There were a couple of things from the article that caught my eye, but I wasn't able to comment on until the WotC site came back up...
Can you imagine wandering the desert, even on horseback, in that? You'd bake in no time flat. Heck, for that matter, can you even guess how you'd get on the horse without a hoist and a couple of guys to help you? Can anyone tell me what's up with those goofy pointed toes? And forget about making a quick dash to the nearest portable toilet.
"May all those who go to don armour tomorrow, remember to go before they don armour tomorrow." - Prince Edmund, the Black Adder.
I mentioned environment. I'd like to discuss that topic for a moment. I've heard folks put down images that had people wandering around in nothing but loincloths. Before you discount the style of dress, please ask yourself whether it fit the culture and environment.
The problem is that in a world where other things exist, loincloths
are silly. The moment a culture can craft any other type of armour (or, indeed, make anything we would describe as clothing), loincloths disappear - they're simply inferior in terms of protection, hygeine, and durability.
Tarzan doesn't coexist with Charlemagne. In any marginally-realistic world, he finds himself cut down in seconds.
Now, in terms of culture, while I was looking at armor and considering the topic of appropriateness, I spent a lot of time and energy researching historical female armor. Guess what? There isn't much armor. We can find mentions of Amazons, Valkyrie, and a few female warriors such as Joan of Arc depicted in literature and art, but outside of artistic renderings, we really don't have any solid evidence about what they actually looked like. Many scholars have guessed that they just wore smaller "men's armor" that was appropriate for their culture.
Historically, there really aren't a lot of women-warriors to draw from, at least amongst those who served openly. Of course, there are several tales of women who disguised themselves to serve - in which case they didn't wear "smaller men's armour" - what they wore was simply "men's armour".
Even though the image is from the BBC "Merlin" series, it's pretty historically correct. So this would be culturally appropriate, right? Well, all except for the part that it wasn't culturally appropriate for a woman to fight in that time period's military forces. That means we have to set aside reality for a moment and start looking at this discussion from the point of view of the hypothetical . . . or from the point of view of the fantasy setting.
I tend to agree. My preference for the implied setting is something like the "Battlestar Galactica" model, where
of course a woman can be a warrior, or a fighter-pilot, or president, and nobody gives it even a moment's thought. That's not historically accurate, and it may or may not be 'realistic', but I think it's the best baseline assumption.
Where it comes to armour, then, I think the game would be best served by dressing female warriors in the armour that
would exist had such a thing been common in our history. So, chain mail should indeed be as depicted - Morgause from "Merlin", rather than some equivalent of Seven of Nine's catsuit.
Similarly, plate armour should absolutely
not be moulded to highlight the warrior's breasts, because that is stupidly impractical - doing so would direct incoming attacks in towards vital areas, rather than away.
We may not have examples, and we may not know how such armour
would look, but we can certainly take a guess or two at how it is likely to be designed, given its purpose.
Basically, if the game is going to be serious about depicting female characters in dangerous situations, then it should depict them seriously - they're dungeoneers, not catwalk models!
So we've got this made-up culture, and now we start envisioning what townsfolk, merchants, nobles, and the military might look like. These guys are made-up, so it doesn't matter that there are no real-world cultural metaphors to draw from for a female fighter in the real-world cultures we pulled from. Instead, we just worry about whether the male and female feel like they are both from the same culture, and that they are appropriately armored for their culture, environment, technology, and materials.
Now we have two warriors from a particular culture. Each is wearing equivalent armor types of similar materials, gaining equal protection to the same types of threats, and looking like they belong together on the battlefield.
This is exactly what I would like to see. IMO, this is the point where the article is at its best. And the image of the two warriors (which I haven't quoted) is the best in the article. Again, IMO.
In other words, a male knight in full battle dress, wading through the desert sands, is just about as silly as a female fighter, in a chainmail bikini, forging through the frozen wastes of the Iceland Dale.
Not really. On the one hand, we have a knight who has been stupid enough to don armour inappropriate to his environment. On the other we have a female fighter who has been stupid enough to don 'armour' that is inappropriate to
any environment.
Honestly, I'd rather not see chainmail bikinis anywhere in a D&D book. But if you feel you must have them, then fine - just don't pretend they're anything other than cheesecake.
