Hi to everyone!

Can you wear multiple armors, and do they stack? I mean it's impossible to wear anithing on a breastplate, but a cloth on a leather protection or a mail on anything else...What do you think and usually do?

I make the assumption that those layers are already there in the basic armor (cloth or leather underneath chain, some cloth/leather/chain under plate, etc.), so adding more causes problems for the wearer.

If someone insisted on doing it, I may stack the soak depending on what armors were involved (I'd never stack cloth), but would add something like a challenge die to all physical actions to account for the bulkiness of wearing an additional whole suit of armor.

I remember that the older editions WFR used to allow stacking (and armor location factored into this), but I don't think this edition does. This edition is more geared to be "abstract and simple" over "detailed and complex".

Doc, the Weasel said:

Thats my assumption too - unless for some plotwise reason you want to introduce a special set of gauntlets, helmet or something - I wouldnt bother....

It seems to me armor normally stacks...but it works better assuming they dont!Doc solution is also very detailled!

If you do go with stacking, I would have any layer beyond the first have -1 soak. So chain on leather would be soak 4 (2 for leather and 2 [3-1] for chain). Add another layer of leather on that, and it would be soak 5, etc.

I personally would not allow my players to stack armour. I assume that a chainmail allready has padding underneath it and that it's included in the armour soak, and just feel that stacking armour doesn't really feel realistic and would just look foolish.

But if I did allow armour stacks I would increase the encumberance for the stacked armour, something like +1 for the first extra layer, +2 for the second extra armour layer and so on (or even more). That would make it very impractical to stack lots of armour.

k7e9 said:

For those interested, that was how the advanced armour system in the 2nd edition worked.

The individual parts of a chain mail armour had soak 2 and you could stack them with leather armour for soak 3. The full set of chain mail armour already came with a padded leather below for the usual soak of 3.

Similarly, individual pieces of plate armour had soak values fo 2. You could combine them with either leather for soak of 3, with chain mail for a soak of 4 or with the two of them for a maximum soak of 5. The suit of full plate armour came already with under layers of leather and chain for a protection of 5.

Of course, all these was accounted in the encumbrance of the armour, which also stacked!

As a side topic, has any of you realized that in the 3rd edition armours are much much lighter (less encumbrance) as compared to that of the 2nd edition? More or less, as compared to the 2nd edition, the full plate armor is half the encumbrance and the chain mail is 50% lighter.

Yepesnopes said:

Technically, encumbrance isn't just weight. It's how much something hinders your movement.

Doc, the Weasel said:

You are right, but my statement holds true anyway.

I guess I'm just more simple. My answer to stacking would just be... no. The normal limit of soak from 1-5 for armor is balanced for the cards and having a full plate plus a shield makes you a tank. Special armor could have one extra defence though or some other benefit, but soak values from armor is 0-5 no matter what.