Quote:
Originally Posted by Harald387
It's not 'eight hundred pounds of bear aimed at your sword'; it's 'one extended limb of a creature that weighs eight hundred pounds being deflected far enough from its path to miss your body'. There's far (FAR) more to a 'parry' than simply putting your weapon directly in the path of the swing and letting it take all the force involved.
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Yes I know, but a 800lb bear can still put a huge amount of force into a swing, and yes I also know parries are about redirection* and not just absorption of the energy. And while a good parry can rely way more on redirection than absorption, it's almost never entirely the former (I fenced for years)
But in reality most armed martial arts (and so parries) were developed with facing a relatively similar opponent in mind. Not bears three times your weight.
Now I have no problem with an attempted parry hurting the bear, and as I said I don't think a bear swipe will break the sword.
But as I said I have issues with the two effects of parrying heavier attacks work together.
I'd be tempted to ditch the chances of breaking full stop (barring unusual circumstances your grip will break before your weapon does**), and instead have some kind penalty to parry heaver and heavier attacks.
Another way is let the bear do a "beat" against a parrying weapon. This will use up the bear's turn after it get parried but with ST19 it likely going to win the context against most people.
* I don't know what kind of fighting you do but think about how you redirect such blows and how much you use the structure of the incoming weapon to do so, and how it might not apply that well to bear arms.
**the broken weapon is a bit of troupe that is over represented in fiction I think