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.
