Feb20
on February 20, 2014
Fantasy Olympics: Event Four
The daily Olympic strips continue.
I haven’t gone swimming in armour, but I’ve gone swimming in full clothing and it is not easy. Just swimming holding a few of those weighted bands around your arms can be difficult after a while. Full plate armour should make swimming almost impossible. Amusingly, swimming in armour has gotten easier and easier over the editions. In the playtest for 5e, heavy armour currently only imposes a penalty to stealth checks. So you can swim normally in a suit of full plate. Which sounds a little like swimming with a few dumbbells tucked down your shorts.
I think it’s more accurate to say that there’s no set DC for swim checks in the playtest packet. As DM, I would probably rule that the DC for swimming would be 1 per every 5 pounds carried, so 55 pounds of plate armor would mean a DC of 11; add in swords and other gear the DC increases to 20 when they are carrying 100 pounds of gear.