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This answer currently suggests swimming while wearing a full suit of metal armor would be a reasonable thing to do in real life. In actuality, jumping into water with a full suit of metal armor on may well end in your death.

While most people are, I hope, educated enough to realize that the physics proposed in that answer is just completely wrong and/or reasonable enough to realize that extra weight you can't easily remove + deep water = very bad idea, I'm not confident that everyone is, and so the fact this proposes deadly real-life activity as if it were not deadly concerns me.

Is this something we should do something about?

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    \$\begingroup\$ There's a story I heard of recently about a player who wanted to prove to his DM that fall damage from the second story of a building shouldn't be a thing because it's not realistic, so attempted to prove it. He ended up with two broken legs. This is hear-say, so I cannot confirm the validity of the story or the accuracy of those third-hand details, but suffice to say, it suggests that there are people who will try dumb stuff like this in real life... \$\endgroup\$
    – NathanS
    Commented Feb 5, 2020 at 13:50
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    \$\begingroup\$ @NathanS It is believable; i have seen a number of industrial and flight line accidents that had more severe consequences, each of them involving that similar lack of common sense. \$\endgroup\$
    – KorvinStarmast
    Commented Feb 5, 2020 at 19:24

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I have removed this answer. “Advises actual real life harm” is a pretty good identifying criteria for answers that are a bad idea to have on our site—though in this case it's more like “advice that if taken seriously will lead to someone dying”.

As you noted (and cited in your comment on the answer) people expecting to swim around in a 60-pound suit of metal armor will most definitely drown instead, since even 20 pounds is a challenge for fit swimmers with fins. The line of reasoning leading to the answer's conclusions is faulty as other comments also pointed out.

Normally we'd just remove the harmful part of the answer if possible. In this case once we did that there would be barely any answer left and it'd be delete-worthy anyway, so in this case I've just opted to delete the whole thing.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Sidenote from own experience by slipping into some lake during a LARP: even light chainmail (not europeen 4-1 but japanese 4-1) is very constricting during attempts to swim. Its ca 6-8 pounds slowed my arm movements considerably. Luckily I could stand. Platemail would be even more constricting. \$\endgroup\$
    – Trish
    Commented Feb 13, 2020 at 11:08
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Trish I'm not so sure about that. Plate armor is normally more mobile than maille, because it distributes the weight more evenly around your body, though I'm not sure how that would affect your ability to swim. \$\endgroup\$
    – nick012000
    Commented Feb 13, 2020 at 13:39
  • \$\begingroup\$ @nick012000 you are wrong. Let's assume both chainmail and armor don't change the volume of a body in a significant way. A naked example body has lungs full of air and thus a density of about 0.9 tons/m³ and weighs 90 kg (barely floats), the mentioned chainmail weighs 3 kg+10kg clothes, the plate 40 kg+10 kg clothes. This means that this light chainmail is still swimmable for a human (1.03) while the plate gives you a density of 1.5 - which is "sinks rather fast". The constricting is more the presence of clothes at all and their total weight, the distribution only after those two factors. \$\endgroup\$
    – Trish
    Commented Feb 13, 2020 at 14:01

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