Blunt weapons and edged weapons using the same skills?

[VIVIT]

It doesn't make much sense to me that, for example, a baton as long as a shortsword uses the same skill as a shortsword. With edged weapons you have to worry about edge alignment, while blunt weapons require nothing of the sort. The fact axe and mace are the same skill feels really weird; they're both impact weapons, but they're very different.

Suggesting that skill with a sword transfers to skill with a club feels a little bit less ridiculous than the other way around. It makes some sense that Miyamoto Musashi could adapt his swordsmanship skills to brain someone with an oar, but could someone skilled with clubs pick up a katana and use it? Maybe they could use a sword like a cutlass designed for hacking and chopping, but a katana is designed for draw-cutting.

I suppose this could be addressed with familiarity penalties, but in many cases, especially going from blunt weapons to edged ones, that doesn't feel like enough. Am I missing something here? Is there a HEMA expert in the house? And yes, I know GURPS isn't a reality simulator, but if it didn't care about distinctions between weapon types and the ways in which those weapons are used, it wouldn't have weapon skills at all.

[Varyon]

Edged weapons are a bit more difficult to use than blunt ones, due to concerns of edge alignment, but this is generally assumed to be below the resolution of the system. With that in mind, there's no real difference (beyond Familiarity) between a broadsword and a comparable-size balanced club - or between an axe and mace.

If you want edge alignment to be more difficult, I'd say you could use the skills as-is, but cutting weapons are at -1 to hit. You can negate this with an Average Technique - perhaps call it Edged Weapon Training or similar (and add it to all Martial Arts styles that use edged weapons). Optionally, if the -1 makes the difference between a hit and a miss, you hit with poor edge alignment - double the target's DR and reduce the wounding modifier for Cutting to x1 (x1.5 against the Neck).

[Donny Brook]

Speaking from experience as an old-school sabreuer who lived through the transition to electronic judging*, it turns out not to make that much difference. If the weapon grip is constructed to present the edge, then that is what you will hit with almost all the time anyway. The few cases where you might hit with the flat by accident can be easily consigned to crap damage rolls.



*Human judging included assessment of whether you hit with the edge or the flat; electronic judging abandomed that concern.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Edged weapons are a bit more difficult to use than blunt ones, due to concerns of edge alignment, but this is generally assumed to be below the resolution of the system.

Arguably, edged weapons are harder to defend against, however. A bokken or similar sword-shaped club will be about 0.75-1.25" in width. By comparison, the edge of a blade is fractions of a millimeter. The difference requires your blocks and parries to be much more precise and increases the gaps your opponent can exploit by orders of magnitude.

Also remember that GURPS skills cover experience with lethal combat. Someone with lots of training time with blunt or slowed weapons but no battlefield experience effectively has Weapon Sport or Weapon Art, which defaults to actual weapon skill at -2.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Arguably, edged weapons are harder to defend against, however. A bokken or similar sword-shaped club will be about 0.75-1.25" in width. By comparison, the edge of a blade is fractions of a millimeter. The difference requires your blocks and parries to be much more precise and increases the gaps your opponent can exploit by orders of magnitude.

Maybe if you're trying to Parry with your fingernail or something. Realistically, anything you're using as a parrying surface (to say nothing of blocking!) is going to be sufficiently larger than the width of the blade or bludgeon that differences in said widths don't really come into play.

Now, Parrying a blade unarmed without getting harmed is harder than Parrying a bludgeon unarmed without getting harmed, but honestly, I think if you manage a Parry that wouldn't have harmed you if the foe was using a bludgeon, the shallow cut you'd get from a blade is probably below system resolution.

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Also remember that GURPS skills cover experience with lethal combat. Someone with lots of training time with blunt or slowed weapons but no battlefield experience effectively has Weapon Sport or Weapon Art, which defaults to actual weapon skill at -2.

This is true. That said, it's about how one trains - a bokken can certainly be a lethal weapon, if you train for it to be. A minor correction, however - Combat, Sport, and Art skills default to each other at -3, not -2.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Maybe if you're trying to Parry with your fingernail or something.

