I’m curious how people would stat out Haida armor. It consisted of leather made from sea lion, walrus, moose, or elk hide, plus hardwood (often red cedar) rods and slats tied tightly together with sinew. The Russians found it impervious to arrows and resistant to musket fire at normal combat ranges, while the wooden helmets and face protectors were said to be as heavy as iron. It feels like this should be a somewhat heavier armor, since it protected well and, while I haven’t been able to find weight, it’s clearly pretty bulky from the pictures viewable online, so its encumbrance could easily be higher than its weight. So, how would you (yes, you reading this) assign values to the wood-and-leather armor?
This sounds like something comperable to lamellar to me. For the most simple translation, you could just treat it as AC5, Enc 5. I know for my part, I wouldn’t want to model too many more complexities than that in armor.
That being said, if you want the specifics of armor to matter somewhat, you can generally fiddle with several equivalents: +1 to hit, +1 AC, +1 damage are all often tradeoffs that can be made among fighting styles or proficiencies. In theory there’s also a tradeoff happening with armor where 1 extra encumbrance gives 1 extra AC, but I can’t imagine that’s going to be balanced beyond 6, especially since the right to wear armor of AC5 and AC6 generally requires advanced fighting ability. You can also introduce fragility for slightly powerful items, as I do for spears.
So for example, you might say the armor is AC5, Encumbrance 7, it reduces incoming damage by 1, but the armor gets “broken” whenever a 20 is rolled on an attack against the wearer, then roll on the “scavenged weapon” table to see what happens to it.