Ancients tech play and armor/weapons

[ZorroGames]

So, there has been discussion about moving/creating a D&D setting to a home-brew more ancients oriented. So the big bump in the road is how to restructure armor and weapons.

How would you restructure the armor types or substitute for levels like full plate? Padded, "stiffened linen" (which people vaguely remembered reading but could not be defined un a usable manner, shades if urban myth,) leather, horn scale, metal scale, bronze versus iron all have been thrown out in discussion.

Another suggestion was to let dexterity apply to whatever ends up as heavy armor. Comments?

Some weapons did not exist at that level of technology (or did they) but would there be weapons that could fill that role that none of us (no "ancients" majors in the group) would be not aware of? Would the depicted large axes of Egytpian soldiers in some illustrations equate to Halberd in relative terms?

So far this is just talk but any insights would be helpful.

And no one wants to create and DM such a world so I think this may just be blue sky conversing.

[Aett_Thorn]

It is going to depend on exactly where you are going to place the campaign, but a lot of this can be done by refluffing the existing options and giving them different names.

For instance, if you are going to be set in something akin to ancient Egypt, then you refluff the longsword as a khopesh, and leave the stats the same. Same for the battle axe/great axe. Egypt had versions of each of these, even if they weren't necessarily as effective as later versions from Europe. Probably the only thing that you're going to have to remove is crossbows, as these might not have been invented yet.

As for armor, leave the stats the same, but adjust the names for each. Remember, AC is just an abstraction for the quality of the armor. If the best thing that you're going to have available is a Breastplate, then that becomes 18 AC, and you adjust the other types accordingly. Add something like Padded or Cloth armor as the new "light armor", and you're close to being set.

[Koren]

To add to Aett, while the effectiveness of early armor and weapons is not as high, a weapon that does less damage to armor that protects less should even out.

And outside of the immersion, DMs have a ton to work through when planning sessions as it is. Completely reworking all of the armor and weapons to fit a specific time period is just unnecessary.

[Rainbownaga]

I was considering refluffing light and medium armours, and making heavy armour proficiency let you treat your dex modifier as +3 when calculating AC values if it would otherwise be less.