[Low-Tech] Material or quality
 

This is really just a footnote but it puzzled me - why is Silver listed under Weapon Quality and not under Weapon Composition?

Re: [Low-Tech] Material or quality
 

That's a very good question!

One possible expanation is that silver is basically a crappy material to make a sword out of, and no matter how skilled you are as a smith, you can't make a better-than-average sword, i.e. Fine and Very Fine are flat-out-impossible to achieve. And in fact unless you're a very skilled smith who knows a lot about silver or has tried to pull that silly stunt multiple times before, you can't achieve anything more than cheap...

Re: [Low-Tech] Material or quality
 

I would personally go with the idea that historically, no-one seems to have made weapons out of silver as it is far too expensive given its poor metallurgical qualities. Any weapon like objects made of silver would probably be purely artwork and better priced as such.

Yes, this is a pain for fantasy where you need silver weapons to kill things, but you'd probably need magic to make a sensible weapon out of silver anyway.

Silver coating on the other hand... I would guess adding an appropriate CF for decoration.

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Silver coated weapons are listed as +2 CF.

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Or a liberal attitude towards alloying; there are probably a lot of options if you're willing to go well below the 92.5% of sterling silver.

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For bronzes sure, copper and silver mix quite well. Magnesium silver alloys can be pretty good too. You can forget steels - silver isn't very soluble in iron at all. Still copper or magnesium alloys as tough as low end steels and 5 or 10% silver content ought to be achievable. Some platinum group metals apparently do pretty well too.

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I've consulted with various oracles, and they've all given consistent answers (mark your calender, ladies and gentlehobbits! Consistent answers from multiple oracles, 23rd of April 2015!!!), telling me that even a 10% silver alloy won't have a stronger metaphysical effect, e.g. on werewolves, than a regular steel blade with a coating of silver.

It may be that a 5% or 10% silver alloyed with bronze or copper is preferable to a weapon coated in silver, in terms of maintenance or the like. It might also look quite nice, although my guess would be that 10% silver 90% copper will look quite like normal bronze.

Re: [Low-Tech] Material or quality
 

In Sagatafl, my homebrew RPG system, the severity of the problem with making bladed weapons out of silver - or bronze - depends on how long the blade is.

Knives and daggers are fine, but a silver shortsword gets a Durability penalty, relative to one made of iron, and a silver broadsword even more so, same way a bronze broadsword does. You can use Enchantments to compensate, increasing the Durability to match that of a mundane "iron" weapon, but you can use the same magic on a mundane iron weapon to increase its Durability too, to be above par.

Craftsman's skill, of course, can also affect the final Durability, but the craftsman has to be familiar with the material used (in GURPS that's be a Perk for each exotic alloy, including bronze, silver, meteoric iron, and post-medieval steel, each regarded as a separate alloy, and it probably wouldn't be a good idea to apply the usual limit on how many Perks a character is allowed to have).

A weapon with Durability slightly below par for its type isn't a serious problem, unless you want to parry with it (e.g. if you're of a Keltic inclination, disdaining shields and armour as being for wusses), but if your enemy suspects his weapon is significantly stronger than yours, he might deliberately try to "match" his weapon against yours again and again, hoping to break your blade.

But all that is about sword type blades.

What about an axe head made of silver, or a flanged mace head of silver? I can't see much problem with that. It'd be notably heavier, of course (mass of iron IIRC is about 7, vs 11 for silver), so the mace would count as a lead-weighted mace, which I presume GURPS has rules for, but I'm not sure if there are rules for axes with extra-heavy heads. Ones can probably be devised if needed.

Or you can make most of the axe head out of iron or primitive steel, and just weld a silver axe blade onto it. Then you get an axe not appreciably heavier than one with an iron head (average density probably comparable to bronze, which isn't denser enough than iron to warrant any special "heavy weapon rules"), and the "functional bit" that hits the werewolf is still pure silver (or 75%-92% silver anyway, which is good enough to get the job one).

Re: [Low-Tech] Material or quality
 

The easy solution there is to just make the head a little smaller. Iron has a density of 7.87, silver a density of 10.49. A silver head of equal weight thus takes up 75% as much volume. If reducing the size of the head equally in all ways (simply scaling it down, rather than making it just thinner), each of width, length, and thickness is still 90% of what it was before. Unless actively comparing it to a weapon of normal construction, you might not even notice the difference.

