Making Light Armor that doesn't receive Dex Bonus to AC

[Fenris447]

The magic armor I have doesn't require any armor proficiencies and gives you AC 18, similar to how a set of plate armor would. It doesn't add disadvantage on stealth (that part is easy enough).

How do I disable the proficiency requirements and the DEX bonus to AC? If I start with a piece of heavy armor as a base, that negates the DEX bonus but I need to know how to disable the proficiency requirement.

 

[dungeonguru]

There was a similar thread last year to get all armor to act as light armor, but I don't believe we've ever tried to remove proficiency from armor...

What you might want to do is make the "magical armor" actually a wondrous item that changes your unarmored AC calculations. Have a script on it that checks to see if you have armor on and throw an error if you accidentally equip some and not run the armor bonuses until you take off the offensive armor.


You can look at the monk or barbarian unarmored defense scripts to get an idea of how to check for armor and manipulate unarmored defense. They'll take a bit of manipulation to put on a magic item, but that's the best pointer I can give you.

*Hint, go to the class special tab in the editor and do a new(copy) on unarmored defense and you have a free copy you can dig into and reverse engineer*

 

[ShadowChemosh]

You could also try the "Don't Generate Pre-requisite?" option which should prevent the normal tag checking from happening.

 

[Fenris447]

Thanks guys, I'll give those a look.

My other thought was to build in an automatic granting of heavy armor proficiency when equipped, though I'd like to see if I could hide that proficiency from displaying.

 

[smokeh]

I had a similar issue with something I was trying to replicate that replaced the Dex armor bonus with the minion's proficiency bonus. This was a pretty 'hacky' way to make it work, but the numbers add up and it's only a couple of lines in an eval script. I had this run in the final phase. You could target your hero with the first two lines, and it would accomplish removing the dex bonus, but I'm fully aware this might not be the best solution to your issue.

minion[Familiar].childfound[ArmorClass].field[tACBase].value = 18
minion[Familiar].childfound[ArmorClass].field[tACDexMod].value = 0 

var profnum as number
profnum = minion[Familiar].childfound[ProfBonus].field[tProfBonus].value

minion[Familiar].childfound[ArmorClass].field[tACNatural].value = profnum

 

[dungeonguru]

You could also try the "Don't Generate Pre-requisite?" option which should prevent the normal tag checking from happening.

This checkbox doesn't exist on the magical armor dialogue. This translates to adding the Helper.NoPrereq tag to a bit of magical armor though.

The only way I got a test piece of armor to show up in the magical armor category was to actually just fill out only the name, description, rarity, attunement and bonus fields. Just to idiot-proof it from myself I also added the tag Helper.Proficient to it.

If you try to add the armor class (light, heavy, medium) or set the category manually to armor, it moves it into the non-magical areas on the armor portal dialogue.

 

[Fenris447]

So here's what I did:

The armor levels up, so I wanted to be able to easily make a new version with the extra bonuses at each level. I saw that Magic pieces like Armor of Invulnerability act as a modifier on a base piece of armor via a Gizmo. So I made a level zero, non-magical piece that has the tag to not generate proficiency. It's classified as heavy armor, with zero bonus to AC. I unchecked the disadvantage on Stealth.

Then I made a magic piece, based on one of those "modifier" type of heavy armors. It adds the +8 to AC. I then looked at Elven Chain to see how it grants automatic proficiency in itself; it's done through a Proficient Helper. I added that to the magic version. Then I made sure the magic version pointed at the base through the Gizmo.

By selecting the magic version on my character, I got everything I wanted. It applied +8 (total 18) to my AC, acted as if I was automatically proficient with it, and didn't give me disadvantage on Stealth. It's technically listed as Heavy Armor, but that classification now only serves to disable the DEX bonus. I can live with that, since in-game it really doesn't have any kind of classification at all.

When the armor levels, I'll just copy the magic version, name it "Defender Level 3" and add/tweak whatever new powers it provides. It will still refer to the base version to make sure I'm automatically proficient in it, not provide the DEX bonus, and not give me disadvantage on Stealth.

Let me know if none of that makes sense. Thank you, as always, to everyone here that regularly lend a helping hand and make this program even more amazing!