Armor designs for females?

[Keltest]

I don't care what it does in D&D rules. D&D is not the whole of gaming, and even less of the whole of overlapping genres being discussed.




Jack Sparrow is in a setting where there are firearms, and water to fall into, based on a time period when armor had largely fallen out of use for people in his position. There are reasons behind that design choice.

D&D wizards aren't wearing armor because of silly D&D design decisions.

I think it touches on a valid point though. Someone mentioned much earlier a Forgotten Realms character who has a cleavage window in her chainmail... because it was designed by an incredibly vain sorceress that the character looks more or less identical do, and it is powerfully enchanted, and thus more protective and more comfortable than the full plate the character had been wearing for most of the book until that point.

magical armor is a thing, especially for spellcasters, which is part of the reason I'm slightly more inclined to let explicitly magically powerful characters get away with things like that. They probably don't need the actual armor anyway, although I'm still going to look at the art oddly if whatever other garments theyre wearing look uncomfortable to wear.

[Donnadogsoth]

Exalted has brutal infection rules for mortals. Sometimes, magic makes it that way for heroes and gods as well, especially in the case of Final Viridescence, which resembles death by extreme radiation poisoning.

As I said, not in my experience. Never played Exalted. Neither have most, probably.

Good. He was a hack, anyway; his framework tells us more about his own problems than it does about any general human condition.

Never made a Freudian slip? Freud was the Opener of the Way.

I've been to several funerals but no weddings, so death is readily apparent as a motivator. This isn't about that, though, but about the presentation of death and sexuality as all-powerful or somehow complementary. You know what? MRSA isn't sexy. Getting your guts shot or torn out isn't sexy. Going to funerals doesn't really feel arousing, either.

Ever heard of Dracula? Or WWII bomber nose art?

...than spending a fortune on metal underwear. Which probably wouldn't even be commissioned by a smith unless you paid another fortune as a bribe, hush money, whatever.

That would make for a good story.

[CITATION NEEDED], and big time, because I came here from planet White Wolf/Onyx Path. Maybe you just need to look harder and stop defending bikini armor all the time.

TRPG gamerdom has been male:female 50:50 from the get-go?

Really? Even men who aren't het?

Now you're being difficult.

Why the dang blasted hell do you need cheesecake when the internet is bursting with porn?

Do you ever just look at your wife and admire her rather than rip her clothes off and have at it?

[Donnadogsoth]

All of them?

Do you also avoid movies and TV? Because if that is your opinion of all video games everywhere, you really should steer clear of those two mediums as well.

Most of it, yes.

[SaurOps]

As I said, not in my experience. Never played Exalted. Neither have most, probably.

It's probably not the only one.

Never made a Freudian slip? Freud was the Opener of the Way.

Freud got handed off to a wetnurse and projected himself onto everyone. Feel free to make another joke about that, but it's not on me.

Ever heard of Dracula?

One never stops hearing about Dracula, but it was a Victorian shamefest from a different world, and yet also a kind of safe space for vicarious kink, since it's fiction.

Or WWII bomber nose art?

Some people like to practice art whenever they can so as to not get rusty. However, this still isn't the kind of thing that you're saying, because you just cited a work of fiction and something that people do at base, between alternated hurrying on for missions, waiting for missions, and the rare moment when sleep is possible. One does not typically paint when on an actual bombing run, and certainly not on the nose of the plane.

That would make for a good story.

An exceedingly short one, most likely. The concept is sweaty.

TRPG gamerdom has been male:female 50:50 from the get-go?

I doubt that it's been very male-dominated over the past 25 years, at least.

Now you're being difficult.

Is that what you call it when people remind you that large cross sections of people don't actually share your views?

Do you ever just look at your wife and admire her rather than rip her clothes off and have at it?

That's specifically hardcore porn. Softcore nudes, model shots, etc. also exist under the same banner of porn. So, again, one wonders, why is it that a non-porn product has to have porn in it?

[Max_Killjoy]

Freud got handed off to a wetnurse and projected himself onto everyone. Feel free to make another joke about that, but it's not on me.

Indeed, the most "insightful" thing about Freud's work is what it tells us about the man himself.

Sadly, a century or so later, there are still "professionals" who take his work seriously and inflict Freud's deeply personal issues onto the entire human population.

[Ashiel]

I don't care what it does in D&D rules. D&D is not the whole of gaming, and even less of the whole of overlapping genres being discussed.

Which is why it was accented with humor, and not the main point. Just a side point noting that, hey, in the context of D&D art (which the thread was about) there are actually benefits for wearing less armor. I also already answered your protest concerning the D&D-centric nature of the thread, and so I'm wondering if you missed it or are merely being obtuse.

