Skip to main content

Plate for Fighters


There seemed to be some interest in my notion of restricting plate mail to Fighters.

First thing: I know. I know. Plate mail is not plate armor. But danged if I don’t still picture the full suit of hinged knightwear whenever I read about plate mail, and also-danged if illustrators haven’t populated rule books with image after image of adventurers running around in plate armor.

I'm not a nitty-gritty combat simulationist. I like nice, broad, simple categories of armor:
  1. Light/Flexible: Leather; Hide; Studded; or, I dunno, how thick is that wool peacoat?
  2. Medium/Semi-Rigid: Pretty much everything else.
  3. Heavy/Rigid: Plate Armor; anything that would make the Kelly Gang sit up and take notice.
The Story of the Kelly Gang, 1906 (motion picture)

Heavy/Rigid armor: 
  1. Requires help getting into or out of.
  2. Prevents you from doing pretty much anything except walking, sitting on a horse once you've been placed on it, and swinging weapons.
  3. Will make you fall down if you haven't practiced moving in it a lot.
  4. Sounds like someone has dropped the cutlery bin every time you take a step.

Therefore, I tend to think it should be restricted to Fighters (who have been trained in the stuff), and that all the above inconveniences should be played out in game.  

Of course, I'm no expert. Maybe knights could do a pommel-horse routine in armor that they zipped up like pajamas.

Comments

  1. Most of our concepts on medieval armor are based on our real world medieval history, and then layering our own modern day concepts upon what we imagine life was like back then. Needless to say, we're just a little bit off.

    1. Knight were trained at an early age, taught to start wearing armor from youth, so that their bodies and muscles treated armor like a second skin. Most real knights, didn't need the assistance often portrayed, of getting into a saddle, or of standing back up...but...noble knights, or decorated knights, without the training, would.

    2. Food was incredibly scarce back then. Peasants survived on a meager amount, while all the real protein, meats and vegetables were reserved for the upper class. As a result, it was the knights, with their training and diet alone that could actually wear the armor.

    Picture if you would, a magic user in our real world of the middle ages. He would probably not have worn armor from an early age, let alone learned the physical conditioning, or have the dietary development to wear and use it properly.

    He probably would have been like poor Mr. Ned Kelly there ( GREAT MOVIE! ), if he actually was able to put on some armor.

    So I think your right in some of your thoughts, however, I actually wouldn't force all of the inconveniences on 'trained' fighters, since they would be much more like the knights of old in our real world, and able to do wondrous things in their armor, that we would think virtually magical today.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Excellent points. I just saw this video: http://vimeo.com/13634653
      A guy in plate in a swimming pool. He's not exactly swimming laps, but it's pretty impressive.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knaves, fancypants

I've prepared a new layout document of Ben Milton's Knaves . Knaves is a great, light rules set that has an extremely elegant core mechanic while retaining total compatibility with OSR material. It's pretty much the rpg of my dreams. This document contains the complete rules, plus a bunch of useful hacks from the community, plus a few of my invention, plus some useful resources from Ben Milton's previous effort, Maze Rats . EDIT: I've updated the layout to fix errata and make a few tweaks. Further, I've made 3 variations: KNAVES TABLET LAYOUT The Tablet Layout is meant for scrolling on screens, and contains hyperlinks. KNAVES SPREAD LAYOUT The Spread Layout is set up to print on Letter-sized paper. KNAVES A4 LAYOUT The A4 Layout is set up to print on A4 paper, and is probably the most elegant of the three versions. This is presented with generous permission from Ben Milton, and should in no way be an excuse for not purchasing a copy of Knav

Maze Rats by Post

In my previous post , I reviewed a bunch of my favorite rulesets for optimization for Play-by-Post. It occurred to me almost immediately that I hadn't really thought about Maze Rats enough. In fact, I'd mis-remembered and mischaracterized it. Upon reflection, one of the mechanics I took issue with is actually a big strength. Re-reading the rules, it seems like just a few very simple hacks could make it a highly-optimized PbP game. As follows: Danger Rolls are rolled by the GM. Danger rolls usually fail, so it is in the player’s interest to describe their actions plausibly and mitigate as many risks as they can, in the hopes that they don’t trigger a danger roll. 2d6 + ability bonus ≥ 10 If you have taken enough precautions to have a distinct advantage in an action, but not enough to have eliminated the distinct possibility of danger, the GM will give you a roll with advantage. 3d6 keep 2 + ability bonus ≥ 10 Because each character only has 3 ability scores (S

Reviewing Rules for Play-by-Post Optimization

I’ve played a lot of PbP games: all your favorite flavors of OD&D, AD&D, and their retroclones, Call of Cthulhu, Marvel Superheroes, Traveller, Dungeon World, etc. ad nauseam. In almost every instance, I forgot what ruleset we were using at some point. Which is a good thing. Once chargen is over, you spend a lot more time describing your characters actions and poring over the GM’s descriptions than you spend interacting with rules. When you do roll, it’s usually a combat to-hit roll, which you’ve probably programmed into the online dice-roller as a macro. Pretty much any game will work for PbP. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t points of possible optimization. Point 1: Resolution. Anything that can keep the action moving is a boon to PbP. A game that requires a back-and-forth exchange of information to resolve an action is going to progress very slowly. A good rule of thumb is that it’ll take 2 or 3 days to get a response from any given player. At that pace, an exch