Quote:
Originally Posted by Tenex
I am not an expert on Samurai, but I'm sure their empty hand training didn't evaporate when they wore armor. (...)
Google riot armor and you will see police and corrections personnel in what must charitably count as leather engaging in unarmed combat. (...)
Some police SWAT teams have developed in-house defensive tactics systems specifically designed to be used while wearing body armor and helmets. (...)
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The empty hand training of a samurai didn't vanish when they wore armor. But a samurai would not have relied on hand to hand techniques while in armor BECAUSE it is so much less effective when your vision and movement are limited.
Current body armor is made of materials and with designs that restrict movement less. Today's body armor is less restrictive than medieval cloth or leather armor, but much of that freedom is because it is designed to prevent the penetration of a ballistic weapon, where any effective armor of the past was primarily designed to stop slashing, stabbing and crushing weapons.
Those primarily engaged in the unarmed martial arts have gone without the protection of armor for a reason. There were and are unarmed martial arts designed to be used by someone in armor, but they are mostly techniques for trying to minimize the limitations of armor as much as possible in an extreme circumstance. Any armored fighter knows he's at a decided disadvantage trying to engage in no-weapons fighting.
Armor in real life is more complex than any game system can depict it. Some is more effective against one type of damage (or even one direction of attack) than another. We generalize this to "X armor protects against Y damage" for playability. Otherwise you'd need a computer simulation run every time someone tried to strike a blow.
Similarly, we have to abstract the effect of armor on advanced hand-to-hand techniques. In general, the types of techniques lumped under "Unarmed Combat" in TFT are enough less effective for armored combatants that it makes sense just to say they aren't for armor-wearers most of the time.