The reason why fighters will never have nice things.

K · Post by K » Sun Jun 12, 2011 2:38 am

fectin wrote:Yes, I have. Both sport fencing and SCA light fighting, and a very little bit of kendo. I also did a fair amount of stage combat, but that is simultaneously more and less relevant than you would think.

Saber fencing is not the same as plate mail sword fights.

This site at least cites some of their sources:
http://www.thearma.org/essays/TopMyths.htm
You're looking down at number 18 "Although maile armor ("chain mail") was not foolproof against strong sword cuts, a fighter in full plate armor was however effectively immune to the edged blows of swords. "

Thrusting requires much better range control, and basically loses to slashing. that's why you never see sabrists using the point of their blades (well, you do sometimes, but not very often. It's legal, it just doesn't happen.)

From the same link:
"But, given strong effort and a hit to the right spot, a rigid point stabbing strongly could puncture armor even if its cutting edge would not."

We are assuming that actual swords have points, and are not relying on the DnD category system of "slashing/piercing/bludgeoning," right?

K · Post by K » Sun Jun 12, 2011 2:45 am

Novembermike wrote:
K wrote: Again, I have to ask if anyone here has actually fenced before? You vastly overestimate the amount of skill someone can get in a few months.

I mean, I've personally seen the difference between an Olympic-level saber fencer and the guy who teaches saber fencing who also outweighs him by 100 lbs. It's dramatic.
No, but I've done this before.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnqOMbFDEAI

Take your saber fencer, put him up against a guy with armor and a polearm and watch him die. As a fencer he's almost at a disadvantage against an actual fighter because of his sports dedication to first blood and the assumption that a touch actually does something.

Take someone with basic training in a Lichtenauer based armed combat and he'll be able to take on a master as long as he's fully equipped in plate armor and his choice of weapons. The master still has a shot as long as he has good grappling skills, but that's pretty much it.

LOL. Your entire opinion is based on two untrained morons in plate who aren't even trying to kill each other or even damage each other's equipment ? Seriously? Do you honestly think SCA yahoos even rate as competent fighters?

And why are we talking about saber fencers vs. plate guys? We are talking about armored and unskilled guys(giants) vs. well-trained and also armored guys(DnD fighters), and that's a different fight.

K · Post by K » Sun Jun 12, 2011 2:52 am

fectin wrote:But... the "dirty tricks" you're referring to here are wearing armor. That's something the giant just has. He even gets it without the downsides (heat and fatigue, mostly).

The dirty tricks we are referring can't be wearing armor since both fighter and giant are doing that.

The tricks we are referring to are the non-fencing aspects of actual fighting that range from spitting into your enemies faces to complicated fients that cause an enemy to over-commit to punching and kicking unexpectedly. The list is too long and too situational to be worth going into detail.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sun Jun 12, 2011 2:52 am

K wrote:
Right, and we are assuming that the Fighter is the guy who is good at the dirty tricks of fighting. Thus, he beats the giant.

Wrong. The "dirty tricks" are a set of easy to learn but still efficient tactics. Everyone with a BAB of +1 or higher is going to know these techniques. What the Fighter has that the giant does not, assuming no superpowers, is a bunch of situational or unreliable tricks that are much harder to learn and, thus, much harder to use in a fight. Those advanced tricks are a huge difference when each side is already roughly even in terms of size and equipment, but when the size difference is four feet and the equipment difference is that his steel plate is literally his skin and provides no encumbrance to him whatsoever, the advanced tricks don't count for half as much.

"But, given strong effort and a hit to the right spot, a rigid point stabbing strongly could puncture armor even if its cutting edge would not."

That would basically be a critical.

K · Post by K » Sun Jun 12, 2011 2:57 am

Chamomile wrote:
K wrote:
Right, and we are assuming that the Fighter is the guy who is good at the dirty tricks of fighting. Thus, he beats the giant.
Wrong. The "dirty tricks" are a set of easy to learn but still efficient tactics. Everyone with a BAB of +1 or higher is going to know these techniques. What the Fighter has that the giant does not, assuming no superpowers, is a bunch of situational or unreliable tricks that are much harder to learn and, thus, much harder to use in a fight. Those advanced tricks are a huge difference when each side is already roughly even in terms of size and equipment, but when the size difference is four feet and the equipment difference is that his steel plate is literally his skin and provides no encumbrance to him whatsoever, the advanced tricks don't count for half as much.