Jack Sparrow is in a setting where there are firearms, and water to fall into, based on a time period when armor had largely fallen out of use for people in his position. There are reasons behind that design choice.

Thanks for making my point for me, chief. It's a design choice, because armor wasn't fashionable. And while armor had fallen out of use, it wasn't because it didn't work. Armor could stop a pistol and a sword. Yet it wasn't worn for various reasons, none of which trump "avoid dying" (mostly because it was expensive). So by your logic, everyone not wearing armor was an idiot. I mean, it's not like you couldn't design armor that could be discarded if you were to fall overboard (a vest with metal plates in it would be easy enough to get out of if you were to fall into the ocean).

It all comes down to the design choice, as you state. Your argument was less armor or no armor, when superior armor is available, is nothing more than stupidity, suicide, and snuff fetish bait. Well...then that makes the pirates buffoons as well. Because it's not like the armor couldn't be made. It's not like it couldn't be commissioned. It just wasn't fashionable at the time.

I'm just enjoying the hypocrisy. It reeks of it in this thread. There's no difference between fighting these guys dressed like this or dressed like this, other than your own preference.

Please continue demonstrating my points for me. It's very helpful of you.

D&D wizards aren't wearing armor because of silly D&D design decisions.

Yeah, that having the benefit of walking around in scale mail armor with nary a belt to latch or burden to bear for hours on end is pretty nice isn't it?

[ImNotTrevor]

l
Freud got handed off to a wetnurse and projected himself onto everyone. Feel free to make another joke about that, but it's not on me.

Actually, Freud originally theorized that his patients were severely sexually abused. The science board at the time deemed the mere thought abhorrent and probably wrong for that reason.
So he came up with something stupider.
That story doesn't get told as much because it makes psychology look bad, and they have enough trouble being called a pseudo-science or soft-science.

One never stops hearing about Dracula, but it was a Victorian shamefest from a different world, and yet also a kind of safe space for vicarious kink, since it's fiction.

Why is the 80's, a world now 30 years old, less of a different world than the victorian era?

Some people like to practice art whenever they can so as to not get rusty. However, this still isn't the kind of thing that you're saying, because you just cited a work of fiction and something that people do at base, between alternated hurrying on for missions, waiting for missions, and the rare moment when sleep is possible. One does not typically paint when on an actual bombing run, and certainly not on the nose of the plane.

Put those goalposts back, please. This is entirely tangential to the point.

I doubt that it's been very male-dominated over the past 25 years, at least.

According to the little and difficult-to-find market data that I'm not going to mine for a third time just for this silliness,
TRPGs as of 2008 were still heavily male-dominated. (80/20)
Granted that is 9-year-old data at this point, but looking at their marketing stratrgies will reveal the target market based on who is most likely to buy it:
Mostly males ages 12-30.
Marketing, etc.

Is that what you call it when people remind you that large cross sections of people don't actually share your views?

Homosexual males are not the target market for scantily clad females, in what I'm sure is the shocker of the century.
In the second shocker of the century, 3-5% of the male population is not a significant enough portion to merit throwing in nonstop asterisks.

That's specifically hardcore porn. Softcore nudes, model shots, etc. also exist under the same banner of porn. So, again, one wonders, why is it that a non-porn product has to have porn in it?

By this metric, all sexual imagery is porn.
So my question is this:
Are sexy depictions of women allowed at all outside of porn? Or is it flat-out forbidden no matter who is producing it?

[Arbane]

I doubt that it's been very male-dominated over the past 25 years, at least.

Are you kidding? Gaming continues to be mostly a hobby for white male nerds, and my time on the internet gives me the impression that a LOT of female gamers have at least one horror story that ends with '....and I'm amazed I ever played again'. Which strongly implies there are a lot more stories we're not hearing that end with '...and I never played again;.

[Ashiel]

Are you kidding? Gaming continues to be mostly a hobby for white male nerds, and my time on the internet gives me the impression that a LOT of female gamers have at least one horror story that ends with '....and I'm amazed I ever played again'. Which strongly implies there are a lot more stories we're not hearing that end with '...and I never played again;.

I'd hazard to say that a pretty decent pile of the women in the community are, or were, also male nerds.

[Max_Killjoy]

Which is why it was accented with humor, and not the main point. Just a side point noting that, hey, in the context of D&D art (which the thread was about) there are actually benefits for wearing less armor. I also already answered your protest concerning the D&D-centric nature of the thread, and so I'm wondering if you missed it or are merely being obtuse.

Sticking a smiley face after every other line doesn't make your comments any less wrong, any less smug, or any less insulting.

