You know you're an RPG'er when you see this video and think 'I should check this out'!

ARROWS vs ARMOUR - Medieval Myth Busting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBxdTkddHaE

Has some useful idea seeds for when armour/weapons used against it might fail/work and how- as well as on how such items might be improved/upgraded/varied (options for layers of armour, attack method and intent etc).

As something of a pacifist myself IRL it also shows that even ancient warfare was very brutal- can't have been fun taking these arrow hits even if they bounced off. (I've done paintballing and the hits can hurt a lot, so one possible way to deal with things in an RPG sense is the pain factor- maybe even not being wounded would still be painful/unpleasant, plus of course the lucky shots/ volume of shots.) Would be interesting to know more about if the non-penetrating shots were still harmful through the amount of energy they hit the body with- from the metal heating up a lot it suggests there's considerable energy at work- this heating would itself dissipate some of that energy- but they didn't explore this too much, could the impact energy passing through the body still do any harm? How much would reach the body and how much would the armour negate? How much if any pain from the 'punch' of the arrow hit would there be?

*Lots of players start new armour/weapon options after watching videos like this*

Knights wore a mail hauberk and a padded armour below the plate armour parts. That's enough to soften the impact of non-penetrating blows. What I find the most interesting isn't that a steel breastplate is impervious to arrow shot from a welsh longbow, but that the first arrow that hit just below the breastplate penetrated deeply the mail and padded armour. The whole arrowhead is inside the belly. That means if there was a real human inside the armour, he would be dying. Belly wounds were often fatal in this time.

On 9/12/2019 at 12:35 PM, WolfRider said:

Knights wore a mail hauberk and a padded armour below the plate armour parts. That's enough to soften the impact of non-penetrating blows. What I find the most interesting isn't that a steel breastplate is impervious to arrow shot from a welsh longbow, but that the first arrow that hit just below the breastplate penetrated deeply the mail and padded armour. The whole arrowhead is inside the belly. That means if there was a real human inside the armour, he would be dying. Belly wounds were often fatal in this time.

I think that's why a lot of the logic of the study was that it was the lucky shots like these that made arrows successful, which is certainly good thematic fodder for RPG gameplay and storytelling as the game unfolds. It's a logic that probably carries over to a lot of other battle situations that could crop up in-game, the defenses for lots of things would probably quite often negate the attacks, hence it probably is a lot to do with both luck and well placed aim/ strategy to exploit the weaknesses in those defenses.

A lot of fun can probably be had with the story development aspect and 'action film' aspects of interpreting the die rolls!:

"The arrowhead breaks clean off flying uncomfortably close to my face...." / "Against the odds I find a weak spot just below the armor...."

On 9/12/2019 at 1:35 PM, WolfRider said:

Knights wore a mail hauberk and a padded armour below the plate armour parts.

That's not quite accurate. It was padding plus mail OR padding plus plate, not all three. Some plate armor will have small segments of mail protecting the spots you want to keep flexible, and I'm sure there were people who wore mostly mail plus some piecemeal plating they managed to get, but nobody wore a full suit of mail under a full suit of plate, as that'd barely have any effect beyond the encumbrance.

Yes and no. In 14th century while plate armour were developed, knights wore a mail hauberk with plate protection on shoulders, elbows, knees, feet and ankles and hands and wrist, and a breast plate. Then arms, upper and lower, and legs, upper and lower, plate protection were added and the helm was modified to cover the neck and head and changed shape too.

By 15th century all those elements were common enough so the need for a mail hauberk underneath disappeared, except for the lower belly. And the full plate armour had the look it keep up to 16th century, when it started to disappear from battlefield.

Personally I'll love to see the same video making a comparison between the longbow, the crossbow (the one using a winch to reload) and the early 16th century arquebus. We see in the video that an arrow shot from a longbow rebound on a breastplate. But what happens for a quarrel shot from a crossbow and a lead bullet shot from an arquebus ? All three were used in late 15th and most of 16th century.

Firefox spell checker doesn't accept arquebus. But when I used a traslator to find the english translation for the french "arquebuse" that's what I got. I arquebus a valid english word ?

1 hour ago, WolfRider said:

Yes and no. In 14th century while plate armour were developed, knights wore a mail hauberk with plate protection on shoulders, elbows, knees, feet and ankles and hands and wrist, and a breast plate. Then arms, upper and lower, and legs, upper and lower, plate protection were added and the helm was modified to cover the neck and head and changed shape too.

By 15th century all those elements were common enough so the need for a mail hauberk underneath disappeared, except for the lower belly. And the full plate armour had the look it keep up to 16th century, when it started to disappear from battlefield.

While true, it's important to understand that this layering of plate on mail on gambeson doesn't noticably increase protection compared to just plate and gambeson, and partial plating was only installed on full mail because while plating is better then mail, full body coverage is better than partial coverage. If having all three layers was useful, the mail layer wouldn't have all but disappeared with the advent of full plate.

EDIT: Far as I know, arquebus is a valid English word. I wouldn't count on most standard spellchecks to have such rare words.