Level Up (A5E) Studded Leather Armor

[Haiku Elvis]

I don't know why little technical things like studded leather armour or why a sabre/scimitar only does D6 damage compared to a longsword's D8 (in standard 5e) annoy me It's still a fully fleged sword! (actually this annoys me a lot more than the armour thing).
If a guy is fighting the reanimated form of a undead wizard or a psychic brain eating bipedal cuttlefish the construction method of his jacket shouldn't be the thing that I pick up on for historical inaccuracy.

But it is!

 

[jeffh]

To be clear, leather armor existed, it just isn't attested by sources or archaeological finds to have been very prominent. But there have been a few finds, and leather can be fashioned into something that gives some light protection. Actual prominence in use is debatable, but there is nothing implausible about leather for a fantasy armor.

Studded leather, however, does not seem to have ever been a thing, and, as imagined, does not seem to be capable of providing any additional meaningful protection over leather without some studs in it. Studs are usually portrayed as too widely spaced to do anything meaningful, and were they tightly spaced they would provide less protection for more work and resources than attaching larger pieces of metal. Some people believe that, as portrayed, studded leather seems to be based on misinterpreting leather brigantines with the leather on the outside and plates riveted to it on the inside as just leather with studs on it, which would seem to suggest leather brigantine as the logical substitution.

But leather brigantine is AC 13 + Dex medium armor in this system, whereas padded leather is AC 12 + Dex light armor, which would seem to occupy the space of studded leather, with leather's old place given over to padded cloth, which, unlike in 5e, actually gets to have a distinct identity (comparable to that it had in the middle ages) as the basic, workhorse every day light armor, rather than just being offbrand leather armor.

I don't think a leather brigantine would be wearable... nor would it float very well, at least not for long. Wood seems all around much more viable for shipbuilding.

(You no doubt mean "brigandine".)

As for leather armour, it's in a weird place in D&D and other RPGs. It's sometimes said to be modelled on cuir bouilli, but it doesn't seem like it offers enough protection for that to be the case (insofar as you can gather from how it plays in D&D, which is not exactly winning any awards for its realistic simulation of any kind of armour). I think cuir bouilli is reasonably well-attested but not so much anything with the properties D&D and other games attribute to "leather armour". Still, as you say, it's not an unreasonable choice for a fantasy game.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Here's some historical leather armor. It's even more like what most players want their leather armor to be like (a leather jacket) than what the D&D rulebooks describe (dungeon punk modified cuir boulli).

It's my justification for treating thick leather jackets as leather armor.