Knowing a trick and having the reflexes and skill to use them appropriately is an entirely different matter. I mean, I can show you all the moves that a black belt uses in about ten minutes, but that doesn't mean that you could actually beat a black belt after ten minutes or even ten months of instruction.

Chamomile wrote:
"But, given strong effort and a hit to the right spot, a rigid point stabbing strongly could puncture armor even if its cutting edge would not."
That would basically be a critical.

It sounds to me like a hit on a high AC foe. A crit would be something like a lucky shot through a visor or the seam of armor at the neck.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sun Jun 12, 2011 3:08 am

Knowing a trick and having the reflexes and skill to use them appropriately is an entirely different matter.

The good tricks are the ones that take, like, three hours to be usable in battle, and after that it's just training to improve accuracy and power. The latter of which the giant already has in abundance because he's ten feet tall. He could probably break your bones through your plate with his eight-foot, ~30 pound longsword. And the former doesn't matter so much when you've got attrition on your side.

Novembermike · Post by **Novembermike** » Sun Jun 12, 2011 3:20 am

K wrote: LOL. Your entire opinion is based on two untrained morons in plate who aren't even trying to kill each other or even damage each other's equipment ? Seriously? Do you honestly think SCA yahoos even rate as competent fighters?

I'm not a member of ARMA because of politics (their leader's been alienating a lot people in the community), but those guys look like they know what they're doing. They start off at the half-sword, which is reasonable for armored combat, there's a few tentative attempts to bind, the guy gets off a decent mordschlag into ringen and then a failed mordschlag leads to ringen again and a disarm and sword in a joint. If you noticed something terrible let me know, but they were being reasonably tentative given how much armored combat revolves around takedowns.

Also, this isn't SCA. Just clarifying, but that's a ruleset that turns it into a fantasy battle. ARMA is based in Lichtenauer and several other classical fighting manuals.

And why are we talking about saber fencers vs. plate guys? We are talking about armored and unskilled guys(giants) vs. well-trained and also armored guys(DnD fighters), and that's a different fight.

You brought up real world "master swordsmen" which means fencing which means unarmored.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Sun Jun 12, 2011 4:12 am

seriously guys don't nerd this up with SCA bullshit

stick to fictional combat only

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Sun Jun 12, 2011 4:24 am

no matter how good you are.. if you're opponent has an Iron sword and shield, and you have bronze.. you're fucked

Novembermike · Post by **Novembermike** » Sun Jun 12, 2011 4:42 am

Well, SCA pretty much is fictional combat...

Novembermike · Post by **Novembermike** » Sun Jun 12, 2011 4:54 am

sabs wrote:no matter how good you are.. if you're opponent has an Iron sword and shield, and you have bronze.. you're fucked

IIRC Bronze is typically a little stronger than the Irons of the time, the problem is that it's much scarcer. The jump from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age was more about the widespread use of metals to the point that an average landed warrior could afford a full suit of metal armor (usually chain or scale) and a metal weapon.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sun Jun 12, 2011 5:57 am

sabs wrote:no matter how good you are.. if you're opponent has an Iron sword and shield, and you have bronze.. you're fucked

It's got more to do with your opponent being ten feet tall than minor gaps in equipment quality.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Sun Jun 12, 2011 6:15 am

It's got more to do with your opponent being ten feet tall than minor gaps in equipment quality.

True strike, bitches.

K · Post by K » Sun Jun 12, 2011 7:01 am

I prefer this:

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sun Jun 12, 2011 10:44 pm

K wrote:I prefer this:

So do I. There's two ways you can get that. You can either make a giant fight something your character will never breeze through like it's nothing even if the odds do favor them, or you can make your character inhumanly strong/fast. No amount of skill will change the fact that a glancing blow from that thing will break your arm, and a solid blow will cave in your ribcage.

shau · Post by **shau** » Mon Jun 13, 2011 12:27 am

Even K's example is pretty anime. Look at the club the ogre/giant thing is holding, it's really only a handle and the rest of it's lying in pieces on the ground. Which means swordswoman just cut through what's basically a tree with a few sword strokes.

K · Post by K » Mon Jun 13, 2011 12:58 am

shau wrote:Even K's example is pretty anime. Look at the club the ogre/giant thing is holding, it's really only a handle and the rest of it's lying in pieces on the ground. Which means swordswoman just cut through what's basically a tree with a few sword strokes.

