More Armor Makes You More Killable?

[Paedrig]

As far as i know something like "banded armor" (Bänderrüstung) existed also in european medieval times and in the 16th century (at least i have read this in a book about historic weapons and armors).

[Sturn]

Roman legion armor (the common type that comes to mind) might be considered "banded"?

http://www.legionxiiii.com/images/roman ... -armor.gif

Banded MAIL I believe is more of a misnomer again, and is actually just mail armor. See the wiki for Banded Mail.

I agree with Kival, my perception of splinted and banded also makes me think of oriental armors. That is the reason I suggested the Splint armor of SoIF RPG to be "found only in the East" and not upon Westeros.

Picture from Wiki's Splinted armor (look at the bracers): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Samurai.jpg
Picture of armor found during a search of banded armor images: http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9 ... ubT0S2R2zi

The second might not actually be oriental? I'm not sure. It may be European? In which case this could be something found in the "West" that is considered banded.

I've always been confused of the difference between splinted and banded. It just seems they are the same thing, one being horizantal strips of metal, the other vertical?

[Kival]

AFAIK Splint Armour means long and relatively thin vertical parts while banded armour in the sence of lorica segmentata (which is often mistaken (!) as the main armour of roman legionaries, while in fact they primiarily used lorica hamata, chainmail-like armour) has relatively broad (?) horizont parts. While banded armour in that sense clearly existed I really don't know about any body (!) armour made of splints.

I'm very curious what the armour in that last picture is... it comes from this site: http://nokia-ph-gs.com/themespirations3 ... our&page=6

[Ancient1]

Hi All,

This is my first post so be gentle with me.
We have had this discussion in our group as well, so we took the liberty to shave the
Armor rules a bit here is how we dealt with it:

First we introduced the same qualities as per weapons; poor, normal, superior
Second we decided that wearing a plate mail should make you less vunarable to killing blows
but easier to hit (slower response, less agility in defense)
So we came up with 3 catagories (light, medium, heavy armor)
Light crit rating +1 (meaning if you roll 3 6s then it counts as 4 6s)
Medium crit mod +0 (meaning if you roll 3 6s then it counts as 3 6s)
Heavy crit mod -1 (meaning if you roll 3 6s then it counts as 2 6s)
No armor counts as crit rating +2 (meaning if you roll 3 6s then it counts as 5 6s)

I like to hear what you make of this!

[Sturn]

Hi All,

I like to hear what you make of this!

I like additions/changes/house rules that use the current rule system without adding more complexity. So, I like the concept of this. Has it worked well for your group?

I would be concerned that plate-armored "tanks" would be slightly more unstoppable. This could be a bad thing even if it is realistic. Has this been an issue for you? If so, perhaps shift everything down one notch? A.i. heavy +0 (crits as written), medium -1, etc.

[Ancient1]

It hasn't been an issue yet, but tonight we play again and there will be much fighting....so perhaps then it will come up. Before we had the problem that heavy armored characters would in the end have more damage then the medium or even the lightly armored characters....which struck us as odd.

Ill keep you informed

[Ancient1]

...Oh before i forget to mention it...we as a group like it when there is that extra reality flavour like the chance when caught ' with your pants down ' aka lightly armored you could be in for a real challenge...

Be ready, be weary and on occasion take a risk....or step on some toes (going fully armored and combat ready where it might insult a lord) if not ready to risk it all.....

[Kival]

I'm not sure how things are handled here. I'm at the moment revisiting the armour-list completly and my questions probably do not completly fit the thread. If you rather want to have it in a new thread, you may just want to move it.

For me personally I'm adjusting all armour around plate armour on the one end and chainmail on the other as they both represent the two most relevant armours in my opinion.

Is (Chain-)Mail too cheap and better than represented (not only) in this system?

After some further reading it seems very wrong too me to make mail cheaper then plate armor. According to my knowledge plate armor did replace chainmail not primarily because it was better but because it was cheaper and easier to produce than mail. While you needed month for a suit of chainmail, you could make a breastplate in two days. I can see full-plate to be more expensive as it had to be perfectly fitted to the body of the wearer but the difference may still be much too big and things like breastplates should be clearly (!) cheaper than Mail. (armor is much too expensive in general in the system but I'm only interested in the relative costs here)

On the other hand we have Chainmail with 5 -3 2 which seems wrong on two accounts: Chainmail was very flexible and would probably better be represented with less AP in comparison to other armours. On the other hand a complete suit of mail over padded armor together with a helmet should seems to be a better protection for me than a breastplate. On the other hand Bulk 2 seems not enough as chainmail weights much more then the other medium armours (scale, ring, breastplate etc.) and not less then plate Armour.

