D&D 5E Why do guns do so much damage?

[Doug McCrae]

And standing armies should increase not reduce the prevalence of armour if armour is being mass produced - if anything the reverse. The key cost for a standing army is in the upkeep while the cost for plate armour is a one-shot cost per person in your force with comparatively minimal upkeep. If you're willing to pay for your army in peacetime it's much more cost effective to pay for fewer troops but to armour them than the greater numbers with higher upkeep and less combat power.

Alan Williams offers an explanation for this in The Knight and the Blast Furnace (2003) -- As armies increased in size in the early modern period, less fit and able troops had to be employed, and they didn't have the stamina to wear the cheap-but-heavy armour necessary to provide protection from firearms.

Firearms offer a greater order of magnitude of energy, and very soon offer a real possibility of defeating armour. There are two courses then open to the armourer: make the armour of better metal, or thicker.

The difficulties of heat-treating steel meant that this first solution, although desirable, was expensive.

While a few individual centres of metallurgical excellence continued to make princely armour of great elegance as well as metallurgical ingenuity, the great bulk of production had to be made down to a price, and be effective simply through its thickness.

The second solution, although crude, was effective. As armies got larger and firepower increased, the demand for armour (even for the infantry) increased; the likelihood of princes paying for large quantities of armour—unless the cheapest solution had been adopted— was very small.

Increasing the thickness from 2 to 3.1mm will double the resistance, and have a similar effect to the use of hardened steel, at a fraction of the cost.

The problem then was the stamina of the wearers, and indeed as handgunners replaced archers, less skilful troops were needed and wages fell. But if recruits were drawn from the poorer and less well-nourished strata of society then they were even less capable of marching and fighting in bulletproof armour.

So the situation arose of leaders with wearable protective armour, while their armies of thousands could no longer wear what might protect them, and armour dropped out of use, despite the well thought-out arguments of military commentators like Maurice de Saxe. The craftsmen turned to other industries like gunmaking or clockmaking, and the centres of armour production became the centres of the Industrial Revolution.​

 

[Steampunkette]

The problem you're not taking into account is that it's not just demand that increased - it's that as gunpowder tech improved the amount of thickness required to protect the wearer increased and the practicality of e.g. marching wearing it. And with it the difference between the effectiveness of heavily armoured, lightly armoured, and unarmoured troops decreased. To pick a famous example the armour below was worn at the battle of Waterloo. It clearly didn't do enough.
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You joke about "Check in the back I think we've got another box of XL Breastplates" - but suits of armour were literally ordered from the manufactories of Milan in the thousands between the 1300s and 1500s. That's a thousand suits of armour (or several thousand) in a single order. These soldiers didn't all go to Milan to be custom-fitted. Instead you might order enough armour from the factory to outfit an entire batallion or even regiment. And if you look at the Italian White Armour below from 1450 it will fit a range of people and is not form-fitting. There are straps to adjust, the shoulder pieces can fit a range of body types and the rondels and elbow guards are flamboyantly large, enabling them to cover a range of arm lengths. I don't know why the people in your question wouldn't know where the large breastplates were.
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But what changed a lot was the effectiveness of armour. In 1450 a man at arms in the white plate above would have been more than a match for multiple armed but unarmoured men to the point that their best approach might be to try to get past his pollaxe (or whatever weapon) and start wrestling him four on one to pin him down and hold him still long enough to slide a dagger between his gorget and breastplate and cut his throat. Everywhere on his body is protected by metal - but any slash he makes onto his opponents is going to make them bleed. Give him a few allies and wrestling becomes a lot harder because the unarmoured wrestlers are easy prey.

You talk about arquebusiers. The first thing to point out about arquebusiers is that every shot costs money and the earlier you go the more it costs per shot. That cost for the arquebusier you mention will get him a breastplate - and an unloaded gun. And an unloaded gun is frankly pretty pointless. Which is why by 1500 only about 10% of European soldiers carried muskets despite the trail blazed by Hungary's Black Army with one soldier in four carrying guns.

