Armour and Encumbrance

[AntediluvianXIII]

Something occured to me during character creation (an elf rogue)...here goes, I'm a biker and to maintain safety on the road I am effectivley wearing (unstudded) leather armour to a degree - the jacket is reasonably heavy. HOWEVER, once it is put on I do not feel the weight...(if you own a leather jacket or long wool overcoat try this - place it on the floor and pick it up a couple of times. Now...put it on...See?)so my question is...

Is the weight of armour for encumbrance carrying weight or wearing weight? Yes, my bikers leather is restrictive (DEX penalty!) but it certainly doesn't feel as heavy wearing it as it does carrying it around on a hot sunny day

Any thoughts? - I was thinking of maybe cutting each armour weight by a certain percentage as a house rule for wearing as opposed to carrying it.

and no answers about clockwork or steam driven motorbikes in Golarion :D

[AntediluvianXIII]

...also I don't know if this will apply to chainmail or full plate, as I have never had the chance to put it to the test!!!

[Abraham spalding]

The armor is counted towards carrying weight but not towards encumbrance... iirc.

Chain when worn properly has weight and takes more effort to move in, but isn't going to stop you from doing much... it simply makes it a little harder than it was before.

[AntediluvianXIII]

cheers for that - I'll check with the GM and other victims...er....i mean fellow players :D (I haven't RP'ed fantasy RPGs for YEARS!!)

[Helaman]

I wore a heavy steel link chainmail shirt that covered upper arms, torso to mid thigh once for a costume party... felt fine though my shoulders were feeling it by 2nd - 3rd hour. Where it was an issue was getting out of the sofa once I sat to take some of the wieght off... I sort of needed to slide sideways and lever/push myself up off the arm of the sofa becsause I couldnt stand on my own.

By about midnight I needed some help to get out of it... even sitting/laying down to make it easier.

Now, I am a) a bit out of shape and b) not used to wearing armour but it wasnt that bad to wear it.

The hard bit? Carrying it back to my friends place to return it in a gym bag. It was like 20 kgs... in the end I put it back on (and a trench coat over the top) to ride a bus half way across town to return it... why? because it was easier to wear it than lug it.

[mdt]

Abraham spalding wrote:

The armor is counted towards carrying weight but not towards encumbrance... iirc.

Chain when worn properly has weight and takes more effort to move in, but isn't going to stop you from doing much... it simply makes it a little harder than it was before.

Sorry Abraham, you missed this bit.

PRD wrote:

Encumbrance by Weight: If you want to determine whether your character's gear is heavy enough to slow him down more than his armor already does, total the weight of all the character's items, including armor, weapons, and gear.

What you read was that encumbrance by armor is usually all you need to worry about. Basically, you use the worse of the two, the encumbrance from armor type (Light/Medium/Heavy) or the by weight.

Example : If I'm wearing mithral breast plate, I have light encumbrance from armor. If, while wearing it, I'm carrying 500lbs of lead ingots on my person, I'm probably moderately or heavily encumbered from weight, and use that instead.

[Stubs McKenzie]

There is a basic ruleset in D&D in place that directly goes against real world experience but is there to maintain balance... that ruleset is the bonuses and penalties to wearing armor. There are a few reasons for this:

1) The different armor types are from different historical time periods, so the weapons they were made to protect against and the technologies users in their creation differ greatly. Making older armors still viable requires some counter-intuitive tinkering.

2) basic game balance requires that more protective armors be more movement restrictive, again to force a choice in armor, even though some of the most restrictive armors in the game hardly restricted movement at all, full plate for example was articulated at every joint and used an advanced (for its time) strapping system that worked similar to todays camping packs... it distributed weight across the body to remove stress from the lower back and neck. It was also crafted like a tux is fitted, specifically for the individuals measurements. If D&D took this sort of thing into account, full plate would only have an armor check penalty of 2 to 3, and would not restrict speed at all. Carrying capacity would also be heavily effected, allowing those with very low strength to put the best armor in the game on.

3) A number of other factors go into it as well, but those are the big two imo... other things like weapon balance vs ac, and class concept restrictions also play a major role.

[spalding]

mdt wrote:

correct stuff

Yeah I felt I was missing something -- thank you for finding what it was. I remembered that you only take the higher of the penalties between encumbrance and armor though which is important in its own right.

[mdt]

Abraham spalding wrote:

mdt wrote:

correct stuff

Yeah I felt I was missing something -- thank you for finding what it was. I remembered that you only take the higher of the penalties between encumbrance and armor though which is important in its own right.

Yeppers. Only reason I remembered it is I had a player who played a rogue/warlock poisondusk lizardfolk with like a 6 or 7 STR. He didn't wear armor (just bracers), but we had to keep calculating his encumbrance every few gaming sessions, since it was so low that even just minimal equipment was pushing it, and he was maxing out his movement with feats and magic equipment. So I've read that section of the book a few hundred times. :)

[Quantum Steve]

You don't feel the weight because it's well distributed and a leather coat isn't that heavy. My leather overcoat weighs about 8 or 10 lbs.

Having worn a heavy chain shirt (not extensively, just trying on a friend's once) I could definitely feel the weight of that. If I remember correctly the shirt weighed a little less than 25 lbs.

On the rules side of things, mdt's post is correct.

[AntediluvianXIII]

Thanx for all posts - I'm just a bit of practise with 3.5/Pathfinder rules - I'm used to running angst ridden V:TM where armour isn't a worry, unless the enemy is carrying a stake :)

[Theo Stern]

Helaman wrote:

I wore a heavy steel link chainmail shirt that covered upper arms, torso to mid thigh once for a costume party... felt fine though my shoulders were feeling it by 2nd - 3rd hour. Where it was an issue was getting out of the sofa once I sat to take some of the wieght off... I sort of needed to slide sideways and lever/push myself up off the arm of the sofa becsause I couldnt stand on my own.

By about midnight I needed some help to get out of it... even sitting/laying down to make it easier.

Now, I am a) a bit out of shape and b) not used to wearing armour but it wasnt that bad to wear it.

The hard bit? Carrying it back to my friends place to return it in a gym bag. It was like 20 kgs... in the end I put it back on (and a trench coat over the top) to ride a bus half way across town to return it... why? because it was easier to wear it than lug it.

fyi the proper way to wear a chain shirt is to belt it with a little overlap over the belt and the upper part "hiked up slightly", that will distribute a lot the weight to your hips, try it next time, it should help your shoulders