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Thread: Armor check penalties are dumb
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2017-07-19, 12:57 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2010
Armor check penalties are dumb
The proof is right here.
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2017-07-19, 01:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2016
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- DPT's Window
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Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
Yes, armor is not as immobile as most people seem to think but it definitely has some impact. You will still do better with no armor than with armor, it's just that as mobile as medieval armor is, it still is not as mobile as no armor at all.
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2017-07-19, 01:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2010
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2017-07-19, 01:18 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2016
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- Virgo Supercluster
Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
This is probably just a case of science marching on.
The False Balance Fallacy
The tendency to interpret the rules, not based on any validity with RAW or logic, but that which makes the game (in their eyes) more balanced.
This tendency is often fueled by the incorrect belief that the game is balanced or the desire for it to be.
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2017-07-19, 01:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2010
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2017-07-19, 01:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2016
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- Virgo Supercluster
Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
The False Balance Fallacy
The tendency to interpret the rules, not based on any validity with RAW or logic, but that which makes the game (in their eyes) more balanced.
This tendency is often fueled by the incorrect belief that the game is balanced or the desire for it to be.
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2017-07-19, 01:39 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2007
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2017-07-19, 01:45 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2016
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- No Longer The Frostfell
Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
Full plate is not quiet. It will affect your ability to move silently and lift objects off of people. Full plate is typically metal, which can scratch, glint, shine, etc which would impact your ability to hide. While you can move fairly well, you can't move as if you weren't wearing it at all which can impact your ability to climb, tumble, and jump. It's also not exactly light which makes it harder to do all of the above.
I understand that the armor is designed to distribute the weight, but an extra 5-10 lbs of armor on your arms will make you tire quicker. the extra 30-40 lbs being carried by your legs and lifted by your legs when jumping will make you wear out a little quicker. Coming from someone who used to do live steel exhibitions, that stuff may carry well and not feel as heavy, but it's still heavy and it will wear you out faster than you think. A 10 minute exhibition feels like you just ran a 5K. It makes a difference.
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2017-07-19, 01:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2017
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- ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
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2017-07-19, 02:18 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2010
Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
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2017-07-19, 02:27 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2006
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- NYC
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Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
ACP isn't a prohibition, it's a penalty. You can still do all the things, you just do them worse than you would without armor.
Tumble: let's see a competition-winning gymnast perform gymnastics, and then a person in full armor perform the same gymnastics.
Swim: let's see a competition-winning swimmer do some timed laps, and then a person in full armor beat that time.
Climb, Jump, Move Silently... these can all be measured, the last one in dB. What ACP should mean is a statistically significant difference in measured performance.
These are things that can be tested.
They can be tested because people can do all the things in armor, so we can test how well they do all the things.
They will generally do all the things a bit worse. How much worse? The ACP value represents exactly that.I want you to PEACH me as hard as you can.
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2017-07-19, 02:29 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2016
- Location
- Virgo Supercluster
Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
The False Balance Fallacy
The tendency to interpret the rules, not based on any validity with RAW or logic, but that which makes the game (in their eyes) more balanced.
This tendency is often fueled by the incorrect belief that the game is balanced or the desire for it to be.
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2017-07-19, 02:33 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2010
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- ganiseville GA
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Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
Yeah, if you wanted to go for accuracy Armor checks would be a maximum, not a penalty. An character who is good at escape artist can bend until they can wiggle through a space. The problem is armor cannot bend past a point. If your armor is not flexible enough to get through a space, not amount of skill will make a difference.
And gauntlets should impose a massive penalty to fine manipulation. You need free fingers to use lockpicks well.
But we cannot have a system that complicated. 3.5 is already complex. Do not make it worse.
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2017-07-19, 02:36 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2010
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2017-07-19, 02:37 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2006
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- (r, theta, phi) in S2
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Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
Precisely this. An argument that ACP shouldn't be a thing from a realism perspective would require demonstrating that a person can complete an obstacle course just as easily while armored as when unarmored. All the video in the OP demonstrates is that full plate has a similar ACP to that of modern soldier kit and a higher one than firefighting gear (if we make the assumption that the knight and soldier were equally skilled). Indeed, that last point bears repeating: the knight lost to the firefighter. Unless you're going to argue that firefighting gear provides a bonus to obstacle course skills, this pretty clearly shows that wearing armor is worse than wearing nothing.
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2017-07-19, 02:50 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Oct 2010
Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
Yeah, certainly having something heavy on you makes obstacles harder, but it shouldn't be a different system than encumbrance for things like climbing or jumping.
Also, remember that it was an ACTUAL firefighter against someone who has trained in heavy armor (some guy from a museum who does demonstrations I think). Getting through obstacles in heavy gear is one of a firefighters main jobs, so he can get to people in danger. A knight is trained for different things.
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2017-07-19, 03:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2006
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- NYC
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Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
I think you're talking about the video of the full-plate guy running an obstacle course next to a modern soldier (in modern armor) and a modern firefighter (with full firefighter gear).
All 3 of those people are wearing heavy protective equipment. All 3 of those people are going to exhibit the effects of an armor check penalty.
