AC for Leather Armor?

[NoreasterDM]

Shouldn't leather only be AC7? It's listed in both books as 8. It's 8 in the Other Clone and in Holmes. Leather suck enough already, why the down-grade?

[kipper]

Shouldn't leather only be AC7? It's listed in both books as 8. It's 8 in the Other Clone and in Holmes. Leather suck enough already, why the down-grade?

In AD&D leather is AC8 too.

Possibly this happened because with the addition of other armour types (beyond leather/chain/plate in OD&D) there was overlap between different armour types (eg Studded Leather is AC7, padded is AC8), so leather armour was moved to AC8 because it was more similar to padded, and/or because "unarmoured" became AC10.

LL has the added armour types (unlike BX), so Leather's AC was changed too.

You can easily house rule it back to AC7 if you like.

In an earlier (first?) printing of LL the armours were as follows:

AC8: padded
AC7: leather
AC6: studded, scale
AC5: chain
AC4: banded, splint
AC3: plate

[Goblinoid Games]

Yes, is that way because of the additional armor types. But nothing has to be written in stone!