So my question is: Should we change Chainmail to 6 -2 3 or would that be too overpowered? The three discussed armours would than be:

Breastplate 5 -2 2 (relatively cheap)
Chainmail 6 -2 3 (expensive especially in comparison to Breastplate)
Full Plate (Padded) 11 -5 3 (the most expensive one but perhaps not the 3,75 times chainmail cost it had been)

As a related question I'm wondering what exactly Half-Plate means to represent. IN my readings I did not really encounter the term half-plate. Especially Breastplate + arm and leg-protection in plate + chainmail should weight clearly more then Full plate and also be more cumbersome, while the protection is worse:

Half-Plate (Mail) 9 -4 3 (or actually rather 9 -5 4)?

[Jon Snow]

It's never been an issue in our campaign. Armor is treated like the American Express card - don't leave home without it.

[Faytte]

Regarding the damage scaling, wouldnt the following maybe make sense...

1. Castle Forged Armor provides +1 Armor Rating or -1 Armor Penalty (or rather +1..since Armor Penalties are negative) minimum(maximum) 0.
2. Half/Full Plate field plate are sets of master crafted armor which are worth a small fortune. Such armor receive both a +1 armor rating and a -1 armor penalty, but cost three times the amount to create.
3. The Armored Mastery Quality also reduces the Armor Penalty by 1, to a minimum of 0.

Maybe its too much, but that would mean someone with both qualities (which of course means 100 xp of investment) and Tourney Armor would be moving in -3 penalty (comparable to chain or splint).

[Zorbeltuss]

Maybe it's covered, I did not really see a good explanation, so I'll add mine to the mix.

Question: More armor makes you more killable?
Answer: It depends, the short version is that lower combat defence makes you more killable, while higher AR makes you less killable.

The damage you take depends on two variables, base damage and degrees of success. Well, critical hits is a third, but that's a general "you're screwed" add-on to damage that already should be fairly impressive. And it would be utterly painful to calculate so I'm ignoring it.

At the core, you have the fighting test result versus your CD, for each 5 steps above that is hit, base damage is dealt again.

Before going further, I will use padded armor as the reference. It has AR 1 and AP 0, thus you do not reduce your chances of avoiding being hit.

When an attack is successfully made against a character in padded, it is either 5, 4, 3, 2 or 1 step away from an additional degree of success. Unless he already have 4 degrees, but I will make my calculations on the assumption that this happens rare enough to be ignored.

If said character was wearing soft leather, his defence was 1 lower due to the AP. If the fighting result would be one step away from another degree against padded, we are talking an additional degree of success in soft leather. In Hard leather, this would be the case if it was 1 or 2 steps away. Essentially, compared to padded's AP of 0, each point of AP adds a 20% chance of an additional degree of success.

Essentially a person in soft leather takes on average 20% of the Base Damage of the weapon (B) before applying AR. In general terms, before AR is subtracted from the damage received, compared to padded, a character will on average sustain an extra damage of 0.2*AP*BD.

Armor penalty of 5 translated into one free degree of success, compared to armor penalty of 0.

Expanding the formula above, compared to padded, a character takes 1+0.2*AP*B-AR extra damage on average.
If the result is negative, then this means you'll take that much less damage on average compared to padded, while a positive result means that you take that much more damage compared to padded.

For examples, let us take a look at the best armors in their AP category:
Soft Leather: AR 2, AP 1: 0.2*B-1
Breastplate: AR 5, AP 2: 0.4*B-4
Splint: AR 7, AP 3: 0.6*B-6
Brigandine: AR 8, AP 4: 0.8*B-7
Half-plate: AR 9, AP 5: B-8
Full-plate: AR 10, AP 6: 1.2B-9

You can input them in a program such as this: http://my.hrw.com/math06_07/nsmedia/too ... hCalc.html

I made a screenshot showing:
http://img826.imageshack.us/img826/7614/screenieth.png
red=soft leather, green=breastplate, blue=splint, purple=full plate.

From the graph (remember that negative is good in this case), we can see that of the selection, full plate is best up until base damage 5, after which splint is best until base damage 10, at this point padded is best, but breastplate also becomes better than splint. Soft Leather is better than padded until base damage 5.

