D&D (2024) What, exactly, is a 5e "scimitar"?
niklinna
satisfied?
Druids can wear metal armor! They just won't.
Edit: How the heck did that happen?!
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Blue Orange
Gone to Texas
Druids aren't vegan necessarily; predators are part of nature.
niklinna
satisfied?
Eep! Talk about a serious mistake. That's what I get for being sleep-deprived.
QuentinGeorge
Legend
They will if the metal is only small studs apparently. We can calculate the exact metal percent that renders the armour a no go
Crimson Longinus
Legend
No! Brigandine most definitely is no light armour. In D&D brigandine probably should just use same rules as scale armour. (They're very similar anyway. Smallish pieces of metal attached together.)
Studded leather could be just renamed "reinforced leather" or something like that. Leather with some pieces of metal or cuir-bouilli attached to here and there. Not that there really needs to be any other types of light armour than 12+dex, the price difference between the worse and the better type is so small that you can upgrade pretty soon, so "crappy starter version" doesn't seem particularly necessary.
As for scimitars, I just removed them and gave both short and longswords piercing/slashing damage type (user's choice.) They can be used to represent various swords of different blade shapes and of course most swords could be used to either slash or stab. Not that it almost ever matters in D&D.
Blue Orange
Gone to Texas
Weeelll...it kind of fits our idea of the pacifist hippie, right? A lot of it (as I think Snarf Zagyg said elsewhere) was tied up in the 60s and 70s environmentalist movements, and even now a lot of environmentalists support veganism because it generates less carbon dioxide (it's inefficient to grow all that grain to feed the animal you then kill, plus the animals generate CO2 when they breathe and die, and methane when they fart--sounds dumb but it is apparently a serious issue). The avoidance of metal kind of fits with that--it's part of the whole 'artificial is bad' idea you see even now with those 'natural flavors'.
But I always took the D&D world to have an essentially premodern mindset--nature is red in tooth and claw. Druids live among and change into animals, and animals include predators. Most organisms have adaptations to avoid being eaten, or to eat other things themselves.
I'd argue the druid is basically taking the place of the shaman as 'spellcaster for tribal, non-urbanized peoples', which is probably why you never saw shamans really take off as a class even before the current concerns about cultural appropriation. ('Spiritualist' might be a better word, though I think it still conjures up images of 19th-century spirit mediums...who might also be an interesting character concept, but a very different one.)
Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
I conceptualize “studded leather” as brigandine because that’s almost certainly the actual armor that was visually mistaken for being some sort of studded jack, the “studs” being the rivets holding the plates to the garment. The armor weight categories have never really made a ton of sense anyway, any armor when worn properly has fairly well-distributed weight (though mail probably least so), so the real issues are flexibility and heat.
Leather armor should already be cuir-bouilli since leather that isn’t reinforced isn’t even really armor; it’s just clothing.
You could honestly just rename the whole armor table. Have light armor be gambesons - padded, quilted, and “reinforced” (with mail voiders). Medium armor could be chest pieces - cuir bouilli, scale, mail hauberk, brigandine, and plate cuirass. Then heavy armor could be full suits - lamellar, mail, half plate, and full plate.
Yeah, seems like a good call.
Bill Zebub
“It’s probably Matt Mercer’s fault.”
I think it was supposed to be Studly Armor but a clueless TSR editor changed it and the rest is history.
Azzy
ᚳᚣᚾᛖᚹᚢᛚᚠ
From the description in the 1e DMG, that seems to be what it was supposed to be.
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