“Madam,” said Sir Launcelot, “is there here any armour within your chamber, that I might cover my poor body withal? An if there be any give it me, and I shall soon stint their malice, by the grace of God."
"Truly,” said the queen, “I have none armour, shield, sword, nor spear; wherefore I dread me sore our long love is come to a mischievous end, for I hear by their noise there be many noble knights, and well I wot they be surely armed, and against them ye may make no resistance.”Sir Thomas Malory, _Morte D’Arthur
What should armor do, and how effective should it be? There are three mental metrics I have for this.
Armor is Life-or-Death
Armor is a serious thing, and being caught with your pants down is grave danger. It’s a thought that should be horrifying to knights - and to engage in it is wicked or dishonorable because it is so cruelly effective. It should shock people when characters will stain the battle by such an ambush.
To feel the texture of the genre we want players to feel exposed without their armor - like it’s inherently unfair - so unfair that it tempts them to commit dishonor and reminds them to pity their foes.
At the same time, armor isn’t used against all foes, or in all situations - especially when you’ve got characters who don’t wear armor typically. It should feel more deadly for them too, but not so much it’s useless and un-fun. Nor should knights be bundling up in armor at all times - hunting is somewhat like combat, but you shouldn’t want armor to face an elk1.
Armor is gradated
We want to feel the progression of technology from one armor type to another, and to highlight wealth and well equipped knights vs. the poor. Armor isn’t a binary on/off, but there’s at least a few levels it can be - either all at once or a shifting scale era to era2.
Armor (that is, complete and the best available armor) is part of what distinguishes a knight from “lesser” opponents - to a degree it should feel like a cheat code against an armored-but-not-as-well opponent. It doesn’t fully bridge the gap of skill, but gives a buffer for the rich.
You also want to subvert the distinction between knight and “common” soldier sometimes. All those weird shaped polearms innovated to be can-openers should keep reminding knights that they aren’t invincible - and when they meet Milanese crossbowmen and suddenly learn that technology has advanced you want knights to feel the fear of God.
But Lancelot,
Shortly after the quote on this page, Lancelot kills an armored knight naked and surprised and partially surrounded3. When the skill gap is high (even at high levels - his foes aren’t chumps) and the character is impassioned, you should still fear Lancelot.
Footnotes
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Maybe for some creatures like boars you’d dress up a bit, but not in full plate. ↩
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Originally I always tried to fit in each one in an absolute sense. But that means the dice mechanic has to handle maybe 9 eras of technological change, plus differentiate unarmored characters - and that is very difficult. Instead, most of my more modern designs rely on determining armor to be current, advanced or obsolete (or at least some grades) and to let each era shift what armor counts as each. ↩
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Malory does make sure to highlight he is being tactical, drawing Sir Colgrevance into a narrow entryway to isolate the odds, and quickly retreating to steal some of the dead knight’s armor when he takes on the others. The dice aren’t so far in his favor that he doesn’t care. ↩