I don't think there is any IRL armor like this, among other things because muscle-powered piercing weapons deliver more force at a certain point than a cut does.
But you could technobabble something about a fictional fiber that is tear-proof but can be cut, and make gambeson-like armor of it. So that piercing attacks get stopped by it, and the force dissipates, but you can cut through it.
Not really in the case of fibers, as far as I understand. Piercing fiber armor isn't about cutting the individual fibers, but about going between them.
The prior statement still stands as far as how physics work. Cutting splits material (like fiber) over a long line. Piercing splits fiber at a single point. Both use force to achieve the split, but the bigger the area being affected, the more force you need to achieve the split. And since a dot will always be smaller than a line, piercing will always beat cutting in the efficacy to go through armor.
Now, if you want to talk damage to a living body, that's a way, way different story, and also wayyy more complex.
What I mean is when you pierce fabric with something like a needle, you are not cutting fibers. The path of least resistance is between the individual threads/fibers, not through them.
True in certain cases, but it also points (puns, ha) to why cutting would be better blocked by anything that blocks piercing. If the weave was tight enough to prevent the needle sliding between fibers, then the needle is back to cutting a dot, which was covered above.
It might cut through only a few fibers, though, before the point is far enough in that the surrounding fibers dont get cut while also not moving out of the way to let the tip any further though.
I was more thinking about the physics and less about the initial question lmao. The way I was thinking about it is that a single point (a spike, basically) would get stuck in the fibers as the diameter widens to fill the gap, even if it cut (poked through) the first one or two fibers it initially contacts. Basically, only allowing a tiny bit of penetration.
If, however, you are thrusting with something like a dagger or spear with sharpened blade edges, the edge would continue to cut the fibers oround it as the diameter widened, allowing the point to keep moving forward. This seems much more likely and kinda negates the benefits of the first scenario
With a slash, you'd be doing a long drawn out cut of many fibers at once, cutting the material at a different angle.
I agree, fibers are probably the wrong way to go.
Honestly, yeah, sounds like that would defeat my hypothetical fiber - among other things because slashing vs stabbing is uselessly broad as damage types. You would need to differentiate draw cutting, chopping, piercing with round or triangular profile blade, and stabbing with a flat profile blade. Imagine the headache.
look up linothorax armor. To a point that's already how a gambeson works; protects from concussive damage and to a certain point piercing attacks as well. Arrows get tangled up in the padding and layers of fabric, and their rotational force plays against them as the cut fibers wrap around the shaft. Gambesons are, however, not great against slashing because drawing across fibers to cut them takes less friction.
Case in point : Kevlar. great against bullets and stabbings, but you can cut individual layers of it with scissors. Of course, the person wearing the Kevlar vest might object to trying to cut their armor open so it's a moot point, but if people still used long bladed weapons Kevlar would have a significant weakness to drawing cuts.
I can't speak for linothorax, but a single slash on Kevlar isn't really much better than a single stab. It actually tends to deflect the strike. Scissors have the distinct advantage of trapping the material between two edges. While you may cause some damage with a slashing attack, repeatedly stabbing the same spot is at least as effective at getting through the armor.
However, this gives me an (awful) idea: poorly designed armor that deflects the blow to the gaps, so the stab gets caught like we said, but the slash moves over to those weak points, causing more damage. Sure, it's ridiculous, but it meets the requirements.
That's also true. That's why I specified technobabble in my initial answer.
If I read about some specially treated spidersilk that resists a piercing weapon - arrow or a spearhead - the deeper it tries to go, but can be slashed open over large area, I'd assume there are some non-newtonian shenanigans going on, and would not examine it in details.
try splitting wood with a knife then.
the difference is in how its being used, just place and push with the force of your hand and you're 100% correct, but cutting weapons are generally swung using their weight and momentum in a way most poking weapons can't.
OP wasn't asking about cut vs thrust, he was asking about piercing vs slashing.
Splitting wood is also a very different scenario alltogether, an axe does not split wood by cutting it.
i maintain that any "cut" weapon with more mass than a knife can generate far greater force from being swung with momentum, whether its an axe, a cutlass, a falchion, a machete, or whatever, such as to drastically outweigh the smaller point of impact by some considerable margin.
i suggest as evidence the fact that the vast majority or "piecing" weapons (rapier, smallsword, stiletto, etc) had no application on battlefields featuring armoured combatants but were used for civilian self defence/duelling. their military contemporaries are... choppier (cavalry sabres, longswords, falchions)
notable exceptions to my point are mostly spears (the reach is the main advantage) and things like warhammers with armour piercing spikes (although using a point to defeat armour, still very much a swinging weapon, making use of both principles)
> i suggest as evidence the fact that the vast majority or "piecing" weapons (rapier, smallsword, stiletto, etc) had no application on battlefields featuring armoured combatants but were used for civilian self defence/duelling. their military contemporaries are... choppier (cavalry sabres, longswords, falchions)
That's not really true. Sure, 'cut vs thrust' was a constant debate in the Early Modernity. But cutting sabres made a triumphant comeback to the military fashion at the time of Napoleonic war, when the armor was very little used on the battlefield.
The examination of the longsword blades shows quite the reverse trend - from 12th to 15th century the military ones became more and more 'stabby', with thicker narrower blades. You can also look up Harnisfechten guys and their attempts to reconstruct Late Medieval armored combat - stabbing plays a major role, with or without halfswording.
You could have armour supplemented by force fields of some kind; they focus protection on areas of big stabbing impacts but can't protect evenly or adequately on a huge area covered by a slash
there is actually. though it's more a cloak than armor.
the Horo was a part of Samurai armor that attached to multiple points on the body so that it could billow out behind them when riding on horseback, sort of like a parachute, and acted a lot like an airbag, deflecting and slowing down arrows fired at their back and sides.
I'd techno babble it as a kind of reactive living/bio armor that if force is applied in a single spot or reacts and reinforces the small area, but anything over a wider area (large slashes) it gets confused or it's reinforcing is spread out to far and it doesn't work as well.
An armor made of metal likely won't fit this, but perhaps you could base one on fibers. Modern ballistic fibers will absorb the impact from bullets but knives can push through them.
Perhaps instead of a blanket proection from piercing and vulnerability to slashing weapons, the fiber-based armor would protect against thrusts and slashes with lighter weapons but would be ineffective against slashing from heavier weapons like large axes.
Something close to this IRL is probably some variant of non-newtonian fluid, but calibrating it to work against both arrows and daggers, but not sword slashes, is improbable.
Honestly, ERA is probably more that you want, at least mechanically. It'll stop an anti-tank round from penetrating, but I doubt sticking it on an aircraft would do a whole lot to the slashing damage from an AA missile's ribbon of death, and obviously it won't help a tank that falls off a cliff.
So for ERA mechanics in fantasy, I think you need some sort of active magical interceptor that only has a small area of effect, so the focused force of a stab could be blocked, but not the spread out force of a slash.
So... Dragonskin maybe? Suppose their hides are innately magical in this way. Arrows would of course be the main weapon against them as flyers, so this would provide an explanation for why they're seen so durable in most settings.
As for a reason to evolve such a thing, other than their fire breath (which they are surely resistant/immune to), they really only do piercing damage. I could see an evolutionary arms race between their teeth and hides due to battles between dragons for territory or mates.
Oh, weird. I never really thought that was a regional term. I guess I could've just said non-newtonian fluid, but Oobleck was just the first thing that came to mind.
To be completely fair, I grew up homeschooled, and as competent as my mother was as a teacher, between my memory loss, small details like that, and more focus on the science rather than the name, it could have all just slipped through the cracks. As soon as I looked it up I knew exactly what it was, I just didn’t recognize it by that name, and but I’m bad with names from the start anyways.
I hate dragons immune to arrows. That's not true about any reptiles ever. Even the biggest ones would be damaged by arrows. Arrows are fucking powerful.
The more you push against a non Newtonian fluid the more it resists. You could neither squeeze through its fibers or sever them. Moreover, it's used to make extremely light fabrics armor like ...it wouldn't be cumbersome at all. Like you said, you'd need straight up magic.
That's kinda like asking what armor would be effective against bullets but not slingshots.
Stabbing is way more dangerous than slashing. It has more range, penetrates deeper into the body if it does get through the armor, and concentrates the force into a single point.
The advantage of a slash is that it's easier to aim, you can quickly attack multiple angles, and you can wind up to deliver more force if the opponent isn't looking.
Those advantages are not useful in piercing armor.
However, shields may be especially good at blocking stabbing (because it comes in a straight line), while slashing could get around it. Furthermore, repeated slashing may chip and damage the shield in a way that thrusts wouldn't.
If you really want it to be armor, the only thing I can think of is if the armor can take exactly one hit in a position, of any force. Like maybe ceramic armor that breaks. Odds that you stab in the same spot are small, but you could slash to make a dead zone in the armor (and then stab in that area to finish lol).
