Martial arts for the man-at-arms

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Anders

No cheap plate, no. I'll probably arbitrarily double the base price of plate armor - the steel can only be made in the deepest bowels of the Earth, where the lava spirits are chained to the furnaces. Also, the spirits of the ore must consent to be made into whatever the dwarves make it into, and that may be rare. Adjust to taste, really.

Plate is already available at TL3, although lack of sliding rivets means chinks are easier to target. The primary problem with such plate is that it's made of bronze, and is therefore quite expensive. Of course, while the description of Dwarven Plate sounds like it would be extremely expensive, it's going to need to cost at least equal to the bronze equivalent (unless you opt to make it not suffer the no-sliding-rivets problem). Doubling the base cost works if you're looking at everyone just getting Good quality plate, but once you start adding in Tailoring and Fluting, bronze is going to be far superior (a DR 6 Fluted Bronze Plate Cuirass is going to be around $20,000, a DR 6 Fluted Dwarven Plate Cuirass is going to be around $25,000; it gets worse if you go for higher CF options and/or Styling). Unless you want this (let's face it, bronze looks a lot better than iron), I'd suggest increasing the price in the form of a CF modifier. +1 will give you the same end price for Good quality and keep superiority over bronze. +2 will make Good quality more costly than your doubling, but will maintain superiority over bronze. +3 makes it equal to bronze... if you want to go this route (or higher), I suggest ignoring the sliding rivets rule for Dwarven plate.