Studs: Fashionably Useless Studded Leather Armor VS Brigadine

November 10, 2016

We, as a race, tend to have a bad habit of believing what we are told. In the days before the internet this was especially true since fact checking often involved going down to the local library and pouring over texts. It is no surprise then that Gygax and company made a few errors in their initial attempts at something as extensive as what Dungeons and Dragons would become.

This doubly true when at the time sometimes the scholarly text they were basing their information on was what was incorrect! Which brings us to the biker punk fantasy that is studded leather armor.

Studded leather armor, as you might realize at this point, did not exist. The most commonly accepted reason this misconception came to be is probably misidentified brigandine. Many pieces of brigandine look a ton like studded leather armor from the outside. The armor is essentially a leather outer layer with studs holding oblong metal plates under the armor. This is all well and good but one thing to bear in mind is that armor, especially organic armor, is almost never found in a state that looks as it did when a medieval person was using it.

By the time a modern historian gets a look at it, rust might have taken a serious chunk out of the piece and anywhere rot could apply has usually totally destroyed organic components (such as leather or cloth) of an artifact. Instead we usually learn how something worked by using bits and pieces of low quality historical examples and then reverse engineering the object into something that makes sense based on the information we have.

While some remains of brigandine looks a lot like we imagine studded leather armor would be like, the fact remains we both know brigandine exists and also that studded leather would serve no practical purpose. Essentially, there is no real evidence studded leather armor existed. If leather was ever studded, it was purely for decorative purposes (not unlike why we often stud things today).

Some people might fairly ask why studded leather armor is impractical. The first thing to note is that leather armor was also not very historically present. While it did exist in some parts of the world at various periods, it simply isn’t a very resistant material when compared to things like metal and even wood (please do note that there are SOME examples of leather as armor, it is at least more resistant than just basic cloth). Leather was certainly used in many pieces of armor but only rarely has it been relied upon as the main source of protection. Studs however, only really have one practical purpose: to bind two or more pieces of material together (such as the leather and metal plates in brigandine).

When just studded onto leather, they provide basically no protection. Anything striking a stud (which would be a rare event anyways) would be deflected within a fraction of a second to the much softer leather armor. The reduction of force would be minimal and the leather would end up being the real armor, not the studs. The only way to make “studded” armor that was effective would maybe be to group the studs so close as to be touching, at which point one might as well have used the metal for a more traditional piece of metal armor such as chainmail (which, for the record, was historically known only as mail).

Now for the part where I must emphasize that yes, studded leather armor has a useful if historically dubious place in ttrpgs. It tends to be a middle level of light armor and helps keep the list of armors concise while still giving players a range of options for each tier of armor (in most games those being light, medium, and heavy). However, there are other options for this. Wooden armor, while not historically accurate, would at least fit a similar role and at least could be conceivably possible (samurai often had some portions of their armor made of wood for example).

Rawhide might be another alternative as rawhide is much harder and sturdier than traditional leather without being much more expensive or massively more weighty. Of course, at the end of the day historical accuracy can be (and almost always is) ignored.

Yet unlike many of the other inaccuracies I have pointed out in the past, there isn’t much way to justify studded leather armor working better than leather armor, historical or otherwise. It simply isn’t a good design for an armor (which is why it wasn’t ever done in a historical context). No disrespect to Mr. Gygax but I am of the opinion this particular armor type really should be edited out as a thing of the past. Or I guess more accurately as a thing not of the past.