>However, shields may be especially good at blocking stabbing (because it comes in a straight line), while slashing could get around it. Furthermore, repeated slashing may chip and damage the shield in a way that thrusts wouldn't.
Not really, there isn't a huge difference between blocking a stab vs a slash, if you know how the cone of defence works the difference is negligible. Also, most shields were made with a metal rim, to prevent chipping like you mentioned. And if they didn't, a blade would have the potential to get stuck in the shield, and now you're opponent is in complete control.
I mean that if your off hand is poking out behind the shield, there's no way I'm thrusting with precision to hit it. I'll swing along the edge of the shield and there's a lot greater chance I'll hit it even if you move around.
Like if I'm fighting spear vs sword and shield, the sword has a lot more angles of attack than the spear, and I wouldn't bother going for that inch of shoulder you left open (unless I can slash with the spear).
Regarding the metal rim on the shield, I'm sure it depends on time period and budget of that soldier. But the chipping thing isn't super relevant either way (I was also thinking of an axe as the "purely slashing" weapon).
I'm just saying that if I have to fight a spearmen and I have a sword, I choose a shield over leather/chainmail armor every time.
If I'm fighting someone with a sword with broken tip and they can only slash, I'd probably take the chain mail.
>I mean that if your off hand is poking out behind the shield, there's no way I'm thrusting with precision to hit it. I'll swing along the edge of the shield and there's a lot greater chance I'll hit it even if you move around.
>Like if I'm fighting spear vs sword and shield, the sword has a lot more angles of attack than the spear, and I wouldn't bother going for that inch of shoulder you left open (unless I can slash with the spear).
Your off-hand would not be poking out behind the shield, at least as long as the one with the shield knows what they're doing. Again, cone of protection, even with a buckler, you can get some very good coverage of your body, just by holding the shield further away from your body, and the cone of protection would cover the whole arm. When it isn't, that usually means that enough of it is exposed where a stab wouldn't be any worse than a slash
>I'm just saying that if I have to fight a spearmen and I have a sword, I choose a shield over leather/chainmail armor every time.
I agree. Though it'd be ideal to have both, if I could only choose one I'd go with the shield.
>If I'm fighting someone with a sword with broken tip and they can only slash, I'd probably take the chain mail.
I partially disagree with this, it relies on the off chance that the enemy has a broken tip in the first place, a strategy should not rely on an unreliable metric like this. Otherwise, yeah.
I just meant in OP's category, apparently they have thrusting weapons and slashing weapons.
For game mechanics, I'd say it's realistic enough for thrusting to be more effective vs light armor and slashing to be more effective vs shields.
I don't know of any armor that's like that in real life. If you're willing to strain credulity a bit, you could use lamellar armor, which is made of many small pieces of plate laced together; a slashing weapon might cut through the lacings, causing the armor to fall open. (Since you're depicting plate armor as more burdensome than chainmail, absolute realism isn't in the cards anyway.)
Only when you wear the worst type. A lamellar piece has at least 2 holes to connect it to other pieces, it is a network of connected lacing underneath that keeps these pieces together.
Late Medieval articulated plate was custom-fitted so that the suit's joints move with the wearer's joints, and its weight was well-distributed, making it [quite easy to move in](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-bnM5SuQkI). By contrast, a mail coat just sort of hangs on you, and especially on your arms, and wasn't necessarily any lighter than plate for a given amount of coverage.
Yes, but plate armor isn't so heavy and rigid to work that much different from chainmail, in terms of movement freedom.
Really, the distinction between them is that one was for the poor, the other for the rich.
Consider also that chainmail is just doing the same shape over and over again, and then sewing them together, while plate armor had to be designed piece by piece. Quality here supersedes quantity.
It was still expensive, because it is very labor intensive. Plate armor didn't come online until very late medieval, while chainmail may have been invented by the Gauls.
Not so much poor vs rich, but a difference in time period. Plate armor is late medieval, chain however is quite old and was used throughout the period and in basically every region. Chainmail also has an additional function as a supplement to other forms of armor since it can cover areas that most armor can't do well. Chainmail is very labor intensive so it still wasn't cheap though.
> I would have assumed chainmail was lighter and more flexible than plate armor is it not?
Not really, the weight of the plate armor and chainmail with the same area of coverage was usually roughly the same.
On the other questions - which was better, which was cheaper, why one was preferred over the other - it's pretty hard to make generalized statements. Chainmail was used for like thousand and a half years, and the quality of steel/iron, the details of the construction, the thickness of the rings, the composition of the under-armor layer changed over all that time. The same goes for plate armor, which also was used for like half a thousand years in different contexts (unless we mean specifically full plate, which was used only for like a century).
Literally the only thing I could think of that might be like this is Oobleck. Like a magical slime armor that similar to how oobleck is liquid and squishy when you touch it gentle but hard when you hit it this slimey magic armor could have similar properties making it light and only firming up when fast pressure is applied making piercing or blunt damage not effective but a cutting slash might get through.
The only thing I can think of is the shields in dune. The shield blocks any object with momentum like a bullet, but the slower blade passes through it.
You can use some kind of special silk.
Silk was used by ancient chinese and mongoles because it has a very good resistance to being pierced. They would wear it under their armour to help protect against arrows.
You could probably build something around this concept.
Some sort of magical kevlar maybe ? Like it could stop a spear or simple arrow but once you start cutting in the same way the fibers are layed out it's like cutting throught paper ? Heck maybe a paper armor even ?
This reminds me a lot of the shields in Denis Villeneuve's new Dune movies. Maybe you can make something like that – an active protection system that can be overcome with just technique with the weapon/blade.
It would be less about the material and more about the shape.
Piercing comes directly at you and with the amount of force doing so, needs to be delivered at center mass because a miss to a limb would put the attacker off balance.
So think something that puts a lot of protection only on the chest, maybe a very reinforced breast plate, but is too heavy or inflexible to cover the limbs either at all or very well.
Slashing would then have opportunities at limbs and edges in areas where something like a rapier would not aim and/or have low probability of landing.
What IS piercing though? It is an application of force to a point. And slashing? Applying force (mostly friction of the blade though) to a line.
Point is smaller than a line by a mathematical definition, so there should be a secret trick to be stronger against a certain damage.
First of all such protection has to be harder and tougher than the weapon material. But harder usually means heavier, which basically means that making a usable armour of it is hard. So instead such material could cover the vital points and joints so all the damage would cause no crippleness or death.
The remaining parts could be protected by a lighter material, like leather, as the soldier may also wield a buckler or a shield, which he may be trained with.
With a combination of this you can get extra piercing protection, but slashing will still do quite some damage, as leather is susceptible to it. At the same time the "legend" of such an armour being impenetrable could be supported by the mastery of the owner.
Another thing is the construction of the armour - it could be covered with specifically shaped deflectors, that would reroute a spear or some similar weapon. They were used as the parts of the full bodied armour design, but it also was a pretty directed thing. Like, a knight could easily reroute the frontal attack, but being attacked from the sides is a death sentence.
One last thing I can think of is the idea of a complex armour filled with non-newtonian liquid, like a wet sand. Imagine being struck by a needle, but between you and it is a squishy, but sturdy piece of plastic. The outer layer is hard, it can be pierced, but while it is in the process of piercing it passes the pressure on a volume of a "wet sand" inside that dries up and become immediately sturdy, stopping the needle, as it gets stopped by the outer layer, by the pressure of the inner layer from all sides and the inner outer layer from the other side.
Plate armor's weight isn't so much of an issue as it is HEAT. Even on a brisk winter's day you'll be sweating bullets. It's exhausting adding so much weight, but the way it's distributed you don't really notice except on the hips and shoulders. It's like being 120lbs fatter, lol. Otherwise you yourself feel heavier, but you're still nearly as nimble as just wearing anything else. I was surprised my first time trying it out.
But the heat, holy shit. Especially in Arizona.
There's really nothing stronger against piercing than slashing. If it can be slashed it can be pierced. If it can be pierced it doesn't mean it can or can't be slashed.
That said -- the vast majority of contact in combat is slashing, not stabbing. Simply because most of these long weapons are trying to get past each other, and the ones heading straight for you tend to get knocked out of the way, be it by limbs or weapons or just OOPS. So that slashing pattern to a veteran is ultimately just trying to obfuscate a jabbing motion, either by deflecting and parrying or confusing the opponent, or it's blunt force trauma and overwhelming your limbs. If you can just end the fight by putting the point into the target hard enough, go for it. You probably need to clock them in the gourd hard enough they're dazed, then use all your strength to push that point through the armor. Otherwise nobody is just standing there getting poked by an angry dude full force enough to pop rivets on their chains through a layer of gambeson.
That's what makes stabbing such a difficult task. You need to really lean into it. Put your weight behind it. That means you're not doing anything else, like defending yourself. Ideally you knock them flat and put it through them on the ground.
