Got a Real-World Weapon or Armor Question? Mk. XIV

[Mr. Mask]

Larger animals certainly are hardier than people. Someone tried executing a caged, rogue grizzly bear with a .45 round at point-blank range to the head. Bear didn't blink much less croak...

Admittedly you are correct in that there are flails which wouldn't kill the bear with anything but the best of strikes to the head. I just didn't want an overestimation of animals' abilities as compared to medieval weapons (that being said, the user of the weapon is a crucial point).


Rapiers aren't designed to counter armour. If you managed to do anything against mail, it would be pure luck rather than any skill on yours or the weapon manufacturer's part.

Weight actually is helpful to armour penetration, but it isn't the key factor. A heavier sword will do better against armour, but it still will be lousy against armour compared to lighter hammers.

[TuggyNE]

While I can't personally attest to the lethality of medieval weaponry, I can tell you that there was a news reel a few months ago which brought this to mind. A girl and her father were driving home when they were attacked by a stag or something. I don't remember the exact sequence of events, but it ended with the father being pinned by the animal. The girl grabbed a hammer from the truck and wailed on the animal. Repeatedly. Only after she turned the clawed end of the hammer on it did the animal finally flee.

The difference between a carpenter's hammer and a morningstar is immense, yes, but even so, it would seem that larger animals are slightly hardier than the average human.

Possibly, but from that it's hard to tell. I do know of a counterexample of a taekwondo black belt who killed a deer with a whack to the head, barehanded, while deployed in I believe Okinawa. So I suspect proper technique and strength are more significant than skull hardness.

[Galloglaich]

While I can't personally attest to the lethality of medieval weaponry, I can tell you that there was a news reel a few months ago which brought this to mind. A girl and her father were driving home when they were attacked by a stag or something. I don't remember the exact sequence of events, but it ended with the father being pinned by the animal. The girl grabbed a hammer from the truck and wailed on the animal. Repeatedly. Only after she turned the clawed end of the hammer on it did the animal finally flee.

The difference between a carpenter's hammer and a morningstar is immense, yes, but even so, it would seem that larger animals are slightly hardier than the average human.

Yes ... that is a pretty good point as far as how blunt weapons work, there is definitely a ratio to the size of the target and how they cause injuries.

I'd think that armor penetration would be more a function of heft than damage type. Perhaps that can tie into weight...But yes, I don't think a rapier simply has enough weight behind it to pierce armor reliably.

Well, it can't pierce plate armor...What about ringmail?

The point (forgive the pun) is that rapiers weren't armor piercing weapons, whereas daggers often were (especially certain types of daggers).

I think where "realistic" combat systems often fall down is in two places. Problem one, they focus too heavily on wound effects and wound tracking. The fact is for a human, most purpose-made medieval to bronze age weapons were effective enough to kill in fairly short order. The gory details can be fun, but people aren't like mech warriors in some computer game; you can't just shoot pieces off until they finally ablate away. A good hit is going to kill or maim. A not so good hit causes a pretty trivial wound.



But this is all they know about (from horror movies and so on) so that they typically spend an enormous amount of time on the damage model, the guts and squishy stuff. But the fun part of a fight is the fight. The damage is the icing but if you have a cake that's 90% icing it's gross. If you have a story which is just the cutting and the smashing part, it's like a torture porn movie, after a while it's just kind of gross and icky... whereas a good horror movie tells a scary story. You want that excitement in a fight, a fight should be scary... and thrilling.

This is dismaying for a lot of gamers, since most of the game designers of yesteryear didn't typically know much about fighting in hand to hand. But we have HEMA now, and revivals of other martial arts like Filippino Kali / Arnis and various forms of Japanese and Chinese fencing and so on. We know a little bit about what fighting with weapons is like now. Lot's of people have seen it. And it's pretty interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmLaZHStmI

If you've ever been involved in this at a serious level, particularly if you've been involved in the tournament circuit, you know that it's in fact also very exciting and engaging, it's a pretty good game in and of itself. Worth all the hours of training once you get some basic competency, because it's fun, it's interesting, there is strategy to it. This is what drew so many of us gamers, especially those of us into fantasy or historical genres, to rpg's in the first place. The idea of holding a sword and going off to do battle with it.

