ArmoredSaint's page

I'm inclined to agree with the position that armor is represented as being too weak.

I'm a 1st-level Fighter in a breastplate with a shield and some Dexterity, and an entry-level basic Goblin is hitting me on a 12+.

Not good.

Feels too much like D&D 4e; it seems like everything in that game hit you on a 12+ if you were in heavy armor.

I'm not seeing the appeal of the O-Yoroi over full plate...

I still don't see any good reason that acquisition of new spells should be automatic. I miss the days of mages having to roll to learn each new spell they got; it helped rein in their power somewhat. I wish the rule hadn't been discarded in later editions...

Spellcasters will dominate only if the DM allows them to.

I very tightly control which spells they have access to. Where does it say that a spellcaster gets to have whatever spell he wants just because he gains a level?

Make them fight hard to earn each and every single spell they gain, and don't let them have the game-breaking ones at all. No flight, wish, etc. No access to spells that affect metal for druids and such. They already get to warp reality--I see nothing wrong with applying a few sensible restrictions to that ability.

I enjoy playing heavily-armored knight-types, though I don't find playing Paladins much fun.

I definitely have to have the armour, though. Gaming just isn't any fun at all without armor. I don't get the appeal of the light-fighter types; that sort of thing is dreadfully overdone in recent fiction and media anyway--everybody wants to play a ninja or something like one. No thanks!

Historically, by the way, the English longbows were far superiour to both crossbows and firearms. Accurate volley firing of up to 200 yards, armor piercing arrows, and the ability to fire just about every other second made it the top method of combat. Armored knights were powerless against it...

This is coming dangerously close to longbow fanboyism, which is very nearly as irritating as katana fanboyism.

Remember that Agincourt is the last of the great English longbow victories. It did not prove as effective against advancing armour technology. Plate armour won the conflict with the longbow. Sure, there was a back-and-forth, and at times the longbow even had the upper hand at a few points in the 14th century, but ultimately plate armour prevailed. It took the advent of effective firearms to drive armour from the battlefield. William Turner, writing hudreds of years later in the late 17th century argues that longbow use should be revived because, "...arrows would do more mischief than formerly they did: since neither men nor horses are so well armed now to resist them, as in former ages they used to be." Essentially, he believed that a force of longbowmen would be effective in battle since they can shoot more quickly than musketeers, but also because soldiers would be vulnerable to the arrows precisely because they no longer made a practice of wearing armour into battle. He acknowledges that armour defeated arrows and drove the longbow from its once-exalted position on the battlefield.

The longbow won at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt simply because the English got to pick the battlefield and made the French fight on their terms, which included placing their longbowmen behind substantial field fortifications. What conclusion should we draw from the results of other battles in which English archers were ridden down by the very heavy cavalry whose bane they supposedly were? In the batle of Patay, that's just what happened. Where was the longbow's armour-piercing power then?

I submit the following passage from Dr. Michael Lacy's paper on the Effectiveness of Medieval Knightly Armour. This portion deals with the battle of Flodden (1513) wherein the Scots fielded a force clad in the latest plate infantry armours mass-produced on the Continent:

"...the longbow, so decisive in the wars of the last century, was defeated by the heavy German armour of the Scottish front ranks; a contemporary accounts describe them as "most assuredly harnesed" in armour, and that they "abode the most dangerous shot of arrows, which sore them annoyed but yet except it hit them in some bare place, did them no hurt." Bishop Ruthal, writing 10 days after the battle remarked "they were so well cased in armour that the arrows did them no harm, and were such large and stout men that one would not fall when four or five bills struck them."

That's right, contemporary English chroniclers reveal that the longbow did not pierce armour. Other accounts from Poitiers and Brouwershaven (1426) tell similar stories, to say nothing of reports of battles from the English dynastic struggle known as the Wars of the Roses in which both sides turned the longbow on each other, in which it is specially pointed out that Lords Clifford and Dacre were not vulnerable to arrows until they had lifted their visors to drink or shout or breathe.

