The Obligatory "Pre-industrial Weapons and Armour in Games" Post

The Obligatory "Pre-industrial Weapons and Armour in Games" Post

This post is in two parts: first "The Principles", where I lay it out, and then "The Polemic", where I whinge about it. None of the content is controversial, but it IS relevant when considering questions like "why do the majority of fantasy and historical TTRPGs use great detail and complicated rules to get the fundamentals of combat completely wrong, when they could just get it all wrong with nice simple rules and thereby leave more room for impressive full-colour artwork? Or maybe they could even get it right?"

This has been percolating a while; I was motivated to actually write it down because Tod's Workshop recently posted his updated arrow vs armour videos.

Part 1: The Principles

How do historical weapons and armour work?

Hard objects are propelled by muscle power to cause trauma to bodily tissue. Force multipliers exist: delivering the same amount of force at a point increases trauma (especially to the more delicate internal organs) by improving penetration; delivering that force at an edge increases trauma by causing a cut. A weapon strike is more dangerous if the point or edge is sharper, or if the muscle delivering the power is stronger, or if the muscle delivers the power more efficiently, or if the weapon is heavier.

It should go without saying that if practically ANY bit of a person gets forcefully hit by a battlefield or arming weapon (that is, a weapon that is actually designed as a weapon, with a metal striking blade/point/face), that person is likely maimed or suffers a wound that kills them (whether after seconds, minutes, or hours). The body simply cannot stand up to the kinds of forces that pre-industrial weapons can very easily attain.

Armour mostly protects against weapon strikes in one or more of three particular ways:
1. Dampen - the armour reduces the force multiplier provided by the point/edge. Sophisticated armour, when struck directly, can mostly negate the weapon's ability to pierce or cut, so that the force behind the blow is all that matters.
2. Distribute - the armour distributes the weapon's force over a wider surface area and through a greater volume of material. It absorbs some of the weapon strike's force so that it causes less trauma.
3. Deflect - the armour provides a surface that is curved and hard to bite. This can cause a weapon to hit less squarely and therefore transmit less force.

Armour of course does not make a weapon strike less likely to hit the wearer. More enclosing armour includes face protection which restricts the wearer's vision and may restrict their head's range of motion; you are accordingly more likely to be hit by weapon strikes when wearing it. Combatants with visored helmets are known to have often left those visors up when in combat, trading protection for visibility and breathability.

Armour is part of a protective package which includes its wearer trying not to be hit by weapon strikes. There are any number of variations on what we might call defences: parry, dodge, sidestep, stepping away, counter, riposte, deflect; any of these can fail, or succeed, or be partially successful (reducing the potential for harm), and might leave the defender in a more or less advantageous position to follow up.

Without the ability to fight defensively, armour helps (especially against ranged and poorly-aimed attacks), but is certainly less effective. In particular, given a weapon, time, and access to an unconscious or otherwise non-resisting armoured target, it is trivial to harm the target by aiming for (necessary) gaps or removing parts of the armour. Both tactics are historically attested.

Armour has gaps because people have needs: they need to breathe, speak, listen, and move their joints. With skill and technological advancement, these gaps could be made quite small. They can't be removed, except perhaps with magic.

Armour historically came in myriad types and forms. If we wanted to impose a simple typology on effective battlefield armours, we might decide on four categories:
1. Textile, flexible armour made of layers of cloth.
2. Mail, flexible armour made of small joined metal rings.
3. Semi-rigid armour, made of many small rigid plates joined in various ways (brigandine, lamellar, etc).
4. Plate armour, made of larger rigid plates moulded to specific body parts, almost always metal, usually iron or steel.
All four kinds were at times worn over (greater or lesser amounts of) padding.

Competent warriors can strike quickly with a weapon: it's heavily contextual, but once per second is a reasonable baseline. In optimal situations (a helpless opponent, shallow strikes, thrusts rather than swings, a light weapon) they might be able to deliver upwards of three strikes per second. In poor situations (concurrently needing to defend, deep follow-through strikes, swings rather than thrusts, a heavy weapon) they might only deliver a strike every few seconds. Seriously, in general strikes can be made incredibly quickly, even against an opponent skillfully fighting back - I recommend looking up videos of HEMA fencing with any number of different weapons and see for yourself.

A weapon does not have a single "kind" of attack it can make. Different strikes can accomplish different things, risk different things, and are more or less useful in very specific situations. Someone skilled with a versatile weapon like a sword might distinguish between hundreds of different kinds of ways to use it to deliver a blow.

It is generally true that the closer the weapon's point of impact to the wielder's hand, the easier it is to aim. It is more or less impossible to fail an attack with a dagger because you missed, assuming that you can see and reach the target. Conversely, it is more or less impossible to hit even a stationary human-sized target at the longer ranges a war bow can reach. At long ranges, bows are for shooting at formations.

So what specifically happens when weapons and armour meet?

