Combat vs knights in full plate

[Plane Sailing]

Heavy mace gets my vote - your best chance of injuring someone in plate armour quickly. A dagger between the joints sounds all fine and dandy, but unless you are assassinating someone in their sleep, good luck getting into position!

Arguably, maces were undervalued in the very beginnings of D&D and ever since people discussing ancient weapons have looked down on them, considering them to be capable of less damage and disregarding their true fearsomeness. Especially against armour.

Cheers

 

[NewJeffCT]

Heavy mace gets my vote - your best chance of injuring someone in plate armour quickly. A dagger between the joints sounds all fine and dandy, but unless you are assassinating someone in their sleep, good luck getting into position!

Arguably, maces were undervalued in the very beginnings of D&D and ever since people discussing ancient weapons have looked down on them, considering them to be capable of less damage and disregarding their true fearsomeness. Especially against armour.

Cheers

good point, but D&D has never really valued the different types of armor, other than saying plate provides +2 or +3 AC better than chainmail, which is +2 better than studded leather and +3 better than regular leather. (maybe 1E did with weapon vs AC charts, since armor was more static in 1E, but I never really used it.)

Plate armor might be easier to hit, but harder to damage - if two identical combatants faced off against each other, and one was in leather and the other in plate, the guy in leather should be able to move more quickly and be harder to hit, but easier to damage once hit. And, the guy in plate would be the opposite. Moves slower, easier to hit, but harder to damage.

 

[El Mahdi]

good point, but D&D has never really valued the different types of armor, other than saying plate provides +2 or +3 AC better than chainmail, which is +2 better than studded leather and +3 better than regular leather. (maybe 1E did with weapon vs AC charts, since armor was more static in 1E, but I never really used it.)

Plate armor might be easier to hit, but harder to damage - if two identical combatants faced off against each other, and one was in leather and the other in plate, the guy in leather should be able to move more quickly and be harder to hit, but easier to damage once hit. And, the guy in plate would be the opposite. Moves slower, easier to hit, but harder to damage.

Yeah, that's where damage reduction comes in. However for many, DR adds an unacceptable increase in complexity.

It just goes to show how perfectly simple and perfectly realistic at the same time are impossible. So you end up deciding from modular options what level of complexity you want vs. what level of simplicity you want...balancing the two according to each DM's/Gamer's preference. That's definitely one area where 5E could be very successful...if they make the modularity easy to deal with.

 

[Janx]

other variables to the sword vs. armor debate

most sword fights aren't prolonged bouts of clanging swords together. That would ding and gouge the blade edges pretty quick. It's more like there's a short exchange of blows, a close, then a thrust into a weak spot.

a guy with a claymore (two handed sword), isn't just making big swings with it. He can put a hand past the hilt and hold it like a spear, to guide it into a weak spot and ram the point home into his target's visor, armpit, or other weak spot.

 

[Derren]

Firearms, since they effectively ended the age of plate.

That is a common misconception.
Advanced firearms sealed the deal, but the age of plate was ended by pikes, not firearms.
Plate armor and firearms coexisted for a long time. But when knights in plate armor vanished they were not replaced by line infantry but by pike formation (Landsknechte, Swiss mercenaries) which slowly evolved into line infantry by incorporating more and more guns into their formation.

 

[Plane Sailing]

if two identical combatants faced off against each other, and one was in leather and the other in plate, the guy in leather should be able to move more quickly and be harder to hit, but easier to damage once hit. And, the guy in plate would be the opposite. Moves slower, easier to hit, but harder to damage.

I'm not sure - I've seen people at the royal armouries fighting in plate and I have to say they seemed to be able to move pretty much as quickly as a person could. In hollywoodland the person in leather might be doing acrobatic tumbling that the plate armoured guy couldn't, but in terms of actual melee neither would be functionally more manoeuvrable than the other.

Ground speed with endurance is the only real area of advantage that I can see.

Cheers

 

[Derren]

I'm not sure - I've seen people at the royal armouries fighting in plate and I have to say they seemed to be able to move pretty much as quickly as a person could. In hollywoodland the person in leather might be doing acrobatic tumbling that the plate armoured guy couldn't, but in terms of actual melee neither would be functionally more manoeuvrable than the other.

Ground speed with endurance is the only real area of advantage that I can see.

Cheers

See the first video I linked on page 2 (http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...n-full-plate&p=6057404&viewfull=1#post6057404) at the end (around 36 minutes in) for an example how agile plate fighters are in combat.

 

[Umbran]

Heavy mace gets my vote - your best chance of injuring someone in plate armour quickly. A dagger between the joints sounds all fine and dandy, but unless you are assassinating someone in their sleep, good luck getting into position!

Remember, the guy you're trying to get to is not Inigo Montoya or something once he's off his horse. He's not super-agile, he's a guy in plate armor. On a battlefield, with lots of fighting going on, he cannot just stand there pointing his sword at you to keep you at bay. He doesn't have forever. He doesn't see or hear very well in that helmet, so without the extra mobility of the horse, he has some distinct disadvantages. He's going to take a swing eventually, and that's apt to be your moment.

Are you assured a kill? No. But coming into grappling distance on a man in armor with a sword is not all that hard, either.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Remember, the guy you're trying to get to is not Inigo Montoya or something once he's off his horse. He's not super-agile, he's a guy in plate armor. On a battlefield, with lots of fighting going on, he cannot just stand there pointing his sword at you to keep you at bay. He doesn't have forever. He doesn't see or hear very well in that helmet, so without the extra mobility of the horse, he has some distinct disadvantages. He's going to take a swing eventually, and that's apt to be your moment.

Are you assured a kill? No. But coming into grappling distance on a man in armor with a sword is not all that hard, either.

You are making the classic mistake of mixing up jousting plate armour with actual plate armour used in battle (plate mail). It just doesn't look anything like the way you describe that battlefield.

I don't know if you are speaking from the experience of having tried the real thing on, but I've seen people moving and fighting in the authentic article and believe me - they had no noticeable hindrance to their speed and mobility. As I said, at the royal armouries museum. The real thing.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I've seen the same kind of demoes- there is a bit of a slowdown, but for someone trained and conditioned to wear the armor, its not going to be that noticeable. The real issue with such armor is going to be endurance.

If you look at history, the average soldier has been loaded down with 60-80lbs of gear. They're trained to carry it. Its mass is efficiently distributed. But the guys in plate, unlike some warriors of other eras, could not drop significant portions of their gear to fight in. Additionally, that armor is not as good at allowing heat to escape as the fighting gear of other areas and areas, which also saps endurance.