Based man of culture ref to Shalltear =) Forgot about that scene. Those nails are at most an inch long and it would be pretty tricky to align them perfectly with narrow weapons like swords compared to big-headed attacks like mauls/warhammers or even punches.

That said: it probably takes the same accuracy to do a centre-of-mass parry against a maul/punch. If you didn't perfectly parry in centre of mass it could glance off to the side and work like a deflection where you prevented it from hitting the primary/intended target but maybe it hits some secondary target adjacent to it instead?

I'm wondering if we could somehow fiddle with how T-bone's rules in pyramid 3/34 worked for this. Like instead of "half damage on a MoF 1 parry" if you're using a tiny parrying implement like a finger, you ignore this benefit?

IMO the 'miss by 1' graze rule should not just be half-damage, but should also alter the hit location. The idea here is that the parry still made contact, right? If it made enough contact to halve the damage then it should be enough to deflect the attack?

Originally Posted by Varyon

Realistically, anything you're using as a parrying surface (to say nothing of blocking!) is going to be sufficiently larger than the width of the blade or bludgeon that differences in said widths don't really come into play.

Another example similar to "Shalltear parries a normal sword with her fingernail" would be something like "anyone with a normal sword parries Ichigo Kurosaki"

For example when Zaraki Kenpachi parries Ichigo

Zaraki's sword is much thinner, however it's also pretty long so he has a lot more flexibility in where he places his hand.

Ichigo v. Zaraki is I think one of those situations where we can recognize that with variations in lenght (I'm going to assume their swords are reach 1,2 ? or maybe 3?) that parries could actually make contact in a variety of places.

IE you might parry just before the sword hits you (contact in your own hex) or make contact w/ a parry further out, in longsword vs. longsword dueling.

This could actually be an important factor if you have stuff going on like "any time my sword makes contact there is an AE explosion centered on point of contact") so maybe we should actually have rules for determining in which hex the swords make contact?

I would say for example that where Zaraki parries Ichigo, it's probably in the empty hex between them (middle meets middle), as opposed to a narrow parry in Zaraki's hex (guard parries tip) or a pre-emptive parry in Ichigo's hex (tip parries guard)

- -

Maybe this relates to "matter of inches" areas (normally only a factor in Cascading Waits) where maybe if we categorized weapons based on their sub-hex length varyations we might give them some kind of parrying bonus or penalty.

There's IMO already some element of this seen in the -1 to parry which B272 assigns to all of the knives. It doesn't seem to distinguish between the reach C vs the reach C,1 ones though.

(btw does anyone remember why the large/small knife is C for impale and C,1 for cut? Is this due to them being curved like katana?)

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Arguably, edged weapons are harder to defend against, however. A bokken or similar sword-shaped club will be about 0.75-1.25" in width. By comparison, the edge of a blade is fractions of a millimeter. The difference requires your blocks and parries to be much more precise and increases the gaps your opponent can exploit by orders of magnitude.

Good grief. Are you serious?

Quite aside from that the width of a sword is a great deal wider than a millimeter, no one who's been in armed combat would possibly think so. The difference isn't in the width of the parrying surface. The difference is in the relative air resistance of the weapon, and even that's less important than many other factors. It'd be a coin toss even with perfectly evenly matched master fencers on a piste.

And once again, the question is meaningless. GURPS just isn't granular enough for the difference to matter.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by VIVIT

Suggesting that skill with a sword transfers to skill with a club feels a little bit less ridiculous than the other way around. It makes some sense that Miyamoto Musashi could adapt his swordsmanship skills to brain someone skilled with clubs could pick up a katana and use it? Maybe they could use a sword like a cutlass designed for hacking and chopping, but a katana is designed for draw-cutting.

