armor check penalties


3.5/d20/OGL


if you are wearing masterwork full plate with an armor check penalty of 5 can you with magic enhancements bring the check penalty down to 0.
it may sound stupid but if you brought full plate down to 0 it would be stupid as even with things like weightless surely you are still encumbered as the plates aren't somehow going to let you move freely as wearing no armor, so surely you can't bring the penalty to less than 1.
i can't find in any of the rules that say you can't or can

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No, you can't bring it all the way down to zero. you only get the masterwork bonus once. Which the aformentioned masterwork full plate already has (5 instead of normal 6).


Best you can hope for is Mithral full plate, which has a check penalty of either -3 or -4 (basically wears as a masterwork breastplate). Of course, if you want to be sneaky or something, there's ways around everything. I played a massively armored dwarf for a while, and when the group had the resources for it, they would always douse him with a silence + invisibility/greater invisibility combo, just to keep him from alerting every BBEG in the dungeon that they were there. Total stealth mode, with no more rolling those pesky dice or check penalties!


You won't be able to bring down the armor check penalties completely, however there are magical armor qualities that might be able to negate or even add a positive modifier to certain skill checks that the armor penalizes. Please note that the armor quality will only be able to effect one skill check per quality.

Such as full plate +1 with Silent Moves will negate the armor check penalty for the armor. Silent Moves grants a +5 competence bonus to move silently. There is Improved and Greater Silent Moves which will give a +10 and +15 respectively.
(the great things about qualities as this is that they don't count as +1 or higher bonuses by themselves so they don't count against the maximum)

So theoretically you could have +1 full plate with Silent Moves, Shadow and Slick qualities. Your skill checks with move silently, hide and escape artist are negated. The armor is still considered to have just a +1 bonus, however the armor would cost [1000 (+1 bonus) +1650 (full plate) +3,750 (Slick) +3,750 (Silent Moves) +3,750 (Shadow)] or 13,900 gp. Not exactly cost effective... but hey it might happen.

If you made the above armor out of mithral tack on an additional 9000 gp and you'd get a +3 bonus for those skills. (Since the maximum armor check penalty is reduced by 3) +2 if you interpret it slightly differently, meaning that since mithral stuff is masterwork anyway that the max bonus is already included to the -3 reduction to armor check penalty. So +1 mithral full plate with Slick, Shadow, and Silent Moves would be 21,900 gp.

Contributor

lizard1978uk wrote:

if you are wearing masterwork full plate with an armor check penalty of 5 can you with magic enhancements bring the check penalty down to 0.

it may sound stupid but if you brought full plate down to 0 it would be stupid as even with things like weightless surely you are still encumbered as the plates aren't somehow going to let you move freely as wearing no armor, so surely you can't bring the penalty to less than 1.
i can't find in any of the rules that say you can't or can

Masterwork and all of the enhancements mentioned already do not alter arcane spell failure chances. It only decreases armor check penalties. They are not the same thing.

However, certain materials such as mithral can reduce arcane spell failure chances (by 10% in the case of mithral). See pg. 220 of the DMG for the mitrhal shirt. It's spell failure chance is 10%. There is nothing that says arcane spell failure chance cannot be reduced to 0%. For example, a light steel shield or buckler made of mithral would have no arcane spell failure chance. I cannot cite where you would find this rule, but I believe that you can't reduce this below 0 (not that it matters, really).


Steve Greer wrote:
Masterwork and all of the enhancements mentioned already do not alter arcane spell failure chances. It only decreases armor check penalties. They are not the same thing.

Although none of the previous posts mentioned anything about lowering the arcane spell failure chance of wearing armor, but was entirely geared towards check penalties to skills... you're 100% correct.

Shadow Lodge

Sharpe wrote:
You won't be able to bring down the armor check penalties completely, however there are magical armor qualities that might be able to negate or even add a positive modifier to certain skill checks that the armor penalizes. Please note that the armor quality will only be able to effect one skill check per quality.

There is at least one PrC that can reduce it further... Dread Commando, from [u]Heroes of Battle[/u] has the 'Armored Ease' class feature, which, by the class's 4th level, reduces the armor check penalty by 4. So mithral full plate can be worn with an effective armor check penalty of 0. Arcane spell failure, would remain at 25%, however...

I'm not aware of others OTTOMH, but they may be out there...

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