CaptainBlackGold wrote...
I always find it amusing when people dismiss feminine "fantasy" styles of armor with the "realism" argument.
In "reality" given the socio-economics of "fantasy" worlds steel would be extremely difficult to produce and hence, incredibly expensive. In our own world, in Medieval times, plate armor cost the equivilent of a small farm (i.e., several hundred thousand dollars, US) and even a "long sword" the price of a luxury sports car (somewhere between $75 - 100,000 US).
It depends on which part of the Medieval times you're refering to.
High Middle-Ages had steel extremely costly, yes, and manpower very cheap - which is why there was lots of chainmail, which required lots of the latter and little of the former.
Low Middle-Ages, though, saw multiple little advances in melting metal, and had the situation progressively reverse - by the mid-15th century, chainmail ended up costing more than plate armour.
Also, even if the unqualified manpower was cheap (lacing together the rings of a chainmail didn't require any high-level skill, so it kept this cost low), the qualified manpower was, on the contrary, extremely high. The largest part of a true good full-plate armour was the time the blacksmith would spend on it - late plate armour were cheaper because they were mass-produced and were of a lower quality, high nobility still had incredibly costly ones.
Furthermore, if anyone on these boards can trace their ancestry to any Northern European peoples like the Celts or Germans, then we have actual historical evidence that your great-great-great grandfathers and mothers, often fought naked!
And most of the time they lost, or required a large advantage in numbers to win.
As for the actually victorious barbarians, it was by a time where they started to use heavy armour (it was actually barbarians that, by crushing Romans at Adrianople with their heavy cavalry, started the diminishing role of infantry in roman armies in favour of the armoured horsemen).
The only reason why fantasy RPG's allow low level characters to have plate or maille armor is not for "realism" but for "coolness" - people like the way those armors look so the game makers create them. But if we were actually IN those worlds, "realistically" we would have cheap cloth, maybe a little bit of leather (also expensive) and would be armed with knives, spears and small axes or even farming impliments.
Not only it's quite a stretch even in the strict medieval times and place, but it's also completely mixing two unrelated points : the actual physical realism (I throw a stone -> it falls down, I stab someone -> I hurt him, I have an armour that actually covers the vital part -> I'm better protected), which is more or less always the same, with historical particularity - the economical situation in the Middle-Age is simply a particular point in history, not an obligatory situation.
Finally, all your points about realism are more about using the overused "if something is not striclty realist, then nothing has to make sense !", which is not only, as said, overused, but also extremely weak and pointless.
Retour en haut
