The Tavern

I might end up on badforum for this, but I think it's a discussion worth having. Is there any point to non-dragon armour heavier than leather and lighter than plate? In the old days, you used to have to work your way up to plate armour. Just putting on that suit you found on D:1 was a good way to kill a character since the penalties to hit were pretty significant. At the same time you couldn't not wear any heavy armour if you wanted to go that direction since there was no way to train armour otherwise.

Based on my understanding, right now wearing anything other than a robe, leather armour, most dragon armours, plate armour or CPM is essentially just a newbie trap. If that understanding is correct, should we leave them in the game?

that decision is only trivial later in the game. Early on, you don't have all the options. Also, you don't have the enchant armour scrolls (heck, I often don't have them until after rune time), so things like +2 splint mail of fire resistance become more useful. And what about melee/ranged characters with less str? They will still wear the heaviest thing they can afford.

If you get a highly-enchanted randart mid-range armour with special bonuses like +Blink and resistances, and are still training up to an unenchanted higher armour, that might work for you.

I think that at least a couple armour types should be removed. There are a few I have never felt the need to wear; like splint mail is in that zone where it severely hurts spellcasting, so its useless to mages, has a high str requirement, making it useless to low-str stabbers and the like, and is outclassed by relatively common platemail for high-str ranged/melee chars.

I do realize that having more armour types does open up choices for the player if he happens to find a decent one (like in rchandra's cases), but it seems a bit silly to have these "garbage" armour types in the game. The team made a good choice removing banded armour.

On the other hand, there isn't that many armours in the game and they do open up choices. I'd like to see some more input on the topic first.

XuaXua wrote:If you get a highly-enchanted randart mid-range armour with special bonuses like +Blink and resistances, and are still training up to an unenchanted higher armour, that might work for you.

I'm willing to give up that 1/1000 chance.

rchandra wrote:that decision is only trivial later in the game. Early on, you don't have all the options. Also, you don't have the enchant armour scrolls (heck, I often don't have them until after rune time), so things like +2 splint mail of fire resistance become more useful. And what about melee/ranged characters with less str? They will still wear the heaviest thing they can afford.

I'm pretty sure that robes and leather are extremely common and that plate is pretty common after you start encountering orc packs. The odds of finding +2 splint mail of fire resist are just as common as finding +2 plate mail of fire resist, so I guess I just don't understand your point there.

Melee / ranged characters without strength to wear plate is certainly a slight concern. I don't have a good answer, but I would suggest that if they don't have the 18 STR needed, wearing splint isn't very satisfactory one either.

Not all items need to be super awesome all the time. Some base types are not super awesome and need a good ego to be useful. There is not a lot of overlap in armor types, but some are worse than others. This is okay. Do you (Edit: rebthor) also want to remove 3/4 of all weapon types?

So what would be left with? Robe, leather, troll, dragon, plate, and CPM? That gives us six types, two of which are geared for light armor users, two for heavy armor, one of which is seen maybe once every hundred games, and two that require finding the monster, killing it, hoping it drops a corpse, hoping that butchering the corpse gives you a hide, and then enchanting the hide. That leaves a pretty big hole there...

Making "medium" armor more useful would be ideal I think and could probably be done by messing with EV penalties vs AC and taking it down to two or three types (say, ring and chain).

Galefury wrote:Not all items need to be super awesome all the time. Some base types are not super awesome and need a good ego to be useful. There is not a lot of overlap in armor types, but some are worse than others. This is okay. Do you (Edit: rebthor) also want to remove 3/4 of all weapon types?

Yes. At least the obvious "trap" ones like scythes and ankus and probably things like the war axe should go too unless the devs want to actually make a change to 1.5 handers as well.

The rest should either be better differentiated or removed. There's no reason to use a spiked flail right now instead of a eveningstar except that the latter are rare. Contrast that to axes where an executioner's axe is both rare and requires more skill or to sabres v. quickblades where the former does more base damage but the latter is 66% faster and is rare.

I would liken them in both cases to armour. For much of the game your might be using a sabre or a battleaxe or a spiked flail, but when you find mottled dragon armour on a robe user or to a lesser extent, GDA on a plate user, you switch.

One particular difference between armour and weapons is that the effect of min delay in speeding attacks only has a partial analogue in armour. This can mean that it does make sense to work your way up the weapons list in a way that it does not in armour.

