Larian Studios Forums General Chat Moving away from D&D and BG3 - a good move

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.