Got A Weapon or Armor Question?

[Eric_The_Mad]

Confucius would lose. Being Chinese and being Chinese raised, I have witnessed the long-term effects of Confucius' arguments (traditional Chinese family structure and behavior), and must say that his ideas were just hypocritical or awkward at best. Socrates, now there was a philosopher worthy of remembrance. He was a genuine tinkerer of social consciousness, whereas Confucius was a lackluster self-aggrandizing minor official given way too much credit than he really deserved. The only reason why he became so popular was because his dogmatic premises allowed a Chinese authoritarian imperial system to continue dictating its people's lives with impunity. Sorry if I seem particularly anti-Confucius, but it's true, the people who live under a philosophy tend to know it best, its strengths and its weaknesses. I know only a few strengths of Confucian ethics, that being clear and decisive authority and loyalty, but the weaknesses and inhumanities produced by such an institution are legion.

I'd much rather watch Socrates take on Lao Tzu, whom I consider to be China's closest parallel to Socrates.

If want someone to debate with Confucius, choose Aristotle, if there ever was an equal to Confucius in pomposity and inflated prestige, it was that bastard who held back atomic theory for a thousand years by decrying Democritus as a fool, when Democritus hit the nail on the head.


Slightly Off-topic...

You feel the same way about Confucius that I feel about Freud when it comes to discussing Psychology :P Only problem is... Is that Freud was either bang-on OR completely off in the ozone, and it's hard to seperate the gold from the dross.

[Rand]

I have an armor question. I had +2fullplate and so i thought that it would give me +10 to AC instead of the regular +8. Am I right or am I wrong.

[Hzurr]

Yep. An enhancement on armor adds to your total armor bonus, just like an enhancement on a weapon adds to your attack/damage bonus.

[Fhaolan]

I have an armor question. I had +2fullplate and so i thought that it would give me +10 to AC instead of the regular +8. Am I right or am I wrong.


+2 Full Plate would give a +10 armor bonus. Unless the enchantment on the armor is not, in fact, protective in nature. Which would be odd, but not completely unheard off.

It's possible that you may not get the full benefit of wearing +2 Full Plate, though, depending on what other AC affecting equipment/magic active on you.

However, you have me curious now. Has your DM ruled differently? Are there any other circumstances around this ruling, such as other AC-adjusting equipment/magic, etc.

[Rand]

Yes, thank you for clearing that up because Thanatos(my brother and DM) said that the bonus was only for the armor check penalty to go down, but i couldnt find anywhere in the books to support that thoery. Plus he didnt DM this armor i got it when i turned into an Shadowbane Inquisiter. So once again thank you and I now have an AC of 30.


And no Fhaolan he didnt rule anything diferently because we are both pretty new to the game so he just followed the books, of course this is only to the the best of my knowledge i cant be sure about his DMing technigues unless i ask him. And then he will probably be mad at me for proving him wrong anyway.

[Hzurr]

Yes, thank you for clearing that up because Thanatos(my brother and DM) said that the bonus was only for the armor check penalty to go down, but i couldnt find anywhere in the books to support that thoery.

Ahh, that's because that's very wrong. It doesn't (unfortunately) lower the armor check penalty. The only way to lower the penalty is to make the armor with a special metal (like mithril).

[Rand]

I thought as much Hzurr and thank you once again for the info. Because i thought it didnt make sense becuase to change the check penalty you would have to either thin the metal(which would in turn LOWER the AC ) or as you said make it out of an epually strong but lighter metal as not to lower the AC.

[Sophistemon]

Okay, okay. I admit that I was wrong. I'll go ahead and make the necessary adjustments. Thanks for getting that cleared up, by the way.

[Furanku_S]

Next question:

How long, exactly, would a sword (or any other metal-based weapon, for that matter) last? I'd imagine that getting banged up, knicked by shields (or anything), and occasionally resharpened would wear one down pretty quickly.

[Umael]

Next question:

How long, exactly, would a sword (or any other metal-based weapon, for that matter) last? I'd imagine that getting banged up, knicked by shields (or anything), and occasionally resharpened would wear one down pretty quickly.

Well, the cheap answer is "depends."

Is the sword in good condition, is it masterwork, or is shody?
Are you just going off damage in a battle or wear because of the environment?
If the sword is being used, does the people using it know how to strike with it so as not to excessively damage it, and how to generally take care of it?

Taking the most logically example, you want an average sword, good condition, being used properly but not too extravagrantly in care, and how long it lasts.

From what I recall (recall, mind you), most swords lasted two battles before you needed a new sword. I am not talking about the conflicts that the PCs might have, but actual "my-army-over-here, your-army-over-there" battles.

Is my recollection accurate? Don't honestly know. It sounds right. I mean, in a battle, you aren't play-fighting, but swinging (or stabbing) with deadly intent. I know that most boffer weapons last for a few years if well-made, one battle if poorly made. Boffer weapons are not as sturdy as real weapons those, being made out of plastic, duct tape, and foam. On the other hand, most people using boffer weapons don't try to swim full-force because they don't want to actually hurt anyone.

I do know that whenever kingdoms prepared for war they had to get new swords, new armor, and just generally pay for all kinds of equipment. Grandfather's sword (OOTS withstanding) was probably broken by now (oh, what, that does include OOTS anyway... sorry, Roy) and that meant you needed a new one.

[Xudo]

how much damage would a blackjack do? i could never find the stats for that

[MrNexx]

I'd just call a blackjack a sap.

[laughingfuzzball]

Next question:

How long, exactly, would a sword (or any other metal-based weapon, for that matter) last? I'd imagine that getting banged up, knicked by shields (or anything), and occasionally resharpened would wear one down pretty quickly.

I don't know about the two-battle idea, but Umeal sounds about right. Higher quality swords will last longer than munitions quality, which will last longer than inferior ones. Proper care and maintenece can extend a weapons life expectency. Only using a sword as it was meant to be used can greatly hold off damage as well, but one is generally more concerned with one's life than the life of one's weapon. It wasn't completely unheard of in Europe for a well made and cared for sword to last so long that it's repeated sharpenings had removed enough material that it would cross into a different typology. Sword steel was valuable enough in Japan in some time periods that a broken sword would sometimes be reforged into a smaller weapon. In Europe, iirc, a broken wepon was generally melted down into stock unless it was particularly beloved. One cannot simply heat the former pieces and forge them back together (unless you allow for some kind of magical intervention).

Generally similar guidelines will apply for most steel blades. Steel hafts, however, will be much more durable since a rounded or squared shape is more durable than most blade designs, and a small nick that may be fatal to a blade may only be slightly unnatractive in a haft. This is barring metalurgical concerns, which can go either way depending on cicumstances, and can get just a bit complicated in some respects.

[Fhaolan]

Next question:

How long, exactly, would a sword (or any other metal-based weapon, for that matter) last? I'd imagine that getting banged up, knicked by shields (or anything), and occasionally resharpened would wear one down pretty quickly.

In real life, swords don't last very long. Resharpening is a bit of a boondoggle, as edge nicks set up microfractures in the metal of the blade. The blade will weaken and snap off before you manage to wear the blade down appreciatively from resharpening. There's a big push in live steel re-enactment groups to switch from what is called the 'Hollywood' style of edge-to-edge blocking to flat-to-edge blocking. Some say it's more historical to flat block, some say edge block, but nearly everyone agrees flat blocking means the blades last longer and since a good sword (even a stage-combat one) is expensive...

Anyway, drifting off of topic...

Chopping and slashing swords get banged up and damaged beyond use fairly quickly. Stabbing swords, spears, axes, maces, etc. last a lot longer. Given the type of use a 'typical' D&D fighter would put a sword through, I'd say a typical steel sword would last a year or so before needing to be replaced. Masterwork would last much longer, and special materials like Mithril and Adamanite could make it last effectively forever.

Oh, and I've talked to a couple of modern swordmakers about 'reforging' swords, and they're all a bit puzzled over the concept. Cheap swords could be reforged, because it would be as simple as pounding the metal of the sword back into a lump and then drawing out the metal as a new blade. Expensive swords, especially in Northern Europe and Asia, are usually pattern-welded blades. If you try to reforge a pattern-welded blade you'll end up with a homoginized blade, which is in effect 'cheaper' than the original. And then there would be the re-tempering, etc. Basically my survey of 'people-in-the-know' of sword manufacture said that a broken blade is as much scrap metal and will be treated as such by a swordmaker. It is very likely, apparantly, that any 'reforged' blade is in fact a completely new blade made in the shape of the old one, possibly including some metal salvaged from the old one.

[Sundog]

That's because modern swordmakers don't make swords for use. So, they make dress or show swords, and make them all pretty with pattern construction, or make Damascus Steel blades for the "discerning connoisseur."

The real swords used in medieval battles were a lump of steel with an edge, in a shape. They lasted one or two battles, then got reforged. The only people who had fancy-schmancy pattern-construction blades were wealthy nobles, and KINGS bought Damascus Steel blades. The basic sword could be reforged about five times, then it would lose it's temper completely and have to be either re-smelted or simply scrapped.

As for reforging a pattern blade - there are supposedly techniques by which the orginal pattern could be repaired with new material. Frankly, I figure this is a myth created by medieval master smiths to make them seem better than they really were, and the "reforged" blades were no better than a mendicant knight's sword - maybe worse, since there would be built in weaknesses in the joins between old and new metal.

[Fhaolan]

That's because modern swordmakers don't make swords for use. So, they make dress or show swords, and make them all pretty with pattern construction, or make Damascus Steel blades for the "discerning connoisseur."


I agree with that, and can back it up with personal experience. (Well, not the reforging bit as I've never found anyone willing to try to reforge a blade. :) )

I know a couple of swordmakers (to talk to, not as close friends), and only one of them makes forged blades and even then only for his knives. The others are all using the modern knife-making method of grinding the blade out of a solid blank of steel. They say it's not how you shape the blade, it's the quality of the steel, and how you heat-treat and temper it. Which I thought was odd when I found out that the grind/shape people were sending their blades off to another company to be heat-treated for them. (I found this out because I ordered a custom sword from one of these people and he was late getting the sword to me because "The blade came back from the heat-treaters warped." Reasonably good sword when it arrived, though.)

Not being a sword-maker myself, all I have to go by is what people tell me. :)

[Leperflesh]

That's because modern swordmakers don't make swords for use. So, they make dress or show swords, and make them all pretty with pattern construction, or make Damascus Steel blades for the "discerning connoisseur."
This is certainly true. What's more, they make swords out of stainless steel, which was invented in the 19th century, and out of various other modern alloys too.

The real swords used in medieval battles were a lump of steel with an edge, in a shape. They lasted one or two battles, then got reforged.
This is sort of also true. The thing to know is that steel is iron plus carbon, and that there is a range going from tough-but-no-good-edge to great-edge-but-way-too-brittle, with a perfect 'sweet spot' in the center where you have just the right amount of carbon content in your iron to get really good steel. Also that other impurities (especially sulphur introduced by your coal fire) weakened the steel too. Steel is expensive, so cheap swords often were made from lower-carbon steel... making them tough and long-lasting, but not very sharp. To get them sharper they are over-tempered, making them too brittle and prone to breakage. Cheap swords therefore ran a gamut from tough but blunt to brittle but sharp.


The only people who had fancy-schmancy pattern-construction blades were wealthy nobles, and KINGS bought Damascus Steel blades. mostly true, sort of. Pattern-welded steel is indeed much more labor intensive to produce, especially to make it 'pretty', but at its most basic level, a sword might be made from a low-carbon core, and then either a thin layer of high-carbon steel is welded onto it, or the low-carbon core is 'carburized' (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carburization ). You could make a bunch of 'trash' swords out of low-carbon steel or even just wrought iron, and then carburize all of them at once with a process that only takes a few hours. Then do whatever final annealing and tempuring is necessary, and you have a decent sword with a tough core and sharp outer surface, the best of both worlds (but not quite as good as a true pattern-welded blade of course).


The basic sword could be reforged about five times, then it would lose it's temper completely and have to be either re-smelted or simply scrapped. This is not the right way to say this. A carbon-steel blade loses its temper as soon as it is heated to about 500 to 600 degrees, long before it gets even deep cherry-red hot. The act of 're-forging' a blade would always destroy its temper. In fact the very first step you'd take if you wanted to start working a piece of steel that had been tempered, would be to anneal it, deliberately destroying all temper to make the metal as soft and pliable as possible for working. After you re-shaped and did your grinding, you'd temper the blade and then put on its final edge.

However, probably what you are referring to is de-carburization, because the more heats the steel experiences in the forge, you lose a bit of the carbon. The opposite can also happen, depending on what you're using for fuel and the kind of forging you are doing, you can wind up over-carburizing the metal and you wind up with "cast iron", basically very brittle stuff that is useless for a weapon. So you are ultimately correct in saying that re-forging the blade over and over would have a solid limit before the metal would no longer be useable. More importantly, though, is just the fact that you lose some percentage of the metal every time you heat it, to scale (oxidization). You'd have to keep adding more material.. and it is far easier to make a blade from a single piece of stock, than to keep welding old stock together over and over again (although you might do this if you want to make a pattern-weld and the old sword's steel is a good match with the stock you've got for doing this kind of thing). Again, though, you're really not 're-forging' or repairing the original blade... it might as well have been a plowblade or a steel strap off of a wagon wheel.


As for reforging a pattern blade - there are supposedly techniques by which the orginal pattern could be repaired with new material. Frankly, I figure this is a myth created by medieval master smiths to make them seem better than they really were, and the "reforged" blades were no better than a mendicant knight's sword - maybe worse, since there would be built in weaknesses in the joins between old and new metal.

I agree, re-forging a pattern blade is utter nonsense. Pattern-welding is folding and re-folding and re-folding two (or rarely, more than two) different alloys, to create a many-layered sandwich granting the benefits of both metals. Typically this means high-carbon for sharpness and hardness, and low-carbon for toughness and flexibility. Steel + Nickel is popular in modern blades for high-contrast, but ancient blades were generally just a low-carbon and high-carbon steel. The 'grain' has to run parallel to the blade for it to be useful. You could never match up broken pieces and weld them together without creating an obvious and ugly mismatched spot, and it would clearly introduce a weakness to the blade. Much more likely would be to just re-use the metal, meaning smelting or working it together into a homogonized alloy having no pattern-welded or 'damascus' appearance, and possessing a carbon content of about the average of the two original alloys. This again is not a repair, just a re-use of valuable material as scrap.

Having said all that, I'm afraid the answer to the question "how long does a sword last" is indeed "it depends". Against unarmored civilians, where you're just bringing the blade against flesh, it might last a really long time. If your soldiers are in the habit of sticking their swords into things which are armored, smacking them against other swords, or (duh) jamming them into the dirt (where all kinds of rocks and stuff will ruin the blade immediately), they may not last for any time at all. If the sword is really big and thick, minor nicks can be ground out. If it's a thinner, lighter blade, it will be less prone to nicking but more likely to snap... less likely to be brought with force against someone's armor, but more likely to be used in fencing-type battles... and what is the quality of the steel, anyway? Hard, brittle steel will be harder to nick, but more likely to snap, whereas soft, flexible steel (such as used for an axe blade) will nick very easily but the nicks will be less of a problem for the blade (a couple of nicks in your axe are not going to be a big issue).

If you are going for realism in your games, I suggest you don't single out swords... all equipment and weapons and armor are prone to wear and tear. Require your PCs (and NPCs!) to spend money or use skills/crafts to repair armor and weapons after every two or three encounters, or risk breakage/failure.

But I don't reccomend this. It hurts the PCs (who have to maintain equipment all the time) but not NPCs (who the PCs kill before their armor and weapons have time to get nicked). It adds to the bookkeeping and penalizes those who rely on equipment more (warriors, rogues, clerics) and not those who don't (sorcerers, wizards, etc.).

If you like, a nice compromize might be to tell the party that someone needs to have a whetstone, someone needs craft skills to cover basic repair of weapons and armor, and they have to spend (as a group) x gold between each adventure, for general maintenance. If they don't or can't do these things, you'll roll d% during each encounter (don't tell them the exact odds, and they can't argue with you about how unfair they are) and if the result is bad, some item of equipment or weapon will fail/break/become less good. Make sure basic weapons/armor/eqipment is much more likely to fail/break/become less good than masterwork items, and magic items probably don't need nearly as much maintenance to stay 'good'. Do all the bookkeeping yourself. (you can skip it when you're too busy and the PCs will never know it; you can build it into encounters where it makes the most sense; and you don't have to argue about this house-rule with people who want to insist that splint mail needs less maintenance than a chain shirt, or that they sharpened the longsword using a handy rock last night, but never mentioned it because it was just an assumed mundane chore, etc.

-Lep

[Leperflesh]

Here: http://www.angelswords.com/trueswords3.html is a very good introductory reference to steel treatments.

The construction which this page calls 'San Mai' is one of the easiest types of forge-welding to improve the blade, and would have been much more common than most of the others.

'Differential Carburization' accurately describes what I was talking about in reference to repeatedly re-forging: most smiths were not mastersmiths so they got one or the other direction (too much or too little carbon), accumulatively through multiple re-forgings.

[laughingfuzzball]

One must keep in mind that by the High Middle Ages (which the technology of most D&D campaigns seems to most resemble), smelting had to progress to the point that pattern welding was no longer necesary. It was still used, but mostly for it's beauty, rather than it's physical properties, and even then only by the wealthy.

Even if we assume the pcs aren't rich enough to afford a fancy forge-welded blade, it doesn't make reforging the blade any less impossible, unless you plan on completely melting it down and starting from scratch (including normalizing and bilitting the steel). The physical stresses placed on a sword are incredible. The seem that just hammering the pieces together would create a weeak point that would simply be unacceptable. Unless you want the sword to re-break the next time it hits something hard, it would be better to just scrap the blade, and I have similar one forged and try to fit the old furniture to it.

As far as in-game maintenence goes, I simply assume that basic maintence gear (rags, whetstone. oils if appropriate), just like it is commonly assumed to include a scabbard and belt.

The edge vs. flat controversy isn't a new thing. Some early manuals advocate each of them, though generally don't seem to go int the pros and cons. From what I can gather, it's easier to strike following a guard on the edge, but a guard on the flat is less likely to damage the sword, since the edge is not only the thinnest part of the blade, but often also the most brittle.

[snow_cheetah]

hi hi

When I am DMing, I usually cop out by saying things like, "Magic is used to mend the blade." or "Metal smiths have some really advanced techniques." Players usually dispise upkeep like that on their equipment, but when a weapon needs to be completely remade, I usually let them keep the handle and use it on the new weapon that was made from the materals of the old one. That is usually enough to make them feel as though they have not lost a beloved item.

I usually assume upkeep, but I'll let my players know from time to time, when they have been acting non stop, that if they don't take a break that their going to suffer from fatigue, and their equipment too. :P

If we were to get really technical, it would be important to point out that all those ancient blades would be much weaker than when they were first made. Alloys tend to change over time on a molecular level, and after a long enough time they are quite weakened. Much different from the notion that ancient blades are stronger.

[Umael]

From a DM standpoint, there is nothing wrong with nicking the PCs every now and then for upkeep, especially if the PCs rolled a lot of "1"s (time to get a new sword) or if the monsters rolled a lot of criticals (time to get new armor).

To reduce the bookkeeping, as DM, you could increase the amount of gold the PCs get, or maybe have them find something just what they needed. Your fighter uses a standard longsword? Great, so do those hobgoblins you just killed. Got a +1 shortspear? Don't worry about it, the magic protects it from normal wear and tear.

[Gorbash Kazdar]

Hey, Umael - how did the rest Unicorn/Crab balltes go, and did you see my post (http://www.giantitp.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=gaming;action=display;num=1119641664 ;start=240#246) in regards to the first one? Just curious how it turned out. :)

[Umael]

Hey, Umael - how did the rest Unicorn/Crab balltes go, and did you see my post (http://www.giantitp.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=gaming;action=display;num=1119641664 ;start=240#246) in regards to the first one? Just curious how it turned out. :)

That one battle took the entire game session (and it was mostly role-play, as my group is heavy into that).

I did see that post and I am taking it into account. Without the seige engines, the Unicorn feel more comfortable about leaving a smaller force to watch them (only 2,000 or so) while the remaining force (2,000-2,500 after wounded are patched up and sent home) go looking for the Ratling. The smaller force will also do some minor seige, just to keep the Crab in their shell.

As you pointed out, the Unicorn don't need to take the Crab fortification, just keep the Crab from interfering while they go Ratling hunting.

This is a contingency of Kuni bushi on the way to reinforce the fortification, and by the time they show up to relieve the PCs of command, I've got a three-prong setup for the next step of the game. (By the by, the fortification has enough food to last until the Kuni arrive and the fortification is actually just north of Crab territory proper, so there aren't that many villages that the Unicorn will destroy.)

1) They will be given a strong hint as to where the Ratling is heading, as well as what troubles lay ahead for it.
2) The Unicorn will be willing to negiotate, since they are far from Unicorn territory, heavily outnumbered by a fresh contingency of Crab troops, and unlikely to... well, I don't think my players read this, but I'll let that part sit for now.
3) Hiruma Kage, their immediate lord, wants them back in Kyuden Hida. Now.

Their choices should boil down to: follow the Ratling (which has a Black Scroll and is heading into danger), negiotate with the Unicorn, or return to their lord.

I am thinking I can railroad them into going after the Ratling, despite the dishonor of disobeying their lord. Of course, if they might not, so I have to be prepared for either option. And if they do go after the Ratling, they had better come back with the Black Scroll, or at least one PC has a strong chance to be forced to commit seppuku.

I am not sure about the negiotation though. The Unicorn have attacked for a number of reasons (one of their shugenja was murdered by a Crab, tensions between the Crab and the Unicorn over how the Unicorn treat the Ratlings, and now this errant Ratling with a Black Scroll), but the two Clans have been mostly allies. As far as the Unicorns see it, the battle was a success - they showed the Crab they can and will use force to kill Ratlings, regardless of whether they are allies of the Crab or not, they committed a successful assault on a Crab fortification that accomplished the objectives (destroying the seige engines), and they repaid the Crab for the death of one of their own. The Crab, being pragmatic, don't care what the Unicorn think as long as they stop attacking their allies and get out of Crab territory. The Crab can try to negiotate for these issues, but in the face of the Kuni contingency, the Unicorn might just say, "We'll leave, but the Ratling hides are still ours to collect."

[Sir_Banjo]

hi hi

Since there are people here with experience in weapon fighting, as opposed to myself who only has experience with wooden dowels and metal tubes, (no money, so sue me :P ) I was wondering if you could help me out with a question I have.

I'm trying to come up with a list of weapon categories, and while I don't expect anyone to come up with the lists for me, I was wondering if I could get some input on weapon similarity.

Could an expert with a katana weild a bastard sword with equal proficiency? Could a longswordsman wield a kali stick with similar proficiency? How much different is a halberd from a glave when used in combat? If you knew how to weild a heavy axe, would a similarly weighted hammer be similar or quite different?

Check out the weapon group feats in Unearthed Arcana. It's quite good and my group has been using it for a while now.

[alec]

Question:
Were ninjas really as brilliant as everyone thinks they were? I argue with my freinds that pirates would beat them any day, but I need more information about ninjas, which I know almost nothing about, to finnaly settle the argument.

[Shiyuan]

Question:
Were ninjas really as brilliant as everyone thinks they were? I argue with my freinds that pirates would beat them any day, but I need more information about ninjas, which I know almost nothing about, to finnaly settle the argument.

You're not going to like my answer, because it's going to just ruin the whole fun of having the argument in the first place.

First Point: Ninja vs. Pirates? Wouldn't very likely happen, and if it does, those pirates had better be clever, have all their debts covered, and made very few enemies, (considering these are pirates we're talking about, fat chance...) or else they will end up dead or find themselves in compromising positions, but likely not because of combat with ninjas or direct confrontation.

Second Point: Ninjas were NOT warriors... they were not even really assassins per se. They were first and foremost spies, intriguists and negotiators (unconventional negotiators, but negotiators nonetheless).

Third Point: There were only two historically identified ninja ryu (or schools), the Iga and the Koga. The Iga were betrayed by Oda Nobunaga after he no longer had use for their skills and worried about their ability to compromise him. Iga prefecture was attacked and razed by Nobunaga's forces, and there have been many myths about the fate of the Iga after this treachery. I personally choose to believe some survived, but their descendants have given up the lifestyle long ago. Most modern claimants to ninja tradition are either legitimate descendants of the Koga ninja, or tend to be posers to the legacy of the Iga.

Fourth Point: Ninja did not wear black suits to be stealthy or remain unseen. The black suit made infamous during the 80s by numerous bad American movies and video games, was the gear of the genin, the lowest class of ninja in a ninja clan. The genin were the foot soldiers per se, but never were intended to fight toe to toe or even aggressively ambush non-ninja (bushi) with the intent to win. No, the genin often played an integral role in an overall ninja mission. If there was a need for an infiltration, theft or assassination (once again, in reality very rare), the genin (often around two to four of them) were dispatched ahead of the actual mission operative to pretend to be stealthy and to purposely distract the guards of a compound. They would make their way about semi-covertly and reveal themselves a opportune moments (sometimes dramatically) to the bushi they intend to bait, and then bolt, leading the alarmed warriors on a wild goose chase into the night. Very rarely did ninja actually kill any of the warriors pursuing them, they were not more skilled in martial arts than the bushi they were baiting. However, the genin were much more skilled than their pursuers in the arts of running (yes, there is a technique to running in ninjiutsu), evasion and distraction; making use of caltrops, smoke bombs and shuriken (oh yes, let me also make it clear that shuriken were actually used more often by samurai themselves, historically, it's called shuriken-jiutsu) to impede, maim or infuriate their pursuers to even more folly. Yet by the end of the evening's tromp, the bushi would more often than not find themselves without a ninja at hand and many many bruises, cuts and light puncture wounds, but still very much alive. This may have contributed to the legend of the black-clad ninja assailant, as some historical records of actual ninja practices were not revealed until later.

Fifth Point: Actual ninja operations were agreed to and ordered by the clan's jounin, the head members of the ninja clans, and practically the masters. The missions themselves were carried out by the mid-level chunin, who were often masters of disguise, mimicry, ventriloquism and had silver tongues. These were the true ninja of history, weaving deft webs of lies and betrayal between their enemies. A chunin also could be of either gender, with female operatives being more effective and preferred, due to the natural benefits bestowed upon a female in terms of discretion given the chauvinism of Japanese society. A chunin's preferred jobs were information gathering and conflict resolution. The former being a relatively non-violent affair, and the latter usually involving a beautiful blend of bribery, blackmail, diplomacy and intimidation. Rarely would violence result from such dealings unless specifically wished by the chunin. A favorite historical tale I learned from my grandfather was about two towns:

Town A had belonged to a prosperous merchant alliance with the local ruffians and the gambling houses.

Town B belonged to two feuding families who've only just recently set aside their differences due to a sudden brash love affair between their respective scions. Think Romeo and Juliet in Japan.