It's not that the men weren't worth the armour. It's that the armour was worth a lot less. And the things that could break the armour (like gunpowder weapons) became a lot cheaper and better at it so armour became less effective. Spending $1350 per dude upfront would have made sense for Napoleon if it had made that dude worth two dudes on the other side. It wouldn't for 1.05 dudes on the other side.

You're not -entirely- wrong. But that Curassier was ALSO wielding guns. Two Wheellock Pistols and a saber. And I guess his $1,350 didn't include bullets, either.

Also they were both Cavalry Units. Essentially "Heavy" and "Light" cavalry that were contemporaries.

Though I am a little curious about the "Armor" that you keep referencing. I can't find access to the Pfaffenbichler, Matthias, Medieval Craftsmen, Armourers, 1992, Toronto book on short notice, but I did look at a review of some of the contents. Including a specific mention of the kind of armor sales you're referencing which took place in 1321 under the auspices of Frederick the Lombard.

He managed to pull off 6,000 shields, 3,000 helmets, and 4,000 maille shirts to entirely equip a fleet! That's a lot. Very impressive! But.

It's not a full suit of plate armor like the one you show above. Which includes the Maille Shirt that Lombard sold, as well as the helmets. See, with a maille shirt one size kinda -does- fit all, you just make it in the big size and everyone else rolls up their overly long sleeves and ties them down with belts at the wrist to keep the chainmail from rolling down over their hands. Or you can just rivet them into place. Or use a piece of rope looped through the rings. Or any number of other options.

Now that's not to say that sheet-plate wasn't a thing. It -absolutely- was. But it was lower-quality by -far-. And as the quantity and quality of metal required to stop a musketball went up compared to the quantity and quality required to stop an arrow things declined quickly. Not the quantity so much, but the quality.

As production rates went up, the amount of time required to make a given amount of iron into steel didn't really change. So the armorers started "Fining" armor. That is making a naughty word iron breastplate very quickly through a Blast Furnace, then attempting to refine it into steel. That mostly resulted in low-quality steel or moderate quality wrought iron. Both of which require even more thickness to stop a bullet because they lack the hardness of a mid or high quality steel. Which was more expensive.

And so yo-oh... Hey... I got McCrae'd.

The mass produced plate-armors of the early 1500s were naughty word, naughty word, heavy metal to get the same protection as a high quality lighter armor, which was too expensive, especially for big armies. So they gave up on it.

 

[Steampunkette]

I think it might be most accurate to say:

Armor fell into disuse with the rise of firearms due to a series of factors including, but perhaps not limited to, the quality and/or thickness of the armor required, the fitness level of the soldiers who would be wearing it, the cost to get good quality armor which functions against firearms, and the quantities of quality armored required to equip larger and larger scale armies over time.

 

[Neonchameleon]

You're not -entirely- wrong. But that Curassier was ALSO wielding guns. Two Wheellock Pistols and a saber. And I guess his $1,350 didn't include bullets, either.

Also they were both Cavalry Units. Essentially "Heavy" and "Light" cavalry that were contemporaries.

But they had very different jobs. And probably social classes.

Including a specific mention of the kind of armor sales you're referencing which took place in 1321 under the auspices of Frederick the Lombard.

He managed to pull off 6,000 shields, 3,000 helmets, and 4,000 maille shirts to entirely equip a fleet! That's a lot. Very impressive! But.

It's not a full suit of plate armor like the one you show above.

Indeed. It's 1321. The full suit of plate armour I show was 1450 and was just about from the high point of Milanese armour making. And chain armour both came into style and fell out of style because of economics. Chain armour is extremely labour intensive to make because you need to hand rivet the links. It's cheap for individuals to make because the hand riveting is not time consuming and if you've nothing better to do in those long winter nights the labour costs for someone to make their own from essentially iron wrapped round a bar and cut, and some wire for the rivets, is trivial if you're doing it for yourself rather than as part of a large order.

