Armor in Role Playing Games #2 - Armor

If you read the first installment in this series, you know that we discussed how shields worked in actual fighting and warfare, at least as far as we can tell from our current perspective as people who do not rely on them to do those things. If you missed the first part, go ahead and read it. You can catch up with the rest of us later.

In brief, what I was trying to get across is that the use and efficacy of shields is twofold - being both Active and Passive defense. Active, in that they require the wielder to parry with them, just as he or she would need to parry with a sword or other weapon. Of course, blocking with shields has some natural advantages because a shield is designed for that very thing. Passive defense is the real estate the shield occupies between the shieldbearer and the thing trying to do him harm, regardless of the bearers attempts to block. The aspects of active and passive defense work together to make the shield one of the most common and successful defense methods in in the history of warfare.

But this post is supposed to be about armor. On first consideration, you might think that armor would be 100% passive defense. After all, you don't parry with your helm, or vambrace, right? Well, it is not that simple. Sometines you do just that - sort of. We'll come back to this point in the next installment, but I wanted to put it out there for your consideration right from the start.

Armor, Various Types and Development Over Time

This is a BIG subject and I cannot do it justice in a blog of a couple thousand words. Armor of various types has been worn for at least the last 3000 years or so, and over that time it has seen a number of forms. I am not here to run down every culture and piece ever conceived. Instead, I am going to concentrate, as I did in Part 1, on the functionality and use of armor. If you want me to do pieces on the armor, weapons and shields of various cultures, LMK, but each one would be worthy of multiple posts in its own right.

How Armor Works:

We can look at armor as essentially being of two types - Flexible or Rigid.

Flexible armor includes cloth, suppler leather, mail and to a more limited extent things like scale, or uncommon armor like a jazerund or brigantine. These move reasonably well with the wearer, do not impede his movement terribly and generally are on the lighter end of the armor spectrum in terms of weight [although in the cases of scale, mail, jazerund and brigantine, weight becomes much more significant].

Rigid armor includes things like hardened leather, lamellar, and metal plate - be it bronze, iron or steel, as well as some less common types like wood or horn. These generally do mot move as well with the wearer, and act as a greater or lesser impediment on his movement depending on design, expense and material.

Now, having divided armor into these two types, I am going to tell you that the division does not truly exist. In actuality, it is a continuum, with flexibility at one end and rigidity at the other. Some armor leans closer to one end of the continuum than the other, but all types have some qualities of both. After all, a coat of quilted wool or cotton [often called a gambeson or aketon] is still more rigid, and more restrictive to movement, than say, a t-shirt. It is also better at protecting you.  In the same way, scale, jazerund and brigantine have reduced flexibility and greater rigidity than mail or leather.

Which takes us to another continuum that is a consideration for every armor ever made, Stopping Power - the degree to which the armor impede or reduces impact, and therefore damage, visited upon the wearer. This is the main reason for wearing armor after all. And the two continua [Flexible < > Rigid and Low Stopping Power < > Hight Stopping Power] are linked. Generally, the more flexible the armor is, the lower its stopping power. So, the aketon is more flexible than an iron breastplate, but the breastplate will stop a lot more impact from reaching the body.

And there are more continua to consider. Low vs. High Expense, Light vs. Heavy. Ease-of-use vs. Specialized Training, Ready Availability vs. Rarity, are a few, and we can certainly find others like Heat Retention, or factors societal, technological, political, or martial, that affected things to a greater or lesser extent over time. The ideal armor yields High Stopping Power, Good Flexibility, Low Expense, Low Weight and Easy availability. Unfortunately, armor with all of these qualities never existed. The better it did the job, generally the more expertise it took to construct, which increased costs and reduced effective availability. Such that, the most evolved forms of armor – like the highest quality late medieval/ Renaissance plate armor, was extremely expensive and available only to the very rich.

But enough about generalities. Lets take a look at some specific armors.

Cloth/ Supple leather - this comprises things like the above gambeson/ aketon [a quilted coat, jacket or vest of wool, cotton, leather or some combination thereof]. It could also be a simple leather jacket of decent thickness [sorry folks, but a t-shirt doesn't count as armor]. This armor is fairly light, in terms of weight, not too restrictive, and on the cheaper end. It was often the first layer of heavier armors too. Mail, scale, or other heavier types often were worn over [or under] this type for increased protection and/or comfort.

Mail - Mail was an incredible innovation in armor. It probably was an invention of the ancient Celts living in contact with the Romans in the centuries just before the beginning of the Common Era [A.D.]. The Romans liked it so much that they rapidly adopted it. From there is spread to just about every people who came into contact with the legions, such that within a century, cultures all over the Mediterranean and beyond were using it. In fact, Roman commentators complained about that very thing regarding the peoples of Germania and Sarmatia, who did not at that time have the technological sophistication to fashion mail - so they took it from the bodies of the Romans they killed, or kept it after serving in Roman armies as auxilia. Mail may have been separately developed further afield [say India or China, possibly even Persia].

Mail offered much better protection than cloth or leather, and good flexibility, at the expense of increased weight, expense and rarity. It was especially effective at stopping arrows, javelins and other pointy weapons, which could deeply penetrate an unarmored body. This made it especially valuable in warfare, which often began with flights of arrows or javelins. Combined with a shield [remember Part 1 of this series] a mail-armored fighter was much more likely to reach the enemy without significant injury. 

This last is a very important thing to consider - Significant Injury. Armor was always a case of various degrees of 'Better than nothing'. No one in armor, even the late medieval knight in full Milanese plate, was immune to damage. Armor was worn to reduce the level and frequency of injury, but it could not protect against all damage all the time. Mail is a terrific example of 'Better Than Nothing'. In many cases it could turn a death wound like an arrow in the lung, liver or intestine, into a bruise or less. Given that penetrating wounds like spears and arrows were particularly deadly because they get so far inside the body, and among the more common and cheapest weapons produced, mail was incredibly useful. Mail does a particularly good job of keeping the weapon from entering the body, possibly even from causing a cut in the case of axe or sword. This lessens the likelihood of amputations in combat AND after, as well as reduces the possibility of death from infection in a world with much less sophistication in terms understanding and preventing it.

But mail does have limitations. Its unique ability to be flexible while providing a largely impermeable barrier to penetration, kept it around for millenia, but it still suffered from the weakness that all flexible armors possess - it is lets much of the impact of a blow transfer through it to the body beneath. So a sword or axe stroke may not sever an arm, or cleave into the torso. Instead it transfers much of its kinetic energy through the protective, impermeable layer of the mail, into the body beneath. Undoubtedly, in most cases this was an improvement. But a blunted blow could still hurt or kill. In many ways this turns a sword into a baseball bat or club. A hard shot to the skull with a baseball bat will still send you to the emergency room [or the chirugeon]. If you're lucky.

So, people being interested in not dying, and still wanting to cause said condition in others, strove for further improvements, or just alternatives. Scale was one alternative, which provided better impact resistance, but at the cost of lessening its ability to resist penetration. Splint [armor composed of lengths of metal, or sometimes wood, attached to a leather underlayer] did something similar. As the ability to manufacture and manipulate larger pieces of iron and steel developed, armors like scale and splint gave way to things like the brigandine [plates sandwiched between layers of leather and/or cloth] and the individual plates became larger until the brigandine evolved into the coat of plates worn by knights and men at arms in the high middle ages and beyond. This, in turn led to the creation of the breastplate and plate armor generally.

More accurately, we are talking about the recreation of the breastplate and plate armor, which had existed in the ancient world as well. Persians, Parthians, Romans, the armies of Alexander the Great, and before him those of the Greek city-states all had plate armor, generally not as all-encompassing as medieval plate, but occasionally nearly so. At first, this plate armor was of bronze. But since the elites of these societies could afford the best in armor and the materials to make it, iron and steel were adopted as soon as these improvements became available.

Why did the armorers of the middle ages have to rediscover plate armor. The full answer to that is long and circuitous, but here is a [very] short version. Firstly, bronze could be cast in ways that iron cannot. So working bronze was inherently different from working in iron or steel. So the technological understanding of ancient bronzeworking was not immediately useful to those working in iron and then steel. Secondly, and more significantly, since iron and [very rarely and in comparatively low-carbon form] steel plate were not unknown in the ancient world, Rome fell. The upheaval of the centuries afterward, caused the loss of many technologies, or at least the widespread ability to enable them. Plate was still around even after the fall of Rome, but was much less common and reserved for helmets, and occasionally other bits like arm and leg protection. As things settled down and the economy to diversify, armor specialists begin to proliferate.

Next time, I will discuss plate armor in greater detail, various styles of it, and tell you why plate mail never existed, even though it was used throughout much the later middle ages. I might also try to give you some ideas on how a deeper understanding of armor can inform you RPG experience.