Why does padded armor have stealth disadvantage?

2 thoughts on “Why does padded armor have stealth disadvantage?

  1. D. Walker says:

    A fair amount of the armor in D&D is basically utter nonsense, which seems to have been inherited from older editions.

    For example, “Studded Leather” isn’t a thing that ever existed in reality – it appears to be a gross misunderstanding of brigandine; similarly, “Padded Armor” seems to be a gross misunderstanding of gambesons; also “Ring Mail” seems to be almost entirely fictional, dreamed up by the Victorians, possibly as a TRULY massive misunderstanding of certain unusual asiatic armors; etc.

    It would be nice if in the next edition of D&D, they actually sit down with a consultant who understands actual historical armor and fix some of the nonsensical tropes that stick around because of “tradition”. You don’t even need to change the actual game mechanics all that much, just rename things and describe them differently, so the different options reflect real armor types.

    A lot of it is little things – using the term “mail” instead of “chain”; NOT using mail for things that have nothing to do with mail (“ring mail”, “splinted mail”, etc); recognizing that historical armors were worn in layers (plate was worn over top of mail, which was itself worn over top of gambesons or other padding, etc)… it wouldn’t be hard to fix those sorts of things with a minimal investment of time.

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