More near the time of Agincourt, here is a passage from the biography of Don Pero Niño, a Spanish privateer, who raided the English coast a couple of years before Agincourt:

"...they (the Spanish) were so near them (the English) that they could easily tell the fair men from the dark...the standard and he who bore it were likewise riddled with arrows, and the standard bearer had as many round his body as a bull in the ring, but he was shielded by his good armour"

For what it's worth, that standard bearer was none other than the author of this account himself, Gutierre Diaz de Gamez. It is noteworthy that his plate armour enabled him to survive a close-range arrow onslaught and live to write this passage years later.

The longbow was not the "king of the battlefield," the magical nuclear armour-piercer that its fanboys want you to believe. It was only effective under certain controlled circumstances, and even then was mostly an anti-cavalry weapon. Don't buy the hype. Don't misunderstand me--the English were awesome during the early part of the Hundred Years War, but it was because of their strategic expertise, and canny use of combined arms tactics, not because they possessed some magical, battle-winning wonder weapon.

I do not say that most of the casualties at Agincourt are the result of Henry's slaughtering of prisoners, but it can't be denied that that action did indeed inflate the numbers of men of rank who perished there.

The fact that the English were caught out in the open as being a decisive factor in the French victory. Again, IMO the English longbow seems to prevail over armoured men only if the English get to choose the ground and have time to set up their stakes and such beforehand.

I have lately dug up another account in support of armour stopping arrows. This is from a letter written by one Jehan Baugey, and dated 16 September 1475:

"That Monday after supper the English (mercenary longbowmen) quarreled over a wench and wanted to kill each other. As soon as the duke (of Burgundy) heard of this, he went to them with a few people to appease them but they, not recognizing the duke, as they claimed, shot two or three times directly at him with their bows. (The arrows went) very near his head and it was extraordinarily lucky that he was not killed, for he had no armour on at all."

The Burgundians had been hiring English longbowmen as mercenaries for decades at this point, and would have been intimately familiar with the power of the longbow. Yet they still expected that plate armour would have saved a man if he were struck by one of those arrows. What conclusion should we draw from this?

Here is a passage from Vaughan's Philip the Good that deals with the battle of Brouwershaven:

"...they (The English) returned fire with their deadly long-bows and drove the Dutch back in disorder. However, arrows could make no impression on Philip and his heavily-armed knights, who now arrived on the scene. The chronicler points out that Andrieu de Valines was killed by an arrow in the eye because he was not wearing a helmet."

Here, not only do we again have the expectation that a helmet would have saved one man, but a direct statement that the arrows from those longbows made no impression on the (presumably plate-clad) knights.

If a player were to try to pull of something so cheesy as to try to shatter someone's armor with this spell, I would, as a GM, feel fully justified in going into full pedant mode and ruling that he merely shattered one randomly-determined component of the armor--e.g. a buckle or a single link of mail, etc.

You guys all know that guns predate plate armor, right?

That depends on how you're defining plate armor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendra_panoply

http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/LX/IronThoraxIgoumenitsa.jpg

The most important change I'd make if I were to implement this rule in my game would be to eliminate the notion that creatures of higher size category ignore DR. As someone said upthread, that winds up accounting for their "bigness" twice, since larger creatures tend to do more damage anyway. I think I would simply impose a flat -1 DR penalty for every size category that the attacker was greater than the defender. That way, the armour would still do some good, and the people who want Dragons' teeth to penetrate anything can be happy, too.

It doesn't bother me at all that high DRs render certain opponents incapable of damaging a well-equipped character. That's what armour is supposed to do!

