Are swords worth it?

[tbone]

Originally Posted by JoelSammallahti

My calculations were done with the spear's one-handed stats, so that's kind of neither here nor there. And I agree that swords are a lot nimbler in real life than spears (and especially compared to axes), and that could be represented by the mechanics better. The halved Rapid Strike penalty would be one approach to that.

Boosting the capabilities of swords is one way to go about things, though halving the Rapid Strike penalty would award swords a key Weapon Master advantage for free. And shouldn't all nimble weapons – fencing weapons, knives, batons and other light sticks, even fists, also enjoy the same advantage? (That'd give all kinds of fighters a big incentive to make Rapid Strikes all the time – frenetically fun, maybe, but that's a lot of extra rolling every turn...)

If adding benefits to swords seems problematic, you could instead look for areas where GURPS overlooks added drawbacks of spears, axes, etc.

For example, it should be far easier to grab a foe's spear or axe than grab a sword (at least with an unprotected hand), or even to step on a spear-tip that's pointed (or knocked down) close to the ground. I don't know that there any rules in GURPS for these.

In addition, on a hit with less-than-ideal distance control, a sword will still strike a foe with a sharp edge anywhere along its blade length, while a similarly-swung axe might strike rather ineffectually with its haft. I'm pretty sure GURPS ignores this potential downside of axe blows (though it sounds a little fiddly in play, so I toss it out just as an example).

And going back to Rapid Attacks: Rather than speeding up swords here (with problematic considerations as noted above), how about slowing down the less nimble weapons instead? GURPS allows axes and spears and greatswords to make Rapid Attacks as freely as knives and small swords. I'd consider boosting the Rapid Attack (and multiple Parry?) penalties on these big weapons, leaving shortswords and the like more nimble by comparison.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

That's actually kind of cool. :-) May have plane shifting abilities, too.

Since it exists in all realms, its damage has the Affects Insubstantial enhancement.

[Phoenix_Dragon]

Originally Posted by JoelSammallahti

So, what gives? It looks to me like a broadsword is a chump's choice. Shortswords are even worse. A greatsword is a different beast entirely, much more attractive especially at high strength.

Well, I think the short version is that you setup a test that considers only a narrow range of options that specifically diminish the advantages of a sword. Raw damage to the torso is good for a default attack, but it's far from covering the broad range of uses a weapon can have in combat, including the ones the sword is better at, so that's going to skew your results.

Though first, comparing the raw damage to the torso, it's not so simple as "spears win" for several reasons. First, the assumption that fine-quality weapons are always available isn't always going to be true outside of character creation, and if you can't get a fine spear, then the sword is as good or better for raw damage to the torso for the entire range of ST and DR you mentioned.

Second, I get the impression you're taking all the averages from ST 10-16 and DR 0-6 and lumping it all together to get one winning weapon, but the better results would be more granular. I quickly whipped up a spreadsheet to compare different values. Even if you compare a fine spear vs a regular sword, it only beats the sword at low ST or low DR (And at high ST, even in the cases where the spear wins, both are doing so much damage that it's pretty much academic). Even if you use the optional "edge-penetration" style rule for cutting attacks against armor, the results don't change much at all.

But mostly, I think what skews the results is that there's often much better things you could do than simple attacks to the torso. A sword is going to be better at crippling limbs, for instance, which are also often less armored than the torso. Strikes to the neck and head also go to the sword. Being able to efficiently cut things give a sword more utility. Swords are less penalized in tight quarters or close combat. They're slightly lighter (Especially if carried without a sheath). They're significantly easier to carry around with you without it getting in the way (Try doing any other activity while keeping your spear as handy as a sword on your hip).

They're both pretty versatile weapons, and they don't neatly overlap, so which one is better depends heavily on what you're using it for, not which does more damage with a straight attack to the torso. If that were the metric I were interested in, I'd almost never use a sword or a spear. Their strengths lie elsewhere.

Mind you, I say this as someone who's more likely to build a character using a spear as a primary weapon rather than a broadsword.

[Whyte]

Originally Posted by mr beer

Maybe the country you are in has conducted years of successful warfare and looted swords are common. Cheap swords are available to anyone who wants one and Good quality ones go for $100 a pop, as long as you know enough to spot the difference amongst all the dross.

