Ultimately it's the same idea - you are halting change for an indeterminate amount of time. You are exercising control over your shape. Most likely someone with the RoU would polymorph themselves several times until they landed in a useful shape, slip on their ring, and away they go.

After several hours of considering this problem instead of doing my homework, I've got another solution proposal. Pros: It will probably solve the problem without the need to add new mechanics. Cons: It involves a new item, likely some new art, and possibly a little code.

The new item would be plate mail. It would have two material types (a metal primary and hardened leather as a secondary). The total volume might be comparable to current body armor, but a smaller proportion of it (perhaps as small as half) would be made of metal. The result would be an overall reduction in mass. It would still rely on the primary material to derive it's AV; I would recommend not futzing with the actual armor values (i.e. a new-style meteoric plate armor would still have AV 9, just like the current meteoric plate). A new item built in this manner would have the advantage of being mostly immune to SoCM abuse - if you turned it into a soft material, you should just end up with a heavier version of normal soft armor, since part of it would still be made of relatively dense hardened leather. The only exceptions would be troll hide and dragon hide, but we can probably find a way around that, if we so desire. (However, dragon-hide plate armor actually sounds kinda cool.)

The current body armor item would have it's material spawn chances modified to only spawn with soft materials. We would also want to adjust the Possibility factor for both old body armor and new plate armor; probably the sum of the two should be the same 250 that existing plate armor has.

Also, for reference: If I did my math right, a new-style meteoric plate would weigh only 8200 g, compared to it's current 14000 g, if it were made of 50% hardened leather.

Thoughts?

Can confirm. I've never found plate mail made of a useful material. Copper, bronze, and iron plate are all worse than useless. (Meteoric) Steel plate is just normal-level useless. Plate armor literally does not spawn with any higher-level metals. You can get ommel bone/tooth armor sometimes, but the combined spawn rate for them is 0.16%. Even broken plate doesn't spawn high-tier materials - you have a 1.4% chance to get dragon hide, but that's not metal.

And as we've discussed earlier, metal plate of any material earlier than Arcanite is pretty much ineffective. Trying to get Loricatus to turn plate armor into Adamant (which I still feel is of dubious value considering adamant is the fourth-densest material in the game, behind gold, lead, and silver) takes a lot of time, patience, and lugging around a 14-kg meteoric plate which you may or may not be using anyways.

I think I'm beating a dead horse here. The point is that plate is a non-option until midgame at the earliest, and is very questionable even then.

Is there any other way we can approach this, besides fiddling with numbers? A change in how they behave, or something?

Lets me think. Disregarding gloves and boots, we have:

Cloth armor: (Effectively) no penalties, low weight, poor-to-moderate protection
Chain mail: Moderate penalties, moderate-to-low weight, moderate-to-good protection
Plate armor: Substantial penalties, high-to-moderate weight, good protection
AoGH: .... Everything is bad, nevermind

Instead of taking away from plate, is there anything we can add? Something that isn't as easy to compare? Deflection chances, elemental protections, etc?
What about an armor proficiency skill, with unique benefits depending on the specific skill?

Currently every armor has some level of penalty, some amount of weight, and some degree of protection. Generally, higher AV comes at a cost of weight and dex/AGI penalties. I feel a bit like if all three armor types performed in a perfectly balanced manner in these three categories, the game would become... more balanced, sure, but also more bland. It would be interesting if choosing an armor type was a deliberate thing, something you could consider the options, weight the consequences, then pick one based on whatever criteria was most important at the time.

Let me paint a hypothetical example of a system. We'll say that we still only have 3 viable armor types. Chain mail, being the most moderate of the three, offers a great balance of weight-to-AV with reasonable penalties. No major drawbacks. But no major benefits, either. It's main draw is economy: the best raw AV for it's weight. A PC skilled in mail might be able to reduce it's penalties to virtually nil. By comparison, we have light armor (which would include cloth and even bare skin). These have quite low weight, and effectively zero penalties, but don't really provide much meaningful AV either. Their advantage comes entirely with skill: a talented light armor warrior could gain increasing chances of completely avoiding attacks - including traps. Lastly, would be the heavy armor group. High weight, moderate penalties, and excellent AV. Not really economical in the short term, however. But if you are strong enough to wear it, and skilled in it's use, you gain not only good protection against physical attacks, but are able to apply a larger amount of it's AV to fireballs (and lightning bolts?). So which do you choose? Some chance to totally negate traps and attacks? Better protection against the elements? Or sheer, balanced, physical protection?

Totally hypothetical, though. It's 2:30 and I'm hardly in a condition to be coming up with good game design ideas. Think of it as a springboard, if you want to discuss further.

It's a bit uncommon - in my experience - to get totally stuck in that gap. Arcanite plate armor is quite easily acquired from Atavus; though it doesn't come in a chain mail version, it's weight and penalties are still very low. Further, the Arcanite -> Mithril -> Octiron sequence is a good progression at middle intelligence levels. Achieving the 25 Int required to CM a set of chain mail into arcanite is quite reasonable for a PC who has cleared the Enner - and if you can CM to Arcante, you can harden directly to Mithril (though in the case of chain mail I don't personally feel that it would be worth it).

Now, if you aren't building your intelligence at all *and* are playing a mildly chaotic character without Atavus access, and as a result you are relying on Loricatus to do your hardening for you, then yes, the gap between meteoric and adamant is a bit broad. And yet, since (current versions of) the game ignore PC intelligence for Lorcatian hardening, the hurdle can be cleared with nothing more difficult than time and persistence.

I think one of the difficulties here is that due to the way the game works at present, any adjustment made to plate armor will also affect soft armor. (We can be pretty precise with chain mail adjustments, which is good, because I don't feel chain mail needs a lot of adjustment.) We can fiddle with the material attributes, but (with the exception of flexibility) anything we do here will also affect other items, such as weapons, made from the materials in question. Simply adding new materials is equally questionable in terms of balance. If we want to target *just* metal plate armor for balance changes, we might need to create a new item type, which of course presents complications with regards to item spawn rate weights...

I agree caution is warranted. As a discussion baseline, perhaps we could modify the penalties by a factor of .8 or .85? Maybe a bit more for AoGH - on the order of .7 or .75? This would reduce e.g. the Adamant Plate penalty to 16-17%, and the Adamant AoGH to 28-30%.

Chain is much better balanced than plate. If we fiddle with penalties there, I don't think we should apply a factor of less than ~.9 (adamant chain -> 9% penalty)

I for one am all for more variety in viable play styles. In the current game, plate armor builds are not viable. Chain armor builds are iffy. I'd like to see that changed.

SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.

Ah yes. Metal armor. While it sounds good on paper, it's drawbacks are a real problem. Most players stick with the best soft armor they can find, and leave plate armor to rust in the dungeon.

If you want to spoil yourself, there is a pretty thorough discussion of the merits of (almost) all the armor types over in the Tips & Tricks section.