In the interest of providing a frame of reference, here is a thread from another forum in which an armourer who was ranked among the modern world's best armourers (until his retirement) chronicles the start-to-finish manufacture of a full plate harness. The date stamps on the posts indicate that it took him almost a year, though I know he didn't work on it all day, every day, as we might expect our Pathfinder armourer to do.

http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=43459&hi lit=+The+Making+of+a+Suit+in+Pictures+

Heck, I don't even ask that they do some basic research on real-world armour.

I just wanna know why they changed the description from 3e. What was the purpose of reducing it to only covering the only the front of the torso while raising the Armor Bonus and leaving the weight still at 30 pounds?

This has been bugging me. This single issue, more than any other at the moment, bothers me about the Pathfinder rules.

In 3.0/3.5 D&D, the description of "breastplate" armour ran thus:

"A breastplate covers your front and your back. It comes with a helmet and greaves (plates to cover your lower legs). A light skirt or suit of studded leather beneath the breastplate protects your limbs without restricting movement much."

However, in stark contrast, the Pathfinder description of this armour reads:

"Covering only the torso, a breastplate is made up of a single piece of sculpted metal."

Say what?

And the recent Ultimate Equipment book drives home the point even further by emphasizing that the breastplate covers only the front of the torso. So they really do mean that this is a single piece of metal affording its wearer a +6 Armor Bonus.

And not only does the Pathfinder version offer a higher Armor Bonus, but its weight remains unchanged from 3.5e D&D?

This "single piece of sculpted metal" weighs a whopping 30 pounds? If so, that makes it heavier than darn near any breastplate ever manufactured in history.

http://www.allenantiques.com/Armour-Breastplates-Collection.html

See the above link for some actual weight figures for real "single piece" breastplates. Note that even the heaviest shot-proof breastplate doesn't even break the 20-pound barrier.

And it gets one two-thirds the way to the Armor Bonus of Full Plate?

I have a much easier time believing that the old D&D 3e combination of cuirass (that is, breast and backplate), helmet, and greaves adds up to a +6 Armor Bonus while weighing in the neighborhood of 30 pounds than I do accepting the same claim that Pathfinder makes for their "single piece of sculpted metal."

Can we change this, please, Paizo?

*sigh* Not this again...

Try not to get too carried away with the longbow fanboy-ism.

I wrote an essay on the topic of longbows vs. plate armour that I keep prepared for whenever I happen to encounter the tired old pop-culture myth that longbows were the bane of plate armour. One always hears about how it sent arrows through the armour of the French knights at Agincourt like paper. It simply isn't true, and the historical sources do not support such a position.

I offer this now:

Remember that at Agincourt the French armoured men-at-arms did in fact reach the English line, and were defeated in hand-to-hand combat, not by archery. The high casualty figures for the men-at-arms are probably the result of Henry ordering all prisoners to be slaughtered after they were captured and bound.

Also, remember that Agincourt is the last of the great English longbow victories. It did not prove as effective against advancing armour technology. Plate armour won the conflict with the longbow. Sure, there was a back-and-forth, and at times the longbow even had the upper hand at a few points in the 14th century, but ultimately plate armour prevailed. It took the advent of effective firearms to drive armour from the battlefield. William Turner, writing hudreds of years later in the late 17th century argues that longbow use should be revived because, "...arrows would do more mischief than formerly they did: since neither men nor horses are so well armed now to resist them, as in former ages they used to be." Essentially, he believed that a force of longbowmen would be effective in battle since they can shoot more quickly than musketeers, but also because soldiers would be vulnerable to the arrows precisely because they no longer made a practice of wearing armour into battle. He acknowledges that armour defeated arrows and drove the longbow from its once-exalted position on the battlefield. A century later, none other than Benjamin Franklin would echo his words.

The longbow won at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt simply because the English got to pick the battlefield and made the French fight on their terms, which included placing their longbowmen behind substantial field fortifications. What conclusion should we draw from the results of other battles in which English archers were ridden down by the very heavy cavalry whose bane they supposedly were? In the batle of Patay, that's just what happened. Where was the longbow's armour-piercing power then?