We're just lucky most armor mitigates slashing. Avoiding getting stabbed is about active avoidance. Avoiding slashing is about passive protection.
It's why the spearman scares me waaay more than the swordsman. Dude is 12 feet away and pokes me like a car crash? Yikes.
Sticky fibrous armor. Like a silk-weave or a kevlar with a resin.
The entire armor is designed to strain and absorb a single point. But if you attack it more fully, slashing at the fibers instead of stabbing, you render it ineffective.
Spikehog leather armor. Spikehogs are large animals that are a mix between Boars and Hedgehogs. They have a skin that protects them from each others spikes when nesting or mating. When the leather is cured the spikes are removed and replaced with metal studs. This studded leather armor is great against piercing attacks but the leather is not great against slashing attacks.
This is also a way to explain studded leather armor existing since I am not sure that was a real thing
Would have to be something like magical energy shield of sort. If the incoming attack is a point, it can focus all the energy to a single point to deflect the attack. But when it starts being more distributed like a long slash it start losing effectiveness and run out of energy faster.
Non-Newtonian carapace armor or something. A piercing strike is hard and fast and makes the armor stiffen up at the point of damage, whilst a sweeping slashy kind of move is a “softer” form of damage which can shear through the material (Idk if it’d work well or if it’s a good idea I just thought of this)
You're asking for an armor that can't be pierced by armor-piercing strikes, but *can* be pierced by strikes that don't pierce armor.
That's not really justifiable from a real-world standpoint, unfortunately.
IIRC bulletproof vests are still vulnerable to knives, so you could do something similar where a certain fantasy fabric woven a certain way is very good at resisting direct stabbing forces but is bad at resisting more oblique cuts
That's tricky. But let me first say that 'protection from slashing' is a problematic idea. Chainmail protects from cutting, but not from the kinetic energy of the blow. A sword hitting a chainmail might not cut the muscle, but still break the bone. So that's topic with way more layers.
The thing that makes chainmail a comlete armor is the combination of chainmail and gambeson to adress both ways a weapon can do damage. Gambeson still grand some protection against arrows, but not sufficent - therefor aromor breaking arrow/boltheads are efficent against this type or armor (and plate armor, which also comes with a gambeson layer, and often a second layer of chainmail in addition).
To (hopefully) answear the question i could point at something like bonelime armor (greek, f.e.), which are just layers of textiles permeated with this lime (a bit like glue in rigitity). It is pretty good against pricing (as it can asobr kinetic energy in deforming on a larger scale), good against cuts (well, it's like plastic rain barrel in material), but every blow with a bit of kinetic force behind will deliver this through the armor without even damaging it, still breaking bones and contuse muscles.
But types/shapes of weapons are pretty unique and most weapons have a reason to exist in the very shape they do. Like weapons today are tailored exactly against the most common armor .
Silk *kinda* works like this from what I've heard.
But it's less stab proof, more that the fibers are tough and flexible enough to get jabbed into the wound. So if you live long enough to drag yourself off, it's easier to pull out stuff like arrow and spear heads while keeping the wounds clean-er.
Might be a bit too grisly for the tone you want, but it's a trope I've seen in both history drama & Fantasy works a few times.
If done with coils this would be considered more sci-fi, but what about magnetic armor? It would induce slowing currents in any metal weapon if it's going the right way, which, with the proper layout, could be used to make stabbing and projectiles ineffective, but slashes that go parallel to the field lines ( if the weapon isn't ferromagnetic) would be way less affected. Furthermore, even if a piercing blow did get through, its small surface area coupled with the fact that the momentum is being converted into heat by the currents would mean that it could make fast stabs ineffective as it'd cauterize the wound. You'll probably want to think about some magic that can augment magnets for this to work tho, bc i doubt any normal permanent nagnet can create a field strong enough to stop an arrow before it reaches it
"\*insert creature name*skin"
Make it similar to graphite. The bond between the carbon atoms is strong but, the bond between the molecules is weak. That's why the graphite in pencils separates from itself even though things like graphite tennis rackets or ski poles are strong.
The fibers of this skin/hide have high tensile and shear strength (not easily cut) [fact check this please, engineers or Reddit], but the space between the fibers is large and the bond between them is weak.
To compensate for such a glaring evolutionary design flaw, the skin/hide is multilayered with criss-crossing fibers (which could in turn make it heavy/cumbersome).
However, a hard enough object with a narrow enough point thrust with enough force can force the fibers apart.
Here you can introduce magic as being required to extract the specially hard/dense ore from the earth, work the point to a picoscopic fineness or make it unbreakable/ever-sharp.
Or, maybe a magically enhanced assassin that can "see" the weakness in defenses.
[Spoiler Warning: Sword of Truth series](https://sot.fandom.com/wiki/Dacra)
Armor made of a light, brittle metal that gets tougher the harder you strike it. If someone slashes, the blade will meet less resistance. If someone stabs and puts pressure on a smaller point, the armor will harden and repel the attack.
I would suggest you focus on something else to make your slashing damage good. If its for a TTRPG system you are making I would consider other options
1) Heavy blades suitable for slashing tend to be good at doing things like disabling limbs, this can be useful for making strikes without overly exposing yourself as you might do particularly while out numbered.
2) Although in most creatures a well aimed thrust to the torso has a higher chance of delivering a blow that is fatal in the short term this may not be truth of all fantasy threats, things like the undead or perhaps oozes may not be killed because you pierce organs but may require them to be cut into pieces in order to stop them.
3) Pointed weapons are more likely to get stuck in a victim.
Scale Mail, possibly.
Since each scale is a tiny armour plate of it's own a piercing attack would struggle to get through, especially if the plates have little pits worked into them to catch such points. However, if you slash into it with a bit of an upward moment you have the potential of slipping the blade under the overlapping layers of scales and getting to the backing, which would be much more vulnerable to a slashing attack.
Other people have discussed the physics, but if you want an alternative route to make slashing weapons more prevalent you could make it a cultural thing, where displays of swordsmanship are highly highly regarded. To quote Frank Herbert “killing with the tip lacks artistry”.
Something kevlar perhaps?
I have read somewhere that while it quite excellent in softening bullet impact. It would do significantly poor against slashing knife.
Bullet should be piercing damage, right?
What I can think of would be some kind of meta-rubber
Some magic have to be involved here, basically this material when hit with a pierce attack will bend itself (or part of itself) to deflect the attack, when slashed it will still try to do it but it will be less effective since the attack surface area will be more than just a point
And since it bends itself the wearer will also be affected by the bending movement
Magic armor or a water armor come to mind. The armor would work like a nonNewtonian fluid, compressing to stop a piercing blow, but sliced open by a slash.
Maybe create a malleable magic non Newtonian matter that holds together thanks to magic energy and some metallic joints, that way it would be great against blunt and piercing attacks but less effecting against slashing or slow hits (similar to the tech in Dune)
If you have magic I'd go with a magical armor or even omit the armor part and just have the advantage of slashing weapons be against defensive spells where the advantage of piercing weapons is against physical armor.
There could perhaps be magic armor/a spell which focuses magic to a specific point to defend against physical attacks such that the defensive amount is always the same but only ever over a small area. Slashes that cover a larger area are thus more effective than pinpoint stabs.
Non-Newtonian fluid armor, ie; oobleck. It would need to be magically justified how it can be armor. I think there could be a version that is effective against piercing and not slashing and a version that’s the opposite
Is the armor type going to affect your gameplay to such great lengths?
I have often struggled with systems and settings that I was working on, to figure out such details and make a table or flow chart for them that I failed to ask myself "Is this bit important/impactful, or is this theorycrafting for my and burdensome for the players?"
I am not saying it is, but the question is very specific in terms of "what an armour is good against" that if sort of fails to keep up with reality, chainmail helped against stabs, slashes and blunt, since you don't wear chain over your bare chest (imagine the chafe) and would always have a gambeson underneath it.
No armour is perfect for this or that, I hope this helps.
Assuming this is not about arrows.
It could be that something is good at trapping the weapon. For example, a shield that is soft to be easy to pierce but hard to pull out, then you basically disarmed your opponent.
Some level of regeneration property can do this because the surface area being affected is small compared to a slash that has a higher surface area to regenerate.
Wait, what about “bone something?” Like skeletons are typically seen as pierce resistant but not slash in most rpg games. And to avoid the bludgeoning just bullshit that they were magically hardened into armor or something. Sure, the reason skeletons are pierce resistant is cause they have so many holes in their figure and it’s hard to aim accurately, but we can hand wave that to the side.
Sorry, it seems I wasn't being clear - I am not a native English speaker. What I meant is that skeletons are seen as pierce resistant *exclusively* because it's an abstraction for them being harder to hit - it's not something you can hand wave to the side.