Town A wished nothing more than to have their nearby trading rival, Town B stay divided and weak. So Town A contracted the ninja clan of their region through their local temple (which, apparently is a historical truth, as ninja seemed to favor using holy sites as meeting places for taking jobs) and asked for their intervention between the families of Town B, so as to prevent their union. The ninja demanded a high price and when appeased, they cryptically demand of the supplicants that the methods of the ninja involved not be questioned or interfered with, or else the ninja will exact a greater price for their services. Once the supplicants wearily agree, the ninja representative informs the representatives of Town A that the job will be done.

As the two families in Town B bicker over what to do with the love affair, a lone traveling priest enters the town and politely inquires the nature of the problem. Once informed about the affair and the outrage, the priest quietly nods and then proceeds to mediate between the families. He soon arranges for a deal to be made. The boy will court the girl's family as tradition demanded and the courtship shall take the course of a year, during which the priest will stay at the town to oversee and mediate the courtship. The courtship between the two scions under this priest makes extraordinary leaps and bounds and the two families seemingly grow more and more unified. Town A is horrified, and return to the temple searching for the ninja representative, demanding recompense for this failure in services paid for. The ninja representative mysteriously ignores the merchants' questions and coldly reminds the angry merchants of their original deal and leaves without another word. The merchants are left trembling with rage and fear, unsure as what to do next. They return home to hide and sulk.

A year passes, and the courtship has bloomed into an impending marriage. The priest happily agrees to perform the Shinto marriage ceremony in the local jinja (shrine). Upon hearing this news, the representatives of Town A are in a furor, and dispatch a gang of toughs and mercenaries to murder either of the two lovers under the cover of the night to throw the families back into chaos.

On the night before the marriage ceremony is to be performed, the band makes its move, but is thwarted by the very priest set to lead the marriage ceremony, who had happened to hear the footsteps of the would-be murderers from his hut. Stumbling from his shelter, the priest spots the men and lets out a great yelp of fear and flees through the town, being chased by the paid killers who hope to silence him before he wakes the townspeople. The priest leads them in a hot chase around the town, as the men always seem to be on the cusp of catching the scrawny holy man but always seem to run into some inane obstacle when they're close enough to nab him. Soon, caught up in the chase, they realize too late that the families have awoken and their ire has taken the form of their guards, who are armed and currently surrounding them. Trapped, and not willing to commit suicide as ordered to do by their benefactors, the hired killers surrender and are questioned. The plot of Town A is revealed, and the families of Town B rise together and instead of the marriage ceremony on the next morning, set out in wrath to punish the conspirators of Town A. After considerable blood-letting and burning, the tempers of Town B are satisfied, and they leave the ravaged remains of Town A behind them.

Overjoyed at this thwarted plot, and even more in love with their lucky charm of a priest, the families resolve to settle all difference once and for all with this marriage. The marriage ceremony is set to be carried out immediately the next day after much celebration.

On the morning of the marriage, the families rise to find a commotion in the compound of the family whose daughter is to be married. The daughter has gone missing, as has the priest. Confusion and outcries ring through the town, and the son of the other family, the groom, heads out with a search party to find his lost love. Their search takes them through the nearby woods and one-by-one the men of the party give up hope and head back until only the groom stubbornly continues onward, carefully and ardently searching every copse and hidey-hole, unwilling to give up on his love. Suspicisions are already rising about the girl's fidelity, and the two families' apparent unity is slowly dissapating as the hours drag on. Suddenly, a lone traveler enters the town, and happening upon the frantic commotion of Town B, helpfully responds that he spotted a young woman that met their description being led into the woods by a priest.

Spurred by this information, and the realization that the groom had been heading in that direction all the long, the families rush off to catch up.

Back with the groom, he makes his way slowly through the woods, ever-searching until he comes across a clearing near a river. There he spies the priest and a young woman dressed in a wedding kimono, at the water's edge, embraced and kissing. With a blood-curdling roar of rage, the betrayed-feeling groom flings himself at the couple, intent on slaying the treacherous priest. The priest turns to the young man and humors him with a sly smile, grabbing the lady by the hand and fleeing into the river and following it into the woods again. The groom pursues, red hot with anger and loses sight of his quarry for a minute as he navigates the rocky river bed and past trees and undergrowth.

He turns another bend and comes across the young lady in the wedding kimono again, alone. It is indeed his wife-to-be. Crying tears of shame and humiliation, he confronts her with her betrayal, to which she appears genuinely shocked and confused about. She tries to tell her lover that she had only come out here at the request of the kindly priest who told her he had something special to retrieve for their wedding. She then continues with a confused expression to tell the disbelieving young man in front of her that at some point, she had lost sight of the priest and had been lost here for quite some time. Her denial only infuriates him more, and he draws his sword, menacingly advancing on his former love, demanding that she tell him the truth, assuring her if she told him the truth, he'd forgive her. When she continues to deny her infidelity, he lets out a strangled cry and runs her through with his sword. As she slowly slides off his blade, the fastest among the families' scouts come upon the slaying, and immediately, the scouts from the girl's family let out a hoarse yell of alarm and fury, rushing to the side of their fallen scion. When they angrily demand to know why had their beloved lady's own groom had slain her, the groom could only sputter out baffling accusations of betrayal and laments for his dead lover. The girl's family scouts draw their swords and proceed to ask for an explanation for the murder and are held at bay by the groom's family scouts until the remaining family members arrive.

Once upon the scene, the heads of the family both are distraught by the sight that greets them. They both approach the young man and shake some sense into the boy and demand to know what happened. When the young man responds with his tale, the two families who were within hearing distance broke immediately into accusations and defenses. The heads even cannot agree and begin to bicker and threaten one another. The girl's family head furiously reminds the other head that his daughter, if she had been guilty of such a crime, should've been punished by her own family for dishonoring them so; while the boy's family head fires back that it was within his son's right to execute his disloyal fiancee.

Suddenly, the priest comes out of a nearby copse of trees to be greeted by a chorus of angry questions and threats. To which the priest responds by throwing up his hands in confusion, trying to explain himself, when suddenly a young woman steps from the copse the priest had been hiding in, and stuns the crowd with the fact that she was also wearing the same kimono as the bride-to-be. She frantically appeals to the mob, asking them to forgive the priest's absence from the marriage ceremony and his weakness in falling to her seduction.

Now confronted with a case of misplaced suspicion and a lusty priest instead of a seducer of young brides, the families reel with the implication of what has happened. The young man, realizing what he has done, bursts into a scream of despair and falls to the body of the woman he has murdered, and asks her spirit to forgive him. Upon this revelation, the armed scouts who had previously stayed their swords out of confusion, struck at the prostrate young man, slaying him in a fit of rage at their lady's murder. This single act sets the powder keg of emotion between the two families off, and a general melee ensues. The ultimate symbol of hope has transformed into the darkest symbol of treachery. The priest and his amour flee the bloodbath and renewed clan war.

Gasping for breath and exhausted as they enter the safety of the temple they had come across, the couple are given a small shock when the encouner a traveling stranger who also has found refuge there. He greets them warmly and wearily regales them with the tale of the crazy town inhabited by two bickering families he had just traveled from. At this familiar tale, the couple merely nod numbly and sigh. After the tale is finished, the priest releases his woman's hand and throws himself down in supplication before the altar and then meditates, chanting for succor and a return from the evils of the world, only to receive a coolly-voiced reply, "Well done." To which, the traveling stranger, young woman and priest smile and nod in response and leave the temple, heading in seperate directions...

The families, as a result of the horrible events of that day, would never again consider peace between their houses and warred with one another until the township itself faded into history. Unfortunately, the people of Town A, and particularly, the plotters there, would likewise never benefit from this permanent division, as they paid the severe price of questioning the ninja's methods.

Now finally in response to your quesiton, alec, just how air-tight are the pirates' social ties and allegiances? Just how many enemies have they garnered. Because, I assure you, any weakness, any emotional ties, and any debt, monetary or otherwise, they have... will be be used against them. No amount of "Arr!"-ing and swashbuckling will save them from themselves.

[Nasrudith]

Okay here's a question. How practical would a whip dagger be? Its from the arms and equipment guide.

[laughingfuzzball]

it'sjust a whip with a steel blade on the end, right?

It seems like it might work, but with all of that weight at the end, it would no longer behave like a whip. The closest analog I can come up with is a kusarigama, but that's not really quite the same idea.

[Umael]

*really cool Shiyuan story*



Have I mentioned recently how much you rock?

[Shiyuan]

Have I mentioned recently how much you rock?

;D As much as I'd like to take credit for that, it's all Grandpa. If you thought it rocked, imagine being 10 years old and sitting at the feet of a wizened old man with a roguish glint to his eye and a ghost of a smile always lurking at his lips, while he animatedly tells you this story...

[Aribin]

Okay here's a question. How practical would a whip dagger be?
That would be unpratical. Think about it. It would be to heavy at the end. And would not be afective. The whip does fine on it's own. So does the dagger. That is my opinuon.

[Nasrudith]

I always did think the whip dagger was a sillly concept. A dragonhide whip however could be justifed in doing non subudal damage.

[sktarq]

I've always thought that whip-daggers/dagger-whips would be more like fighting with soap-on-a-rope than a traditional whip.

[laughingfuzzball]

I've always thought that whip-daggers/dagger-whips would be more like fighting with soap-on-a-rope than a traditional whip.

Now try point-cutting with that. Edge-cutting and thrusting are flat out. It would be difficult to ues at best.

[sktarq]

bingo!--difficult to the point of sillyness

[Laevus]

On the Parthians and Scipio: You should not and cannot make the Parthians a comparable analogy for the Mongols against the Romans.

*snip*

In fact, Romans and Mongols share a startling commonality in their utter pragmatism in war. If you lost, figure out why, and then fix it.

In fact, I would give my left nut to see the two square off in a campaign. Both were astoundingly astute observers of their opponents, constantly learning from their encounters. A single battle just wouldn't do, because both of these men thrived in the campaign environment, where they had room and time to absorb and process their enemies' moves. Yes, add that fantasy to my "So I can die a happy man" list...

On the first point.. Yes. I admit it. Too few people know a damned thing about the Mongols, and thus tend to fall into the error of believeing that put any collection of barbarians on horseback, and they'll thrash any military offering 'civilization' has to make.

Again, just a pet peeve of mine, and was not meant to be taken that the Mongols were n00bs. ^_-

And I add my name to the list of those who would experience strategy-gasms at the notion of watching the impossable campaign you desribed.

On a much less epic note, I'd simply love to see what Scipio could have done with the more refined military machine the Romans has by the early imperial period.

[Shiyuan]

EDIT: Got schooled by SKTARQ :P I'm on a roll!

EDIT: Got schooled by Mephibosheth ;D

EDIT: Seperating Macedonians from Greeks out of hindsight.




On the first point.. Yes. I admit it. Too few people know a damned thing about the Mongols, and thus tend to fall into the error of believeing that put any collection of barbarians on horseback, and they'll thrash any military offering 'civilization' has to make.

Again, just a pet peeve of mine, and was not meant to be taken that the Mongols were n00bs. ^_-

And I add my name to the list of those who would experience strategy-gasms at the notion of watching the impossable campaign you desribed.

On a much less epic note, I'd simply love to see what Scipio could have done with the more refined military machine the Romans has by the early imperial period.

Don't worry, I meant no particular indignation. : ) In fact, I whole-heartedly agree with you on one aspect, the Mongols are NOT the best military in history. Frankly I doubt there is any one specific "BEST ARMY EVER" as some would wish their pet army to be. Every strategy and tactic had its place and purpose.

I mainly get a kick out of the Mongols for their stunning progress in five actually non-Mongol specific criteria:

1) Commandability: Were the troops composed of professional quality men who obeyed their military superior's orders and could execute those orders precisely and faithfully?

2) Good Officer-Corp: Was their leadership of excellent quality and their performance of a professional consistency?

3) Versatility of Strategy and Tactics: Self-explanatory

4) Stability of Command: Was the leadership solidly entrenched? Did these people constantly rebell or betray their rulers/leaders out of political or religious strife?

5) Longevity of their Work: How long did their conquered empires last? Centralized or not, did their military efforts leave a legacy?




Ancient to Late Ancient Western Eurasian Major Powers (Including Egypt and Carthage)



Greeks:

1) Yes

2) Yes

3) No

4) Yes

5) Yes

Macedonians: (Remembering their historical development, the Macedonians more resemble the Mongols and the Romans than the other Greeks, being mainly pastoral or tribal people who rose to the occassion, but with the addition of Alexander's stellar rise to emperor of a vast empire, he shares a common theme with Temujin)

1) Yes

2) Yes

3) Yes (Philip and Alexander showed exemplary command of innovating military strategy, which Alexander's generals, the Diadochi, also inherited after his death)

4) Yes (After the fracturing the Macedonian Empire into the Antigonid Empire, the Ptolemaic Kingdom, and the Seleucid Empire, stability of rule and command was re-instilled into the seperate Macedonian successor states)

5) Yes

Egyptians: (Middle Dynasties)

1) Yes

2) Yes

3) No

4) Yes

5) Yes

Egyptians: (Later Dynasties)

1) Maybe

2) No

3) No

4) No

5) No

Assyrians:

1) Yes

2) Yes

3) No

4) Yes

5) Yes (they innovated alot of siege warfare tactics)

Scythians:

1) Maybe

2) Maybe

3) No

4) No

5) No

Persians: (First Persian Empire)

1) Yes

2) Yes

3) No (Never truly adapted to combatting the Greeks)

4) Yes

5) Yes

Parthians:

1) Yes

2) Yes

3) No (Never truly adapted to combatting the Romans)

4) Yes

5) Yes

Persians: (Sassanid Persian Empire)

1) Yes

2) Yes

3) Yes

4) Yes

5) No

Romans: (Even the supposed "barbaric" armies of the latter period empire that everyone here seems to sneer at were in truth damn good soldiers, just not very loyal to the Roman government)

1) Yes

2) Yes

3) Yes

4) Yes

5) Yes

Carthagnians: (and their allied troops)

1) Yes

2) Yes

3) No (hence why Scipio managed to beat them at Zama)

4) Yes

5) No (while bringing elephants over the Alps is cool, it is not a sweeping military innovation)

Huns:

1) No (Only under Attila were the Huns tractable as a unified military force)

2) Yes

3) No

4) No (Attila was one of the only stable commanders in their history)

5) Yes

Someone feel free to help me fill out the Dark Ages to Middle Ages of Western Eurasia. I'm getting lazy :P



Ancient to Middle Ages Eastern Eurasian Major Powers



Indians: (Early Indian Empires such as the Mauryan; under men such as Chandragupta and Asoka)

1) Yes

2) Yes

3) Yes (Got schooled just now :P)

4) No (Same reason as above)

5) Yes (India wasn't always India, now that I think on it, so the establishment of the modern Indian country borders have a lot to do with their ancient conquests of smaller, independent kingdoms of the region, just like China)

Chinese: (Earlier Dynasties up to the Ming)

1) Yes

2) Yes

3) Yes

4) Yes

5) Yes

Mongols: (Early period Mongols)

1) Yes

2) No

3) No

4) No

5) No

Mongols: (Later period Mongols after Temujin Reforms)

1) Yes

2) Yes

3) Yes

4) Yes

5) Yes

Japanese:

1) Yes

2) No (The stirling command acuity of the Sengoku Jidai generalissimos does not exonerate all of Japanese history)

3) No

4) Yes

5) Yes

Koreans: (Under Choson and during the Three Kingdoms period between Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla, and post Three Kingdoms, especially during the Toyotomi Hideyoshi Invasions from Japan)

1) Yes

2) Yes

3) Yes

4) No (As sadly evidenced by the tale of Admiral Yi)

5) No (As much as I would like to say otherwise, but no)

Siamese: (Old Thailand for those not familiar with this name)

1) Yes

2) Yes

3) No

4) No (long-term effect of warlordism)

5) No

Old Tibetans:

1) No (Frighteningly vicious warriors nonetheless)

2) Yes (that they managed to coerce their bloodthirsty warriors to attack other nations was a miracle in itself)

3) No

4) No (tribalism)

5) No

Old Vietnamese: (These people fought practically a thousand year war against almost constant Chinese invasion using both field tactics and guerilla fighting, there's a reason why the U.S. wasn't having much luck there)

1) Yes

2) Yes

3) Yes

4) No

5) No

[Hzurr]

Hmm...so the only 5/5 are the Romans, Mongols, and Early Chinese. Interesting. Do you think you could give more details on how these three managed to obtain all 5 of these fields? I'm familiar with Romans, and partially Mongol, but I couldn't tell you anything about the early Chinese; but I'd be interested in seeing your reasoning behind giving these three civilzations perfect scores (I'm sure it's a correct assessment, I'm simply curious :) )

[Shiyuan]

Hmm...so the only 5/5 are the Romans, Mongols, and Early Chinese. Interesting. Do you think you could give more details on how these three managed to obtain all 5 of these fields? I'm familiar with Romans, and partially Mongol, but I couldn't tell you anything about the early Chinese; but I'd be interested in seeing your reasoning behind giving these three civilzations perfect scores (I'm sure it's a correct assessment, I'm simply curious :) )

I revised my evaluation to bump the number of perfect scores up to four. I seperated the Macedonians from the other Greeks due to a strong point made by a friend about just how un-"Greek" the Macedonians were.

On the part of the early Chinese, I'll try to answer your question as soon as possible, but I have some big chores to tend to now, so please be patient. : )

[Hzurr]

No! You must tend to me every whim now! How dare you put real life ahead of some random guy on the internet!

Haha, take your time, whenever you get around to it is fine. Man, even saying that still makes it sound like I'm issuing you a command that you are required to follow. Let me try again: Mr. Shiyuan, in the past, your posts have been enlightening, and informative. In light of your recent post, I would humbly like to ask if you would bestow some of your further knowledge upon us, and provide more detail for those of us who are ignorent, yet eager to learn.

*Sigh* for some reason, they don't really stress ancient warfare in my engineering classes. I don't know why.

[Gorbash Kazdar]

I'd say you have to break the Chinese down further, as well as the Japanese (I wouldn't give the Japanese 5/5 at any point, but at I'd say they went Y/Y/Y/N/N at some points, and Y/N/N/Y/Y at others). It tends to be that the Japanese were most innovative and had the most effective officers when things were unstable, but once things settled down, they tended to get inflexible and the officer classes got, well, lazy.

During the end stages of their warring states period, they had some incredible commanders and basically invented wholesale very effective large-unit tactics involving firearms (they produced more firearms than all of Europe for a few years), but things were incredibly chaotic, with five or more major leaders who looked like they were about to fully unite Japan getting assassinated over the space of a decade or two. Once the Tokugawa won, though, they tried to turn back the clock and their innovation and skilled leadership went to pot over the next couple centuries.

The Chinese show similar tendencies (at some points, I'd actually answer "no" for every category on their count).

For another 5/5 group, I'd have to go with the British at the height of their Empire (when the nobility actually were professional officers, though the non-coms really made the British army effective). Napoleon's France probably comes in as a 3/5 (N for long term, and N for stable leadership), but is pretty close on the that count.

[Hzurr]

Ahh, but how far into the present are we taking this? I can start assigning things to 20th century (although "Longevity of their Work" can't really be known in all the cases), but I think that might spark a bit too much debate.


But yes, Gorbash, I'd completely agree with you on both counts as far as the British and the Napoleanic French are concerned. For longevity, the brits were going fairly strong all the way up until after WW2, when they started letting colonies go (except for the Falkland Islands. They need those for strategic Sheep purposes)

[Mephibosheth]

I’m most impressed by Shiyuan’s analysis of the military capabilities of ancient empires. In general, my knowledge of these empires is limited, and I won’t presume to comment on Shiyuan’s analysis in most cases.

However, I want to point out that the innovativeness of Indian empires is greater and more influential than most assume. The problem is that, for the period about which we are talking, surviving scholarship from India is almost exclusively religious. Most sources of a secular nature have been lost (if indeed they were even composed at all). Indian texts were most frequently recorded on “paper” constructed from wide, flat leaves. The problem is, in a climate dominated by the monsoon, these texts don’t last long, rotting easily to the damp climate. This problem has always been evident, even dating back to the expansion of Buddhism in China, when several Chinese monks made pilgrimages to India to collect Buddhist texts, only to find most of the texts lost. The majority of the information we have about life in ancient India dates from the period after the 6th century BCE, when the Pali Cannon of Buddhist scriptures began to be recorded. Even these texts mention politics only peripherally.

One of the few exceptions to this rule is Kautilya’s Arthashastra, a treatise on governing from the time of Chandragupta Maurya (founder of the Maurya dynasty, not to be confused with Chandra Gupta, founder of the Gupta dynasty about 200 years later). The Arthashastra (Shastra from the Sanskrit for “text” and Artha from most frequently [and somewhat inaccurately] translated as “polity”) sets forth a unique system of governing based on units known as Mandalas. A Mandala was defined as any polity, and usually viewed as circular, with the ruler at the center. According to Kautilya, every Mandala was inherently in conflict with its neighbors and in uneasy alliance with those Mandalas that did not border it but were adjacent to its enemies. Thus, international was the interaction of these circular domains, requiring constant power struggles and balancing. Kautilya also advocated a somewhat Machiavellian mindset about politics, advocating attacks by night, duplicity in negotiations, and always exploiting your enemy’s weakness, no matter the circumstances. Mandala theory was incredibly influential in the political structures throughout South and Southeast Asia, and was modeled by the Khmer Empire in Cambodia, and the Thai empires of Ayodhaya and Sukhothai (not sure if I’m spelling those correctly). Finally, the military influence of the Arthashastra can be seen in Ashok Maurya’s expansion through the Hindu Kush and into Central Asia, something advised in the Arthashastra that no other Indian empire has duplicated. In a way, the Arthashastra can be viewed as the Indian version of The Prince, and has had a profound impact on military and political issues in South and Southeast Asia.

Additionally, more specific Indian military tactics have been adopted in several ancient empires. For example, units of Indian soldiers with elephants fought in the wars between Alexander and Persia, and the tactics used by the Persian and Greek empires in Central Asia certainly borrowed their use of elephants from Indian tactical tradition. Additionally, after his particularly bloody battles with the Kalinga people (if memory serves) of eastern India, the Mauryan Emperor Ashok supposedly forsook violent expansion altogether and managed to continue his expansion across the subcontinent using only Dharma (Dharma being a slightly amorphous concept assumed to mean something like religion or truth). If this is to be believed (an I have my doubts, as, I’m sure do you), Ashok’s continued expansion is a predecessor to Gandhi’s use of Satyagraha and non-violence to gain India’s independence from Britain. In any event, it set the precedent for the application of non-violent conflict resolution techniques to military situations.

Finally, over the course of their history, Indian commanders have displayed astounding versatility and creativity in their gambits. Who can forget Chandra Gupta II (mid- to late-100’s CE if memory serves) and his soldiers dressing in drag and seducing the king of the Scythians, ultimately killing him and rescuing the emperor at the time, Rama Gupta and ending the Scythian power in western India (modern-day Gujrat).

Wow, that was a lot longer than I thought. However, I guess the thrust of my argument is that Indian military tactics are a lot more influential and diverse than is commonly known, especially since we know next to nothing about them. However, I would also argue that India deserves a “no” vote for stability of command. No empires lasted more than five or six generations, most dying out with the death of their founder.

[Shiyuan]

I'd say you have to break the Chinese down further, as well as the Japanese (I wouldn't give the Japanese 5/5 at any point, but at I'd say they went Y/Y/Y/N/N at some points, and Y/N/N/Y/Y at others). It tends to be that the Japanese were most innovative and had the most effective officers when things were unstable, but once things settled down, they tended to get inflexible and the officer classes got, well, lazy.

During the end stages of their warring states period, they had some incredible commanders and basically invented wholesale very effective large-unit tactics involving firearms (they produced more firearms than all of Europe for a few years), but things were incredibly chaotic, with five or more major leaders who looked like they were about to fully unite Japan getting assassinated over the space of a decade or two. Once the Tokugawa won, though, they tried to turn back the clock and their innovation and skilled leadership went to pot over the next couple centuries.

The Chinese show similar tendencies (at some points, I'd actually answer "no" for every category on their count).

For another 5/5 group, I'd have to go with the British at the height of their Empire (when the nobility actually were professional officers, though the non-coms really made the British army effective). Napoleon's France probably comes in as a 3/5 (N for long term, and N for stable leadership), but is pretty close on the that count.

I definitely agree with your evaluation of the British and the Napoleonic French. Also, I'd have to agree with your assessment of fluctuating Japanese traits.

However, on the matter of the Chinese, I'd have to politely disagree.

Early Chinese Dynasties fielded very sophisticated armies for their times. They marched with divisions of infantry, light and heavy; supported by contingents of archers, crossbowmen and occasionally repeating crossbows; and were often flanked by full war chariot bands or cavalry companies. The intial span of the Chinese Empire under the Qin was expanded again and again under successive dynasties, and most considerably under the Early Han and Tang Dynasties. By the time of the Early Han Dynasty, for a civilzation contemporary to the Roman Empire, the Chinese were probably the only other superpower in the entire world.

Chinese strategies often took into account the terrain and climate they were fighting in, which is a detail suprisingly often overlooked by some of history's most fearsome armies. When fighting the Tibetans, Vietnamese and the Siamese in the south, the Chinese made use to elephants and specialized infantry recruited from Chinese provinces boasting similar environments. When fighting the mounted nomad tribes of the north, the Chinese made good use of the strategic weakness of their disunity and greed combined with a strong cavalry corp in an attempt to counter the nomad's manueverability. The Great Wall, while considered a large waste of effort and lives by some, was taken in stride by the Chinese armies of later generations, and actually employed intelligently in strategies involving the funneling of enemy incursions into specific "weak points" of the wall seemingly undermanned, where the horsemen could possibly be ambushed and engaged at choke-points.

This sort of practicality is one of the reasons why the Hsiang Nu failed to take China and eventually migrated west to become the Huns of Roman nightmares. Twice, when the Chinese defenses did manage to crumple under nomad or barbarian onslaught, they defeated their foes through the more insidious means of syncretism, culturalization and intermarriage. The first victim of this ultimate Chinese defense mechanism were the roaming nomad warriors who would sweep China by storm only to become the much storied and vaunted Tang Dynasty; whose dynastic family, Li, are in actuality my own Li family's distant ancestors. (so I'm just a BIT biased, :P) By the time of the dynasty's end, the Tang rulers thought themselves to be Chinese, without a thought to their tribal origins. Likewise, the faction of the Mongol Empire that would eventually rule China grew increasingly more Chinese until under Kubilai Khan, the Mongol overlords simply began to call themselves Emperors of China and their family, the Yuan Dynasty.

Also, while defeated in battle by these two invaders gone native, the Chinese military merely adapted and adopted the stratagems of their supposed conquerors and soon fought with as much lightning tenacity as their nomad foes. By the time of the up-coming Ming Dynasty, where a nativist Han Chinese movement began to take sway, the Yuan Dynasty warriors fought in a Mongol-like fashion, and the Ming proponents themselves fielded warriors of supposedly "Chinese" fashion, but due to neccessity adapted native Chinese warfare to combatting the mounted superiority of the Yuan warriors, creating a whole new blend of Chinese military.

