I mentioned a "Pathfinder armor mod" in my last Twitch stream and I didn't mention all of the details there so I'll list them here. I think I ran this game like 8 years ago or something.

You may not be surprised to hear that I don't like how 3.X D&D and by extension, PF, "do" armor. Specifically, I don't like that the great majority of base types are mechanically trash, leading most players to gravitate toward chain shirt or full plate.

5E is better in this regard, but for now let me just talk about 3.X/PF. The reason why most armor types are trash is because of how Dexterity bonuses to AC are capped (or not) by the armor base types and how movement penalties further discourage using a whole armor category.

I'm not really talking about picking armor during character creation, btw, but during the course of play. For that reason, base expense is effectively meaningless, so we're really looking at other mechanical stats.

If you have an ultra-high Dex, you'll want leather armor. If you have pretty high Dex, you'll want chain shirt. If you have a poor Dex, you'll want full plate. There are occasional cases where players *may* be mechanically motivated to wear a breastplate, but they are rare.

In fact, the entire medium armor category (Hide, Scale, Chain, Breastplate) gets routinely ignored because it's the worst of all worlds. Middling base Armor Bonus, low Dex bonus cap, and a big movement penalty (30' to 20' for Medium characters, 20' to 15' for Small).

There's a question to ask here, which is, "What are they trying to accomplish?" There's no need to ask the designers; you can simply infer intent from the effect of the design. The main effect is that caps on Dex bonus to AC mean most combatants will fall into a similar AC range.

This is in contrast to 1st and 2nd Ed. AD&D, where high Dex always added more to AC even in the heaviest armor, so heavier armor was (in terms of protection) almost always better assuming your class could wear it.

But this also meant a wider range of Armor + Dex ACs, from no armor, no Dex bonus (few built characters with Dex penalties) to full plate, high Dex bonus. In 3E, the ranges are more normalized, meaning a rogue in leather will likely have an AC near a fighter in plate (in theory)

So, in essence, most characters have one, maybe two armor types that are ideal for their Dex bonus to achieve maximum AC effectiveness. It's rare that many characters will ever change their base armor type from 1st to 20th level unless their Dexterity changes.

There's nothing wrong with that if that what the player *wants* to do, but in mechanical terms, 3E punishes characters for using armor types that aren't optimized for their Dex. This is especially true if the character has many Dex-based skills (e.g. rogues, rangers, etc.).

This is further confused by the idea of armor proficiencies. Armor proficiencies are feats. Feats have value, because you have to spend to get them. They're also listed as base features of classes. Fighters are proficient in all armors, rogues are proficient in light armor.

So it gives you the *sense* that heavier armors are more valuable, but that's not mechanically how they're set up. In a vacuum, armor choice is about making trade-offs. In practice (i.e., on a specific character), base armor type is dictated by Dex and party role.

Put another way: if armor proficiencies were removed from the game, would it significantly alter what armor your characters would wear? In most cases, no, because the armor stats are already doing the mechanical motivation.

A high Dex character wouldn't wear heavy armor because it caps their Dex contribution to AC, hammers their Dex-based skill checks, and slows them down. A wizard wouldn't wear heavy armor because they'd have to make Arcane Spell Failure checks.

So... it raises the question of why armor proficiency feats exist at all. And in practice, I noticed that even if I, as the DM, dropped something like a nice magical suit of scale armor -- it's still scale, medium (i.e., bad) armor.

I decided to mod the system with two goals 1) simplify the armor mechanics and 2) promote a wider range of armor choices over the course of a character's adventuring career.

Realism is not a goal.

In this scheme, 1 point of Armor Bonus is worth the following:

* 5' of movement.
* -1 to armor checks, attack rolls, & save DCs (for attacks you make).
* 3x mult for run vs. 4x AND increased diagonal movement cost.

This is true if you move between or within a category.

You may ask "Wow, who would incur that -3 penalty for an extra +3 armor?" The answer is likely: tanks, support, and any other character who is not focused on offense.

And when we played with this system, that is usually what happened.

Mobile characters always picked light or medium armors. Tanks usually favored heavy armors. Offensive characters went lower within their categories (e.g. Hide, not Breastplate) and defensive/support characters went higher (Full Plate, not Splint).

It's not a particularly "realistic" system, but it keeps armor ranges tighter than the 3E/PF RAW and makes armor more of a playstyle choice than something the character is welded to from character creation onward.

Thanks for reading.

Sorry, one other modification to the base rules: armor proficiencies don't exist.