Stack armor enhancements with chain shirt and breastplate?

[dipolartech]

If you have to rely on the argument you can't do "whatever" in real life, well, D&D (3.5) is not designed well-enough to make that argument feasible.

Sorry, but I think D&D in general try very, very hard to be as close to reality than possible without cutting down on the fun factor and succeed very well at it. We're not discussing magic or any intangible force here, we're discussing being able to layer different kind of armors in the hope to add up on the defense factor.

True our current talking point is layering a (quite possibly magical) "light" "armor" underneath a (quite possibly magical) heavier (and rigid) "medium" or "heavy" "armor". Note the air quotes? Thats because in normal conversation those words are relative to context and the context here is the table of Armor and Shields in the PHB. Which states that a chain shirt weighs in at 25 pounds and that a Breastplate weighs in at 30 pounds. So thats 55 pounds... must be way to heavy to move in right? Well Full Plate weighs in at 50 pounds so unless those 5 pounds broke the camel's back ( ok stupid turn of phrase there) you can still RUN at 3x your landspeed.... thats an 8 second 40 yard dash wearing 50 pounds of rigid articulated metal or 55 pounds of metal on top of (well i guess its quilted padding) on top of a "chain shirt" ( i guess thats a "mail" or "maile" shirt)

So I guess its  up if you think that meets "realism" I haven't ever had the opportunity to do speed drills with metal armor on.

I remember reading some very good papers about realism in D&D. I remember one in particular which suggested that the max level someone in the real world could be in comparison to D&D around level 5. So take about any best of the best person or worker or whatever in the real life, in D&D they would be about level 5. Great stuff to read and it really help to imagine realism in relation to real world in this game.

You wouldn't happen to remember how I might find that would you? I'd actually love to read it, as I'm going to be doing a panel about D&D vs Real Life (or more precisely physical skills and combat) next year at MomoCon (shameless plug: come to the convention!)

Comparing what people can do in real life version D&D is counting on skills though. Stats are another different thing altogether. I have PCs with a strength score of 18 in my games and I would not say that even them would be able to lift a real anvil above their head and throw it efficiently. Not a human or a dwarf anyways. A monstrous entity maybe...

That or we don't have the same definition of an anvil, I guess. Maybe you have very, very small anvils in your world.

Now about the anvil, well i was worried that I had spoken too soon, but I did a a little bit of searching and found a reference that gives general weights for various types of anvils. The heaviest two types of anvils are forging and farrier anvils IRL, but I couldn't find a reference to anvils in the srd ( and unfortunately I don't have AEG around) so we'll go with the IRL numbers. A forging anvil goes from 75 to 500 pounds which means (based on which size anvil) a strength 10 character could lift the smallest one above the head and a strength 22 character could lift the heaviest one above their head. Note that a strength 22 character can (if wearing less than 20 pounds of other gear) according to the text after that carrying capacity table can

"hoist [anvil] over onto his shoulders, and now the [character] is carrying [500] pounds. He can manage it but it's a heavy load. His [blah Dexterity, AC , armor check yada yada] ..., and now he runs at x3 speed instead of x4.

Which means again if his standard landspeed is 30 ft a round then its an 8 second 40 yard dash while carrying a 500 pound anvil on his shoulders.

I would contend that the D&D authors worked towards ( perhaps some would say blindly groped towards) internal consistency and referenced real experience in some of the places that simulated fantasy game and real life experience could intersect but I won't say the authors got to "realism". 

I'd like to point out that while LARPing is awesome its not D&D and the thought you just expressed specifically leads to "melee" can't have nice things.

Thank you for the LARP compliment but that really wasn't the point I was trying to make. Also, I really don't understand how preventing melee chars to layer armor simply to stack bonuses lead to melee can't have nice things.

Let's not forget that the main point of this thread is "I think I found out an interesting way to get armor enhancements +10 more cheaply than before", which in itself is not a way to get "nice things" but rather some try to break and abuse the system in place. There is rules and this suggestion is clearly trying to circumvent them. I am not surprised to see people stepping and answering just plain no...

I read the OP to be saying that "there is a rule here that says one thing about armor, an object that is named shirt over here without an exception rule, and another rule talking about things named shirt over here" its a rules wormhole that loops back into itself.