I think it was scholagladiatoria or one of the other youtubers who made a video of how expensive swords are in medieval times, and if memory serves, they stated that since swords generally last for generations (as expensive things they used to be reasonably well taken care of), it meant that the pool of available swords get expanding with each new blade that was made. This increased the supply and lowered the price, meaning that by Late Medieval period, it was not that rare for a free peasant or a townsman to own his own sword. Likely a messer in the German regions, and so forth.

So yeah, a situation like mr beer described or simply having a pool of old sword being had at second-hand rates would help to make sword cheaper.

I totally agree with posters who said that swords were almost never the primary weapon, and that their popularity has more to do with the ease that you can carry one around as a backup weapon, either in a civilian context or when the enemy gets past your polearm or spear.

[mhd]

A TL is a long time, and when it comes to things like swords and plate armor, the tables seem to err on the high end of things. I wouldn't call every Katzbalger, Messer (or Trabharnisch) "cheap" in the GURPS sense, whereas early TL3 swords are a different matter, just ask Wayland and Siegfried.

[JoelSammallahti]

Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon

Second, I get the impression you're taking all the averages from ST 10-16 and DR 0-6 and lumping it all together to get one winning weapon, but the better results would be more granular. I quickly whipped up a spreadsheet to compare different values. Even if you compare a fine spear vs a regular sword, it only beats the sword at low ST or low DR (And at high ST, even in the cases where the spear wins, both are doing so much damage that it's pretty much academic).

Well, I think if you're trying to evaluate the overall effectiveness of two different options, whether weapons, advantages, or whatever, the best way to go about it is to compare average performance over a representative range of parameter values. Now, certainly the cheap/good sword slightly overperforms the fine spear in some cases, but I don't see why those cases should receive more emphasis than the others.

If you think ST 10-16 is skewed too low, I simply disagree: I don't think an average much higher than 13 is a reasonable expectation in a mundane/realistic-scale game. Dungeon Fantasy and the like are a different beast, of course. The same goes for my selected DR range of 0-6: values much higher than 6 are pretty rare before TL 4 and even then we're talking about the most expensive kinds of armor. And yeah, probably some values like 4 for mail would be more common than others, but all in all 0 is undoubtedly the most common DR value for combatants in history!

Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon

Swords are less penalized in tight quarters or close combat. They're slightly lighter (Especially if carried without a sheath). They're significantly easier to carry around with you without it getting in the way (Try doing any other activity while keeping your spear as handy as a sword on your hip).

Now these are very good points! Although by Basic Set neither a sword nor a spear can be used in close combat, I'm the one who brought up Martial Arts rules, so it's reasonable to consider that by the rules in that book, a spear in close combat gets -8 while a sword gets -4, so that's definitely a big advantage for the sword. (I've given Shortsword thrusts Reach C,1 in my games to make them worthwhile.) And the matter of inconvenience is something I could definitely do better to remember when running a game! Way too often I've just hand-waved somebody carrying a big weapon when they're climbing, squeezing through tight spaces, swimming, etc., when I could and probably should have been imposing a -4 penalty like for One Arm.

[VariousRen]

I'm actually in a good position to give some feedback on this from an in-play side. I'm a player in a DF game, playing a half-elf archer of about 200 points (we started from the henchmen templates in DF 15). I'm specialised in the bow (skill 19), but have a very sold score in axe/mace (17) and use it as my melee weapon. One of the driving factors was the price, which let me make it Balanced, Fine, and Dwarven on a relatively low budget. That means I'm doing as much or more damage than a sword on a swing, I can parry even when I attack, and I have a slight skill bonus.

My companion in the last session we played was a human skirmisher, specialised in the longsword and about the same point value as me. We ended up in a few fights together away from the rest of the adventuring group, which highlighted some key differences:

Fight One
We ambushed a group of savages who were by the edge of the lake. We laid down some bow fire until they reached us, then entered melee with them. Many of the savages were unarmoured, or so lightly armoured that it didn't matter much. My companion was able to make stabs to the vitals for a x3 wounding modifier, while I was limited to cutting at the torso for solid damage or limbs for potential maiming. While our raw damage ended up roughly the same, the sword-wielder tended to put people down and keep them down. The ability to hit the vitals made it much easier to exploit temporary weaknesses that might only last for a single round.

