This is part 5 of my ongoing series on improving the armor tables. Unlike my Fixing the Weapons Table posts, these changes should be considered entirely optional and a GM should carefully consider whether they want to use them in their game, because it might mean a lot of tweaking stat blocks behind the scenes. These changes are designed for GMs who love history and want their fantasy worlds to be a little more grounded in it.
This week's subject is heavy armor. This is the armor for those who can afford it, for while it may be more restrictive and, well, heavier than other armors, the protection it provides is second to none. In the category of heavy armor, we have banded armor, bronze plate, mail-and-plate, heavy mail, bronze panoply, plate, and full plate. This is armor for your characters that can take a beating and give one back in return: your stalwart legionnaires, your axe-wielding sea-raiders, your shining knights errant, and your bloodthirsty horsemen of the steppe.
Fans of plate armor will be pleased to see that, in these tables, plate and full plate offer more flexibility than they do in Pathfinder or D&D 3.5. This is some of the best armor ever made, worn by the wealthiest warriors of Europe. They would not have fought in it if it restricted their movements and limited their ability to fight. It may have been heavy, but the way it was made and worn distributed its weight across the whole body, making it feel lighter than mail.
Read on to see the stats for all these armor types and learn more about them. As before, I have provided some historical information with each armor entry in order to aid the GM in determining which armors would fit best in a particular campaign setting.
The following items and rules in gold and their accompanying tables are available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2015 Jonah Bomgaars and d20 Despot.
