Ah, heavy armor.
The boon of burly fighters everywhere, and the bane of one Canadian writer who is trying his absolute best to fight the instinct to write “armour.”
While grabbing yourself some heavy armor may seem like the obvious choice when you’re piloting a strength-heavy martial character in D&D 5e, there may be a bit more to the protective gear than you might have initially thought.
(PS. If you landed at this article after Googling “Can you swim in Heavy Armor in D&D” and don’t really care about my other ramblings, please feel free to scroll down to the subheading that reads “Can you swim in heavy armor in D&D. Thank you.)
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Armor of all types
So here’s the thing about heavy armor in D&D — it runs quite the wide gamut. On one end you have the lowly Ring Mail, which will only give you a flat AC of 14. You could get the same or better with over half of the Medium Armour options, but I guess 30gp is something of a steal for penniless adventurers (especially if you can convince the local mayor to outfit you and your party prior to whatever level 1 quests they may be sending you on. I’m sure the local town guard has a few bloodstained coats of Ring Mail laying around).
Nine Hells, the Player’s Handbook even mentions that it is the poor man’s choice: “Ring Mail is inferior to Chain Mail, and it’s usually worn only by those who can’t afford better armor.”
Chain Mail is the next step up, though it’ll cost you over double (75gp) for that extra +2 to the AC. If you’re low on funds, you might as well just pick up a cheap wooden shield which will give you the same boost.
Pricing gets exponentially higher once you hit Split, which offers a flat 17 AC — 19 with that shield — requires a Strength score of 15 to not suffer any reduction to speed, and costs 200 gp.
And, finally, we have the piggybank-buster for fighters: Plate, which costs an arm and a leg just a casual 1,500 freaking gp. Good luck convincing your adventuring party that dipping into the treasury is worth giving yourself that one extra AC, bringing you up to a flat 18.
Plate also requires a strength of 15 to avoid any reduction to speed, weighs a whopping 65 lbs, and, just as all the other heavy armor options, gives you disadvantage on saving throws.
The Nitty Gritty
The important thing to remember about Heavy Armor is that it is cumbersome, even to super strong individuals.
No amount of pushups will stop you from having disadvantage on stealth checks as your Tin-Man-looking ass clinks and clanks all over the place (though a Druid’s clutch Pass Without Trace may just be enough to stop you from being such a liability) and it actually takes forever to put on and take off the damn stuff.
According to the Player’s Handbook, it takes 10 minutes to don all heavy armor — yes, including your dinky Ring Mail — and 5 minutes to take it off.
And I don’t think a reasonable DM would allow for you to get that good of a sleep while wearing a full on suit of plate mail (haven’t you seen the King? Those things look super uncomfortable) so if your party gets attacked at night, there’s no way in hell you’re going to be able to just “throw on” your armor.
Or throw it off, for that matter, if the DM-controlled spellcaster happens to hit you with a Heat Metal right before retreating out of range to ensure their concentration is held for the whole, excruciating minute (or, you know, 10 rounds of burning alive).
Can you swim in heavy armor
Okay, okay. We’re here. We made it.
But you’re not going to like the answer…. because there is no actual answer to this.
You’d think that after *checks watch* SIX (6) freaking YEARS of D&D 5e being out, the powers that be would have come to some sort of definitive answer about this, but alas, they have not.
Usually I look to the Sage Advice resource to see if any big names from WotC had anything to say about the question, but all I could find was a tweeted 2016 answer to the question “[is it] ok to give heavy armor fighter who is swimming disadvantage on the STR (athletics) roll b/c of the armor?”
To which Mike Mearls, the co-creator of D&D 5th Edition, offered this underwhelming piece of sage advice: “If you want to make that a house rule, I’d suggest applying it to armory that grants disadvantage on stealth checks.”
Cool. Cool cool cool.
So all that is to say that there hasn’t been much, if at all, from the good people at WotC when it comes to the question of whether or not you can swim in heavy armor in D&D.
And you may not want to know my take, but here it is anyway.
No. Hell no. Are you kidding me? Did I not just say that plate weighs 65 pounds? Look, I get that D&D characters basically become superheroes at a certain point, but you go ahead and strap a 65 lb weight to Arnold Schwarzenegger at his prime, push him into a pool, and see just how long it takes for him to sink.
(Spoiler alert: like, 2 seconds probably.)
I’d even argue that a Str. 20 fighter would basically be all skin and dense muscles at that point, too, which doesn’t really lend itself to buoyancy.
I’m clearly not the first person to bring this up, either. There are plenty of reddit/discussion threads
where people far smarter than I get into the physics of it all, and come up with various house-ruled DCs, and all that jazz… but they don’t have a D&D blog and I do, so my ruling goes (here and only here, you do what you want, people).
In conclusion
The limitations of heavy armor (in regards to taking it off, swimming, stealth checks, etc) are an interesting one in D&D because they raise the issue bubbling under the surface of any D&D game; does a DM stick hard and fast to realism, or do they leave some wiggle room to make things easier for the players. Does “easier” necessarily = more fun, though? Could a heavy armor-wearer’s inability to swim result in some creative and out of the box thinking from the party as a whole?
Just like everything else in D&D; it all depends on who you’re playing with.