So as I'm finalizing my collection of masterwork mail set in my current game, I find myself wondering the same question that I always do: why bother?
Leather (or bear fur) gives you protection of 3 against point and 3 against edge. Point is I think overall more important since it includes normal arrows, and NPC archers seem more likely to carry them than broadheads. Two layers of this is 6 point and 6 edge. Mail is 5 point and 8 edge, which is at best slightly better. The problem is that mail is heavier for that protection. Leather shirt is 6 lbs, bear fur shirt is 7 lbs and together they are 13 lbs. Mail habergeon weights 22 pounds. It's simply not weight effective, and in addition to that you can repair the leather and furs yourself and they are easier to acquire.
But you can put the mail on after you wear the leather and fur shirts right? You can sure, but the trend continues. Bear fur cloak and overcoat are still at least as good as long mail hauberk. And after you have finished wearing every possible fur and leather garment, the next step after that is not the mail, but the linens. At some point along there you end up wearing heavier protection than early modern period cuirassier in bulletproof plate, all while not touching metal armor. And the northerner lightweights I like to play find themselves unable to bench press a squirrel fur.
Something is very very wrong here.
Now there are some useful pieces of metal armor, namely those that are otherwise hard to stack protection on: mittens, coudes, cowls (downright essential) and the spectacle helm. But other than those metal armor is a vanity project, equivalent to collecting silver accessories. If somebody has an argument why expensive (and at least in masterwork quality, hard to find) metal armor being for vanity makes for good gameplay I'm all ears but I can't figure why.
It doesn't strike to me as realistic either. Combatants used metal armor if it was available and affordable, and they wore it with ultimately fairly light clothing (equivalent to about single layer of furs here). If it wasn't available, people didn't wrap themselves into leather and fur balls.
One possible solution would be to make wrapping your joints in multiple layers of heavy clothing more penalizing than just the weight, but this would require new coding. However it seems more simple solution would work because the whole premise that leather is more weight effective than metal armor seems questionable at best.
Three links of interest:
https://todsworkshop.com/blogs/blog/arrows-v-s-armour-agincourt-myth-bustingShooting late medieval warbow (i.e. something we arguably don't really have here in URW) with period accurate wrought iron and case hardened wrought iron arrows at period accurate 2,5-1,5mm thick steel breastplate. The arrows break and fail against the armor.
https://www.academia.edu/5520314/Arrows_Against_Linen_and_Leather_ArmourA study of arrows against linen and leather. Of particular interest because he actually stacks the leather so far it's heavier per square meter than 2mm plate. The 76 lb draw weight bow is also probably good approximation of our longbow.
https://www.academia.edu/7691143/Arrows_against_mail_armourStudy against mail by the same author.
What I first want to address is that I'm fine with plate being weaker than it should be. By all accounts it was tremendously effective and fighting styles evolved for getting around rather than through it. But we have only a few pieces of plate armor in URW, there is no mechanism for transforming non-penetrating edge/point hits into some blunt damage and there is no possibility for Njerp or bandit to grapple you while another stabs you into weak spot. Additionally the plate we have can be assumed to be weaker, e.g. helmets could be of segmented type with lots of holes in the plates and blade traps on the surface.
The comparison between the mail and the triple layer leather is very topical and I think something that can be translated into URW. I'm assuming it takes about square meter of material to make shirt covering torso, shoulders and upper arms. In practice it seems making a T-shirt tends to need bit more depending on the cut of the cloth being used and of course the person being clothed, but I'm assuming there is some wastage and that this figure is a good enough approximation. Using this assumption I convert the armor used in David Jones' linked studies above into URW terms and briefly examine whether the protective qualities of the materials in URW are reasonable in light of Jones' studies.
So the scenarios:
Three layers of thick shoe sole leather for weight of 16,4 kg per square meter, that is to say a theoretical (if utterly impractical) shirt made of them has weight of 16.4 kg or 36 pounds. This is 6 URW leather shirts for total protection of 18 point and 18 edge. All arrows penetrate this assembly, however the leather seems quite effective at reducing the depth of penetration. The bodkin does better than the broadhead.
Layer of mail (of 7-10.3 kg per square meter) with 8 layers of linen cloth to 2,92 kg per square meter or about 6,4 pounds to a shirt. I take this as representing mail habergeon and two and half linen shirts in URW, for total protection of 7,5 point and 13 edge. This setup does seem to do slightly less well against the bodkin (which consistently penetrates), however I think it's not nearly enough to justify 8.5 point difference, more like couple. Against the leaf shaped arrow it adopts completely different mode of protection, it reduces penetration much less than triple leather however it rejects 25%-33% of the arrows, something the leather doesn't do at all. This is hard to quantify, but I'd say it does not support difference of 5 points in edge protection. This armor setup is also hard to quantify in the sense that it's working like composite armor that is more effective than sum of it's parts, but since you aren't really supposed to wear mail without backing and mail is the expensive part I think it's worth attributing the effect to the mail. Worth also remarking that if you add 9 kg/square meter linen padding under the mail instead of the 3 kg one it becomes very effective.
For concrete suggestion (and start here for
TL;DR) I think it's important that this is kept simple. It must not upset existing armor-weapon balance in the game. It should be quick to implement so it doesn't end up as something pushed a decade down the development plan. I do not touch any other numbers except edge and point except for the bear fur which needs to be kept as rewarding fur to get.
So here are my suggested numbers:
Furs/Leather
Reindeer/Elk: 2 point 2 edge
Generic fur: 2 point 2 edge (remove edge bonus from masterwork)
Bear fur: 2 point 2 edge 6 warmth (rather than armor fur, bear fur is re-imagined as alternative for fine+ generic furs, and it's now simple upgrade on elk/reindeer)
Leather: 2 point (remove masterwork bonus) 2 edge (remove masterwork bonus)
The non-functional furs (squirrels and such) and leathers don't really matter, just as long as they aren't better than above. That being said by weight leather and fur clothing here always represents rather sturdy clothing.
Metal (add to all +1 bonus for both point and edge at fine; add another +1 to both at masterwork for total +2 both):
Mail: 7 point 10 edge (or 9 point 12 edge for masterwork mail)
Lamellar: 7 point 11 edge
Iron: 10 point 12 edge
And for cloth go for 1 point 1 edge for all except the magic nettle shirt which is probably good as is (though I don't quite recall what that was as I don't have one right now).
I do get that 2-2 or 1-1 everything looks pretty boring, but there isn't really lot of wiggling room and single point represents a huge change at these numbers, particularly when stacked.
The basic idea is that every metal armor gets buffed +2, and leather and bear fur are dropped to 2 protection only. Hence, wearing mail and two layers of bear furs or leather gives identical protection as before, but it's made more mail centric. Mail alone is buffed and mail and extra thick padding is made weaker, this is really opposite of what it should be but the synergy is currently impossible to represent. Unarmored NPCs become slightly weaker protected, but they didn't wear much anyway. Clothing remains somewhat effective if you layer it enough due to being light. Since metal armor is heavy, the quality bonuses layer based (which is why I'm suggesting to remove them from everything else together with +50% being too much), the price difference in it considerable due to high base price, the sheer rarity of masterwork armor and the historically variable quality of metal armor I think +2 to both point and edge at masterwork is reasonable.
With these changes, the 36 lb leather coat would be reduced to 12 point 12 edge protection, while the mail plus 2,5x layer of linen would become 9,5 point and 12,5 edge. More reasonable I think?
Lastly it might not be bad idea to rename the leather cuirass into leather vest due to now being less of a piece of armor and more like clothing.
Thanks for reading.