It depends on a huge number of factors. But in general, the armour dampens, distributes, and/or deflects some or all of the force as described above. A sapient attacker knows this, and therefore will typically attempt to strike where the opponent is unarmoured, or strike at points where the armour is thinner (limbs and especially joints). In heavily armoured combat, it was VERY common to resort to wrestling, to position the enemy such that you can remove a piece of their armour, or drive a small, narrow weapon like a dagger into a gap.

Again, there are a huge number of factors to consider. But we can give some important generalities. A bladed weapon can deliver various different kinds of "cut". For strikes where the edge does all the work (like a draw cut or push cut with a sword), any kind of metal armour can easily dampen the strike to the point that it has no effect whatsoever (and this would be true even for attackers with supernatural strength). Those kinds of strike can only harm the armoured opponent at places where they are not covered with armour. For kinds of cut where the weapon's weight does a lot of the work (like a downward chop from a polearm or axe), encountering armour will always lessen the blow, but much of the force is likely to be transmitted. Such a strike can cut through mail (or break bones through it), and has a chance of cutting through thinner or lower-quality metal plates (or cause bruising or concussion through it, damage the armour's ability to articulate properly, or other woes).

Historically, the tactics to use against plate armour were (a) to wrestle the wearer, (b) to penetrate it with gunpowder weapons (the arms race between plate and guns being a key driver for the very existence of sophisticated plate armour), or (c) to deliver heavy impacts with large amounts of force dealt by heavy weapons delivered by muscle power. Weapons specifically designed for blunt impact have an advantage here mostly because they have less risk of breaking (thickness, langets, relatively broad striking face, etc).

More speculatively, armour would have some protective qualities against attacks in the form of quick bursts of very hot, very cold, or very corrosive substances, by way of reducing the amount of the body exposed. It might not work or even be counterproductive for long exposures, but any insulation is going to be better than none against a few seconds of exposure: you can wave your hand through a candle flame, but it will hurt to hold it there for a few seconds unless you're wearing a glove, in which case you might well be fine until the glove catches fire. (Don't try this.)

Against electrical attacks, it may not be intuitively obvious, but if you are receiving an electrical shock, then wearing lots of metal armour like a full plate harness or mail hauberk might actually help by acting as a Faraday cage, especially if your armour extends to sabatons (plate boots) or chausses (mail leggings). Metal is a better electrical conductor than the human body. (REALLY don't try this. Also, if the attack is a literal "lightning bolt", then in addition to the shock you're receiving a superheated explosion, so armour may add metal shrapnel to the injury.)

So to sum up, the most fundamental elements of pre-industrial combat are
1. Weapons are used to deliver strikes very rapidly against an opponent who is trying to reciprocate and also trying to counteract your strikes;
2. Armour can save your life by making mortal wounds into minor ones or even completely preventing them (but it may make you easier to hit);
3. A competent fighter would know their armour's limitations (in terms of actual physical gaps and weak points, the way the armour has to compromise with mobility and perception, weaknesses to specific types of weapon and styles of strike, etc) and focus their defensive manoeuvring on compensating for those limitations;
4. There are some situations where a type of armour would make you near-invulnerable (e.g. wearing plate armour and attacked with an arming sword) and others where it would do nothing but slow you down (e.g. wearing mail and shot at with high-poundage crossbows);
5. It's possible your opponent will defend against your melee weapon strike, but it's very unlikely you will just miss; conversely, pre-industrial ranged weapons can shoot further than they can be accurately aimed at individual targets;
6. Any unarmoured part of your body being forcefully struck with an actual battlefield weapon would cause physical trauma that would immediately reduce your capacity to fight, and often kill you (whether immediately or eventually).

It's very interesting to me that so many historical or fantasy TTRPGs (accidentally or deliberately) get either most or all of these elements wrong.

Part 2: The Polemic

I'm not going to write in detail about the degree to which table-top role-playing games tend to exclude these six elements (I think a survey of the field is convincing in that regard), nor an analysis of whether their designers do so wittingly or unwittingly (I suspect it would mostly come down to inertia and precedent, and that if some different choices had been made in 1974, the state of play would be startlingly different).

But I do want to suggest that if you're not going to have armour work the way that armour actually works, and you're not going to have weapons work the way that weapons actually work, and you're not going to have bodily injury work the way that bodily injury actually works...

Then since those parts of your combat system don't correspond to anything in the real world, why not make it all very simple and quick to deal with at the table? Or more drastically, why have a mechanical combat system at all? Why shouldn't a fight and its possible outcomes be deeply abstracted, so that the referee can describe it however they wish and move on to a part of the game that players can actually make informed choices in, a part whose mechanics reflect how the players understand reality?

What really baffles me is layering lots of game complexity on top of mechanics which are fundamentally immersion-breaking.

