Masked Lord Armor

[Joval]

So I've been looking through the D&D4e Builder and I found the Masked Lord Feature. If you haven't heard of it before, it reads like this:

"Encounter. Minor Action

Keyword: Arcane

Requirement: You must not be wearing armor, other than nonmagical clothing.

Effect: Choose a type of armor with which you have proficiency. You instantly don +1 magic armor of that type. The armor lasts until you dismiss it as a minor action, until it is removed from you, or until you use this power again."

So I have a question, and it may be stupid, but it says a type of armor with which you have proficiency. I realize that they are Cloth, Leather, etc. Can one with this power select, say, Githweave, or is it only the core armor type?

[NecroRebel]

Tricky... The power actually creates a suit of armor of the appropriate type rather than using an existing one like some other effects do. As such, the question is whether it can create exotic materials and such. I'd guess that the intent is for it only to create the base armor type, but technically masterwork armors are also armors of the base type, so it's ambiguous. If it does allow masterwork armors you would still need to have the appropriate enhancement level - no godplate at level 1.

I'd probably let it summon masterwork armor, but I'd require that they select the same type of masterwork armor each time until they can qualify for a better one (so for instance they wouldn't be able to get feyweave one battle and githweave the next, but if they chose githweave they could take starweave once their enhancement bonus got to +6).

[Rhaegar14]

I'd say no, because all of the exotic materials have minimum enhancement bonuses above +1.

[allonym]

The armour summoned scales with level. The various masterwork armours have minimum enhancement bonuses. The masterwork armours exist in order that PC defences scale the way they should. To my mind, the only reasonable interpretation of the ability is that you can use masterwork armours, as long as the armour you summon is of sufficient enhancement bonus to gain that masterwork variety; if this were not the case, the ability would quickly become obselete (and would also be significantly less useful for a plate user than for a cloth user).

I agree with Necrorebel that the question of whether you can change what kind of masterwork armour you don is the main point of contention, but I don't see any real need to state that you are 'locked in' to a certain kind of masterwork armour for each tier. The little bit of flexibility you get access to by being able to switch between them is not going to break the game, and it would slightly improve what is otherwise a pretty average theme.

[Joval]

Thank you very much for helping me out.

[Hyena]

Sorry for being a noob, but where is this theme from? I am incredibly interested in it.

[allonym]

Sorry for being a noob, but where is this theme from? I am incredibly interested in it.

Dragon 409.