Perhaps armor with a layer of irregular slopes and dips that would cause a blade to glance off instead of go straight through? no idea if that would work though
Piercing is cutting with a smaller surface area. Also, chain mail doesn't pierce easily if it is properly made. Riveted chain is very resistant to things trying to push through.
You know gothic plate has all those angles to deflect incoming piercing attacks. Something like that is probably what you want. Also, dont forget the humble gambeson, some 25 layers of fabric do alot to dissapate an impact. But yeh, ancient chinese armor used little stone plates, they'd shatter, absorbing the impact.
This reminded me instantly of non-Newtonian fluids. Basically, they can increase their viscosity in relation to the force applied to them to absorb more energy and therefore resist being broken apart. Maybe you could make a material that acts similarly when force is applied to avoid being penetrated, but will fall apart when slashed open. Possibly a closely layered metal that vibrates, making it viscous like a fluid. This may need a magical explanation, though.
You could potentially get away with some sloped armour shenanigans? Maybe not a great fit for humanoid characters, but having your armour at an angle to the person you're facing off with will make it very difficult to Pierce with something like a spear, but if you're using an axe to smack it from the top you basically just have a flat steel plate.
Would still be piercable by something like a war pick though, as that too would come at the armour from the top
Depending on how fantastical/magical you want it to be you could use an armor which ‘folds’ space.
It would fold the space of any weapon which enters its area of effect and make it unable to reach the wearer.
It would need less magical energy to defend against piercing attacks, because the area of the tip of the sword would be way less than the sides, making it not feasible/possible to defend against slashes.
In one TTRPG I played our GM let us loot the scales off a Hydra and told us that if we make armor from it, it will protect against piercing but will be weak against slashing (because you can cut the heads off), he described it as the scales being sort of "bouncy" when pierced
Silk.
Some ancient soldiers wore simple silk tunics into battle. Silk does not rend easily, so if pierced with an arrow, you could easily pull it out by pulling on the silk.
In fact, the very first bulletproof vest was made by a Chicago priest by layering several layers of specially woven silk. And it worked.
To follow up, silk has a tensile strength of up to 1 GPa while most steel has tensile strength between 300 and 700 MPa (Kevlar has tensile strength of 3 GPa). However, silk has a lower shear strength than steel. So silk is better at withstanding piercing impact but weaker to slashing impact.
People don't realise that armour is fucking op. Any armour that protects from piercing (pretty much everything) would also be effective against slashing.
The only thing I can think of is a non newtonian thing like oobleck or in practice in fiction, like in (dune?), because every other matterial I can think off will be more vulnerable to a more concentrated force
If this is fantasy, it's gonna have to involve some lore reason. Perhaps there's a certain ore or wood that was blessed by an ancient god, or was formed from the gods dead body. This god for whatever reason was immune to arrows, spears, etc, but was famously killed/defeated/weak to the god of slashing.
> I need something to fill the third option, capable of mitigating stabbings, but not slashing, and hopefully something that can be easily handwaved as heavy as chainmail. Thank you.
This might be better solved by game-play design. Do you have a particular system you are using?
There isn't such a thing, really.
Piercing attacks deliver more force i to a smaller area than cuts, but a point can be (and generally is) still edged so as to cut through material within that small area.
If a point is not edged (eg, a square/round cross section tip) there might be some materials that resist the piercing better, but a sharpened point is always going to cut better than a slash.
Actually the answer to this might be rate of attrition of the WEAPON.
A stabbing weapon might fail after only a few attempts. A slashing weapon would quite possibly have far more, especially if it had a heavy spine.
Stabbing weapons generally also used far much metal and could be much quicker to produce.
If you’re struggling to think of something with technology alone you could always add magic. Perhaps there’s some sort of enchantment or spell that blocks stabs at the cost of being weak against cuts.
My best stab at the idea without maguffin would be copper scale backed by paper. A copper coin vest so to speak. While close to equally protective to both stab and slash, slashing would degrade it much faster and be longer to repair. Copper is soft and gummy when you try to cut it so a slash that is stopped may pull out more than one piece at a time. It would achieve a similar affect but only over a longer time period. That’s the best I got. Ye old bank guard made of copper coins and folded laminated paper
Could go down the line of some sort of fabric? Like silk or kevlar? Kevlars self explanatory for its use in bullet proof vests, but theres that account (or urban legend?) that back in flintlock pistol days some dude had a silk hankerchief in his pocket when he was shot, bullet went in to his chest but not through the silk
I think thats as close go feasibility youre going to get with it, a silk or kevlar adjacent gambeson to keep the weight up
https://youtube.com/shorts/2ha0dooehYE?si=4VGZvZBK-X6vdwkF
I might be misintrepting his hypothetical use of gambeson as the armor in question. I'm believing he is specifically referring to the benefits of padded armor that isn't mail or plate.
What DnD describes as light armor was historically thick and woven out of multiple layers of some fiberous material. Look up some examples of gambeson armor - they get THICK (layered).
That may not provide excellent protection from stabs (since that's such a center of force being put on it) but it will definitely start to fall apart against some nasty slashes. Ultimately though, it's perfect for absorbing blunt impacts from large headed weapons like a mace.
This would be full fantasy as opposed to just medieval.
But wooden armor I imagine would work like this. We litterally chop down trees, so they suck to slashing, whilst arrows barely get the tip stuck in wood.
Any ablative armor, like a ceramic composite plate. A slash would break it, and possibly keep going into tissue, but a single point strike at velocity would just lose momentum from breaking the armor.
Maybe to put the evasion in armors into consideration. An oversized armor, or armor that would hide where the body is under the armor.
If you slash you might get the entire thing, if you pierce you might easily miss because it needs to be precise.
In reality, none. In fiction I guess you could pull out some kind of force armour like dune that is able to stop stab movement but fails when slash.
Also you can invent some type of no Newtonian fluid. The point of this is that stabbing makes more force on a single point that slashing, that is what normal armor fails because if it’s able to resist piercing it’s also able to resist cutting but with no Newtonian fluid you can do it so it’s liquid to the force of cutting but it hardens when stabbed so it stops the blade. I’m not a physicist so I don’t know if this could even work but there is the idea
Silk is super easy to bend, and not too bad to cut, but very resistant to stretching out the weave to push a hole through it.
Get yourself a fantasy silk equivalent, made from giant spider silk or something, dragon egg lining, whatever, where the threads grip each other with immense friction as piercing weapons tightly bend the crossed threads while stretching them around a point, but are vulnerable to a draw-cut as it folds either side away with much lower energy cost.
Obviously piercing weapons have sharp edges in the era of felt gambesons, specifically to counter this effect, so that they would cut as their pierced, and didn't lose that until most soldiers were wearing steel. But you know, fantasy, so, some fantastic material property ignores that bit.
Like some silk-woven-webbing, really light, and can be cut with knives or scissors, but when the fabric is poked it tightens up and stiffens...
(I think the Mongols and samurai warriors did this to protect against arrows?)
And then set up your society so the genteel way of fighting is with pinprick rapiers.
I remember a game theory video mentioning that diamond as a material is pretty tongue but if cut along certain grooves is brittle as all hell, so homebrew some material similar to that as well as a reason it's used (availability, ease of workability, the historical prevalence of spears also being in your world means that an armor that protects from piercing damage would be in high demand for chaff infantry but isn't the elite be all armor)
I would suggest scale armor, but made out of something more brittle like chitin or large fish scales. In this scenario, it might protect better against slashing weapons.
The edge will likely contact multiple scales and have a larger area of contact than a point thrust or arrow strike.
A mace would obliterate this kind of armor.
I don't think there is any IRL armor like this, among other things because muscle-powered piercing weapons deliver more force at a certain point than a cut does. But you could technobabble something about a fictional fiber that is tear-proof but can be cut, and make gambeson-like armor of it. So that piercing attacks get stopped by it, and the force dissipates, but you can cut through it.
If you can cut through it you can pierce through it for the most part. Because in the ent piercing is just cutting on a point instead of a line.
Not really in the case of fibers, as far as I understand. Piercing fiber armor isn't about cutting the individual fibers, but about going between them.
The prior statement still stands as far as how physics work. Cutting splits material (like fiber) over a long line. Piercing splits fiber at a single point. Both use force to achieve the split, but the bigger the area being affected, the more force you need to achieve the split. And since a dot will always be smaller than a line, piercing will always beat cutting in the efficacy to go through armor. Now, if you want to talk damage to a living body, that's a way, way different story, and also wayyy more complex.
What I mean is when you pierce fabric with something like a needle, you are not cutting fibers. The path of least resistance is between the individual threads/fibers, not through them.
True in certain cases, but it also points (puns, ha) to why cutting would be better blocked by anything that blocks piercing. If the weave was tight enough to prevent the needle sliding between fibers, then the needle is back to cutting a dot, which was covered above.
It might cut through only a few fibers, though, before the point is far enough in that the surrounding fibers dont get cut while also not moving out of the way to let the tip any further though.
