Realism; Strength is not important for swordsmanship(?)

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

IMO it does. With enough skill you can hit more precisely, which means you can bypass armour or hit more damaging targets. The net result is you do more damage. It's not direct like the way ST does but, but its a constant enough effect to count IMO

Right. And that is even more true (at least, more sensible) with bowmen. More you are skilled, more you are able to hit a far target. Hitting a far target requires precision, of course (DX, in GURPS). But it also requires strength, in order to stretch the bow to give the arrow enough speed.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by Gollum

Right. And that is even more true (at least, more sensible) with bowmen. More you are skilled, more you are able to hit a far target. Hitting a far target requires precision, of course (DX, in GURPS). But it also requires strength, in order to stretch the bow to give the arrow enough speed.

Yep I think it's more true of bowmen than melee because if you lack the ability to draw a bow that is powerful enough to reach your target, all the accuracy in the world won't matter you still won't hit.

What I really think is true is that while we tend to look at these things as completely separate in these discussions, the reality is they end up being liked just by the practicality of real life.

So yeah in GURPS it's possible to build a DX15, ST5 adult with Skill +10, in reality that combination of things won't happen with a human swordsman*.

(however because it's GURPS it has to be able to accommodate the non human and non realistic, i.e. no human swordmaster is likely to have the above build, but a hobbit one might).


When it comes to modelling humans, especially one's who excel at something I try and go for a holistic approach that brings in several factors. Because the reality is when your training very hard at something there tends to be a lot of synergy with several factors.

So while my preference is for stat normalisation, which means I won't have C14th English archers walking around with ST20 in order to pull heavy bows, but neither will I have them be ST8 and have +12 in a technique that allows them to.

Instead I tend to give them a combination of things that working together given them a combined ability to do a thing. Archery is great example of this as there is a pretty coherent set of advantages that build on each other and narrow in specificity.

TBH I've found a nice side effect of this approach is that I tend to avoid the knock on issues that can come with very high scores in advantages that have a wider scopes. e.g my English HYW archers know to avoid arm wrestling a 1,000lb polar bears!



*yes OK may soem outlandish culmination of events could give you this, but I suggest it wouldn't be a static ongoing situation

[cdru]

Originally Posted by Gollum

Try to cut wood with an axe and compare your effectiveness with the one of a professional woodcutter. Even if you are generally stronger than him, his blows will be stronger than yours because he is very used to do that. He did that thousands of time!

This is modelled in GURPS: Forced entry allows you to hit harder against inanimate objects

[Drop Bear]

conciser this you are likely impacting the target a lot more than the dice would indicate, it's just your blows are glancing off or striking protection at an angle that is absorbed by the protection.

in my miss spent youth I was a mediocre archer, as part of an experiment using a (then) modern low end sports bow, I got to shoot arrows at recreation Cloth & Leather Armors. I was hitting a man sized target at 20m in excess of 80% of the time, less than half those hits struck home because slight variations in angle of impact glancing off the armor or with non penetrating embeds. at 30m (60% hits 40% penetration) & 40m (40-45% hits around 35% penetration) my hit rate was down but my penetrations per 100 arrows (my arms where very sore by weeks end) stayed roughly constant. at around 50m penetration drooped of a quite a bit bit due to range attenuation of impact force (and the fact my hit rate was down too).

so Skill is your chance of landing a telling blow, Damage is how much you mess them up when you do land that blow.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Drop Bear

conciser this you are likely impacting the target a lot more than the dice would indicate, it's just your blows are glancing off or striking protection at an angle that is absorbed by the protection.

Nah, GURPS combat rules don't work like that. A miss really is an outright miss (although there can be room for interpreting it as a "hesitation"). Otherwise you'd get an attack bonus against foes with insufficient armor for such a glance to occur (or a penalty against foes with such armor).

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by cdru

This is modelled in GURPS: Forced entry allows you to hit harder against inanimate objects

I'm not sure that, as GM, I would allow to use Forced entry to cut wood with an axe but, no matter, I do agree with you: there are a lot of ways to model specific strength in GURPS instead of just buying a high ST level.

[Minuteman37]

Originally Posted by Gerrard of Titan Server

I have no first hand experience in historical weapon-based martial arts, but I have some second-hand appreciation and fascination for those who do, such as HEMA.

Some of the "experts" and actual experts in the community have said in several occasions that strength is not terribly important. Skill is much more important. Matt Easton of Scholagladiatoria has even stated that during his time of teaching historical European martial arts to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people, he hasn't yet seen someone that is too physically weak to effectively wield a longsword (aka a hand-and-a-half sword) with two hands. (He says that a little bit more strength is required for effective wielding of a sword in one hand, but still not that much.)

See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3OIjpLSaYQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip-_vEPotYo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cNO6uRqUcE

Is this true?

In terms of GURPS, a very strong person has a ST of 13, for a base Swing damage of 2d-1, which comes out to 2d+1 cut for two-handing a "bastard sword". A weak person has a ST of 7, for a base Swing damage of 1d-2, which comes out to 1d cut for two-handing a "bastard sword". Right? That's over twice the damage, which doesn't gel with my understanding of the above sources.

