Blunt weapons and edged weapons using the same skills?

[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.