Staves
 

Hi all

I have participated in - and am currently running - a combat tournament game set in a fantasy milieu.

As can be seen in another thread somewhere (edit: There it was!), the question has been raised about the Staff being just a bit of an über-weapon with it's +2 Parry bonus.

I wonder if what lead the staff to get that +2 Parry in the Basic Set isn't really what has become the "Parrying with Two-handed Weapons (Multiple Parries)"-rule. Or the Defensive Grip-rules for that matter - or the combination of the two - and that while it's fine to just go with the +2 Parry in a simple, Baic Set game, it should really be removed in a Martial Arts game, and those other rules utilized to the full instead?

Is that realistic? A better representation of the RW properties of the Staff? or is the +2 dead on?

Make sense?

Re: Staves
 

IDHMBWM, so I can't compare the options from MA, but I do know that a staff is very easy to parry with. Provided the person knows what they're doing, it can be very difficult to get a hit in - the size of the staff, and the way in which it's generally held, makes it very easy to maneuver into position to block just about anything thrown at it.

My big problem with the GURPS staff, however, is how difficult the blasted thing is to break. Most of the defensive maneuvers I know of that benefit from the staff's shape involve dead-on blocks rather than proper parries. The breakage rules, however, are for proper parries rather than dead-on blocks. So while a pudao (heavy horse-cutter) would probably break right through most staves, it generally takes several parries before it does so in GURPS. Heck, I think the only weapon from basic set that even threatens to break a staff is a maul.

Note that I've never done any staff-fighting and am basically working off of how it seems things should work, so I could be completely off here. I do seem to recall a story of someone going after my brother with a meat-cleaver of some sort while he had a quarterstaff, and I distinctly recall said staff changing from being a decent length to being two rather short staves.

Re: Staves
 

The weapon breakage rules are a "gameable" abstraction, and unfortunately some things get lost below the existing resolution.

A workable hack would be to note that staves, when wielding with the Staff skill instead of Two-handed Sword, count as half their real weight when parrying a swing/cutting weapon. Possibly swing/cutting and swing/crushing, depending on input from folks familiar with the weapon.

Slight sidetrack:

A detailed, hardcore system would toss out the breakage 1d roll and weight comparisons, and instead could specify HP, DR (including the various notes from the damaging objects appendix, like flammable, semiablative to a minimum of X DR, etc), and HT for each weapon, and would provide to-hit penalties for repeatedly striking a damaged location to exploit weaknesses from ablated DR. You'd also want a way of determining your chance of randomly hitting a weakened location when being parried repeatedly.

You'd roll damage every time you were parried and apply it to the weapon as per the usual rules. You'd want hard rules for the effects of 1/3 HP on a given weapon (or class of weapons), also at the 0 HP point, and clearly state what is implied by "death" for a busted weapon.

And you'd probably roll shield damage into the same system, and you'd probably want to re-do shield DR and HP (again!) to keep them consistent. Shields are currently superheroically tough, IIRC. Personally I go the other way and subject shields to the usual weapon breakage rules, but I'm playing Dungeon Fantasy.

Re: Staves
 

Or just treat staffs a little like shields, and say that if the +2 makes the difference between success and failure on a parry, you roll the attacking weapon's full damage and apply it to staff DR and HP. Thus, even light weapons could eventually chop a staff to splinters unless the user were good enough to ward off blows rather than hide behind his stick.

Re: Staves
 

Well, that didn't take long to derail ;-)

Breakage was not my question even if that needs to be adressed as well ;-)

Re: Staves
 

Well, the question was answered in the first sentence of the first reply, so all that was left to do was to derail the thread. ;)

Re: Staves
 

No, the +2 isn't replaced by the rules for defense with long weapons. Long weapons can obstruct attackers and trade distance for time regardless of how good or crappy they are at parrying. And they can be used in a Defensive Grip whether or not that's a good idea. The staff is simply better at parrying, because it has no bits that the user can't safely touch, and nothing that tends to snag or overbalance. I'll grant that this is based largely on the word of Silver and Swetnam, and the tale (legend?) of Richard Peeke, with a small dose of Robin Hood. But it does seem that the staff has a major defensive advantage over most weapons. What keeps this in check in real life is the tendency for the staff to get whittled away, so breakage is in fact directly relevant to the question.