While there are periods of Chinese deterioration and devolution, most noticeable nearing the modern era, and during relatively short pockets of imcompetence during the Xin, Sui and Song Dynasties, I would argue that the level of fluctuation in Chinese military quality is on the same level with that of the Roman Republic/Empire. Considering the score I gave to the Romans, I believe my scoring of the Chinese to be consistent with my evaluation scheme.




However, I want to point out that the innovativeness of Indian empires is greater and more influential than most assume. The problem is that, for the period about which we are talking, surviving scholarship from India is almost exclusively religious. Most sources of a secular nature have been lost (if indeed they were even composed at all). Indian texts were most frequently recorded on “paper” constructed from wide, flat leaves. The problem is, in a climate dominated by the monsoon, these texts don’t last long, rotting easily to the damp climate. This problem has always been evident, even dating back to the expansion of Buddhism in China, when several Chinese monks made pilgrimages to India to collect Buddhist texts, only to find most of the texts lost. The majority of the information we have about life in ancient India dates from the period after the 6th century BCE, when the Pali Cannon of Buddhist scriptures began to be recorded. Even these texts mention politics only peripherally.

*snip*

Wow, that was a lot longer than I thought. However, I guess the thrust of my argument is that Indian military tactics are a lot more influential and diverse than is commonly known, especially since we know next to nothing about them. However, I would also argue that India deserves a “no” vote for stability of command. No empires lasted more than five or six generations, most dying out with the death of their founder.

I fully applaud your lesson on Indian military development. ;D My own grasp of Indian history is rudimentary at best, and I shall acquiese to the better read of us two. Thank you for that explanation!

[Umael]

Shiyuan... did I, or did I not mention that you rock?

On to a topic-related question, can you military geniuses tell me if there were any worth African, Australian, or American cultures that had a powerful military presence?

[Shiyuan]

At the time of the colapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Roman army was pathetic. They were hiring barbarians to keep other barbarians away from Rome, which was, in hindsight, a very silly thing to do. One of the hired tribes, the Visigoths, then proseded to sack Rome, while it was unprotected by any real force.

I would also very politely disagree with you.

First off, I dislike this continued clinginess to usage of the term "barbarian" in a way that innately implies derision or marginalization of a culture's significance or sophistication.

The Visigoths were in actuality very skilled and formidable warriors. They were also trained as Roman legionaires, so imagine a sturdier, tougher "barbaric" Visigoth being instilled with the discipline and tactical intelligence of a Roman soldier, that is something that would've made the Roman legions of yore wet their sandals. Native Romans were in truth smaller of stature and weaker in physical strength on average than a "barbarian", such as a Gaul or Germanic tribesman. Their one great attribute and reason for military dominance was their iron (or should I say bronze?) discipline and practical approach to war, which their traditional enemies of the the Early Empire, namely the fearsome but squabbling Gauls, lacked. Roman strength lies in part with the weakness of their foes, just as what made the Mongols frightening was their opponent's relative unfamiliarity with their long-distance logistics and cavalry tactics.

To say that the military of the late Roman Empire was pathetic is a sore mistake. That the loyalty and agenda of the military of the late Roman Empire was questionable, is the point you want to be emphasizing. In truth, if you took the Visigoths under Alaric (a vastly underestimated or undermentioned military leader) and faced them against let's say Julius Caesar with his own Gaulic Campaign legions, I'd say it'd be a fair match.

Remember, it was the Goths who sacked Rome. Why? Because they were supposed to be the guys guarding it! :P

[sktarq]

In reference to your comment of part four in of the Early Egyptian section you mentioned....I am assuming you were refering to the middle dynasties....as they were the ones who had issues with political infighting (which is a possible reason for the hyskos getting in but they had iron-even Egyptologists i've asked shrug on who they really were) .... The actual reason the Early period came to a close (with a disasterous 100 year inter-dynatic period) was that there was a mini ice age in europe at the time which shifted rainfall patterns and the nile just about dried up for 30-50 years (or at least failed to flood)....this information only came to light in the past 5 years or so and it was previously believed that intra-court fighting had brought them down....Just making sure you are working with the most up to date info there mate.

[Ayana]

What weapons and armor (and other implements of war) were used by Egypteans? Ant trademark tractics or formations that they used? (One of the areas in my campaign world is based on Egypt and I realized it could benefit from the expertise you all have in matters of real world warfare ;D)

Thanks in advance for any answers.

[Gordon]

I revised my evaluation to bump the number of perfect scores up to four. I seperated the Macedonians from the other Greeks due to a strong point made by a friend about just how un-"Greek" the Macedonians were.



Very true. In our grad scool days, the consensus was that in antiquity, the Greekness of Macedonians was "disputed"-- the Macedonians said that they were Greeks, and everyone else said they weren't! :P

In modern times, the Greekness of Macedonians varies directly with the laudability of what they've most recently done.

Philip II's inability to sell the remainder of Greece on his hegemony and "Greekness" is a case in point; his son Alexander III's solution to the problem is the real meaning of the Bucephalus story. If you want to ride the unridable horse (be king of Greece), you have to turn his head toward the morning sun (i.e., eastwards, towards Persia). Once you've externalized the enemy, turning a collection of unruly states intent upon their own independence into a league of more or less obedient vassals eager to plunder the fertile crescent is easy.

Any resemblance to modern-day usurpers is purely coincidental, of course ;D and such comparisons are left as an exercise for the reader.

[Shiyuan]

In reference to your comment of part four in of the Early Egyptian section you mentioned....I am assuming you were refering to the middle dynasties....as they were the ones who had issues with political infighting (which is a possible reason for the hyskos getting in but they had iron-even Egyptologists i've asked shrug on who they really were) .... The actual reason the Early period came to a close (with a disasterous 100 year inter-dynatic period) was that there was a mini ice age in europe at the time which shifted rainfall patterns and the nile just about dried up for 30-50 years (or at least failed to flood)....this information only came to light in the past 5 years or so and it was previously believed that intra-court fighting had brought them down....Just making sure you are working with the most up to date info there mate.

Wow, no, I was not working with the most up to date info on Eqypt! This is what I get for getting lazy on certain subjects. :P Thank you very much for revealing this to me. I need to catch up on my Eqyptian history, alongside some meterological and archaeological findings.

[Laevus]

A lot of the bad reputation that later period Western Roman armies get is due to a few facts:
1) That they did not possess the same level of dicipline that the legions had maintained at the height of their effectiveness.

True, but bear in mind that the dicipline level of Imperial legions at thier zenith was unprecednented on such a scale. (As much as people love to talk up the Spartans, bear in mind that there were never more than several thousand of them.. compared with the scope of Rome at it's peak there is NO comparision)

Just because later period legions would become discontented if forced to dig fortifications around thier camp every night on the march in FRIENDLY territory, and in a myriad other ways fail to live up to the greatest military machine the world had ever seen does'nt make them complete failures.. It simply puts them in a very long shadow which they could'nt hope to live up to.

Late Roman dicipline was a shadow of its former self, but to be fair, bear in mind that during the civil wars of Augustus the level of experience and dicipline was such that when two veteran legions clashed, neither side wasted breath in battle cries, or shouting unneccesary orders. They set to killing each other with no sound but the death rattles of the dying, and the clashing of weapons (Livy).

2) In later period, more and more defeats in battle were suffered by roman armies. Why? Because they were fighting other roman armies more often than rival nations. In the end though, the society which would have supportd the heyday of theLegions was gone. The armies of the Western Romans were as good as could have been expected in an age of perpetual political instability, constant pressure from the expansive frontiers (The west had three quarters of the hostile frontiers of the unified empire, and only one third of the wealth with which to maintain said frontiers.. small wonder the Eastern Empire lasted longer), and financial collapse.

[Eric_The_Mad]

I apologize for my abscence, but I am glad to see I wasn't missed, and that other scholars far more worthy have picked up the slack.

Some Questions For Consideration And Discussion:

1) If you were to base fantasy races on historical models, how would elves, dwarves, orcs, etc be ogranized and fight?

2) Would clerical and arcane magic signifigantly change logistics, or would the relatively small numbers of such caster be of limited impact? I already acknowledge that fantasy armies would tend to have much better intelligence. It's supplys and medical care I'm discussing.

2a) With clerics at hand to heal or raise him, where do you think Alexander would have stopped? Would he have gone after Western Europe?

3) Could Drow REALLY ever hope to conquer a much more populous surface, given their almost pathological infighting, the small populations that a Underdark enviroment can support, and that surface dwellers both outnumber and can mount just as potent magical attacks and/or defences?

[sktarq]

Shiyuan... did I, or did I not mention that you rock?

On to a topic-related question, can you military geniuses tell me if there were any worth African, Australian, or American cultures that had a powerful military presence?
Well Both the Aztec and Inca were Empires in the proper sence in that they used their military to take over their neighbors
In africa The Emperor of Benin was noted for having a massive army-don't know if anybody recorded what tactics they used though.
Songhai/Mali Nations where known for have decent sized armies - some histories say that at one point the empire of mali had tthe strongest army in Islam but think that might have been a common myth more than anything.
Ghana's Armies were large but again actualy knowledge of their fighting abilites eludes me.


2a) With clerics at hand to heal or raise him, where do you think Alexander would have stopped? Would he have gone after Western Europe?


Possibly but there wasn't much there for him to go after at the time most likly would have kept going through India into the Khemer Empire (which at the time had a capital of between 250,000-1,000,000) which would have been an interesting as most of his tactics would have to be attapted for jungle fighting (though he may hav learned some things in the jungle parts of India) If he beat the Khemer he would have been more likly to go after China that putz all the way back to bother with Western Europe.

[Gorbash Kazdar]

I apologize for my abscence, but I am glad to see I wasn't missed, and that other scholars far more worthy have picked up the slack.

Some Questions For Consideration And Discussion:

1) If you were to base fantasy races on historical models, how would elves, dwarves, orcs, etc be ogranized and fight?
It's hard to peg specific historical models, since the strengths of many of the D&D races tend to favor more hybrid organization and styles. But rough similarities probaly can be seen.

For dwarves, I usually figure they'd fight along the lines of pikemen and Norse shieldwalls - not particularly mobile, but hard to crack on defense, and capable of standing at fighting until the enemy exhausted themselves attacking the dwarves, allowing them to launch a counter attack. They'd favor heavy armor and shields, though they'd likely have formations of shock-troops to add punch to their counter attacks (ie, Norse hauskarls). Naturally, they'd probably make excellent use of field fortifications.

Orcs (and most of the other "savage" D&D races) I can't help but imagine fighting like the various tribal and clannish ancient and medieval groups. They'd form up en masse, with fairly little differentiation between units, and then launch attacks in mobs, led by champions. Think the Scots in Braveheart or the tribesmen the Romans fight at the beginning of Gladiator.

Hobgoblins seem to fit right into the style of the Roman legions, or perhaps the Spartan phalanxes. Strict military discipline, a focus on the group over the individual, use of large highly organized units.

Elves would probably favor the style of the English armies during the 100 Years War - small numbers of horse mounted knights and heavy infantry (armsmen) forming the hitting power of the army, supported by larger numbers of archers (and mages). They'd probably also make great use of scouts and irregular guerilla forces.


2) Would clerical and arcane magic signifigantly change logistics, or would the relatively small numbers of such caster be of limited impact? I already acknowledge that fantasy armies would tend to have much better intelligence. It's supplys and medical care I'm discussing.
I think the biggest difference would be for small, special forces units (adventuring parties, anyone?) which could operate behind enemy lines much more effectively, as their firepower and survivability would be increased dramatically.

Speaking solely of logistics, however, the ability of mid-level casters to move or create large amounts of supplies via magic would make certain tactics less effective, and others more tenable - cutting supply lines would still be bad for an army, but not disasterous. Besieged garrisons would have avenues for resupply, reinforcement, and escape even without the aid of a relieving attack on those besieging them. Mid-sized forces could cross inhospitable terrain (deserts, for example) to launch raids and surprise attacks.

In essence, even a relatively small number of mid-level casters (1 to every 500 soldiers or so) would allow otherwise "medieval" forces to operate more like modern forces, that can expect aerial resupply and the like. Also, I'd dare say medical care would approach what was seen in WWII or so, as even very low level casters can at least stablize wounded troops, who could then convalesce and eventually return to the battle field; being wounded would not be nearly as disasterous for a soldier in a magical world as it was for real medieval soldiers.


2a) With clerics at hand to heal or raise him, where do you think Alexander would have stopped? Would he have gone after Western Europe?
I don't think Alexander would have gone West. After all, there was a reason he went East in the first place - that's where everything worth conquering was. I suspect Alexander might have tried to push north around India (the one place where he was actually defeated) and further into Central Asia, and come at India from multiple sides. He could potentially have headed further south into Africa as well; there were a few wealthy and powerful cultures south of Egypt at that time.


3) Could Drow REALLY ever hope to conquer a much more populous surface, given their almost pathological infighting, the small populations that a Underdark enviroment can support, and that surface dwellers both outnumber and can mount just as potent magical attacks and/or defences?
I think you answered your own question.

[Ayana]

2) I think the presence of even low level spellcasters would significantly change logistics and behind-the-scenes aspects of war. For example a low-mid level cleric can create enough water for several other people reducing the effectiveness of cutting/poisoning water sources (she can also detect/delay poison and purify food and drink). Access to teleport would allow besieged locations to bring almost limitless supplies (especially if say you bring say cows (large, willing creatures), which you can butcher on location, loaded to their fairly significant maximum load with packs of other supplies). Darkness, silence, fogs, etc would be significant advantages in guerilla tactics. Disguise Self (and so on) would make spying, assasinations and replacing enemy commanders easier / possible (not to mention if changelings existed). Awakened animals would mean any rat or bird (or even tree) can be a potentially intelligent enemy spy.

If spells worked as in DnD then AE offensive spells would be extremely strong against tightly packed formations (as it is far easier to affect than protect multiple targets). If higher level casting was available permanent fortifications would probably loose some of their value as spells like Move Earth, Stone Wall, etc could be used to create basic fortifications within hours. Overall communication, coordination and mobility would be vastly improved and the ability of bringing powerful leaders back to life would likely promote longer-lasting empires.

Healing wouldn't reduce much the number of in-combat casualties, however wounded would likely have a far far better survival ratio (few if any deaths to infections, disease, etc) and speedier recovery. Healing potions / wands / etc would become a very important type of supply to have and stores of such likely the target of sabotage attempts.

3) Conquer, no. A further and significant obstacle would be their light sensitivity. However I could see small groups of drow being able to use deception, manipulation, etc to attain sway over parts of the surface world and potentially incite these into conquering other surface nations.

[Sundog]

On to a topic-related question, can you military geniuses tell me if there were any worth African, Australian, or American cultures that had a powerful military presence?


Oh, hell yes. In Africa, consider the Axumites, later known as Ethiopians. They ran Arabia for a while, and were one of only two governments that the Second Persian Empire actually respected - the other being the Byzantine Empire!

Somewhat later, you have the Zulu Empire, especially under it's first Emperor, Chaka.

And don't forget, technically Egypt is in Africa.

As SKTARQ said, the Incas and Aztecs had powerful armed forces, and I'd add the Apache and Cherokee nations to that list, and the Nez Perce in the Northwest. Though low-tech, all three of these had effectively "professional" militaries capable (though not always willing) of fighting for a goal rather than individual glory, and as a team (the true difference between a soldier and a mere warrior).

As for Australia, no. The native Australians never got above the organisational level of the individual clan, save for trading and ceremonial needs. At that level, military power is nonexistent as far as projecting power is concerned.

[nirha]

I think even low-level magic would have a huge impact on war.
One of the things is disease control: up untill the first world war disease has claimed more lives in a military campaign than fighting. (But I've never seen it as a big factor in games or movies).

The second is a tiny matter that always gets overlooked as well. It is called morale. Just think what a few well-placed illusions can do.

[Hzurr]

And don't forget, technically Egypt is in Africa.



Ahh, so when I used to date this girl who was egyptian, would she be considered African-American, or Arab-American? I always wondered about that. (My family simply called her Cleopatra, because they couldn't remember her name, and they knew it drove me crazy)

[MrNexx]

Ahh, so when I used to date this girl who was egyptian, would she be considered African-American, or Arab-American? I always wondered about that. (My family simply called her Cleopatra, because they couldn't remember her name, and they knew it drove me crazy)

While Egypt is technically in Africa, north Africa has long been racially separate from the south.

[Hzurr]

While Egypt is technically in Africa, north Africa has long been racially separate from the south.

Yeah, that's where the confusion came from. Geographically, she was African; but racially, she was Arabic. That's why I could never decide which one she was.


Ahh, sorry. Not on topic. Let me get back onto the subject of the thread with a question.

Who were the goths? (No, not the loser high-school kids at the mall, I mean the real goths). I hear people reference them, and I know that they came out of Europe, but aside from that, I don't know anything about them.

[MrNexx]

Who were the goths? (No, not the loser high-school kids at the mall, I mean the real goths). I hear people reference them, and I know that they came out of Europe, but aside from that, I don't know anything about them.

A group of related Germanic tribes who spent some time invading Roman areas in the later empire. There were several tribes, including the Ostrogoths and Visigoths.

[sktarq]

Okay with my above list of African groups who had significant military forces was only for SUbSarahhan Africa- otherwise the various goups of the Ethiopian Highlands deserve serious mention. Including Puntland, Kush, And series of other empires that did very well for themselves in the upper nile valleys aswell. Africa north of the Sahara has more in common with the Medeteranian and the Middle East cultures. heck at one point 1/3 of Roman senetors were from that continent and were racially the same as those north of that large saltwater lake known as the Med.

[Sundog]

salfemale genitaliaer lake

SKTARQ, I just have to know what you typed to get that result from the filter. PM me if you don't want to post it.

[MrNexx]

SKTARQ, I just have to know what you typed to get that result from the filter. PM me if you don't want to post it.

Just a guess, but it was "salt water" without a space between the two words.

[Premier]

Who were the goths? (No, not the loser high-school kids at the mall, I mean the real goths).

They're the loser university students at the mall. ;D

[Nyrath]

A group of related Germanic tribes who spent some time invading Roman areas in the later empire. There were several tribes, including the Ostrogoths and Visigoths.


They originally came from the island of Gotland in the baltic, why they moved south I actaully don't know. Those that stayed behind did eventually become some of the greatest traders in europe, trading goods from Constantinopel and Moorish spain.
Interestingly enough the locals still call themselves Gutar and in order to be able to qualify for Gute mayor during the medieval week you have to be able to show three generations of habitation on the island.

[Gordon]

Ahh, so when I used to date this girl who was egyptian, would she be considered African-American, or Arab-American? I always wondered about that. (My family simply called her Cleopatra, because they couldn't remember her name, and they knew it drove me crazy)

Either they were having way too much fun at yoru expense, or they were weighing in on the decision: Cleopatra VII (the famous one) was, after all, Macedonian, and thus neither Arabic nor African at all. Granted, Cleopatra VII did have a grandmother who was from Syria, so that may have been their vote on the whole question...

[Hzurr]

Either they were having way too much fun at yoru expense, or they were weighing in on the decision: Cleopatra VII (the famous one) was, after all, Macedonian, and thus neither Arabic nor African at all. Granted, Cleopatra VII did have a grandmother who was from Syria, so that may have been their vote on the whole question...

Nope, they just did it to bother me. :)

[MrNexx]

Either they were having way too much fun at yoru expense, or they were weighing in on the decision: Cleopatra VII (the famous one) was, after all, Macedonian, and thus neither Arabic nor African at all. Granted, Cleopatra VII did have a grandmother who was from Syria, so that may have been their vote on the whole question...

But, IIRC, weren't the Syrian nobility claiming descent from Alexander's Macedonian generals, too?

[Sundog]

Mr Nexx, everybody and his dog who ruled anywhere in the med claimed descent from either Remus or one of Alexander the Maniac's generals, when they weren't claiming to be a the descendent of one of Alex's byblows. The Ptolemy's are actually one of the few that could back it up.

[Umael]

Got one for you guys to kick around.

Arrows.

To be exact, what exactly do we know about arrows? In fantasy campaigns, you can have barbed arrows that do more damage when they are removed, the default hunting arrow that is used again most game, the sickle-headed arrow for cutting rope, the hollow head for holding gas or smoke or something else... how realistic are any of these and are there any others we are missing?

Furthermore, in D&D, you have just arrows. Same size for the shortbow and the longbow. Is this accurate?

What do people suggest to make arrows more interesting? (It's just one detail, but you never know...)

[sktarq]

Well I know of "barbed" arrows actually existing...personally think they did a better job in representing the difference in 2e when there wer "war" and "flight" arrows. The horizontal-moon-bladed arrows do have some historical basis (they used a different fletching pattern to prevent spin and were therefore horribly in accurate and short range) but were used in some parlor trick at some festival i forget. (or at least that is the only time i've read of them being used). As for longbows-they really needed their own arrows-you pulled a longbow to the cheak (a shortbow goes to the shoulder generally). And the strongbow (what was for years just the "bow" as a latter type of bow was developed as a "shortbow"-the later could probably use the same arrows of the "shortbow".

As a side note Longbows were rare over the course of history - the Welsh and the Japanese are generally the two groups that everyone agrees use "longbows" (there is some discussion for a few other groups but not general concensus) so calling it an exotic weapon (as it does need serious training) would not be amiss.

[Hzurr]

As a side note Longbows were rare over the course of history - the Welsh and the Japanese are generally the two groups that everyone agrees use "longbows" (there is some discussion for a few other groups but not general concensus) so calling it an exotic weapon (as it does need serious training) would not be amiss.

Weren't the English famous for their longbows? I don't recall hearing anything about the Welsh and longbows, but I could be mistaken. Or maybe it was the Two Rivers...

[sktarq]

The English Longbow is a myth...they were welsh...they became known as English Longbows because well - England sorta took over Wales and the King of England had them fighting next to him. But just about all of the longbowmen that the English fielded were Welsh.

[Shiyuan]

The English Longbow is a myth...they were welsh...they became known as English Longbows because well - England sorta took over Wales and the King of England had them fighting next to him. But just about all of the longbowmen that the English fielded were Welsh.

Indeed, SKTARQ is very correct on this matter. On a related note, you just brought back some old memories of an excellent fantasy series I used to avidly read, I can't remember the author's name at the moment, but I do believe the first book was named, "The Dragon and the George," and had a Welsh character who adamantly reitterated the fact that the Welsh invented the longbow and how the English merely stole the credit for it.

[sktarq]

"The Dragon and the George," and had a Welsh character who adamantly reitterated the fact that the Welsh invented the longbow and how the English merely stole the credit for it.
I could see that getting very Funny for an extended period of time. What really gets me is how in most modern renditions they give longbows to people of massive hight when the Welsh (particularly at the time) were not know for their great stature.

[Umael]

I can't remember the author's name at the moment, but I do believe the first book was named, "The Dragon and the George," and had a Welsh character who adamantly reitterated the fact that the Welsh invented the longbow and how the English merely stole the credit for it.

Gordon R Dickson.

The Welsh character was named Dafydd, also known as Master Archer Dafydd.

...

You're welcome.

[Sundog]

The "half-moon" arrow was used primarily in bird hunting. The razor sharp blade could remove a bird's wing quite neatly, and then the hunter or his dog could retrieve it easily. Cruel, but effective.

The other two common heads were broadheads (for hunting or use against unarmoured targets, caused massive trauma) and bodkins (blunt-tipped armour piercers).

The crosshead (x-cross section) head was almost never used with either short or longbows, but was commonly used with crossbows, where the greater impact effect translated the crosshead into having both armour-piercing and trauma effects.

[MrNexx]

As a side note Longbows were rare over the course of history - the Welsh and the Japanese are generally the two groups that everyone agrees use "longbows" (there is some discussion for a few other groups but not general concensus) so calling it an exotic weapon (as it does need serious training) would not be amiss.

And the Norse, as well. I remember reading, I believe in the Heimskringla, where one of the kings (Olaf) hands his bow to one of his archers, because the archer's bow had broken. The archer nearly breaks the thing, saying "Too weak, our king's bow is too weak."

[Fhaolan]

Arrows. Interesting subject.

There are many types of arrows, including some rather strange thingies that never made it into D&D. Let's start with the basics:

Arrow-shafts fall under four main categories:
Standard arrows: What we all know.
Flight arrows: Designed for longer distance shooting, tend to be of poor accuracy when it comes to actual target shooting.
Flu-flu arrows: These arrows have lots of fletching for slowing the arrow down. When combined with blunt arrowheads, these are used to hunt birds as regular arrows tend to make very messy bird carcasses.
Long arrows: This actually includes a bunch of strange arrows that seem to be more like javelins, like fishing arrows, or arrows from Melanesia (http://www.tribalarts.com/feature/arrows/).

Arrowheads or 'points':
Target points: These are what you seen in sporting good stores. They're for target shooting, as they will still penetrate a target, but will do minimum damage so the target can be reused, hopefully.

Pile points: Very similar to Target points, but are heavier and stronger. Usually with a triangular or square cross-section. Made for penetrating armor, especially plate-style armors.

Bodkin points: Very long pile points made for punching through maille.

Broadhead points: These are the points everyone thinks of for arrowheads. They have a broad slicing head made for doing a lot of damage to flesh and other soft targets. May have two to four 'edges' depending on the sophistication of the point-smith. May be 'barbed' to make them more difficult to remove from the target.

Blunt points: Flat-ended points made to do crushing damage to delicate targets like birds, rather than penetrating.

Whistling points: Signal arrows. Tend to be innacurate, and slow down in flight fast.

Flaming points: Usually regular arrows wrapped with oiled rags and set alight. Again, innacurate, but who cares?

Clay-bulb points: Used to deliver more oil to a target for flaming arrows to set alight. VERY short range, as that's a lot of weight to push through the air. I've heard of these being used to deliver smoke-grenade-type loads as well.

'Crotch' points: For all the stories of these being used to cut ropes and standards, these points had a different use. In Europe they were called 'gauler' points, and were used to do massive internal damage to large animals such as horses. Cutting a rope with one of these is *extremely* difficult, as arrows spin in flight making hitting the rope so that the blade is perpendicular to the rope very tricky. Master archers can pull this off, but a master archer can perform the same trick with a well-sharpened broadhead point.

'Line' points: These are usually simple broadheads with a hole in them for attaching a thin, strong cord of some kind. Usually used on fishing arrows.

I have heard of 'stone-biting' points made to penetrate and hold in stone, but I've never actually seen one in real life, so I think this one is a fantasy concept.

[Shiyuan]

Gordon R Dickson.

The Welsh character was named Dafydd, also known as Master Archer Dafydd.

...

You're welcome.


Ah! Thank you very much Umael! My turn to say you rock! Heh heh. Ah yes, Master Archer Dafydd... I shall never forget that scene where they were fighting the Hollow Men... X P

[Ayana]

Would modern bullet technologies for increased damage or armor penetration be of any benefit in arrowheads? Or more exactly what kind of improvements (if any) could be expected in a world that uses bows and crossbows but had the techno-magical resources to produce advanced arrowheads. And similarly what advances could be made to ballistas and other large scale weapons?

[Sundog]

Modern bullets operate as they do due to their fairly extreme velocity, while arrows (and bolts) rely more on their intrinsic weight and sharpness, velocity being important, but secondary. So, you need different means to prevent penetration. With a razor-edged but relatively slow projectile like an arrow, rigid "deflection" armour is more efficacious, while the blunt but very fast bullet-type projectiles are better stopped by non-rigid "absorption/energy spread" armours. Which, of course, is the type of armour "armour piercing" bullets are designed to defeat.