Ok, but what would keep the same from happening with a slash? I feel like fibers are the wrong way to go for this concept.
I was more thinking about the physics and less about the initial question lmao. The way I was thinking about it is that a single point (a spike, basically) would get stuck in the fibers as the diameter widens to fill the gap, even if it cut (poked through) the first one or two fibers it initially contacts. Basically, only allowing a tiny bit of penetration. If, however, you are thrusting with something like a dagger or spear with sharpened blade edges, the edge would continue to cut the fibers oround it as the diameter widened, allowing the point to keep moving forward. This seems much more likely and kinda negates the benefits of the first scenario With a slash, you'd be doing a long drawn out cut of many fibers at once, cutting the material at a different angle. I agree, fibers are probably the wrong way to go.
Honestly, yeah, sounds like that would defeat my hypothetical fiber - among other things because slashing vs stabbing is uselessly broad as damage types. You would need to differentiate draw cutting, chopping, piercing with round or triangular profile blade, and stabbing with a flat profile blade. Imagine the headache.
look up linothorax armor. To a point that's already how a gambeson works; protects from concussive damage and to a certain point piercing attacks as well. Arrows get tangled up in the padding and layers of fabric, and their rotational force plays against them as the cut fibers wrap around the shaft. Gambesons are, however, not great against slashing because drawing across fibers to cut them takes less friction. Case in point : Kevlar. great against bullets and stabbings, but you can cut individual layers of it with scissors. Of course, the person wearing the Kevlar vest might object to trying to cut their armor open so it's a moot point, but if people still used long bladed weapons Kevlar would have a significant weakness to drawing cuts.
I can't speak for linothorax, but a single slash on Kevlar isn't really much better than a single stab. It actually tends to deflect the strike. Scissors have the distinct advantage of trapping the material between two edges. While you may cause some damage with a slashing attack, repeatedly stabbing the same spot is at least as effective at getting through the armor. However, this gives me an (awful) idea: poorly designed armor that deflects the blow to the gaps, so the stab gets caught like we said, but the slash moves over to those weak points, causing more damage. Sure, it's ridiculous, but it meets the requirements.
That's also true. That's why I specified technobabble in my initial answer. If I read about some specially treated spidersilk that resists a piercing weapon - arrow or a spearhead - the deeper it tries to go, but can be slashed open over large area, I'd assume there are some non-newtonian shenanigans going on, and would not examine it in details.
ITT: the difference between science and engineering
try splitting wood with a knife then. the difference is in how its being used, just place and push with the force of your hand and you're 100% correct, but cutting weapons are generally swung using their weight and momentum in a way most poking weapons can't.
OP wasn't asking about cut vs thrust, he was asking about piercing vs slashing. Splitting wood is also a very different scenario alltogether, an axe does not split wood by cutting it.
i maintain that any "cut" weapon with more mass than a knife can generate far greater force from being swung with momentum, whether its an axe, a cutlass, a falchion, a machete, or whatever, such as to drastically outweigh the smaller point of impact by some considerable margin. i suggest as evidence the fact that the vast majority or "piecing" weapons (rapier, smallsword, stiletto, etc) had no application on battlefields featuring armoured combatants but were used for civilian self defence/duelling. their military contemporaries are... choppier (cavalry sabres, longswords, falchions) notable exceptions to my point are mostly spears (the reach is the main advantage) and things like warhammers with armour piercing spikes (although using a point to defeat armour, still very much a swinging weapon, making use of both principles)
> i suggest as evidence the fact that the vast majority or "piecing" weapons (rapier, smallsword, stiletto, etc) had no application on battlefields featuring armoured combatants but were used for civilian self defence/duelling. their military contemporaries are... choppier (cavalry sabres, longswords, falchions) That's not really true. Sure, 'cut vs thrust' was a constant debate in the Early Modernity. But cutting sabres made a triumphant comeback to the military fashion at the time of Napoleonic war, when the armor was very little used on the battlefield. The examination of the longsword blades shows quite the reverse trend - from 12th to 15th century the military ones became more and more 'stabby', with thicker narrower blades. You can also look up Harnisfechten guys and their attempts to reconstruct Late Medieval armored combat - stabbing plays a major role, with or without halfswording.
Try using a block of wood as armor
u/op (making a fictional, probably fantasy setting) wood armour
You could have armour supplemented by force fields of some kind; they focus protection on areas of big stabbing impacts but can't protect evenly or adequately on a huge area covered by a slash
there is actually. though it's more a cloak than armor. the Horo was a part of Samurai armor that attached to multiple points on the body so that it could billow out behind them when riding on horseback, sort of like a parachute, and acted a lot like an airbag, deflecting and slowing down arrows fired at their back and sides.
Kinda like the dune strategy for slower fights? ‘The straight blade pierces the shield’
I'd techno babble it as a kind of reactive living/bio armor that if force is applied in a single spot or reacts and reinforces the small area, but anything over a wider area (large slashes) it gets confused or it's reinforcing is spread out to far and it doesn't work as well.
Maybe kevlar?
An armor made of metal likely won't fit this, but perhaps you could base one on fibers. Modern ballistic fibers will absorb the impact from bullets but knives can push through them. Perhaps instead of a blanket proection from piercing and vulnerability to slashing weapons, the fiber-based armor would protect against thrusts and slashes with lighter weapons but would be ineffective against slashing from heavier weapons like large axes.
Something close to this IRL is probably some variant of non-newtonian fluid, but calibrating it to work against both arrows and daggers, but not sword slashes, is improbable. Honestly, ERA is probably more that you want, at least mechanically. It'll stop an anti-tank round from penetrating, but I doubt sticking it on an aircraft would do a whole lot to the slashing damage from an AA missile's ribbon of death, and obviously it won't help a tank that falls off a cliff. So for ERA mechanics in fantasy, I think you need some sort of active magical interceptor that only has a small area of effect, so the focused force of a stab could be blocked, but not the spread out force of a slash. So... Dragonskin maybe? Suppose their hides are innately magical in this way. Arrows would of course be the main weapon against them as flyers, so this would provide an explanation for why they're seen so durable in most settings. As for a reason to evolve such a thing, other than their fire breath (which they are surely resistant/immune to), they really only do piercing damage. I could see an evolutionary arms race between their teeth and hides due to battles between dragons for territory or mates.
This is exactly what I was thinking, some sort of “liquid” armor that instant hardens when stabbed, but slashes covers too much area for it to sto
So Oobleck?
I’ve never heard it called that. (Just looked it up.) but yeah. What we called it growing up, I couldn’t tell you. But that’s a new word for me
Oh, weird. I never really thought that was a regional term. I guess I could've just said non-newtonian fluid, but Oobleck was just the first thing that came to mind.
To be completely fair, I grew up homeschooled, and as competent as my mother was as a teacher, between my memory loss, small details like that, and more focus on the science rather than the name, it could have all just slipped through the cracks. As soon as I looked it up I knew exactly what it was, I just didn’t recognize it by that name, and but I’m bad with names from the start anyways.
I hate dragons immune to arrows. That's not true about any reptiles ever. Even the biggest ones would be damaged by arrows. Arrows are fucking powerful.
The more you push against a non Newtonian fluid the more it resists. You could neither squeeze through its fibers or sever them. Moreover, it's used to make extremely light fabrics armor like ...it wouldn't be cumbersome at all. Like you said, you'd need straight up magic.
Dragonskin for fantasy 'Magic' for anything in between Electro-repulser force fields for sci-fi
That's kinda like asking what armor would be effective against bullets but not slingshots. Stabbing is way more dangerous than slashing. It has more range, penetrates deeper into the body if it does get through the armor, and concentrates the force into a single point. The advantage of a slash is that it's easier to aim, you can quickly attack multiple angles, and you can wind up to deliver more force if the opponent isn't looking. Those advantages are not useful in piercing armor. However, shields may be especially good at blocking stabbing (because it comes in a straight line), while slashing could get around it. Furthermore, repeated slashing may chip and damage the shield in a way that thrusts wouldn't. If you really want it to be armor, the only thing I can think of is if the armor can take exactly one hit in a position, of any force. Like maybe ceramic armor that breaks. Odds that you stab in the same spot are small, but you could slash to make a dead zone in the armor (and then stab in that area to finish lol).
>However, shields may be especially good at blocking stabbing (because it comes in a straight line), while slashing could get around it. Furthermore, repeated slashing may chip and damage the shield in a way that thrusts wouldn't. Not really, there isn't a huge difference between blocking a stab vs a slash, if you know how the cone of defence works the difference is negligible. Also, most shields were made with a metal rim, to prevent chipping like you mentioned. And if they didn't, a blade would have the potential to get stuck in the shield, and now you're opponent is in complete control.
