immediately turned off of an OSR game with armor as dr because it's "more realistic."
The ways armors work as defenses are a lot more complicated than that.

was reading up on an osr game based on white box

I feel like it's needless faffery.

You nerd who likely never wore armor of any kind: armor should always reduce damage in rpgs.
Me an intellectual who has worn multiple kinds of armor in different contexts: do go on with your deep understanding of martial technology.

while you studied the elf, I studied the blade

you a nerd obsessed with combat as war in osr: guns should have exploding dice and blow through armor and kill high level fighters
me an intellectual who read the explanations and source fictions: do go on about how level based hp makes no sense in a genre of flesh wounds

you an scadian stick jock: armor reduces damage and my experience in the sca supports this
me: you know the wrap shot isn't a real technique that only works in part due to how sca combat works.

yuo an larper: my extensive larp experience says more people should be using shield in d&d because shields are really good
me: you have a flawed understanding of how arms and armor evolved in part warped by the light contact and stickiness of foam weapons

there a lot of assumptions that are made by a lot of people & therefore games on how people fight & in "medieval" frpgs how armors and arms work.
We're going to go the extreme case of fighting 1v1 with men-at-arms in armor with knightly weapons.

With the assumption that these people are trying to kill eachother there are two main ways to defeat armor.
Brute force strikes to batter through armor & targeting the gaps with the point.
Already we're at armor is being both dr and ac, how do you deal with that cleanly?

and even then, when battering your foe, blows are primarily directed to the extremities, hands, feet, head, where the armor is thinner, or the joints where percussive blows will bend the armor hindering movement.

BUT it should be acknowledged that men-at-arms DID use brute force against eachother. It was common enough that is always mentioned in the manuals we still have along with techniques to defeat this tactic.

Armor is complicated. Such that beyond griping about it periodically I use w/e way armor works in a game w/o feeling the great need to change the rules. This isn't even a balance thing, it's a "this shit is a game & I don't care to crawl into the rabbit hole of realistic combat"

I did that when I was a kid, to the point that I was working on feats and rules change how armor worked from the perspective of the attacker and hybridized armor as both AC and DR.

getting back to the SCA/LARP idea that shields are awesome and more people should them. This is a layered thing. The use of shields in Europe decline among the armored class, sticking around the longest for use in jousts.
This is in the context IRL human on human combat.

And between armored combatants. The more armored the less shields were needed.
In sport combat systems, like SCA and LARPs, contact anywhere on the body counts, so shields matter, effectively saying armor is a costume, even in the SCA where it does provide actual protection.

So in the SCA, there are rules and shit about how to take a blow, regardless of the amount or kind of armor, the blow standards are the same. A mail hauberk and late age of plate harness are treated the same, and are the same as someone wearing kidney plates and a helm.

hands and feet aren't legal targets. you cannot trip or grapple. the weapons are clubs, and there are requirements on how to construct a thrusting tip on them. You can't start a two-handed swing more than 90-sih degrees.
These are a lot of stipulations for safety in a sport

it's a fine sport but one that favors the use of sword & board in single and small group combat. Thus easily leading to the conclusion that shields are really good. By extension applicable to LARP due a lot of them having similar targeting restrictions.

So that's both some historical and modern sporting context on shields and armor, not a full indepth one, just a bit, on why this is an imperfect line of reasoning.

The real world doesn't have fire breathing dragons, however.
Dragons, and wizards with fireballs is imo the justification.
Thank you for coming to my tedtalk.

I really need to package up all my armor threads and put them on my blog.
Or maybe an anti-sys

To be clearer. AOE shit like fire breating dragons means hiding behind a shield might make sense and it also pretty thematic/genre appropriate.