armor rule question

[Ben Lehman]

BTW, I'm not sure where Jake is coming from with his expertise.

BL>  Have you read the website?

http://www.theriddleofsteel.net/about/

ARMA is, of course, controversial, but still...

yrs--
--Ben

[DanW]

Hi Ben,

No I haven't read the website. My only experience is reading the quickstart some time last week. And playing thru a couple of combat encounters with some one who has the full book.

Sorry if I came across badly about Jake.

But to me he's some guy on the net that says, "yes, this is how it really is". Okay, I take that and add it to the pot. I don't take it as ending the discussion.

Who knows. Maybe when I find out more about Jake & his organization then I'll take everthing he says with a great deal of consideration.

Anywho, I'll bow out now with the assumption that TROS has the tactical options I'm looking for.

Dan

[Salamander]

DanW,

Hello and welcome to the TRoS Forums! I can understand your reservations in regards to the authority of Jake. You have not met him and you do not know him. I am also a member of a Western Martial Arts organization, and a darn fine one, I might add. My credentials are not nearly as involved as Jake's, but there is one thing I can vouch for. And that is his honesty in his efforts to learn how they really did fight 500 years ago. He will not come out and say "X" if "X" is not true. So far what he and others more learned than I, have had to say about the whole armour thing have been pretty spot on from what I have seen and learned from my instructors.

We all have this preconcieved notion of what a battle or brawl or even a duel was like. We may not have all the specifics, but I am willing to bet that Jake is closer to knowing and appreciating than most of the others who are discussing this here. This is because he trains and uses swords in his training, referring to the books of the Meisters/Maestros of the time. These books were written to help students learn how to best kill. They are intense and no nonsense in the context of the readers and authors. These books, while seeming round-about to us, give me the impression they pretty much got to the point with the intended audience.

This is where Jake draws his experience and his authority, from his training, paucity of preconception and the works of these guys who would consider our very best to be about average in their time.

[Jake Norwood]

Hey Dan-

No problem with questioning my credentials. It's a healthy thing. I'm a certified Longsword instructer and "Senior Free Scholar" with the Association for Rennaissance martial arts. I am the senior student of John Clements, who won the US national Kung-fu weapons sparring competition in 1994 with a german longsword and european techniques. I've published materials on training and I run a group of some of the most advanced students of the sword in the western US. I am intimately familiar with the source materials from which we know what we know about medieval and rennaissance personal combat. I have no degrees in the area (unless linguistics counts), but I'm a respected member of the worldwide community as both a researcher and--IMO more importantly--as a fighter. I also try to refrain from making comments without having citations on hand as to where I get my information. It is time consuming to produce them, however, so ask for anything, just not everything.

ANyway, welcome to the boards. You've caught me at an annoying transitional time in things and so I'm a bit short right now. I'm a nice guy, really! Ask, um, Brian or someone. ;-)

Now Jake, before you get offended- Realise that I'm only saying for every authoritative claim you make, I could probably find an expert that says the opposite.

No offence. On some things, sure, but not on this. Not an "expert," at least. Armor's use and the way it was worn was very well documented. I will refer you, as everyone, to Dr. Sydney Anglo's landmark work "The Martial Arts of Rennaissance Europe." That will answer soooo many of your questions and concerns with more historical citations than I could list in a week.

Jake

[Brian Leybourne]

I'm a nice guy, really! Ask, um, Brian or someone. ;-)

Jake just just emailed me and said that if I don't say he's a nice guy he'll eviscerate me with a rusty doppelhander.

So, uh, yeah, he's real sweet. :-)

Brian.

[contracycle]

Stasngely enough, I nearly created a topic on this very matter myself.  I've decided to ditch the CP penalties for armour; I think they are too rigorous.

And I agree that this is something of a problem.  While I accept that competent combatants will always attenpt a deliberate blow, opportunity does not always allow this, and not everybody is a competent combatant.  Secondly, accidents happen.

I agree there are big differences between the duellist approach and the mass combat, and that armour is much more important in the latter than the former.  But I also feel TROS is slightly over-balanced in favour of the duellist approach, penalising armour wearing too much.Between the armour penalty and the a manouvre cost you wipe your combat pool out in short order.

I also think the objections to partial armour are overstated.  Yes of course many combatants wore only helmets: the poor ones.  Usually not pot helms but dish ones, or skull caps, and for much the same reasons as modern soldiers do - the frequency with which head hits are lethal or incapacitating.  But for this reason, I don't think I could legitmiately apply a penalty to someone wearing just a helmet; the category is too broad to assume every helm is an iron pot helm.

[Jake Norwood]

And I'll state, AGAIN, that I agree that the CP penalties are generally too great. Just for the record.

Jake

[Caz]

Here are my house rules on armour and shields (of which I have a lot of experience with) if anyone's interested

(no mod if not mentioned)

                       CP mod            Other mods
gauntlets             -0 to -1
Breastplate/cuirass  -0 to -1
helm/helmet          -0 to -1         -0 to -2 per
sabotons                -0 to -2          -0 to -2 move
large shields                -1                -1 move

Notes-  The specific design of armour has everything to do with the mods.
   example-sabotons for mounted combat with 8" long toe spike will give the neg. mods when fighting on foot, etc.

* some penalties can be up to double if the armour is munition, or if it's specialized joost armour used on foot, etc.
* additional cp or move penalties can be applied if the character isn't "used" to the piece.