This is further informed by this one page that I found. It doesn't look terribly professional, but it's the only source that I've found. It claims to be measured impact force of a sword swing and mace swing with proper form and technique, vs "bad technique" aka hitting as hard as you can.

http://weaponsofchoice.com/extras/we...ort-and-force/

The numbers are quite interesting. According to this author, a mace swing with proper form has 10x less impact force than a full-out, "bad" technique swing, and a sword swing with proper form has 100x less impact force than a full-out, "bad" technique swing! Again, are these numbers accurate? It's incredibly difficult to find numbers on this. I lack all firsthand expertise in this, and it's hard for me to even sanity check these claims, and that's a big reason why I'm here.

If those force impact numbers are to be trusted, then it leads me to the conclusion that swords deal damage because they're sharp and because they hit vulnerable areas with proper edge alignment, etc., and generally not because of of the person's strength - except to the extent that is necessary to get the sword moving at speed.

I would guess that a relatively weak real world person can swing a sword about as fast as a very strong person, and thus the above numbers pass my initial, uneducated, "sniff" test.

If all of this is correct, this would mean that the entire framework and system in place for modeling damage with swords based on strength and swing damage is entirely broken.

Alternatively, maybe I'm coming from the wrong perspective. In a real fight, the first person to get get a cut generally wins, so maybe a very strong person would do substantially more damage with a sword cut with good form because of their strength, but it doesn't matter because the actual flesh wounds from a sword cut from a weaker than average person does more than enough to incapacitate a person most of the time.

I guess I'm just looking for comments, pointers, and general education. I'd like to understand reality before I decide if I want to ignore reality for being cinematic, and exactly what the difference would be.

Thanks for your time!

My first though upon reading this post was "maybe weapon master isn't as cinematic as we've been lead to believe?"

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

My first though upon reading this post was "maybe weapon master isn't as cinematic as we've been lead to believe?"

If we dropped the access to cinematic skills and techniques, it could become quite realistic ...

Except for the difference between DX+1 and DX+2 level (+1 and +2 to damage). I find that a bit weird, exactly like for Karate skill.

A karateka has to reach DX+0 (or a weapon master has to reach DX+1) to get +1 to damage, which requires quite a lot of training / character points (depending on the difficulty of the skill). But he only needs 4 points more to get +2 to damage. And after that, nothing else. Even if he reaches DX+10. The distribution of theses bonuses sounds weird to me. Something like DX+0 for +1 to damage and DX+4 for +2 to damage would have been more realistic in my humble opinion.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by Anthony

It's definitely not linear, but it's definitely faster. There's a reason baseball batters weightlift and use steroids...

True, baseball's a good example actually (because a lot of work has been down on what in sport science terms is a fairly simple* mechanism), what it seems to come down in getting the sweet spot on both how heavy a bat you can swing, but it also being able to swing it fast and under control**.

Again there are lots of limiting factors in play, not least there's only so fast human arm (and torso) muscles can swing the arm. If you look at the animal world for very fast strikes it tends to come down to specific morphological adaptation to allow for extreme speed, not muscle mass (of course morphological specialisation is a bit out of context here).

So yes baseball hitter strength train but there is an point of diminishing returns even when just swinging a bat very hard.



*a very relative term, its still complex!

**and even then compared to moving weapon around in ongoing combat for attack and defence, swinging baseball bat is a much simpler, narrower use.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

Again there are lots of limiting factors in play, not least there's only so fast human arm (and torso) muscles can swing the arm. If you look at the animal world for very fast strikes it tends to come down to specific morphological adaptation to allow for extreme speed, not muscle mass (of course morphological specialisation is a bit out of context here).

Until we have some serious transhumanist body modifications available to the general public, swordsmen, martial-artists, and baseball batters will have to stick to the kind of morphological refinement available to us. To whit - exercise, with or without hormones etc., and regardless of if those chemical aids are from natural mutations or medical help.

Exercise at a specialized task from an early age deforms the skeleton as well as builds muscle-mass. The skeleton of Sir John de Stricheley[1] was unearthed at Stirling castle, and is a fantastic case study of what knightly training actually did to your body.
His right shoulder-blade is warped and rippled to an extent you just don't see in modern people, and his arm bones are ridged and flanged; he worked so hard with his right arm that his body deformed the bone to produce more muscle attachment points. His left side is less drastic, but still well developed - his shield arm took impact in different ways from his sword and lance arm.
This man was visibly deformed to become a specialist at the job of wielding weapons in combat to murder other people; he was lop-sided.
He also had classical knightly injuries, like a healed blade wound to the forehead that scarred the bone but didn't penetrate the braincase, bashed front teeth (typical of both a punch to the face, and a shield to the face), lower back injury (from bouncing around in the saddle for hours and hours) and an infected crushed ankle (typical from having a horse roll on you).

Sir John de Stricheley, and other knights like him, clearly felt strength was important.

[1] Probably John de Stricheley - they don't have an inscription over his burial or clearly identifying artifacts; he was definitely a knight from the south of England. Incidentally, he probably died of an arrow wound or the subsequent infection - they found the barbed head of the war arrow still lodged in his rib bones.