What Price Movement Penalty Elimination?

[hymer]

I'm aware of the tooth of what's-his-name from ToM as the most expedient means of removing the movement penalty for medium and heavy armour (outside of being born a dwarf). But I'd like to make a less personally affecting method. How would you go about this?

A Special Ability for the suit of armour? What should be the price?

An Armor Crystal? How would you stat it?

A Feat? A spell? A variation on the Belt of Dwarvenkind?

Your thoughts and suggestions are most welcome.

[Demonique]

permanent 'expeditious retreat'.
Had to use it on my Juggernaut, who has an un-augmented move of 15'

-Demi-

[Bohandas]

Possibly a ring of free action might work.

Armor penalties are not on the list of things specifically alleviated by freedom of movement but neither is it one of the things specifically called out as not affected

[Thurbane]

The Halfweight armor ability (Underdark p.70) makes any armor count as light. +3 bonus equivalent (or +2 on illithidwrought armor).

The Knight base class (PHB2 p.24) gets to ignore movement penalty for medium armor at 4th level, and heavy armor at 9th.

[hymer]

Thanks for all the interesting suggestions! :smallsmile:

However, I'm looking to make a new way to achieve the effect, and I'm wondering about the balance of such an ability. It doesn't need to increase speed, and it doesn't need to make armour wearable by those with only lesser armour proficiencies. I'm looking specifically to elminate the movement penalty of medium and heavy armour. A feat that does this alone would probably be underpowered? And paying +2 or +3 armour bonus would be way too expensive. So whereabouts does this particular ability fall? A first level spell that lasts three hours per level? A second level spell that lasts 1 minute per level? 3000gp as a medium armour enhancement and 5000 for heavy armour?

[DrKerosene]

You know the Tooth of Savnok is 2k gp, and slotless.

Using the custom item rules, that would mean probably 1k gp for an item that takes up a slot.

There are restrictions to you behavior, so removing those would probably increase the cost back up to 2k gp, maybe more.

Seeing as how some feats are valued at 3k gp, I'd say something around 2,500 gp for any piece of equipment/crystal that does this would be fair.

[Zaq]

You know the Tooth of Savnok is 2k gp, and slotless.

Using the custom item rules, that would mean probably 1k gp for an item that takes up a slot.

There are restrictions to you behavior, so removing those would probably increase the cost back up to 2k gp, maybe more.

Seeing as how some feats are valued at 3k gp, I'd say something around 2,500 gp for any piece of equipment/crystal that does this would be fair.

More or less this. The best way to price new magic items fairly is to compare them to existing items and existing effects. We already have an existing item (the aforementioned Tooth of Savnok) that does exactly what you want, so if you want to make a different item that has a similar effect, the difference in price should only be based on any difference from the Tooth.

The Tooth does carry the upside of being slotless (as already mentioned), and it carries the downside of automatically placing you under Savnok's influence (giving you stacking penalties if you remove any AC-granting item for any reason). If I'm not reading too much into your original post, you also seem a bit put off by the fluff on the Tooth (and the associated minor crunch of needing to permanently remove a natural tooth), so we can also count that as a very minor downside.

Anything in the neighborhood of 2k (the cost of the Tooth) to about 4k is probably reasonable unless you start making radical departures from the base effect. Basically, the question is less "what's the price on the base effect?" and more "what's the price on any departures I'm making from the existing Tooth?"

[hymer]

@ DrKerosene and Zaq: Good thoughts, thank you both!