Thrust speed vs cuts and a matter of inches

[Dangerious P. Cats]

One of the things that bothers me about the matter of inches rule in martial arts is that it seems to buy into the Victorian myth that thrusting is intrinsically faster that cutting. This video sums up my feelings on the matter and displays things that would be a bit difficult to explain.

Thoughts?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

Thoughts?

In GURPS terms, all of the attacks he's talking about would do thrust damage. The greater damage of swing attacks is because they're assumed to cover a large arc and are therefore slow.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Anthony

In GURPS terms, all of the attacks he's talking about would do thrust damage. The greater damage of swing attacks is because they're assumed to cover a large arc and are therefore slow.

Then there would be thr cut attacks as well as sw cut and thr imp.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Then there would be thr cut attacks as well as sw cut and thr imp.

There should be. A fast cut doesn't have any more power than a thrust. GURPS just chooses to pretend that such attacks don't exist.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The greater damage of swing attacks is because they're assumed to cover a large arc and are therefore slow.

I don't think that distinction really makes any sense, and it makes even less sense if you start trying to apply real world physics to it. In real life, you end up with varying damage based on the weight of the weapon, the starting position of the weapon, and the weapon's speed. GURPS doesn't account for any of that.

Looking at how the numbers in the damage table fail to match up with firearms damage, and how the scaling doesn't make any sense (why is a katana always +2 damage, regardless of how fast the person is swinging it?), I'd say those numbers aren't really assuming any sort of weapon speed or position.

What I think the RAW weapon damages are intended to do is provide results that match up to player expectations, regardless of how those fit with reality. After all, the default assumption in GURPS is usually highly cinematic, at least as far as player characters' physical interactions with the world. They're inhumanly fast, able to dodge and parry and attack as weak speedsters. They're able to survive being shot and stabbed. They're able to cleave through thick steel armor.

The damage figures are clearly designed to match players' expectations of what cinematic heroes are capable of. If you try to figure the energy levels and speeds of the weapons, you end up with results that don't make sense for any other ends.

In the same way, that's what I think the "matter of inches" rule is designed to represent, rather than reality. If you could take a video camera back to seventeenth century Japan and record a duel between two samurai, the results probably wouldn't match up very well to the GURPS rules here, for a variety of reasons. But if you watch a late nineteen-sixties samurai film, I imagine the rules will match that much more closely, as I think is intended.

[Walrus]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Then there would be thr cut attacks as well as sw cut and thr imp.

There's Tip Slash which doesn't differ much from that fast short cut shown in the video.

And those short strikes he shows may be Defensive Attacks which might be faster in the Matter of Inches.

This may be nice summarize for Pyramid.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

One of the things that bothers me about the matter of inches rule in martial arts is that it seems to buy into the Victorian myth that thrusting is intrinsically faster that cutting. This video sums up my feelings on the matter and displays things that would be a bit difficult to explain.

Thoughts?

Yeah not that convinced by that, It's not so much a question of the speed the striking surface is travelling at in abstract that makes one strike faster than another, it's what you arm has to do to generate the motion as well and the starting point of the weapon.

Basically once in motion the swung end of weapon my well be faster than the thrust tip, but it still takes longer to execute the attack.

The ends of swung weapons are obviously travelling very fast and even when you take into account the distance of arc vs. straight line travel arc is still faster. However a thrust weapon tip is probably already starting at some point in front of you towards your target. This is less likely for swung weapons, which often also have to be drawn back in order to effectively swing. i.e it's almost never a head to head race, with the thrust getting a head start, while the swing has to tie it shoes.

As mentioned above I'd give a bonus for defensive swings in "a matter of inches".

As a side note I think while Victorian historians rightly get corrected on certain arms and armour myths, the worst cases tend to be from much earlier periods (and more to do with miss-characterisation of details, such as field vs. jousting plate, or longbow mythology at the expense of the French etc). And while duelling with swords had faded in favour of duelling with pistols by the end of the C18th it wasn't exactly a little understood part of history in the C19th.

[Varyon]

For a thrust, your weapon is more-or-less already in position to strike before you begin, particularly with a typical fencing stance. There are cuts you can do from this position with minimal adjustment, but those are going to fall under what GURPS calls Tip Slashes, which are Thrusts in GURPS. A Swing requires you to reposition your weapon before attacking, which is going to take a bit longer. There may be room for an option to designate a different stance, one which allows you to swing without set up but would penalize Parry (and probably make your weapon into Parry U, if it wasn't already). Provided you are in such a stance, the swing vs thrust relationship would probably be inverted. You might be able to make a case for a Swing from this stance still being a little slower than a Thrust from a more typical stance, but the difference is probably miniscule.

I guess you could have 3 such stances - one which emphasizes Thrusts (thrusts are extra fast, swings extra slow, Parry is penalized against attacks from Side/Back), one which emphasizes Swings (thrusts are slow, swings are fast, Parry is penalized and U), and the default that emphasizes neither (thrusts are fast, swings are slow, Parry is normal).

[Peter V. Dell'Orto]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

One of the things that bothers me about the matter of inches rule in martial arts is that it seems to buy into the Victorian myth that thrusting is intrinsically faster that cutting. This video sums up my feelings on the matter and displays things that would be a bit difficult to explain.

Thoughts?

If you think that full-power cuts and full-power thrusts should have the same speed, don't apply the cut vs. thrust modifiers from the box.

If you think there is a speed disadvantage - even fractionally - for a full-power swing vs. a full power thrust - apply the cut vs. thrust modifiers from the box.

FWIW, the box wasn't written by guys who study Victorian takes on swordsmanship and apply them blindly. Or at all, really. The idea is pretty simple physics and experience - a straight-in attack has less ground to cover than a wide, sweeping attack, and people other than the guy in the video seem to largely agree this converts into a speed advantage. I found it worked that way in my own stick-based fighting (kendo, contact stickfighting), as well.

It's also a question of GURPS's assumptions, which is that Swings gets a (often substantially) higher base damage because "they take extra time to apply ST though a long arc, increasing momentum." You can simply expand this to say that any weapon that is doing Thrust damage doesn't get the -1, because it's not using Swing for damage - so tip slashes don't get the -1 (but don't do as much as full swings.)

[Kromm]

Swing damage in GURPS is meant to represent a high-powered windup through 90° or greater – usually overhead or to the side – involving extreme rotation of the body, with the goal of hacking through the target. Thrust damage emulates everything else, including true thrusts, tip slashes, draw cuts, and cuts that involve extension but less than 90° of bodily torsion. You could say that GURPS defines swinging attacks as slow ones with maximal preparation and thrusting attacks as fast ones with minimal preparation. To simulate a swift cut, use the rules for a Tip Slash.

Put another way, any cut-and-thrust sword should have a third line that says something like "thrust cut." Actual damage is the usual thrust impaling damage, -2, made cutting: thrust cut for a broadsword, thrust-1 cut for a cavalry saber or a rapier, thrust-2 cut for a large knife, etc.