Problem two is that game designers in the past didn't have this. Few of them, if you'll forgive me for saying so, had probably ever been in a fight let alone a sword fight (not counting larp here). So they modeled ridiculous combat based on a poor understanding of weapons and armor of the genre and really no idea how people actually went about killing with swords and axes and so on. These systems tended to be ridiculously complex and require reams of charts and endless die rolls (ala rolemaster) and were ultimately pretty boring if you were honest about it.

A fight can't be slow and plodding and still be fun. And there is only so much fairy dust and comic hero powers that you can use to embellish it - those are the candles on top of the two inches of icing.

If you want combat to be interesting it has to be based in something real, that has rhythm of a real fight, and it has to be fast paced, it has to allow you to tell a story (not the story of rockem sockem robots either) and it has to be scary and at least a little thrilling if you win.

G

[Mr. Mask]

Well, I'm happy to praise any criteria which puts my combat model in a positive light. Though I would have included plenty of gory details if it weren't for the problems you mention (they're cumbersome). Gory details aren't a bad thing for a representation of combat--but they certainly don't make for a substantial experience on their own, as you expressed.

[AgentPaper]

Personally, I like the idea of using "energy" as round-to-round life resource. When you score a "hit", rather than actually representing a physical blow, it would represent something that would have been a hit if your opponent hadn't dodged away, and said dodging away would cost you energy. Energy comes back slowly at the end of each round, and would also be used for attacking, so a big attack would be harder to defend but leave you open as well. Once your energy is depleted, or if your opponent rolls particularly high, then you start taking real damage, which can then be represented in all the gory details, since it should be expected for most fights to only have a few wounds occurring before one side either surrenders or gets killed.

[Galloglaich]

It makes sense but that's not really what a fight is like. Under the influence of adrenaline you don't notice fatigue that much, and they are usually over long before a reasonably fit person would be exhausted.

You might be breathing hard after, mind you, but I think this attritive model isn't really what the experience is like.

Of course it's different if you and your opponent(s) are in full armor harness, and are unable for some reason to immediately grapple your opponent or attack them with armor piercing weapons, in which case I think endurance does become more of a 'thing' without a doubt.

G

[AgentPaper]

It makes sense but that's not really what a fight is like. Under the influence of adrenaline you don't notice fatigue that much, and they are usually over long before a reasonably fit person would be exhausted.

You might be breathing hard after, mind you, but I think this attritive model isn't really what the experience is like.

Of course it's different if you and your opponent(s) are in full armor harness, and are unable for some reason to immediately grapple your opponent or attack them with armor piercing weapons, in which case I think endurance does become more of a 'thing' without a doubt.

G

Fair enough, though I mostly liked it from a design standpoint, rather than having it mirror reality more closely. Another way of going about mostly the same thing would be to have "form" or "positioning" points, and as you attack you slowly build up points that you can use for bigger attacks, while eroding away your opponent's points by forcing them to use them on defensive actions.

More than anything though, I like it since it allows you to have a system where wounds can be scary and detailed, since you only have to keep track of a few of them, without turning it into "who rolls high first".

[AMFV]

It makes sense but that's not really what a fight is like. Under the influence of adrenaline you don't notice fatigue that much, and they are usually over long before a reasonably fit person would be exhausted.

You might be breathing hard after, mind you, but I think this attritive model isn't really what the experience is like.

Of course it's different if you and your opponent(s) are in full armor harness, and are unable for some reason to immediately grapple your opponent or attack them with armor piercing weapons, in which case I think endurance does become more of a 'thing' without a doubt.

G

Now I don't have a lot of actual knowledge on medieval fighting, but in a real battle you're not likely to be fighting only a single opponent, but many. So fatigue is definitely more likely to become a factor, especially if you factor in the need to move about the battlefield in full gear. Of course, I might be mistaken, but I think that in an environment with multiple opponents then fatigue is going to be a much bigger factor.

[Galloglaich]

Now I don't have a lot of actual knowledge on medieval fighting, but in a real battle you're not likely to be fighting only a single opponent, but many. So fatigue is definitely more likely to become a factor, especially if you factor in the need to move about the battlefield in full gear. Of course, I might be mistaken, but I think that in an environment with multiple opponents then fatigue is going to be a much bigger factor.