The second screenshot for the heavy options only:
http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/7705/screeniemw.png
Red=splint, green=brigandine, blue=half-plate, purple=full plate.
In this case, the math turns out that at base damage 5, all of them are equally good. While before base damage 5 the higher the AR, the better the armor, while above, the lower the AR, the better the armor.

Note on critical hits:
There's a higher chance of getting them against you with lower combat defence. Lower CD by 1 and the range in which an opponent might land a critical hit goes down by 2. Critical hits may increase base damage, which always makes lower AP armors better. So AP increasing the chance of having a critical against you, and the most common result of a critical (increased base damage) pushes it further down the line. It might result in as much as an increase to 1+0.25*B-AR, though I don't think it'd go as far as .25.

But against base damage 5+, yes, more armor makes you more killable.

[Kival]

Are you sure that's modelled correctly? Do you have experience with mathematical modelling? I've to check it but I've the "feeling" (or you can call it intuition) something is wrong. Especially your focus on additional damage could be problematic because the primary damage is also different for the armours. But admittetly I have to check the whole thing first, can't tell it for sure at the moment.

[ddgon]

Odd question, but if you also add a shield, how dose that change the numbers? Lets say a large shield with the Shield mastery, that gives you +5 CD, which almost offsets FullPlate AP. Would that change things or not?

Also, what would be the most common armor for people on foot? (people who can afford anything on the chart)

[Kival]

Mail together with breastplate or a brigantine was common for wealthy foot soldiers... though outisde of mercenaries it's questionable why anyone wealthy would choose not to fight on horse. In Westeros Brigantines are not too common and I would probably advise to choose plain mail if you choose to take vanilla stats (Bulk 2 sounds fine for footmen). If you want to represent late medieval very heavy footsoldiers it would actually be plate armour (without shield).

[Zorbeltuss]

Are you sure that's modelled correctly? Do you have experience with mathematical modelling? I've to check it but I've the "feeling" (or you can call it intuition) something is wrong. Especially your focus on additional damage could be problematic because the primary damage is also different for the armours. But admittetly I have to check the whole thing first, can't tell it for sure at the moment.

I'm an engineering student, so I've done these sort of things before, yes.

What do you mean by "primary damage"?

There may be a question of whether or not the model accounts for the one degree hits against, say full plate, that would be misses against padded, which will not get through the AR in the first place. On the other hand, it is somewhat countered by the fact that a one degree hit on padded is a two degree hit on plate.

Compare an 8 base damage hit on padded with one degree of success, The model claims that padded should be better than full plate. The hit on a guy with full plate is definitively a two degree hit, with a 20% chance of three degree hit. Padded takes away 1 damage, leaving us with 7 (or 6 with armor mastery, 5 with improved). Against plate, the damage is 16+0.2*8=17.6. Plate takes away 10 damage, leaving us with 7.6 (or 6.6 with armor master, 5.6 with improved). So the model holds.

A two degree hit on padded just ups it to a three degree hit (with 20% chance of a four degree hit) on plate, so in both cases, 8 extra damage goes through. While a one degree hit on plate is ignored because of the AR, it is a miss against padded, so the model holds. The extra damage received will then always be 8 rather than an average of 9.6, and you'd take 1 less damage than in padded.

For all other armors than full plate though, the model holds until the hit scored against padded is a four degree hit, in that case, only your AR matters. But when you get up there, critical hits becomes a very real possibility, and that might very well make the model a good approximation even at those ranges.

For the specific case of plate, the model does not hold for a three degree hit against padded, as five degrees of success does not exist.

Odd question, but if you also add a shield, how dose that change the numbers? Lets say a large shield with the Shield mastery, that gives you +5 CD, which almost offsets FullPlate AP. Would that change things or not

If you compare shield+full plate with no shield+padded, it would certainly change the numbers. But if you compare shield+full plate with shield+padded, it will not, because the only thing that matters for how much extra damage taken (before AR applies) is the difference in combat defence.

[Ancient1]

Check this die roller:
http://topps.diku.dk/torbenm/troll.msp

You can calculate probability rolls with it.....
That being said:

Say a character has a def 10
with a plate mail this would be 4
with soft leather this would be 9

An avarage warrior 3D+2B fig would throw:
Value % = % ≥
12 11.330 77.456
13 13.567 66.127
14 14.853 52.559
15 14.288 37.706
16 12.024 23.418

When wearing the plate you would mostly hit crits around 90%
When wearing the leather that chance is less!!! like 10%
17 7.845 11.394
18 3.549 3.549

While i can defend the case heavier armed is slower so easier to hit, it also would say heavier armor would decrease the change of critical damage....