Re: Staves
 

Well, staves are fairly resilient to a single trauma (this I actually know from experience, although it's related to chopping wood for the fireplace), so that would probably make them a bit too light. I think I would prefer to use that hack for determining if they can break other weapons, though - a staff breaking a katar doesn't sit quite well with me (unless it's being wielded like a Two-handed sword). Kromm's suggestion to treat it like the DB of shields would probably work fairly well, though.

If you all don't mind me derailing this thread a little further... what if we were to extend this to other weapons? Basically, let them parry with a small bonus (+1), but risk damage. I think it's easier to block with a weapon than do a proper parry, which could justify the bonus, but it also risks seriously damaging your weapon. Maybe extend the threat range a little - so that if you succeed with MoS 1 or lower (at MoS 1, you should've just parried - oops!), your weapon takes damage. The 1d breakage rules in this case simply represent the weapon being too massive to push aside, and in cases where both rules come into play the weapon both takes damage and has a chance to break outright. Under this concept, cross-parries would always be considered as blocking in this manner (and maybe get an extra +1), but damage might be equally distributed (so that it ends up negated by hardness). Just throwing things out here.

Re: Staves
 

Well, one significant flaw of the staff as a weapon is that realistically, it has very poor performance against armor (this is not reflected in GURPS). Another is that it can't do much against archery. Robert Silver, in the Paradoxes of Defense, was rather enamored with the forest bill and similar short pole weapons, at least for single combat, and realistically, short polearms (including the short spear) have many of the defensive advantages of staves, combined with superior offense.

Re: Staves
 

If a character is sufficiently cinematically skilled and badass, parrying an arrow with a quarterstaff is no harder than parrying an arrow with a sword.

Yes to the armour thing. Also staffs ought to have low damage (I presume GURPS handles this) compared to something like a shortsword.


I tend towards make quarterstaves fairly badass weapons in Sagatafl, although with some significant limitations: Low damage (a broadsword does d10 per Success, and a heavy quarterstaff does IIRC d6, or d5 for a slender and more breakable walking staff) and very poor versus-armour performance (AP 0.0, compared to AP 0.5 for a shortsword, 1.0 for a broadsword, 1.5 for an axe or mace, and 2.0 for a combat pick). That tends to make them into defensive tools (parrying and disarming) rather than offensive tools (hurting people, especially people in even light armour - a couple of d5s or d6ses versus even AV 2 won't accomplish much).


Back to GURPS, part of the problem may be Wizards and similar characters in DF campaigns who get the full +2 bonus to parry rolls after just 1 CP in the Staff skill.

To work around that, one could use a similar rule saying that skill must equal DX in order to qualify for a +1 parry bonus, and skill must equal DX+2 in order to qualify for the full +2 parry bonus. That way, the staff remains a superb defensive tool, but only in the hands of a well-trained user.

Alternatively, bump the Staff's normal bonus down to +1 to parry and then require a 1 CP Perk to get the other +1 parry bonus, called Defensive Staff Usage. The problem with this is, pretty much any character would take it (IIRC is is the equivalent of 1 level of Enhanced Parry for one weapon, which normally costs 5 CPs althouhg that can of course be stacked in cinematic campaigns - this perk is not intended to be taken more than once).

Re: Staves
 

The simple way to represent a quarterstaff's poor performance against armor would be to give it a negative armor divisor. (0.5) should cut it, although it does lead to some oddities. First off, the quarterstaff will always suffer at least a -1 damage malus. Secondly, a quarterstaff in the hands of an ST 12 individual will do nothing half the time when striking someone's bare head. How close to reality is this? If a modestly strong individual struck someone on the head with a staff, would you expect for the target to suffer nothing more than a slight sting half the time (with the other half the time ranging from reeling with pain to crumpling from a concussion)?