Thanks for making my point for me, chief. It's a design choice, because armor wasn't fashionable. And while armor had fallen out of use, it wasn't because it didn't work. Armor could stop a pistol and a sword. Yet it wasn't worn for various reasons, none of which trump "avoid dying" (mostly because it was expensive). So by your logic, everyone not wearing armor was an idiot. I mean, it's not like you couldn't design armor that could be discarded if you were to fall overboard (a vest with metal plates in it would be easy enough to get out of if you were to fall into the ocean).

It all comes down to the design choice, as you state. Your argument was less armor or no armor, when superior armor is available, is nothing more than stupidity, suicide, and snuff fetish bait. Well...then that makes the pirates buffoons as well. Because it's not like the armor couldn't be made. It's not like it couldn't be commissioned. It just wasn't fashionable at the time.

I'm just enjoying the hypocrisy. It reeks of it in this thread. There's no difference between fighting these guys dressed like this or dressed like this, other than your own preference

It had nothing to do with "fashion", and the only place your point was "proven" was in your own head. People in that and other time periods weren't making armor decisions based on fashion, they were making the same sorts of cost-benefit tradeoffs that real people have always made. Our ancestors were not idiots.

It doesn't come down to "design choice", it comes down to depicting characters as something other than fools, and treating them as something other than symbolic iconography.

But I've come to realize that this argument is pointless, as you're just going to keep circling back to this blinkered notion that everything is about subjective personal preference and aesthetics, that form dominates function, and that art is just about symbols. I guess I shouldn't be shocked, given the corrosive influence of postmodernism.

And all the while, you're going to accuse anyone who won't jump on your little train of being a "hypocrite" simply because they're looking for something more substantive than your "aesthetics uber alles" approach can deal with.


/plonk

[2D8HP]

D&D wizards aren't wearing armor because of silly D&D design decisions.

IIRC, an issue of The Dragon in the late 1970's or eary '80's (which is when I bought my D&D stuff) explained how more Iron than a dagger close to the spell-caster interferes with the spell, which has at least some basis in folklore.

TRPG gamerdom has been male:female 50:50 from the get-go?

My Dad's girlfriend, and her friend (both women) played D&D in the 1970's (so all two of the adults I knew who had played D&D outside of conventions, or behind the counter at Gambit and Games of Berkeley were women), but most of the gamers I knew in the 1980's were overwhelmingly male (and mostly boys not men, and if you still count early 20-something young men as boys, as I do now, overwhelmingly boys).

IIRC, it was after Shadowrun, and Vampire came out that girls and women entered the hobby in any numbers, and I saw them at the table much (though I did have a women DM for D&D before than, and as I recall she really wanted to play Ars Magica instead, whreas I really wanted to play Pendragon instead, which she decided was "sexist" because they were different rules for "Knights" and "Ladies"), Cyberpunk players were all still male as I recall. For the record, of '90's RPG's that I played, the most fun was Shadowrun which had a "mixed" table, I didn't like Vampire which had a mixed table, and Cyberpunk was just so boring, but if it matters the tables I played at were more mixed racially for Cyberpunk (and D&D before that), but since all male less mixed by gender.

The 21st century is better than the '90's gamewise in that they are people willing to play D&D again, and better than the '80's and '90's in that people will play Pendragon besides me (including women, but they play as "Knights" not "Ladies", thank you Brienne of Tarth!).

In general the tables that I've played at that have women are more fun (they can quote Monty Python besides Holy Grail), SinceI don't take polls, I don't know if images of "chainmail bikinis" scare women off (I would guess not as much as being told to play cleric/healers does, the same as the boys), but if not having those images will bring more women to the tables than sure drop them, but in '70's D&D I can only remember one "chainmail bikini"

The "bikinis" seemed more like an '80's and '90's thing to me.

[Max_Killjoy]

IIRC, an issue of The Dragon in the late 1970's or eary '80's (which is when I bought my D&D stuff) explained how more Iron than a dagger close to the spell-caster interferes with the spell, which has at least some basis in folklore.

1) Seems like reverse-design, coming up with a reason to justify the aesthetic decision.
2) I'd like to see this folklore.
3) Bronze.
4) Spellcasting classes that can wear armor go back quite a ways in D&D.

[Talakeal]

2) I'd like to see this folklore.

I have always heard that iron contains "anti-magic" properties. A quick Wikipedia search yields this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_in_folklore

I know it isn't exactly a reputable source, but it should serve as an adequate starting point for further research.

[scalyfreak]

1) Seems like reverse-design, coming up with a reason to justify the aesthetic decision.
2) I'd like to see this folklore.
3) Bronze.
4) Spellcasting classes that can wear armor go back quite a ways in D&D.

