long to don this particular piece of gear because of how well it's been crafted.

Sound good to anyone here?

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

I have had a character use the Called + Quick Escape armor combo before. That in itself is totally doable. I haven't done it with sectioned armor, however.

If I follow correctly, you are calling the entire armor, than quick escaping pieces off, using a standard action to remove each section of size category? Sounds perfectly logical to me.

Not very time efficient in the midst of combat, but if you are just talking about a way to put it on and take it off, then your reasoning makes sense.

 

[Jackinthegreen]

You've got it for the most part. The main thing about Called Sectioned Armor though is that a character should be able to choose how much of it he wants to wear at the time of Calling, then if he feels he needs more it's another Standard to Call the extra bits.

Now that I think on it, there need to be rules for putting on the extra pieces without using Called. I'm leaning on each section taking two minutes to don, since that adds up quite nicely to the six I said for putting on the full rig. Halve the time if the character gets help.