Re: Staves
 

Another potential point of abuse...in most settings staves will be cheap!!

in the campaign I am playing a wizard in the base cost for a stave is $5.

If the GM allows it, its not RAW (mine does) the cost for a VF staff (20x) is $100...less than an average broadsword.

So in addition to the +2 to parry my ST 9 mage can do 1d+3 sw or 1d+2 th...it is only crush but not too bad...

If I was GMing I wouldnt allow it but it is somewhat logical....

Re: Staves
 

But that house rule isn't logical. Only bladed weapons get the damage bonus for increased materials. Even having a Fine Staff won't increase damage.

So you are a ST-9 Mage...with say, DX 10...because you've spent all your points in IQ and HT. You are not spending your points on weapon master...you've got Magery and all sorts of spells to get. Let's say you only put 1 pt in the skill, as someone mentioned upthread.

So you have Staff - 9 (DX-1) [1]
Damage thrust/cr 1d, swing/cr 1d+1
You have a Staff parry of 9. And that isn't a Fencing Parry.

This Staff-wielding mage is not Uber.

Now a Staff-wielding Weapon Master Ogre with a ST20...that is something I'm pondering considering that my little Rapier fighter may have to fight one in Wrathchild's play by post Arena fight on rpol...

Here: http://rpol.net/game.cgi?gi=35464&date=1236651857

All you GURPS fighters...join!

Re: Staves
 

Lets not forget what any one wither a /real/ skill would do to them with a feint...

Re: Staves
 

My experience with staff fighters in the SCA is that hands tend to get smashed alot while defending with a shafted weapon. Hands arent typically an issue when using a sword or other weapons held by one end. I think there is a major oversight concerning the exposed hands and lack of stops for slides along the shaft. Swords have crossguards and basket hilts to guard against this, but what does a staff have? nothing, and two potential targets to slide towards and defend from damage.

Even wearing steel clamshell gauntlets completely concealing and covering the hands a pole fighter comes off a battlefield or tournament with battered fingers fairly often.

Re: Staves
 

One point in an Average skill. Let's assume that the wizard is pretty dextrous as GURPS wizards go in my experience, and make him DX 13. So one point gets him Staff-12, which gives a base parry of 9; +2 for the staff, and +1 for retreating (because a wizard who doesn't back out of melee combat as fast as his little robe-covered legs will carry him) takes that up to 12. Pretty good, but, you know, he's taking the hit on a 13+. That's not really nice odds.

Plus, two-handed staff implies no shield; no shield implies no block and no DB, so incoming missile fire is a bitch. Sure, a "badass" staff-fighter has Parry Missile Weapons at ungodly levels - but drop those same points into shortsword and shield, and you may well be better off.

I suspect that the optimised build for a 100-150 point GURPS wizard who wants some chance of surviving melee combat is actually sword and shield; the staff is more a matter of tradition and innocuous appearances. Conversely, it is possible to build a truly badass cinematic staff fighter, but that's in keeping with tradition, from Elizabethan boasts about staff-fighters taking down three Spanish swordsmen at a time, through tales of Robin Hood in various media, to modern kung fu movies.

Re: Staves
 

The strong advantage of Staff for mages isn't the parry, but the 2 hex reduction in Regular spell casting penalties provided by the Staff spell on a two-hex object.

I've been playing around with mages using Shield (Buckler) and Smallsword (Short Staff) to carry a 1 hex Staff object and a small shield. The extra DB and ability to block missiles is hopefully a fair trade-off for the slightly worse parry and additional -1 to cast Regular spells.

Re: Staves
 

The parry's base number is worse, but it IS a fencing parry (and he has a block available), so if cornered, the Buckler and Baton wizard is in at least as good a situation as Mr Staff.