I submit the following passage from Dr. Michael Lacy's paper on the Effectiveness of Medieval Knightly Armour. This portion deals with the battle of Flodden (1513) wherein the Scots fielded a force clad in the latest plate infantry armours mass-produced on the Continent:

"...the longbow, so decisive in the wars of the last century, was defeated by the heavy German armour of the Scottish front ranks; a contemporary accounts describe them as "most assuredly harnesed" in armour, and that they "abode the most dangerous shot of arrows, which sore them annoyed but yet except it hit them in some bare place, did them no hurt." Bishop Ruthal, writing 10 days after the battle remarked "they were so well cased in armour that the arrows did them no harm, and were such large and stout men that one would not fall when four or five bills struck them."

That's right, contemporary English chroniclers reveal that the longbow did not pierce armour. Other accounts from Poitiers and Brouwershaven (1426) tell similar stories, to say nothing of reports of battles from the English dynastic struggle known as the Wars of the Roses in which both sides turned the longbow on each other, in which it is specially pointed out that Lords Clifford and Dacre were not vulnerable to arrows until they had lifted their visors to drink or shout or breathe.

More near the time of Agincourt, here is a passage from the biography of Don Pero Niño, a Spanish privateer, who raided the English coast a couple of years before Agincourt:

"...they (the Spanish) were so near them (the English) that they could easily tell the fair men from the dark...the standard and he who bore it were likewise riddled with arrows, and the standard bearer had as many round his body as a bull in the ring, but he was shielded by his good armour"

For what it's worth, that standard bearer was none other than the author of this account himself, Gutierre Diaz de Gamez. It is noteworthy that his plate armour enabled him to survive a close-range arrow onslaught and live to write this passage years later.

The longbow was not the "king of the battlefield," the magical nuclear armour-piercer that its fanboys want you to believe. It was only effective under certain controlled circumstances, and even then was mostly an anti-cavalry weapon. Don't buy the hype. Don't misunderstand me--the English were awesome during the early part of the Hundred Years War, but it was because of their strategic expertise, and canny use of combined arms tactics, not because they possessed some magical, battle-winning wonder weapon.

I do not say that most of the casualties at Agincourt are the result of Henry's slaughtering of prisoners, but it can't be denied that that action did indeed inflate the numbers of men of rank who perished there.

I think I do make mention of the fact that the English were caught out in the open as being a decisive factor in the French victory. Again, IMO the English longbow seems to prevail over armoured men only if the English get to choose the ground and have time to set up their stakes and such beforehand.

I have lately dug up another account in support of armour stopping arrows. This is from a letter written by one Jehan Baugey, and dated 16 September 1475:

"That Monday after supper the English (mercenary longbowmen) quarreled over a wench and wanted to kill each other. As soon as the duke (of Burgundy) heard of this, he went to them with a few people to appease them but they, not recognizing the duke, as they claimed, shot two or three times directly at him with their bows. (The arrows went) very near his head and it was extraordinarily lucky that he was not killed, for he had no armour on at all."

The Burgundians had been hiring English longbowmen as mercenaries for decades at this point, and would have been intimately familiar with the power of the longbow. Yet they still expected that plate armour would have saved a man if he were struck by one of those arrows. What conclusion should we draw from this?

Here is a passage from Vaughan's Philip the Good that deals with the battle of Brouwershaven:

"...they (The English) returned fire with their deadly long-bows and drove the Dutch back in disorder. However, arrows could make no impression on Philip and his heavily-armed knights, who now arrived on the scene. The chronicler points out that Andrieu de Valines was killed by an arrow in the eye because he was not wearing a helmet."

Here, not only do we again have the expectation that a helmet would have saved one man, but a direct statement that the arrows from those longbows made no impression on the (presumably plate-clad) knights.

So there you are: evidence from several primary sources attesting to the ineffectiveness of longbows against steel plate armour. I can't seem to find any sources stating that arrows killed men through plate armour.

