Re: Armour Talents

[raito@raito.com]

The quoting's awful whenever Edward posts, I'm not sure why.

> Plate and scale limit range of motion, so yes you
> can do most anything but you won't do it as well.  Neil says he did
> fine motor stuff but I wouldn't try working on a Swiss time piece in
> gauntlets or disarming a trap.  Still TFT's penalties are again

I think I said I didn't do find motor in gauntlets. At least I intended
to. But I've always used mittens. Some of the better fingered job would
work better. Mostly, gauntlets just make your fingers bigger, which
detunes a lot of actions.

And I've never found properly fitting armour to limit my range of motion.

Sure, I'm a stiff, fat old man now so it's a lot easier to find armour
that's not limiting. But 40 years ago I was a competitive wrestler, and
we're second only to gymnasts in flexibility. Never had a problem with
armour flexibility.

Somewhere in the aether is some video of Dr. Tobias Capwell, curator at
the Wallace collection, wearing his harness by Robert MacPherson, and
doing stuff. He also says that properly fitting armour is much less of a
liability that most think.

Couple all that info with, say, Fiore's work and you get right back to
harder to hit vs. harder to damage.

Well, on one level, I don't find wearing armour makes me easier to hit,
nor harder to hit.

But there's no denying that it's much harder to hit an armoured man in
such a way as to do him harm than it is an unarmoured man. Thus we have
toe D&D system. It's not quite that it's harder to lay a weapon on him
than that it's hard to do damage to him. So D&D had a problem where, say,
a magic weapon that just has to touch the other guy to work doesn't work
right. But at some point, they corrected that by saying that if your roll
would hit an unarmoured man, it touched the other guy.

So say you do hit the other guy. How much damage do you do? Well, there's
2 ways to do it. Through the armour or around it. Through the armour is
the TFT way -- damage reduction. And one could fold in double and triple
damage there.

But the fighting systems of the times, like Fiore's, fight armoured men
very differently than unarmoured men. According to him, and I gather to
his contempraries, though I've studied them less, they considered plate to
be nigh invulnerable to the point where the system of how to fight an
armoured opponent bears more resemblance to wrestling (which had a lot to
do with breaking the other guy, not just grappling) than to swordsmanship.
Fiore considered that swinging a sword at an armoured man to be a useless
exercise. And there were complaints that young men (especially rich ones)
never learned to parry, because they didn't have to as their armour would
just shrug off the blow.

Rather, the usual thing to attempt was to lock an arm, or throw the
opponent to the ground. If you did use the weapon, it was more like a
crowbar. If you did attempt to use the weapon as a weapon, you tried to
get the point under the gorget, through the gauntlet cuff, or maybe the
fauld. What you didn't do was try to defeat the armour.

So you end up with 3 things:
How does the armour affect touching the other guy with your weapon?
What happens if you hit the armour?
What happens if you avoid the armour and hit the man?

OK, 4...

How do creatures natural armour fit into all this?

Last point. In the 1400's pollaxe play was considered to be good exercise,
and not particularly dangerous. Because armour works.

Neil Gilmore
raito@raito.com