When you are stringing together multiple fights, on a small unit level or a series of running fights, yes certainly. Both for a fighter and for their horse, if any (for example)

But not so much within a typical fight. I think that is where it is both unrealistic and requires unnecessary bookkeeping.

So maybe you have a certain amount of bennies or (in my system) a small dice pool (for use in a roll -many keep-one system). So say you have 4 dice that you can use in your first fight. You might have lost one or two of after that fight and when a second opponent comes up, you only have 3. Subsequent fights will be harder and more dangerous.

Your ability to regenerate this energy between fights would be related to fitness and also to how efficiently you fought (i.e. did you have 3 exchanges or 13).

But I should also add, I think you may be thinking of a full scale battlefield when in RPG games, that's pretty rare. And in a more realistic system you are not going to be fighting dozens of 'mooks', because that is not safe with hand to hand weapons. It's more likely to be 5 on 5 or 5 on 10 maybe... but still, each individual doesn't necessarily fight more than once or twice. Those kinds of situations are more common in my games anyway.


G

[AMFV]

When you are stringing together multiple fights, on a small unit level or a series of running fights, yes certainly. Both for a fighter and for their horse, if any (for example)

But not so much within a typical fight. I think that is where it is both unrealistic and requires unnecessary bookkeeping.

Certainly possible, I was more referring to actual real world battlefield stuff, I'm not sure how that could be simulated in a roleplaying context.

So maybe you have a certain amount of bennies or (in my system) a small dice pool (for use in a roll -many keep-one system). So say you have 4 dice that you can use in your first fight. You might have lost one or two of after that fight and when a second opponent comes up, you only have 3. Subsequent fights will be harder and more dangerous.

Your ability to regenerate this energy between fights would be related to fitness and also to how efficiently you fought (i.e. did you have 3 exchanges or 13).

But I should also add, I think you may be thinking of a full scale battlefield when in RPG games, that's pretty rare. And in a more realistic system you are not going to be fighting dozens of 'mooks', because that is not safe with hand to hand weapons. It's more likely to be 5 on 5 or 5 on 10 maybe... but still, each individual doesn't necessarily fight more than once or twice. Those kinds of situations are more common in my games anyway.


G

Fair enough, I agree that those situations are more common in most games. Although I would imagine that 5 on 5 could be made exhausting depending on the scenario, anything involving lots of movement would be different, anything that involves large amounts of movement prior, which is most combats, however it definitely might introduce an unnecessary complication.

[Mr. Mask]

You do get some of that energy/HP stuff in contact sports like boxing. It takes energy to hit people, it saps energy when you're hit, the more energy you have the easier it is to absorb hits without getting hurt, and low energy means hits will start inflicting more damage. You'll also get that if you decide to slap each other with ineffective weapons while in harness.

[Brother Oni]

You do get some of that energy/HP stuff in contact sports like boxing. It takes energy to hit people, it saps energy when you're hit, the more energy you have the easier it is to absorb hits without getting hurt, and low energy means hits will start inflicting more damage. You'll also get that if you decide to slap each other with ineffective weapons while in harness.

Isn't this sort of abstraction usually called 'endurance'?

[Mr. Mask]

Some games have a stat called endurance but it normally behaves differently from anything in reality (sports games being the exception).

[Galloglaich]

I only put it in an RPG context because that is what everyone else was discussing; in the real world historically duels, impromptu one-on-one fights and small group fights were much more common than any form of warfare, and warfare itself was much more often made up of small scale raids and sieges than pitched battles.

People always tend to visualize a sort of Bravehart scenario but that wasn't the common situation of armed violence, major pitched battles were relatively rare.

G

[Mr. Mask]

That's true of basically all conflict in media. Bandits as common as flies all through the year, murders every Tuesday. Muggings on an hourly basis. All out wars within cities involving AK-47s regularly.

Circumstances can get so bad that such is happening regularly, and sometimes they do. Some places manage to keep those circumstances lasting for a long, long time...

[Galloglaich]

One of the interesting things is that, part of how the towns in Europe managed to get a grip on mayhem and banditry was to arm their citizens. It was actually against the law not to own a sword in some towns. But this, in turn, led to a certain amount of trouble since all the citizens (about 20% of the population in most of the larger towns) were armed and they often got into fights with each other. In Italy this got really out of hand with factional disputes and vendettas between families, though they learned to moderate formal duels.

