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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4694181" data-attributes="member: 82106">I gotta through my 2 cents in for ArmoredSaint. Having handled one or two pieces of period armor and weapons. Sounds like he knows a good bit more about it than I do, but the late medieval armor I saw was on the order of a couple millimeters thick and these suites are all known to weigh around 50-70 lbs. Typically a suite of plate armour would be worn over an arming doublet, which was a padded/quilted cloth material designed to keep the armor from cutting into you and provide cushioning if you got hit. It wouldn't be much different in weight from a quilted jacket and heavy pants.As for chainmail under the armor. Not really. There would be a coif and a few areas like under arms and such would be covered, there wouldn't be a full suite of chainmail under it.It is QUITE true however that armor evolved tremendously. Before the 11th century there certainly was no such thing as plate armor. At best the most elite warriors in the most advanced nations had full suites of chainmail with chest plates etc of solid metal, and that would only have been say Byzantine cataphracts, nobody in Western Europe had that kind of thing at all at that time. Most knights of that period would have been lucky to have chainmail at all and most wore some kind of brigandine.Armor in Europe gradually and steadily improved from there. But it wasn't until the later part of the 15th century that you had something like ArmoredSaint's sort of full plate. Even then only the very wealthiest nobles could afford it. The fancy early rennaisance Italian and German armors you normally see were also pretty much show pieces or used only in tournaments. In battle and for the less well off there were more practical and usually less entirely complete field armor. A typical knight in 1400 would have most likely still been wearing reinforced chain mail. Another source of confusion that people have is looking at post-medieval 16th and 17th century armor. This stuff was made to stop bullets and was much heavier than the earlier sorts. To make up for that they did away with heavy protection for the limbs etc, which was less needed anyway if you were fighting at range. So it is deceiving to extrapolate full plate armor from the breastplate that a conquistador would be wearing.D&D's notions of weapon and armor terminologies and some of their ancillary info are pretty questionable from a historical point of view, but they did get some facts straight! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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