Editing to add: One thing that Crawl prides itself on is that there are supposed to be no "no-brainers." I would argue that right now, armour is a very big no brainer. If you are skilling toward heavy armour, wear plate, CPM or GDA. If you are dodging or spell casting wear robes, leather or one of the numerous "light" dragon armours. Weapon choice is also very close to being one, but due to the breakpoint issues, does lead to at least some choices, such as "Do I go with min delay and shield on a trident or do I go back to full delay and no shield on this glaive I just found?"

I said it before and ended up on badforum for it: equipment choice in crawl in general is a bit of a nobrainer. Very rarely you have multiple items competing for a slot that isn't easy to swap. Usually one thing is clearly the best, so that is what you use. Other times you have multiple good choices, in which case you just use one of them and hope for the best. The influence of the equipment and other items you find on your strategic and tactical choices is interesting, the choice what to wear right now generally isn't. That wont change if "bad" armors and weapons are removed. Simply more "good" ones would spawn instead, raising the quality of equipment in general. This doesn't make the game more interesting, just easier (monsters use equipment too, so not strictly easier I suppose...).

I think we should get rid of all monsters except orcs and dragons, and every monster should either be an iteration on orcs or dragons.

Magic orcs, slime orcs, warrior orcs. Dragons, demon dragons, death dragons, orb guardian dragons, dracoliches.

That said, get rid of Haste if you want a no-brainer tactic removed.
If you aren't with Trog or Chei, you likely have it memorized or are working towards it.

I don't think there needs to be a change. The variety of types is not a problem, and it does actually create interesting choices. You might find a good plate armour, but then a randart scale or chain mail with amazing bonuses, making you choose between good AC or those bonus abilities.

The variety just adds a bit of flavour. I don't much care if the amazing artefact might be a scale mail, chain mail or splint mail.

ring mail, scale mail, chain mail, splint mail, plate armour.

Honestly, I still have a hard time remembering which of scale or splint is better. Maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker. Aren't those 2 the worst ones anyway? I think we could use some simplification and trimming.

While we're at it, I see 2 other issues. The "evasion penalty" is both confusing and limiting. It's confusing, because It doesn't actually does what it says on the tin. The -3 EVP niche is overloaded with good armours. It's the sweet spot and it could use some diversification and more choices with a more fine scale.

For example, armours could have a stiffness value which would be equal to the strength requirement. And then we spread the -3 EVP armours in the 7-11 or 8-10 stiffness range.

Okay, I take objection to the "remove most armours from the game" bit. We got tons of armours, and this conversation is really only about the four mails. Here's a list. :p

Code:: man(or otherwise)made armours hides / magically derived armours robe animal skin leather armour troll hide / leather armour ring mail steam dragon hide / armour scale mail mottled dragon hide / armour chain mail swamp dragon hide / armour split mail fire dragon hide / armour plate armour ice dragon hide / armour crystal plate armour pearl dragon hide /armour storm dragon hide / armour gold dragon hide / armour (Sorted in increasing order of AC. AC values across the columns aren't synced)

We really don't need a nice linear progression of vanilla armours with AC. I wouldn't mid combining the four mails into 2 or 3 with larger AC steps in between. (At least the dragon armours make the progression interesting with choices of resistances).

Hmm… Back of the envelope brainstorming here.

First, eliminate the -0.8 discount on EV penalty with respect to spell success, so that -1EV is meaningfully different for a starting character than -0EV. Currently you'll hardly ever notice the difference unless you train a buckler at the same time. In exchange, the armor skill reduction to the EV penalty should be made favorable, so that a lightly armored can get a meaningful reduction on the spell success penalty from realistic early- or mid-game investment armor skill. None of this 'eliminate penalties on -2EV ring mail… for only 27 armor skill!' business.

All entries on the same line are approximately interchangeable, like gloves vs. gauntlets or caps vs. wizard hats. No particular reason to keep both, but there are tiles that already exist for most of them, so there's no particular reason not to leave them in.

robes, furs: +0AC, -0EV, no enchantment or corrosion possible
most armor brands possible, including archmagi but not resistance

leather armor, hide armor: +2AC, -1EV, hide armor is usable by anything that can currently use robes
fire, cold, or poison resistance brands only
starts approximately as hard to cast in as ring mail or swamp dragon armour is now

ring mail, scale mail, chain mail: +5AC, -2EV
fire, cold, or poison resistance brands only
starts approximately as hard to cast in as fire dragon armour is now

splint mail, plate armour: +8AC, -5EV
fire, cold, poison, electric, negative energy resistance possible, MR inherent
not feasible to cast in until endgame, and worse defense than rarest endgame armors, but inherent MR makes plate appealing to non-casters until you find rare equipment

The dragon armour chain and crystal plate armour can likewise be tweaked to be generally better than more common armors, but the general idea is that you get a big boost in defense with every level, but you've got to pay for it if you want to overcome the spell success penalty. The idea is that a caster in Lair may want to sink ~8 levels into armor to upgrade to something a little more defensive, or they can stick with robes and hope they don't need it. Investing in armor should be cheaper than extra levels in magic skills to overcome the spell success penalty, and the strongest defenses require some of both.