In order to give an example, I will pick on 5e because it's the biggest target and violates 5 of those 6 fundamental elements I listed. In particular, consider:

• Six-second turns. One weapon strike per six seconds regardless of armament (a very slow rate), with small improvements for some characters which never come close to what's easily physically possible (even for these characters who are superhuman in other ways!). We know it's not a matter of "the rest of your turn is spent defending" because e.g. you don't get more attacks if you're attacking a paralysed (or unconscious, etc) creature while its cronies are kept busy elsewhere in the battle. We also know it's not a matter of "one attack equal multiple weapon strikes" because of rider effects which are meant to take place on every hit. (There's a related issue of preposterously fast crossbows which I won't get into.)
• Hit Points. Works well as a game mechanic, doesn't reflect anything about the reality of bodily injury. We know it's not just a measure of heroic luck (attacks barely grazing you) etc, because of various things like fall damage and rider effects like inflicting poison on hit. Most entities can suffer multiple weapon strikes before going from "perfectly combat-effective" to "dying". And "dying" actually means "roughly equal chances of waking up without a scratch on you tomorrow, and being dead in seconds. No middle ground", which obviously doesn't map onto anything from our reality, and has largely unexplored consequences for a 5e game world.
• Armo[u]r Class. In 5e, armour makes it more difficult to hit you. More charitably, you could interpret it as an extreme abstraction where armour either completely negates a blow (somehow including any rider effects like ``teleport any creature struck'' or ``delivers electrical shock on hit'') or does nothing. Note that any given armour works as well against a two-ton boulder as it does against a thrown branch, a magic dart, or a shark bite. Except when one of those things uses a save mechanic instead, in which case it does nothing.
• It's relatively easy for even an untrained archer to shoot at individual targets at the limits of a projectile weapon's range.

These design choices make it VERY DIFFICULT for a GM to adequately describe a fight. An attack that hits usually doesn't feel like it hits; "you're injured" doesn't really mean you're injured. If a player rolls maximum damage, taking off all but one of the foebeast's hit points, and you the GM describe how their character cleaved through the monster's arm and into their torso, then they're going to be upset if it starts using that arm. Any reasonable player will want to know if they can stand back and wait for it to bleed out. You'll find yourself rolling back your description or desperately trying to invent mechanics that 5e doesn't provide, despite its overarching focus on the tactical combat minigame. The GM is forced to describe all strikes before the killing blow as tiny glancing hits, or admit that all adversaries can fight on just fine with a "deep stab wound" or "crushed collarbone" or whatever.

...And even that would be fine if 5e didn't have variable rolled damage. Even players who know nothing at all about real pre-industrial weapons and armour are going to start thinking "why doesn't this match my expectations?" when their 23-damage rage-fuelled heavy magical bardiche attack is described as "a small cut" and the 2-damage sword slice which kills the beast "lops its head from its body".

So 5e is designed to have all these elements which don't match reasonable expectations of how reality should work. Why? Mostly "historical antecedent"; they all largely existed in the game since 1974... but back then, you could run a hundred-per-side combat in fifteen minutes, so that lack of verisimilitude paid off with the huge amount you could get done in a game. And having relatively few mechanics alongside that abstraction meant the referee had much more scope to invent details of the combat however they saw fit.

What changed? The answer is simple - that same layer of abstraction persisted, but a lot of stuff got built on top of it. Where before that implausible abstraction bought you a game that ran really fast and smoothly, now you have the same implausible abstraction but with dozens of combat-oriented class features and player options built on top of it, with the GM forced to find a way to describe them in a way that somehow makes sense. And it doesn't run fast or smoothly; you have to linger in the immersion-breaking details, because the increased rules burden means that "fifteen minute combat" is only possible with a handful of player characters against a tiny number of foes (and even then, only when the players are decisive, competent, and playing at low levels where some of their options are locked away).

And you end up with a game that's FUN, yes, of course it's fun, but it's a game where anyone actually paying attention at the table, or with even a smidgen of domain knowledge, surely comes away from it thinking some variation of "it's weird how this expensive equipment my character has doesn't do what you'd think" or "I wish we didn't have to do combats so that I could be better immersed in the game" or "so if I wasn't wearing my armour when I frozen in place, I guess that big ogre's sword swing... wouldn't have 'barely whistled over my head'?" or "it sure is weird how the GM said the battle took eighteen seconds but it took almost an hour to play and I only got to swing my axe three times, I guess that's just how tabletop gaming works".

Or "I wonder what we're doing wrong." 😞

I'd like to think that this mess of words could be of use to some game designer, so let's distil out a takeaway: Use some introspection in making design decisions. If it's fun to do tactical combat games, and it's fun to be immersed in a role-playing game, then maybe design your tactical-combat-heavy role-playing game in a way where it's possible to be immersed in the tactical combat. Make it so really basic practical understanding of reality like "these metal plates should protect me exceptionally well against swords; against a five-ton giant they are a liability" isn't a curse but a boon. And no, going full GURPS granularity to simulate every strike every fraction of a second doesn't have to be the only solution: all games use abstraction. You can use abstraction in a way that produces fun and makes sense and speeds up the game in the places where it should be sped up. You can! We believe in you.

- Ben M, Periapt Games