Staves

[The Wrathchild]

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?

[SuedodeuS]

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.

[Bruno]

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.

[Kromm]

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.

[The Wrathchild]

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

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

[WingedKagouti]

Originally Posted by The Wrathchild

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

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

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. ;)

[Kromm]

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.

[SuedodeuS]

Originally Posted by Bruno

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.

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.