Hence we said Hvy armor lessens the degree of crits by 1, while L armor would increase it by 1

[Faytte]

What I plan to implement in my game is for half plate/heavy plate is stats of

Brigandine: 8 Armor, -4 Armor Check, 2 Bulk (-1 bulk total)
Half Plate: 9 Armor, -4 Armor Check, 3 Bulk (-1 armor check total)
Full Plate: 11 Armor, -5 Armor Check, 3 Bulk (+1 armor, -1 armor check total)

In addition I have the following rules for castle forged armor (which only applies to armor made primarily out of metal)

Castle Forged Armor tailored for the particular wearer has its bulk reduced by 1. The armor has double normal costs.

Jousting/Field Plate are specially crafted Castle Forged Armors for Half/Full Plate. In addition to the benefits of Castle Forged Armor, the Armor Ratings of these armors are increased by 1 or its Armor Check Penalties decreased by 1. This armor has four times the normal costs.


Taking this, a knight wearing castle forged (not tourney) plate with a defense of 10 wearing Plate is at a adjusted defense of 5. With a tower shield they are at a defense of 11.

A more lightly armed opponent with Splint and large Shield with the same starting values is at a defense of 11 as well. Technically they could wear splint with a tower shield (nothing prevents them) which puts them at a defense of 13.

The person in plat is going to be head 4 points of damage reduction, while behind 2 mores of defense. Someone with 0 Armor Pen and a tower shield (that seems strange) is going to be at 16.

If both have both armor master buffs then the differences I think favor the Heavy Armor Wearer more so, add in field plate as well (better fitted, vs better protected).
Plate: 13 AR, Defense of 13 (with tower)
Splint: 8 AR, Defense of 15 (with tower)

[zebuleon]

i don't have a book in front of me so I can't get exact numbers, but in my experience i had a waterdancer player that went up against a full plate armor opponents. The def was like 5 and the player was rolling at least 9(6d+3b) dice He would basically have to botch the roll to not get 2 degrees. he would more often than not, get 3+ degrees, even with taking away the AR he would still one shot every opponent. Now if he fought an unarmored opponent he would on average only get 2 -3 degrees yeah he would still mostly one shot people but he would actually miss occasionally.

If it wasn't for the degree system he probably would have a hard time killing an armored opponent but the degrees made him a killing machine.

So in our experience wearing armor really wasn't worth it. so no one in the group every wore it.

[Lord Ben]

So in our experience wearing armor really wasn't worth it. so no one in the group every wore it.

If the numbers and types of opponents vary the effectiveness of the various armor types should too. Take a trained garrison unit, 3 awareness, 2 endurance, 4 fighting and their 4D against a guy in platemail (say combat defense 10 with shield) will need to roll a 25 to deal 2 damage, a plate guy is completely immune to their attacks (knockdowns, etc still give them something to do). Same waterdancer type will gain the +6 back from the armor and 4D vs 16 isn't so easy to avoid without armor. Doubly so if they use a few of the alternate rules.

They each have their advantages.

[Zorbeltuss]

6D+3B will likely one shot most NPC's.

But you'll generally want to have some armor, I'd go with splint, unless you're aiming for acrobatic defense.

Full Plate, on the other hand, is just lame.

[Lord Ben]

Personally I go with Breastplate, lesser action to stand from prone is a big deal compared to greater.

[Zorbeltuss]

That's a very good point.

[aprewett]

As I posted pages ago, acording to what I have read, metal armour should be near to impervious to edged attacks, only breaking bones and point penertrations through the gaps.
Is not the problem the system is simplifying the armour?
If you want to make it better you would have to split the armours up into; Cut, Point and Blunt protection.
It would not add that much more detail.
Weapons would just need to be stated the same.
Otherwise we really just need to go with the system as written and hand wave the detail away.

Allan

[Zorbeltuss]

As I posted pages ago, acording to what I have read, metal armour should be near to impervious to edged attacks, only breaking bones and point penertrations through the gaps.
Is not the problem the system is simplifying the armour?
If you want to make it better you would have to split the armours up into; Cut, Point and Blunt protection.
It would not add that much more detail.
Weapons would just need to be stated the same.
Otherwise we really just need to go with the system as written and hand wave the detail away.

Allan

If you want detailed realism, sure.

The system as written is simple, yet accounts for pros and cons of wearing heavy armor. This thread is about how the system works out in actual play.

[aprewett]

Sorry I am confused, I thought that would be the same thing?

Play being a point somewhere on the scale between realism and simplisity.

Allan