Disclaimed 2: this is not a solutions thread, it's a short, profanity laced rant followed by some brief suggestions. At some point in the mid to far future I may actually use this rant to do the needed editing and implement some solutions.
Disclaimer 3: Most, if not all of these have been brought up before, this is just collecting them in one single rant.
- Fucking Armor Proficiencies - how do they work?
- For the love of Vecna, what possessed you to think Armor Stealth Penalty was a good idea? It's just like armor check penalty with an arbitrary +/- 2 applied.
- Does heavier-than-light armor reduce movement in tome or not? The world may never know
- Penalty Reductions by level - what a great idea, and what a crying shame the execution was to bring back THAC0, and then add division, subtraction and exclusion steps.
- Why do all these dozens of different types of armors do one of the exact fucking same three things for the first 5 levels?
- Since they all do one of the same exact three fucking things, why should players care about anything but getting their sweet spot of Armor Bonus + Max Dex? Are pillowfights really such a big deal in this game that reducing nonlethal damage is worth gaining a point of AC for?
- Ohhhh, lookie at these shiny new suits of armor we found. So who's got both heavy armor and ranks in Knowledge: Engineering to unlock the Mechanus Armor's bonuses? knight? cleric? Bueller? Bueller? Nope. Okay, how about this suit of Silk Steel, either of you heavy armor 4-or-fewer skill point per level, int meaningless guys sink ranks into Move Silently - which isn't even on your class skill list? Why-the hell not, don't you guys like armor?
- Wait, you're saying there are armors other than Adamantine on this list? You gotta be shittin' me here.
- Is there even reason to wear heavy armor after mid levels, when you can be pumping your dex bonus (via items or magic) while wearing medium armors for the same total AC but better touch AC, lower penalties and maybe faster movement? I mean Tome is full of stuff like the Fire Mage and similar options, who by mid level are making a pair of ranged touch attacks every round, so it's not like the heavier flatfooted AC of heavier armor and lower dex is even arguably compensating.
Proposed solutions
1. In addition to classes granting proficiencies, we need Tome Scaling Armor Proficiency feat(s). Either one general Armor Proficiency feat that lets you gain proficiency as a "practice for a day" exploit with a specified number of particular-suits similar to Tome XWPs as the base ability or three feats different feats - one each for Light, Medium and Heavy armors that grant different and yet sometimes synergistic abilities.
2. Armor Stealth Penalty goes away as the needless complication that it is. Armor that is supposed to be more stealthy than normal can just get that as a property. Armor that is supposed to be less stealthy than normal can just have a high ACP and a property that give a bonus to the other things ACP applies to.
3. Probably fairest and easiest to leave movement reductions as part of the non-proficient penalties, and let people in heavy armor tear around at full speed.
4. Simplify the scaling fractional negative penalty reductions to explicit break points, and use those break points as part of either the feat or armor scaling abilities.
5 & 6: Suit-by-suit editing is needed. DR vs nonlethal is not a real ability and should be reserved as a tradeoff for armor that is awesome on AC and Dex alone. Particularly the low-level abilities should be distinct on just about every suit of armor and repeats shouldn't show up until at least the 5th level ability. Probably useful to make a lot of the conditional damage reductions a bit less conditional but move them to the 5th level ability.
7: Either great care needs to be taken that skill-based armor keys off of skills that classes which get the relevant proficiency are likely to have and/or armor abilities need to key off one of multiple different skills and/or heavier armors should have 0 level abilities that any wearer can access. (similar to how Tome feats have a base level ability) and/or armor prof feats can let you treat armor abilities as though you had the relevant skill ranks.
8: The above mentioned suit-by-suit editing needs a Nerfbat here.
9: If heavier armor has any sort of slower movement or harsher skill penalties, or just rarer proficiency than lighter armors, then both the best-case and the average case AC and ability setups need to be outright better than those cases for lighter armors in order to compensate. This can be accomplished by giving heavier armor zero-level ability slots and paying more attention to the Max Dex + AC and penalty totals for low-dex, med-dex and crazy dex characters with whichever type of penalty reduction or Max Dex increase is decided on.