Help with a homebrew campaign [5e]

Hi guys, im cooking up a campaign thats historically realistic (based around 11th century-13th century) mixed in with your general fantastical shit like magic and dragons and whatever and im having a bit of problem with the armour

I have the armour divided into armour types (gambesons, chain mail, lamellar, etc.) and the material theyre made from (Linen, canvas, silk, and chitin for light armour, iron, and mithril for medium armour, and iron, silver, and ebony for heavy armour - heavy armour covers more and has more layers)

I want to have a clear distinction in raw ac and defensive stats between armour types and armour materials (An iron chain shirt would have 25 AC, +5 against Slashing atk rolls, -2 against Piercing/Bludgeon atk rolls however an ebony chain shirt would have more ac and more resistances, but it would be extremely expensive and rare, etc)

But this is where im having my problem, historically armour was very expensive and much better than its usually depicted in games, in the middle ages most run of the mill soldiers would have gambesons on, and those were basically really thick linen jackets, and the jackets would protect mainly from blunt damage (maces and such, which is why it was used as padding for your more expensive metal armour), but it would also protect relatively well against swords, spears, and arrows, the best made ones would stop bodkin arrows (which were armour piercing) entirely (although if you had the money to buy that, you probably had the money to buy much better metal armour). And if you had full plate on, you were really really really difficult to take on (since they were basically impervious to many weapons, with late 15th, and 16th century plate armour being able to stop bullets)

Guess what im saying is that i have a balancing problem, on one part i want armour to behave the way it would irl, sans the occasional fireball to the face, but i have no idea how. Anyone here have any expertise on the subject?

Submitted January 31, 2017 at 03:40PM by Avehand1 http://ift.tt/2kp426X