Cold iron repels fey, ghosts, evil spirits, and evil magic. The reason hanging a horse shoe above your door brings good luck is it keeps those things out. Including witches.

If you want to research more, I'm certain google can point you towards one or two reputable sources among all the white noise caused by the many ghost hunter websites out there. Or you can ask someone who grew up in the northern half of Europe, and who has an active interest in the folklore and oral traditions of their homeland.

Personally, I think making a leap from that concept to declaring that a wizard can't cast spells if they wear too much weapons and armor is ridiculous. For one, it implies the wizard and his/her spells are evil, which most PC in D&D aren't. For another, most weapons and armor are made of steel, not cold iron. Most likely, they wanted an excuse to force wizard characters to dress in robes, and this was an easy way to do it.

[Ashiel]

Sticking a smiley face after every other line doesn't make your comments any less wrong, any less smug, or any less insulting.

That's cool man. Doesn't need to. I'm not particularly worried about offending people who go out of their way to be offended on behalf of figments.

It had nothing to do with "fashion", and the only place your point was "proven" was in your own head. People in that and other time periods weren't making armor decisions based on fashion, they were making the same sorts of cost-benefit tradeoffs that real people have always made. Our ancestors were not idiots.

This is a simple definition miscommunication. You do know that fashion means and is used to describe things other than just simply trying to look pretty, right? Such as particular customs or societal norms? To say "armor fell out of fashion" isn't to say that enough runway models weren't packing steel, it's to say that it was no longer widely popular.

As to proving points, that's not hard. On one hand you act as though fighting folks with little armor is nothing less that suicidal stupidity, assured death, snuff porn in motion. Yet on the other hand, you seem fine to dismiss such notions when applied to Captain Jack Sparrow or anyone else, despite the fact they are never in any less danger. Ergo, it's very easy to show it's just a case of smoke and mirrors.

Nobody whined about Aragorn's ranger outfit, even though it's not armor. He actually puts on some armor when he's about to be fighting in a siege against untold numbers of orcs and not moving around, but nobody complains that he's just snuff bait the other 90% of the time he's out adventuring and slaughtering orcs.

Hypocrisy. Get it? It's apparently good for the gander but not for the goose. Either it's true all the time or it's not true at all. So if you admit that Captain Jack Sparrow or Aragorn aren't snuff bait, you by proxy admit that neither is the barbarian who wear's boots, a loincloth, and a wolfskin cloak.

So that beggars the question, what's your real motivation? Could it be that you just don't like the idea? Maybe it messes with your sense of artistic vision? Maybe you think it's silly? You're very comfortable branding characters (and presumably players by proxy) idiots, and artists ignorant, yet your justification for such is so easily dispelled with just a few images and comparisons. Oh d-dear, I do hope that you're not offended by my rejection of your claims that the preferences of others are born out of ignorance and foolishness. I might not be able to sleep at night with such a heavy burden on my conscience.

It doesn't come down to "design choice", it comes down to depicting characters as something other than fools, and treating them as something other than symbolic iconography.

If someone wants to depict their character as a fool, power to them.

But I've come to realize that this argument is pointless, as you're just going to keep circling back to this blinkered notion that everything is about subjective personal preference and aesthetics, that form dominates function, and that art is just about symbols. I guess I shouldn't be shocked, given the corrosive influence of postmodernism.

Oh that's rich man. I absolutely hate post modernism. I think it's a scourge on the world. I also realize that what I'm talking about isn't post modernism. Unless you think Raphael Slaying the Demon is post modern artistic drivel. In which case, sure I'm on board with that then. Just because I find fault with your reasoning doesn't mean I find fault with reason.

And all the while, you're going to accuse anyone who won't jump on your little train of being a "hypocrite" simply because they're looking for something more substantive than your "aesthetics uber alles" approach can deal with.


/plonk

C'est la vie.

[SaurOps]

Are you kidding? Gaming continues to be mostly a hobby for white male nerds, and my time on the internet gives me the impression that a LOT of female gamers have at least one horror story that ends with '....and I'm amazed I ever played again'. Which strongly implies there are a lot more stories we're not hearing that end with '...and I never played again;.

Or that they kept playing and aren't in venues that you frequent?

Actually, Freud originally theorized that his patients were severely sexually abused. The science board at the time deemed the mere thought abhorrent and probably wrong for that reason.
So he came up with something stupider.
That story doesn't get told as much because it makes psychology look bad, and they have enough trouble being called a pseudo-science or soft-science.

Must be why they're going for neuroscience over psychoanalysis nowadays.

Why is the 80's, a world now 30 years old, less of a different world than the victorian era?

What, exactly, are you trying to do with this question? The 1980s are well within the Information Age, containing many different facets of life that people from a century before would never have been able to imagine. That's a rather tall hurdle.

