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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 8671137" data-attributes="member: 6799660">The problem I foresee with this is the number of people who handwave encumbrance*. Mind you, if encumbrance starts to have more meaning for more gaming groups, it might get used more. However, such a change wouldn't catch on, I feel, unless there was something interesting you could do with this on an ongoing bases. Bean counting isn't fun for a lot of people; bean counting towards some kind of bonus possibly is. Regardless, a second problem I foresee is this just makes the high-strength characters the party U-haul (or at least everyone just spreads out the gear and loot until everyone is a half-pound below threshold and then maybe someone -- likely again the high-str guy -- takes on the extra load and tries not to get asked to do any athletics).*And I'm really not going to fault them on this. Once D&D left gp=xp and the subtle risk-reward weighing of trying to pull just a few more coins out of the dungeon, they never exactly came up with an alternative that would regularly make this engaging. One idea would be to have Dex or Dex bonus create a minimum AC, but not add to an existing one. Example: if you are unarmored, but a master of agility (18 Dex or whatever), you might have a 14 AC (6 if 0=good), but if you are wearing armor that provides 4+ points of armor, you just take the armor's benefit. This goes completely opposite to the OP point about people retaining their Dexterity when wearing heavy armor (perhaps we say it is simply less vital to defense when doing so). Although this means your high-dex platemail character isn't really more rugged than a more clumsy platemail wearer, it does make it such that Dex-based and even light-armor-based characters are going to be less rugged. I don't know which power fantasies this serves or harms (I guess the warrior who has high stats in everything, which honestly I really have no problem with the system giving some redundant/non-overlapping abilities).Otherwise, moving all the heavy armor up a point might help.Or some side benefit like making the benefits of Heavy Armor Master inherent to wearing heavy armor.A fundamental issue I think D&D takes extreme measures never to take a solid stand on -- how realistic is it supposed to be, anyways? Are you playing IRL medieval soldiers? medieval soldiers of folklore or of myth? Bruce Willis action character or Arnold Schwarzenegger action character? Various editions have had different levels of rigor on things like lifting and jumping distance and even if you can swim in armor and what kind of surfaces thieves can or cannot climb, and it usually is towards incentivizing not being a physically-oriented character.</blockquote>

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