Even the recent book by Strickland and Hardy The Great Warbow--surely the authoritative work on the subject, in its obligatory armour vs. arrows chapter pretty much admits that good-quality plate would keep a man from being killed by arrows, and lists a few more accounts that reinforce that position that I have not noted above.

Every once in a while, one sees low-quality videos posted by longbow fanboys on Youtube that seem to show their mighty arrows pincushioning a breastplate. 99% of the time, they're using a thin, poorly-made sheet-steel breastplate that has little in common with the real thing; they'll be scrupulously accurate with with their archery tackle, but not pay much attention to the accuracy of the armour they're shooting at, and then they'll offer up these worthless tests as "proof" that longbows can reliably pierce plate armour.

For some figures of real breastplate thicknesses, I refer you here:

http://www.allenantiques.com/Breastplate%20Thickness%20Study.html

They're pretty thick most of the time, especially through the center. Not even Mark Stretton, the current record-holder for longbow draw weight and a god in the eyes of the longbow fanboys, has been documented as reliably penetrating 4+mm thick steel with his 200+ pound bow. There is a point of diminishing return for longbow draw weights, and he has passed it.

In my experience, this issue is strongly tied up with English national pride; it's difficult to convince an Englishman that the longbows used by his Hallowed Ancestors were not, in fact, capable of easily downing a haughty French knight with every mighty bow-pull because the Englishman doesn't want to admit it.

Nevertheless, the primary source evidence seems preponderantly in favor of armour being pretty darn effective at keeping one safe from arrows, even at fairly close range.

I'll say it still needs work!

Notice that in granting the O-Yoroi's leg pieces a +2 bonus while everything else gets only a +1, they've made the O-Yoroi's total bonus (including the "full suit" bonus) +9 rather than the +8 it has in its listing in an earlier chapter.

Note that the AC rating for O-yoroi legs is twice the AC of any other armor type (including plate!). Why is that? When added together with the rest of the O-yoroi components, and taking into account the "full suit" bonus, its total AC bonus adds up to 9 rather than the 8 it's listed with in the table elsewhere in the book. Is this an error?

Now, if we could just get some rules for individual European martial arts styles...

I'd like to see a more in-depth treatment of more European armor types--including ones that are already represented in the game, just like they did with Asian armor in Ultimate Combat. I feel like the culturally-specific Asian "update" in UC was both unnecessary (all those armor types could have been represented with already-existing armors) and overpowered (there's absolutely no way I'm going to believe that the leg armor components of an O-Yoroi provide more protection than a European steel plate legharness).

O-Yoroi leg piece armor bonus?

Is this an error?

In the Piecemeal armor rules it is listed as providing a +2 armor bonus while the bonus of every other piece is only +1. This results in the statistics for a full O-Yoroi suit having a higher total armor bonus than its separate listing under Asian armor in an earlier chapter.

Which is correct? Is the total armor bonus for a full O-Yoroi suit supposed +8 or +9?

It also looks like the O-yoroi pieces, when worn together, result in a +9 armour bonus under the piecemeal armour rules:

Torso piece: +5 armour bonus
Arm pieces: +1 armour bonus
Leg pieces: +2 armour bonus
Full suit: +1 armour bonus
Total: +9 armour bonus

...while the listing for the complete O-yoroi armour earlier in the book gives the armour bonus only as +8.

What's up with that? Were these sections written by different people?

on the other hand i am pleased that the samurai great armor is on par with full plate.

I'm not. There's no way I'm going to buy the notion that an O-yoroi afforded protection to its wearer on par with a European steel plate harness. No way! The worst offense is their claim in the piecemeal armour rules that the leg components of an o-yoroi are actually better (literally twice as good!) than a European fauld, tassets, and legharness. Utter, uninformed Japanophile nonsense!

