[Low-Tech] Padded Cloth and Layered Armour penalty

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

If you use the design rules in Pyramid rules they will give you a "thickness" when you create armour. You could link some kind sliding scale DX penalty to that.

I.e. so a layer of padded cloth that was DR2 would be rather a lot thicker than a layer of DR3 mail.

Granularity will be a question though, -1DX per layer is already the finest grain the system can do.

Which pyramid? Sounds great. Granularity-wise we could track decimals for how armor would add up, though they for the most part won't matter, you'll just never tie your skill, only roll above it or below it on whole-number dice.

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

There's also the question that some other physical aspects might apply, rigidity for instance even if it's not enough to qualify at non-flexible in the system. It is almost impossible to make cloth or leather armour not become more and more rigid as thickness increases.

I just figured if you treated blunt trauma that gets through as crushing damage to the next layer of armor. So if you had a 25 DR cape above a 5 DR shirt hit for 25 crushing, 5 BT-as-crushing hits the shirt, and then 1 BT-as-crushing gets through the shirt to hit the person?

Of course that would make wearing a 5 DR shirt underneath a 25 DR cape superior to wearing a 50 DR cape, so that seems like a problem.

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

Another great thing about mail* is that in terms of increasing equivalent DR it maintains it's flexibility for far longer than padded or leather.

Another rule to keep in mind which I remember seeing somewhere in Low-Tech is only Rigid armor has Chinks and that Flexible armor doesn't have Chinks, so would that mean as leather moves from flexible to rigid it gains chinks? Seems strange.

Plus aren't there also different rules for whether (when using the optional rules for armor taking damage) armor counts as Homogenous or Unliving depending on whether it's Flexible or Rigid? I can try to find the page numbers later tonight.

Originally Posted by Anthony

Flexible over rigid is generally not there for purposes that translate as DR -- the way flexible armor stops attacks is dependent on it flexing, so if it's unable to do so, it's significantly less effective.

However diminished, it feels like it ought to do something though... as little as leather "skintight" overtop plate might protect against something like a knife slash, the knife still has to slice through the leather before it can begin to scratch up the metal.