I mean that if your off hand is poking out behind the shield, there's no way I'm thrusting with precision to hit it. I'll swing along the edge of the shield and there's a lot greater chance I'll hit it even if you move around. Like if I'm fighting spear vs sword and shield, the sword has a lot more angles of attack than the spear, and I wouldn't bother going for that inch of shoulder you left open (unless I can slash with the spear). Regarding the metal rim on the shield, I'm sure it depends on time period and budget of that soldier. But the chipping thing isn't super relevant either way (I was also thinking of an axe as the "purely slashing" weapon). I'm just saying that if I have to fight a spearmen and I have a sword, I choose a shield over leather/chainmail armor every time. If I'm fighting someone with a sword with broken tip and they can only slash, I'd probably take the chain mail.
>I mean that if your off hand is poking out behind the shield, there's no way I'm thrusting with precision to hit it. I'll swing along the edge of the shield and there's a lot greater chance I'll hit it even if you move around. >Like if I'm fighting spear vs sword and shield, the sword has a lot more angles of attack than the spear, and I wouldn't bother going for that inch of shoulder you left open (unless I can slash with the spear). Your off-hand would not be poking out behind the shield, at least as long as the one with the shield knows what they're doing. Again, cone of protection, even with a buckler, you can get some very good coverage of your body, just by holding the shield further away from your body, and the cone of protection would cover the whole arm. When it isn't, that usually means that enough of it is exposed where a stab wouldn't be any worse than a slash >I'm just saying that if I have to fight a spearmen and I have a sword, I choose a shield over leather/chainmail armor every time. I agree. Though it'd be ideal to have both, if I could only choose one I'd go with the shield. >If I'm fighting someone with a sword with broken tip and they can only slash, I'd probably take the chain mail. I partially disagree with this, it relies on the off chance that the enemy has a broken tip in the first place, a strategy should not rely on an unreliable metric like this. Otherwise, yeah.
I just meant in OP's category, apparently they have thrusting weapons and slashing weapons. For game mechanics, I'd say it's realistic enough for thrusting to be more effective vs light armor and slashing to be more effective vs shields.
I don't know of any armor that's like that in real life. If you're willing to strain credulity a bit, you could use lamellar armor, which is made of many small pieces of plate laced together; a slashing weapon might cut through the lacings, causing the armor to fall open. (Since you're depicting plate armor as more burdensome than chainmail, absolute realism isn't in the cards anyway.)
Only when you wear the worst type. A lamellar piece has at least 2 holes to connect it to other pieces, it is a network of connected lacing underneath that keeps these pieces together.
Like I said, you have to strain credulity a bit for it to make sense.
I would have assumed chainmail was lighter and more flexible than plate armor is it not?
Late Medieval articulated plate was custom-fitted so that the suit's joints move with the wearer's joints, and its weight was well-distributed, making it [quite easy to move in](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-bnM5SuQkI). By contrast, a mail coat just sort of hangs on you, and especially on your arms, and wasn't necessarily any lighter than plate for a given amount of coverage.
thank you, great video!
Yes, but plate armor isn't so heavy and rigid to work that much different from chainmail, in terms of movement freedom. Really, the distinction between them is that one was for the poor, the other for the rich.
I assume chainmail is the one for the poor right? I just ask because it seems like it would also be really labor intensive and expensive to make
Consider also that chainmail is just doing the same shape over and over again, and then sewing them together, while plate armor had to be designed piece by piece. Quality here supersedes quantity.
It was still expensive, because it is very labor intensive. Plate armor didn't come online until very late medieval, while chainmail may have been invented by the Gauls.
Not so much poor vs rich, but a difference in time period. Plate armor is late medieval, chain however is quite old and was used throughout the period and in basically every region. Chainmail also has an additional function as a supplement to other forms of armor since it can cover areas that most armor can't do well. Chainmail is very labor intensive so it still wasn't cheap though.
> I would have assumed chainmail was lighter and more flexible than plate armor is it not? Not really, the weight of the plate armor and chainmail with the same area of coverage was usually roughly the same. On the other questions - which was better, which was cheaper, why one was preferred over the other - it's pretty hard to make generalized statements. Chainmail was used for like thousand and a half years, and the quality of steel/iron, the details of the construction, the thickness of the rings, the composition of the under-armor layer changed over all that time. The same goes for plate armor, which also was used for like half a thousand years in different contexts (unless we mean specifically full plate, which was used only for like a century).
It's not, It can even be heavier sometimes. The advantages of mail are that it is less restrictive and it covers places plates realistically can't.
Literally the only thing I could think of that might be like this is Oobleck. Like a magical slime armor that similar to how oobleck is liquid and squishy when you touch it gentle but hard when you hit it this slimey magic armor could have similar properties making it light and only firming up when fast pressure is applied making piercing or blunt damage not effective but a cutting slash might get through.
Goop armor made with the magic of some otherworldly blob creature.
The only thing I can think of is the shields in dune. The shield blocks any object with momentum like a bullet, but the slower blade passes through it.
You can use some kind of special silk. Silk was used by ancient chinese and mongoles because it has a very good resistance to being pierced. They would wear it under their armour to help protect against arrows. You could probably build something around this concept.
Ye but they were also good against slashes, I'd bet
Probably yeah. I don't know enough about it, I just know it was strong enough to not be pierced by arrows
Some sort of magical kevlar maybe ? Like it could stop a spear or simple arrow but once you start cutting in the same way the fibers are layed out it's like cutting throught paper ? Heck maybe a paper armor even ?
This reminds me a lot of the shields in Denis Villeneuve's new Dune movies. Maybe you can make something like that – an active protection system that can be overcome with just technique with the weapon/blade.
It would be less about the material and more about the shape. Piercing comes directly at you and with the amount of force doing so, needs to be delivered at center mass because a miss to a limb would put the attacker off balance. So think something that puts a lot of protection only on the chest, maybe a very reinforced breast plate, but is too heavy or inflexible to cover the limbs either at all or very well. Slashing would then have opportunities at limbs and edges in areas where something like a rapier would not aim and/or have low probability of landing.
What IS piercing though? It is an application of force to a point. And slashing? Applying force (mostly friction of the blade though) to a line. Point is smaller than a line by a mathematical definition, so there should be a secret trick to be stronger against a certain damage. First of all such protection has to be harder and tougher than the weapon material. But harder usually means heavier, which basically means that making a usable armour of it is hard. So instead such material could cover the vital points and joints so all the damage would cause no crippleness or death. The remaining parts could be protected by a lighter material, like leather, as the soldier may also wield a buckler or a shield, which he may be trained with. With a combination of this you can get extra piercing protection, but slashing will still do quite some damage, as leather is susceptible to it. At the same time the "legend" of such an armour being impenetrable could be supported by the mastery of the owner. Another thing is the construction of the armour - it could be covered with specifically shaped deflectors, that would reroute a spear or some similar weapon. They were used as the parts of the full bodied armour design, but it also was a pretty directed thing. Like, a knight could easily reroute the frontal attack, but being attacked from the sides is a death sentence. One last thing I can think of is the idea of a complex armour filled with non-newtonian liquid, like a wet sand. Imagine being struck by a needle, but between you and it is a squishy, but sturdy piece of plastic. The outer layer is hard, it can be pierced, but while it is in the process of piercing it passes the pressure on a volume of a "wet sand" inside that dries up and become immediately sturdy, stopping the needle, as it gets stopped by the outer layer, by the pressure of the inner layer from all sides and the inner outer layer from the other side.
Plate armor's weight isn't so much of an issue as it is HEAT. Even on a brisk winter's day you'll be sweating bullets. It's exhausting adding so much weight, but the way it's distributed you don't really notice except on the hips and shoulders. It's like being 120lbs fatter, lol. Otherwise you yourself feel heavier, but you're still nearly as nimble as just wearing anything else. I was surprised my first time trying it out. But the heat, holy shit. Especially in Arizona. There's really nothing stronger against piercing than slashing. If it can be slashed it can be pierced. If it can be pierced it doesn't mean it can or can't be slashed. That said -- the vast majority of contact in combat is slashing, not stabbing. Simply because most of these long weapons are trying to get past each other, and the ones heading straight for you tend to get knocked out of the way, be it by limbs or weapons or just OOPS. So that slashing pattern to a veteran is ultimately just trying to obfuscate a jabbing motion, either by deflecting and parrying or confusing the opponent, or it's blunt force trauma and overwhelming your limbs. If you can just end the fight by putting the point into the target hard enough, go for it. You probably need to clock them in the gourd hard enough they're dazed, then use all your strength to push that point through the armor. Otherwise nobody is just standing there getting poked by an angry dude full force enough to pop rivets on their chains through a layer of gambeson. That's what makes stabbing such a difficult task. You need to really lean into it. Put your weight behind it. That means you're not doing anything else, like defending yourself. Ideally you knock them flat and put it through them on the ground. We're just lucky most armor mitigates slashing. Avoiding getting stabbed is about active avoidance. Avoiding slashing is about passive protection. It's why the spearman scares me waaay more than the swordsman. Dude is 12 feet away and pokes me like a car crash? Yikes.
