A medieval warrior always wore the best armor available. You weren’t light infantry because you were agile, you were light infantry because you didn’t have heavy armor.

OK, so D&D is fantasy, not reality.

So far in my reading of the REH stories, Conan always wore the best armor available to him.

It used to bother me that the D&D rules meant that a fighter should always wear plate mail if he could. What if it didn’t fit your character concept? I guess somewhere between the realism argument & my new attitude of “let D&D be D&D”, this stopped bothering me so much.

And there are disadvantages to heavy armor in D&D: Mainly encumberance. To run away & fight again another day, you need movement rate. Sure, dropping food, treasure, or burning oil might help; but movement rate is the surest way to escape.

If you do want to make the lightly armored agile fighter equal to the heavy armored fighter, the thing to do is to make the Dex bonus to AC equal to armor. You can do this either by increasing the Dex bonus...

(...perhaps...)

• 18: +6
• 17: +5
• 16: +4
• 15: +3
• 14: +2
• 13: +1

...or decreasing the AC of armor...

• leather: 8
• leather & shield: 7
• chain: 7
• chain & shield: 6
• plate: 6
• plate & shield: 5

...or some combination. You probably also want to make armor cancel the Dex bonus to AC.

There are other ways, but this, IMHO, is the best way. If you use different mechanics (e.g. damage resistance for armor & parrying for agility), they’ll be very hard to balance.

Honestly, though, I think there are other games that handle this much better than D&D. Let D&D be D&D. If you really want parity between an agile fighter & a heavily armored fighter, you want a different game.

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“How did you get away?” he asked presently.

Conan tapped his mail-shirt and helmet.

“If more borderers would wear harness there’d be fewer skulls hanging on the altar-huts.”

—Beyond the black river by Robert E. Howard

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Classic D&D

last updated 1 year ago #