It's pretty obvious that the Asian armour section was written by somebody with a deep interest in the subject--just compare the lavishly detailed description of O-yoroi in UC versus the vague description of full plate armour in the core rulebook. I suspect that one or more of the Paizo designers has a serious untreated case of "Japanese w3ap0nz r0xxorz!!!11" and that they allowed it to creep into their representation of such things in the game's rules. It's sad that we'll probably never be rid of it now. :(

I just don't think any of it was necessary at all; most of the new armour types introduced in UC could have been easily represented in the game by scale, splint, and banded, etc.

If Paizo wants to give such in-depth treatment to armours from different cultures, when can I expect such a treatment of European stuff? Maybe I think the rules for scale, splint, banded, etc. don't do justice to my favorite armour types. Maybe I demand specific rules for brigandine, coats of plates, several different types/styles of full plate armour, double mail, and others.

Why in the heck do the designers think that the leg components of an O-Yoroi provide more protection than European steel full plate legharness? That makes absolutely no sense to me, and further convinces me that at least some of the designers have an unrealistically high opinion of Japanese arms/armour/martial arts. What happened? Did somebody at the Paizo office get their hands on a copy of Secrets of the Samurai and then not bother to read up on European stuff? Seriously, what gives with all the over-the-top Japan-love all of a sudden?

Seconded.

Hey Paizo, how about a press release after major announcements so that we do not have to go searching for details on the forums?

Could I get away with this?

After hearing about how Asia-dominated this book was on these boards, I was hesitant about picking it up.

I did anyway, and am happy with my decision.

The Asian stuff (which I find absolutely obnoxious) doesn't take up as much space in the book as I'd expected, and is easy to ignore.

The rest of the book, I like. Armour as DR is something I've been dreaming about for a long time, and I think the idea is fairly well-executed here. I like most of the new archetypes presented for each class.

I'm on the fence about the firearm stuff, though. I really do think they're a bit more powerful than they ought to be, and there's something about the Gunslinger that I find jarring. It just doesn't fit with the rest of the stuff in the game. Like the monk, it doesn't belong. No thanks.

I do admit that it is unpleasant to hear that the game's lead designer favors Wizards above all other classes. I really would have preferred that this book had nothing to offer casters at all. That space could have been better used for more Fighter awesomeness.

My money's on the weapon's puzzlingly powerful statistics being based on nothing more than the designers being enamored of the thing's air of mystical Asian martial-artsy badassery.

i.e. It's Asian, so it must be automatically better than anything those idiotic, backwards European clods could ever come up with.

sigh...

I admit that the emphasis on Asian flavor is puzzling and disappointing.

Did we really need a pile of new rules for Japanese armours? I thought existing Banded/Splint/etc. armour types did an adequate job of simulating them. That Pathfinder now represents them as being so much better than almost anything else is frustrating. It smacks of a certain amount of "weeaboo" tendencies amongst at least some of the designers...

So how does the "Armour as DR" optional rule work?

I am really curious about the Armor Master Fighter...

Areteas wrote:

Karui Kage wrote:

Not if Sean has anything to say about it! :D

Mongoose's treatment of armor-as-DR (with Finesse used to counteract the dagger-versus-plate scenario) in the Conan D20 system pokes a lot of holes in Sean's argument, at least as it's presented there. If you're looking for a solid basis for an armor-as-DR system, it's worth a read-throguh.

+1

+2

Why does he have to have any AC bonus to make up for not wearing armour? Shouldn't a guy who isn't wearing armour be easier to hit/kill than a guy who isn't? Why not just play a samurai with a low AC?

I don´t get it... If you like to do this, don´t you already know how it plays out?

Or are you saying you THINK you like to ban those spells but have never done so?

It's never really come up before, so I don't know how it plays out.

Every time I start a campaign, I go through the books and decide what I want to explicitly allow, ban, or tweak before character creation even begins. So far, nobody's yet played a Druid, even though I've resolved to ban these spells from selection if someone had decided to run a Druid.

