Low Tech: Choosing the right armor by weight

This is a follow-on post to my previous one about how to get a certain DR value for the lowest cost possible. Well, the lowest cost possible without dressing up a a wicker statue. Or a tree.

I'm biased that way.

Still, I promised to revisit this for the wealthy, and so for GURPS-Day today, here we go.

Introduction Repeated

GURPS Low Tech is a pretty darn good book. There's a lot of value there, and even more so in the three companions.

There are a few books out, such as Instant Armor, and the forthcoming Low Tech Armor Loadouts, that help whittle down the very large job of choosing armor kit. It took me a very, very long time to assemble the armor for Cadmus, my Warrior Saint in +Nathan Joy's game.

Along the way, I put together a spreadsheet. It took permutations of the various armor types in Low Tech, with quality and heaviness modifiers. I then sorted it by DR, and calcualted Cost/DR as well as Weight/DR.

Here, I present a long summary table of the results of that work, this time sorted by DR per unit weight. I've removed enough material that you can't do without the book (and I'm still not even remotely sorry).

Warriors Unburdened
My premise here is less simple than last time, where you were starting off on a budget.This time, you've either purchased enough Wealth or starting cash that you can skip the cheap stuff, or you have been around the block a few times and can afford to upgrade. That's exactly what happened to Cadmus, as a by-the-way. I started with a complex and unbalanced set of armor, as follows:

1xMail, Plate, and Leather Armor Panoply

1× Boots, Leather ($80; 3 lb; DR 2)

1× Cloth, Padded Undersuit (Shoulders, Upper Arms, Legs, Torso; Reduced Cost (-20%); $88; 13.2 lb; DR 1*)

1× Gauntlets, Medium Segmented (Reduced Cost (-20%); $72; 2.4 lb; DR 4)

1× Layered Leather, Medium (Front Forearms, Front Knees, Front Shins; Leather of Quality; $440; 10.4 lb; DR 4)

1× Mail and Plates (Shoulders, Front Thighs, Front Torso; Reduced Cost (-20%); $924; 16.5 lb; DR 5)

1× Mail, Heavy (Upper Arms, Back Thighs, Back Torso; Cheap; Reduced Cost (-20%); $316.8; 14.85 lb; DR 4*)

1× Plate, Medium (Full Helm, Padding; Reduced Cost (-20%); $612; 7.8 lb; DR 7);

Wow. That's a lot of bizarre stuff, but it was a balance of protection up front, weight, and most of all, cost. I bought as much extra Cash (5 points worth) as allowed, which I think gave me a $3500 starting point (less the Dwarven Axe and other weaponry). It also took me a long time and a lot of help by +Mark Langsdorf , +Emily Smirle , +Kevin Smyth , +Nathan Joy , and +Theodore Briggs . 

After we adventured for a bit, we came into a bit of money. Cadmus can't keep more than he can carry by Holy Vow, but good armor is expensive. I upgraded!

1× Boots, Leather ($80; 3 lb; DR 2)

1× Cloth, Padded Undersuit (Full Suit, Ornate (x2 cost), Lighten 3/4); $375; 12.4 lb; DR 1*)

1× Gauntlets, Medium Segmented (Reduced Cost (-20%); $72; 2.4 lb; DR 4)

1× Heavy Mail Armss and Legs (Ornate x2 cost; Lighten 3/4; Fortify +1); $3668; 20.25 lb; DR 6/4*)

1× DR 7 Plate Corselet (Torso; TL4 x2 cost; Lighten 3/4, Fortify +1); $6150; 18 lb; DR 8)

1× DR7 Plate Full Helm (Padding;TL4 x2 cost; Fortify +1; Lighten 3/4); $1845; 6.75 lb; DR 8);

This cost me a favor from the party merchant prince, and about $12,000 in cash. While the low-level Fortify and Lighten spells are more expensive in Nate's game because he wants all magically enchanted stuff to start from a base of at least +1 Cost Factor  (a good rule; no enchanting crap stuff), the big changes is that I'm now equally protected on front and back, and my encumbrance while armored dropped from Medium to Light - a big deal. 

So, where's the awesome when you have money to burn?

Cheesy Protection: DR 1-2

Well, while this might not be enough protection to do much other than protect against incidental contact and angry kittens (maybe), you can at least do this in some semblance of style here.

The DR 1 go-to by far is fine light leather. This low-end protection can be yours at 3.3 lbs, which isn't bad for covering your full torso (but not arms, legs, which add their usual +150% to the weight and cost of these figures).