Use a Regular shield for the +2 DB, and you've made up all of the Staff's bonus, plus gained an extra defense option. The fencing parry isn't as good against big or heavy weapons, but the shield will work fine. If your wizard gets pinned in a corner by three halberdeers he's not going to have enough defenses to go around, but that's a rather bad situation for a non-melee combatant anyways.

EDIT: My emergency backup Mrugnak is a buckler-and-baton type.

Re: Staves
 

In Sagatafl, an impotant tool for all spellcasters except the most amateurish dabblers, is a Focus. It is somewhat equivalent to a Magery bonus with Gadget Limitations, except rather more important than that.

Originally, characters would always opt for small Focus items, ideally rings or brooches (or even earrings or toe rings) because there are huge advantages to that (less likely that your Focus gets stolen) and no disadvantages.

I didn't like that. I wanted the iconic wizard-with-his-staff look to be fairly common, but that would not realistically emerge from the rules as they were.

I therefore changed the rules so that the Essence cost of a Focus item (vaguely similar to the Energy Point of a gURPS Enchantment) depended on the size class of the item: Tiny, Normal size or Large, with Large being staff, two-handed sword, longbow and similar quite large items. That gets me what I want. Now characters will - realistically - contemplate creating large Focus items, because the Essence cost discount is somewhat attractive.

In GURPS DF, there could be a similar rule for Items of Power, those energy storage items (I believe) all spellcaster templates buy with starting money. Either make a rule that makes the SM of the item affect its cost (cost being derived from maximum energy storage), or else simply make a rule that an Item of Power can be of any shape and size, but if it is a staff of between 5.5 and 7 feet in length, it gets 50% more energy storage for the same cost (in exchange for which the character must also live with the encumbrance of a quarterstaff).

It's all a question of deciding what one wants, as a GM, and then tweaking the rules so that that which one wants emerges realistically.


(If one wants more, one can do what I've done and add all sorts of staff-pimping Enchantments to the system. All weapons can get Enchantments, in Sagatafl, to become able to parry ranged attacks without penalties, but on staves the Essence cost is reduced - and even further reduced on shields. Likewise extra attacks and extra parries Enchantments are available for all weapons, but they cost less on staves. I think in GURPS terms a discount on Shatterproof on quarterstaves might be good, perhaps with the discount only applying if the quarterstaff already has the Staff Enchantment.)

Re: Staves
 

Under the same assumptions the Warrior has at least Flail 18, Shield 16, and Extra Attack, so he can do Deceptive Attacks quickly reducing defense from 12 to 6 (-4 for morning star, -2 or more for deceptive attack) or worse, so the staff is not that nice anyway.

@All: Staffs are great (Cheap, easy available, good parry, decent damage)

Problems with staffs:
- Some attacks cannot be parried (Spray- / Area Attacks or really heavy weapons (The giants giant maul))
- Some attacks can only be parried at a penalty (Ranged Attacks / Flails etc.).
- Climbing, Swimming, Stealth with a 2 meter long pole is not an easy task (A spear has a Bulk of -6)
- While you can pack it on top of your backpack you could never Fast-Draw it, so most staff wielding heroes have it constantly in their hands while a Shortsword can be easily worn on the belt...
- Disarming / Breaking is really bad (Hard to carry a backup staff)
- While Knives will be acceptable in most places you cannot always carry a staff

Problems specific for staff wielding mages:
- A mages Staff is probably enchanted and expensive (which will make some of the problems mentioned above even graver as no mage will leave his staff behind to climb a cliff etc.)
- A staff requires two hand = no gestures = only spells that require no gesture!!!
- A staff is a farmers weapon and might be not worthy of a nobel mage.

I personally think that a mage with a short stick is better off, with the smallsword skill he gets +3 for retreat so his parry will be the same as someone with the same skill level of staff, but a short stick is much easier to carry. My favorite weapon for mages is actually the bladed hand, as it leaves the hands empty for spellcasting...