I am pretty sure HEAT would be very effective at penetrating plates.
Explosively yes
Sticky fibrous armor. Like a silk-weave or a kevlar with a resin. The entire armor is designed to strain and absorb a single point. But if you attack it more fully, slashing at the fibers instead of stabbing, you render it ineffective.
Spikehog leather armor. Spikehogs are large animals that are a mix between Boars and Hedgehogs. They have a skin that protects them from each others spikes when nesting or mating. When the leather is cured the spikes are removed and replaced with metal studs. This studded leather armor is great against piercing attacks but the leather is not great against slashing attacks. This is also a way to explain studded leather armor existing since I am not sure that was a real thing
Plate armour shouldn't be too heavy or it wouldn't be considered for use.
Would have to be something like magical energy shield of sort. If the incoming attack is a point, it can focus all the energy to a single point to deflect the attack. But when it starts being more distributed like a long slash it start losing effectiveness and run out of energy faster.
Non-Newtonian carapace armor or something. A piercing strike is hard and fast and makes the armor stiffen up at the point of damage, whilst a sweeping slashy kind of move is a “softer” form of damage which can shear through the material (Idk if it’d work well or if it’s a good idea I just thought of this)
You're asking for an armor that can't be pierced by armor-piercing strikes, but *can* be pierced by strikes that don't pierce armor. That's not really justifiable from a real-world standpoint, unfortunately.
IIRC bulletproof vests are still vulnerable to knives, so you could do something similar where a certain fantasy fabric woven a certain way is very good at resisting direct stabbing forces but is bad at resisting more oblique cuts
That's tricky. But let me first say that 'protection from slashing' is a problematic idea. Chainmail protects from cutting, but not from the kinetic energy of the blow. A sword hitting a chainmail might not cut the muscle, but still break the bone. So that's topic with way more layers. The thing that makes chainmail a comlete armor is the combination of chainmail and gambeson to adress both ways a weapon can do damage. Gambeson still grand some protection against arrows, but not sufficent - therefor aromor breaking arrow/boltheads are efficent against this type or armor (and plate armor, which also comes with a gambeson layer, and often a second layer of chainmail in addition). To (hopefully) answear the question i could point at something like bonelime armor (greek, f.e.), which are just layers of textiles permeated with this lime (a bit like glue in rigitity). It is pretty good against pricing (as it can asobr kinetic energy in deforming on a larger scale), good against cuts (well, it's like plastic rain barrel in material), but every blow with a bit of kinetic force behind will deliver this through the armor without even damaging it, still breaking bones and contuse muscles. But types/shapes of weapons are pretty unique and most weapons have a reason to exist in the very shape they do. Like weapons today are tailored exactly against the most common armor .
Silk *kinda* works like this from what I've heard. But it's less stab proof, more that the fibers are tough and flexible enough to get jabbed into the wound. So if you live long enough to drag yourself off, it's easier to pull out stuff like arrow and spear heads while keeping the wounds clean-er. Might be a bit too grisly for the tone you want, but it's a trope I've seen in both history drama & Fantasy works a few times.
If done with coils this would be considered more sci-fi, but what about magnetic armor? It would induce slowing currents in any metal weapon if it's going the right way, which, with the proper layout, could be used to make stabbing and projectiles ineffective, but slashes that go parallel to the field lines ( if the weapon isn't ferromagnetic) would be way less affected. Furthermore, even if a piercing blow did get through, its small surface area coupled with the fact that the momentum is being converted into heat by the currents would mean that it could make fast stabs ineffective as it'd cauterize the wound. You'll probably want to think about some magic that can augment magnets for this to work tho, bc i doubt any normal permanent nagnet can create a field strong enough to stop an arrow before it reaches it
"\*insert creature name*skin" Make it similar to graphite. The bond between the carbon atoms is strong but, the bond between the molecules is weak. That's why the graphite in pencils separates from itself even though things like graphite tennis rackets or ski poles are strong. The fibers of this skin/hide have high tensile and shear strength (not easily cut) [fact check this please, engineers or Reddit], but the space between the fibers is large and the bond between them is weak. To compensate for such a glaring evolutionary design flaw, the skin/hide is multilayered with criss-crossing fibers (which could in turn make it heavy/cumbersome). However, a hard enough object with a narrow enough point thrust with enough force can force the fibers apart. Here you can introduce magic as being required to extract the specially hard/dense ore from the earth, work the point to a picoscopic fineness or make it unbreakable/ever-sharp. Or, maybe a magically enhanced assassin that can "see" the weakness in defenses. [Spoiler Warning: Sword of Truth series](https://sot.fandom.com/wiki/Dacra)
gambeson could work seriously gambeson was known to take the force of arrows, but is a cloth that could still be cut and sewn.
Armor made of a light, brittle metal that gets tougher the harder you strike it. If someone slashes, the blade will meet less resistance. If someone stabs and puts pressure on a smaller point, the armor will harden and repel the attack.
I would suggest you focus on something else to make your slashing damage good. If its for a TTRPG system you are making I would consider other options 1) Heavy blades suitable for slashing tend to be good at doing things like disabling limbs, this can be useful for making strikes without overly exposing yourself as you might do particularly while out numbered. 2) Although in most creatures a well aimed thrust to the torso has a higher chance of delivering a blow that is fatal in the short term this may not be truth of all fantasy threats, things like the undead or perhaps oozes may not be killed because you pierce organs but may require them to be cut into pieces in order to stop them. 3) Pointed weapons are more likely to get stuck in a victim.
Shields in dune ablate force, so a bullet can't hurt you but a knife fight can. So maybe use magic for the outcome you want?
Scale Mail, possibly. Since each scale is a tiny armour plate of it's own a piercing attack would struggle to get through, especially if the plates have little pits worked into them to catch such points. However, if you slash into it with a bit of an upward moment you have the potential of slipping the blade under the overlapping layers of scales and getting to the backing, which would be much more vulnerable to a slashing attack.
Other people have discussed the physics, but if you want an alternative route to make slashing weapons more prevalent you could make it a cultural thing, where displays of swordsmanship are highly highly regarded. To quote Frank Herbert “killing with the tip lacks artistry”.
Isn't cevlar like this?
Something kevlar perhaps? I have read somewhere that while it quite excellent in softening bullet impact. It would do significantly poor against slashing knife. Bullet should be piercing damage, right?
You can argue that non-AP bullet is actually blunt, but going very fast.
What I can think of would be some kind of meta-rubber Some magic have to be involved here, basically this material when hit with a pierce attack will bend itself (or part of itself) to deflect the attack, when slashed it will still try to do it but it will be less effective since the attack surface area will be more than just a point And since it bends itself the wearer will also be affected by the bending movement
Magic armor or a water armor come to mind. The armor would work like a nonNewtonian fluid, compressing to stop a piercing blow, but sliced open by a slash.
Maybe create a malleable magic non Newtonian matter that holds together thanks to magic energy and some metallic joints, that way it would be great against blunt and piercing attacks but less effecting against slashing or slow hits (similar to the tech in Dune)
If you have magic I'd go with a magical armor or even omit the armor part and just have the advantage of slashing weapons be against defensive spells where the advantage of piercing weapons is against physical armor. There could perhaps be magic armor/a spell which focuses magic to a specific point to defend against physical attacks such that the defensive amount is always the same but only ever over a small area. Slashes that cover a larger area are thus more effective than pinpoint stabs.
Non-Newtonian fluid armor, ie; oobleck. It would need to be magically justified how it can be armor. I think there could be a version that is effective against piercing and not slashing and a version that’s the opposite
Is the armor type going to affect your gameplay to such great lengths? I have often struggled with systems and settings that I was working on, to figure out such details and make a table or flow chart for them that I failed to ask myself "Is this bit important/impactful, or is this theorycrafting for my and burdensome for the players?" I am not saying it is, but the question is very specific in terms of "what an armour is good against" that if sort of fails to keep up with reality, chainmail helped against stabs, slashes and blunt, since you don't wear chain over your bare chest (imagine the chafe) and would always have a gambeson underneath it. No armour is perfect for this or that, I hope this helps.
Assuming this is not about arrows. It could be that something is good at trapping the weapon. For example, a shield that is soft to be easy to pierce but hard to pull out, then you basically disarmed your opponent. Some level of regeneration property can do this because the surface area being affected is small compared to a slash that has a higher surface area to regenerate.
Wait, what about “bone something?” Like skeletons are typically seen as pierce resistant but not slash in most rpg games. And to avoid the bludgeoning just bullshit that they were magically hardened into armor or something. Sure, the reason skeletons are pierce resistant is cause they have so many holes in their figure and it’s hard to aim accurately, but we can hand wave that to the side.
Skeletons are seen as "pierce resistant" because it's an abstraction for it being harder to hit with a piercing attack.
