Armor
As many of you may know, I have for many years participated in the Society for Creative Anachronism's heavy weapons combat. It's a fun little hobby. Though it is not, as one of my football team-mates disparagingly called it "playing dress up", unless your definition of "dress up" is to strap seventy pounds of metal to your body and then be brutally beaten by 20-something linebackers with clubs.
Okay, you /do/ get to beat them back, but it's mostly the beating that lands on me that comes quickly to mind this morning as I ice my poor bloodied elbow.
That's a nice little drawing of me in armor, huh? Alas, the truth is, I really look more like this:
Metal deforms with use, and I've never quite figured out the best way to strap said pieces to my body so they stay put. Also, I am a terrible horrible rotten person when it comes to maintaining my equipment. In the SCA, you see, even if you buy your armor pieces pre-made, it's almost always up to you to figure out the strapping and mounting of them. Imagine if your football helmet came without a chin strap nor any padding and you had to come up with your own! And leather stretches. Straps break. The thing you mount TO shifts. It can become a hot mess fast.
My opponents are absolute geniuses at laser-targeting my exposed spots. Weight drags the armor pieces lower than they should be and no one ever seems to accidentally hit where the armor is. This close up shows the arm-harness hot mess, but the most annoying is my left thigh. No matter how I try, I have /never/ had armor cover the spot on my left thigh that everyone hits. I have permanent scar tissue all over that. And how does my wrist get exposed? I have a long-cuff glove on that tucks a good four inches under the leather vambrace, but inevitably I'll look down at the end of the night and see bare wrist turning a lovely purple. And no matter how many times I re-shape my breastplate, it deforms so I have the world's sharpest point cutting into my tender inner arm. And... and... okay, okay, I should just fix the crap, right? But working on armor isn't fun and it's hard to keep up a hobby that requires another hobby which you don't want to do.
Okay, enough ranting and shaking my fist. The point is: armor is hard to get right. Fitting is crucial and maintenance constant.
So tell me again how your game character just picked up that armor on the dungeon floor and put it on. :P