A spear might have been a solid weapon in this fight, but there was a key moment where we needed to destroy an enemies weapon (they were steelwraithed and couldn't be hit directly). A spear would have suffered against other opponents we knew to be in the area who take reduced damage from impaling/piercing as well.

Fight Two
We were travelling back to town and encountered a duo of tree sized worms. We killed one with alchemist's fire, but had to deal with the other one in melee combat. The creature didn't have any specific vitals that we knew of, so we focused on dealing raw damage. The sword was able to do just as much raw swing damage as the axe in this fight, and both were able to pierce the relatively damage resistant hide (DR 4 or 5).

A sword was just as competent as an axe in this fight, but it brought a flexibility that the axe just didn't have.

Conclusion
So the key advantage I've seen from a sword is the versatility, especially for a longsword that gives you thrusts at reach 2 or 1. A sword is relatively light compared to other weapons, gives you a very respectable swing AND thrust damage, lets you parry and strike in the same round, and gives you a lot of flexibility with reach (don't forget about reverse grip for swords for reach C). I'm a huge fan of the axe as a secondary weapon for specialists of some other type, because cutting will always be useful and the cost is much lower. For a melee specialist the sword might represent the only flexibility you have in combat.

[Railstar]

Originally Posted by JoelSammallahti

The point about more lightly armored limbs making swings more attractive is valid, but you've also got to take into account other less heavily armored hit locations. The one case, I'd assert, where that swing with the Cheap or Good sword is going to be better than the thrust with a Balanced, Fine spear is where the limbs are unarmored, and everything else including the face is heavily armored. Because if the face is no more heavily armored than the limbs, you still do more injury with the spear in the face. Admittedly, you don't get to cripple the face - but you have a much higher chance of causing knockdown/stun, so it's not clear to me you're not better off.

Heavier overall armor isn't going to make the sword top the spear either, unless we're talking very heavy indeed. I redid the calculations with DR ranging from 3-6 instead of 0-6, and the fine spear still gives you a little more injury on the average. And remember, we're talking about a wide strength range, ST 10-16. For regular soldiers, 9-12 seems like a more likely range, and that emphasises the advantages of big adds over swing damage again. If you restrict ST to that range, swords fall even further behind spears and axes.

The main thing I'd highlight here is the face is a much harder target to hit. I don't just mean in terms of -5 vs -2, but also in terms of hitting whichever target is available (random hit locations) - if you attack whichever target presents itself you're far more likely to hit a limb or extremity than the face.

I'm confused by your math however: Thr+3 from Spear one-handed + Fine is at best equal to Sw+1 from a broadsword.

[JoelSammallahti]

Originally Posted by Railstar

I'm confused by your math however: Thr+3 from Spear one-handed + Fine is at best equal to Sw+1 from a broadsword.

You'll note I use the terms damage and injury strictly: damage is what you roll, injury is what you get after DR and the wounding modifier. For example, a ST 13 fighter with a Fine spear thrusts for 1d+3, or swings for 2d with a broadsword, and while the latter is more damage, against any DR less than 5, the spear deals more injury.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

This is something that tends to be greatly overstated, and is very specific to the time and place, as well as what specifically legally constitutes a "sword" in that particular jurisdiction. For example the period in Japan that the katana was restricted to Samurai was preceded by a longer period in which swords legislated weren't by class at all. For another, the in my research into 16th century highlanders, the parish histories would imply that everyone had a "sword" but these are probably including weapons GURPS would call a Long Knife. Similarly throughout Europe from the late medieval through the 18th century most infantry carried hangers of some kind, which run from Long Knives to Broadswords in GURPS terms, and in many places this was part of a soldier's kit that he was expected to keep and maintain himself, rather than return to a militia armory or whatever. In Elizabethan England, swords were regulated by length, but otherwise not by class, if you could afford a rapier, you could carry one, but if was too long there would be fines or they would take a hammer to it. So there really probably isn't a good argument for "swords are upper class only" for most places.

Then too a lot of people will prefer a utility tool that can easily be converted into a weapon, either for expense or just for being able to use it for mundane uses. A farmer might have a sword if he goes out a-Viking once in awhile, or lives in wild country or just has a dad who was an impoverished noble but retained affectations(it wasn't unknown in some parts). But he might well prefer a brushchopper that can be used as a peoplechopper to a just plain people chopper if he hasn't enough money to get both.