Put those goalposts back, please. This is entirely tangential to the point.

I'm doubting that there is a point to be had in insisting that I accept psychoanalysis by someone without any apparent accreditations to begin with. Especially not with what it was used to try and justify...

According to the little and difficult-to-find market data that I'm not going to mine for a third time just for this silliness,
TRPGs as of 2008 were still heavily male-dominated. (80/20)
Granted that is 9-year-old data at this point, but looking at their marketing stratrgies will reveal the target market based on who is most likely to buy it:
Mostly males ages 12-30.
Marketing, etc.

And another look at marketing strategy reveals that Lifeforce flopped in spite of having Mathilda May wear nothing for most of the movie, and that it was a gender-flipped Dracula with space vampires. It was the death of the Cannon Group, which had only ever eked along slightly making B-movie schlock, on account of making less than $12 million.

Lifeforce isn't the only example of its kind, either. People want to be entertained, not get sucked into the creator's creepy magical realm, and the top-grossing films seem to bear that out.

Homosexual males are not the target market for scantily clad females, in what I'm sure is the shocker of the century.
In the second shocker of the century, 3-5% of the male population is not a significant enough portion to merit throwing in nonstop asterisks.

The statement, as originally cast, was a broad-sweeping generalization of a population much larger than the TRPG industry. Which suggests that if the TRPG industry wanted to actually reach out and grow, it would cut it out with ridiculous chain-link bikini illustrations and stick with what would make sense. Sticking with the Metal Bikini fixation would doom it to relegation, much like the Cannon group, above.

By this metric, all sexual imagery is porn.

No, by this metric, art meant specifically to titillate is porn. The other side of the argument seemed oddly fixated on keeping porn-like elements in places where they didn't belong, like on a battlefield. The entire mess with Stekel's theory of Eros and Thanatos over the past few posts revolved around this. And it doesn't make any sense to place the two together, again, because not wanting to die is unisex. So you wear armor instead of "armor" instead of, to put another spin on Donnadogsoth's patronizing statement about "admiring your wife", the equivalent of knowing that there's a knife fight about to break out that you can't avoid and making your wife dress up as Leia after being captured by Jabba the Hut in RotJ. Pointless, dumb, and an all-around bad move that would likely get her killed.

So my question is this:
Are sexy depictions of women allowed at all outside of porn? Or is it flat-out forbidden no matter who is producing it?

Boundaries are often necessary in life and art, so that one form doesn't have to split its attention between two purposes. Trying to present a serious fight scene while also including pinups or porn is typically going to make the end product suffer in both respects. Lots of people probably think that they can pull it off, but in the end, trying to pull double duty here is an abyss that consumes them all.

[Max_Killjoy]

I think it touches on a valid point though. Someone mentioned much earlier a Forgotten Realms character who has a cleavage window in her chainmail... because it was designed by an incredibly vain sorceress that the character looks more or less identical do, and it is powerfully enchanted, and thus more protective and more comfortable than the full plate the character had been wearing for most of the book until that point.

That's a very specific case, and I can't tell if it's lampshading the trope, or just the author making an excuse for what they wanted to do anyway.

magical armor is a thing, especially for spellcasters, which is part of the reason I'm slightly more inclined to let explicitly magically powerful characters get away with things like that. They probably don't need the actual armor anyway, although I'm still going to look at the art oddly if whatever other garments theyre wearing look uncomfortable to wear.

Uncomfortable, and/or impractical for "adventuring"... and "just happens" to be revealing or otherwise blatantly provocative.

[Ashiel]

Cold iron repels fey, ghosts, evil spirits, and evil magic. The reason hanging a horse shoe above your door brings good luck is it keeps those things out. Including witches.

If you want to research more, I'm certain google can point you towards one or two reputable sources among all the white noise caused by the many ghost hunter websites out there. Or you can ask someone who grew up in the northern half of Europe, and who has an active interest in the folklore and oral traditions of their homeland.

Personally, I think making a leap from that concept to declaring that a wizard can't cast spells if they wear too much weapons and armor is ridiculous. For one, it implies the wizard and his/her spells are evil, which most PC in D&D aren't. For another, most weapons and armor are made of steel, not cold iron. Most likely, they wanted an excuse to force wizard characters to dress in robes, and this was an easy way to do it.

I was under the impression that only druids had any issue with metals, and it was the weight and restriction of armor that made it harder to cast spells. Which is why you suffer a little spell failure from things like leather armor, but not much. Apparently wizards need to be able to perform elaborate dance moves to properly cast spells.