As for "melee" can't have nice things well I still haven't come up with a really a better term because I refuse to perpetuate the idea that somebody who can run a 40 yard dash in 8 seconds in a loin cloth,carrying guisarme in one hand and an anvil in the other is mundane.

The issue is anything that isn't magic has intersection with the in-game representation of "real world" physics. I.e. the charts for ability scores reflecting how much you can carry, how fast you can run etc and the skills list that don't have to do with "soft sciences" and "magic" ( so not things like diplomacy or spellcraft) but stuff like jump, balance, and climb. I read a scenario the other day about somebody need adjudication on "my swashbuckler wants to jump off a balcony, grab a silk rope, swing towards someone below me and attack as if i'm charging". Somebody came up with like 6 skill checks for that and there was an argument about if it counted as charging... Guess what though? One freaking spell can make that whole adjudication moot... "My gish casts fly the round before, i then do a charge (flying blithely through the air of course) and skewer the bad guy."

I'm just trying to say that taken as a whole the idea that you want to be "realistic" because you have some way of working through game construct <-> real world equivalence means you get to do way less ( or have to succeed more d20 rolls to try) than what people get to say when they cast spells. Which by the way "Hey its freakin' magic! It does exactly what the book says it does! Now gimme my Decanter of Endless Water powered hover donkey!"

[SneeR]

Let me put it this way: Chain shirt gives you an armor bonus to AC, right? So in game terms, it is "armor."

Now, you can wear your mundane chain shirt under your magic or mundane breastplate, but it will do nothing but weigh you down.

However, once you enchant that chain shirt, it becomes magic armor. This means that the chain shirt takes up your armor slot on your body. As such, it swells violently in an etreme allergic reaction on any contact with other sort of "magic armor."

Wearing other armor over the poor chain shirt causes it to go into anaphylactic shock and slip into a coma, becoming useless, naturally, until the offending armor is removed.

Please be kind to your magic armor.

[Talore]

If you have to rely on the argument you can't do "whatever" in real life, well, D&D (3.5) is not designed well-enough to make that argument feasible.

Sorry, but I think D&D in general try very, very hard to be as close to reality than possible without cutting down on the fun factor and succeed very well at it. We're not discussing magic or any intangible force here, we're discussing being able to layer different kind of armors in the hope to add up on the defense factor.

I remember reading some very good papers about realism in D&D. I remember one in particular which suggested that the max level someone in the real world could be in comparison to D&D around level 5. So take about any best of the best person or worker or whatever in the real life, in D&D they would be about level 5. Great stuff to read and it really help to imagine realism in relation to real world in this game.

Comparing what people can do in real life version D&D is counting on skills though. Stats are another different thing altogether. I have PCs with a strength score of 18 in my games and I would not say that even them would be able to lift a real anvil above their head and throw it efficiently. Not a human or a dwarf anyways. A monstrous entity maybe...

That or we don't have the same definition of an anvil, I guess. Maybe you have very, very small anvils in your world.

I'd like to point out that while LARPing is awesome its not D&D and the thought you just expressed specifically leads to "melee" can't have nice things.

Thank you for the LARP compliment but that really wasn't the point I was trying to make. Also, I really don't understand how preventing melee chars to layer armor simply to stack bonuses lead to melee can't have nice things.

Let's not forget that the main point of this thread is "I think I found out an interesting way to get armor enhancements +10 more cheaply than before", which in itself is not a way to get "nice things" but rather some try to break and abuse the system in place. There is rules and this suggestion is clearly trying to circumvent them. I am not surprised to see people stepping and answering just plain no...

A cat will kill a 1st-level human commoner in combat more than the other way around. Your realism argument doesn't hold water.

[Halinn]

Let's not forget that the main point of this thread is "I think I found out an interesting way to get armor enhancements +10 more cheaply than before", which in itself is not a way to get "nice things" but rather some try to break and abuse the system in place. There is rules and this suggestion is clearly trying to circumvent them. I am not surprised to see people stepping and answering just plain no...

As a general rule, the people on this forum love breaking the system and abusing the rules, but only if it is actually within the rules. It's good fun to find interesting, unintended combinations, as well as shooting it down when others try to do that.

