>>96319899
Honestly, if people are willing to actually give robe casters enough abilities to fairly compensate for it, there's no reason not to have more archetypes that have magic and no armor. Though I'd also put that the other way around. No reason not to have arcane casters that just wear armor without needing 1000 hoops to do it. You're just going to cast your dumb armor spell at the start of the day and forget it's there anyway or have some other measures that are not-armor.

This issue really is just a weird DNDism.

>>96172571
I'm not going to do a granular break down here, but I'll try to explain as best I can.

Gygax himself was on record in long past that DnD should be played by keeping track of EVERYTHING. You should know exactly how much time tasks take. How much food needs to be consumed. How much all your dumb crap weighs. Exactly who is carrying it. How long getting place to place takes. Even how long leveling up takes. More. Much more.

By shaving off all this busy work, you've removed the balance points DnD is originally built on. At least built on up to 3.5. Those too powerful full casters? No, they can't afford to dump all their spells on combat. Most of those should be saved for noncombat issues. Including incredibly mundane ones. Survival mechanics. Passing difficult terrain. Knowing where the hell you are. Bypassing the slow natural healing rate. Just to name a few obvious ones. These things are difficult and annoying precisely so you have a reason to spend resources to get past them. Full casters don't like having to reserve slots for sheer mundanity. It interferes with being cool. That's the point. On the other side, half casters have plenty of useful tools to bypass these kinds of mundane problems while still being almost as good as a plain fighter. The fighter himself comes out smelling rosey because SUDDENLY you realize a guy who can be set to blend for no cost is a massive gain to productivity. Better, you may be thankful the fighter is a minmaxer for once so you don't have to worry about your resource squeeze. If it can blend, let it blend. Save your resources for real problems that kill more adventurers than any amount of two headed giants or invisible dragons.

Player aversion to this kind of gameplay is probably why subsequent editions play the way they do. Ironically, people now enjoy DnD less. Or maybe that is exactly as expected and why things were designed that way.

>>96092134
>>96092129
I'm going to put it to you plainly, chief.

Any system which demands more investment than the created item is useful is a system no one will use. You'll get someone to bite the bait once. Maybe they'll even praise it. Then never do it again. Cause, whenever they approach the issue, they remember how much pleasure they got out of what happened versus how much work it cost. This evaluation is automatic in the background of the mind of the person. Not active. It spits out in your conscious view as
>Eh.. maybe some other time.
before you go to do something more practical. Note, this is also why certain types of video games will never be popular. No matter how big a clever upstanding nerd you pretend to be, you've done it too.

Let me put it simply. The effect given must be more than what was put in to gaining that effect or you've wasted every unit of [work] that went into it. Even abstract units of work. This is how the world works. Methods that take more energy than they put out in results have always been bad. I'll put this in an even more basic way. Suppose you put more effort in to gaining food than you get energy from the food. What happens? You die.