After much debate and consideration, as well as a lot of insightful commentary on the shield size poll, I've finally come to a shield ruling. The important points are summarized here. I've also included my lines of reasoning below for anyone who wants to know how I arrived at the new rules.
- A shield may be no larger than one third of your height in any dimension.
- If you have the Heavy Shield proficiency, your shield may be up to one half of your height in a single dimension.
- Because this ruling eliminates the use of tower shields, if you are a warrior with the Heavy Shield proficiency, you are entitled to a free respend.
Here was the process I used to arrive at the ruling. I began by Googling some basic information. The average adult human in the United States is about 69.5 inches tall. About 9 inches of this is head and about 5 inches is neck, so the average person has 55.5 inches of legal hitting height.
I followed this by combing through online stores and cataloging the dimensions of LARP shields on sale, with the premise being that they would tend to sell shields that would be considered legal to use in most contexts. This revealed an interesting fact: 84% of all the shield sizes I saw met our 24-inch shield size requirement in width anyway.
This gave me the idea that the main difference between a heavy shield and a light shield was in one dimension. There was a pretty steady progression of sizes from 18 through 36 inches, then there was a sudden jump to 44 to 48 inches. Since these would cover better than 80% of the legal hitting area of a normal person, they were clearly out.
Thus, I arrived at the conclusion that 36 inches by 24 inches on a normal-sized person was considered a decently sized shield. On our hypothetical person, it covers about two thirds of the legal hitting area at a time. If you apply some simple division to the original height of 69.5 inches, that you me a shield that's about one half by one third the person's height.
Hopefully this ruling appeases everyone. I think heavy shields will still be a viable option without being considered too powerful. I think warriors will still dominate a straight fight. And I think we'll see shields of more appropriate and realistic sizes regardless of the wielder's height. Not to mention it's a fairly simple rule to apply during shield construction.
If you have any comments, please share them below. If you're a heavy shield warrior who'd like a respend, please send me a PM.
My Mark Shell says stamped and approved :)