The fact that modern heavy protective gear has an equivalent ACP is not proof that ACP is dumb.
It's just a demonstration that you can't kill the metal.I want you to PEACH me as hard as you can.
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2017-07-19, 03:24 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2012
Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
Armor, as a mechanical construct in-game, doesn't make physical sense, period. With the standard bonus to AC, it represents the ability of armor to help deflect blows, but doesn't represent damage you would take through the armor from the transference of kinetic energy. When representing armor as damage reduction, you have a representation of armor's ability to absorb some of that energy, but not of its decreasing ability to do so over time (due to damage).
The mere fact that you'll take damage in excess of what your armor does, even when faced with Str-based melee combatants, is just plain silly.
Armor is, as mentioned, nowhere near as hampering as most fantasy writers of the past 40 years seem to have believed.
The way ASF scales is physically utter nonsense. Somatic components are mostly performed with the hand, and the implication that progressively heavier types of armor must have progressively more restrictive gauntlets is ridiculous--especially since you can wear gauntlets as a weapon without incurring any ASF at all.
Then there's the absolutely arbitrary AC values that differing suits of armor have been assigned, and the fact that someone with 50 Str has the same max dex from a breastplate as someone with 5.
Like every other set of rules in the game, armor was written as an abstraction--one ultimately based on romanticized notions that were in vogue during the 70s and 80s. The reason those notions haven't really been updated to reflect current knowledge in the editions since then is because D&D has never really tried to reflect reality--it's much more interested in reflecting fantasy tropes.
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2017-07-19, 03:27 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2006
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- NYC
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Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
I want you to PEACH me as hard as you can.
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2017-07-19, 03:27 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jun 2007
Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
Guide to the Magus, the Pathfinder Gish class.
"I would really like to see a game made by Obryn, Kurald Galain, and Knaight from these forums. I'm not joking one bit. I would buy the hell out of that." -- ChubbyRain
Crystal Shard Studios - Freeware games designed by Kurald and others!
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2017-07-19, 03:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2014
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- Alabama
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Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
Folding ACP into Max Dex Bonus seems like the easiest solution here. Aftwr a certain amount of Dexterity only adding a +3 modifier to skills may as well be a penalty
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2017-07-19, 03:52 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2008
Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
It depends. I'd take the heavy backpack over the armor when climbing or swimming, as gauntlets and armored boots will seriously hurt your grip with your hands and feet for climbing and the armor is almost certainly denser than a heavy backpack. Running is a case where it depends on the armor, where leg armor in particular is more of a problem than just weight, but torso armor is way easier to run in than a backpack of comparable weight. Then there's helmets, where something open faced and on your head is a minor heat concern at worse and generally just not a big deal, and anything close faced is a miserable heat trap (although a lot of the time you'd either flip a visor open or remove an overhelm or just take the helmet off when you're not fighting anyways). I've worn decent armor, I've done fighting in decent armor, and while it's not really a problem to fight in* it absolutely gets in the way elsewhere. The extent it gets in the way gets dramatically exaggerated into nonsense like being totally unable to get on a horse without a winch, or being unable to get up from falling, or being unable to move at more than a walking pace, or whatever else, but armor is absolutely a hindrance.
*If anything it's the maximum dex bonus I'd have an issue with, not ACPs.I would really like to see a game made by Obryn, Kurald Galain, and Knaight from these forums.
I'm not joking one bit. I would buy the hell out of that. -- ChubbyRain
Current Design Project: Legacy, a game of masters and apprentices for two players and a GM.
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2017-07-19, 04:54 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2010
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2017-07-19, 05:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2012
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2017-07-19, 05:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2015
Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
Armor check penalties are not dumb. They reflect real life about as well as any of the other abstractions, and they're a very low-complexity way to model the tradeoffs between light and heavy armor. Since the penalties for heavy and medium encumbrance are almost exactly the same as what you get with the best heavy and medium armor, and since they don't stack, there's barely anything to talk about there anyway.
Now, the armor categories are a weird mishmash of nonsense and unnecessary detail, and I think arcane spell failure needs to be rethought or at least refluffed, but ACP is the second-least objectionable thing in the whole armor system.
With the standard bonus to AC, it represents the ability of armor to help deflect blows, but doesn't represent damage you would take through the armor from the transference of kinetic energy.
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2017-07-19, 05:30 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2010
Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
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2017-07-19, 05:46 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2012
Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
I feel like it would probably be easier to kill an unprepared party of level 1 casters with a ranged wilderness ambush than it would be to kill their donkeys, to be honest. I don't think encumbrance had very much to do with that particular party death.
I wasn't arguing for or against either version, it's just neither does a perfect job of representing physically what's going on when two real guys in real armor try to kill each other. My point was just that the armor rules in general are an abstraction of a romanticism, expecting them to make perfect real world physical sense is just killing catgirls or whatever.Last edited by Ellrin; 2017-07-19 at 05:47 PM.
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2017-07-19, 06:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2013
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2017-07-19, 06:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2012
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- Necro-equestrian Pugilism
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Re: Armor check penalties are dumb
Exhibit A - A typical blaster wizard.
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2017-07-19, 06:46 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2015
Re: Armor check penalties are dumb