[Mike_G]

Thanks for making my point for me, chief. It's a design choice, because armor wasn't fashionable. And while armor had fallen out of use, it wasn't because it didn't work. Armor could stop a pistol and a sword. Yet it wasn't worn for various reasons, none of which trump "avoid dying" (mostly because it was expensive). So by your logic, everyone not wearing armor was an idiot. I mean, it's not like you couldn't design armor that could be discarded if you were to fall overboard (a vest with metal plates in it would be easy enough to get out of if you were to fall into the ocean).

Actually, armor fell out of use for lots of reasons. Armies got bigger, so cost of equipping them was more of an issue. Cannon got common, and even muskets will defeat many types of armor, so the relative benefit went down as the cost went up. And full plate weighs a lot, tires you out, and cuts your vision. Worth it if it makes you invulnerable, less worth it if it only makes you kinda invulnerable.

Falling overboard in any degree if armor is bad, and it's tough to unbuckle straps under water before you die. Fishermen have drown because they couldn't get their boots off in time after they filled with water and dragged them down. Can't imagine struggling out of a breastplate. WWII soldiers drowned on amphibious landings being pulled down by gear which was more easily ditched than a mail hauberk.

I totally see the argument against armor on ship to ship combat.

I'm just enjoying the hypocrisy. It reeks of it in this thread. There's no difference between fighting these guys dressed like this or dressed like this, other than your own preference.

Again, I see what you're saying about fantasy having a lot of unarmored characters who don't get the hate that the chainmail bikini gets, but in your example, they first guy is better protected from many weapon. Maybe not the Orc axe. But light slashing swords, yes, a bit. In the Crimea, the British cavalry complained that their sabres wouldn't cut through the heavy coats of the Russian Cossacks. Not even metal, just heavy cloth. They could stab through, but not hack through them. They could have sliced Conan or Red Sonya to the bone.

Again, I say art is what you want to look at, so if you like Princess of Mars style naked warriors, that's fine.

I like the idea of warriors that would want something between their favorite skin and the slashing blades. I think naked sword fighters of either sex are silly. And I do think that art where every male is covered head to toe and every woman is wearing a handful of glitter a little sexist. I prefer the "We haven't invented clothes yet" worlds of Frank Frazetta where everybody is in a furry or leather or metal Speedo to the "only men's armor covers the sternum" art.

[Keltest]

That's a very specific case, and I can't tell if it's lampshading the trope, or just the author making an excuse for what they wanted to do anyway.




Uncomfortable, and/or impractical for "adventuring"... and "just happens" to be revealing or otherwise blatantly provocative.

Its probably both.

Anyway, once you get super magic involved, "impractical" stops being a thing. Who cares about being sworded when your skin is protected by a magical force field? Who cares about sunburn when you cant be affected by the sun? Who cares about dehydration when you can create water by waving your hand? If they have all that and are also vain enough to run around in revealing or provocative clothing, that's at least some characterization on top of the titillation.

[scalyfreak]

I was under the impression that only druids had any issue with metals, and it was the weight and restriction of armor that made it harder to cast spells. Which is why you suffer a little spell failure from things like leather armor, but not much. Apparently wizards need to be able to perform elaborate dance moves to properly cast spells.

It depends on the system, obviously.

I always prefer the ones that state that if you're a spell casting class you don't get the full benefit of armor, or even necessarily help from it, simply because you haven't spent most of your life learning how to move about in one. You have studied other things, and a heavy, clumsy, suit of metal that makes it hard to breath and move, just will not give you any advantages. So you decide not to wear one.

And you have a whole new appreciation for the group's knight and mercenary who occasionally do back flips and effortless sprinting in their respective suits of armor.

[Max_Killjoy]

Its probably both.

Anyway, once you get super magic involved, "impractical" stops being a thing. Who cares about being sworded when your skin is protected by a magical force field? Who cares about sunburn when you cant be affected by the sun? Who cares about dehydration when you can create water by waving your hand? If they have all that and are also vain enough to run around in revealing or provocative clothing, that's at least some characterization on top of the titillation.

I think we can look beyond settings/systems that have "super magic".

[Max_Killjoy]

Actually, armor fell out of use for lots of reasons. Armies got bigger, so cost of equipping them was more of an issue. Cannon got common, and even muskets will defeat many types of armor, so the relative benefit went down as the cost went up. And full plate weighs a lot, tires you out, and cuts your vision. Worth it if it makes you invulnerable, less worth it if it only makes you kinda invulnerable.

Falling overboard in any degree if armor is bad, and it's tough to unbuckle straps under water before you die. Fishermen have drown because they couldn't get their boots off in time after they filled with water and dragged them down. Can't imagine struggling out of a breastplate. WWII soldiers drowned on amphibious landings being pulled down by gear which was more easily ditched than a mail hauberk.