She's got a magic sword. You can tell because it looks nice and has writing on it. This is relevant because of what a magic sword does.... it makes someone's chainmail-hard skin protect them like leather and makes wood like flesh..... I mean, what did you think the +3 to hit actually did?

That's not even an issue though. Anime would have her shooting "wind" that looks like sheets of fire that cause the ground to explode while she flies through the air.

The presence of some magic does not make anime. The defaulting of everyone to a spellcaster is what does.

Gx1080 · Post by **Gx1080** » Mon Jun 13, 2011 2:04 am

Aaaand this is a circular discussion already.

Listen, if you want to be a meat puppet for +X magic items just to conserve the illusion that your "skills" mean shit on High Fantasy, go ahead.

Problem is: That has proven to be a shitty paradigm of game design so far.

"Not-magic" that you can get by doing push-ups solves that problem.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Mon Jun 13, 2011 2:47 am

Even K's example is pretty anime. Look at the club the ogre/giant thing is holding, it's really only a handle and the rest of it's lying in pieces on the ground. Which means swordswoman just cut through what's basically a tree with a few sword strokes.

that's not really anime. anime would be her jumping seventy feet in the air while shooting lasers from her sword and perhaps transforming into a lolicon. as k noted she probably has a magical sword (something I'd definitely wager given the clean cuts) which again is different from anime

Aaaand this is a circular discussion already.

yeah that happens around here

K · Post by K » Mon Jun 13, 2011 3:06 am

Gx1080 wrote:Aaaand this is a circular discussion already.

Listen, if you want to be a meat puppet for +X magic items just to conserve the illusion that your "skills" mean shit on High Fantasy, go ahead.

Problem is: That has proven to be a shitty paradigm of game design so far.

"Not-magic" that you can get by doing push-ups solves that problem.

A picture from 2e DnD does not mean what you think it means.

Listen. A bunch of people don't want your poxy Ki magic that comes from push-ups because it's fucking lame. They don't want to be superhuman because they can't relate to that, but they like having a few magic items that don't overshadow them because they are like tools.

You can give people abilities that feel like skill and are powerful. Every action movie ever written has ample inspiration for what these things look like, and the abilities are as powerful as you write them to be.

Why can't you fuckers get that? Do you have so little imagination?

For example, you can just say that powerful fighters can bring down a Wall of Force because they can predict where momentary shimmers in the field show a weakness that when struck cause it to go down and only they have the timing and skill to hit those spots.

You can just say that skilled fighters can out-fient every giant ever born so that their steel-hard skin is no protection when the giant over-commits to a swing and ends up ramming it's own eye into the fighter's blade. People can actually imagine how that works because 99% of the combat is abstracted anyway.

The fucking flavor only matters in the sense that some flavors are going to meet heavy player resistance. It's like if you decided "hey, our paladins are all going to be rapists..." That kind of radical flavor departure causes people to not want to play your game.

People never cared that Book of Nine Swords powered up the fighter.... they didn't like the flavor. If you learned from the data that was being presented, you would have learned that almost every power-up to the fighting classes has been embraced except for the ones with anime flavor.

When people think of DnD, they don't think "where is my anime goodness?" They think, "I want something like the 1000+ fantasy books in the fantasy section of the bookstore/library."

CapnTthePirateG · Post by **CapnTthePirateG** » Mon Jun 13, 2011 3:23 am

K wrote:
Gx1080 wrote:Aaaand this is a circular discussion already.

Listen, if you want to be a meat puppet for +X magic items just to conserve the illusion that your "skills" mean shit on High Fantasy, go ahead.

Problem is: That has proven to be a shitty paradigm of game design so far.

"Not-magic" that you can get by doing push-ups solves that problem.
A picture from 2e DnD does not mean what you think it means.

Listen. A bunch of people don't want your poxy Ki magic that comes from push-ups because it's fucking lame. They don't want to be superhuman because they can't relate to that, but they like having a few magic items that don't overshadow them because they are like tools.

You can give people abilities that feel like skill and are powerful. Every action movie ever written has ample inspiration for what these things look like, and the abilities are as powerful as you write them to be.

Why can't you fuckers get that? Do you have so little imagination?

For example, you can just say that powerful fighters can bring down a Wall of Force because they can predict where momentary shimmers in the field show a weakness that when struck cause it to go down and only they have the timing and skill to hit those spots.

