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I don't want to completely spoil things, but there's magical armor in a module I'm running. Does it do anything besides give a bonus to AC? Does it lower the check penalty?

MajorLeeAwesome wrote: ↑Tue May 24, 2022 12:45 pm I don't want to completely spoil things, but there's magical armor in a module I'm running. Does it do anything besides give a bonus to AC? Does it lower the check penalty?

Unless it specifies otherwise, I would assume that it just increases AC.

Yeah, it'd be down to what it says it does.

I can easily imagine (and have employed) 'magic armor' where the magic part is that it doesn't have a check penalty or doesn't slow you down, but does NOT provide any better AC.

MajorLeeAwesome wrote: ↑Tue May 24, 2022 12:45 pm I don't want to completely spoil things, but there's magical armor in a module I'm running. Does it do anything besides give a bonus to AC? Does it lower the check penalty?

To provide a clear and direct answer: No.

If the item is "just" chainmail +1 then it functions identically to a regular suit of chainmail except its +6 instead of +5 to AC.

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Now then. While this answer would be sufficient if you were playing regular D&D, I would be remiss if I didn't add that in a OSR-adjacent game such as DCC, magic weapons and armor that "only" provide numerical bonuses are considered dull and uninventive.

In regular d20 (the ruleset DCC is built upon) heroes need larger numbers as they level up. This is true to a much smaller degree in DCC.

Simply put: there are much fewer good reasons to ever put a +1 sword or +1 chainmail as loot in your DCC adventures, to the point where many gamers consider it an outright bug to feature them.

If you're fairly new to the game, don't sweat it and just hand out the chainmail +1 as indicated. But if and when you become more ambitious, you will find that you will want to embellish any magic items the heroes might find.

The heroes simply don't need the AC bonuses, so many Judges would take the opportunity to replace the numeric bonus with something more dramatic and impactful than merely a 5 percentage points reduction in incoming hits.

It's up to you! There's nothing really set in stone in DCC for magical armor, as far as I can tell. But things you CAN change are the check penalty, the fumble die, the movement penalty. You can also think of obscure and strange things to add to the armor. Adaptive camouflage, or maybe it shines so bright that when you're fighting outside in the sunlight that there's a chance it blinds your opponent every round. Or maybe it can melt under your characters clothes on command, and melt back out and take armor form on command, allowing you to disguise the fact that you're wearing armor if you want to pretend to be weak in some situation where its a social/sneaky/infiltration type of scenario.

Yes.

The boring answer is: +1 chain mail provides only +1 to AC because that is the rule in regular D&D, and regular D&D does not have the check penalty of DCC.

For the core DCC rule to have been "you gain +1 to AC and -1 to the check penalty" the DCC developers would have had to go "oh, we added a new parameter to armor, perhaps we should incorporate that in the basic rule?"

They did not. The reason likely isn't simple negligence. More likely the reason is "all cool armor in OSR is more than a mere plus bonus, so we don't care much about the basic rule."

Like Banjo says, if you feel better with armor giving the same benefit (one point advantage) to the check penalty (a one point reduction) as it does to armor class (a one point increase), you should definitely go for it.

It's just that most people around here would feel an even better approach would be to not focus on numeric bonuses at all! Like banjo says, deflect your player's misgivings about where the +1 goes with armor that can melt your character's clothes or blinds the wearer (or whatever he suggested I possibly didn't read too closely )

MajorLeeAwesome wrote: ↑Tue May 24, 2022 12:45 pm I don't want to completely spoil things, but there's magical armor in a module I'm running. Does it do anything besides give a bonus to AC? Does it lower the check penalty?

You're the Judge.