GURPS doesn't have any rules for weapons with extra-heavy heads, outside of the general rules for extra-heavy weapons. A full-sized silver mace is going to weigh more, but even if the weapon were originally made entirely out of iron switching over to silver (for x1.33 to weight) it's not going to be enough for even a +1 to damage.

Re: [Low-Tech] Material or quality
 

Obviously an axe or a mace with a heavier head is going to do more damage, yes. But there has got to be some drawback to it as well, otherwies standard axes and maces would be made with heads that heavy.

And there really should be something in the RAW. Weren't lead-filled maces used historically?

Re: [Low-Tech] Material or quality
 

Sorry, typo there. It's cleared up now, but what I was meaning to say was that the weight increase isn't enough to get a +1 to damage. The general rule is that you multiply the damage boost (if any) by the square root of the weight multiplier and round normally. The square root of 1.33 is around 1.15, so you need a bonus of at least +4 before that would make a difference.

Not that I'm aware of, although it's certainly possible. I've been working on a set of rules for designing weapons in GURPS and have considered having more than just "Balanced, no bonus" and "Unbalanced, +1 to damage," but I'm not certain how to properly resolve it.

Re: [Low-Tech] Material or quality
 

The d20 solution is to make a distinct Alchemical Silver (if only to explain why a silver dagger is worth so much more than its weight in silver pieces), a solution which can be imported into GURPS to fix the different issue of weapon quality, by giving it the other properties of steel, or at least bronze.

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A heavier weapon increases resistance to your strength, which lets you apply your muscles more efficiently, but there's an upper limit to that, and it also makes the weapon slower.

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Actually it often develops an interesting dark (black or purplish) patina - shibuichi in Japan, hepatizon in the Classical world.

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I think that was the reason for the evolution of the broadsword to rapier to smallsword. A tiny shaft of metal shoved through your guts will kill you just as dead as a sharpened car door. So it often ended up with whoever stabbed fastest.

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My impression is that that sword development was caused by changes in armour fashion. A rapier isn't worth anything against an armoured foe, but as armour went out of fashion, so did broadswords.

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Nah, there's probably some metallurgy issues involved (not that easy to make a long thin stabby thing that doesn't just break), but mostly it's a matter of where the weapon was intended to be used. A broadsword is a battlefield weapon (a 19th century cavalry saber is a broadsword), a smallsword is a weapon for court duels (and is the size it is for political reasons), a rapier is what happens when there's no limit on how long a sword you're allowed to carry.

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Yup, your thoughts mirror my (lazy) research.

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There is no such thing as a sword "evolution". The kinds of swords used on the battlefield have changed very little for thousands of years. No sword can cut through armour and the only sword that can stab through armour are specialised weapons such as the estoc/tuck. Whether armour was common or not had little influence over which swords were chosen by soldiers. If you chose a sword to fight someone in armour then you were likely to lose. Polearms were king on the battlefield. A sword is just a sidearm, like a pistol in modern warfare.

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Dan, as one of the authors of Low-Tech, can you tell us something about the original question?

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I don't know. I had so much on my plate that I didn't even read most of the rest of the book until the playtest was over.

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So you're saying that a broadsword (what we fairly normal roleplayers understand as a broadsword) is as useless against an armoured foe as a rapier (what we fairly normal roleplayers understand as a rapier) is?

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Yup. No rapiers in my 10th century Ärth setting. Some places actually have the metallurgy to make them (the equivalent of GURPS' TL4 in metallurgy and smithing, sometimes even TL5) but it hasn't happened yet.

That's also why their presence bothers me in D&D and in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. I don't think metallurgy was contemplated. I don't think anybody remembered to ask "hey, can a medieval smith do a rapier?"

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D&D has the armor and metallurgy of TL 4-5, government of European TL 2-3, etc.

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There are plenty of ways to take out an armoured foe with a sword. It is just that none of them involve cutting or punching through the armour.

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The best La Tene Celt smiths could do a rapier. We have extant examples of their swords with the required metallurgy. There is at least one that can still be flexed almost double and spring back straight even though it is over two thousand years old.

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Dungeon Fantasy is not particularly concerned with historical accuracy...

I thought you were in charge of weapons and armor? Ah, well...

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I wrote chapters 6. Defenses and 7. Security & Covert Ops. Peter wrote Chapter 5. Weapons.

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Of course not. What they asked was "Will anyone want to play a Buckleswasher?"

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Who would ever play one that left his swash unbuckled? That's scandalous.

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Now I want to play the Masked Unbuckler! No swash is safe!