However things changed. The Black Death (1346-1353) ballooned labour costs and technological innovation came in making plate armour much easier to make. To use a web source that's screwed up its https:

Other factors that need to be considered include technological innovations in mass production, namely the water-powered trip hammer and the blast furnace. These technologies enabled iron plate to be manufactured in much larger quantities and much more cheaply than previously. In addition, labour costs dramatically increased after the Black Death (14th century), and the technologies previously mentioned meant that mail actually cost more to produce than all but the finest of plate armour. Williams compares the cost of 12 oxen for a 9th century helmet, mail and leggings with the cost of only 2 oxen for horseman's plate armour at the end of the 16th century.111 At Iserlohn in the 15th century, a mail haubergeon cost 4.6 gulden while plate armour only cost 4.3 gulden.112 Kassa's archives (Hungary 1633) record a mail shirt costing six times that of a "double breastplate." These records also indicate the huge difference in labour involved. The mail required 2 months to be completed while the breastplate, only 2 days.​

With circa fifteenth century plate armour we really are talking things produced using industrial techniques and in industrial quantities. And yes it did get worse quality later.

And sheet plate was more than good enough to stop muscle powered weapons - and even handheld gunpowder weapons of 1350. But they got better.

 

[Steampunkette]

But they had very different jobs. And probably social classes.

Indeed. It's 1321. The full suit of plate armour I show was 1450 and was just about from the high point of Milanese armour making. And chain armour both came into style and fell out of style because of economics. Chain armour is extremely labour intensive to make because you need to hand rivet the links. It's cheap for individuals to make because the hand riveting is not time consuming and if you've nothing better to do in those long winter nights the labour costs for someone to make their own from essentially iron wrapped round a bar and cut, and some wire for the rivets, is trivial if you're doing it for yourself rather than as part of a large order.

However things changed. The Black Death (1346-1353) ballooned labour costs and technological innovation came in making plate armour much easier to make. To use a web source that's screwed up its https:

Other factors that need to be considered include technological innovations in mass production, namely the water-powered trip hammer and the blast furnace. These technologies enabled iron plate to be manufactured in much larger quantities and much more cheaply than previously. In addition, labour costs dramatically increased after the Black Death (14th century), and the technologies previously mentioned meant that mail actually cost more to produce than all but the finest of plate armour. Williams compares the cost of 12 oxen for a 9th century helmet, mail and leggings with the cost of only 2 oxen for horseman's plate armour at the end of the 16th century.111 At Iserlohn in the 15th century, a mail haubergeon cost 4.6 gulden while plate armour only cost 4.3 gulden.112 Kassa's archives (Hungary 1633) record a mail shirt costing six times that of a "double breastplate." These records also indicate the huge difference in labour involved. The mail required 2 months to be completed while the breastplate, only 2 days.​

With circa fifteenth century plate armour we really are talking things produced using industrial techniques and in industrial quantities. And yes it did get worse quality later.

And sheet plate was more than good enough to stop muscle powered weapons - and even handheld gunpowder weapons of 1350. But they got better.

But by the end of the 16th century, that Horseman's Plate Armor was -naughty word-. It was the blast-furnaced wrought iron fined into low-grade steel. Yes it was less expensive, yes it was faster, it was also much lower in quality.

So while the sheet-plate was less expensive you had to get it thicker to make it work, which the larger armies of conscripted soldiers couldn't wear for any length of time, and actual good armor that -would- be able to be worn by the conscripted was too expensive, particularly when you consider the quantity of soldiers that were conscripted.

It's funny how mass-produced lower quality products helped to doom the industry. That feels relevant for some reason...