I don't know if it would be worth the effort it would take to rebalance everything, though. Currently, trash armors have a tiny role in the early game until you find plate, and then they're floor trash that randomly lets enemy orcs be slightly more resilient to your attacks. The presence of useless armors isn't especially elegant or minimalist, but it isn't being actively harmful either. Not like the -0.8 discount on EV for spell success, anyway.

There's also mottled hide/armour which is in between steam and swamp.

galehar wrote:Honestly, I still have a hard time remembering which of scale or splint is better. Maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker.

I can never remember the difference either.

Quicksilver gives running. Make it happen. QDA erry day.

Shadow gives... partial rTorment? Necromancy boost?

Iron gives extra AC... maybe an Earth boost? Something to make it more interesting than vanilla defense. Some slight damage shaving?

galehar wrote:Honestly, I still have a hard time remembering which of scale or splint is better. Maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker. Aren't those 2 the worst ones anyway? I think we could use some simplification and trimming.

Oh, it's not just because you're not a native speaker. Native speakers can't typically tell which of those is supposed to be better, either, because the armor tiers are a D&D-ism that has been held over from the days back when the people who invented D&D were just a group of amateur wargamers using their miniatures to play out mass combat. In reality, most of those armors were separated from each other by region or by time period, and they probably never existed in the same time and place to be compared to each other. Some of them may have never even existed at all. Good armor was custom-made, too, so its defensive value depended more on the skill of the smith and the physical ability of the user than the theoretical properties of its design.

At least the banded mail has been dispensed with, if I am correctly informed. In general, reduction (removal of superfluous features) is good, so I'll just try to gauge what one may expect from the armour subgame:

1) Tactical choices: what to wear now? Decisions would be along the lines: what's best among the current set of AC/EV/casting that I can currently have and want. For this, AC vs EV has to different enough, depending on monsters, and the effect of armour types on stealth, casting, stabbing noticeably (I think they are).

2) Strategical choices: where do I want to take this character and what steps will be necessary to do it? Decisions would be stat choice (a pity that Dex comes in so indirectly here) or skilling path. This includes rarities: dragon armours or CPM are not something you may have right now.

3) Resources: what to spend the ?EA on. A mixture of the above two. (Acquirement does not fit because of the many additional armour items.)

I am probably missing something (and I wouldn't mind discussing what). None of these is set up ideally in current Crawl, at least in my opinion. For a change, let me mention that one should not do it like Brogue, where you always want the heaviest armour you can afford (the mark there is Str). How could the current set made more interesting: I can afford to fantasise wildly, here we go:
* Change "vorpalise weapon" into "vorpalise item"; use it on a small set of (mundane) armours to get Stuff, e.g. resistances, increased EA limit etc.
* Make skills more relevant, as indicated by KoboldLord.
* Give a weakish mundane type some explicit SH synergy.

What we don't want, I believe, are weapon-armour pairings. E.g. maces are good against certain armours but worse against others etc. While that may be realistic, I don't expect a good game there.

I haven't seen much discussion about the impact of armor on melee and ranged attack speed/accuracy. How does that work currently?

For a change, let me mention that one should not do it like Brogue, where you always want the heaviest armour you can afford (the mark there is Str).

Unless you find lighter armour with a particularly good brands. IMO Brogue armour brands are mostly underpowered but something like dragon immunity can impact late game strategy significantly.

Could armour differentiation in crawl be achieved by grouping armours into classes that can get special brands, like resistance for robes?

BlackSheep wrote:I haven't seen much discussion about the impact of armor on melee and ranged attack speed/accuracy. How does that work currently?

It does absolutely nothing to attack speed unless you are using unarmed, and the accuracy hit exists for melee but is generally not a big deal.

Maybe another way of differentiating armor would be to make it impact melee, ranged and casting, forcing you to invest in the skill if you want the benefits of heavier suits without the penalties?