As to how magic would improve things - with a bow/arrows, I really can't see much that you could do, aside from developing the modern composite/compound bow, and that's not magic, just good engineering.

But crossbows are another story. Crossbows are as long ranged (save for specialist sniper rifles) and hit harder than modern firearms. Their problem is, reloading one is a time-consuming process.

So, what magic could do is speed up the process. A Crossbow that could fire as fast as the user could pull the trigger would be a fearsome weapon indeed!

[Hzurr]

So, what magic could do is speed up the process. A Crossbow that could fire as fast as the user could pull the trigger would be a fearsome weapon indeed!

Yes. It's called a pistol.

[Furanku_S]

*Summons thread back from the cold hands of death*

How easy would it be to tell friend from foe in a melee? I'd imagine that any sort of armor would be fairly standardized across the board (that is, unless it isn't...uhh...) in terms of appearance, so would you you just try to stab the guys that look French instead of the ones that look English, or what?

[sktarq]

Actually the above is one of the reasons why many nations took to wearing fancy uniforms - British Redcoats? Made it obvious who you were fighting and rubbed the spanish's nose in it (as the red dye was stolen from spanish galleons by priviteers early on)
Also tabards and such were quite popular.

As for overall standardization i'd say its allot less than you'd think except perhaps in a civil war.

This would also be much more a problem in Europe than asia where the battlefields tended to be significantly looser on average.

[Eric_The_Mad]

Two words... Paint and tabards.

A tabard is basically a sleeveless surcoat. Take a piece of cloth, fold in two, cut a hole for the head, and voila! Embroider and dye at your leisure. Even a first level party should be able to afford tabards.

Paint? Paint your helms and armor. Yes, it can and was done.


As to hitting your own side... It happens. At least I can easily see it happening. Of course, if you start pushing the issue, enforcing such on your PC's, they'll probaly hate you and you'll wind up in a "Bad Players, Bad DM's thread". But yes, I can see it happening.

SCA Story to illustrate... No shi...errr...there I was. It was a melee, a bunch of them versus a bunch of us. I'm fighting sword and shield, and the field was broken up, we had pushed into their formation. I saw a armored arm holding a polearm extend into the field of vision offered by my helmet from one side. I turned and *swung* at about head height.

And then as my body pivoted, I saw he wasn't wearing a helmet. It was one of the Marshalls (those who ensure safety and such during SCA combat). I saw his eyes grow as wide as mine must have. I managed to drop my arm, bringing my blow down so that it landed on his armor, instead of cracking his head wide open. At the same time, we both screamed "HOLD!!!" (the cry in SCA to STOP whatever it is you are doing, and look around for imminent danger) at the top of our lungs simultaneously...

I apologized profusely and sincerely; after all, I'd just come close to perhaps killing him. I went and sat down for a few bouts, and shook like mad while I realized how close I had come.

In a dark corridor, fighting in close quarters? Yeah, it could happen. But we're playing a heroic fantasy game here, not trying to recreate death by friendly fire.

[Laevus]

*Summons thread back from the cold hands of death*

How easy would it be to tell friend from foe in a melee? I'd imagine that any sort of armor would be fairly standardized across the board (that is, unless it isn't...uhh...) in terms of appearance, so would you you just try to stab the guys that look French instead of the ones that look English, or what?

Uniforms, tabarads, paint, etc were all very valid methods. Yet there is one even simpler:

In general, the simplest and surest way to tell the difference, in large scale battles involving real armies (real, read: bare minimum of dicipline, and of sufficient number that simply knowing who was around you wasnt feasable) is to simply note who is facing you. Since most battles were decided by one side losing unit cohesion, and fleeing. While two cohesive units are facing one another, it's rather simple to tell one side from the other.. Even when lines charge, and intermingle, the overwhelming standard is that the ones rushing at you, or facing you while you rush them, are the enemy.

The sort of chaotic melee that would need to ensue before any hint of this is lost (contrary to what Braveheart would show you), would need for both sides to have broken, and for elements of both sides to consinue fighting. A very rare circumstance.

Judging by armor styles was'nt very effective though, as regardless of nationality, most armies would wear significant amounts of armor often Italian (or insert any other major armor producing nation, whose aesthetic style would be copied) in make, and thus, style.

[sktarq]

any other questions?

[LE4dGOLEM]

Yes, but i don't know if it's been asked already:

I've heard of (And actually physically seen IRL, courtesy of my GM) Chinese "double link" chainmail where the chain is linked more closely than regular mail. Supposedly, it is also bulletproof. Is this true? and how does it function in-game



(And why isn't this thread a sticky?)

[Gorbash Kazdar]

Some maille is bullet resistant - that is, due to the way its constructed it can act like a bullet "proof" vest and absorb the energy of certain rounds before they penetrate and cause severe damage. You'd probably still have a nasty bruise, at least. But I wouldn't count on it to stop anything heavier than handguns, and not even the strongest of those. An intermediate or rifle round would probably punch right through. (Note: Intermediate rounds are the ones fired by assault rifles; they look like rifle rounds but are smaller.)

Is it possible? Yes, and IIRC such maille vests do exist (both in China and in the West), but kevlar and other modern materials are much much lighter and more effective. As for tight spaces on links, using a pattern with lots of connections and small rings would do, and then layering it. Maille comes in a multitude of different patterns, named according to how many rings go through one central one. The classic maille is 4-in-1, but it can go higher than that.

As for a sticky... most stickied threads are for forum utility, but I may consider it for this one.

[Fhaolan]

Maille comes in a multitude of different patterns, named according to how many rings go through one central one. The classic maille is 4-in-1, but it can go higher than that.


Just to expand on this, maille (The accepted term used by people 'in-the-know'. The term 'chainmail' is generally looked down on by armor-snobs. ;) ) comes in many, many different patterns and types. Some of the basic differentiations:

Riveted, Butted and Welded: Butted maille is the most common found today. It means the ends of the little rings of metal are simply butted together. Because of this, the individual rings can spread apart when force is applied to them, causing the armor to fail. Riveted maille means that the little rings are individually riveted with tiny little stakes of metal to make each ring stronger. Riveted mail is relatively hard to come by now-a-days, although I know of a few sources, but it used to be far more common. One trick used to make riveted mail was to have solid washer-type rings and join them together with riveted rings. This reduces the amount of riveting you need to do. Another type I've only seen in modern usage is welded rings, where each ring is welded shut. This is typical of shark maille.

Pattern: The ring pattern (such as 4-in-1) has far more variations than I can describe here. And so, I will turn it over to a site that I know has samples of a bunch of different weaves: http://www.mailleartisans.org/
This is a massive site, and is difficult to sort out because of the sheer number of patterns available.

Style: This one's a bit easier. Maille armor came in many different 'cuts', to borrow the tailor's phrase. Maille shirts could have short sleeves, long sleeves, no sleeves, the 'skirt' could reach from just below the crotch to almost ankle-length. Maille leggings, maille head-coverings (coifs), maille gloves, maille foot-coverings (sabatons), all existed and were used in different combinations, sometimes attached to the main hauberk, sometimes not. People expected to ride horses would have a split in the front and the back from the bottom of the skirt to just below the belt so you could sit astride a horse and have the maille hang to either side without bunching up. One of the oddest differences that a lot of people don't realize is that the 'pull-over' style of maille that you see everywhere currently was common to the Nordic peoples, but not elsewhere in Europe. The Romans had maille but supposedly put it on like a hospital gown (buckled or laced at the back) just like they did their other styles of armor. Others would put it on like a tabbard, with buckles or lacings up the sides. I don't know what the Eastern peoples like the Chinese or Japanese did, as that's not my area of knowledge. :)

[Sacrath]

I have a more game-oriented question about armor. In Races of Stone there is an exotic shield called the Gnome Battle Cloak (GBC). The GBC gives +2 shield bonus to AC but takes up a cloak slot. However, in the picture, the GBG is shown to wrap around the user's left arm to provide protection and aid in disarm (gives a +4). My question is, when enchanting the GBC does it enchant as a shield (ie: +1, +2, +2 Arrow Catching, ect.) or as a Cloak (Cloak of Flying, Cloak of Resistance)? Could it enchant as both? Or just one that must be selected the first time it is enchanted?

[TheThan]

Wow this thread is great, I’m amazed at the amount of knowledge and personal experience on display here.
So anyway I think I have an answer to a question, and an adequate solution to a problem, as well as a question.
1. On weapon weight, I just looked in my 3.5 player’s handbook and all the weapons have appropriate weights, for example the great sword is listed at a weight of 8 lbs. This seems to be close enough to the correct weight of a real great sword. Also the heaviest weapons on the table all weigh in at 12 lbs. These are the big pole arms. Once again this seem to be fairly accurate.
2. On weapon proficiency that are too lax or too tight. I think I came up with an adequate solution. That is to group all the like weapons together. Then separate them according to size, and weight. For example:
weapon group proficiency light swords
this group contains the following weapons. Dagger, short sword, rapier, scimitar
Weapon group proficiency medium swords.
This group contains the following weapons. Long sword, bastard sword
Weapon group proficiency heavy swords
this group contains the following weapons, great sword, falichon

The cool thing about this setup is a DM can simply fit any weapon he wants into the proficiencies, for example if I was running an Japanese campaign I could easily fit the Katana into “weapon group proficiency medium swords”. One problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a clear definition of what exactly constitutes an exotic weapon. I think this is mostly up to DM discretion. This gives a DM a good tool to tailor weapon proficiencies to his or her campaign. I’m only using the swords that are presented in the player’s handbook but you could easily place real world weapons (that aren’t in the handbook) into this setup with few problems. One could easily apply this setup to swords, axes, pole arms, bows/crossbows, and hammers/picks. Now for flails, clubs, morning stars, quarter staves, saps and maces I would group them together into one group, something like weapon group bludgeoning weapons. If this has been done before well I apologize I've only used the 3.5 rules ;D
3. Ok now onto my question. I’m currently designing a campaign world. The region I am currently working on is set in a tropical environment, you know hot steaming jungles and the like. So I realized I need information on the types of weapons and armor that was used in this kind of climate. So the question is. What kind of weapons and armor have been used in tropical environments? I’m not really picky on the culture behind it. So I will take information from any culture on any continent. Off the top of my head I can think of blowguns, short spears, and bolas. Any information would be helpful.

[CharPixie]

Wasn't the original name for chainmail haubrek?

[Ian]

Wasn't the original name for chainmail haubrek?

I think a hauberk was the name attributed to a 'shirt' of chainmail.

[Eric_The_Mad]

Wow this thread is great, I’m amazed at the amount of knowledge and personal experience on display here.
So anyway I think I have an answer to a question, and an adequate solution to a problem, as well as a question.
1. On weapon weight, I just looked in my 3.5 player’s handbook and all the weapons have appropriate weights, for example the great sword is listed at a weight of 8 lbs. This seems to be close enough to the correct weight of a real great sword. Also the heaviest weapons on the table all weigh in at 12 lbs. These are the big pole arms. Once again this seem to be fairly accurate.
2. On weapon proficiency that are too lax or too tight. I think I came up with an adequate solution. That is to group all the like weapons together. Then separate them according to size, and weight. For example:
weapon group proficiency light swords
this group contains the following weapons. Dagger, short sword, rapier, scimitar
Weapon group proficiency medium swords.
This group contains the following weapons. Long sword, bastard sword
Weapon group proficiency heavy swords
this group contains the following weapons, great sword, falichon

The cool thing about this setup is a DM can simply fit any weapon he wants into the proficiencies, for example if I was running an Japanese campaign I could easily fit the Katana into “weapon group proficiency medium swords”. One problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a clear definition of what exactly constitutes an exotic weapon. I think this is mostly up to DM discretion. This gives a DM a good tool to tailor weapon proficiencies to his or her campaign. I’m only using the swords that are presented in the player’s handbook but you could easily place real world weapons (that aren’t in the handbook) into this setup with few problems. One could easily apply this setup to swords, axes, pole arms, bows/crossbows, and hammers/picks. Now for flails, clubs, morning stars, quarter staves, saps and maces I would group them together into one group, something like weapon group bludgeoning weapons. If this has been done before well I apologize I've only used the 3.5 rules ;D
3. Ok now onto my question. I’m currently designing a campaign world. The region I am currently working on is set in a tropical environment, you know hot steaming jungles and the like. So I realized I need information on the types of weapons and armor that was used in this kind of climate. So the question is. What kind of weapons and armor have been used in tropical environments? I’m not really picky on the culture behind it. So I will take information from any culture on any continent. Off the top of my head I can think of blowguns, short spears, and bolas. Any information would be helpful.





Interesting ideas.

But... since this thread is more or less dedicated to discussing the reality of ancient and medieval weapons, there's a couple of holes I could point out.

If we base the shortsword on the model of the gladius (as opposed to the seax), then it and the rapier are wielded in dissimilar manners. Yes, they're poth "pokey" weapons, as opposed to "slashy" weapons, but the shortsword requires you to adopt entirely different tactics. Such as getting close and personal, as opposed to staying back with a rapier. Or such has been my experience...

Rapiers are called "light weapons", but in reality, they tend to be as long as a longsword. More or less... Your mileage might vary. The reason they do 1d6 (like the shortsword) is that they don't tend to leave large wounds... Unless you hit something vital, which is why they have a better critical multiplier then a longsword.

[Seffbasilisk]

Rapiers ARE primarily stabbing weapons, but against a low level character a whipping slash could do a goodly amount of damage. (I fence, and have left horrible welts on people when i swing too hard with a foil [why i do saber now]).

A good rigged up rapier could be even crazier. Bend back a green branch, set the rapier on it, and whip it. Either throwing it THROUGH someone, or whipping so the point cuts them. It would take extreme accuracy but be good.

[TheThan]

Well Eric the Mad, I was grouping the swords based on both size and weight. According to the player’s handbook (3.5), the short sword and the rapier weigh the same (that’s 2lbs). I felt that they should both be in the same group. Now I am aware of the physical differences between a rapier and a short sword. And I am also aware that they were both used differently. This classification system doesn’t take into account the different techniques in using different styles of weapons. So one could assume that they have studied the use of a variety of “light” weapons.

Now if we assume that a “light” sword is any sword that weighs less than 4 lbs. (excluding exotic weapons). Then I should really bump up the scimitar up to a medium sword, seeing as it weighs in at about 4 lbs. (once again according to the 3.5 player handbook). Also rapiers do not have a large cross section. So I also felt that it would be appropriate to group them as I have due to the thin blade, once again disregarding length. I guess I should have been more specific in why I grouped them as I have.
Oh I am referring to rapiers as a group. That group being a group of fencing swords such as the actual rapier, foil etc.

[Fhaolan]

Rapiers are called "light weapons", but in reality, they tend to be as long as a longsword. More or less... Your mileage might vary. The reason they do 1d6 (like the shortsword) is that they don't tend to leave large wounds... Unless you hit something vital, which is why they have a better critical multiplier then a longsword.



Rapiers are one of those unfortunate weapons have changed a great deal over time, and somehow retained the name, making people a wee bit confused when they see rapiers in museums versus what they see in fencing tourneys. Original rapiers were a great deal larger, heavier, and slower than what are used in modern fencing. They were created specifically for nobility to wear around, because they couldn't be seen carrying a low-class weapon. So they had to be more impressive than a longsword. For awhile they got huge; longer and heavier than any actual working sword, and they had fancy hilts. Ooooh. Aaaaaah. Over time, when these nobles actually got it into their heads that they had to *use* these silly things for something other than impressing the ladies with their studly way of wearing them on their hips, they got lighter, faster, and shorter. They still had an edge though. Eventually, edge-work became so gauche that rapiers were considered 'lower-class' weapons, and the smallsword took over.

A smallsword is what happens when you take an estoc (an actual battlefield weapon much like a giant stilleto. I believe they were considered a horseman's weapon, but don't quote me on that.) and go through the same evolution as a longsword to a rapier and then go a bit farther, just to make it even lighter and smaller. I've always wanted an estoc. I don't have one in my collection.

[Fhaolan]

I think a hauberk was the name attributed to a 'shirt' of chainmail.


Depends on who you ask nowadays. Currently, I believe the agreed-upon definition of a hauberk is a specific style of shirt of maille. One with long sleeves and the skirt reaches to just past your knees.

[LE4dGOLEM]

New question:

What separates a dagger from a shortsword from a longsword from a bastardsword from a greatsword, lengthwise? ie, at what length does a shortsword be classed as a longsword etc.

AND what kind of stats would a broadsword have in v3.5?

[AtomicKitKat]

New question:

What separates a dagger from a shortsword from a longsword from a bastardsword from a greatsword, lengthwise? ie, at what length does a shortsword be classed as a longsword etc.

AND what kind of stats would a broadsword have in v3.5?

The way I classify them at home, the following upper limits are probably a good guide.

Up to 1 foot, dagger
up to 2 feet, short sword.
Up to 4 feet, longsword
Around 5 feet, bastardsword
6 feet, Greatsword.

Anything bigger would probably be unwieldable by your average human.

Regarding the broadsword, it probably falls somewhere between bastard and long. Maybe class it as a longsword or bastardsword in damage, with smaller crit-range(20 instead of 19-20) and bigger multiplier(X3 instead of X2)

That's just the way I feel about it though, since I never liked the old 2nd ed broad/bastard swords(to say nothing of the ridiculous polearms like the Bohemian Ear-Spoon...)

[sktarq]

Allright the differnce between a dagger and a short sword has always been fuzzy but i generall callanything over 16" a short sword. That is gernerally where you see some differences in blade structure take over from you "big knife" types. boardswords seemingly dissapeared into thin air, rules wise, but i have generally considered them to be the strait sided, short to medium length, one handed, wide bladed, chopping swords...many shorter chopping swords had inward curves and there is a bunchof discussion on that early in this thread if you want to look. If you want more research on broadswords i recomend looking at renisance era England as several schools of fighting or "broadsword dueling" formed there just before the rapier/saber era. longswords I'd generally say 3-4 ft range one handed swords which ephisis on slashing....bastard swords are also called hand-and-a-half swords because you can wield them either way - just like in D&D...generally id say if it hits 4lbs it is probably a bastard sword....if the weapon HAS to be used two handed to be effective that's you greatsword-depending on blade width, balence etc that is anywhere from 4' and up....now all these definitions are loose it is more of there is a small group of swords that are classed as "x" and another group classed as "y" and you get to decide which is your sword more like....to make matters worse there isn't a single body that is widely enough accepted to say what swords make up group "x" and that all the swords that were also called "x" a century later but look different should be called "z".....and as for rapiers they went through lots of variation....at one point Elizebeth I got niggled that she was tripping over the blades that were so long people needed help to draw ther weapons that she passed a rule to chop them down (approx 36" i think)....There have been "sword rapiers" tried throughout history where people try to combine a broadsword type blade with the rapier blade....with results that varied from spectacular to comical.

[Gorbash Kazdar]

A short sword versus a dagger is a bit fuzzy, and open to individual interpretation - the scramasax, for example, is right on the line between a dagger and a short sword. Personally, I tend to seperate it by function/use. If it's used as a tool as well as a fighting implement, and is used with dagger techniques, it's a dagger. If it's exclusively a weapon and uses sword techniques, then it's a short sword. But there's still a lot of room for interpretation and variation.

SKTAQ: fencing and rapier styles are very dissimilar; foil fencing tends to more closely match small sword fighting techniques, not rapiers. With a rapier, the thrust is pre-eminent, and only very small cutting motions are generally used. A true rapier is much larger than a foil - one could hit someone as far as 12 foot or more away with a single attack. You could slash with a rapier, but the damage done would not be impressive, and it would leave you quite open for attack.

[sktarq]

SKTAQ: fencing and rapier styles are very dissimilar; foil fencing tends to more closely match small sword fighting techniques, not rapiers. With a rapier, the thrust is pre-eminent, and only very small cutting motions are generally used. A true rapier is much larger than a foil - one could hit someone as far as 12 foot or more away with a single attack. You could slash with a rapier, but the damage done would not be impressive, and it would leave you quite open for attack.

Huh? where did you get this from?...

[Vikingkingq]

The English Longbow is a myth...they were welsh...they became known as English Longbows because well - England sorta took over Wales and the King of England had them fighting next to him. But just about all of the longbowmen that the English fielded were Welsh.

The Longbow started out Welsh. However, after the English realized how effective the Longbow was, they imported into England and made it legally required for every man who earned 2-5 pounds a year (roughly the pay of an average worker/peasant) to own a longbow and train in its use on Sundays after church. This allowed England to mobilize large numbers of effective and inexpensive soldiers. This tradition lasted well into the 17th century, so I wouldn't say it's totally inaccurate to speak of the English Longbow.
http://www.thebeckoning.com/medieval/longbow/the-longbow.html

[Edmund]

The way I classify them at home, the following upper limits are probably a good guide.

Up to 1 foot, dagger
up to 2 feet, short sword.
Up to 4 feet, longsword
Around 5 feet, bastardsword
6 feet, Greatsword.

Anything bigger would probably be unwieldable by your average human.

Woah, there. 4 feet for a longsword? That's 48 inches. Assuming we're using the single-hand sword definition of a longsword (which seems to be relegated to D&D), try more around the area of 33-40 inches. 4 feet is well into the realm of the two-handed sword, and five feet is relatively unheard of.

Six foot 'swords' were not really used as weapons, from what I've heard and read, but more of a device for opening up pike formations, like a giant lever. You certainly couldn't get off more than one swing with it before leaving yourself wide open if you were to actually employ one in combat.

I've also heard that they were half-sworded and used like pikes themselves, which also makes some sense. Half-swording, for those who don't know, is keeping one hand on the handle (the left for a right-handed person) and the other on the ricasso of the blade, which was generally fairly long for swords designed for such handling.

The true longswords (like those employed in Talhoffer's Fechtbuch) were not too much longer than bastard swords, this length adjustment mainly for the full accomodation of an extra hand. They also had a fighting style all their own.

To think that being able to wield a longsword can be taught wholly with a single-hand sword is wrong. Longswords employ different guards, move differently, and require different tactics in many cases.

Also, as for weights, bastard swords tend not to exceed 3.5 pounds, and single-hand swords tend not to exceed 3.

[subzerosako]

I have the Heros of Battle book, but it isn't the best for large scale tactics and how to resolve mass unit v mass unit combat. It mainly focus's on the characters and i was wondering if anyone could help me on that. and also, I was wondering if anyone knew where to get the Khopis, the falcatta and the khopesh statistics.

[AtomicKitKat]

I think the Khopesh is from Deities and Demigods, under the Egyptian pantheon.

[LE4dGOLEM]

I've heard that a gauss cannon is just a set of rotating magnets that fires a lump of (whatever) rather fast... How accurate is this? And waht might the v3.5 Stats be?

[Sundog]

Gauss weapons, also known as Linear Accelerators or Railguns, use magnetic acceleration technology to throw a lump of ferrous material (or something wrapped in ferrous material) at high speeds, in a similar way to how a chemically powered gun does. The ring magnets don't need to be rotating, they need to be stacked in a line , so that one grabs the mass and attracts it, then the next one does, then the next and so forth. The more magnets and the more powerful the magnets the faster the "slug" winds up travelling, and provided you can keep the sequencing of the magnets right you can end up with velocities far in excess of anything available to a conventional gun.

There are two problems with it. First, railguns are energy hogs of the first order. Second, all that energy you're using has to go somewhere, and only a tiny fraction of it is transferred to the projectile. The rest escapes as heat, and as tremendous amounts of light - to the point where "light burn" tends to destroy the barrel of the weapon. This is actually a bigger problem with modern attempts to make Linear Accelerator weapons than the power drain is.

As to stats, how big a cannon do you want? I could see an emplacement gun firing osmium projectiles at things in earth orbit and destroying them. On the other hand, a rifle version could be just a little better than a standard sniper rifle. You probably couldn't build a pistol version - barrel length would be too short to accelerate the slug to lethal speeds.

[Ellisthion]

With the rotating magnets idea, you're probably thinking of Half-Life, which is absolute rubbish. Ignore that.
A Gauss gun, or Coil Gun, should not be confused with Railguns, which are different. Among other things, a Railgun provides much more acceleration.

A railgun consists of two parallel, uh, rail, which are magnitised and electrocised and stuff. The heat and electricity from the rails goes into the projectile, which plasmarises (if I remember correctly, of course). A substance in a plasma is highly charged, such that it will electrically held exactly in the middle of the two rails; due to the directional electric field between the rails, a powerful Lorenz force is produced, which will rapidly accelerate any charged particles, such as the ammunition, between the rails. Ferrous material is not required for railgun ammunition, because any plasmarised material is highly ionic. Aluminium and tungten are often used.

Amount of power required: HUGE.
Due to the power requirements, practical railguns, especially for weaponry use, are not currently possible.

The use of a Coil Gun to speed up the ammunition before it enters the Railgun has been suggested, primarily to help prevent the welding of the ammunition to the rails.

As a weapon, there is research into developing a tank-mounted railgun. The sheer speed of the projectile (typically over 12 times sound speed) means that it would be highly effective against modern Reactive Armour, designed to stop explosive, AP shells. A small, personal weapon would be highly unlikely, as the size would restrict the velocity, and the amount of power required would be too much to lug around.

[Sundog]

Actually, Ellisthion, both Railguns and Coilguns are Linear Accelerators, that is, they both function according to the same basic concept. Railguns don't require two rails either; the earliest examples used a single, notched rail and fired a projectile that fitted around the rail and was held in place by the notch. They were, however, less efficient than the dual-rail sysytems (which don't need to fire a plasma, btw; ferrous projectiles work too).

Coil-style Accelerators are the ones normally referred to as Gauss weapons, and the ones we are actually developing. There's about a 50% chance that the next US tank will carry a Gauss gun as it's main armament, according to Jane's.

[LE4dGOLEM]

So If I had a gauss cannon that took up 2x2 squares (10 ft2), that had solar cells and heat --> energy converters (for faster recharging + cooling) what kind of damage, what kind of range might it have?

[Premier]

None. 40 square feet of solar panels could not even supply your house with constant electricity, let alone power a weapon that has LARGE power requirements.

And there's no such thing as a "heat to energy converter", just like there's no such thing as an "energy to another form of energy converter". The term is just meaninglessly vague.

[SpiderBrigade]

None. 40 square feet of solar panels could not even supply your house with constant electricity, let alone power a weapon that has LARGE power requirements.

And there's no such thing as a "heat to energy converter", just like there's no such thing as an "energy to another form of energy converter". The term is just meaninglessly vague.
Well, not at this progress level anyway. I think what he's going for is some mechanism to reduce the inneficiency that Sundog described: solar panels to capture the light, and some technobabble device to convert the heat back into battery power.
It'd still be really inefficient.
Leadgolem: Look into the d20 future section of the SRD (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/article/msrd). Until we have lots of railguns around to base rules on, they're essentially magic tech, like plasma weapons or lightsabers. If you really want a gauss cannon in your game, talk to your DM to see what he'll allow.