Gunslingers have the base attack bonus of a fighter, why do they need to do touch attacks in order to hit?

While I'm cool with having guns in my fantasy world, I don't think I would ever, ever permit this class in my game. Touch attacks *and* a fighter's attack bonus? No way! I'd really like to see something done to rein in the power of firearms; they don't need to totally ignore armour, IMO. But the designers have made it clear that that aren't open to discussion on that issue at all...

Is this class the pet project of one of the designers who wants his own personal "Mary Sue" class to own all the others or something? I just can't see how any of this is a good idea at all, and I don't understand why the designers are being so obstinate with refusing to consider revising the overpowered mechanics. Thus, it looks like they're *really* pushing to have this class enjoy a huge pile of benefits that are unavailable to other characters.

The Gunslinger just has "someone's baby" written all over it...

I don't think it is thematically appropriate for Druids to have any power over metal items. Additionally, I don't care at all for the idea that the a spellcaster should be able to just snap his fingers and take away the tools a fighter needs to be effective--unless the rules also provide for the fighter to be able to do the same to the caster, like, say, cut off his hands or something. Thus, I like to ban spells like Metal to Wood and Rusting Grasp from games that I run.

I have a game coming up, and I expect at least one (maybe two) of the players to be very interested in running Druids. Would I be unreasonable in instituting my usual ban on the aforementioned spells?

I did search the messageboard archives, but all I could find were references to Heavy Armor Optimization and Greater Heavy Armor Optimization in D&D 3.5's Races of Stone.

I'm looking for similar feats that allow a heavy armour wearer to raise his armour class in official Pathfinder products. I am a fairly new convert to the game, and am not yet familiar with all the products available, since I have only the core books.

Is there anything like this out there, or am I out of luck?

As a matter of fact Long Bows and Crossbows should get this same treatment in my opinion. If people want realism don't watch "Deadliest Warrior", read some history books, the Long Bow changed the battlefield for good, taking the mounted Knights right off the horse, penetrating armor easily.

As it happens, I've read rather a lot of history books that address this very topic.

Since I encounter the claim that the longbow was some sort of quasi-magical armour-piercing weapon so very often on the internet, I have a pre-prepared essay that I like to post in response whenever I find myself confronting this regrettably common myth:

The English longbow was not as good at piercing plate armour as its fanboys frequently claim.

Remember that at Agincourt the French armoured men-at-arms did in fact reach the English line, and were defeated in hand-to-hand combat, not by archery. The high casualty figures for the men-at-arms are probably the result of Henry ordering all prisoners to be slaughtered after they were captured and bound.

Also, remember that Agincourt is the last of the great English longbow victories. It did not prove as effective against advancing armour technology. Plate armour won the conflict with the longbow. Sure, there was a back-and-forth, and at times the longbow even had the upper hand at a few points in the 14th century, but ultimately plate armour prevailed. It took the advent of effective firearms to drive armour from the battlefield. William Turner, writing hudreds of years later in the late 17th century argues that longbow use should be revived because, "...arrows would do more mischief than formerly they did: since neither men nor horses are so well armed now to resist them, as in former ages they used to be." Essentially, he believed that a force of longbowmen would be effective in battle since they can shoot more quickly than musketeers, but also because soldiers would be vulnerable to the arrows precisely because they no longer made a practice of wearing armour into battle. He acknowledges that armour defeated arrows and drove the longbow from its once-exalted position on the battlefield. A century later, none other than Benjamin Franklin would echo his words.

The longbow won at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt simply because the English got to pick the battlefield and made the French fight on their terms, which included placing their longbowmen behind substantial field fortifications. What conclusion should we draw from the results of other battles in which English archers were ridden down by the very heavy cavalry whose bane they supposedly were? In the batle of Patay, that's just what happened. Where was the longbow's armour-piercing power then?