If I'm using spells I just use a robe. If I'm not then I go for a plate. Yes eventually you're going to use dragon armor but that usually doesn't happen until the vaults.

I don't think much can be done with intermediate armors. You only really need robe, leather, scale, and plate for the early game... scale fits that -3 niche so it's nice if you're only planning on getting 9 strength for dragon armor later on. Ring, chain, and splint aren't all that useful except if you're trying to stone arrow things with 12 strength or something along those lines.

I said this in a thread about the usefulness (or lack thereof) of hides in the game. While hides give resistances now the thread basically talks about why hides themselves are a flavorful but kind of useless intermediate item to dragon armors.

I'd hate to see the art assets and sprite work for the current armor tiles go to waste since I helped design a few, but I don't see the trouble for medium armor users, if you want to go down 1 EV you need 3 more strength, that seems like a decent progression of strengths for someone trying to spec into a higher armor than the STR they started with. Say, moving from chain mail to plate mail, that's 12 Str to 18 Str, depending on the race, anything starting at 12 Str is probably a hybrid looking to get a lot of AC but still casting, or perhaps ranged going for high Dex and Str enough for the heaviest armor they can afford to wear. Splint mail could probably be gone since it's too close to Plate as it stands without much benefit over it.

I also suggested we add more variety to the medium armor range from different animal hides and magically enchanting them like dragon armor to fill a different niche, taking on attributes of the skin-able monsters of the dungeon just like trolls. They all have to be found and made, so their base stats are slightly better than mundane armor and have added effects appropriate for their mid-game locations. I would consider making them more heavily enchantable as well.

Wolf Hide- alternative to Troll Armor, instead of regeneration, stealth oriented medium armor
4AC, -1 EV, 19% GDR, Stealth bonus, +(Dex or Ev or +Inv? Maybe too far.)

Polar Bear/Grizzly Bear Pelt- Less evasion penalty but as thick as ring mail. 4% less GDR
5 AC, -1 EV, 19% GDR, Armour slot berzerk for free amulet slot. If you prove your worth and kill a bear and magically endow it's pelt should you not gain it's powers? Polar Bear may also have (rC+)?

Sheep skin- same as robe except for -1 Ev penalty, perhaps a tiny bit of GDR, 7% is right between robe and thick tanned leather.
(rC+) seems natural on a wooly new outfit.

Turtle Shell Mail- Moderate weight, scale mail AC and a bit of SH to compensate for high weight and rarity.
6 AC, -3 EV, 3-4 SH, 24% GDR possibly affected by shield skill.(Ring mail GDR, less than scale)

Phoenix Garb-
(they probably need to gen outside of Zig...) for (rF+)or (rF++), possibly evocable flight, or controlled flight at least. Make figuring out you need to butcher their corpses rewarding for the unspoiled.
3AC, 0 EV, 19% GDR

Alligator Hide- Evocable burst of speed that costs food? Decent AC. Perhaps some bonus to speed/stealth in water. Tempted to give it a bite attack (magic!)but perhaps that would interact weirdly with helmet slots.
4AC, -2EV, 24% GDR (GDR of ring mail, relatively low AC, light but tough GDR hide not very suited for evasion or providing the best AC coverage)

There has to be plenty of other possible hides to consider that would make light, medium and heavy "natural" armours totally cool and flavorful and well balanced. My examples might not play out very well in a real implementation, but tweaking them would give an interesting variety to the already very dominant late game attraction of dragon armors, but for several other niches in the medium armors at midgame.

I think that GDR should be shown as an in-game attribute of armours; it is just as significant, if not moreso, than EV penalty and AC bonus.

XuaXua wrote:I think that GDR should be shown as an in-game attribute of armours; it is just as significant, if not moreso, than EV penalty and AC bonus.

Why? All three properties scale together. Greater AC = greater EV penalty = greater GDR.

Heck, I'm not even sure why we show the EV penalty. I suppose it's good for the times 3 str check (although really, you could do the same thing with a line in the description that gives the str requirement. Less spoiler-y, and preempts wear testing and getting a warning message). And I suppose it gives you some way to distinguish heavy armour from light. But for the most part it seems like it just confuses matters for newer players.

(I suppose the three don't scale perfectly with one another- jumping from vanilla to dragon armours you can get the same AC with slightly different EV penalties. But this is kinda titchy).