You can just say that skilled fighters can out-fient every giant ever born so that their steel-hard skin is no protection when the giant over-commits to a swing and ends up ramming it's own eye into the fighter's blade. People can actually imagine how that works because 99% of the combat is abstracted anyway.

The fucking flavor only matters in the sense that some flavors are going to meet heavy player resistance. It's like if you decided "hey, our paladins are all going to be rapists..." That kind of radical flavor departure causes people to not want to play your game.

People never cared that Book of Nine Swords powered up the fighter.... they didn't like the flavor. If you learned from the data that was being presented, you would have learned that almost every power-up to the fighting classes has been embraced except for the ones with anime flavor.

When people think of DnD, they don't think "where is my anime goodness?" They think, "I want something like the 1000+ fantasy books in the fantasy section of the bookstore/library."

And the damn dragon still drops a rock on your head. Sure, you can take the fighter and have him fight well, maybe even be good at hacking things, but that really doesn't solve the rest of the problems. What the hell does the fighter from the 1000+ fantasy books do when the artificer, sky wizard, and necromancer get on the jetpack, cloud, and dragon zombie in an attempt to head off the army of dragons raised by Baron von Kittykiller before they reach Sky City? How does he compete with a mage's teleport, plane shift, or shadow walk? Most of the warriors in fantasy literature live under the magic>you law, and we wouldn't be having this discussion if we actually liked that.

Gx1080 · Post by **Gx1080** » Mon Jun 13, 2011 3:34 am

I think that "we" is overrated.

When I see most Fantasy media, I see that most people are perfectly fine with two solutions:

a)Having the non-Magic people only there to suck the cock of the Magic people. So all players are magic people.

b)Keeping it low-powered Fantasy, where only NPCs do the really cool shit.

That's depressing. Or a market oportunity. I mean, low-power Fantasy is so overdone that the idea of a smooth progression from dungeon crawling to epic myths/planar demon slaying is refreshing.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Mon Jun 13, 2011 3:54 am

Anime would have her shooting "wind" that looks like sheets of fire that cause the ground to explode while she flies through the air.

That's aesthetic. It has nothing to do with mechanical ability, unless the fire/wind, exploding ground, or flight are actually written into the rules.

They think, "I want something like the 1000+ fantasy books in the fantasy section of the bookstore/library."

Then D&D is not for them. Granted, I haven't read all 1,000+ of those books, but of the ones I've read, none of them have featured slaying giants like they're ill-mannered children. Actually, none of them I can think of featured giants at all, except in the sense of "unusually tall person." But really, anything that went further than orc-level was a big deal.

souran · Post by **souran** » Mon Jun 13, 2011 4:12 am

Well, its good to see people throughing out their SCA, Arma, fencing, kendo, mma, and fight book credentials.

I had not seen an argument to that sort of card pulling in a while here and so I had almost wondered if we were going to lose our status as a rpg forum.

There is a historical context for all these weapons, fighting styles, and methods. Fighitng methods are not developed in a vaccum they are develped because they have the ability to be repeatedly effective against something.

However, for most rpgs, and for D&D and pathfinder especially none of that shit matters because the level of detail just isn't there.

Many of the weapons characters can use in D&D are from different cultures (some of which never encountered some of the others), from different time periods, some weapons like the rapier stand for a selection of 3 or 4 weapons. Others like the longsword and the short sword and the dagger are standing in for literally dozens of different weapons, all from different cultures all with different expected uses and many with massively varing fighting methods.

Further, when characters find magic weapons they are often in treasure hordes or from vaults or graves of long dead warriors. These warriors probably used really different shit. If you gave a Mideveal knight the equipment from a dead centeriun he would look at you like you were retarded. If you offered the best sniper in the military of whatever country you think is the most kick ass a "magic" gun that was 200 years old and he is going to refuse because in all likelyhood he has little to no experiece with black powder firearms.....

Shit changes, and that people won't accept a less "realistic" D&D seems really silly. Most rpg combat systems fall apart if there are more than about a dozen combatants - often because if you can beat 3-4 baddies of a type then you can probably bat 1000s. That is a result of the way the game is written, not anthing having to do with genre convetions or styles or historical accuracy, or sporting accuracy. Its just the way the rules play out.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Mon Jun 13, 2011 5:46 am

fyi bullseye is a good example of a non-caster who has a really high skill that allows him to do quasi-supernatural things without being anime