In the German and Slavic parts of Europe they managed to create a kind of etiquette for informal fights so that they didn't escalate that often to the point of people being killed ... though this didn't work perfectly. So they had all kinds of laws regarding escalation or picking fights, with a series of fines for provocative or aggressive behavior. The result was that serious fights still happened but not nearly as often as you might think with everyone walking around armed.

G

[Knaight]

On thrusts: The Dubious Quick Kill was linked a few pages ago, and there's been lots of commentary regarding thrusts doing limited damage. It's worth nothing that these are within the specific context of swords, and often fairly narrow swords at that. Something like a spear is an entirely different beast - the shaft has a far greater cross sectional area than just about any sword, and while spear heads vary highly they're often going to be leaving much bigger holes than you'd see from the tip of a sword.

[Galloglaich]

The debate about which was more effective: a thrust or a cut, was a huge flamewar that went on from most of 1750-1850, when swords finally began to seriously recede from the battlefield and the dueling square.

As usual, the classic argument is overly simplistic. Trying to say a thrust is better than a cut or vice versa, is missing the point. Both types of attacks have a kind of profile or fingerprint, which varies widely depending on the specific weapon -and- the skill of the person delivering the injury.

We actually have some data on what really killed and what didn't in the Middle Ages. For example one published a study last year of several hundred letters of remissions in France and Burgundy in the 15th Century. These were pardon letters which were necessary in those regions to get out of trouble in the event of causing a homicide or a serious injury from a fight.

Analysis of this data, though it's a small sample, is interesting especially when correlated with data from other areas.

Daggers, contrary to most rpg systems, are among the most dangerous weapons. The very most dangerous was the halberd, partly because it was highly and equally effective at causing cuts as well as puncture wounds, and interestingly, people apparently used to choke up on the halberd to use it at close range. Spears were also high on the list.

In the records I reviewed from Augsburg from this book and This book, thrust attacks from swords and daggers were more likely to cause death in the long run, though cuts seemed to cause just as many serious wounds, and wounds from swords caused death about 50% of the time in almost all cases. In the letters from remission from France we can see that goes as high as around 60% for head and upper torso injuries and as low as 25% for lower limbs. But all much higher than what you usually see in RPGs.

What you may have been referring to regarding rapiers and the like, is that there is data from the London Coroners rolls and various archives in Italy both in the period roughly 1550-1650 in which many people dueling with dueling rapiers or smallswords received multiple mortal wounds each, none of which stopped the fight (so they kept stabbing each other until they were both mortally wounded). This is why thrusting was illegal in duels in many German and Slavic towns until the 17th Century since it was believed to increase the risk of fatal wounds. This is partly because of medicine in the day which was fairly good at dealing with cuts, even bad cuts, (amputations and so on) but not very good at dealing with punctures especially in the abdomen or torso.

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But some archives from Poland where people often fought duels with sabers described 'loose fingers' being an almost immediate result as well as severed hands, both of which are likely to be disabling pretty quickly.

The letters of remission from France, which are often quite detailed, give us the data that immediate death was pretty rare from any type of weapon and was more the result of where the injury was (basically head or neck) than the type of attack used.

Unscientific conclusions from what I've seen of the data: Very thin blades can cause mortal wounds that don't kill quickly, spears seem to often disable pretty fast from Augsburg records I've read. Halberds seem to be pretty devastating. Short knife blades often seem to cause superficial wounds. Swords may be the most effective for self defense and hardest to grab out of an assailants hand (hardest, though not impossible).


G

[Mr. Mask]

G: Yeah. Not arming your populace means they can't defend themselves from bandits, muggers, thieves, or government alike.

The story of how they finished the James gang was pretty good. Required everyone to bring their guns to church in Dodge city. Since the James gang liked robbing banks on Sundays while people were at church... robbing Dodge city's bank ended with them getting blasted to little bits.


Daggers are indeed incredibly dangerous weapons. I can't think of an RPG that has captured the lethality of a boxcutter. How you use them makes a huge difference though... If you wave them around like a feather duster, wounds are going to be superficial--though several of them will still endanger you from bleeding.