After many games spent tabbing with Dr/robes/leather, I believe that GDR isn't all that important. Nice to have, but not important.

mageykun wrote:
XuaXua wrote:I think that GDR should be shown as an in-game attribute of armours; it is just as significant, if not moreso, than EV penalty and AC bonus.

Why? All three properties scale together. Greater AC = greater EV penalty = greater GDR.

...

(I suppose the three don't scale perfectly with one another- jumping from vanilla to dragon armours you can get the same AC with slightly different EV penalties. But this is kinda titchy).

Think of armours as falling under two tiers: "mundane" and "dragon" (might also include troll leather in the latter category). Dragon armours are strictly better than mundane armours, and have vastly lower EV penalties. The difference isn't slight. Try casting spells in fire dragon armour vs splint mail (same AC, different penalties).

Showing these numbers gets the point across that dragon armours are much better than mundane ones.

That said, I think calling it a "base evasion modifier" is very misleading, since EV is only one thing this stat represents. I don't know what else to call it though.

evilmike wrote:That said, I think calling it a "base evasion modifier" is very misleading, since EV is only one thing this stat represents. I don't know what else to call it though.

That was the point of my earlier post. How about "stiffness" or "rigidity"? Or a more straightforward "strength requirement"? Or maybe a more generic "penalty".

evilmike wrote:That said, I think calling it a "base evasion modifier" is very misleading, since EV is only one thing this stat represents. I don't know what else to call it though.

"Encumberance"? "Hinderance"? "Obstructuosity"?

OK, that last one wasn't for real.

I thought of encumbrance, as well. That or strength requirement sound best to me.

evilmike wrote:Showing these numbers gets the point across that dragon armours are much better than mundane ones.

Yeah, I vastly understated the value of dragon armours there. (I'll sand by my GDR comment though. Pretty sure that scales directly with base AC- everything with the same base AC has the same GDR, so it's not worth showing).

That said, I think calling it a "base evasion modifier" is very misleading, since EV is only one thing this stat represents. I don't know what else to call it though.

I guess this is my complaint with EV penalties. It just doesn't seem clear, even if strictly speaking it does provide the information.

Maybe we want something like...

This armour requires <foo> strength to wear effectively and <descriptor> impede(s) spellcasting.
(<descriptor> = does not, barely, somewhat, significantly, severely, etc).

Hmm. Or maybe just saying "STR requirement: <foo>" is more elegant than introducing another set of adjectives. :p

njvack wrote:
evilmike wrote:That said, I think calling it a "base evasion modifier" is very misleading, since EV is only one thing this stat represents. I don't know what else to call it though.

"Encumberance"? "Hinderance"? "Obstructuosity"?

OK, that last one wasn't for real.

Flexibility, aka FLEX.

KoboldLord wrote:
galehar wrote:Honestly, I still have a hard time remembering which of scale or splint is better. Maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker. Aren't those 2 the worst ones anyway? I think we could use some simplification and trimming.

Oh, it's not just because you're not a native speaker. Native speakers can't typically tell which of those is supposed to be better, either, because the armor tiers are a D&D-ism that has been held over from the days back when the people who invented D&D were just a group of amateur wargamers using their miniatures to play out mass combat. In reality, most of those armors were separated from each other by region or by time period, and they probably never existed in the same time and place to be compared to each other. Some of them may have never even existed at all. Good armor was custom-made, too, so its defensive value depended more on the skill of the smith and the physical ability of the user than the theoretical properties of its design.

All of those (that are in crawl at least) did exist... and there are actually some pretty significant structural differences between a scale armor, a chain mail or a plate armor. Plate armor was so much of a game-changer when it was invented that people had to come up with new fighting techniques just to be able to penetrate it.

As for removing the mid-range armors, why does every item need to be super good and useful? I think some of the "crap" items serve a purpose as well - they're things that you find and go "meh, I don't need that, hope I find something better next time". If they didn't exist, every time you found something would be "oh, there's that item again, funny how this dungeon is full of them" and that would in my opinion destroy a large piece of the "mood" of crawl. I think it'd make the game feel really boring if there's only robes and plate armors in the game...

I think our goal here should be to fix the armor we have, not remove it.

The reason why I think most armours should be removed is not because I think that every item needs to be super good and useful. It's because seeing people wearing chain or splint or whatever because they don't know any better shows that these items are newbie traps. If plate and robes were rare, maybe you'd have a point, but neither are. You find so many robes and plates that there is a whole optimal strategy of going around the dungeon, picking up every glowing robe and plate to see if any have useful resistances.

