[MA] Wrestling with Weapons

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Danukian

I understand WHY you want I weapon skill over 16, my point was 16+ is useful because all the defenses and techniques default to it - I was saying if Skill 20 only represented "bashing", it was useless.

Deceptive Attack, hit location, rapid strikes...

If you're fighting someone with Skill-16, they'll parry at 11- by default, and with Combat Reflexes or Extra Defense, and a retreat, you're looking at 14- without even getting unrealistic; 16- if you have a weapon with a DB.

Deceptive attack penalties to parry of 6-10 are thus pretty useful, which implies "surplus" skill of 12-20 by itself.

To be good enough to hit various targets requires "surplus" skill of up to +7 (brain) to +10 (eyes through a helm), or 8 for chinks in armor. Call it up to +8.

Rapid strikes are at -6 each; you can do a triple combination that hits you up with a -12. Let's stay within the realm of reason and only hit with the 6.

So if you take 90% chance to hit (14), add 12-20 for DA, 7-10 for hit location, and 6 more for rapid strike. So 'bashing' skill of 39 or higher can be justified just by the types of things a master might want to do; if you say that you don't want to do it all at once, you can still say that bashing skill of about Skill-30 has real practical utility in beating people up.

So I disagree that all that extra skill is inherently or intuitively grappling stuff. I don't think it's emphatically NOT that, but you can spend a lot of time hitting people with sticks without learning how to Judo Throw someone or do an arm lock with stick (and I say this as someone who has done both)