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<blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8129104" data-attributes="member: 6988941">Evidently medieval knights complained frequently about how obnoxious it was fighting in full helms. They were little ovens you put on your head that sealed off the only real vent of the big oven of the rest of your armor. Still worse they severely restricted visibility. It also made it more difficult to hear and much more difficult to accurately hear what direction things came from. As generally the easiest part of one's armor to take off they would often not be worn when not actually in or anticipating battle or would at least be swapped out for various levels of less enclosed helmet (it was possibly the decision of Richard I &quot;the Lionheart&quot; to do this while overseeing a small, unimportant siege against a sparsely defended castle that encouraged an archer in that castle to take the pot shot that killed him, though the arrow actually got him in the shoulder).Which is to say that I think a helmet is more like a shield than the rest of one's armor in that it is generally relatively quick to doff and don and has advantages and disadvantages to having equipped at a given moment, and the calculus for how protective/constraining one is willing to go with the helmet is different from the decision the same person may make for the rest of their armor. I can imagine both the adventurer who goes for fairly extensive armor but goes minimalist on the helmet or even skips it because they want maximum sensory awareness (and as bad as it is to have most of the attacks coming at your exposed head that also makes it easy to anticipate which way the strikes are coming) and the adventurer who skips on most armor for the sake of mobility, comfort, stealth, etc but wants their damn head as protected as can possibly be.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Benjamin Olson, post: 8129104, member: 6988941"] Evidently medieval knights complained frequently about how obnoxious it was fighting in full helms. They were little ovens you put on your head that sealed off the only real vent of the big oven of the rest of your armor. Still worse they severely restricted visibility. It also made it more difficult to hear and much more difficult to accurately hear what direction things came from. As generally the easiest part of one's armor to take off they would often not be worn when not actually in or anticipating battle or would at least be swapped out for various levels of less enclosed helmet (it was possibly the decision of Richard I "the Lionheart" to do this while overseeing a small, unimportant siege against a sparsely defended castle that encouraged an archer in that castle to take the pot shot that killed him, though the arrow actually got him in the shoulder). Which is to say that I think a helmet is more like a shield than the rest of one's armor in that it is generally relatively quick to doff and don and has advantages and disadvantages to having equipped at a given moment, and the calculus for how protective/constraining one is willing to go with the helmet is different from the decision the same person may make for the rest of their armor. I can imagine both the adventurer who goes for fairly extensive armor but goes minimalist on the helmet or even skips it because they want maximum sensory awareness (and as bad as it is to have most of the attacks coming at your exposed head that also makes it easy to anticipate which way the strikes are coming) and the adventurer who skips on most armor for the sake of mobility, comfort, stealth, etc but wants their damn head as protected as can possibly be. [/QUOTE]

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