It usually will bite you. Skeletons in the Prison will destroy you if you don’t use upgraded armour. The explosion damage is doubly-reduced by armour, so you don’t need many upgrades to neutralize it, but +0 armour is not good enough.
Also note that upgrades to armour reduce the strength requirement like this +1, +3, +6, +10 for -1 to -4 strength requirement respectively. As an aside, this sequence is known as the triangular numbers:
