But if you use light armor in combo with restoration, alteration or conjuration magic, it can be just as effective as a warrior wearing the full protection of heavy armor. The same is for a character using agility to dodge, hide or make haste.

maybe. But then again there are a large amount of people who grow beyond that mentality and want something more serious and realistic. Something that has been thought out with a more educated mindset and presents itself as something that could really exist.

Fantasy isn't a mentality you "grow out of". It's supposed to be its own thing, not a stepping stone to "gritty realistic history". Granted there is (has to be) an element of realism in fantasy, but just because something is more realistic doesn't mean it's automatically better and should be used in fantasy forever onward. For a fantasy RPG, it's better to look at the mechanical benefits offered by such a change, and whether or not it fits the tone of what you're going for, not whether it's historically accurate.

wow that sounds totally boring for a fantasy rpg. especially for TES, where you can literally enchant a bikini to provide as much protection as steel armor.

Yeah, taking Realism as an absolute rule is just as problematic a philosophy as throwing it entirely out the window for the sake of 'Fantasy'. A game in which a single broken ankle can hobble you for the rest of your life, or a serious wound could take weeks to heal before you could go back out there, aren't really able to mesh with the 'Adventure' ideology.


In terms of armour and weapons, realism is also inherently problematic, because of how they suffer damage. Armour isn't easy to repair, and if it gets actually damaged (split, punctured or otherwise too warped) you just discarded it. Weapons didn't typically break from use (beyond wooden hafts) but because of impurities, and could snap at any time with little or no warning. The heaviest armours also rendered you almost impervious to damage, with Jousting Armoire able to withstand impacts that would instantly kill you otherwise.


The Real World is great as an influence, and as a way to gauge how mechanics can logically interact and play out its fantastic, but taking it as absolute law isn't always a good choice. Armour is one of those things which I think would greatly benefit from some more real-world influence, but even I have limits.

I don't need 100% realism, but I do need enough realism to have a rational suspension of disbelief.

The problems with armor in TES are two fold. The first being obviously how the skills between each individual armor is applied when trying to wear multiple pieces from different "types", and the second is that each armor type doesn't have intrinsic traits, regardless of the Skill, that actually makes them seem different in a meaningful capacity.

Personally, I'd like to see the relevant Skill be utilized based on the combined total of your characters equipment, over managing each and every individual piece. You could mix and match heavy and light armors and wind up using the medium armor skill, while those individual pieces still retain the benefits of being heavy/light armor.

In TES, one of the biggest advantages of Light Armor is that you can carry more loot. Unless you travel with practically nothing with weight, you're not going to outrun many of the opponents, so increased speed isn't all that much of a benefit. Agility is not affected by armor in TES, so there's no reason why your sneaking thief or assassin needs to stick with less protection.

The entire Light-Heavy armor divide is completely artificial. I would much prefer a system where every piece has its inherent good and bad points, so it makes sense to wear particular types of armor for specific purposes. A thief should have drastically different armor needs than a fighter, and an assassin should have some differences in needs from either of those. Balancing protection, weight, durability, repairability, cost, and availability, in order to create a complete spectrum of types, seems like a much more reasonably approach than having a "rat race" where you have to keep getting the latest "simply better" type for your new level, and having two or three distinct "lines" of armor to progress through, with no real distinction at the end when Perks cancel all of the disadvantages.

Ok. Lets clarify a bit better what I mean. I don't mean the lack of imagination in design and appearance. I mean something like "lets makes a weapon that is obviously too large for a person to handle and to make it seem real, lets just say the physics are different in our world".

Yep, I knew what you meant and I would tend to agree. The Wile E. Coyote weapons like the enormous hammers in http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/102500/header.jpg?t=1447355189 and the antics some heroes do (like Gerault's somersaults, for example) tend to make me not very interested in playing those games.