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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tzarevitch" data-source="post: 1859057" data-attributes="member: 1792">Ace's post is correct. Heavy plate mail was perfectly capable of stopping arrows, bolts AND bullets of the era. In fact they were specifically built and tested to resist such things. If you look closely at some you will see a small dent where the maker fired a bullet into the armor to prove to the buyer that it can stop a bullet. This is called the "proof". I saw a program on armor years ago. Here's how it went:The gun did not doom heavy armor because of ability to penetrate it. Guns doomed heavy armor because they doomed the knight, who was the one who primarily wore such armor. Note that lighter armor types still exist today in the form of bullet-proof vests and other military body armors. The training and equipping of a single knight is very expensive and is done from birth amongst the noble class. The heavy armor was the halmark of a knight. It was VERY espensive and time consuming to make, to the point that only the landed nobility who formed the pool of people who became knights, could afford it and it became their status symbol. Since knights came from the nobility, there was only a very limited number of them available to form an army unless the king wanted to parcel out more lands and increase the number of nobles at the expense of his own power. Reliance on these landed nobles also had a political cost to the monarch; he had to pay them for their ability with monies, lands and/or titles. Giving any of those to a noble meant the king had to weaken himself politically (and thereby strengthen them accordingly). With the advent of efficient and cheap gun designs a king could simply draft large numbers of commoners into his army and train them to fire and reload a gun with far less time, cost and hassle. This increased the monarch's ability to project power and simultaneously reduced his need to depend on the nobility and their knights (a win-win for the monarch).Now that knights were no longer needed as the backbone of an army, monarchs could set about destroying the landed noble classes from whom the knights were drawn. This way they could rid themselves of potential political threats and consolidate their lands back in the monarchs' hands. Note, this happened in both Europe and Japan (replace knight with samurai and you have the same story). Firearms relegated the knightly class to the dustbin of history and they took their use of heavy armor with them. Firearms did not directly do away with armor. Armor use has never gone away. Only the heavy armors that were the halmarks of the knights disappeared, and that is because the knights themselves disappeared. There is no reason in AD&D why heavy armor should decline with the use of firearms, because heavy armor use in D&D is not tied to an obsolete social class. For the record, I use WWI era firearms in my D&D game and they only require simple weapon proficiency to use, and it works just fine. I even allow an Arcane Archer variant that uses guns. The PCs even ran into a golem that was built with two gatling guns in its arms (2d12/x4 damage each and 3 shots from each gun). Tzarevitch</blockquote>

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