For the next level of non-protection, you are, interestingly enough, looking at cheap versions of otherwise very expensive armors as well. Light brigandine is nice if you need to not be quite so obvious and comes in at ten pounds, while cheap plate that is usually DR 3 but downgraded due to being cheap   Both will ring your cash register for $350-400, so you're paying nearly $200 per point of DR - but both combined cost less than fine light leather!

Low-end Serious

DR 3 is enough to provide just less than average proection against a 1d attack. So it's just enough to pretend you're wearing armor, and honestly, there are times, like getting hit to the vitals, where with that x3 wound multiplier, removing 9 points of injury really is the difference between life and death.

If you've got money to burn, fluted DR 3 plate is the way to go.Thing is, that fluting is a very large cost multiplier for a very small weight reduction, so just regular-old boring DR 3 plate is probably a slightly better bet, as it comes in at 8 lbs for front -and back protection to the torso. 

Decent Serious Protection
Now at DR 4-5 you're looking at being protected vs. the average damage from a 1d or 1d+1 attack, or being completely protected vs. 1d-2 or 1d-1, which doesn't look like much, but it effectively renders you proof against unarmed punches of up to ST 12 to 14, which ain't all bad.

The king here will always wind up being plate armor. It's nearly too good, but then again, you are paying thousands or even nearly ten of thousands of dollars for the privilege here.

So duplex and hardened plate are the tickets for the uber-rich. You're still talking about 8 lbs, or slightly less, but you're sporting DR 4.

Again for the sneaky and fashionable set, the 10-lb hardened light brigantine is pretty interesting too, and if you drop down to light hardened mail. it's still expensive (and not rigid), but literally half the cost of the more-expensive plate or brigantine.

We don't yet have a piece of torso armor that breaks the ten grand mark yet - but we're getting darn close

Starting to Tank Out

DR 6 and DR 7 are the points where you would normally find plate armor, and so you do. In fact, without magic the only way you can achieve DR 7 using Low Tech and Instant Armor that doesn't involve some form of plate is hardened jousting mail (for $7500).

But that's not even the most expensive non-magical armor - though a sorting error has provided a nice example of where you can get with magical help, with Mail and Plates (usually starting at DR 5) being slapped with Ornate, Fortify +2, and Lighten for just shy of $10K.

For DR 6, you are still throwing down with hardened and duplex plate, with a very large price increase  being paid to save about a pound and a half going from hardened to duplex.

If you don't mind mail and 18 lbs instead of 14.4 lbs, you can go with hardened heavy mail, which is TL2, DR 6, and not stupidly expensive.
You Wanna Wear WHAT?

Oh, you can now wear plate, plate, plate, plate, and look . . . more lembas bread.

Mmmmm.

But yeah, in the DR Crazyland realm you can basically count on hardened and duplex plate being the best combination of weight per DR you can get short of physics-busting stuff.


You Can do Magic . . .

Adding magic adds cost, and can add a lot of it. If money really is no object, you want Lighten 1/2 and Fortify +2 - more if you can get it, but I'll assume you can't. There's really no trick here - take the best armor per unit weight, cut that weight in half (and pay through the nose for it), and you might as well add +2 DR through magic while you're at it.

Parting Shot

Actually, when you really look at it, and I should have long ago, the answer to "best protection per unit weight is duplex plate all the way from DR 4 on up. Not terribly surprising, but also very, very expensive. I think even without Nate's house rules, DR 10 duplex plate runs more than $20K (we double cost for TL4, and my sheet says it's over $40K, so . . . )

So ultimately, this is less interesting in terms of choices than the "do it on a budget" post was, largely because there's really only one answer - wear plate - unless other things intervene.

Such things can be concealability (brigantine, probably) or being not metal for noise, electrical conductivity, or if it interferes with tropes such as no metal armor for spellcasters.

There's also the fact that even at 3-ish pounds per point of DR, DR 11 duplex plate is still 32 lbs for just your torso, and about 90 lbs for a full suit including a helm.

Fast Play and Slow Combat

Some recent posts by me and others have touched on combat pacing.

On the one hand, we have a situation where the frantic pace of blows given and received strikes some as unreasonable for certain situations. It doesn't properly match some one-on-one combats, and even when it does, one has to invoke pretty extreme rules (like The Last Gasp) to force people to back off after a few seconds.

So, thoughts about combat openings and 'closures' came into play, with a neat way of generating these online developed by +Christian Blouin. Still, that has the potential to not just slow down combat, but to make play drag.

Is there any way to basically be able to rip around the table, and down the NPC action sheet (should one exist) and if you have six players and ten NPCs (for example), you can resolve all sixteen potential actions in only a few moments, with no real perceived penalty to fun by saying "Evaluate!" each turn?

