Indeed, imbuing such an already expensive armour would then also involve sending adventurers to obtain crazy components and cost the wizard involved at least one point of constitution which was not at all easy to get back in AD&D. There wasn't even an increase of ability scores through level progression, so the point was likely gone for good.
And then in came video games. "Ah crap, the twelfth dagger +1. Let's go back to the village and sell all the scrolls." Of course this impacted player expectations.
Err ... as a rule of thumb, D&D has nothing to do with reality at all.
Plate armor was very widespread in late medieval times, and during the renaissance.
Some plate armor was of course created to insane standards, and super decorated, like the replica one Adam Savage from Mythbusters recently tried on.
But professional soldiers of the time could already afford a full set of plate armor. You wouldnt need to be super rich.
Even regular foot soldiers especially in german regions are shown as already wearing a plate harness, even if they couldnt afford a full set of plate armor.
I don't know how it's handled in Wizards' D&D, but AD&D always included a history lesson and differentiated between Field Plate, Full Plate, and Plate Mail. In that sense, it would depend on the tech-level of your campaign. The affordable steel plate armour you're describing, like munition armour (half-plate in D&D) or cuirass breast plates, didn't arrive on German battlefields until the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), which is the latest era of setting recommended in 2e rules. Earlier depictions often show cheaper varieties from leather. Wikipedia even states that "During the English Civil War (1642–1651), only the wealthiest and physically strongest men could afford this type of armour. [Cuirass]" Thus, if the standard setting is dark ages, crusades, Hundred Years' War or Renaissance, metal plate armour was unaffordable for common soldiers. With the advent of firearms during the Renaissance, plate mail disappeared and then had its own renaissance with the evolution from unwieldy heavy plates of wrought iron to standardised lighter steel versions at the beginning of early modern times. If you're going for that Dark Souls suit that allows you to roll around, climb walls or mount a horse by yourself, you'll have to pay an individually fitted field plate or full plate.
Again, D&D has hardly any relation to reality. It certainly doesnt describe actual history. These terms like "Full Plate", "Half Plate" etc are not used by scientists who study medieval armor, because they have no actual meaning.
Real terms such scientists use are for example Mail, Gambeson, Brigandine, and Plate. Those are the four most important types of medieval armor. They can be freely combined of course. For example early plate armor would be combined with Mail, because it was just a cuirass or even just a breastplate in the beginning.
There is no "tech-level" in reality either. This is literally a gamer term.
Wikipedia is not a reliable source, even less so if you pick random pages and interepret them chaotically.
We think that the first cuirass may have been made of leather because the very word cuirass. Its a french word that relates to leather.
How exactly would one be able to distinguish a leather from a metal cuirass in the 12. century, anyway ? At that time knights would wear a cloth with their crest over their armor.
Nevermind that these are medieval images we talk about; typically drawings in books. Realistic paintings didnt really exist until the Renaissance.
If you had bothered to watch the video I linked you would know that an old man like Adam Savage can very comfortably wear a late Renaissance plate armor.
The 30 years war was a modern war, i.e. a war without knights, and a time of extreme destruction. A third of the population of the Holy Roman Empire perished during this time. A peasant unable to afford plate armor under these conditions isnt surprising. Apparently you have the strange idea that earlier times are always worse than later times.
The plate armor got introduced as the coat of plates in the 12. century, at the same time as the invention of gunpowder. Its height was the 15. and 16. century, when Germany and Italy produced the probably best plate armor ever made. After that war simply changed, so expensive protection for elite warriors became rare. Its end came in the 19. century, when modern guns became much more reliable, able to hit targets at greater distance, and could fire multiple shots before reloading. The concept is still not dead even today though, modern plate armor is made from titanium and combined with materials like kevlar and ceramic plates.
Again why are you talking about something called Dark Souls. I was discussing reality.
All plate armor has to be tailor made. If plate armor doesnt fit exactly, you will pay dearly. Plate armor is made from the same material as weapons. It will not budge. It can very seriously hurt you if it doesnt fit properly.
This debate is about the D&D system, so of course I'm referring to game terms. The game needed some standardisation of terms, so TSR used some typical combinations as standard sets. As I said, I don't know how it's handled in later editions, but in AD&D 2e, you could combine individual pieces of armour to different outcomes and the available gear was at least modelled after historical examples. While Gambeson would be "Padded Armor", Mail, Brigandine and Plate were all terms commonly used in 2nd edition. This is however not to say that earlier editions were supposed to mirror reality in any way. But, the books usually gave you some historical context before saying, for example, how they had to nerf crossbows to keep them balanced for the game.
So, you're saying Wikipedia is no reliable source of information, but one YouTube video is? The steel plate cuirass in my example is a piece of armour that covers the upper torso front and back. It goes back to at least classical antiquity and was initially made of leather. Later they were also made of brass, bronze, cloth, iron and finally steel with modern composite versions, like bullet-proof vests still evolving.
