Game has knights

>implying the better diet didn't lead them to be be fatter

Nonsense.
No knight ever was seen on ground. EVER.

this is what communists believe
we're not talking about french aristocracy here, we're talking about a warrior class of nobility, sworn to fight for their liege.

According to the chronicles IIRC by the mid Hundred Years' War it was the normal French tactic for the knights to either begin or eventually go into battle unhorsed in an infantry block. When Jehan Le Bon was captured at Poitiers it was after a foot melee, for instance.

Imagine how effective a group of dismounted knights would be at assassinations!

>Mail has only slightly worse stats than plate
>Mail is considered heavy and not medium or medium/heavy armor depending on amount of mail
>Padded cloth armor has garbage stats
>Leather armor exists
>Plate armor doesn't give nigh invulnerability to slashing damage
>War bows do less damage than light crossbows
>Heavy crossbow does more damage than a blackpowder handgun
>Armor skill is required to use armor

>Playing RPGs with statistics

Has there ever been a form of 'leather armor' in history or is it solely an invention of roleplaying games?

leather yes constantly, almost always with cloth padding, but yes

studded leather is what never existed, it makes no sense.

Yes I know studded leather is false and nonsensical.

But did people just make torso protection and such out of leather without any metal? What form did it take exactly?

You hear people talk about it on the likes of Veeky Forums, makes it sound like the kind of basic 'light armour' that would appear in roleplaying games or vidya should instead be some kind of padded material set instead of leathers.

Some exist. What I know of, and can currently remeber:

Leather as the light armour option would mostly resemble buffed leather armour, which turns up, hm, it's around by the 30 years war at least. Light, flexible, easy to wear, and it can stop a glancing slice or the shrapnel from a bullet failing to punch through armour. Anything resembling a solid hit is unlikely to even notice it's there though.

We also see some leather scale lamellar here and there. In this case the leather will tend to be thick, heavy and hard stuff, with no more flexibility expected than from metal plates. It pops up in ancient Egypt, Japan, Tibet, probably Russia, etc.

In high medieval Europe we also see a bit of hardened leather, but hat appears to have been almost purely as extra reinforcement on top of mail, not something used on its own. Hardened leather bracers as standalone do pop up in Tibet though.

All that said and done, the typical RPG leather armour has probably been invented mroe out of pure imagination than anything historical. With some help from leather covered splints, brigandine and coat of plates mistaken as leather/studded leather when someone didn't realise that the studs were there to keep stuff in place on the inside.

you take leather in two or three layers, usually hardened with a chemical treatment, and you add it over top of cloth shirt, usually with extra padding, usually only a thin layer or none at all around joints.

Pic Related is lamellar, its pretty primitive but it was used for a long time all around the world.

Leather was never armor on it's own. Even when hardened it provides little defense against slashing, stabbing, or bashing. Padded armor would be better in all cases, and was actually used throughout history. The only cases where leather was used was when it was used to hold together other materials, like riveting segmented metal plates underneath or on top of leather.

>we're talking about a warrior class of nobility
So,they were trained for war. I don't deny it.
They were living hedonistic life ,though.

GET THEE HENCE, BROTHERS! THE FLOOR IS LAVA!

>But did people just make torso protection and such out of leather without any metal?
No.

If you couldn't afford metal armour you'd wear padded clothing, aketons, gambesons. These came in the form of many stacked layers of linen, or padded clothes with air pockets that were filled with loose wool or straw, or other combinations.

The only applications of leather as a protective material in and of itself (rather as just something you attack metal to) were cuir bouilli, which was made from leather plates that were made very hard and resilient through a process which was lost to time; and Japanese lamellar armour occasionally fashioned from rawhide.

Yeah, that looks like something a spear would laugh at.

This isn't just navel gazing you benis. You can dig up the bodies from the middle ages and see that nobles were taller and better built than peasants and serfs.

you ever try using a leather punch attached to a long pole?

either way you might as well stab them in the shoulder or neck if that was the only thing they were wearing.

