Melee Weapon Skills (Confusion In reguards to Ruling)

[Dejavroom]

Originally Posted by johndallman

There is no "Fencing Weapons" skill in GURPS rules-as-written. There is a category of weapons called "Fencing Weapons" and a category of melee weapon skills, also called "Fencing Weapons". These categories exist because the weapons and skills within them use similar rules.

Rapier is a skill, which is DX/A. If a character puts four points into it, they have it at DX+1. They also have the other three fencing weapons skills at Rapier-3, which comes out to DX-2.

If the same character also has four points in Broadsword skill, making DX+1, they have a Rapier default from that of Broadsword-4, which is DX-3. That's much worse than the skill level they bought in Rapier, and should be ignored.

I'm sorry, I still don't really understand. Why does rapier have a broadsword -4 default? What context is that used in?

Is that to say if someone had Broadsword 15, They'd also be able to use rapiers at Skill level 11? Is that correct?

But if you just took Rapier as a skill, It'd have the fencing weapon default of -3?