Now if you want to claim that plate is rare on D:2, I'll grant you that point. The thing is on D:2 you don't need plate armour. Whatever you come in with is going to be OK.

It seems to me that "the more the merrier" in case of EV or AC so my hybrids will always end up with -1ev or less armours so they don't cripple their spellcasting, and, say, 15-17 str characters feel like a waste of statpoints because they can't reach the really good AC numbers - so might as well wear robes and pick casting up. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know. But I would always choose say 30EV/10AC over 20/20 or even 10/30 sometimes, because hey, spells

I should add that this is mostly a demonspawn player point of view, where the aptitudes don't help hybrids either

What about making Dex work on the midrange armours? By either reducing penalties or increasing EV. As is, I'm not sure when to pick dex as a levelup stat, if ever.

paplaukes wrote:It seems to me that "the more the merrier" in case of EV or AC so my hybrids will always end up with -1ev or less armours so they don't cripple their spellcasting, and, say, 15-17 str characters feel like a waste of statpoints because they can't reach the really good AC numbers - so might as well wear robes and pick casting up. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know. But I would always choose say 30EV/10AC over 20/20 or even 10/30 sometimes, because hey, spells
I should add that this is mostly a demonspawn player point of view, where the aptitudes don't help hybrids either

What about making Dex work on the midrange armours? By either reducing penalties or increasing EV. As is, I'm not sure when to pick dex as a levelup stat, if ever.

Dex is already better than str for all non-caster builds, assuming you already have enough str to wear your desired armour. That means for anything other than GDA, it's easy enough to not raise str for almost all builds. Crate recently said that even on his hybrids, he's been taking dex more often than int.

rebthor wrote:Dex is already better than str for all non-caster builds, assuming you already have enough str to wear your desired armour. That means for anything other than GDA, it's easy enough to not raise str for almost all builds. Crate recently said that even on his hybrids, he's been taking dex more often than int.

I do not take dex more often than int, but I do raise it some much of the time.

rebthor wrote:Dex is already better than str for all non-caster builds, assuming you already have enough str to wear your desired armour. That means for anything other than GDA, it's easy enough to not raise str for almost all builds. Crate recently said that even on his hybrids, he's been taking dex more often than int.

Sorry for my noobish question, but doesn't Strength impacts the damage you deal using melee weapons?

Amrod wrote:Sorry for my noobish question, but doesn't Strength impacts the damage you deal using melee weapons?

Yes, strength does increase the damage you do with a melee weapon by a very small amount. It's not worth raising strength for that tiny bit more damage though.

What if, just like with weapons, there were different kinds of enchantment scrolls for armour?

Enchant Armour 1 - Boosts the AC of the armour
Enchant Armour 2 - Improves the EV penalty of the armour. Probably a relatively rare scroll. Only works on body armour. It could be made more common if the EV penalty scale were changed to have more steps
Enchant Armour 3 - Does both 1 and 2
Vorpalise Armour - Boosts the _base AC_ of the body armour.

With scrolls like this around, you suddenly might have new interesting choices. Maybe the only source of rPois you've found is a chainmail. You now have the choice of waiting to see if something better comes along, or slowly starting to turn it into something endgame-worthy using scrolls.

Another thought: Why not just tie the strength requirement for armour to its weight, rather than, or in addition to its EV penalty? This would make some of the lighter armours that have the same EV penalty as heavier armours more attractive.

I was just thinking about a vorpalize scroll for armour, but also about armour enhancers.

Like, you can cast certain spells on your weapons to enhance them and vorpalize to make these spells permanent.

Why aren't there spells to enhance armour, and vorpalize scrolls to make those permanent? Or do Dragon and Troll armours serve those needs?

I guess enchanting a Hide is sort of the armour equivalent of vorpalizing, but that doesn't really count because until you do that you don't really have an armour worth much at all.

It does seem odd that you can do way more stuff to weapons - enchant two different stats, add a variety of brands through either spells or divine blessing, make brands permanent. With armour, all you can do is boost AC.

last I checked, there weren't any legends about King Arthur's breastplate.

(translation: weapons get more stuff because they're more memorable and more significant than armour)

The Tavern

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Re: Remove most armours from the game

Re: Remove most armours from the game

Re: Remove most armours from the game

Re: Remove most armours from the game

Re: Remove most armours from the game

Re: Remove most armours from the game

Re: Remove most armours from the game