Armour doesn't slow you down, it just tires you faster, which the fatigue rules cover perfectly.

[Caz]

BTW, those mods assume fitted "field" armour

[Morfedel]

So, Jake, if you think they are too rigorous, how WOULD you do them?

[Farmer]

Hello All,

I am new to the Forum ( I have been lurking for sometime) and this is my first post.

Anyway, I think one of the problems with CP penalties for armor is not that they are unrealistic but that there is no adjustment factor. i.e. there should be some rule as to the skill of the person wearing the armor.

A knight IRL would have trained for years wearing armor and learn to deal with the its disadvantages thereby lessening them. OTOH Joe yeoman puts on armor for the first time and tries to fight in it is going have to get used to the weight even if he is skilled at wielding his weapon.

Basically use of armor should be a skill that benefits the skilled and punishes the unskilled.

Hope I did not over look a rule that already exists!

[Mike Holmes]

Farmer, welcome aboard.

The idea that armor is limiting in combat is an artifact of second generation games that sought to find some "realistic" way in which to limit the use of armor. The first example I can think of was TFT (based off the Melee rules) which said that you lost DEX for wearing armor. The idea here is to make armor a tactical option, not a certain advantage.

The problem with this is that D&D had it right in that, wearing armor is an advantage. Yes, you aren't perfectly able to do all the things that you could without armor on, but it was designed so that you could fight in it, if not exactly as well, close enough to exactly as well. The point being that, given a choice in battle between going in armored, or unarmored, the soldier chooses to be armored. There is no downside.

So there's nothing to "train" for to negate in these terms. This is from Rolemaster, which followed that second generation ideal. Where armor is a real problem, say in swimming, there's nothing that you can do to prevent this in terms of training. Raw strength and endurance will help, and you can train for that, but the only thing that I could even concieve of for water training for armor would be how to get out of it fast.

Mike

[Valamir]

The problem here is that there is no real world situation (that I know of) where we can look to support or disprove the idea of armor training.

In the real world people who wore armor, wore armor pretty much their entire life.  It was just something they did.  

People who didn't wear armor simply never wore armor.  The reasons for this being largely social and financial.

I can't think of any historical situation that has come down to us where people who never wore armor before suddenly started to wear armor and fought side by side (or against) people who'd always worn armor.  So there is nothing to indicate whether those new armor wearers were at a disadvantage (lack of training) or not (no/little need for armor training)

About the closest thing we'd have to compare to today would be new soldiers going through basic training and becoming accustomed to hoofing around 80+ pounds of gear.  Like armor, the modern soldiers pack and webbing does a pretty good job of distributing weight and approximately in the same areas of the body so its not an unreasonable proxy.

Seems to me that 1) yes there is a learning curve to adapting to moving around with a pack effectively, 2) its a shallow enough learning curve that new soldiers pick it up pretty easily.

Therefor I'd conclude that an "armor training" skill probably does exist but that its so "cheap" and "quick" to learn (in RPG character improvement terms) that doesn't really need to be portrayed as a character skill.  

The GM may impose an additional penelty for someone putting on heavy armor who never before in his life has had a suit of armor on...but after a week or so on the campaign trail, that new soldier is going to have mastered everything there is to master about it (that can be covered at typical level of RPG granularity).

[Jake Norwood]

I don't know, Mike.

Knights used to run obstacle courses in full plate to accostom themselves better to it, and so I think it's an issue of "getting used to it." The more I think about it and read about it and consult with people who spend a lot of time in the real stuff (not standard SCA grade, which I ran around in in High school), the more I think along these lines:

Never wore it before? Use existing penalties.
Been wearing it for years?

Full Helms cause -1 CP, pot helms don't.
Torso armor causes -0 CP
Plate Arms and legs caues -1 CP for each pair (thus arms and legs would be -2 CP)
Chain full suits would cause a total -1 CP. Just pants or arms with a shirt would be - 0

That means that a fully armored knight in chain is at -2 CP total and in plate -3 total, assuming both are wearing a full helmet and everything is perfectly fitted and padded with great care.

I would then be more adamant about fatigue rolls in either chain or plate, and I'd assign those CP mods to "reflex" for any contest that involves reflex, such as red-red. Any armor on the legs would drop movement, as would a full helm (try running at full speed with one eye open or something, you'll get the idea). Perception would obviously be hindered by a helm, and hearing would be hindered by just wearing plate at all.

That's how I'd do it, and that's probably what I'll put in TFOB.

Jake

[Mike Holmes]

Knights used to run obstacle courses in full plate to accostom themselves better to it, and so I think it's an issue of "getting used to it."

Again, I think this is mostly endurance training. The obstacle courses are for general agility. You wear the armor through them because it's a truism that it's best to "train as you fight". But for all that, I think that armor is still not going to hamper you much, even untrained.

BTW, I totally agree about ill-fitting armor. In fact, if the penalties listed were for a suit that was issued "off the rack" as happens at time in armies, or you couldn't afford to get the suit tailor-made (like you got it off a corpse), then definitely you should have penalties.

OTOH, the penalties that Jake lists for familiar I could definitely live with. I'm not sure about the full chain suit, tho. I assume this is because of the weight, but, again, when your life is on the line, you'll push through that weight. Sounds like END to me. I could see a smaller penalty, maybe. But then we're talking fractions. Eh, works either way. I can go with slight cinematic/tactical armor rules. Why not?

Mike