Making a spear

[Verjigorm]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

To everyone saying "Just whittle a sharp end on a stick, it ain't hard".

Yes, yes it is. You are talking about Armoury/TL 0 (defaults to IQ-5).

I have watched someone spend days trying to make a 'fishing' spear and repeatedly fail, making the same mistakes over, and over, and over agian.

In GURPS terms those are repeated skill roll failures.



Now personally I'd allow a Survival at a penalty (say -3) for making fishing spears or small game spears. Anything sturdier however? No. That's Armoury.


And my first month of stone knapping resulted in blood loss and broken rocks. After that I got better at not bleeding. I never did get the hang of properly knapping an arrow head, but I did make some skinning knives.

I am with Dan Howard on this. It's simple to make a spear our of wood.

But here's a few things: If you're making a spear or any thing out of wood, anything you make from a stick just lying onthe ground is going to be a piece of trash. The wood you use for making handles for wooden weapons is not green wood, but is instead seasoned wood that has been selected carefully. Heck, if there's any fitting to be done, the last thing you want to do is use green, sappy wood that is going to dry out, split and crack while you are using it.

I can make you a spear out of paper towels and some copper wire. Given some actual real materials to work with and tools, and I can craft somethign real nice. It's probably one of the simplest weapons to make.