Clumsy Weight of Half-Leggings and Greaves

I’ve been studying the armor chapter in the detail for the first time and found an inconsistency and a “huh?” moment:

(inconsistency bolding mine, emphasis on the thing that made me go “huh?”)

Searching the forum only pointed out to me that swimming is unassigned to any armor piece.

Two questions:

  1. Why would greaves affect the same things that arm sleeves do? They’re leg armor, right?

  2. Should the climbing penalty be caused by full leggings as the Clumsy Weight table caption says, or by full arm sleeves as half sleeve description implies? Or maybe both? Or maybe the half leggings benefit should not apply to climbing?

I always thought that sleeves affected anything done with the arms while greeves affected anything done with the legs.
Climbing uses both arms and legs so I would average the penalties and round up. If a speed test involved movement the greeves mattered, if it involves the arms (I grab the sword before my companions do), the sleeves mattered, and if it’s an issue of full body involvement in the speed test (I block the greedy dwarf so he can’t grab the sword) they both matter (and the penalties are averaged).
Of course, I could’ve been doing this all wrong over the years. (In which case, this presents an excellent opportunity for me to find out.)

Penalties are cumulative everywhere else, so I think they should be here, too. Climbing in armor is very, very hard.

Yeah, penalties are cumulative. Half leggings only reduce penalties for speed. That’s my read.

That would clear the issue up, if only the arm sleeves were said to add penalties. As it is, half-sleeves seem to remove a nonexistent penalty. So, if anyone else has some thoughts on the issue, I’d appreciate them too. Never too many perspectives to found one’s opinion on. Especially a BWHQ perspective would be welcome.

Come to think of it, maybe other BW-powered games tackle the issue or the inconsistency has been cleared up in later printing automagically? I have a 2nd printing BWG.

In Revised, the armor now known as “plated mail” had clumsy weight penalties to Climbing for sleeves, but here I suspect there’s just an error in the simplified table description and “climbing” should be referring to half-leggings.

Sleeves had penalties to Agility based tests and leggings had penalties to Speed based tests. Even leather sleeves had a 1D penalty.

It does make more sense to add, rather than average, these penalties (especially with the speed penalties while swimming, leaping, or any other “total body”, Speed test). I’ve been doing it wrong then. (Not that it’s come up that much).

Yes, but plated chain and plate both had obstacles to climbing for sleeves. Again this was Revised, not Gold. The armor rules were streamlined a bit for Gold, so I think it’s just fixing that table caption.