On Knaight's point(/thrust/stab/jab/etc.), spears are pretty darned disabling, more than the rapiers for sure. It just be noted that with knives and swords, you can cut the blade out instead of just pulling it straight out, which increases the damage of a stab by a lot.

[Galloglaich]

Also depends on the sword or the dagger. Notice for example how the Roman pugio is made something like a garden shovel. I'd hate to be stabbed ... but I'd especially hate to be stabbed by one these:







A blade like that goes in pretty easy with the point, but it's going to split organs and muscles like ripe melons once it's pushed in a bit. If you want to finish off somebody real quick, you could do worse than this weapon, as the lethal and ruthless Romans knew very well.

On the other hand, if you want to plant a knife on somebody in a crowd where they might not even notice it, but be pretty sure it will go through their clothing and be able to puncture something really bad so that they die within a few days... a stiletto is a pretty good choice.



G

[Mr. Mask]

Bringing the right weapons to the job is indeed important.


PS: Where do you find all these neat pictures and sources?

[Galloglaich]

Using the right search terms is helpful.

G

[Mr. Mask]

Not getting MMO weapons and armour results is something of a trick.

[Xuc Xac]

I imagine it's much easier to recover from a sword stroke than an axe stroke.

An axe is usually harder to wield than a heavier sword due to balance.

Battle axes are much lighter than the axes you use to chop down trees. A wood ax is very heavy and slow compared to any battlefield weapon because trees don't dodge. The bit on a battle ax is very light: it's only about the size of your palm and it's as thin and sharp as a chef's knife. Swinging one isn't any noticeably slower than swinging the naked handle.

[Mr. Mask]

If they were as bad as a woodaxes, they'd be be pretty unsuitable for fighting. As it was they weren't as easy to use as swords but they were still very usable.

[Knaight]

Battle axes are much lighter than the axes you use to chop down trees. A wood ax is very heavy and slow compared to any battlefield weapon because trees don't dodge.

Trees not dodging (and not trying to hit you back with weapons) is part of why wood axes are heavier. It's basically why they can afford that weight - there's still the matter of why they need it, which is where wood being way harder to cut through than flesh comes in.

[Spiryt]

Battle axes are much lighter than the axes you use to chop down trees. A wood ax is very heavy and slow compared to any battlefield weapon because trees don't dodge. The bit on a battle ax is very light: it's only about the size of your palm and it's as thin and sharp as a chef's knife. Swinging one isn't any noticeably slower than swinging the naked handle.

That just about entirely depends on 'chopping axe' and 'battle axe' in question.

There are different specialisations and preferences...

Not to mention that huge amount of actual medieval axe heads are horribly hard to decisively qualify : tool or weapon?


As far as 'lack of stopping power' or thrust goes, I would believe that this is indeed the issue that had risen from the experiences with late rapiers, smallswords, epees and other specialised dueling weapons.

In all other instances, people have murdered themselves with stabbing weapons trough the ages, and I don't think anyone would seriously try to consider 'average' spear, dagger, arrow, javelin etc. wounds 'not stopping enough'.

Usama ibn Munqidh writes about arms being removed at the elbow by the spear strikes, for example.

[Mr. Mask]

Spiryt is back, cool.


Considering I've heard of arrows just about taking arms off, I can easily picture spears doing a full job of it.

[Thiel]

It's also worth noting that with a spear you've got a couple of meters of stick after the blade and possibly a two handed grip to work with. That should give you plenty of options for extra damage when you pull it out.
Not to mention the sheer bewildering varieties of spearheads available

[Brother Oni]

Some games have a stat called endurance but it normally behaves differently from anything in reality (sports games being the exception).

Sport video games use endurance as a synonym as for stamina, but is purely a measure of cardiovascular fitness.

Some systems use endurance/stamina as a measure of vitality where wounds, starvation, fatigue and a couple of other measures all deplete it - off the top of my head, the Fighting Fantasy and the non-D20 version of Lone Wolf systems do this.
These systems are very abstracted though with only 3 or 2 attributes to represent your character compared to the 6+ in D&D.

Also depends on the sword or the dagger. Notice for example how the Roman pugio is made something like a garden shovel. I'd hate to be stabbed ... but I'd especially hate to be stabbed by one these:

I'm probably mistaken, but aren't they also taught to twist the blade before withdrawing to improve the chance of the wound not closing?