 

[Oofta]

There's a whole series of events and factors that largely ended the use of armor for a few centuries until the invention of modern body armor. There were advances in chemistry that dramatically reduced the cost of saltpeter that made gunpowder more affordable. Advances in gun manufacturing technology which made them more reliable. There were changes to the way wars were waged, and the cheap armor soldiers were given.

Even towards the end of the "armor" era, high quality armor did stop most bullets (not much you can do versus a cannonball) but most armor was not high quality. That high quality armor was incredibly expensive, only a few could afford it.

All of which is to say is that if you change some of these factors, armor which had already coexisted with guns for centuries may have lasted even longer. In a world with magic, maybe someone starts cranking out golems that can hammer out higher quality steel effectively. Maybe someone figures out how to make an alloy of iron and a small amount of adamantine that makes a cheap steel or that better at absorbing the energy of a bullet. Maybe the chemistry to bring down the cost of gunpowder is never discovered. Maybe high quality plate is still around because it's still the best thing around when fighting dragons and melee weapons are still in use because there are a whole slew of monsters out there that don't give a fig about cavitation damage.

We can only take history in the real world as it applies to a fantasy world so far.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

There's a whole series of events and factors that largely ended the use of armor for a few centuries until the invention of modern body armor. There were advances in chemistry that dramatically reduced the cost of saltpeter that made gunpowder more affordable. Advances in gun manufacturing technology which made them more reliable. There were changes to the way wars were waged, and the cheap armor soldiers were given.

Even towards the end of the "armor" era, high quality armor did stop most bullets (not much you can do versus a cannonball) but most armor was not high quality. That high quality armor was incredibly expensive, only a few could afford it.

All of which is to say is that if you change some of these factors, armor which had already coexisted with guns for centuries may have lasted even longer. In a world with magic, maybe someone starts cranking out golems that can hammer out higher quality steel effectively. Maybe someone figures out how to make an alloy of iron and a small amount of adamantine that makes a cheap steel or that better at absorbing the energy of a bullet. Maybe the chemistry to bring down the cost of gunpowder is never discovered. Maybe high quality plate is still around because it's still the best thing around when fighting dragons and melee weapons are still in use because there are a whole slew of monsters out there that don't give a fig about cavitation damage.

We can only take history in the real world as it applies to a fantasy world so far.

It doesn’t even take much to get better armor than IRL more consistently. A lot of RL materials create stronger steel when mixed into iron before smelting, it just wasn’t until the modern era that metallurgy was precise enough, and detailed enough, to reliably make stuff like Damascus steel (not Damascus welding, but the actual steel).

No reason that metallurgical knowledge couldn’t be more advanced in D&D, not to mention Transmutation magic and the like.

Though in my own TTRPG, swords and such are useful for a few reasons:

They’re less restricted than guns. A sword in your cars trunk raises few questions. People collect medieval weapons.

They are easier to channel magic through, because you are holding them. All magic in my world is harder at a distance than close up touching the thing. Missile weapons like bows are in between, because you’re touching the missile upon release, but not upon impact. Armor is also much easier to channel magic through than projectiles.

There are multiple magic schools that have ways to deflect ranged attacks, and others with ways to speed up a persons movements, allowing a melee fighter to get in close more easily and safely, from a greater distance, than is the case IRL.

Some of that can translate to D&D, but not all of it.

 

[Umbran]

But by the end of the 16th century, that Horseman's Plate Armor was -****-.

Mod Note:
So, this is like the third post of yours in the last few days that we've needed to edit for language. Could you keep it family-friendly, please? Thanks much.

 

[Steampunkette]

Absolutely, @Umbran and I apologize.

 

[jayoungr]

Have only skimmed the thread, but I'll just toss my suggestion from the "modern settings" discussion here:

"Spitballing, but would exploding dice make guns sufficiently more dangerous than other weapons, yet still not instakills every time? (Exploding dice: if you roll the maximum on a damage die, you roll again and add that amount to the damage. If the second roll is also maximum, you keep doing it until you get a non-maximum roll.)"