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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatzimaus" data-source="post: 3324075" data-attributes="member: 3051">Remember that most "normal" humans will have an average stat of 10ish.  If the town guards don't get to roll 4d6 for their stats, and don't ever get high enough in level for the +1/4levels, a 12 DEX starts seeming pretty reasonable.  And part of this is a chicken-or-egg thing.  In D&D, armors other than light armor suck.  Therefore, everyone pumps up their DEX.  But what if the heavier armors DIDN'T suck?  You'd see more players using DEX as a dump stat and wearing heavy armors; same AC, and more stat points spent on things like CON.And that's what I'm trying to change.  Light armors have become such a no-brainer in D&D that the rest just almost never get used.And ACP?  If you're not a Rogue, what do you care?  (So yes, Rogues will stick with light armor, which fits the fact that that's all they're proficient with.)  Okay, the heavily-armored tank will on rare occasions need a Climb, Swim, or Balance check, but Hide and Move Silently?  A Ranger might like those, but he'll be sticking with light armor anyway, for his pseudoFeats.  And Tumble?  Monks care about that too, but they don't wear armor.  The same sort of argument applies to Somatic Failure (arcane spell failure): it's substantially higher for the heavier armors, but outside of a few multiclass combos, it never comes up.  MaxDEX matters to everyone, but there's not nearly the discrepancy between light and medium there.So for the Fighters, Barbarians, Paladins, and Clerics, medium or heavy armors will be desirable.  That's what I'm going for.Also, the numbers I listed in the earlier post are a bit misleading; for the armors using Soft materials (leather), they're calculated using a Hardness of 5.  But, there are no Soft materials with Hardness above 10 (Dragonhide is 10), so the highest DR a Leather suit could get would be 6 points.  Metals, on the other hand, were calculated using H=10, but metal Hardnesses go up to 25, and 20s are common at high level.  So the chain-type armors will pick up substantially more DR as you go up.On top of that, there are simply no ultra-high-level leathers.  My materials have DC modifiers ranging from 0 to +20, with power roughly scaling with DC.  The highest leathers have DCs in the ~12 range, while harder materials go all the way to the top.More or less.  It's not going to be exact, of course.  And when I say "Masterwork" what I really mean is "Armor made from Fine Steel (10 gp/lb, DC +3) and Fine Leather (5 gp/lb, DC +2), using the system in my first post."  Due to the way this system works, they'll actually be slightly better than the PHB masterwork, but they're the closest analogue.I never said it would.  What I was saying is that the PHB prices have the difficulty already factored into their costs; light armors are dirt cheap compared to heavies, but once the masterwork cost is factored in, the difference isn't nearly as much.  It's still there; instead of a 100:1 difference between Leather and Plate, it's only 11:1.  It's because now, neither is really "trivial"; MW Leather is still easier to make than MW Plate, but not by as much, so the price ratio skews closer to the ratio of the material costs.That's the trend I'm trying to keep.  I don't want a flat multiplier, because then the heavy stuff gets really expensive while the light stuff stays cheap; I don't want a flat addition, because then the base cost becomes irrelevant.But in my experience, he doesn't (unless he's a Dwarf).  He gets a Mithral Breastplate or a Chain Shirt, and an item that gives +6 DEX, and that's the end of it.  No one wears Banded or Splint once they can afford Plate (it's pretty much better in every way) or a Breastplate, and no one wears Scale or Chainmail if a Chain Shirt is available.  And once they can afford materials like mithral, all armor is Light (except for Dwarves).Well, that's why I had the part in the very first post where I talked about how much material a weapon required.  I'm still tweaking the formula for it, but it holds together pretty well.  I don't like flat multipliers, in general, any more than I like flat additions.  Both cause trends I dislike.Plus, think of the multipliers we discussed for masterwork; that's for ONE material type.  What multipliers would we use for the other 50 or so materials I have?  That's why I'm trying to come up with a reasonably coherent equation that mimics the trends I was talking about there.</blockquote>

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