[LT] No More Nerf Armor

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Nereidalbel

Has anybody ever considered encumbrance level affecting striking ST? Seems reasonable enough that if being at medium encumbrance slows you down, you're also not going to be able to swing a weapon as hard/fast. Just how much it affects your strength should be fairly simple to reality test, too.

I think it's mostly going to be the armor on the arms that will affect this (armor on legs would lessen the effects of kicks). The further down your arm, the greater the effect of this weight would be. For simplicity, adding somewhere around 1/4 arm armor and 1/2 hand armor weight to the weight of any weapon for determining its MinST might be appropriate. So, we'll have a broadsword (2 lb, MinST 10) wielded by a fellow in full medium plate harness. That's 5 lb on his arm, 1 lb on his hand, which works out to an effective additional 1.75 lb. 3.75 is 1.875*2, for a 1.36 multiplier* to MinST, meaning MinST 14! I believe Dan commented on arm armor typically being less than this in one of these threads recently, meaning probably a less problematic multiplier.
Alternatively, use the weapon's full weight (3 lb, which includes a 1 lb sheath) which in this case means MinST 13. Either way, a fellow with ST 10 is going to be struggling to keep his attacks on target and is going to tire out rather quickly.

*LTC2 establishes that *n to MinST results in *n^2 to weight.

EDIT: If you're wearing the same armor on your hands as your arms, using 1/3 total weight should be close enough. For two-handed weapons, rather than using the weight of armor on both arms, just use whichever arm is heavier (otherwise you'll end up with some weapons that require more strength to use with two arms than one, which makes no sense).

EDIT2: Found Dan's post. That implies my DR 6 harness would probably have DR 3 or so on the arms/hands, meaning 2 lb on the arm, 0.4 on the hand, effective weapon weight +0.7. That is, at worst, MinST 12 (MinST 11 if we use 3 lb, which we probably should, as a 2-lb weapon should probably only be MinST 8).