Re: Armor proposal 1

[Wright Frazier <khelek>]

> 
> I think that your stats are based on an assumption that I would not have 
> made.  I do not recall the book stating that the armor is designed for 
> water combat.  Now, perhaps that is being inferred but contary to that 
> point is that the the Marines are the ones that do the primary fighting 
> at sea.  If armor is so unrestrictive, then why don't we see mariners 
> riding the backs of dolphins wearing steel plate?

I asked one of the original conceptualizers of AQ armor's appearence,
and he described it too me in detail.

Why do we not see marines in steel plate on doliphins.
	a) rust.
	b) because noone has bothered to effectively writeup watermovement
		in armor till recently.
	c) Because it will slow your swimming down from the max rate.
	d) Because steel plate costs 40,000sp.
	e) Because you didn't look very hard and so few well done marine
		combat scenarios are run.

Just for note, the marine that I played up until recently always wore
	a leather breastplate, even when on board ship.

> 
> The same to the water movements.  Was it said that the armor in the game 
> is exactly the same as the armor of our medevil times?  That's the best 
> base line that I had to go from and so I comapred it to that too.  Maybe 
> the plate mail is big old chucks of plate strapped around someones body?  
> I don't know - I didn't design the world.  I think that changing the 
> armor rating or movement rates for them would drastically shift the 
> balance of the game.

We've already covered this.  Medeval armor is completely unrealistic
to be the by and by armor on Jaern.  For over a thousand years people
have lived and fought on Jaern.  That is 10 times the needed time to
invent and optimize armor for Jaern.

Even better, people came from Torandor _WITH_ armor already invented,
that means only optimization had to be done.  There is so little
land on the planet that armor would be optimized for movement at sea,
the truely primary place that war is conducted.  The only exception is
Geleia, and there are different armors employed there.

In the real world 15th century marines usually wore a breast plate when
they fought.  Why?  It was fairly light and uncumbersome and provided
a fair degree of protection.  Further it wouldn't be impossible to
swim in if you got tossed over board.  This was also the period when
armor making was at its absolute peak.  The most incredibly intricuit
suits of armor where invented that allowed for COMPLETE ease of movement
with only _MINOR_, and I mean truely minor hindrances.  Things like
tumbling and extended sword play and ease of movement were givens with
this armor.  Something it did not see though was use on ships.  Why?
It sunk like a rock cause it weighed 100 perfectly distributed pounds.

Further, chain mail was used predominantly up until about the 1300's or
so.  Then someone added plates to it.  Things like greaves, vambraces,
and shoulder plates, then breast plates, and then they just flat
out dropped the mail and went with all plates.  Care to guess how
long that took?  Historical opinion varies, but its about 50 to 100 years.


So what does that tell us?  Our ancestors in europe knew the following:
a) How to, given the current materials, make the ultimate in personal
	protection(full sloped plate armor) that could withstand such
	damage that it made the sword obsolete on the battle field and
	heavy flanged maces became the dominant battle field weapons.
b) It wasn't used on ships.
c) It took a century to go from nifty add on to practical and complete
	use.

So now we have jaern.  The water planet from hell.  Folks came to
the planet already knowing how to make full plate armor, chain mail, etc...
They had the concepts down pat, no problems at all there.  The problem
was that it wasn't practical for the new terrain they found and made
war on.  Full body protection is spiffy and nifty when you got plenty
of solid stable ground to kill the next guy on.  But when its on
a ship and thats the primary location of warfare, heavy armor is impractical.

(real world note: even Romans lightened a soldiers armor load for
ship combat against the carthaginians)

So witht he battle field now on unstable platforms, and you want
personal protection, you go with what works best.  And that is light
mobile armor that you can either swim in or at least get out of
if you get tossed over the side.

As far as drastically shifting the balance of the game by making
armor more mobile?  Nope, just gives you a reason to have a CM
to kill people as opposed to killing just monsters, and makes it
so you don't hit on a 5+ on the d20 against joe average person with
a CM of 5.

Wright