Quote Originally Posted by Averis Vol View Post
In real world combat, strength is actually one of the least important qualities for a good swordsman. Of course he needs to be strong enough to wield his weapon of choice, and realistically, all that a high strength means is that you can swing your weapon faster. But besides that, the ability to adapt to your opponents strikes and quickly interpose your own blade is a lot more important. So if we were to realistically stat out combat, your combat modifier would be some combination of dex, wis and int to hit. Damage would be part dex and part strength, and combat longevity would be based on con (like con score rounds of combat before you could no longer effectively fight).
I really wouldn't put intelligence in there, and even wisdom is dubious (though perception is really useful, particularly outside of duel situations where there's more than one person to keep track of). The "ability to adapt to your opponents strikes and quickly interpose your own blade" is a learned skill. It's part muscle memory, part situational awareness, with a great deal of entirely subconscious built up intuition, all of which are probably trained and definitely practiced. From a realism perspective, having skill be the most important thing, with high strength being helpful and low strength being detrimental would be the way to go.

An obvious way to do this would be to have skill be used as the baseline, with everything else being a small modifier. In more granular systems, it would even be a conditional modifier - you might have skill 4, +1 if you have a big enough strength/speed/reach/battlefield awareness/whatever difference over someone else.