Re: Staves
 

Is that official?
I never interpreted it that way - spells that require gestures actually require one free hand?

Re: Staves
 

I also allow one handed gestures BUT for a Staff to be ready for parrying it must be hold in TWO hands (One handed it would use the spear skill), so unless the mages has more than two hands he cannot make gestures. That of course is my interpretation...

Re: Staves
 

We've always allowed gesture ritual requirements to be filled by the staff movement for spells cast through the staff. Note that at SL15+, gesture requirements can be swapped for vocals, and the gesture requirements are small enough that they could be ruled doable even from a two-handed grip ["speak a word or two or make a small gesture (a couple of fingers are enough)"].

Re: Staves
 

Me too... However, then I don't allow casting without staff (or the mage has to learn the spell twice for the different gestures).

At 14-: He chooses when he buys the spell whether he can do the gestures with the staff OR with bare hand(s)...
At 15+: he can do the small gestures either with the staff, or with a bare hand, or he can use his voice...

For me, even moving a couple of fingers from a weapon grip makes the weapon unable to parry...

Re: Staves
 

As I explained it isnt RAW...although if someone were to construct one out of sword steel (think tesubo but moreso) it might be logical...

otherwise I actually have DX 12 and am a competent combatant...just adding to the discussion pointing out a potential flaw...not even sure I think that staves are upgunned....

Re: Staves
 

Ummm...no reason a wizard cannot ground his staff, take one hand off, make the gesture, and then put the hand back on the staff.

Re: Staves
 

Sure there is. Switching from a one handed grip to a two handed takes a ready maneuver unless you have Grip Mastery (MA 50).

Re: Staves
 

And even with Grip Mastery he cannot ground his staff cast a spell (which by itself takes at least 1 second) and ready it again for parrying in less than 3 seconds (1 ready to stick the staff into the ground (dropping would be free), cast the spell, 1 ready to take the staff back into his hand and ready it), which means no parry for at least 2 combat rounds...

Re: Staves
 

given the frac all yo are do in effectively dropping it with one hand is a free action (contrate that turn) But what you then have is an unready staff.

you do need a ready action to either go to a proper one handed grip or back to 2 hand grip

Re: Staves
 

Never Mind, yes you could just hold it in one hand... But while holding it in one hand you cannot parry using the Staff skill (you would need the spear skill) AND to hold it one handed in a spear grip you would need a ready maneuver (or Grip Mastery).

Re: Staves
 

I basically agree with the key thing is, you CAN hold it in one hand without ready maneuver (or Grip Mastery), you just holding it unready (hence can't parry) you need ready maneuver (or Grip Mastery) to hold it ready one handed.

the slight difference is key is the spell casting concentration maneuver doesn't care if it is ready or not. only parrying (or attacking) with the staff cares if it ready or not.

Re: Staves
 

Well, his name as George, not Robert, but I'm sure you knew that.

And I agree. I've long given all such weapons a +1 to Parry when used with the Staff skill in my games.

Re: Staves
 

Interesting. I have no idea why I misnamed him. Certainly, the link I gave has the right name ;)

Re: Staves
 

I'm sure Freud had his theories, but I'm going to go with 'accident'.

Or the Reptoids.

Either way.

Re: Staves
 

I'm now STRUGGLING to find a way to link "tinfoil hat" back to "quarterstaves" without making a dirty joke.

Re: Staves
 

If Freud had his way, every joke is a dirty joke. ;)

Re: Staves
 

Except when he smoked it...

Re: Staves
 

I don't even wanna know what that little 'sometimes a cigar is just a cigar' exception he procured for himself tells us about his childhood.

Re: Staves
 

Don't some campaigns have house rules where instead of gesture or voice requirements automagicall going away at certain effective skill levels, casters can take optional penalties to cast without voice or gestures or both?

Re: Staves
 

That's not a house rule. IIRC that is an option in Thaumatology.

Re: Staves
 

It's printed in Magic and the Basic Set, too.