[sktarq]

Okay...these things are amazingly ineffiecent power wise...unless the military are playing with order of magnitude better magnetic coils then I've seen in the research labs at school (which is quite possible even if the place did do nobel prize work) then I don't see a magnetic driven projectile coming out anytime soon...as mentioned before these things produce gobs of heat because the amount of current you need to generate the magnetic fields is just icky...(actually you generally hear about superconductors when you hear about these things-there is a reason for that)...Personally I've heard of the plasma versions mostly being used in coil varieties also plasma pushing a cermaic block at least once (and the shape of the block prevented the plasma from going everywhere...As for toting one about? ermmm mini nuclear power plant would be a good place to start....

and there are heat to energy converters....not very useful in anything like "normal" conditions but are used to power some satalites-some involve generating convection currents but theree are other ways too-They get the heat most comonly from radioactive pellets-Cassini uses this for example (plutonium if memory serves)

[Ellisthion]

If you chuck an anchor over a power line and let it charge capacitors for a few days, you might have enough power for one shot. Solar is out of the question.

The problem with a projectile simply notched on is friction. This, of course, dramatically reduces effectiveness.

[Sundog]

Yeah, that's why they abandoned that design. Ring and Dual-Rail systems suspend the projectile, so the friction is greatly reduced.

Even so, with the most powerful current versions atmospheric friction is becoming a problem, reducing efficiency still further.

I seriously doubt Linear Acceleration technology will ever supercede chemguns in atmosphere.

[Nyrath]

Not likely, if it comes to outer space combat at some point however it will rule the field as it where.

[Spuddly]

"heat to energy converter"

Fission powerplants, steam, coal, combustion engines.... All take heat and use it to move gases (or water) that drive pistons that turn turbines that generate electricity.

There are certain alloys of metal that when heated up become slightly electric.

Here's a link:
www.iop.org/EJ/article/0022-3727/38/5/017/d5_5_017.pdf

[Kelmon]

Original rapiers were a great deal larger, heavier, and slower than what are used in modern fencing. They were created specifically for nobility to wear around, because they couldn't be seen carrying a low-class weapon. So they had to be more impressive than a longsword. For awhile they got huge; longer and heavier than any actual working sword, and they had fancy hilts. Ooooh. Aaaaaah. Over time, when these nobles actually got it into their heads that they had to *use* these silly things for something other than impressing the ladies with their studly way of wearing them on their hips, they got lighter, faster, and shorter. They still had an edge though. Eventually, edge-work became so gauche that rapiers were considered 'lower-class' weapons, and the smallsword took over.

I wonder where you got his from?
Rapiers were the answer to the increasing stability of armour and their imperviousnes to slashing attacks. It started with the hand-and-a-half (or bastard-)swords that changed from a flat edge and a small triangular point to a blade form that was a single triangle. Thus thrusting became more important than slashing. To be able to control the thrusting moves you need to stabilize the bald with one finger *over* the sword guard. To avoid damage to the wielder's fingers many people who adopted the "new" fighting style fitted their sword with small rings into which to pt their index finger - just above the guard. Soon afterwards there were two identical rings on either side - then a large oval shape which survived in all rapier forms to come, that encompasses a part of the blade's ricasso.
Of course the blade changed too, but mostly for civil combat - the military rapier had only a slightly thinner blade than the older bastard sword. Civil blades were much thinner than their military counterparts.
The ring-hilts, basket-hilts etc. formed because due to the thrusting style of fighting the hand was no longer sufficiently protected by the rapier's guard - so over time more and more rings, bands. etc. were added.

Rapiers surely did not come to be as toys for nobles, although nobles often could afford impressively ornamented versions of the "field" blades. In renaissance europe carrying a rapier was never seen as being lower class, it was the right of nobles, citizens - and students (at least in germany, but probably in most or all european countries).
I must admit that i don't know the term "smallsword" - is this the very lightweight weapon that strongly resembles modern foils?

[Edmund]

Rapiers were the answer to the increasing stability of armour and their imperviousnes to slashing attacks. It started with the hand-and-a-half (or bastard-)swords that changed from a flat edge and a small triangular point to a blade form that was a single triangle.

I think you're confusing the rapier with the Oakeshott Type XV sword, which is the only sword that really 'looks' like a triangle, aside from the sidesword which is a sword that certainly benefitted from cutting.

You may also be confusing it with the Tuck, some types of which which had a triangular cross-section, but were really more of stiff pointy lengths of hilted steel rather than true swords.

Also, bastard swords evolved not from a desire to focus on the thrust but from the rise of plate armour and the discarding of shields. With shields being dropped, a sword that was usable with one or both hands was favoured by well-armoured horsemen, knights and kings.


To be able to control the thrusting moves you need to stabilize the bald with one finger *over* the sword guard. To avoid damage to the wielder's fingers many people who adopted the "new" fighting style fitted their sword with small rings into which to pt their index finger - just above the guard.

You don't 'need' to, but it does give you better point control, despite the fact that it does take away some of the brunt from your slash, there were early attempts to rectify the problem of the exposed finger with finger rings (see the Arsenal of Alexandria and the Oakeshott type XIX).


Soon afterwards there were two identical rings on either side - then a large oval shape which survived in all rapier forms to come, that encompasses a part of the blade's ricasso. Of course the blade changed too, but mostly for civil combat - the military rapier had only a slightly thinner blade than the older bastard sword.

They also didn't emply the same style of fighting. A hand-and-a-half sword and a rapier certainly do not use the same fighting style, especially with the rise of guns and death of chivalry. And what 'oval shape' do you refer to?


The ring-hilts, basket-hilts etc. formed because due to the thrusting style of fighting the hand was no longer sufficiently protected by the rapier's guard - so over time more and more rings, bands. etc. were added.

It's more than just that. The increased flexibility of rapiers made them much more difficult to bind with. Also, the fighting style in general demanded much less movement of the arm and more movement of the wrist, leaving a relatively stationary target in the form of the hand.


Rapiers surely did not come to be as toys for nobles, although nobles often could afford impressively ornamented versions of the "field" blades. In renaissance europe carrying a rapier was never seen as being lower class, it was the right of nobles, citizens - and students (at least in germany, but probably in most or all european countries).

In renaissance europe, carrying a rapier wasn't really seen as much of *any* class. The renaissance was really the first era in which civilians could freely walk around fully armed and not be arrested. Though there was, of course, significant difference between the 'cavalier' rapiers and the 'civilian' rapiers, as mentioned.


I must admit that i don't know the term "smallsword" - is this the very lightweight weapon that strongly resembles modern foils?

Sort of. Smallswords were weapons that developed in the 18th century, and gained popularity in France as gentleman's weapons over the rapier-and-dagger fighting that remained common in Spain and Italy.

They were purely, and I mean *purely* thrusting weapons, often having triangular cross sections, and were rather flexible and lightweight, but certainly deadly.

[Raum]

Rapiers were the answer to the increasing stability of armour and their imperviousnes to slashing attacks.

Actually rapiers didn't become a common weapon until after firearms had made wearing of full armor uncommon. They would have been extremely ineffective against someone in a full set of heavy armor.

[Edmund]

EDIT: Got schooled by SKTARQ :P I'm on a roll!

EDIT: Got schooled by Mephibosheth ;D

EDIT: Seperating Macedonians from Greeks out of hindsight.


Don't worry, I meant no particular indignation. : ) In fact, I whole-heartedly agree with you on one aspect, the Mongols are NOT the best military in history. Frankly I doubt there is any one specific "BEST ARMY EVER" as some would wish their pet army to be. Every strategy and tactic had its place and purpose.

I mainly get a kick out of the Mongols for their stunning progress in five actually non-Mongol specific criteria:

1) Commandability: Were the troops composed of professional quality men who obeyed their military superior's orders and could execute those orders precisely and faithfully?

2) Good Officer-Corp: Was their leadership of excellent quality and their performance of a professional consistency?

3) Versatility of Strategy and Tactics: Self-explanatory

4) Stability of Command: Was the leadership solidly entrenched? Did these people constantly rebell or betray their rulers/leaders out of political or religious strife?

5) Longevity of their Work: How long did their conquered empires last? Centralized or not, did their military efforts leave a legacy?


Other stuff goes down here.


Since our dear Shiyuan has not been present for an extended period, but asked for someone to do the Mediaeval & Dark Ages Eurasian powers, I've decided to start taking up the challenge. The Middle Ages (around 1066 to 1453) is my particular era of specialty, so I'm going to be schooled fairly easily. Bear with me.

I consider the Dark Ages around 500

We'll start with the Dark Ages and the Anglo-Saxons:

1) Commandability: Maybe.

2) Good Officer-Corp: Generally, yes.

3) Versatility of Strategy and Tactics: No. Effective, but rigid. (pun intended)

4) Stability of Command: Yes. While in the later years there was some upheaval, and there was frequently assassinations, the command was never really compromised.

5) Longevity of their Work: No. Huscarls, shield walls, and such were neither uniquely Saxon, nor did they endure beyond the early Middle Ages. (I emphasise that shield walls are different than spearmen with shields arranged in a long line.)

Dark Ages Byzantines:

1) Commandability: Yes. Though non-Greek/Romans were used more during the later part, they were still of good quality.

2) Good Officer-Corp: Yes.

3) Versatility of Strategy and Tactics: Yes.

4) Stability of Command: Yes

5) Longevity of their Work: Yes. Arguably, about 1000 years of empire. Also, they were probably the first army to actively include a unit of medics.

(Danish) Vikings:

1) Commandability: Yes While their tactics basically involved surprise raids, when brought into open warfare, the Danes were good soldiers to command.

2) Good Officer-Corp: No. Sadly, the Danes had fairly bad lower officers, and often they didn't have one to speak of because their numbers were often too small to need one.

3) Versatility of Strategy and Tactics: No.

4) Stability of Command: No.

5) Longevity of their Work: Yes. Empires lasted for a good period of time.

Now on to the Middle Ages!

Mediaeval Byzantines

1) Commandability: Not as much. Over eager troops often posed problems, as well as the use of non-Greeks

2) Good Officer-Corp: Yes

3) Versatility of Strategy and Tactics: Yes That is, when they properly employed the tactics set out in the earlier manuals. Sadly, at events like Manzikert, the manuals were ignored.

4) Stability of Command: Sort of This was true at the start, but it lessened in the 13th century with the ravaging of Constantinople and the rebellion of the Bulgarians, but returned afterwords

5) Longevity of their Work: No While, culturally, they had extensive work, their empire was dissolving over a period of some four-hundred years.

Mediaeval Russia (988-1478)

1) Commandability: Yes. Both the Varangians sent to the Byzantines (early on) and the Boyars and common infantry of Russia were easy to command, as shown in battles such as that at the Neva River, Kulikovo, etc.

2) Good Officer-Corp: Yes. The more complex tactics (especially in river battles) of both early and late Russians implies good officer-corp.

3) Versatility of Strategy and Tactics: Yes A combination of Western and Eastern influences created a varied style of warfare, using different tactics for different peoples.

4) Stability of Command: Earlier, yes. After invasion of the Golden Horde, the political cracks that had begun to appear earlier finally shattered the Kievan empire, though within the individual principalities the command was fairly stable.

5) Longevity of their Work: Yes The Muscovite empire in particular lasted for an extended time (1917 or still existing, depending on who you ask). Also, the quicker adoption of (small arms) gunpowder and earthworks fortifications set a base for the Westerners.


And that's all for today, folks! Let me know if you have any problems with my assertions and I'll be happy to debate them with you. Anyone who wants to help me with the Dark Ages and certain Mediaeval regions (like Scandinavia, the HRE and the various Italians -Venetians, Genoese, Pisans, Pavians, etc. The tactics are fairly the same, but I don't know much about them otherwise-)

One other thing I'd like to mention is that I'm intending on separating the Crusading Orders as their own culture.

[Edmund]

Part two of the Mediaeval Army Assessment.

First:

The English

Now, before we begin, I must note that the English are a unique case because their commanders were extremely inconsistent. They had some excellent generals (Richard I), and some awful ones (Edward II for example) who used very different tactics, so I will do the assessment with a presumption of a good general

1) Commandability: Yes.

2) Good Officer-Corp: Yes.

3) Versatility of Strategy and Tactics: Yes. While they are famous for their mass longbows, they also used tactics such as flaming naptha, cavalry charges, and skirmishers.

4) Stability of Command: No. While the Plantagenets were always in power, there were many, many revolts, especially in the 14th century (Thomas of Lancaster, The Peasants' revolt, etc.)

5) Longevity of their Work: Yes. Wales is still an English possession, and Ireland was English territory for an awfully long time (Arguably, the Irish are more English than the Scots)

Now, the French

1) Commandability: No. While valorous and skilled, French soldiers were far too often over-eager and undisciplined.

2) Good Officer-Corp: No.

3) Versatility of Strategy and Tactics: No

4) Stability of Command: Yes

5) Longevity of their Work: Yes.

The Castilians

1) Commandability: Yes

2) Good Officer-Corp: Yes

3) Versatility of Strategy and Tactics: No

4) Stability of Command: No

5) Longevity of their Work: Yes

[Belkarseviltwin]

The largest sword used in battle was that used by Northern Indian knights in the medieval period. It was between ten and twelve feet long, and was used as both sword and lance.

It seems almost unbelievable that this thing could actually be used on the ground, but some fairly reliable historical documents indicate that it was indeed so used. It must be remebered that the concept of heroic personal combat in battle remained for a long time in India, with battles often becoming a series of duels, so presumably this was between two similarly equipped people.

The heaviest hand weapon I know of is the Grand Maul, a sixty pound ball of steel on the end of a ten foot steel pole. However, this was as much a siege tool as a weapon, and probably not used much in open battle.
OK, here's my 2 wooden rubles:
Largest Sword: I think that 12-foot Indian sword was actually built to be used by an elephant. You may well be wondering what I mean, but there are stories of an elephant being trained to wield an oversized sword with its trunk. Of course, it had no technique, but it was almost unstoppable (it was finally killed, in one instance, by a Sikh hero who drove a lance through its skull).
Heaviest weapon: I've heard of something called a Pek Kwar Silver Hammer, which weighed 40 lbs.
Longest Spear: The Macedonian Sarissa reached 18 feet.

[Edmund]

Part three:

The Swiss

While the Swiss didn't exactly become conquering giants, their mercenaries were widely very widely used so they deserve mention

1) Commandability: Yes

2) Good Officer-Corp: Yes

3) Versatility of Strategy and Tactics: No

4) Stability of Command: Yes

5) Longevity of their Work: No. Though pike squares became popular, they were neither a sweeping innovation nor very long lasting.

The Seljuk Turks

1) Commandability: No.

2) Good Officer-Corp: No.

3) Versatility of Strategy and Tactics: No

4) Stability of Command: Yes

5) Longevity of their Work: No

The Ottomans

1) Commandability: Yes

2) Good Officer-Corp: Yes

3) Versatility of Strategy and Tactics: No

4) Stability of Command: No

5) Longevity of their Work: Yes

The Ayyubid (Saladin and post-Saladin) Egyptians

1) Commandability: Yes

2) Good Officer-Corp: Yes

3) Versatility of Strategy and Tactics: No

4) Stability of Command: Yes

5) Longevity of their Work: No

The Crusading Orders

1) Commandability: Yes

2) Good Officer-Corp: Yes

3) Versatility of Strategy and Tactics: No

4) Stability of Command: Yes

5) Longevity of their Work: Sorta Neither the Templars nor the Hospitallers contributed greatly to any long-held territories, but the Teutonic Knights and the innumerable Orders in Spain contributed to the expansion of German territory and the Reconquista, respectively.

[Dhavaer]

I've seen a lot of good information on long/short/bastard swords, but how were scimitars used?

[Darnon]

I've seen a lot of good information on long/short/bastard swords, but how were scimitars used?

Slashing, basically, since they were single-edged and the curve allowed for more of the blade to slice into the flesh.

[Edmund]

Slashing, basically, since they were single-edged and the curve allowed for more of the blade to slice into the flesh.

Not only that, really, but specialising in use from horseback, making it popular with any army that primarily used horses... Which is ironic, because Napoleonic Cuirassiers used straight swords. Go figure.

[Fhaolan]

Not only that, really, but specialising in use from horseback, making it popular with any army that primarily used horses... Which is ironic, because Napoleonic Cuirassiers used straight swords. Go figure.

There are three different ways of using a weapon from horseback. The first is the stabbity attack (technical term ;)) Lances, spears, and straight swords are really good at this. Doing this with a curved weapon is less accurate, and torques your wrist somewhat. However, with a straight weapon you have to be prepared to drop it and draw another, because once it's stuck in a target getting it out again while on horseback is a real pain.

The second is a slashing attack. Curved weapons are better at this. Resist the urge to 'clothesline' a target with a sword, or even worse swing a sword forward at a target when charging with a horse. At best you will lose the sword. At worst you will blow your wrist. Trust me on this. I've seen it happen time and time again when one of our horsepeople hits the wooden stanchion the lettuce-head is on instead of the lettuce. Curved weapons take that hit a bit better than the straight sword, but the best hit is backhanding the target as you pass by.

And the third is the crushing attack. This is where the charge failed. You're now up on the horse, striking downwards at the targets, which may be wearing steel helms, or smashing at fellow horsepeople who will very likely be wearing armor. Without the force of the charge, all you have is the strength of your arm to crack their armor. This means a heavy sword, either curved or straight. Honestly however, axes, maces, etc. are the best for this.

So, which is best? It all depends on how your battles tend to go. If your battles involve a lot of fast ride-by attacks where you can swerve, get through and past your targets, curved swords win. If your battles end up with your charge making contact and then getting bogged down in masses of foot and other horse, start with a lance and go to a straight sword. If you're regularly dealing with armored targets, get yourself a good horseman's axe.

There is such a thing as a 'stabbing axe'. This is a heavy horseman's axe with a blade that curves up into a long sharp point. It has the advantages of a curved weapon for slashing, the point is directly in front of the haft making it a good stabbity weapon, and it has the weight to do the crushing blows against armor. The problem is, it's heavy, awkward, and slow. Looks dangerous, though. I have one of these, reproduced from a 15th century Scandinavian weapon, I believe.

[Edmund]

There are three different ways of using a weapon from horseback. The first is the stabbity attack (technical term ;)) Lances, spears, and straight swords are really good at this. Doing this with a curved weapon is less accurate, and torques your wrist somewhat. However, with a straight weapon you have to be prepared to drop it and draw another, because once it's stuck in a target getting it out again while on horseback is a real pain.

This is true, but is sort of irrelevant to the question, since it specifically asked about how scimitars were historically used.

Also, anyone nuts enough to use a slashing sword as the primary weapon in a charge deserves a busted wrist.
Lances were always the primary weapon, but they'd get stuck in the target after the initial charge, so really the sword was the weapon, often, that would cause a greater bodycount (in the case of a Western Knight, at least), but the lance was the weapon that would kill anyone if it hit them. There are many cases of jousts (not tournament jousts, but as prelude to battle) where the opposing horsemen killed each other on their lances. One such was at Kulikovo.

How heavy is your pointy axe? 2-3 pounds? 3-and-a-half?

[Sundog]

Also, anyone nuts enough to use a slashing sword as the primary weapon in a charge deserves a busted wrist.


Except - Sabres are fundamentally slashing weapons, and by the end of the use of swords in combat (roughly, the introduction of repeating pistols for cavalry, or around the US Civil War period) Sabres were the standard Cavalry blade in all European and American armies.

[Shiyuan]

Except - Sabres are fundamentally slashing weapons, and by the end of the use of swords in combat (roughly, the introduction of repeating pistols for cavalry, or around the US Civil War period) Sabres were the standard Cavalry blade in all European and American armies.


Ahh... true, but by that time, cavalrymen did not wear the same heavy armor that would've made slashing charges impractical in the past. The most such men wore were cuirasses, or steel breastplates, which were easily bypassed if the cavalrymen aimed his sabre at the enemy's arm or other exposed fleshy part. If anything, most troopers of the period where the cavalry sabre was in use wore no traditional armor against melee weapons.

Yes, people, I am back. Midterms are over, I am alive, and I am ornery. : )

[Fhaolan]

This is true, but is sort of irrelevant to the question, since it specifically asked about how scimitars were historically used.

True. I was commenting on your reply rather than the original question. Just bringing up the point that the Cuirassiers used 'straight sabres' rather than curved ones because that suited their combat style. Straight sabres came in and out of fashion several times. The sabre Patton designed was straight, and suited the type of cavalry tactics he prefered.


Also, anyone nuts enough to use a slashing sword as the primary weapon in a charge deserves a busted wrist.

Ah, but here in lies the issue. Lances are only good for one charge, unless something odd happens. I am aware that several battles had 'reform and charge' events take place. Which meant either you had to have someone run up to you and hand you a second lance... or you used your 'secondary' weapon on this next charge. This was more common with later-period light cavalry rather than the heavy-armored-knight-types, but it did happen.


How heavy is your pointy axe? 2-3 pounds? 3-and-a-half?
Good question. Unfortunately, I don't have an accurate answer as I don't have a scale at the moment to weigh it. (They do get a mite twitchy when you try to weigh your weapons with the grocery-store produce scale... ;) ) However, it produces approximately the same amount of torque at the grasping point as a good-sized wood axe would even though the handle is shorter than the wood axe's. I'm under the impression that the original it was based off of is a bit lighter than that, but I don't know by how much as I've not had the opportunity to handle the original. I'm capable of using it one-handed, but I've trained specifically with it and have learned a few tricks that make it more manageable.

[Ooooh. After posting this, I realized something. I can actually make a game-related comment! Yay! If I was to rule on this stabbing axe as a D&D weapon, I would have it operate using the model of the bastard sword. I have taken an exotic weapon proficiency in the stabbing axe to make it a one-handed weapon. :) )

[Edmund]

Ah, but here in lies the issue. Lances are only good for one charge, unless something odd happens. I am aware that several battles had 'reform and charge' events take place. Which meant either you had to have someone run up to you and hand you a second lance... or you used your 'secondary' weapon on this next charge. This was more common with later-period light cavalry rather than the heavy-armored-knight-types, but it did happen.

It also happened with other types of cavalry, but often they would not use their swords as a weapon as much as their horses, I'd say.

Of course, we could be completely wrong about the wrist-wrench bit and the sword was actually fairly good on the charge, or a wooden poll isn't a very good substitute for a human, or they're just doing it wrong...

Also: Welcome back Shiyuan.

[Gorbash Kazdar]

Ah, but here in lies the issue. Lances are only good for one charge, unless something odd happens. I am aware that several battles had 'reform and charge' events take place. Which meant either you had to have someone run up to you and hand you a second lance... or you used your 'secondary' weapon on this next charge. This was more common with later-period light cavalry rather than the heavy-armored-knight-types, but it did happen.
This is inaccurate. A properly made combat lance is a very heavy weapon, with a strong wooden shaft and a spearhead attached so that it would not break off. Tourney lances were hollowed specifically so they would break on impact to make scoring easier - and as pointed out, even those could kill. Combat lances could be used multiple attacks, if the cavalary could maintain a proper line and managed not to become embroiled in a melee after the initial charge. If they did, most would cast away the heavy and unwieldy lance in favor of a shorter arm - generally a sword - they could use with greater speed and dexterity. Plus, if an opponent got past the point of a lance, the lancer would be in trouble, so lancers would definitely carry a backup weapon.

The sticking problem was also true, but can be overcome if you can continue past the opponent - if you let the lance pivot in your grip properly, it will pull itself free as you go by. Same with a sword if you use it to stab in a charge. Lances were abandoned because they stopped being effective - they were heavy and unwieldy, a musket with a bayonet could match its reach, they couldn't break infantry squares with them, they got tossed away if another cavalry unit armed with swords got in close, they made shooting carbines a pain... in the end, the weapon became ineffective and in fact interfered with more advantageous weapons that cavalrymen could bring to bear. The sword, though, remained useful since it could be put aside with less trouble so cavalry could use carbines, and still gave the cavalryman an effective melee weapon, especially against their increasingly lightly armored foes.

The horse-as-weapon argument is somewhat true... a charging horse does not particularly like to run into or over things at speed, especially not things with holding pointy sticks. In melee, though, horses were dangerous since they could kick and bite, and gave the rider a height advantage. However, on the flip side, needing to control the horse might distract the rider in battle as well. It took practice to fight on horseback well, and many "cavalry" groups fought as dragoons most of the time - that is, they rode to the battle and dismounted to fight.

As for sword styles, one tactic when using a straightsword would be simply use it like a lance or spear - hold it out straight and stab into the opponent. You could stab with most sabers in this manner as well.

[Sundog]

If I recall correctly, the last users of lances were the British/Sepoy Cavalry Regiments on the Indian Northern Frontier. They retained the use of light lances due to their usefulness against the Pashtun tribesmen who were the Britishers' main enemy there.

[Fhaolan]

The sticking problem was also true, but can be overcome if you can continue past the opponent - if you let the lance pivot in your grip properly, it will pull itself free as you go by.

I've experimented with this, and you're right. Combat lances do indeed last repeated uses, and the problem is the sticking issue. I've had some fun with melons, sandbags, some ballistic geletan a friend of mine managed to procure, and some pieces of miss-cut plate that was supposed to be armor. Providing you don't actually puncture the armor, you can pivot the lance as you ride by. If you're holding it right. If you have the lance crossing over the horse's neck, as you see in 'jousting', you bring the end of the lance up, pass under it, and pull the lance out as the target pivots around. Don't 'couch' the lance under your arm though, you'll clothesline yourself. Ask me how I know. If you're spearing someone on the samer side of the horse as you're holding the lance, you have to hold the lance very oddly, running along the top of your forearm, so the end of the lance swings up unimpeded when it hits the target. There's apparantly a horse-sport based on this. Don't know the name of it, but it involves spearing some kind of mesh sphere and then tossing it towards a goal. My riding instructor mentioned it once. Or you can do it like the Normans did and overhand the spear. This makes the twist far more natural, but holding the spear aloft like this is more effort of course.

If you actually puncture the armor though, you'll probably need to let go of the lance. The spear-head gets bound up in the twisting metal and doesn't pull out nicely.Then you end up with a human-weight load on the end of a spear trying to drag you out of the saddle. Not fun. Especially when the horse interprets this weight shift as a 'turn' command. Again, ask me how I know. :)

Mind you, I don't have a proper military saddle to do these experiments with. That might make a difference. Also, I'm not an expert horseperson, I'm just some weird guy who's wife lets him ride her horse occasionally. Well... who's wife lets him fall off her horse often. :)

[TheThan]

Dhavaer I've seen a lot of good information on long/short/bastard swords, but how were scimitars used?

Ok first you have to be a chaotic good drow ranger, with two magical scimitars…. Oh wait, hehe this is reality ;D
Well my experience with scimitars and sabers tells me that they are ferocious slashing weapons against unarmored enemies.

Since we’re on the topic of lances, I once saw a painting of a knight running another through with a lance on foot, I think it had to do with the legend of King Arthur. This got me thinking about the effectiveness of lances/spears/other polearms on foot, particularly in a one on one situation. Does anyone have any insight into this?

[Fhaolan]

Since we’re on the topic of lances, I once saw a painting of a knight running another through with a lance on foot, I think it had to do with the legend of King Arthur. This got me thinking about the effectiveness of lances/spears/other polearms on foot, particularly in a one on one situation. Does anyone have any insight into this?