Pretty much every historical sword fighting style has used practice blades made of wood (equivalent for the katana: the bokken). While this is largely a practical issue, there aren't a lot of other practical low tech materials for practice blades, it's clear that they were considered close enough for practice purposes.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by VIVIT

It doesn't make much sense to me that, for example, a baton as long as a shortsword uses the same skill as a shortsword. With edged weapons you have to worry about edge alignment, while blunt weapons require nothing of the sort.

I think this depends on the blunt weapon. Something like a Baseball Bat would not, whereas a Cricket Bat (Z44) has similar considerations as a double-edged blade since it has two "swing" attack modes:

"Using the flat of the bat doubles DR vs. the damage and doubles the damage used to determine knockback (only)."

When using one of the cricket bat's two edges, it does swing+1 crushing just like a baseball bat. The flat also does swing+1 but lacks penetrative power yet gets double KB, so it's an interesting tradeoff.

If you were fighting zombies, for example, you'd want to use the edge to attack a skull's 2 DR, but the flat to hit a zombie anywhere else which lacks DR to double, to create distance.

Swords have a similar option to this where you can opt to strike with the flat of a blade (instead of the edge) to convert cutting damage into crushing damage.

The problem I see both with swords and cricket bats is there's no restrictions reflecting how your grip would influence your attack options.

If you are doing a 12 o'clock swing with these weapons, your grip is going to control whether that's hitting with the edge or the flat: to alter that without rotating the handle in your grip would require rotating your forearm out of neutral alignment, which reduces your power generation and increases chance of injury.

IMO to avoid this you should need to make some kind of investment to alter your grip. If that's not a 'ready' it should at least be one of those 'free action' things that you can only do at certain points of your turn.

If we look at the handle of a cricket bat, it is round like a baseball bat, so you should be able to freely rotate it without problems: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/14...g?v=1607070272

Certain swords are different though, while some have round handles like baseball/cricket bats, have non-round handles which are slightly ovular: the tang the handle goes overtop of has a wider and narrower measurement, just like the blade but to a lesser degree.

how you wrap it can smooth that out, but not always completely. I also think this is intentional because it makes for a better grip in some cases, since it's meant to be used just for cutting and not "smacking with the flat".

In the case of those grips, you're due a damage penalty either way, if being realizied:

1) either you grip it normally and do a weird lateral motion (can't use maximal force since instead of relying your your triceps to create the extension to slash, your using either supination+externalShoulder or pronation+internal shoulder.

2) you grip it abnormally to use tricep extension but it doesn't sit well in your thumb web: more stressful on the hand, prone to spin in your hand, etc.

Originally Posted by VIVIT

The fact axe and mace are the same skill feels really weird; they're both impact weapons, but they're very different.

Comparing an axe or pick to a blunt weapon with a clear "striking side" would make sense, like B274's Warhammer. If it looks soemthing like https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/pa...ntory_icon.png then like an axe there's only one direction it can swing toward, whereas stuff like https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/pa...ntory_icon.png could go in all directions with equal effect

Where this would matter more is if we paid more attention to stuff like "upward swing" vs "downsword swing". This would also be a major issue when comparing single-edge swords to double-edge swords.

Originally Posted by VIVIT

Suggesting that skill with a sword transfers to skill with a club feels a little bit less ridiculous than the other way around. It makes some sense that Miyamoto Musashi could adapt his swordsmanship skills to brain someone skilled with clubs could pick up a katana and use it? Maybe they could use a sword like a cutlass designed for hacking and chopping, but a katana is designed for draw-cutting.

There would be holes in both directions. Single-edge sword users have a lot of attack angles and grips they simply just won't use, which a skilled user of blunt objects may normally take advantage of.

Just like a club-user who relies on those angles would need to abandon them when adapting to swordplay, focusing on the angles sword-swings allow.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by VIVIT

Maybe they could use a sword like a cutlass designed for hacking and chopping, but a katana is designed for draw-cutting.

Forgot about this part when I made my initial response. The whole thing about straight swords hacking and curved ones slicing isn't really realistic - see this thread for a discussion (and some options for how to handle the difference in a cinematic campaign). Of particular note in that thread was the link to this article.