I submit the following passage from Dr. Michael Lacy's paper on the Effectiveness of Medieval Knightly Armour. This portion deals with the battle of Flodden (1513) wherein the Scots fielded a force clad in the latest plate infantry armours mass-produced on the Continent:

"...the longbow, so decisive in the wars of the last century, was defeated by the heavy German armour of the Scottish front ranks; a contemporary accounts describe them as "most assuredly harnesed" in armour, and that they "abode the most dangerous shot of arrows, which sore them annoyed but yet except it hit them in some bare place, did them no hurt." Bishop Ruthal, writing 10 days after the battle remarked "they were so well cased in armour that the arrows did them no harm, and were such large and stout men that one would not fall when four or five bills struck them."

That's right, contemporary English chroniclers reveal that the longbow did not pierce armour. Other accounts from Poitiers and Brouwershaven (1426) tell similar stories, to say nothing of reports of battles from the English dynastic struggle known as the Wars of the Roses in which both sides turned the longbow on each other, in which it is specially pointed out that Lords Clifford and Dacre were not vulnerable to arrows until they had lifted their visors to drink or shout or breathe.

More near the time of Agincourt, here is a passage from the biography of Don Pero Niño, a Spanish privateer, who raided the English coast a couple of years before Agincourt:

"...they (the Spanish) were so near them (the English) that they could easily tell the fair men from the dark...the standard and he who bore it were likewise riddled with arrows, and the standard bearer had as many round his body as a bull in the ring, but he was shielded by his good armour"

For what it's worth, that standard bearer was none other than the author of this account himself, Gutierre Diaz de Gamez. It is noteworthy that his plate armour enabled him to survive a close-range arrow onslaught and live to write this passage years later.

The longbow was not the "king of the battlefield," the magical nuclear armour-piercer that its fanboys want you to believe. It was only effective under certain controlled circumstances, and even then was mostly an anti-cavalry weapon. Don't buy the hype. Don't misunderstand me--the English were awesome during the early part of the Hundred Years War, but it was because of their strategic expertise, and canny use of combined arms tactics, not because they possessed some magical, battle-winning wonder weapon.

I do not say that most of the casualties at Agincourt are the result of Henry's slaughtering of prisoners, but it can't be denied that that action did indeed inflate the numbers of men of rank who perished there.

I think I do make mention of the fact that the English were caught out in the open as being a decisive factor in the French victory. Again, IMO the English longbow seems to prevail over armoured men only if the English get to choose the ground and have time to set up their stakes and such beforehand.

I have lately dug up another account in support of armour stopping arrows. This is from a letter written by one Jehan Baugey, and dated 16 September 1475:

"That Monday after supper the English (mercenary longbowmen) quarreled over a wench and wanted to kill each other. As soon as the duke (of Burgundy) heard of this, he went to them with a few people to appease them but they, not recognizing the duke, as they claimed, shot two or three times directly at him with their bows. (The arrows went) very near his head and it was extraordinarily lucky that he was not killed, for he had no armour on at all."

The Burgundians had been hiring English longbowmen as mercenaries for decades at this point, and would have been intimately familiar with the power of the longbow. Yet they still expected that plate armour would have saved a man if he were struck by one of those arrows. What conclusion should we draw from this?

Here is a passage from Vaughan's Philip the Good that deals with the battle of Brouwershaven:

"...they (The English) returned fire with their deadly long-bows and drove the Dutch back in disorder. However, arrows could make no impression on Philip and his heavily-armed knights, who now arrived on the scene. The chronicler points out that Andrieu de Valines was killed by an arrow in the eye because he was not wearing a helmet."

Here, not only do we again have the expectation that a helmet would have saved one man, but a direct statement that the arrows from those longbows made no impression on the (presumably plate-clad) knights.

So there you are: evidence from several primary sources attesting to the ineffectiveness of longbows against steel plate armour. I can't seem to find any sources stating that arrows killed men through plate armour.

I politely call on you to graciously reconsider your position on the subject.