The problem with leather is you can't keep it if you trade up. A professional soldier is going to die fast or live long enough to buy actual armor so it makes more sense to use quilted armor since you can reuse it when you upgrade.

The French rather preferred to keep their knights mounted, since they could raise the horses for it.

The English struggled with that, and as a result they often preferred to put their knights on foot, spreading them throughout the infantry to show the rest how it's done.

Now even with that it's bloody hard for infantry to withstand a solid cavalry shock, even with pikemen you'll need some really good troops to have a chance. So to fight down on the continent the English had to figure out ways to make things hard for the horsemen, or pretty much every battle would go the way of the battle of Patay. Sharpened stakes in the ground, longbowmen (hard to armour horses), choice of terrain. All of that then forced the French to dismount every now and then, regardless of how distasteful they might find it.

>quilted armour
>keep using it
You're constantly replacing or at the very least repairing your gambeson; if you're rich enough to afford proper armour getting a new gambeson will be pocket change in comparison.

A quilted armour meant to be used standalone may be a lot thicker than something meant to fit underneath hard armour. So for both that and a hypothetical leather armour alike, the answer to upgrading would seem to be "just sell the damn thing".

>taller
yes
>better built
no

greatmingmilitary.blogspot.com.br/2014/11/leather-armour-of-ming-dynasty.html
> Armour used by the militia-sailors from Yue region (粤, modern day Guangdong and Guangxi province, especially Guangxi). This armour is made of cowhide, cut into multiple bands and treated with tung oil, then joined together with studs (turning it into a studded leather armour). Its spaudlers can be further reinforced with cow horn plates.

>Yue Bing Kui Jia was considered the best among leather armours.

> Chu Zhou Pi Jia (處州皮甲, 'Hide armour from Chu Zhou')
>A type of hide armour used by Ming troops from Chu Zhou. Recorded in Huo Long Shen Qi Zhen Fa (《火龍神器陣法》), this armour is made of raw buffalo hide, cut into multiple strips and assembled in the likeness of a Zheng Long (蒸籠, bamboo steamer), then painted with tung oil and dried.

>Tang Ni Kai is a rather unusual armour made of pangolin hide. To make this armour, pangolin hide is boiled together with radish seed and lopseed (along with saltpetre, Glauber's salt and Sal ammoniac), before being molded into lamellar or scale plates and assembled into a complete armour.

>Chuan Shan Jia Jia is made of pangolin scales. Said to be extremely tough, it is usually reserved for high-ranking officers.

>People bringing up knights.
>It's always about English and French knights.

>No one ever gives a shit about Spanish knights.

Caballeros are literally what people think of when they say "Knight", even if they don't know it.

I'm of course being slightly facetious.
But the frankly ridiculous adherence to heir own code of conduct, the active warrior aristocracy, guys in retardedly elaborate uniforms beating the snot out of one another and everyone close to them for imaginary slights and high causes, the almost institutionalized wooing of ladies, and the near daily bloody spectacles for cheering crows.

That's literally the caballero class for an actual millennia.

A leather punch gets the job done with grip strength alone. Forward momentum and a steel point would punch through that shit no problem. Maybe not ridiculous game of thrones in-one-end-out-the-other kind of penetration, but organ damage is guaranteed.

No one stopping you from buying a mount and a few lances nignog, shit gets expensive and won't realy be all that usefull in the dungeon bits tho.

except for that battle in 1066
kinda a thing

>either way you might as well stab them in the shoulder or neck if that was the only thing they were wearing.
>Muh full suit of plate armour
Through most of history the only armour most soldiers wore was something to protect their torso and a helmet. The torso is the biggest, easiest to hit, and second most vital (after the head) part of the body. You can get stabbed in the arm or get an arrow to the knee and live. Sure there are a lot of major blood vessels in the arms and legs but the odds of hitting any individual blood vessel of such size is relatively low.

There is a reason soldiers have often survived having arms and legs severed or mangled in battle going back thousands of years.

>Mail
>Medium
nigga full chainmail is heavier than full plate