Armor and Such

Lately I have been thinking about armor in D&D. The results of watching YouTube armor enthusiasts, Shadiversity and Skallagrim, that kind of thing, maybe, and idle time wasting.

I have been thinking about the ways D&D (and apparently every fantasy game ever made, from what I can see) distort historical armor. Studded leather! And how this matters, when it might matter. I have been thinking about how people might dress in a fantasy setting city - who would wear armor when? People going about their business in a city or town - how much armor would they wear? Adventurers going into dungeons - what would they wear? Full plate? Doesn't seem likely. I find the game unsatisfying in some ways. Mostly as a realistic simulation of medieval combat, and as a guide to how people would likely live in medieval (fantasy) settings. How can you fix this?

When does this matter? well:

1) This has nothing to do with the way the game (D&D 5th Edition, specifically) plays. It plays fine. There is lots you can say about D&D armor and hit points and the like, but I think the system works perfectly well for what it is meant to do. It lets you play fairly smoothly, it gives you variation among armors and abilities to get stronger, and all the rest. The level of abstraction in the game works very well at the table. I have no complaints there.

2) This matters for me because I do like realism in games - I like games that simulate reality. I would like to see a more realistic armor and hit point system than D&D. Should it use damage reduction? should armor offer something like hit points of its own? Possibly. I would like a game system that modeled real world historical armor, weapons, fighting methods and so on. I don't know if I would want to play a game like that - realism, accuracy and so on usually means complexity, and that is not always worth it for playing the game. I feel this way about 3/3.5 of D&D vs 5E - the 3's offer a superb simulation of character abilities, feats, skills and so on. But I found it almost unplayable, back in the day. 5E, while far more abstract, sometimes annoyingly so, is very playable, and all these posts don't add up to a real desire to change it. Maybe tweak it, though. And I wish a more complex and realistic game was out there to read.

3) Where this kind of thing really matters, I think, is in giving the game a sense of place. This splits in half, a bit.

First - in fiction, I do want to make the world as accurate and realistic and plausible as I can. To make everything deliberate, at least. Using games as a guide for fantasy stories has some uses - a kind of check on the possibilities in the story, a way to gauge how strong people and things are, a framework for adding magic to the world. In that context, though, you want to imagine how someone would really act in this kind of world - and if the game can't help you, or does something clearly wrong - that makes a problem. But this again doesn't really matter to the game.

Where this comes into the game, I think, is in the possibility of giving more flavor to the world. Specifically, to give it a sense of place. The abstraction of D&D can erase the variations in locations. In our games, we have campaigns set in large northern cities; in a desert with a definite North African/Middle Eastern tone; in the south seas; in the north seas, on the coast; in the jungles of Chult. As well as in mountains, moors, towns and so on, at times.

More variation in arms and armor, both in terms of the names of things and the mechanics, can create a sense of differentiation between them. The desert campaign should have different kinds of weapons and armor than the northern ones. Scimitars and lamellar or scale armor or whatever seems right; as well as the different environmental effects - heat and dust and so on. You want ways to specify the settings - the ways they look different, the ways people act differently - different clothes, different habits. A lot of this is just description - but sometimes, some mechanical differences are nice too. Some of this is purely cosmetic - the difference between a cutlass and a scimitar - even if they are identical mechanically. Some is more solid - there should be arming swords in this game. There should be stats for brigandine. Knowing how things work, how different things work, what choices people make, helps that. 

Anyway. All that said, I am not above taking a crack at redoing the armor tables to match what I think is more historically accurate. How about this?

Maintaining the existing categories and most of their rules...

• Light Armor:

AC 11

Leather jacket or tunic - this is a reinforced leather jacket, maybe with a layer of padding inside. Mostly cosmetic - it looks good - with some minor protection. Very flexible - realy just reinforced clothing.

Light Gambeson/Arming jacket - the kind of padded armor that is worn under chain or plate mail. Less protective by itself though still useful.

AC 12

Leather breastplate - boiled leather, breast plate or vest, only the torso. Stiff, solid, but somewhat limited. 

Heavy Gambeson - padded armor meant to be worn by itself; this should be very common - this stuff is, by most reports, very useful in fact. 

Buff coat - this is something from later, leather hide coats with padding inside; but stiff and useful.

• Medium:

AC 13

Improved leather - meaning in this case a set of boiled leather plates - cuirass, plus arm and leg protections, etc. Better armor, more complete, but a good deal less flexible, harder to move in. This might include things like leather lamellar armor, which apparently existed in fact as well. 

Hide Armor - hardened rawhide. 

Jack of plates - this consists of metal plates sewn into leather or cloth jackets. This is cruder than brigandine, I think, though working on the same principal. Metal armor, in fact, so probably noisy.

Chain shirt - chain, only to the waist, maybe with sleeves. 

AC 14

Breastplate by itself - the book's rules are fine.

Scale Armor - keep the book's rules. One of the problems though is that D&D makes this universal, when in fact, it tended to be used in certain places and times. It would be more interesting to make things like Scale or Splint and Banded armors more exotic - from somewhere other than the places that use chain and plate and the like. 

AC 15

Brigandine - this is not in the 5E books, which is too bad. This was fairly common in medieval Europe, used by foot soldiers archers and the like. It's good armor - metal plates riveted to cloth and leather facing - flexible, protective, convenient. Usually opening in the front or the sides, so someone could put it on by themselves - a common soldiers armor and good stuff. Of course this ends up being more or less the same strength as half-plate in the book. 

• Heavy:

AC 16

Chain hauberk - strength 13; dis on stealth - the book is fine.

“Half plate” - I would put it here. I would say this is chain or brigandine with added plates at the shoulders, on the limbs. Or this might be what they call "munition armor" - a kind of mass produced plate armor used by soldiers in the late medieval, early modern period. 

AC 17

Splint or banded - 15 strength, dis on stealth, etc. These are again more likely to correspond to Asian styles of armor - strips of metal bound together, rather than big plates. 

AC 18

Plate Mail - what the heck? full harness! Though as gets pointed out - really good plate armor is more or less impenetrable. 

I would change a couple weapons as well. The most annoying omission for me is the Arming Sword - what they called a Longsword in first edition. Gygax had the types of weapons more or less right - he just called them the wrong names. Longsword - Bastard Sword - Greatsword - should be Arming sword, longsword/bastard sword/hand and a half sword - Greatsword. Just bring it back:

Arming Sword - one handed, does d8 damage - there you go. This could cover most one handed swords - Viking swords, arming swords in the crusading period, and os on.

Longswords are fine as they are.

Another thing I think makes sense would be to make things like Longswords and Spears into finesse weapons when you use them with two hands. Getting that extra leverage makes them very fast and maneuverable - makes it easier to get in a precise hit. Why should't there be finesse two handed weapons?

Anyway: that is enough for now.