Early-period lances and late-period combat lances are just spears. Long and heavy spears, but spears none-the-less. Late-period tournament lances have all sorts of gee-gaws hanging off of them such as bells to protect your hand, parts that have large diameter to be able to 'couch' the lance with more authority, sometimes hollow tubes with pasta in them to make a more spectacular break when contact is made, etc. Basically lances stopped being spears when jousting became a sport rather than combat training. Calvalry spears were still being called 'lances' in the American Civil War I believe, and looked almost exactly like early-period Norman spear/lances rather than the tournament lances everyone's familiar with.

One-on-one polearm combat was a very popular thing at tournaments and at judicial duels. Pollaxes were one of the few weapons that were truely threatening to someone in full plate.

Spears for one-on-one combat is very common. Vikings, Greeks, and many African tribes would use a spear in one hand and with shield in the other.

Oops, I'd continue, but I have to help someone move today. I'll be back later. :)

[Edmund]

This got me thinking about the effectiveness of lances/spears/other polearms on foot, particularly in a one on one situation. Does anyone have any insight into this?


If you mean like in a judicial duel, 'lances' were not used, per se, but poll-axes definitely were, and their use is shown in Talhoffer's Fechtbuch. However! Lances were used on foot, especially by the English during the reign of Edward III. The English would basically have two lines of archers forming something of a V, with men-at-arms and dismounted knights using their lances as spears in the middle, at the 'bottom' of the V. This tactic only worked on the defencive, and the bows had to have something in front of them (like a ditch or a row of stakes) but it was very effective.

There wasn't much use of the spear as a one-on-one weapon as far as I know-- more of a commoner's armament. Using a pike or a long spear in two hands, though, would be extremely effective. Spears can engage and disengage from binds very easily when wielded with two hands. They also have impressive reach and are rather hard to lop the heads off of, especially if steel langets were included in their making.

One-handed, they lose their maneuverability and some of their reach, but they are then used in conjunction with a shield and still quite deadly.

The spear was never really discontinued as a weapon, arguably showing itself in the modern age as the rifle bayonet. Of course, if you don't consider the addition of a bayonet to a rifle the creation of a spear, then they've died in up-to-date armies.

[Sundog]

My favourite comment regarding a bayonet:

"It is true that with a bayonet on the end you have turned a rifle, a twentieth century weapon, into a spear, a weapon from thousands of years before Christ. But if you have no bayonet, and are engaged in hand to hand combat, then all you have is a club - a weapon more primitive still."

- Attributed to Field Marshal Blamey, Head of the Australian Military, WWII.

[MaN]

Anyone have any practical knowledge of the agny-astra? It is basically a quiver filled with rocket-propelled arrows (pointing out) from the illustration I've seen. The warrior is holding it under his arm almost like a football.
I'm assuming the arrows all fired simultaneously or in rapid sequence. I'm also assuming it was only good against massed troops. How accurate and effective was this contraption?

[Spuddly]

I've read that those things (which I think are a Chinese invention) were more bottle rockets than dangerous projectiles, used to make lots of smoke and noise to spook the Mongolians' horses.

[MaN]

I knew that the Chinese used fireworks and such in that fashion, I just assumed that if they bothered to put arrowheads on the things they were meant to be serious weapons.
When I first heard about it, I figured they were something more along the lines of those Estes hobby rockets one of my 'friends' fired at me when I was but a wee lad. Damn, that thing hurt !
Ah well, there goes that idea. :'(

[LE4dGOLEM]

Not sure If this quite counts a weapons/armour question but still. Pykrete was discovered by... erk... someone in WWII... and because it is so much stronger than regular ice (and indeed, a lot of things) and melts so much slower, it was planned for use as building material for ships. However, by the time enough was made for an acceptably sized fleet, the war had ended. But how would those ships (and other forms of weaponry) do? Does anyone here have any experience with pykrete? If so, how does it compare to regular ice, and other materials, such as plastics and metal? what hardness/hitpoints per inch might it have in 3.5e?

[Gorbash Kazdar]

Pykrete was created by Geoffrey Pyke, for whom it was named. The most (in)famous proposal for the use of the material was to build an unsinkable super-carrier, a project referred to by the code name "Habbukuk." Tests were made in Canada that showed the idea to be viable, but US officials weren't convinced, and felt the ships wouldn't be ready before 1945 - at which point they expected the coventional carrier fleet would be sufficient to render the super-carrier unnecessary. The British were more receptive, but also abandoned the project due to cost; serious study ceased in 1943 - they never actually went ahead with full-scale production, so it would be misleading to say the war ended before they had enough pykrete; rather, the project ended before they even attemped to build a super-carrier.

A magical version of the concept appeared in Harry Turtledove's "World at War" series, which is a fictionalized retelling of the Second World War in a fantasy setting.

There's a Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete) on the stuff; this site (http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/1928/pykrete.htm) examines in greater detail the strength of pykrete. A Google search will pull up other good resources as well.

[LE4dGOLEM]

So Britain AND the US quit the idea because water and sawdust and a big freezer weere all too expensive?

Army Intelligence at work! ;)

[Gorbash Kazdar]

Water and sawdust and refridgeration for a Habbukuk type super-carrier would have cost around £6 million. The funds were simply not available due to more realistic WWII projects. In more recent times, there have been suggestions by other groups to build pykrete super-ships for a variety of reasons, but none have gone forward yet.

[Edmund]

It makes me wonder if a regular carrier made of pykrete would be any cheaper... Hmmmmmmm...

[Kevlimin_Soulaxe]

Since I have already seen a firearm question (gauss cannon), hear goes:

I would like to know what a "Zero Gauge" shotgun should do. Of course, to know exactly what that would even be requires a little more firearm knowledge than I have. I am pretty sure gauge used to be a kind of ratio for shot : powder, but not anymore.

So that brings up this question: How do they define gauge nowadays? 20 is comparably soft, 12 has enough recoil to give you a little testosterone boost, and a 10 gauge hurts. I have shot a 10 three times, and lemme tell you, I do not want to do it again anytime soon. An 8 might be an elephant gun type thing.

I understand that this would probably have to be more of a cannon than a gun, maybe mounted on a humvee or summat. Y'all may discuss the actually feasability and functionality of such a weapon, but I would also like some sort of stat block at least chiseled out.

[Sundog]

A 0-Gauge shotgun would do no damage at all, since there would be no opening in the barrel.

Gauge is, simply,how many lead balls of a particular weight (I forget exactly how much) can be fit into a circle the same diameter as the interior of the barrel.

So, gauge wise, the smallest you could get would be a 1-gauge. I have no idea what the gauge rating is of those dinky little .410 shotguns is, though.

[Gorbash Kazdar]

Actually, Sundog, you're right that 0-gauge wouldn't be possible, but you have it backwards as to why - the smaller the gauge, the larger the barrel and the more powerful the shotgun - a 10 gauge is more powerful than a 12, a 12 more powerful than a 20, and so forth.

This is because gauge is a measurement of how many solid lead spheres could be made, with a diameter equal to the of the interior diameter of the shotgun's barrel, from one pound of lead. So, in the case of a 10 gauge, you can make 10 solid spheres from 1lb of lead with a diameter equal to that of the interior diameter of the barrel. Determining the approximate actual diameter for a gauge can be done with this forumla:

dn = 42.416 mm x n-1/3

The fuill formula is longer and pain to write here. It should be noted that shotguns rarely match the "true" gauge value given, and can vary a fair bit from it in either direction (though usually being larger).

Thus, a 1-gauge would be a huge firearm - the barrel would have an internal diamter over 1.6 inches! There have been weapons this big, but they're called punt guns, not shotguns, and were mounted directly onto boats (punts) for hunting waterfowl commercially. (A 10 gauge is about .777 caliber for comparison.)

The .410 shotguns, btw, are about 67 gauge.

[Sundog]

I bow to your superior knowledge, oh Gorbashy one. I had a feeling I had something out of place when I was writing before, but I wasn't sure what it was.

I would suppose that the numerical value of various kinds of shot is equally arcane? I have NEVER know how that works.
(Hey, sue me. I only shoot rifles...)

[Kevlimin_Soulaxe]

So a 1-gauge/punt gun would fire a 1.6 inch wide pound of lead? Sheet. I am going to toss out 4d12. Too high? Too low?

[Gorbash Kazdar]

Disregard, I'm a moron. :P The lesson as always is not to correct someone unless you're sure you're right.

But punt guns - and shotguns - are technically designed to fire shot, or a bunch of smaller balls of ammunition, in a spread. The closest d20 equivalent would be some form of cone attack with a Reflex save. Punt guns, btw, were eventually outlawed - they could kill an entire flock of waterfowl with a single firing.

Gauge is probably the most arcane measurement used in firearm designation, but the other measurements can be pretty complicated as well. Caliber - a direct measurement of the inside diameter of a firearm barrel expressed in fractions of inches - designations don't always match the actual size of rounds. The well-known .38 caliber, for example, is actually .357 inches in diameter (which is associated with the much more powerful magnum version of the cartridge). And then there's also barrel length expressed as caliber - for example, a battleships guns that are designated as, say, 15"/54 caliber means that the gun has a bore (interior barrel diameter) of 15" and a length of about 810" - or 54 times the bore.

And then there's poundage for cannons, which is determined by taking the weight of a solid lead sphere with the same diameter as the internal diameter of the cannon (sort of a reverse of gauge). So, a cannon that's called a 20-pounder is called this because a solid lead sphere with the same diameter as its bore would weigh 20 pounds. The actual weight of the shot fired from that cannon might be quite different, however.

You can determine the actual bore of a cannon based on the poundage by working with the long version formula for gauge (look here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_%28shotgun%29)).

Firearm and ammunition terminology gets really weird, really fast.

[Sundog]

I understand caliber (I'm actually a pretty good shot with my old .303), what I'm wondering about is the number designation of shotgun shot (like 0:0 or "double ought" buckshot). I would presume it has to do with the number of balls and their size, but I've never understood how the number is derived.

[Gordon]

But punt guns - and shotguns - are technically designed to fire shot, or a bunch of smaller balls of ammunition, in a spread. The closest d20 equivalent would be some form of cone attack with a Reflex save. Punt guns, btw, were eventually outlawed - they could kill an entire flock of waterfowl with a single firing.

Yup. I recall reading that the punt gun and market hunting are why we don't have the Passenger Pigeon anymore. They'd set up the 2 gauge punt gun by the lake, fire off a small pistol-- flock takes off-- fire the punt gun-- entire flock comes back down.

Basically the same reason (minus the punt gun, of course) that the megatheria of prehistory went away.

We ate 'em.

[Gorbash Kazdar]

Buckshot designations have me stymied. I know the terminology, but there doesn't seem to be any correlation beyond that the lower the number, the bigger the buckshot - 4 being smallest and 000 being the largest available. The only thing that makes sense is that, when standard sized buckshot became available, they simply arbitrarily numbered it from 4 down to 1, with 1 being the largest available at that time. Later on, a larger buckshot came into being and was designated 0 so it fit into the existing system. When the need/demand for even larger shot came, they went with 00 and 000 probably on the assumption that negative numbers would be confusing and "more is better" (like the X/XXX movie rating idea). At least, that's what makes sense to me... I'd be interested to hear what the actual origins of the terminology are.

[hr]
There's some argument over whether humans actually hunted the megafauna into extinction - some of the recent paleontological data suggests they died out ahead of human inhabitation in many areas, and other data suggests less large-game hunting by humans of the time period. There was still clearly some going on, though, and without any other reasonable explanation for the extinction of certain megafauna species, it's safe to say we contributed overall and probably did manage to wipe a few out more or less on our own, but others died off due to the climatalogical changes going on and from other factors as much as from overhunting.

And we've certainly hunted a few species into extinction since those times - lions in the Near East, the Steller sea cow, the dodo bird, the passenger pigeon...

[Sundog]

Guess I'll have to do some research. Good thing I'm reasonably good at that, now I just have to find the time...

Human expansion in many areas coincided with either the beginning (in the case of Homo Erectus) or the end (with Homo Sapiens) of the Ice Age. We're talking massive climactic shifts, worldwide.
What hammered which species of Megafauna the worst is completely up in the air. The fossil record just isn't that detailed.

The only species we're reasonably certain was wiped out by Homo Sapiens was our cousin, Homo Neanderthalensis. The pattern is just too damn clear, even if a lot of people don't want to admit it.

[MaN]

Can anyone give me some details on different types of armor. Not plate vs scale type differences, but types like cavalry, infantry, parade, and tourney armor.
Would parade armor be at all effective in battle or would it be like trying to play football in a tuxedo? I assume that armor made for a horseman would be constructed differently (no steel at the crotch or inner thighs maybe) than that for a footman.
How many different 'usage specific' types of armor are there and do they have any real differences that would affect the amount of protection they provide if used in another way.
I don't want the headache of trying to impose rules for this in my game but I have been wondering.

[DeathQuaker]

Can anyone give me some details on different types of armor. Not plate vs scale type differences, but types like cavalry, infantry, parade, and tourney armor.
Would parade armor be at all effective in battle or would it be like trying to play football in a tuxedo?

Ceremonial armor is likely to look cool and allow for more movement but protect less. Nonetheless, if the ceremonial armor still involves metal plates and chain, it probably still would allow some protection. Probably call it a -1 or -2 to armor class but also reduce the armor check penalty.

If by "tourney armor" you mean "what you would wear to a joust," that's half or full plate. If it's a real joust, it should be the real armor (IRL many men were easily killed on the field). Even today in ceremonial jousts, the armor still is meant to protect quite a bit, but perhaps adjust as you would for ceremonial?



I assume that armor made for a horseman would be constructed differently (no steel at the crotch or inner thighs maybe) than that for a footman.

That is true, but OTOH that gets into things that would start getting cumbersome in calculating. "Wait, I'm off my horse so I'm at -2 to AC..." "Crotch exposure penalty" is not something people are going to want to implement in game, I don't think. ;)

Also, technically, AFAIK, a lot of the heavier armors, especially full plate, were intended for horsemen (knights rode into battle on horse). The limited mobility makes one less effective as a melee fighter. Apart from slowed movement and high armor check penalties, we sort of ignore that in D&D for the most part. :) But otherwise you can presume that "cavalry armor" is heavier armor.

Just some thoughts.

[Gorbash Kazdar]

Parade armor tends to be more ornate, with protection sacraficed for looks. With all the little pieces to catch on things, I'd probably leave the check penalty alone but lower the AC.

Tourney armor is actually heavier than battle armor, often by significant amounts. It also is focused on protecting the front over all else, since the strikes will only come from that direction, and they only fight on horseback. In a melee, though, they'd likely use normal armor.

Cavalry armor can be heavier than armor meant for foot, but since knights intended to fight on horseback but needed to be able to fight on foot, I doubt you'll find significant differences on that front - the armor is already a balance between best protection and required mobility.

[Fhaolan]

Can anyone give me some details on different types of armor. Not plate vs scale type differences, but types like cavalry, infantry, parade, and tourney armor.
Would parade armor be at all effective in battle or would it be like trying to play football in a tuxedo? I assume that armor made for a horseman would be constructed differently (no steel at the crotch or inner thighs maybe) than that for a footman.
How many different 'usage specific' types of armor are there and do they have any real differences that would affect the amount of protection they provide if used in another way.
I don't want the headache of trying to impose rules for this in my game but I have been wondering.

Okay, let me think:

Parade/Ceremonial Armor - Fancy, lighter, expensive, less protective and in the case of full plate, less maneuverable. Yes, you could use it in battle, but no-one in their right mind would. Well, except for the King/Emperor who was trying to be a figurehead during a battle, rather than actually fighting.

Tourney Armor - This really only came into existance when 'jousting' became more of a sport than training. In any case, tourney armor is usally much heavier than 'battle' armor, and far less maneuverable. Afterall, you don't need to turn your head or lift your arms above your head in a joust. Sometimes the tourney armor had parts that didn't even attach to the rider. Instead the legs would be permanently attached to the saddle. Once mounted, you'd slide your legs into the sockets. Once shields became... passe, and it was considered gauche to wear a sheild, the armor on that side of the body was increased to the point that the arm was no longer articulated at all, and the gauntlet would lock your hand onto the reigns. The final result was armor that the only thing with articulations was the arm that would hold the lance. The rest of it was bolted onto you once you were up in the saddle. It got really ridiculous with a German clockwork armor... can't remember it's name... that was designed to fly apart when hit, making a more spectacular display for the audence.

Footman's Armor vs Horseman's Armor - Usually you wear a lighter type of armor when you're a ground-pounder. Half-plate if you can afford it. Most ground-pounders are peasant rabble anyway, as anyone with the money to afford full armor can usually afford a horse as well. Except when you get to tourneys and judicial duels. Then you get the rich people in full plate on the ground. Having plate on the inside of the thigh makes riding... interesting. So, unless it's a truely impressive harness, horseman's armor tends to have no armor on the inside of the thigh beyond maybe thick (but soft and flexible) leather, or at best a few small plates attached to the thick leather so it can still move and flex. There's a suit of parade armor made for the Emperor Maximillian that is fully enclosing with no cloth or flesh showing. I believe NASA used it as a model for the articulations on hard-suit spacesuits, but only an Emperor could have afforded this thing and I wouldn't have wanted to ride with it on.

Beyond that, 'specific usage' armor tended to be different types of armor. If you needed lighter armor, you wore half-plate, breast-and-back, or even just a breastplate. Some armor was made so you could use the pieces you needed for the task at hand without having to wear the full harness. The German armors were good for this. Itallian armor, on the other hand, tended to be a bit more interlocked. Breastplate and backplate being hinged together, and having an intregal gorget rather than the free-floating kind common to German armor, etc.

[TheThan]

Ok so this post is a little late, oh well

I happen to know quite a bit about guns, I don’t pretend to be an expert but I have had plenty of experience with a variety of firearms. So I can try to answer any gun-related question asked…

Gorby, the idea of a cone attack makes sense but is not really accurate. See modern shotguns do not have the spread fire effect that is usually associated with them. The key thing to remember is that shot takes time to spread out. It doesn’t exit the barrel in a spread fire pattern. Instead it travels for a ways and spreads out over a distance. The basic idea behind shotguns is to flood a small area with projectiles. Not to spread fire over a huge radius (good luck hitting anything like that), this is why duck hunters don’t blast 25 birds with one shot. Its also why duck and geese hunters don’t have to wait for the birds to get right up to them before they can shoot them. And why bird dogs can sniff out and point out upland game without the hunters having to invest in new dogs every time they go out.
Punt guns were used to nail large number of birds with one shot. Shotguns are not used that way. Also as an aside, I figure if a character was using a blunderbuss type weapon a 30 foot cone would be sufficient, I don’t know a lot about those suckers.

Shotguns have an effective range of about 50 yards. Keep in mind this is a ballpark figure, I don’t actually know the real range of each shotgun out there. (But I have seen several different shotgun gauges knock over steel targets at that range, but not much farther than that.) This is like five times farther than a 30ft cone.
Then there are “chokes”. Chokes are devices that are inserted into the front part of a barrel. As the shot is traveling through the barrel, it spreads out. Chokes force the shot back into a tighter cloud of shot by literally shrinking the interior diameter of the barrel. This increase range and accuracy (yes there is such a thing as accuracy with shotguns).


If you’re interested in shot sizes. The basics goes as follows: the larger the number, the smaller the diameter of the pellets. But for a couple of nifty charts that explains it all better, you all should head on over to http://www.shotgunworld.com/amm.html

Unfortunately I can’t answer the question as to how or why the shot size system came to be. My knowledge is based on my personal experience and what my dad knows (he actually knows much more on the subject than I do, seeing as how his hobby is firearms.)

For a shotgun weapon in dnd I would rule that you can really only reliably hit one target at a time hence no cone attack. But it should to real nice damage, and have a high critical multiplier (something in the neighborhood of x3 or more). Also I would give it a threat range of 18-20. Getting shot by a shotgun is going to be a bit messy. I would rule it takes about a full round to reload and count as a piercing weapon (the shot at least).
Another (and and probably better) idea is to just check out the various shotguns they have in D20 modern.

I hope this clears up some stuff about shotguns.

[Gorbash Kazdar]

Oh, yeah - I know what you're saying about shotguns. It's just hard to model in a d20 system, since there still is a spread, but it's not a cone... and it just gets messy fast in d20. Personally, for d20 I'd give it a better crit multiplier or range than solid rounds, and just ignore most of the other factors so it doesn't get too confusing.

For the cone, I was mainly going with punt guns.

[Edmund]

Parade/Ceremonial Armor - Fancy, lighter, expensive, less protective and in the case of full plate, less maneuverable. Yes, you could use it in battle, but no-one in their right mind would. Well, except for the King/Emperor who was trying to be a figurehead during a battle, rather than actually fighting.

Gorbash is probably right here, actually. Parade armour (like swords for that purpose) was often heavier and more ornate.

You could not use either of these in battle effectively in the least.


Tourney Armor (insert the rest here)

That's all quite right.


Footman's Armor vs Horseman's Armor - Usually you wear a lighter type of armor when you're a ground-pounder. Half-plate if you can afford it. Most ground-pounders are peasant rabble anyway, as anyone with the money to afford full armor can usually afford a horse as well. Except when you get to tourneys and judicial duels. Then you get the rich people in full plate on the ground.

No, no, no. You forget battles like Towton where you have a good number of plate-armoured buggers running about on foot.

In fact, extra-heavily-armoured horsemen began dying out by the time of the perfection of plate armour (Gothic Armour).


Having plate on the inside of the thigh makes riding... interesting. So, unless it's a truely impressive harness, horseman's armor tends to have no armor on the inside of the thigh beyond maybe thick (but soft and flexible) leather, or at best a few small plates attached to the thick leather so it can still move and flex. Yep.


Beyond that, 'specific usage' armor tended to be different types of armor. If you needed lighter armor, you wore half-plate, breast-and-back, or even just a breastplate.

What the heck is 'half-plate' anyway? You could also wear chainmail.


Some armor was made so you could use the pieces you needed for the task at hand without having to wear the full harness. The German armors were good for this.

Says who?


Itallian armor, on the other hand, tended to be a bit more interlocked. Breastplate and backplate being hinged together, and having an intregal gorget rather than the free-floating kind common to German armor, etc.

I agree about the other stuff, but the examples of italian and German armours I've seen seem to be case-specific on hinges or straps.

[TheThan]

Yeah messing with something like shotguns would get messy (in more ways than one ;D).
A 30-foot cone for punt guns…. Well I don’t see why it shouldn’t be used, since they were designed to “spread fire” and hit more than one thing at once.
Ok since it was asked, lets see if we can come up with an approximate damage for a punt gun:
I looked up shotguns in the d20 modern SRD. They have 12 gauge shotguns doing about 2d8 damage, and 10 gauges doing about 2d10. (At least they didn’t give them a cone effect.) Now the difference between the two gauges is about 4 points of damage. So if we scale it, an eight gauge would deal 2d12, a six gauge would deal 2d12+4 (max 28 damage), a four gauge would deal 4d8 (max 32), and a 2 gauge would deal 6d6 (max 36), and the mythical one gauge would deal 5d8 or 4d10 (max 40)

Ok now that we have some numbers, we need to decide what constitutes a punt gun. I figure the easiest way to do this is to take the biggest of the normal shot guns (the eight gauge) and say anything heavier than that is a punt gun. Naturally the bigger punt guns would cost much more money than the smaller ones. So we have the different calibers covered. Lets say anything bigger than a six gauge is considered masterwork.



Edit
stats for a punt gun moved to new thread, sorry for the inconvenience

[LE4dGOLEM]

what happens if you load, into a flintlock rifle, instead of blackpowder, thermite? (if it wasn't a misfire)

[NEO|Phyte]

what happens if you load, into a flintlock rifle, instead of blackpowder, thermite? (if it wasn't a misfire)
assuming you get the thermite to ignite, your gun would most likely melt

[Fhaolan]

No, no, no. You forget battles like Towton where you have a good number of plate-armoured buggers running about on foot.

In fact, extra-heavily-armoured horsemen began dying out by the time of the perfection of plate armour (Gothic Armour).

True, true. I forgot about those examples.



What the heck is 'half-plate' anyway? You could also wear chainmail.

Half-plate is a term I've heard used with reference to a suit of breast-and-back, spaulders, arms, demi-gauntlets, open-faced helm, and no legs. I don't know if it's a common term.



I agree about the other stuff, but the examples of italian and German armours I've seen seem to be case-specific on hinges or straps.


The examples I have access to have German armours being more separate pieces. You can wear the arms without the breastplate or placard because they strap to the gorget. Where on my Itallian white harness the gorget is intregal to the breastplate and so you can't wear the arms without the whole breastplate. For that matter, with the German harnesses I've dealt with, you can wear the placard without the breastplate, where again on my Itallian harness that would be tricky. Some of the people with German suits in my group wear the arms, gorget, and placard and a shirt of mail, and don't bother with the breastplate itself. The Itallian legs I have have greaves permanently attached by rivets, while the German ones I've seen have free-floating greaves. As for the helms, there is the German salet with separate bevor, compared to the all-in-one Itallian bascinet that I own.

Of course, I may be misled by the fact that all the armor I've dealt with in real life are modern reproductions rather than true museum pieces. If all the German and Itallian armors I've seen are built a certain way, maybe they were all modelled off the same two harnesses, and they are not truely typical. :)

[Sundog]

on Today at 9:24am, LE4dGOLEM wrote:
what happens if you load, into a flintlock rifle, instead of blackpowder, thermite? (if it wasn't a misfire)

assuming you get the thermite to ignite, your gun would most likely melt

It would vapourise the gun, and probably the man holding it. Thermite burns at truly EXTREME temperatures, far beyond the melting point of steel. That's what makes it so useful as a controlled demolitions agent; There is almost nothing on earth that can withstand it (certain high-tech silico-ceramics are the only things that come to mind).

[Kevlimin_Soulaxe]

Yeah messing with something like shotguns would get messy (in more ways than one ;D).......Hehe it would be nasty in many kinds of wartime scenarios. Just imagine a wartime siege, or naval combat.



That looks awesome. One question: Could a Huge or Gargantuan monster fire it with it against his shoulder? Carry it around and stuff?

[TheThan]

The implications of a PC using one like a normal long gun (or bazooka for that matter) is probably way unbalancing. I wouldn’t allow it, even if someone was big enough to use it like that I would say its probably a bad idea. I see these suckers being used as turrets mostly. They could be used as a point defense weapon in fortresses and such. They would be really nasty in naval combat.

Now if you let PCs use one like a normal long gun, it’s probably a good idea to give several types of creatures damage reduction Vs ballistic. Just to make something tough enough to challenge the PCs.
I’m thinking of undead and constructs mostly. Just look at most zombie movies. Guns don’t do much to them. With constructs the dm could easily rule that it’s armored enough that the shots from one don’t affect it much. Another idea is simply making armor that is “bullet proof”. They would grant damage reduction Vs ballistic, be expensive as hell, and be close to worthless in melee.
For moving it around, the carriage idea is nice. Also I suppose it would take a few normal sized people to carry one around. If I knew how much they weighed (in real life) it would be easier to figure that one out.

