Super bronze plate mail

So I mentioned super bronze in a previous post, and I mentioned armor stats a while back. I thought some folks might wonder how those two worked.

If you’ve read through Legend Quest - Optional Weaponry, you’ve seen the rules for Breech, Break & Batter. Without getting into the details of it, combat ready, steel weapons have a strength of x3. Super bronze would be x3.5. So how does it work? Let’s look at plate mail armor: Steel plate mail is 75@5 w/ AR=6 (Damage Absorption Limit@Damage Absorption Rate then Attribute Reduction). Now, you can use the stronger super bronze to lighten the weight (reduce the AR) because with super bronze being stronger than steel, less metal will yield the same strength. Or, you can use “the same amount” of metal to yield a stronger suit of plate mail. The math follows (and you can ignore it), but the lighter suit of armor is 73@5 w/ AR=5 and the same weight suit results in 88@6 AR=6.

The math works like this: x3 is 85.7% or x3.5. AR of 6 x 85.7% is 5.14, but since you only need an AR of 5, and 5 is 97.2% of 5.14. So the DAL of 75 x 97.2% is 72.9. x3.5 is 116.7% of x3, so the DAL goes from 75 to 87.5 or 88 and DAR of 5 goes from 5 to 6 (5.83). I might want to lower the DAL to 85 since 5.83 really isn’t 6.

On weapons, I don’t think it is appropriate to make it easier to do damage. So I assume a Strength Needed =6 long sword is not going to do more damage if you make it lighter. However, x3.5 vs x3 means 6=5.14. So while the lighter weapon does the same damage, it does change the Combat Rounds calc (how long you can wave the weapon around before you start getting tired). So the super bronze long sword can be used longer before it starts to tire the wielder.