Realism; Strength is not important for swordsmanship(?)

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Gerrard of Titan Server

Next, as mentioned by another upthread, based on what I've read, I'm dubious as to the claim that stronger people can swing a weapon faster, and I'm especially dubious that this relationship should be linear.

It's definitely not linear, but it's definitely faster. There's a reason baseball batters weightlift and use steroids.

Originally Posted by Gerrard of Titan Server

Further, from a biomechanical point of view, real human strength comes from muscles, and adding muscles adds weight which needs to be moved, and this (highly amateur) armchair reasoning suggests that you won't see linear returns in weapon swing speed by increasing strength, and it may even go so far as to be a wash, e.g. increasing strength also increases mass, and the net result is no improvement in weapon swing speed. AFAICT, IMHO.

It's only going to be a wash if the amount of non-muscle weight added is equal to the amount of muscle weight added. This may well be the case for whole-body activities, but a sword is still a quite considerable weight compared to an arm. A human arm is typically estimated at around 5% of overall body weight, so a 200 lb man might have a 10 lb arm, but because it's a lever with a rotation point of your shoulder, a sword with a length equal to your arm length only needs 1/7 of the mass of the arm to hold an equal amount of energy.

[Gerrard of Titan Server]

Originally Posted by Anthony

but because it's a lever with a rotation point of your shoulder, a sword with a length equal to your arm length only needs 1/7 of the mass of the arm to hold an equal amount of energy.

I'm still slightly dubious of this analysis, because everything I read says that proper technique is not holding the rest of the body still, and moving only the arm and sword. Instead, with proper technique, the whole body is part of the swing, especially going to at least the waist, plus proper footwork at a minimum.

Of course, I can readily relent that more strength does mean faster swing, but definitely not linear, for the GURPS definition of "strength".

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Gerrard of Titan Server

I'm still slightly dubious of this analysis, because everything I read says that proper technique is not holding the rest of the body still, and moving only the arm and sword. Instead, with proper technique, the whole body is part of the swing, especially going to at least the waist, plus proper footwork at a minimum.

This is true but both complicated to compute and actually not all that relevant; the amount of energy in the body at the end is actually quite low because it's all extremely close to the center of rotation and thus moving fairly slowly.

[Minuteman37]

Originally Posted by Gerrard of Titan Server

I have no first hand experience in historical weapon-based martial arts, but I have some second-hand appreciation and fascination for those who do, such as HEMA.

Some of the "experts" and actual experts in the community have said in several occasions that strength is not terribly important. Skill is much more important. Matt Easton of Scholagladiatoria has even stated that during his time of teaching historical European martial arts to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people, he hasn't yet seen someone that is too physically weak to effectively wield a longsword (aka a hand-and-a-half sword) with two hands. (He says that a little bit more strength is required for effective wielding of a sword in one hand, but still not that much.)

See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3OIjpLSaYQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip-_vEPotYo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cNO6uRqUcE

Is this true?

In terms of GURPS, a very strong person has a ST of 13, for a base Swing damage of 2d-1, which comes out to 2d+1 cut for two-handing a "bastard sword". A weak person has a ST of 7, for a base Swing damage of 1d-2, which comes out to 1d cut for two-handing a "bastard sword". Right? That's over twice the damage, which doesn't gel with my understanding of the above sources.

This is further informed by this one page that I found. It doesn't look terribly professional, but it's the only source that I've found. It claims to be measured impact force of a sword swing and mace swing with proper form and technique, vs "bad technique" aka hitting as hard as you can.

http://weaponsofchoice.com/extras/we...ort-and-force/

The numbers are quite interesting. According to this author, a mace swing with proper form has 10x less impact force than a full-out, "bad" technique swing, and a sword swing with proper form has 100x less impact force than a full-out, "bad" technique swing! Again, are these numbers accurate? It's incredibly difficult to find numbers on this. I lack all firsthand expertise in this, and it's hard for me to even sanity check these claims, and that's a big reason why I'm here.

If those force impact numbers are to be trusted, then it leads me to the conclusion that swords deal damage because they're sharp and because they hit vulnerable areas with proper edge alignment, etc., and generally not because of of the person's strength - except to the extent that is necessary to get the sword moving at speed.

I would guess that a relatively weak real world person can swing a sword about as fast as a very strong person, and thus the above numbers pass my initial, uneducated, "sniff" test.

If all of this is correct, this would mean that the entire framework and system in place for modeling damage with swords based on strength and swing damage is entirely broken.

Alternatively, maybe I'm coming from the wrong perspective. In a real fight, the first person to get get a cut generally wins, so maybe a very strong person would do substantially more damage with a sword cut with good form because of their strength, but it doesn't matter because the actual flesh wounds from a sword cut from a weaker than average person does more than enough to incapacitate a person most of the time.

I guess I'm just looking for comments, pointers, and general education. I'd like to understand reality before I decide if I want to ignore reality for being cinematic, and exactly what the difference would be.

Thanks for your time!

My first though upon reading this post was "maybe weapon master isn't as cinematic as we've been lead to believe?"

