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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Salamandyr" data-source="post: 6905045" data-attributes="member: 40233">Not true.  2nd Edition had the arquebus.  Likewise, the flintlock is a firing mechanism, and isn't any more powerful than the wheel lock, or the matchlock, just more reliable.  There may be other reasons for a 18th Century flintlocks to be more powerful than 16th Century matchlocks, like better powder or rifled barrels, but the firing mechanism had nothing to do with it.   untrue, as proven in this very thread.  Unless you're focussing on medieval plate, because the Middle ages ended, but armor wearing didn't.  It was still being worn, a lot, right through the 19th Century.  Likely more to do with the change in focus from heavy cavalry to massed infantry.  It just wasn't not economical to arm a bunch of foot soldiers (whose individual lives the king wasn't overly concerned with anyway).  The gentry kept wearing armor though.Keep in mind that the effective range of a musket ball isn't all that great and wasn't even necessarily the greatest danger an 18th & 19th Century soldier was likely to face on the battlefield.  He still had to fight against pike, sword & bayonet.  And armor, even if it won't take a direct shot, will protect against incidental hits like slow moving shrapnel (the kind you get at the edge of a cannon blast).Proofed plate has more to do with tempering than just thickness.  And as pointed out in this thread, proofing was done with a pistol shot at point blank range.  Most shots in battle are going to be at medium and further range.  The real danger to a cavalryman isn't gunfire, it's canonshot.  Armor doesn't do much against that (much higher velocity)Well, modern armor is essentially brigandine.  Likewise brigandine can be tempered just as easily as plate, and the smaller plates will necessarily cover few areas, but you can harden the really critical areas even more.Mail would actually be pretty against a musket ball at anything out past medium range.  Would leather be effective?  It would be more effective than, say, skin.  Which is the point--it's not that armor would necessarily stop a bullet; it's whether it would be protective, ie if someone wearing armor would have a higher AC than someone not wearing armor.  And the answer is, of course, yes.  Heck, leather was often worn in the 20th Century to protect against shrapnel.D&D of course works in a fantasy world where people wear all different kinds of armor that would never have existed together--like for instance, why is highly labor intensive armor like mail cheaper than relatively inexpensive to produce (once you've figured out how to roll sheet metal) plate armor?  Because...that's why.  A medieval longbowman, could fire an arrow with as much kinetic energy as just about any musket made, and competitive with any hand carried firearm until the 19th Century and minie balls and brass cartridges.  We all accept that leather, mail, and plate work against that, so why do guns get to ignore physics?</blockquote>

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