While I can read and type bits and pieces, I don't usually have time to watch a whole 25-minute-video during my break, but the armour they're showing in the video is not a historical piece, but a modern replica which is made of steel. This was not necessarily the case with the originals, and if, we'd be back at the start of this tangent that this type of armour would be something owned by royalty, not used by foot soldiers. Nowhere I said earlier times are worse than later times, but in the portion of history relevant to most D&D settings, it was always a race between armour and projectile, technological progress still taking place today. Before the battle of Crécy, the mounted knight dominated battlefields. Afterwards, he was more at home in competitive sports. Quite similar to what we're currently seeing with expensive tanks being destroyed by cheap drones. So, take the mounted knight and the English longbow, the introduction of lighter but sturdier steel plates, the rifled barrel,...all these were game changers (no pun intended), but as a dungeon master, you will have to make the decision whether you allow firearms or which other equipment is or isn't available, as this will have a massive impact on the style of your campaign. Tech levels may be a game term, but science does something very similar when discussing technological development, for instance, the shift from the Neolithic to the Chalcolithic era. One civilisation could reach a more advanced state than its contemporaries, so while these terms give you a rough idea of the historical period they are also descriptions of available technology.
The reference to Dark Souls was because of the idiosyncratic rolling around. Badly fitting or heavy iron armour would not allow that, while even full steel suits were surprisingly functional for their perceived bulk if properly customised to the wearer. You're also right that there was a good chance an incompatible piece of armour could injure you badly.
No my posting, that you answered to, was specifically about reality. The armor Adam Savage tried out was a replica of late renaissance plate armor. It showed the last stage of plate armor, right before war changed and plate armor became a more rare sight on the battlefield.
And you flipflop in a strange way between D&D and reality.
Again: mixing D&D and reality makes no sense. D&D uses reality at best as inspiration. Often it completely ignores it outright. D&D has tons of stuff that either didnt exist or havent been this way in reality at all. Examples:
- The main armor for peasants was actually what D&D probably means with "padded armor", except it was worlds more effective than D&D suggests. Its actual name is Gamberson and it was made from many layers of linnen. Linnen is actually quite sturdy, kind of like Kevlar only less so, and unless you manage to pierce or cut it, it can mitigate a lot of incoming damage. For successfully cutting Gambeson you need a razor sharp blade and even then you often wont succeed to cut. Arrows and piercing weapons like spears may also manage to get through, but are not guaranteed to do so either. And Linnen is cheap enough that peasants can easily afford it; more precisely they would usually just grow the linnen themselves, so their only cost would be the work and the loss of food they could have grown instead.
- Leather armor is a very interesting topic. Medieval people used a material they called cooked leather. We dont know what it was, but it certainly wasnt actually leather that had been cooked, because that just destroys leather. Either way leather wasnt really used on its own as armor too often, because for starters that would have been prohibitively expensive. It was however used occasionally in armor for parts that needed to be extra flexible, and it certainly was used a lot for straps and internal structures, specifically for plate armor.
- Studded leather also didnt exist. Adding a few bolts to leather armor makes absolutely no sense at all and wont increase the quality of armor. What could be interpreted as the inspiration for this idea is the Brigandine. Thats relatively small pieces of plate armor, bolted together such that the individual plate armor pieces can still move very freely, and bolted to an outside clothing which yes, could be leather, but also could be any type of cloth, including expensive stuff like velvet and silk for Brigandines made for nobles. So yes, armor which looked like cloth or possibly leather with studs existed, but these studs have been the connections between the plates of the Brigandine below. This was metal armor, not cloth or leather armor.
- Splint armor is another type of D&D armor that could be interpreted as an alias for Brigandine.
- There was also the original Coat of Plates which used quite large plates and lacked all the flexibility and comfort of Brigandine, in fact it was more restrictive than later plate armor as well. The coat of plates would usually be worn over a chain armor. Of course splint armor has been around for long times, the form the romans used has been made popular by the comic Asterix. In reality the most popular armor for romans has been mail. They also used an especially inflexible version of plate armor for their military leaders, which themselves would not fight and would thus not care about the movement restrictions of wearing a massive plate around their torso.
- It should be noted that mail was invented by the Etruscans and that plate armor already was in widespread use among romans. Military leaders famously would wear very restrictive plate armor that made them basically unable to fight, while foot soldiers would wear the sort of splint armor that has been made popular by the Asterix comics.
- Darts existed, but have been a hunting weapon for smaller prey. Use in war is of course possible, heck you can use stones and clubs in war as well, but its not in particular effective. It certainly stands no chance to get through metal armor. For the record both stones and clubs are surprisingly effective. Clubs are far from the worst weapon against plate armor.
- Daggers have been THE antiarmor weapon, if you could get close, and fighting plate armor with swords was done by halfswording, i.e. one hand would grip the blade, to increase control of the blade and basically turn it into a sort of dagger. This allows enough precision to hit into the gaps of plate armor.
- The onehanded sword is called arming sword or knightly sword. Bastard swords, which mainly differ in regards to the length of the hilt, have the same blade length. Longswords, which have an even longer grip, also keep basically the same hilt length. Thats because all three sword types have to be drawn from a sheath at the belt. so there is a natural biomechanical limit how long you can make the blade.
- The lower arm protection so popular in D&D as mage armor has no equivalent at all in reality.
Etc etc etc
If you want to play a game of D&D, reality obviously has very little influence. Pretending otherwise serves nobody.