[LE4dGOLEM]

I see. Thermite = not a propellant


There is almost nothing on earth that can withstand it (certain high-tech silico-ceramics are the only things that come to mind).

Saw on Brainiac (Funny "Science" show for people who don't know) That it cant go a through half-inch plate of titanium too :P

Supposing a large enough gun was made, and the fuse was the right length (or, some kind of contact switch) could a thermite "bomb" be fired from a gigantic RPG? what would happen?

[TheThan]

Sounds like you’re thinking of an enhanced napalm bomb of some kind. Really I don’t know much about that kind of stuff, my dad took away my bomb-making book along time ago, and I haven’t seen it since. :'(

[Sundog]

You'd be better off with Greek Fire. That's distillation of Naphtha, it's sticky, burns hot (but not too hot) and is difficult to put out (dry smothering is the only sure way).

It's also simple to make, well within the capabilities of medieval/renaissance alchemists, and self-igniting if mixed with phosphorous. A ceramic bottle of that, used as a grenade, or a lrger one delivered by catapult, will ruin someone's day quite thoroughly.

[Edmund]

I thought Greek fire was a more mysterious substance than a distillation of naphtha. Like naphtha mixed with sulphur, saltpetre, and various other nasty materials.

In fact, I thought people didn't know how to make true Greek Fire in the modern era, and have basically been postulating at its true mixture for a good while, without any significant success. The basic ingredients are sort-of understood, naphtha was one of them, as was sulphur, but the rest is just sort of... Eh.

[Sundog]

So a lot of people thought. Remember, it was "lost technology" for the best part of 2000 years. But from the descriptions that have come down to us, distillate of Naphtha, possibly mixed with Phosphorous, possibly simply with a lit fuse, fits the bill.

Of course, the mediterraneans were inveterate experimenters, so any or all of the other ingrediants could have been tried at one time or another.

[Gorbash Kazdar]

Actually, IIRC, we know of a few recipes that would do what Greek Fire reportedly did... we just don't know which one was actually used at the time.

As a side note (and it's partly my fault I have to mentione it), I think we're trying to keep discussion of converting weapons into d20 stats to a minimum in this thread, leaving it for answering questions about how weapons work in real life, to the best of our knowledge.

[LE4dGOLEM]

^ He's right, go check eric the mad's first post... :S

[TheThan]

Ok I moved the stats on the punt gun, sorry about that. I’ll try to keep my creativity out of this thread.

[Gorbash Kazdar]

Not too much a problem - just that A) this thread does have a particular purpose (to the point I may end up stickying it at some point) and B) your work is likely to be overlooked due to the length and nature of this thread ;)

[LE4dGOLEM]

Okay, the PHB says that one gold peice weighs one third of an ounce, and www.xe.com says that one third of an ounce of gold is (approximately) £89 GBP... surely this cant be right?
If a longsword costs 15 gp, the GBP equivalent is (about) £1,333.88 GBP... How much does a fully functional (IE battle-ready) longsword cost these days... surely not that much?!

[MrNexx]

Okay, the PHB says that one gold peice weighs one third of an ounce, and www.xe.com says that one third of an ounce of gold is (approximately) £89 GBP... surely this cant be right?
If a longsword costs 15 gp, the GBP equivalent is (about) £1,333.88 GBP... How much does a fully functional (IE battle-ready) longsword cost these days... surely not that much?!

Don't think of it like a long sword. Think of it as a rifle. Now, that's still a pretty high price, but gold seems to be a bit more plentiful in D&D, so it must be a bit devalued.

[Gorbash Kazdar]

You're not accounting for inflation ;) The price of gold at in the past was fixed so it could back currency or be currency; today gold's value is determined on the open market in fiat money and fluctuates quite a bit, and some consider it to be over-valued (plus the real purchasing power of a dollar or pound has decreased quite a bit since the start of the 20th century, and even moreso when compared further into the past - the real purchasing power of $10,000 in the mid to late 1800s was worth well over $150,000 or more in today's money).

Comparing modern economics with even real Medieval economics is dicey, because the underpinnings of the systems are very different, and D&D is but a very rough simulation of that, with the focus on game balance as well.

If you look at it within the system - that is to say, that silver pieces are actually the base currency and roughly equivalent to, say, a dollar; based off Profession, even a first level commoner can expect to earn around 7 gold a week. So a longsword is worth a little over two weeks of work from a very low level worker - more than swords cost in today's dollars (but it's much cheaper to make them now) but less than, say, a car or even a decent computer.

[Premier]

Good points, but I daresay you're missing the basic issue:

D&D economics are stupidly irrealistic and crazy and bonkers and broken, no two ways about it. They've always been since the first incarnation of the game until (and including) our own very day. ANY economic system where coins forged entirely of gold are used as the main form of settling day-to-day transactions is automatically disqualified from the "even remotely realistic" category. That's the ultimate and most encompassing answer to the question, even if it's not the most highbrow and elegant one. ;D

[Raum]

D&D economics are stupidly irrealistic and crazy and bonkers and broken, no two ways about it. They've always been since the first incarnation of the game until (and including) our own very day.
I agree, the D& D economic system is more about gameplay (ease of use and balance) than realism.


ANY economic system where coins forged entirely of gold are used as the main form of settling day-to-day transactions is automatically disqualified from the "even remotely realistic" category.
Well, no. Gold coinage was in use until fairly recent times. Even when actual coins weren't in common use, currency was redeemable in gold until very recently. The US didn't abandon the gold standard until 1971.

Edit: Had to look it up, but gold coins were minted until 1933.

[Spuddly]

ANY economic system where coins forged entirely of gold are used as the main form of settling day-to-day transactions is automatically disqualified from the "even remotely realistic" category.

Actually, I think copper and silver are the most common form of currency used to settle day-to-day interactions, and the DMG explicitly states that most transactions are with goods, anyhow.

Of course, recieving loot from monsters in the form of live chickens is a bit hard to transport. In fact, the elegance about non-commodity markets is that one has a universal currency to trade for both goods and time.

In ancient Rome their silver coins were entirely silver until the empire reached its peak. Then, without any more expansion there was no further growth as they couldnt conquer more lands. The flow of silver and gold into Rome petered out and so coins were minted at half silver, a third silver, etc. until coins were hardly silver anymore. This led to terrible inflation and is one reason why the empire collapsed.

[LE4dGOLEM]

always so easy to blame the romans huh? ;) Kust KIdding. Thanks for the answers peoples. And now, another one.

What kind of conversion rate should I use from real-life to gp (ie a top range commercially available weaopn now (good rifle) and top range comercially available weapon in D&D (long or bastardsword)?
ie, 15 gold peices in d&D has similar buying power now to...?

[Thomas]

1. Why would you want to do that at all?

2. It doesn't work.
2a: The prices of various types of items, relative to each other, vary hugely in different time periods and areas. Also, the median and average buying power of the people in the economy varies greatly (i.e. most people in the Dark Ages were dirt poor by their standards, while most people in modern Finland live very comfortably by modern standards).
2b: The D&D economy is not realistic, balanced, thought-out, or supposed to be comparable to real economy. It's an abstraction, and very likely a shoddy one.

[Darkie]

Caliber - a direct measurement of the inside diameter of a firearm barrel expressed in fractions of inches - designations don't always match the actual size of rounds. The well-known .38 caliber, for example, is actually .357 inches in diameter (which is associated with the much more powerful magnum version of the cartridge).
Firearm and ammunition terminology gets really weird, really fast.

Eh, actually that's because of the naming conventions. One convention measures the actual projectile, another measures the round. (US or, um, other people. Don't recall which is which.) Essentially, the casing for the .38 is .38, but the bit that's fired out is .357.

As for shotgun damage... Savage Worlds is a system I've played with, and someone whipped up realistic stats for guns. Of course, you end up with not much difference between various real-world weapons other than minor penetration statistics. But the 'realistic' determination of shotgun damage is quite interesting.
http://www.savageheroes.com/conversions/Modern%20Weapons%20v1.pdf
Essentially, you're firing a whole lot of small bullets at the same time.

Economic discussions are extremely interesting, and probably way beyond the scope of this thread. An off-the-cuff response I'd considered was 'compare the price of bread', but you can't even do that, due to the modern transportation networks and comparatively readily available commodities. And of course, technically costs also change depending on setting. Eberron, with its lightning rails has a signifigantly more developed transportation network then Forgotten Realms, with the result that certain things cost much less to produce.

But the whole thing is of course wrong, and simply put there so we can have phat lewt. Gold's all shiny, you know?

Although I suppose you could always do a Cost-of-Living analysis, similiar to the annual studies done by certain groups to determine national inflation. Take a basket of 'standard' goods, price'em up, and compare. Of course, they use over two hundred points to determine inflation, but I don't think there are even two hundred mundane items to get.

You'd need items not affected as much by transportation and availibility of resources. You'd also have to keep in mind the ratio of labour:capital required to produce the item in the different settings and shipping to the market. A book, for example, is more capital intensive than labour intensive now, but vice versa in the old days.

[MrNexx]

Although I suppose you could always do a Cost-of-Living analysis, similiar to the annual studies done by certain groups to determine national inflation. Take a basket of 'standard' goods, price'em up, and compare. Of course, they use over two hundred points to determine inflation, but I don't think there are even two hundred mundane items to get.

Actually, I remember seeing in one of the these discussions (back when the TSR message boards were available via newsreader, if that gives you an idea of the antiquity), something called the "beer standard". Essentially, it was an economic model which aassumed that the average, semi-skilled laborer made enough money each X to buy Y beers. If you based your prices from there, the wages of the semi-skilled laborer (who will form the majority of the population, and thus drive the cost of staples), you can get a good picture of the the overall economy, and how an item of a particular value fits in.

[Spuddly]

Would it be possible to compare economies of the modern age to a fictional, semi-medieval one quantitatively? There seem to be too many qualitative differences.

[Raum]

We should probably start a new thread to discuss economies, but I'll point out one major difference. D&D economies are static. Even the most controlled (maybe especially the most controlled) economies in RL are not and cannot be static. When the difference between the controlled price and the real worth of an item is great enough, a blackmarket economy develops.

-------------

A question for you armor experts. Is brigandine worth including in the game or is it too similar to scale? If you would include it, how would you describe, price, and stat it?

EDIT: Spelling.

[Spuddly]

What AC would the wooden armor used by Japanese have in comparison to real armor?

[TheThan]

Orental adventures has some Japanese armor in it, I would look there, but I don’t know how realistic it is.


There's also stats for brigandine in it too. I'd post it but I dont know if its legal to do that. But I can p.m. you if you want me to.

[Fhaolan]

Whew. Out for a few days, and I miss all sorts of stuff here.

LE4dGOLEM - How much does a good/real sword cost nowadays? There are three main methods of making swords nowadays, and each has a different price range. Casting, Grinding, and Forging.

Casting: Casting battle-ready swords is uncommon to the point of non-existance, unless you're talking reproduction bronze weapons which are still rare. http://www.templeresearch.eclipse.co.uk/bronze/swords_for_sale.htm. I've only found a few English smiths that are doing this. No American ones at all.

Grinding: Grinding is the current popular method. Take a bar of steel and grind it into the shape of a sword. Then heat-treat, temper, whatever. You can get 'battle-ready' weapons that are reasonbly close to historical strengths, weights & balances: http://www.tinkerswords.com Tinker's swords run from $500-$1,000 US, depending on the style, but his are on the high side of price due to quality.

Forging: Forged swords are the ones everyone thinks of. http://members.aol.com/gijchar/main.htm Joe here sells forged swords for $700 and up. I've seen prices in the tens of thousands for other smith's swords.

Raum - Physically, brigadine and coat-of-plates are actually more like splint with a leather/cloth skin on top, than scale. However, the scale described in the PHB seems to be one of the 'torso-only' armors, like the breastplate and chain shirt. (I think this because I have experience with scale, and it is nominally very heavy compared to regular maille. So if the scale in the PHB was a full suit, like the splint and the full chainmail, it should be in the Heavy Armor section next to the splint.) I think the torso-only coat-of-plates version would be very similar to scale in statistics, while a complete brigandine that covers arms and legs would have similar statistics to splint. The real difference between brigandine and splint are not covered in the statistics D&D uses. Brigandine is easier to keep clean, is nominally not as decorative, and the plates tended to be made of cheaper steels accordingly.

Spuddly - Wooden armor. Errrr... Like brigandine and cord armor from the Phillipines and others things like that, D&D doesn't really model the attributes that make them effectively different from plain steel armor. I've only seen a few samples of Japanese-style armor in real life, and those I've seen actually do have enamelled metal strips woven into them, along with specially treated bamboo and other hard woods. Given the lightness, and the effectiveness of the protection of what I saw, I would put them in about the Banded area. (Never make the assumption that if it's wood, it's ligher than steel. The wood arm plates I handled were as heavy as I would expect steel arm protection to weigh.) I've been told that there are examples of Japanese-style armor that is equivalent to the Western full plate, in both weight and protective ability, but they were never 'popular' because of the loss of mobility. I can neither confirm nor deny as I've never worked in that kind of armor myself.

[Edmund]

There are a fairly large number of companies that produce good swords now-a-days. Some of them are, of course, better than others. Some also make more attractive weapons. A few good swordmakers are:
Albion Swords http://www.albion-swords.com
Vladimir Cervenka http://www.sword.cz/
Arms & Armor http://www.armor.com
Angus Trim http://www.angustrimdirect.com/
Castle Keep http://www.castlekeep.co.uk/
Vince Evans http://www.picturetrail.com/gallery/view?username=vevans

I like Albion myself, but mostly because they use a hot-peened hilt (which is always nice) and they aren't that high on the price-side (Castle Keep pushes it a little).

If you're going for the cheap, Angus Trim makes probably the best sword you'll get for 350 or so dollars (some models are even less).

Of course, all of these makers tend to have them sharp (One can shave with Cervenka's swords), but I'm sure they'd be happy not to sharpen them on request.

Oh, and they're all forged swords, but of course there *has* to be a certain amount of grinding. I haven't actually run into that many stock-removal producers, in any case.

[Spuddly]

What's wrong with a sharp sword?

[Edmund]

Nothing, particularly, unless you're going to use it on a pell (no point in dulling a sharp blade) or in practice (though swords uniquely for that purpose should be used). Also, sharpening is just that much more expensive.

However, in light of this topic, I'd just like to revisit a myth propagated in this thread...


The real swords used in medieval battles were a lump of steel with an edge, in a shape. They lasted one or two battles, then got reforged..

This is false.

I don't know what sources are used for this statement, but the idea of the crude, untutored peasant wildly bashing at another with a weighty hunk of steel is rather completely fictional. One only need look at any contemporary depictions of fighting in the period to realise that swords were in fact both reliable and excellent weapons.

For more on the subject, I suggest looking into fighting manuals such as Siegmund Ringeck's Fechtbuch, the I.33, the Codex Wallerstein, and others, along with articles such as this one here:
http://www.thearma.org/essays/straight.htm

As a side note: I've never heard of a sword being 'reforged' outside of Lord of the Rings. The closest thing I've heard of is a sword similar to the original being made. The inherent problem with 'reforging a sword' is that the blade section will become immediately thinner, and hammer marks will need to be ground away. Also, the peened end would have to be cut off,and the pommel discarded. In actual fact, it would be cheaper to just have a new sword made if, under some strange circumstance, your weapon broke. And I don't mean the edge got a small bend, I mean it snapped (much more common with the later rapier and smallsword).

Ah well, that's it for this rant.

[Fhaolan]

Oh, and they're all forged swords, but of course there *has* to be a certain amount of grinding. I haven't actually run into that many stock-removal producers, in any case.

I was under the impression that Angus Trim was stock-removal and that Albion is partial stock removal. They start with forged blanks, but they will make different blades out of the same blank-stock by varying the stock removal. I may be mistaken, though.

Oh, and I've found it's easy to break blades. :) All you have to do is block with the edge several times. Each chip sets up microfractures in the metal, eventually leading to crystalization failure. Mind you, blocking with the edge is a whole 'religious war' type thing that's not appropriate for this forum. :)

[Leperflesh]

I'll just chime in and reiterate the important core of all of these price comparisons, which is:

It is fundamentally not possible to compare the costs of modern things to the costs of medievally made things and use that to predict the cost of some third thing, or to create a dollar-to-goldpiece conversion.

That's because the cost of any given good or service in the modern day is the end-result of:
-advances in materials science
-changes in the standard of living
-industrialization
-assembly-line production
-the creation of capital markets
-the availability and cost of extraction of raw materials
-changes in supply and demand
-changes in diet
-changes in social structures

It goes on and on.

Just to take a very simple example, consider the cost of a loaf of bread.

Today, an agri-business seeds a few thousand acres of prime farmland with genetically engineered crops, sprays them with pesticides and herbicides, and reaps x tons of high-quality wheat per acre, using mechanized farming equipment with huge up-front costs but massive long-term savings, and using an expertly-controlled mix of skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled labor.

The wheat is processed mechanically in centralized locations, which is possible only due to transportation infrastructures such as rail and road, and food preservation technologies that prevent spoilage and waste during transport. After processing, various huge food conglomorates purchase the wheat (for prices that are set by international markets using complex futures, hedging, and other capital instruments). The wheat is combined with other ingredients (many of which are produced in similar ways) and fortified with nutritional supplements such as calcium. Finally in regional locations, bread is baked in large, assembly-line facilities, where a minimum of skilled labor is necessary, using energy which is based on a massive global network designed to extract and provide universally-accessable energy at very low, highly-regulated prices.

The bread is then shipped (again using transportation technologies, infrastructure, and according to strict food regulations) to local distribution points (stores) where much of it is purchased by citizens using their hard-earned dollars. A typical supermarket may carry as many as 50 or 60 different types of breads, each available for a different price which is set based on many factors, including cost of production, promotional considerations, brand-value, saleability (demand), and advertising costs. A loaf of bread in the San Francisco Bay Area might cost anywhere from about 60 cents to over six dollars, depending on whether it's cheap, extra-airy white bread or expensive, thick, luxurious premium-brand organic health-bread, or anything in between.

Now, to contrast!

In the medieval society, local farmers plow small plots of land using an animal (which must be fed and housed and is prone to disease, and will get old and die), and seed that field by hand using 'seed corn' which must be stored each year as a portion of every harvest. Hopefully last year's harvest was good so there's enough seed corn to go around.

Then, depending on what the local climate is, the crop will grow with a wildly variable yeild - the farmer has some control, being able to leave fields fallow to help with soil quality, and if he's lucky he may have access to irrigation as well, to prevent a dry year from ruining the crop. Various pests will take a toll on the crop as well, but eventually harvest-time rolls around and the farmer will hand-harvest the grain. This is highly labor-intensive, so the farmer's ability to harvest the entire crop in good order and before it spoils is dependent on how large his family is, the going price of temporary labor this year, what the weather is like during the harvest, etc. If there happens to be a nasty flu going around this season, it is likely that the farmer's harvest will be worse.

Then the grain is stored on-site or transported a short distance (on poor roads by animal-drawn conveyance, losing some percentage of the crop the whole way) until it is time for it to be ground into flour. During storage, more loss will be experienced, from mice and other pests, and if the farmer is unlucky a mold will spoil the entire silo of grain.

Mill facilities will be close-by or distant, but always within a few days' travel at worst. The farmer may be lucky enough to have free access to a mill, but most likely he must pay a variable cost to have the grain milled, or he will sell the whole grain to someone else who will do the milling. If he sells, a markup occurs at this point, and either way the milling process is inefficient, so it will not convert 100% of the edible grain into edible flour.

Flour is then sold to the local community, for prices based on their ability to pay and the cost of production so far. If the local community cannot afford to provide a profit for the farmer (or whoever now owns the flour), then that person will either take a loss or sell the flour outside the community, starving his neighbors.

Finally the flour is made into bread in countless small homes, and a few local bakeries in larger communities.

Throughout this process, we may rely on the following to be generally true:
-unskilled labor is very cheap
-losses at every stage are high
-bread being a very important staple, it will nevertheless be cheap enough for most people to form at least 40% or 50% of their diet from just bread
-regional variations will be vast, due to the variables mentioned above, coupled with slow, inefficient and expensive transportation networks - bread may be very cheap in one village, and another village just 80 miles away it may be very expensive.

As we can see, it is not possible to compare the price of bread in today's supermarket with the price of bread in a medieval village, and draw a conclusion about the value of the currency. Every good and service suffers from a similar gaping chasm between modern and medieval economies, so that any given commodity or service might be vastly cheaper, or vastly more expensive, in one or another era, without that difference being predictive of another good or service's cost. A carefully hand-made item today might be extremely expensive (because skilled artisans are rare and most people buy mass-produced goods) where it would be very cheap in medieval times (because everyone makes it, labor costs are low, wood is cheap, or much lower quality is the norm), or the opposite may be true (because a cheap hand-made import is available now, and in the medieval time a required material is foriegn and vastly expensive).

So. Yeah. Just wanted to really make that point.

-Lep

[Edmund]

Albion actually makes a blade blank for each individual sword (though for some, like the Prince & Squire, they use the same blade). http://www.albion-swords.com/swords-recreated.htm

As for Gus, you may be right. I was under the impression that he forged his swords then ground them, but I can't find any immediate evidence of it. I stand corrected... Maybe.

[Sundog]

on Jul 20th, 2005, 1:18pm, Sundog wrote:
The real swords used in medieval battles were a lump of steel with an edge, in a shape. They lasted one or two battles, then got reforged..


This is false.

I don't know what sources are used for this statement, but the idea of the crude, untutored peasant wildly bashing at another with a weighty hunk of steel is rather completely fictional. One only need look at any contemporary depictions of fighting in the period to realise that swords were in fact both reliable and excellent weapons.

For more on the subject, I suggest looking into fighting manuals such as Siegmund Ringeck's Fechtbuch, the I.33, the Codex Wallerstein, and others, along with articles such as this one here:
http://www.thearma.org/essays/straight.htm

As a side note: I've never heard of a sword being 'reforged' outside of Lord of the Rings. The closest thing I've heard of is a sword similar to the original being made. The inherent problem with 'reforging a sword' is that the blade section will become immediately thinner, and hammer marks will need to be ground away. Also, the peened end would have to be cut off,and the pommel discarded. In actual fact, it would be cheaper to just have a new sword made if, under some strange circumstance, your weapon broke. And I don't mean the edge got a small bend, I mean it snapped (much more common with the later rapier and smallsword).

Well, I perhaps could have been clearer - I was speaking of the swords used by low-ranked knights ("pauper Knights" was a common term) or issued to militia during the Dark Ages - Medieval periods. People of sufficient wealth (landed knights, Barons, etc.) would have had a better blade, because they could afford a better blade. Peasent soldiers didn't get swords; they had spears or pole arms, often their own pruning hooks.

Once you reach the late middle ages, sword making had become both more of an art and more of a craft, with the mass-production techniques pioneered by the Romans being rediscovered, and the average sword took a quantum leap in quality. That's the period you're speaking of.

Oh, and by "reforging" I wasn't referring to the (mythical) concept of putting a sword back together from it's borken pieces, but of melting it down, and forging a new blade from the steel.

These crap blades are quite well known to archaeologists. They tend to find quite a few on early-Medieval battlefields; but they're usually so rusted that they don't make good displays. So they just get stored in the back catalogues of museums, with a coat of spray on plastic preservative, never to see the light of day...

[Edmund]

Which archaeologists? How can you tell they're bad if they're so rusted? Or does a susceptibility to rust make a sword bad?

I still disagree. The swords used by mercenaries (who certainly weren't landed knights, much of the time) and indeed those used by commoners were effective weapons. Of course, though, there was some variation, but expecting the swords of commoners to frequently break apart during combat is a figment. Also, there are a large number of archaeological examples of relatively well-preserved swords, and not solely those of knights etc.

The I.33 shows as much. The fencers portrayed, after all, are a priest and a scholar in commoner's garb.

The pole-arms you describe did indeed exist, but the sword was equally widespread, if not moreso.

Also, as I've mentioned before, the Romans didn't pioneer anything in swordsmithing. Their swords were iron-body with a steel edge welded in. Homogenous blades (which appeared more frequently with the Catalan Forge in the 13th century) are a more effective substitute and were the type used in the mid-late Middle Ages, which is also the time when the pole-arms you describe became more common, especially amongst the Swiss and Flemish.

[Nyrath]

The most widely used type of weapon during the medieval period, at any point during it, was polearms. This means, spears, gliefs, partisans, lochaberaxes, pitchforks, fauchards and so on and so forth. Its a matter of economics and effectivnes vs cavalry. A spear, glief or the like is easily made from sticking common farm impliments on a long pole, and they are more effective in formation and against any cavalry than a sword. You need a fair amount of space to swing a sword, but only a fraction of that to stab with a spear or pike, and in formations that matters a lot. It also keeps the enemy away from you, again even better in formation than a sword. While a sword is certainly better on a one on one basis with room to manouver, it is less effective against a charging knight on the battle field. Lances are also polearms, so there you have another good use for them. I do however concede that the sword is stronger, and more versitile. Swords require better steel then polearms and more skill to make them however.

[Edmund]

Ah. When I think 'polearm', I think halberds, bills, goedendags, and glaives. Weapons that were generally equally good at (and primarily for) chopping as poking. Spears, though, were certainly much more common on the Mediaeval battlefield than swords or other polearms.

Spears, of course, have one gigantic disadvantage: They can't be used in close quarters. Soldiers armed with shields, or even bucklers (as the Spanish had), therefore, can easily lay into groups of pikemen, and so the pikes always had a nice back-up weapon (hammers, swords, maces, clubs, and axes). There are even accounts of cavalry leaping into pike formations and emerging from the other side a-ok, because the horses hopped over the pointy spears, and was done with lighter cavalry.

[Sundog]

No, susceptibility to rust doesn't make for a bad sword, but resistance to rust generally indicates a good one. Good forging and good steel both tell through over time.

Also, where did I say these swords were ineffective or tended to break up? What I said was that they were simple, cheaply made, and tended to wear out quickly. If they were ineffective, no one would have bought them.

Mercenaries actually often had considerably better equipment than any Pauper-Knight. A Landed Knight or a Mercenary had a regular source of income, while a Pauper-Knight got everything fro his liege-lord - which could range from generous to penurious, as with any ruler.

[Bitter_Elf]

Another difference worth considering which affects both the quality and economics of Middle-aged sword making: Availibility of steel. Steel was (relatively speaking) very rare, and it's cost far outweighed the wages of the smiths who used it - even the truly excellent ones. So the making of low-quality swords would have been entirely not cost-effective. Granted, military conscripts did not have excellent weapons (I won't argue that every single level 1 NPC should have masterwork-quality weapons, either), but a good reason most of them used spears, etc., was that those weapons didn't require nearly so much metal.

[Shiyuan]

These crap blades are quite well known to archaeologists. They tend to find quite a few on early-Medieval battlefields; but they're usually so rusted that they don't make good displays. So they just get stored in the back catalogues of museums, with a coat of spray on plastic preservative, never to see the light of day...