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

My first though upon reading this post was "maybe weapon master isn't as cinematic as we've been lead to believe?"

If we dropped the access to cinematic skills and techniques, it could become quite realistic ...

Except for the difference between DX+1 and DX+2 level (+1 and +2 to damage). I find that a bit weird, exactly like for Karate skill.

A karateka has to reach DX+0 (or a weapon master has to reach DX+1) to get +1 to damage, which requires quite a lot of training / character points (depending on the difficulty of the skill). But he only needs 4 points more to get +2 to damage. And after that, nothing else. Even if he reaches DX+10. The distribution of theses bonuses sounds weird to me. Something like DX+0 for +1 to damage and DX+4 for +2 to damage would have been more realistic in my humble opinion.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by Anthony

It's definitely not linear, but it's definitely faster. There's a reason baseball batters weightlift and use steroids...

True, baseball's a good example actually (because a lot of work has been down on what in sport science terms is a fairly simple* mechanism), what it seems to come down in getting the sweet spot on both how heavy a bat you can swing, but it also being able to swing it fast and under control**.

Again there are lots of limiting factors in play, not least there's only so fast human arm (and torso) muscles can swing the arm. If you look at the animal world for very fast strikes it tends to come down to specific morphological adaptation to allow for extreme speed, not muscle mass (of course morphological specialisation is a bit out of context here).

So yes baseball hitter strength train but there is an point of diminishing returns even when just swinging a bat very hard.



*a very relative term, its still complex!

**and even then compared to moving weapon around in ongoing combat for attack and defence, swinging baseball bat is a much simpler, narrower use.

[Minuteman37]

Originally Posted by Gollum

If we dropped the access to cinematic skills and techniques, it could become quite realistic ...

Except for the difference between DX+1 and DX+2 level (+1 and +2 to damage). I find that a bit weird, exactly like for Karate skill.

A karateka has to reach DX+0 (or a weapon master has to reach DX+1) to get +1 to damage, which requires quite a lot of training / character points (depending on the difficulty of the skill). But he only needs 4 points more to get +2 to damage. And after that, nothing else. Even if he reaches DX+10. The distribution of theses bonuses sounds weird to me. Something like DX+0 for +1 to damage and DX+4 for +2 to damage would have been more realistic in my humble opinion.

I'm sure the decision for the x in DX+x to also be the damage bonus was done for ease of use more then anything else.

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

I'm sure the decision for the x in DX+x to also be the damage bonus was done for ease of use more then anything else.

Either do I. But something like DX+0 and DX+4 wouldn't really have been more complicated ... And if the Weapon Master advantage did follow exactly the same numbers, it would have been even more simple.

Here, we have DX+0 and DX+1 for karate and DX+1 and DX+2 for Weapon Master which is just a bit weird.

But that is another topic, actually. I am derailing the thread ... Sorry.

[aesir23]

Originally Posted by Gollum

Either do I. But something like DX+0 and DX+4 wouldn't really have been more complicated ... And if the Weapon Master advantage did follow exactly the same numbers, it would have been even more simple.

Here, we have DX+0 and DX+1 for karate and DX+1 and DX+2 for Weapon Master which is just a bit weird.

But that is another topic, actually. I am derailing the thread ... Sorry.

My own thoughts on this matter can be found here.

Although that thread predates my personal experience with HEMA, so I might rethink some things (fencing weapons, for example.)

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

Again there are lots of limiting factors in play, not least there's only so fast human arm (and torso) muscles can swing the arm. If you look at the animal world for very fast strikes it tends to come down to specific morphological adaptation to allow for extreme speed, not muscle mass (of course morphological specialisation is a bit out of context here).

Until we have some serious transhumanist body modifications available to the general public, swordsmen, martial-artists, and baseball batters will have to stick to the kind of morphological refinement available to us. To whit - exercise, with or without hormones etc., and regardless of if those chemical aids are from natural mutations or medical help.

Exercise at a specialized task from an early age deforms the skeleton as well as builds muscle-mass. The skeleton of Sir John de Stricheley[1] was unearthed at Stirling castle, and is a fantastic case study of what knightly training actually did to your body.
His right shoulder-blade is warped and rippled to an extent you just don't see in modern people, and his arm bones are ridged and flanged; he worked so hard with his right arm that his body deformed the bone to produce more muscle attachment points. His left side is less drastic, but still well developed - his shield arm took impact in different ways from his sword and lance arm.
This man was visibly deformed to become a specialist at the job of wielding weapons in combat to murder other people; he was lop-sided.
He also had classical knightly injuries, like a healed blade wound to the forehead that scarred the bone but didn't penetrate the braincase, bashed front teeth (typical of both a punch to the face, and a shield to the face), lower back injury (from bouncing around in the saddle for hours and hours) and an infected crushed ankle (typical from having a horse roll on you).

Sir John de Stricheley, and other knights like him, clearly felt strength was important.

[1] Probably John de Stricheley - they don't have an inscription over his burial or clearly identifying artifacts; he was definitely a knight from the south of England. Incidentally, he probably died of an arrow wound or the subsequent infection - they found the barbed head of the war arrow still lodged in his rib bones.