I totally see the argument against armor on ship to ship combat.



Again, I see what you're saying about fantasy having a lot of unarmored characters who don't get the hate that the chainmail bikini gets, but in your example, they first guy is better protected from many weapon. Maybe not the Orc axe. But light slashing swords, yes, a bit. In the Crimea, the British cavalry complained that their sabres wouldn't cut through the heavy coats of the Russian Cossacks. Not even metal, just heavy cloth. They could stab through, but not hack through them. They could have sliced Conan or Red Sonya to the bone.

Again, I say art is what you want to look at, so if you like Princess of Mars style naked warriors, that's fine.

I like the idea of warriors that would want something between their favorite skin and the slashing blades. I think naked sword fighters of either sex are silly. And I do think that art where every male is covered head to toe and every woman is wearing a handful of glitter a little sexist. I prefer the "We haven't invented clothes yet" worlds of Frank Frazetta where everybody is in a furry or leather or metal Speedo to the "only men's armor covers the sternum" art.

sarcasm

But don't you see, none of the very practical, functional, factual considerations you listed off matter at all... it doesn't matter if several different unarmored characters from radically different circumstances are a completely apples-to-lugnuts comparison that only works when entirely stripped of context... the choice of whether or not to wear armor, and what sort of armor to wear, all came down to nothing but fashion for the people of all those various times and places.

And any objection someone might have to character gussied up in dysfunctional armor is just their personal aesthetics, since there are no objective or functional reasons behind anything anyone ever does or thinks.

/sarcasm

[Keltest]

I think we can look beyond settings/systems that have "super magic".

Maybe, although I think that most settings that have magic will have some variation of "here is some basic traveling magic to replace all that traveling equipment and learning you would otherwise need."

An anti-sunburn spell, for example, seems fairly mundane. In D&D for example, Endure Elements is a first level spell. Armor spells being rarer, but also a common staple of the combat wizard.

[Ashiel]

Actually, armor fell out of use for lots of reasons. Armies got bigger, so cost of equipping them was more of an issue. Cannon got common, and even muskets will defeat many types of armor, so the relative benefit went down as the cost went up. And full plate weighs a lot, tires you out, and cuts your vision. Worth it if it makes you invulnerable, less worth it if it only makes you kinda invulnerable.

Falling overboard in any degree if armor is bad, and it's tough to unbuckle straps under water before you die. Fishermen have drown because they couldn't get their boots off in time after they filled with water and dragged them down. Can't imagine struggling out of a breastplate. WWII soldiers drowned on amphibious landings being pulled down by gear which was more easily ditched than a mail hauberk.

I totally see the argument against armor on ship to ship combat.

I was mostly referring to the fact that armor fell out of fashion because of things like the cost, not that armor stopped working. A few iron plates in a vest can protect against archaic firearms. Yet people didn't bother. So why didn't people bother? For lots of reasons I'm sure, but they could have tried to use armor if they wanted. Especially pirates who aren't required to meet military uniform standards and wouldn't need to march in them. But they didn't, 'cause either it didn't matter to them or they had other priorities.

Still not snuff bait.

Again, I see what you're saying about fantasy having a lot of unarmored characters who don't get the hate that the chainmail bikini gets, but in your example, they first guy is better protected from many weapon. Maybe not the Orc axe. But light slashing swords, yes, a bit. In the Crimea, the British cavalry complained that their sabres wouldn't cut through the heavy coats of the Russian Cossacks. Not even metal, just heavy cloth. They could stab through, but not hack through them. They could have sliced Conan or Red Sonya to the bone.

For sure. But as long as the clothes aren't functioning as some sort of armor (and a heavy cassock could probably double as a padded armor equivalent at least, similar to silken ceremonial armor in PF), there's no functional difference. And if there's no functional difference, it comes down to aesthetic appeal.

Again, I say art is what you want to look at, so if you like Princess of Mars style naked warriors, that's fine.

I like the idea of warriors that would want something between their favorite skin and the slashing blades. I think naked sword fighters of either sex are silly. And I do think that art where every male is covered head to toe and every woman is wearing a handful of glitter a little sexist. I prefer the "We haven't invented clothes yet" worlds of Frank Frazetta where everybody is in a furry or leather or metal Speedo to the "only men's armor covers the sternum" art.

Yeah, ditto. I generally prefer equal opportunity wardrobes, and generally like characters with lots of gear and outfits and stuff. But that's just me, and sometimes I see pictures that are appealing even outside my usual artistic preference. For example, here's some art I've used for character potraits on my sheets.