Sorry mate. Going to have to chime in with Edmund here. I believe you are mistaking the many long bladed swords found in Gaulic remains in Europe, which are often confused by less militarily oriented archaeologists as Medieval long swords. The Gaulic and Celtic swords of the early Iron Age tended to be quite crude and prone to bending or breakage in battle. In truth, a pauper knight as you refer to, often did not use a sword, this myth of knights always having a sword being propagated by historical romanticists. The swords of the Middle Ages were a work of art and skill, and very easily equal to the blades of any other culture (including early and late [not middle period, cuz they actually sucked quite horribly] Japanese tachi and katana, sorry Japanophiles). A poor knight more often than not used spears, axes, hammers (not the ones you see in D&D, real Medieval warhammers had an almost pick-like design to them, with sharp beaks to punch through armor) and maces, with maces being actually rather popular with even the more well-to-do knights for its symbol of power in its resemblance to a royal scepter.

Also, the idea of the lower ranks of soldiery and even poor knights being equipped with swords is historically very uncommon, if not rare. Why give a footman a sword when he can do the same job with the less complicated axe? Swords were mainly a close-combat weapon, and typically, the soldier that has to resort to his sword is the one on the losing side of a rush. This means he's lost the use of his spear or pole-arm for various reasons, which is a disadvantage for the Medieval army that wishes to keep ranks.

Swords require some room to the sides to wield properly, depending on their make and form. The knight's sword, for instance (what we commonly call the longsword, but in truth is something different) was typically a cut-and-thrust weapon, with strong emphasis on the thrust. Fighting another armored opponent by swinging your sword is impractical and damaging to the sword to boot. Jarring blows and the like, no matter how well-made the sword, will and do irreparable damage to its structural strength. Even the Japanese slashing swords used by the samurai and other bushi were not swung, but employed in a draw-cut fashion, where the blade edge is brought into contact with the target and then drawn or slid across its surface to create the cut. Chopping motions, the most common misconception associated with European swords and their use, are simply the sign of an untrained swordsman undeserving to use one. However, if we get to the issue of falxes, a little guilty pleasure of mine... chopping is whole-heartedly approved.

[Edmund]

In truth, a pauper knight as you refer to, often did not use a sword, this myth of knights always having a sword being propagated by historical romanticists. The swords of the Middle Ages were a work of art and skill, and very easily equal to the blades of any other culture. A poor knight more often than not used spears, axes, hammers (not the ones you see in D&D, real Medieval warhammers had an almost pick-like design to them, with sharp beaks to punch through armor) and maces, with maces being actually rather popular with even the more well-to-do knights for its symbol of power in its resemblance to a royal scepter.

This is true, but even so pauper knights were commonly mercenaries themselves, because to be that poor you generally had to lack a feudal patron.


Also, the idea of the lower ranks of soldiery and even poor knights being equipped with swords is historically very uncommon, if not rare. Why give a footman a sword when he can do the same job with the less complicated axe? Swords were mainly a close-combat weapon, and typically, the soldier that has to resort to his sword is the one on the losing side of a rush. This means he's lost the use of his spear or pole-arm for various reasons, which is a disadvantage for the Medieval army that wishes to keep ranks.

Here's where I disagree. There were advantages to both sword and axe, and they did not do the same job. Axes have a very small area where the energy is transfered, compared to the slice of a sword, and so the cuts of an axe were more similar to those of a mace with an edge. Also, axes were less efficient at stabbing, and quite nasty for parrying because of their top-heaviness.

Second, resorting to a sword doesn't mean you're on the losing side of a rush, in fact, it doesn't mean much of anything except close combat has begun. Mediaeval combat was not fought between hoplites, after all, even if spears were the most common weapon. (except amongst Slavic peoples where the javelin or axe took that honour)

Also, a sword wasn't solely a knight's or nobleman's weapon. As I said, early fencing masters were often themselves commoners.


Swords require some room to the sides to wield properly, depending on their make and form. The knight's sword, for instance (what we commonly call the longsword, but in truth is something different) was typically a cut-and-thrust weapon, with strong emphasis on the thrust.

There are only two types of swords that emphasise the thrust. The type XV, which appeared around the time of the first plate armour, and the type XVII, which appeared some time later. Yet other types of swords, which were either divided between thrust and cut equally or more to the cut side remained commonplace on the battlefield.

One of the best synergies of the two uses was the type XVIII.

To understand what I'm talking about a bit more, see here: http://www.oakeshott.org/Typo.html or read The Sword in The Age of Chivalry by Ewart Oakeshott.


Fighting another armored opponent by swinging your sword is impractical and damaging to the sword to boot. Jarring blows and the like, no matter how well-made the sword, will and do irreparable damage to its structural strength. Even the Japanese slashing swords used by the samurai and other bushi were not swung, but employed in a draw-cut fashion, where the blade edge is brought into contact with the target and then drawn or slid across its surface to create the cut. Chopping motions, the most common misconception associated with European swords and their use, are simply the sign of an untrained swordsman undeserving to use one. However, if we get to the issue of falxes, a little guilty pleasure of mine... chopping is whole-heartedly approved.

Don't forget falchions for chopping, but this is very true otherwise. You don't try to bash your opponent into the dust so much, especially not if they're armoured.

[Raum]

There are only two types of swords that emphasise the thrust. The type XV, which appeared around the time of the first plate armour, and the type XVII, which appeared some time later. Yet other types of swords, which were either divided between thrust and cut equally or more to the cut side remained commonplace on the battlefield.
It was my understanding that all straight swords were used with thrusting attacks. That is the primary advantage of a straight sword over a curved sword. Thrusting was certainly used as a primary sword stroke as early as the Roman gladius. Fighting in close formation doesn't allow for wide swings, particularly when you have to avoid fouling your neighbor's shield. Hence the thrust was a more powerful attack. There is also evidence in written fencing manuals teaching the thrust during the middle ages.

[Edmund]

Well, this is true... to a point. The swords used in manuals like Talhoffer's manuals are type XV, with the exception of the Messer, of course.

There are plenty of swords that had spatulate ends (the claymore, for a wide-known example) which would be useless thrusting against anything but particularly soft targets. There was some improvement of the thrust in the early part of the Middle Ages, but it never became refined until the introduction of the XV in the late 13th century.

The XIV and XII swords also had points, but they were still used primarily for the cut. They generally lacked the diamond or hollow-ground cross-section (at the tip of at least) of a truly effective thusting sword.

Roman swords were used with the thrust, but there is evidence that they were used for the cut as well. It probably wasn't their primary use, though.

[Raum]

There are plenty of swords that had spatulate ends (the claymore, for a wide-known example) which would be useless thrusting against anything but particularly soft targets. There was some improvement of the thrust in the early part of the Middle Ages, but it never became refined until the introduction of the XV in the late 13th century.
Correct, the swords called claymores were primarily (not solely) cutting weapons. The term claymore is used to refer to at least two different swords. One is the basket hilted broadsword and the the other is a two handed greatsword. The two handed sword (properly a 'Claidheamh da laimh') does have a spatulate point. Interestingly, the basket hilted sword was the more commonly used sword by Scottish fighting men.

Also, the Scots Highlanders typically wore little or no armor making a point less necessary. Use of a strongly pointed blade was more of a requirement against armored opponents.


The XIV and XII swords also had points, but they were still used primarily for the cut. They generally lacked the diamond or hollow-ground cross-section (at the tip of at least) of a truly effective thusting sword.

Roman swords were used with the thrust, but there is evidence that they were used for the cut as well. It probably wasn't their primary use, though.
Absolutely, I didn't intend to imply they weren't used for cutting, just that the thrust was the primary attack with a gladius.

The point of swords through time often depended on technology as much as usage. The gladius wasn't strongly pointed even though it was used as a stabbing weapon. It was typically made by welding a strip of steel to the edges around a softer core of iron. This makes the more modern cross cuts hard to duplicate at best.

[Edmund]

Correct, the swords called claymores were primarily (not solely) cutting weapons. The term claymore is used to refer to at least two different swords. One is the basket hilted broadsword and the the other is a two handed greatsword. The two handed sword (properly a 'Claidheamh da laimh') does have a spatulate point. Interestingly, the basket hilted sword was the more commonly used sword by Scottish fighting men.

I've never heard of the basket-hilts being called claymores, but in any case there is an important point that should be made, and that is that the basket-hilt did not appear until well after the Middle Ages, while the greatsword appeared in the 14th century.

The earliest basket-hilt I've seen was in the mid-16th century, and even then it wasn't very much like the image that springs to mind when I hear the term.

[Sundog]

The term "Claymore" has been seriously abused over the years. It was almost certainly coined by the English, who found 'Claidheamh da laimh' practically unpronounceable, and since then has been applied to almost any sword used primarily by the Scots. The Scots themselves applied it to the basket-hilted broadsword, despite almost certainly receiving the weapon from the Dutch, but then, by that time the Scots largely spoke English or Scottish rather than Scots-Gael.

It's always a good idea to include a description when speaking of a "Claymore".

[LE4dGOLEM]

Trivia time!
(also, trivia, = three-way... posts(similar to those (stereo?)typically found in american high schools (I think, I *am* british*)) were set up at every three-way junction, where anyone could place up a message such as "salt is cheap in the street of cunning artificers this week" or whatever)

"Gladius" Is the Latin word for "Penis", In case anyone cared.

In other news, If may ask just one more RL to Game rules question, what might the stats be for a caber (to keep to the whole scottish theme :P)

[Spuddly]

You know, they have that somewhere. I cannot remember where, bt they call them like battle logs or something. They knock down multiple enemies and do like 2d6 damage.

Or something.

[Edmund]

The caber, as I remember, is in the Masters of the Wild. Funny weapon.

[Kelmon]

"Gladius" Is the Latin word for "Penis", In case anyone cared.

No, it isn't. "penis" is the latin word for "root" (as in "root of life", I suppose). "gladius" is just the latin word for "sword". But we can safely assume that romans - just like us - had more than just one word for the body part...

[Gordon]

No, it isn't. "penis" is the latin word for "root" (as in "root of life", I suppose).

"Tail," more accurately. Oddly enough, the diminutive peniculus is a "paint brush" or later the word "pencil."


"gladius" is just the latin word for "sword". But we can safely assume that romans - just like us - had more than just one word for the body part...

They did indeed.

The book to consult in this regard is Adams' The Latin Sexual Vocabulary.

It is a tad off-thread, though.
light, simple weapon, non-lethal, piercing and bludgeoning?

[SpiderBrigade]

It is a tad off-thread, though.
light, simple weapon, non-lethal, piercing and bludgeoning?

...

Even as a joke, that's just...wow, so wrong.

[Gorbash Kazdar]

Comrade Gorby: I'm pretty sure that this discussion of genetalia is now both off topic and potentially in violation of other rules, so let's move on, eh? ;)

Here's one from me, for once... I've been very interested in Sikh weaponry, since they seem to have a number of very unique arms and styles in order to use those arms. In fact, there are a large number of Indian (sub-continent) weapons that seem very interesting. However, I've had a lot of trouble finding out much about these weapons, especially how they were actually used; there's a lot of myth and misapprehensions (generally stemming from Europeans not actually checking to see what was actually being done before they wrote "definitive" accounts).

So, anyways, anyone have the low down on Sikh weaponry, and/or other unique sub-continental Indian weaponry?

[laughingfuzzball]

I don't know much about Indian weapons, but I'd try SFI (www.swordforum.com). They have a subforum dedicated to Middleeast and African weapons, and a search for "siikh" turns up plennty of results, and there are quite a few members who can tell you more than you'd ever want to know about the dha.

In fact, I'd reccomend the forum to anyone who's serious about historical weapons in general (though the forum has a heavy emphasis on swords).

[TheThan]

Here’s a question; is there a martial art of fighting style that specializes in the use of heavy lances?

I ask this because some friends and I were playing Soul Caliber 3 yesterday (great game), when one of them chimed in saying that there is a fighting style based off of the heavy lance (some of the hidden characters use lances). Another friend said there isn’t, and they soon argued over this. Now I feel that there certainly could be one but since don’t know I pose this question to people who are much more knowledgeable than me.

[Fhaolan]

Here’s a question; is there a martial art of fighting style that specializes in the use of heavy lances?

I'm not aware of any martial art style that uses the late-period jousting-type heavy lance. However, the term 'lance' is used interchangably with 'spear' in many documents and references. I've seen the Yari spear be refered to as a 'lance' in several books on martial arts I've glanced through. This may be a simple matter of confusion over nomenclature. I could be wrong, though.

[Furanku_S]

Alright, we've all seen in sci-fi literature the swords that've been honed to the point where the edge is only a molecule (or other insanely small width) wide, thus making it cut through ANYTHING. Production issues aside, isn't this total rubbish? My experience with axes and knives is that if an edge is too thin, it'll fold over and be duller than it was in the first place.

EDIT: Why do I seem to start so many new pages on this forum? ???

[Sundog]

Monomolecular blades are theoretically possible, as is monomolecular wire (as seen in Johnny Mnemonic). You'd theoretically have the entire weaon (or at least the entire blade section) composed of just ONE molecule. Thus you would have an edge that was only a few atoms thick, but because of the structural strength of molecular bonds, also strong and rigid enough to slice almost anything.

Mollywire may not be too far away, actually. Because of it's tensile strength, a LOT of companies are trying to make it - it would be a huge boon to the construction inudustry.

[Spuddly]

Why would monomolecular wires have greater tensile strength?

They seem like they'd only be good at cutting through soft stuff. Try to put it through metal and it would snap.

Take for instance piano wire. You can put it through stuff really easy, but as soon as you try pulling it through something that has some hardness to it, the wire snaps.

[laughingfuzzball]

Here’s a question; is there a martial art of fighting style that specializes in the use of heavy lances?

A few of the European manuals teach the mounted lance, and several of them teach the use of the spear (usually grouped with other pole arms), and the weapons appropriate to it cover a wide range. There are a lot of Eastern arts that have forms for various spears, also of a wide range of weights.

I assume, given the context, that you aren't talking about the mounted lance, but are instead using the word 'lance' in the broader sense. If this isn't how you meant it, please correct me.

[Gorbash Kazdar]

Obsidian blades are actually only a molecule wide on their edges if they are properly made - but they are amazingly fragile.

Most "mono-edge" concepts would be equally fragile, but in theory the right kind of material could be that sharp and also hard and strong enough to cut most substances rather than being damaged by them significantly - for example, using a steel blade on a soft material damages it far less than when used on a harder material - which is why knives used for, say, fileting tend to be much sharper than ones used for whittling. The macromolecule concept is a good example of a possible way to manage this, the idea being that the weapon is both extremely sharp and supremely resilient. Again, though, popular culture examples focus on the sharpness and assume it will automatically allow it to cut anything; the example of obsidian shows this is an incorrect assumption. Also, I haven't seen any suggestions that such a material is in the works.

On the other hand, supposedly, certain macromolecules already common can be large enough to be seen with the naked eye - the molecules of the paint on modern automobiles can, supposedly, bond together during the application process to form extremely large macromolecules, potentially covering the entire contiguous painted portion of the car.

As for "mollywire" - it should be noted that certain fabrics, like Kevlar(R) are made up of polymers (long chain like molecules) that bond to each other, though not in molecular bonds. So a piece of Kevlar(R) fabric is actually a very large number of parallel polymers, though not actually a single molecule. So, in theory, the right polymer chain could be strong enough to use as a "mollywire," but really the idea is that the polymer is a lot stronger than another substance of similar thickness. This doesn't mean it's "strong" - it may in fact be very fragile - just stronger than a non-polymer of similar thickness, weight, and length. Thus, a Kevlar (R) vest is "stronger" than a vest made of steel wires with the same thickness, but not neccessarily "stronger" than a thick steel breastplate.

It should also be noted that strength can mean a lot of different things - steel is harder but not as elastic as Kevlar(R), but Kevlar(R) isn't very hard at all. Kevlar(R)'s elasticity allows it to flex enough to absorb the energy of a bullet that would pierce steel, but a knife blade can cut through Kevlar(R) but not steel. (This fact has an interesting effect now - some police are now wearing chainmail underneath their Kevlar(R) vests!)

It may be possible to make a polymer that acts like the "mollywire" seen in scifi, especially cyberpunk, or a mono-edge sword with similar properties, but most applications now aren't anywhere near that level.

Anyways, to answer the question directly, it's not entirely rubbish in theory and in certain applications (see the fileting vs whittling point, and the fact that obsidian scalpals are used in some surgeries since they are sharper than steel), but it depends a lot on application and the properties of the blade material. In practice, I know of no materials with the correct properties to be a "mono-edge sword" or "mollywire" as seen in sci-fi, but I can't rule out the possibility of such materials appearing in the future (and haven't found any instance where someone more knowledgeable than I - and there are many - has discounted the possibility). Just probably not any time soon.

(I'm a terrible chemist and engineer, so I may have made some errors above, but I am basing what I said on what skilled chemists and engineers have told me.)

[Spuddly]

Besides sharpness, there's also hardness. A dull piece of quartz (7 hardness) will demolish even the sharpest of calcites (only 3 harndess) any day.

Likewise, you can puncture flesh with something as dull as a spoon, but a sharp steel knife won't hurt granite.

A monofillament thread would lack hardness– you wouldn't see a monofillament weapon cut through steel.

[Sundog]

No, probably not. The advantage of monomolecular construction, as Gorbash noted, is structural and tensile strength.

The internal bonds of a molecule, as opposed to betweeen molecules, are very strong. When you break or cut any type of material, you cut between the molecules, not through them. So a monomolecular wire/blade/block would be very resistant to damage.

[Charity]

monofilament blades wouldn't be fragile as the above poster has already stated. The only way to break them would be to disrupt the molecular bonds which are very stong. The problems would more likely be that the item you sliced with the blade probably wouldn't notice, the mono passing through it with little effect, also there is the question of rigiddity.

[TheThan]

laughingfuzzball: I'm not aware of any martial art style that uses the late-period jousting-type heavy lance. However, the term 'lance' is used interchangably with 'spear' in many documents and references. I've seen the Yari spear be refered to as a 'lance' in several books on martial arts I've glanced through. This may be a simple matter of confusion over nomenclature. I could be wrong, though.

I was referring to the typical late period heavy lance you see knights use in jousts and some such. I know there are Asian martial arts techniques for spears, staffs and other similar weapons. Sorry for the confusion.

[Edmund]

The internal bonds of a molecule, as opposed to betweeen molecules, are very strong.

This is true in some cases, but with most metals, for example, there are no molecular bonds, instead there are only metallic bonds between the atoms, and these are often strong in the transition metals, but can be broken by water with the Group 1 and Group 2 metals, with increasing ease going down the list (so potassium is easier to break up than sodium, both of which can be cut with a knife easily)

Common table salt is another example. True, the individual molecules of NaCl are hard to break with a knife, but they can easily be dissociated into Na+ and Cl- ions with the addition of water. The problem, therefore, of this monomolecular wire is finding an inert molecule (the moisture in the very air might destroy it, or the oil of your hands, maybe a spritz of vinegar...) with REALLY strong inter-molecular bonds (because if you ever miss that non-existant gap between the guy's lipids or microfibrils or blood cells, you know your wire is going to snap) that is not a metal like gold or silver, both of which are quite inert, and also rather soft.


When you break or cut any type of material, you cut between the molecules, not through them. So a monomolecular wire/blade/block would be very resistant to damage.

It depends on what you consider a molecule. There are long chains of large molecules that can be easily broken (like proteins!). Also, there are bonds between phospholipids in a cell, yet these can be severed by a thin enough edge (see obsidian)

And to TheThan: No, there are no martial arts systems that I've heard of for the use of a lance (not a spear) on foot, and there isn't really a 'system' for use on horseback, since it only really has a few major functions and no real 'techniques', aside from using it as a shield to protect yourself from crossbow bolts or arrows. As a rule of thumb, don't consider much of anything in Soul Calibur realistic. (Nightmare springs to mind)

[Leperflesh]

The monomolocule discussion is fairly complete. But I thought I'd throw this in:

If you ever really did manage to invent a strand of monomolocule hard enough, with sufficient tensile strength, but only one or two atoms thin, you'd have an immensely difficult time dealing with it. What would you grip it with? It'd slice through anything you tried to mount it in. You'd probably have to manufacture it with thicker 'ends', thinning out to a single molecule in the center, somehow.

What if you dropped it? Would it fall to the center of the earth?

The line itself would be totally invisible to the naked eye. Accidents would be extremely common. Just setting it down somewhere would be dangerous.

If it broke, you'd be in big trouble, too... you might have two, loose ends of filament flailing about. It'd move with every slightest waft of air currents, and cut through anything it encountered (including the mounting device, perhaps?). If it shattered into multiple pieces, you might have tiny, short lengths of the stuff flying about invisibly through the air, cutting through your face or your hand when it happened to land on your skin, or even worse, you could easily inhale it.

Fortunately, it's probably impossible to make something like that. Even covalent bonds (when adjacent atoms share electrons) are not THAT strong. Superstrong materials usually are superstrong due to unique molecular arrangements of atoms (such as a lattice) which create strength through many, many cumulative molecular bonds all working 'for' you in the right direction.

-Lep

[Thomas]

Most semi-sensible sounding explanations for cyberpunk or sci-fi "monomolecular" blades that I have seen have been along the lines of, "Well, okay, so it's not really MONO-molecular..." The wire is just incredibly sharp and strong, and usually mounted against a backing of metal or extra-hard plastic.

[Edmund]

Fortunately, it's probably impossible to make something like that. Even covalent bonds (when adjacent atoms share electrons) are not THAT strong. Superstrong materials usually are superstrong due to unique molecular arrangements of atoms (such as a lattice) which create strength through many, many cumulative molecular bonds all working 'for' you in the right direction.

-Lep

I couldn't have said it better myself. Also, about covalent bonds, taking carbon and diamond as an example, it's not a lattice but the tetrahedral molecular shape in this case that makes diamond so strong.

Moving on, I have a question! (A question, your Majesty?) Yes! A question! Though I suppose it's not technically weapon-related... How extensively were war dogs used in ancient or mediaeval warfare?

[Raum]

Did anyone ever use dogs as an anti-cavalry weapon? Otherwise I'm not sure I can think of anything I would classify as a war dog prior to the last hundred years. Dogs were used for hunting (whether animal or human), for arena style combats (against other dogs, other animals, and humans), and to savage or intimidate unarmed or lightly armed peasants. Today the military uses them to find explosives (often mines) and police use them to subdue criminals or find drugs.

Current day police usage is closest to what I think of as a 'war dog', I just can't think of any historically documented use of attack dogs in organized warfare.

[Gorbash Kazdar]

It depends on a lot of factors - who, what, when, and where - but they seem to have been used fairly regularly by some groups for certain purposes.

Offensive use of dogs in warfare is somewhat rare - the Romans used armored packs to attack enemies occasionally, and the Alanns (one of many tribes forced out of Central Asia and into the area around the Caspian Sea, and from there into Europe - like the Vandals; Ossetia in the Caucasus is the home of the descendants of the Alans who didn't move into Europe) used them to discomfort enemy horses and infantry in battle as well, making them easier prey for the spear-armed cavalry of the Alans (the Huns seem to have picked up this particular tactic from the Alans and used it occasionally as well). The Alans made it all the way to the Iberian Peninsula, bringing their war dogs with them. This breed, the Alano, may be the ancestor of many of the very large European dog breeds, like the Great Dane.

Medieval European forces seem to have used this tactic occasionally as well, but it generally seems to be used against enemy forces that were seen as "lower class" (peasants, non-Christians) rather than against knights. The Conquistadors used war dogs against the Aztecs, for example.

But most war dogs of these periods seem to be used much the same way they are now - sentry and guard, detection and tracking, and courier duties. Some Medieval caravans were protected by armored war dogs, for example. So, it seems its fairly common to see war dogs in support and force protection roles, and much less common to see them used in pitched battle. But they have been used both ways throughout Ancient and Medieval history.

[AtomicKitKat]

Hmm, a mono-filament weapon would indeed be interesting, but it would be far more likely used in piercing rather than slashing attacks(except where slashing involves soft materials like human flesh) Only examples of mono-filaments that I know of are the Thorn and Katana from One Must Fall 2097. ;D

[SpiderBrigade]

Probably the "most realistic" monomolecular weapon award (yeah, it's still not all that plausible) goes to the Deathspinners that 40K Warp Spiders use. Rather than trying to hold onto the stuff and use it as a weapon, you just spray it at your enemy and let them deal with it.

It also is a pet peeve of mine how "monofilament" has come to mean "monomolecular wire." Monofilament just means something made out of a single continuous strand. Like fishing line.

[laughingfuzzball]

I was referring to the typical late period heavy lance you see knights use in jousts and some such. I know there are Asian martial arts techniques for spears, staffs and other similar weapons. Sorry for the confusion.

Ok, then. There are a few manuals that deal with the mounted lance that have managed to survive to today, such as Talhoffer and Hugues Wittenwille (both have facsimiles at thearma.org/manuals). Given how few written materials survived outside of monastarys (and even in them), It would be fair to assume thatr there were, at one time, many more. Keep in mind, though, that a jousting lance and a lance meant for use in war are two entirely different things.

Gorbash- Do you have any references for dogs being armored?

[Gorbash Kazdar]

I found it mentioned in one of my history textbooks, but I double-checked it, and now I'm not so sure of its veracity (older text book, and the example seems to be from a secondary source). I'm seeing if I can find a supporting citation, especially one from a primary source.

But the use of unarmored dogs by the Alans and the Spanish I do know is accurate, and the Romans certainly used dogs in the arenas if no where else (I've seen a few frescos depicting fights between large dogs and gladiators). Medieval dogs were also quite clearly used to hunt large game and for the aforementioned force protection... again, it's the offensive uses that seem somewhat questionable.

EDIT: After some poking around, I haven't been able to find any direct reports of war dogs wearing armor into battle, however I have found examples of armor - usually quilted but occasionally plate and chain - used to protect hunting dogs from large game (like boars). Barring any further evidence of armored dogs being sent into battle, I'm willing to concede the original suggestion was based on a misinterpretation of the hunting armor. (The Higgins Armory Museum has a reconstructed set of plate and chain based off an original in Madrid.) It's also possible the plate and chain particularly was for show, though other sources (such as the Maximilian tapestry) seem to support some form of protective armor for hunting dogs.

In any case, the Romans certainly did bring dogs on campaign with them, but it seems more likely now that they were probably for the usual kind of duties performed by dogs - patrol, sentry, guard, tracking, and possibly courier. Some of the stories of Romans using dogs in battle may stem from the fact that they took the Alans on as allies and auxiliary cavalry, and the Alans are known to have used their dogs in battle. (As a side note, the Roman cavalry commander some cite as the origins of the stories of King Arthur may have been an Alan.)

So, in conclusion, it probably wouldn't be unusual at all to find dogs with an army or at any kind of fortification (reports from besieged forts of all types almost always include reference to a point where the men are forced to eat their dogs), but it would probably be rare to see them fighting on the battlefield.

[Sundog]

There are sections of the Bayeux Tapestry that have depictions of dogs, apparently armoured, but it isn't clear if these are supposed to be actual battlefield scenes or just decorative. They style of the Tapestry doesn't make it easy to tell.

I've seen a suit of dog armour from Switzerland, but it was noted as being Boar-Hunting Armour, not battlefield.