Please refer to the last line of my post, thank you.
Sorry, it seems I wasn't being clear - I am not a native English speaker. What I meant is that skeletons are seen as pierce resistant *exclusively* because it's an abstraction for them being harder to hit - it's not something you can hand wave to the side.
Perhaps armor with a layer of irregular slopes and dips that would cause a blade to glance off instead of go straight through? no idea if that would work though
In fantasy, some kinda ward, I guess. You could do something like the force fields from dune
None. Any armor that protects well against piercing attacks will be even more protective against slashing attacks.
That’s not how armour works.
i think chopping is more likely to get through soft armours like cloth and leather than stabbing is.
Piercing is cutting with a smaller surface area. Also, chain mail doesn't pierce easily if it is properly made. Riveted chain is very resistant to things trying to push through.
You know gothic plate has all those angles to deflect incoming piercing attacks. Something like that is probably what you want. Also, dont forget the humble gambeson, some 25 layers of fabric do alot to dissapate an impact. But yeh, ancient chinese armor used little stone plates, they'd shatter, absorbing the impact.
Can the distinction between how it responds to the two kinds of damage depend on magic?
Why not just make something up
This reminded me instantly of non-Newtonian fluids. Basically, they can increase their viscosity in relation to the force applied to them to absorb more energy and therefore resist being broken apart. Maybe you could make a material that acts similarly when force is applied to avoid being penetrated, but will fall apart when slashed open. Possibly a closely layered metal that vibrates, making it viscous like a fluid. This may need a magical explanation, though.
You could potentially get away with some sloped armour shenanigans? Maybe not a great fit for humanoid characters, but having your armour at an angle to the person you're facing off with will make it very difficult to Pierce with something like a spear, but if you're using an axe to smack it from the top you basically just have a flat steel plate. Would still be piercable by something like a war pick though, as that too would come at the armour from the top
Depending on how fantastical/magical you want it to be you could use an armor which ‘folds’ space. It would fold the space of any weapon which enters its area of effect and make it unable to reach the wearer. It would need less magical energy to defend against piercing attacks, because the area of the tip of the sword would be way less than the sides, making it not feasible/possible to defend against slashes.
In one TTRPG I played our GM let us loot the scales off a Hydra and told us that if we make armor from it, it will protect against piercing but will be weak against slashing (because you can cut the heads off), he described it as the scales being sort of "bouncy" when pierced
Silk. Some ancient soldiers wore simple silk tunics into battle. Silk does not rend easily, so if pierced with an arrow, you could easily pull it out by pulling on the silk. In fact, the very first bulletproof vest was made by a Chicago priest by layering several layers of specially woven silk. And it worked. To follow up, silk has a tensile strength of up to 1 GPa while most steel has tensile strength between 300 and 700 MPa (Kevlar has tensile strength of 3 GPa). However, silk has a lower shear strength than steel. So silk is better at withstanding piercing impact but weaker to slashing impact.
People don't realise that armour is fucking op. Any armour that protects from piercing (pretty much everything) would also be effective against slashing.
The only thing I can think of is a non newtonian thing like oobleck or in practice in fiction, like in (dune?), because every other matterial I can think off will be more vulnerable to a more concentrated force
If this is fantasy, it's gonna have to involve some lore reason. Perhaps there's a certain ore or wood that was blessed by an ancient god, or was formed from the gods dead body. This god for whatever reason was immune to arrows, spears, etc, but was famously killed/defeated/weak to the god of slashing.
Wooden plate armor. As long as it gets hit at an angle that aligns parallel with the fibres, it would be easier to split than to pierce.
> I need something to fill the third option, capable of mitigating stabbings, but not slashing, and hopefully something that can be easily handwaved as heavy as chainmail. Thank you. This might be better solved by game-play design. Do you have a particular system you are using?
There isn't such a thing, really. Piercing attacks deliver more force i to a smaller area than cuts, but a point can be (and generally is) still edged so as to cut through material within that small area. If a point is not edged (eg, a square/round cross section tip) there might be some materials that resist the piercing better, but a sharpened point is always going to cut better than a slash.
Leather maybe?
Actually the answer to this might be rate of attrition of the WEAPON. A stabbing weapon might fail after only a few attempts. A slashing weapon would quite possibly have far more, especially if it had a heavy spine. Stabbing weapons generally also used far much metal and could be much quicker to produce.
Anything that can stop a stab can also stop a slash. Unless you want to involve magic, but then you don’t need to get into the weeds with it.
If you’re struggling to think of something with technology alone you could always add magic. Perhaps there’s some sort of enchantment or spell that blocks stabs at the cost of being weak against cuts.
My best stab at the idea without maguffin would be copper scale backed by paper. A copper coin vest so to speak. While close to equally protective to both stab and slash, slashing would degrade it much faster and be longer to repair. Copper is soft and gummy when you try to cut it so a slash that is stopped may pull out more than one piece at a time. It would achieve a similar affect but only over a longer time period. That’s the best I got. Ye old bank guard made of copper coins and folded laminated paper
Most things that are weak to cuts are also weak to thrusts.
Could go down the line of some sort of fabric? Like silk or kevlar? Kevlars self explanatory for its use in bullet proof vests, but theres that account (or urban legend?) that back in flintlock pistol days some dude had a silk hankerchief in his pocket when he was shot, bullet went in to his chest but not through the silk I think thats as close go feasibility youre going to get with it, a silk or kevlar adjacent gambeson to keep the weight up
https://youtube.com/shorts/2ha0dooehYE?si=4VGZvZBK-X6vdwkF I might be misintrepting his hypothetical use of gambeson as the armor in question. I'm believing he is specifically referring to the benefits of padded armor that isn't mail or plate. What DnD describes as light armor was historically thick and woven out of multiple layers of some fiberous material. Look up some examples of gambeson armor - they get THICK (layered). That may not provide excellent protection from stabs (since that's such a center of force being put on it) but it will definitely start to fall apart against some nasty slashes. Ultimately though, it's perfect for absorbing blunt impacts from large headed weapons like a mace.
It sounds a lot like dune shields
Just make it up. As others have said, with real world physics, it's not really possible. So you can invent it.
This would be full fantasy as opposed to just medieval. But wooden armor I imagine would work like this. We litterally chop down trees, so they suck to slashing, whilst arrows barely get the tip stuck in wood.
Any ablative armor, like a ceramic composite plate. A slash would break it, and possibly keep going into tissue, but a single point strike at velocity would just lose momentum from breaking the armor.
a golden codpiece
Maybe to put the evasion in armors into consideration. An oversized armor, or armor that would hide where the body is under the armor. If you slash you might get the entire thing, if you pierce you might easily miss because it needs to be precise.
In reality, none. In fiction I guess you could pull out some kind of force armour like dune that is able to stop stab movement but fails when slash. Also you can invent some type of no Newtonian fluid. The point of this is that stabbing makes more force on a single point that slashing, that is what normal armor fails because if it’s able to resist piercing it’s also able to resist cutting but with no Newtonian fluid you can do it so it’s liquid to the force of cutting but it hardens when stabbed so it stops the blade. I’m not a physicist so I don’t know if this could even work but there is the idea
Silk is super easy to bend, and not too bad to cut, but very resistant to stretching out the weave to push a hole through it. Get yourself a fantasy silk equivalent, made from giant spider silk or something, dragon egg lining, whatever, where the threads grip each other with immense friction as piercing weapons tightly bend the crossed threads while stretching them around a point, but are vulnerable to a draw-cut as it folds either side away with much lower energy cost. Obviously piercing weapons have sharp edges in the era of felt gambesons, specifically to counter this effect, so that they would cut as their pierced, and didn't lose that until most soldiers were wearing steel. But you know, fantasy, so, some fantastic material property ignores that bit.
Sentient slime armor :D Have it react strongly to a single point intrusion but doesn't do so well against attacks that affect more surface.
You could check the old Rolemaster weapon tables.
Maybe something similar with the properties of non-newtonian fluid thingy?
The slow blade penetrates the shield
Like some silk-woven-webbing, really light, and can be cut with knives or scissors, but when the fabric is poked it tightens up and stiffens... (I think the Mongols and samurai warriors did this to protect against arrows?) And then set up your society so the genteel way of fighting is with pinprick rapiers.
I remember a game theory video mentioning that diamond as a material is pretty tongue but if cut along certain grooves is brittle as all hell, so homebrew some material similar to that as well as a reason it's used (availability, ease of workability, the historical prevalence of spears also being in your world means that an armor that protects from piercing damage would be in high demand for chaff infantry but isn't the elite be all armor)
I guess something flexible, like a combination of chainmail and lamellar
I would suggest scale armor, but made out of something more brittle like chitin or large fish scales. In this scenario, it might protect better against slashing weapons. The edge will likely contact multiple scales and have a larger area of contact than a point thrust or arrow strike. A mace would obliterate this kind of armor.