Image #1
Image #2
Image #3
Image #4
Image #5
Image #6
Image #7
Image #8
Image #9
Image #10

Doesn't mean I have a problem with this portrait, or think that the character (or player) is an idiot, the artist ignorant, or that anything about it screams that she's snuff bait. In fact, viewing it just makes me want to make a badass barbarian lady who wrecks faces.

[Ashiel]

sarcasm

But don't you see, none of the very practical, functional, factual considerations you listed off matter at all... it doesn't matter if several different unarmored characters from radically different circumstances are a completely apples-to-lugnuts comparison that only works when entirely stripped of context... the choice of whether or not to wear armor, and what sort of armor to wear, all came down to nothing but fashion for the people of all those various times and places.

And any objection someone might have to character gussied up in dysfunctional armor is just their personal aesthetics, since there are no objective or functional reasons behind anything anyone ever does or thinks.

/sarcasm

Context. Yeah. That thing. Mmmhmm.

[Vitruviansquid]

Again, I say art is what you want to look at, so if you like Princess of Mars style naked warriors, that's fine.

I like the idea of warriors that would want something between their favorite skin and the slashing blades. I think naked sword fighters of either sex are silly. And I do think that art where every male is covered head to toe and every woman is wearing a handful of glitter a little sexist. I prefer the "We haven't invented clothes yet" worlds of Frank Frazetta where everybody is in a furry or leather or metal Speedo to the "only men's armor covers the sternum" art.

Ding ding ding ding

People in this thread continue to argue the usefulness of armor as if it matters.

It doesn't.

Not every piece of art wants to nor needs to be realistic.
Wanting to look at art with realistic armor is a simply one out of many possible preferences.

[2D8HP]

Cold iron repels fey, ghosts, evil spirits, and evil magic. The reason hanging a horse shoe above your door brings good luck is it keeps those things out. Including witches....
...Most likely, they wanted an excuse to force wizard characters to dress in robes, and this was an easy way to do it.

Like most of early D&D, it was ad hoc, so yes.

Also I should have said "folklore as filtered through the stories of Poul Anderson".

I was under the impression that only druids had any issue with metals, and it was the weight and restriction of armor that made it harder to cast spells. Which is why you suffer a little spell failure from things like leather armor, but not much. Apparently wizards need to be able to perform elaborate dance moves to properly cast spells.

Druids in 5e, 0e and 1e were different.

Originally Elves could act as either "Fighting-Men" or "Magic-Users", but not at the same time, then with supplements sb d th AD&D PHB they became the potential "gish" that could wear armor and cast spells, while humans couldn't, which only made sense (sort of) if you assume that all Elves used "Elven Chain" (ala Anderson).

[Donnadogsoth]

Freud got handed off to a wetnurse and projected himself onto everyone. Feel free to make another joke about that, but it's not on me.

Freud popularised transference, sublimation, freudian slips, the unconscious, the libido, and the importance of dreams. He didn't have all the answers and some of his offerings have become cultish, but that's not the point.

One never stops hearing about Dracula, but it was a Victorian shamefest from a different world, and yet also a kind of safe space for vicarious kink, since it's fiction.

What about Hammer Horror? What about Hellraiser? What about Evil Dead? Sex and violence combined go way back, and on into unspeakable real life instances of war going back to the Greeks and beyond, I'm sure. There's no hope in trying to deny the connection between eros and thanatos. What about the S&M cult? Sex is, after all, the original method of escaping the power of death through one's progeny.

Some people like to practice art whenever they can so as to not get rusty. However, this still isn't the kind of thing that you're saying, because you just cited a work of fiction and something that people do at base, between alternated hurrying on for missions, waiting for missions, and the rare moment when sleep is possible. One does not typically paint when on an actual bombing run, and certainly not on the nose of the plane.

I don't know what this means. Allied bombers often had posed, buxom women depicted on their nose art, if the WWII documentaries I've seen are any indication.

Is that what you call it when people remind you that large cross sections of people don't actually share your views?

Are you saying that 2-5% of the population not liking cheesecake is why we can't have cheesecake?

That's specifically hardcore porn. Softcore nudes, model shots, etc. also exist under the same banner of porn. So, again, one wonders, why is it that a non-porn product has to have porn in it?

Are you saying that we can't have fantasy cheesecake because non-fantasy soft porn exists?

[Ashiel]

Ding ding ding ding

People in this thread continue to argue the usefulness of armor as if it matters.

It doesn't.

Not every piece of art wants to nor needs to be realistic.
Wanting to look at art with realistic armor is a simply one out of many possible preferences.

Indeed. I've played D&D with a lot of people. I've frequently sat down in groups that look like this.
Player #1
Player #2
Player #3
Player #4
Player #5
Player #6

They were all doing it right.