[darqueseid]

Well I think you may be forgetting that "chain mail" was in real life worn underneath some of the heavier armors,

in real suits of armor chainmail was worn underneath as added protection for vital points that plated armor couldnt cover.

http://www.google.com/imgres?q=armor+with+chain&hl=en&biw=1280&bih=868&gbv=2&tbm=isch&tbnid=CI7oWkEh8ItQfM:&imgrefurl=http://echomon.co.uk/medieval-armor-and-weapons-pictures/&docid=KNpCjnIz4O35iM&imgurl=http://echomon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/med-armor.png&w=305&h=465&ei=A1njT92ZLuSM0QHdlNH3Aw&zoom=1

Anyway the comments about real life != d&D are true though, you can certainly wear chain and a breast plate together, but only one magic items properties can be active.  The chain "shirt" uses a body slot.

[RedWarlock]

And actually, if you read the text descriptions, some of the armor sets above chainmail actually include a layer of chain underneath.

(I had this one system that combined the armor-as-DR rules with breakdowns of all the described layers to try to create individual armor components and layers, with each different combo providing a varying amount of AC bonus or DR, giving the armors more variability than just a straight scale. I thought it was a lot of fun, but my players didn't go for it. Magic armor was also a sticking point. I should write it out here some time..)

[Eagle of Fire]

@dipolartech: I've found the paper I mentioned and you asked for. Enjoy.

http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/587/roleplaying-games/dd-calibrating-your-expectations-2

I don't really have much time to seriously add to this discussion... Seasonal jobs are a pain sometimes. But even then:

A cat will kill a 1st-level human commoner in combat more than the other way around. Your realism argument doesn't hold water.

If you allow something like this to happen in your games then I'm sorry to say that you're the one who don't hold water.

There is more to combat and D&D than only stats.

[dipolartech]

Thank you very much for digging that up for me. It is a fairly well-written article and the math will be probably be helpful. I do feel that its pushing a slight bias to explain his examples in the 5 levels below  "superhuman".

Also it reminds me to look into the level "epochs" 1-5~6, 6-??, ??-20 and how it relates to my issue with real-world physics. Anybody remember any guides or threads around here that were talking about the power representation of these level spreads?

[Jackinthegreen]

The main thing I remember is WotC had a page up saying Olympic archers were effectively 7th level rangers for hitting their targets. Here's the page.  Considering such people are the best in the world, it's fairly reasonable to say that 6th and 7th or so is a good cap on human advancement.

I digress from the original topic though.

As already mentioned, a chain shirt is explicitly armor and occupies that slot.  A chain shirt by any other name would still have 4 AC, +4 Max Dex, -2 ACP, and 20% ASF.  If worn with a breastplate and both were mundane, the breastplate would give the better armor boost and of course have the worse ASF, ACP, and MDB.  If both were magical, the chain shirt would cease to function since the breastplate was the most recently equipped, and that is what's used to adjudicate whether a magical item functions in the presence of others in that slot.

Go ahead and have fun with the name of it, but the rules absolutely do not allow it.

[Eagle of Fire]

One thing I think nobody mentioned too is that armors usually heavily rely on leather straps to hold everything in place. It is never explicitely described in the specific armor descriptions but if you read the whole chapter 7 introduction you'll see it mentioned clearly.

What we're discussing here wearing a chain mail kind of armor... And strapping another kind of armor which is clearly not designed to be worn above it.

Imagine it the way you want, it will never be practical. A warrior would always be better to get a special order from a blacksmith and add whatever piece of chainmail to the armor itself (like in real life)... And then it would be considered as a single armor anyways. Not to say that it is probably already taken into consideration too for the armors already listed in the player handbook.

[Kethrian]

If you take the rules for wearing too many magical rings, where they all cease to function, and apply it here, then wearing a chain shirt with a breastplate means they both cease to function, leaving you entirely unprotected, because you are limited to wearing 1 armour.

[Maat Mons]

… the rules for wearing too many magical rings, where they all cease to function …

What?  Dungeon Master's Guide, page 214, says a third ring you put on doesn't function.  It doesn't say the first two stop working.