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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imperialus" data-source="post: 5620883" data-attributes="member: 893">Ultimately D&D's armour system is borked and has been since 1974...  Mainly because they tried to combine (conservatively) 700 years of armour evolution (from 8th and 9th century mail) right through to 16th century articulated plate.  It's a little tougher to nail down the evolution of lighter armours like leather jacks and the like since no artifacts have survived and artists weren't real keen on depicting common soldiers in artwork or statues, but you can trace the evolution of the heavy armours and based on that alone D&D makes zero sense.Realistically you'd see a small subset of each of those armours in use at any point in time.  In a lower tech campaign say 9th-10th century you'd see leather, ringmail and mail coats as the predominant armour types since combat was mostly fought on foot and armour was needed to protect from blows either aimed directly at the torso or towards the head and shoulders.After that in the 11th century you see the evolution of the halburk to protect a horsemans legs, and later still by the 1st and second crusades, mail leggings to further protect him.A century or so later you'd start seeing things like coats of plate worn in conjunction with mail and start to see things like gambsoons (padded armour) and brigadine replacing the lighter armour.The next couple centuries were spent gradually replacing mail with plates through varying stages of transitional armourBy the late middle ages you'll start seeing full suits of articulated plate though gambsoons remained popular.  By this point in time too armourers had figured out how to 'mass produce' munitions quality breastplates and the like for liverymen and other professional but non noble soldiers.  The key thing though is that by the time superior armour types began to be available the older armour types just weren't used any more.  Even a "poor" knight during the 15th century would not wear a mail halburk.  It was no longer effective against the weapons of the time.  Coats of plate were invented in around the 12th century to protect the wearer from the impact of lance strikes since by then the mounted charge had become the primary tactic and a mail halburk was not going to stand up to a lance strike at all.  Mail would not be 'cheaper' than whatever the modern equivalent is.  There would naturally be some overlap, armour was bloody expensive and every knight on the battlefield would not necessarily be on the cutting edge of technology but there is no way that you would see the range of armour types that D&D assumes.</blockquote>

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