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[Galloglaich]

Originally Posted by Dannyalcatraz

The guy from that armor & horseback video is Mike Loades on his show "Weapons that made Britain"- great show!

Yes it's one of the very few pop history shows I've ever seen that really got it right, Mike Loades really gets it.

One of the best points he made in that series was this: The armor of the day was well designed to protect the wearer from the weapons of the day.

The second best point he made was that no armor was perfect- each had a flaw that an experienced warrior with the right tool could exploit.

Of course, and the primary 'flaw' for 95% of the combatants was that the armor usually did not cover the whole body. The number of people who could afford cap-a-pied armor protection was tiny. So the best way to defeat armor was usually to go around it, something most RPG combat systems don't really model.

But that wasn't easy in the middle of a fight, making even partial armor protection incredibly valuable, if you have ever tried sparring with weapons you know how difficult it is not to be hit, and if you have ever cut with a realistic replica you know how devastating these weapons are to unprotected flesh.

just as an example of that, consider this test cut and this one on deer carcases, (warning those clips are not for the squeamish)

This is the real reason the Roman Legions did so well in attrition warfare of the type so often practiced during their heydey, with both sides exchanging javelins and darts all day, the side with little to no armor is at a crippling disadvantage.

To face a fully armored knight was a daunting challenge indeed. It's no accident that the stunning military successes of the First Crusade coincided with Mail armor beginning to creep toward cap-a-pied coverage, this is one of the principle reasons the crusaders were such a shock to the Turks and the Arabs initially according to their own records.

The main flaw, common to all armors, is the human inside- specifically his soft tissues (snip) That is why maces were so popular after the advent of full plate. Ditto the development of the Mortschlag- the Murder Blow-

Of course, thats why the whole system of "harnichefechten" developed as a seperate martial art from the earlier form which became the default unarmored combat ("blossfechten"), and why all the attendent systems of half-swording etc. (including the Mortschlag)

and the further development of KampfRingen or war-wrestling, (in an almost identical to German fencing as Jujitsu is with Japanese fencing -) became so developed as a means of getting armored opponents into that disadvantageous position.



And of course this is also the reason for the development of not only heavy maces of the European type, but all the specialist armor piercing and armor-cleaving weapons like poll-hammers, war-picks, etc.



which became so prominent in the Renaissance battlefields -- and none of which really make any sense in RPGs because there is really no way in most RPG combat systems to model the differences between an armor piercing weapon like a war-pick and say, a sword.

The unarmored fighter is at a huge disadvantage against even a partially armored warrior- the armored fighter can wield a sword which is extremely effective at cutting flesh, wheras the unarmored warrior had better have either a specialized armor - piercing weapon or a high energy missile thrower like a heavy arbalest (crossbow) or an arquebus.

And of course they did figure that out, the hegemony of the Knight was largely broken by innovative commoners quite early, well before Plate armor became well established. The Swiss defeated the Hapsburg Knights at Morgarten (1315), the Flemish annihilated the French knights at Golden Spurs (1302) by inventing new weapons which could defeat armor. The Flemish had their Guden-Tag ("good morning") the Swiss invented the Halberd and had their heavy Crossbows, and later the pike.

The invincible Czech Hussites, another rebellion of commoners, further perfected new systems for defeating the fully armored knight which included their invention of the pistol, the use of war-wagons, and the adaptation of agricultural flails (and the farmers who knew how to use them) into deadly military weapons by adding spikes and iron bands. This proved effective enough for them to defeat all five international Crusades launched to destroy them.

All of which is potentially interesting stuff you could use in an RPG game


Speaking of Maces, don't you think it's interesting that the Mace, (sometimes masked as a 'scepter') is always, in seemingly every culture, the chosen weapon of Kings? When you consider who a King has to worry about most - his fellow aristocrats, who are likely to have armor, it kind of makes sense doesn't it.

G.