Why do I even care? One of the features, I think, of the current GURPS battlefield (discussed here) is that it can be relatively immobile. A few seconds of time between blows means that friends and neighbors can reposition to be mutually supportive, that building up a spell doesn't feel like a drag, etc.

But with the default (and likely proper) thing in most combats being "do something violent and effective" more often than not, I'm not sure if it's really reconcilable with the current rules.

So, what would I feel like I need - or, as I continually remind my 3yo, needs are for survival, wants are for everything else - so what would I want in order to get this done?

1. I would want something like Christian's combat openings application.

Ideally, I'd have an app that when you hit "go" it gives you a list of openings (one or two) and closures (one to four) for the target. These would exist whether or not the attacker uses some sort of mechanic to see them.

I'd want the app to highlight, say, in green the body parts that are more open, and red the ones that are more denied, so that a player (or the GM) can immediately assimilate that information without studying a wall of detailed text.

I'd probably love to have a built in list of combatants, that could be placed and cycled through in initiative order. Drop-down or click-boxes would allow certain options to be set, such as maneuver selection and maybe an optional focused defense selection.

I'd want the ability to designate a "victim" or defender and maybe associate it with the attacker, but perhaps that's not critical.

2. I'd probably rework certain rules

With respect to the focused defense option, I can see instead of the usual "fencing weapons get +3 to retreat, but regular gets only +1" thing, that you be able to select a "defensive stance" option that gives the extra +2 to defenses, and have that be available and stack with maneuver selection.

You might not even be able to attack if someone retreats out of weapon range, which would force a lot of "two-step" committed attacks be required to close the distance. that feels right to me. By and large, backing off like that is very effective, if tiring, and the primary reasons you don't do it is when you can't. That the reason they have rings for matches - and why being in a press of battle is so scary. You can't back up.

What it means
If you can choose a focused defensive stance, a high/low guard (not mentioned yet, but it's a logical extension, and GURPS Martial Arts: Gladiators already has a focused defense option in there), and go all-out on the defensive, you can probably make it really hard to land a random GURPS attack without huge amounts of deceptive attack, or exploiting an opening. You'd need to do a lot more Evaluates and Feints (or Setup Attacks) in order to force a hole in your foes defenses. The opening that eventually appears would be a rare and hopefully fun thing.

Downsides are potentially legion. You'd want to ensure that each person can be resolved in only a few seconds. Going once around the table every three minutes or so wouldn't be awful (ten seconds per person), and would ensure that people stay engaged.

But if there's a lot more jockeying for position, some of the emergent behavior would be very interesting. Archers and spellcasters that have to take a few seconds to reload would be more compelling. Gang tactics to force holes in defenses or pin a foe down, preventing him from just scampering away, would be much more important. Overall mobility would increase, as with more time between effective action, I think people (or teams of people) would feel they can reposition and move around without missing the fun.

And frantic battle lines would be pretty scary. I think even scarier than usual.

But I think that you'd really, really want to use that application to drive it. Otherwise, too many rolls, too many lookups, and too much non-decision time.

I think it'd be fun to try a game like this, with properly integrated tools. It would definitely have to be playtested though!

Apropos of Nothing: Posting velocity?

Is it me, or as summer approaches here in the Northern Hemisphere, has the new content velocity slowed down in general?

I mean, I know why my velocity has slowed down - work heated up and my wife is training for her Black Sash test in Hwa Rang Do, which means my usual writing time is spent putting my toddler to bed.

But I feel (with no real data or stats) that where I used to see a few posts a week from people (and I was hitting 3-4 posts, sometimes more) things have slowed down.

Thoughts?

The Last Gasp in Action

+Jon Couts messaged me the other day about a question regarding The Last Gasp.

Turns out he's running an arena combat with the rules, and he allowed me to link to it.

Click the picture to go to the play-by-post arena combat!

Thanks to Jon for giving the rules a try.

I might suggest he try Delayed Gratification (Setup Attacks) instead of the existing Feint rules in a future combat and see what he and his players think . . .

The important thing to me is that AP allowed the spearman to exhaust her foe, and drove some decisions on the part of the knight that he'd rather not have made. Good HT to aid recovery and shake off the impact of injury for AP reduction was a big deal. At times, skill drove the battle; at other times, fitness. A nice mix, I think. Jon also notes that by the end of the fight, Sir Mander's ST was low enough that he was getting an extra -1 to use his axe because he didn't meet it's Min ST. The Last Gasp gives a small bonus to low min ST weapons in that way. If he'd been using a small axe he'd have been fine.