Combat where a backup weapon is handy to have

[OgreBattle]

D&D trends towards folks sticking with one weapon, Shadowrun too yeah?

But in fiction, historic accounts, reconstructions, 'medieval combat' often involves clashing with polearms then sometimes being disarmed, or willingly dropping your polleaxe to grab and dagger stab someone.

The deeds of Jacques Lalaing cover some of that:
http://www.thearma.org/essays/Lalaing.htm#.XDcGolUzaUk

The two knights emerged from their pavillions, carrying a spear and a polaxe each. "Each marched fiercely towards the other; and as they approached, they hurled their lances" - to no effect. Switching to their polaxes, they closed distance. Early on in the combat, Jacques used a disarming technique, knocking the polaxe out of one of Jean's hands - but the Italian knight quickly recovered his weapon, and resumed the fight. Jacques struck Sir Jean such a blow that it nearly turned him around, but still the fight continued. Finally, Jacques disarmed his opponent entirely, striking the polaxe out of both his hands. The Italian knight immediately sought to close distance, hoping the grapple with Sir Jacques, and trying to catch hold of his visor. But Jacques "kept driving him back with the point of his axe, so that de Boniface was unable to reach him." At this point, seeing the dire straits that Sir Jean was in, the Duke of Burgundy threw down his baton, ending the match.

---

A few moments later, Jacques disarmed Diego, knocking his polaxe out of his hands. Following standard practice, Diego rushed in, arms outstretched, seeking to grapple. Jacques extended his left arm, stopping him, and with his right hand threw his axe aside. Still holding his opponent at bay with his left hand, Jacques was drawing his short sword when the King of Castille threw down the baton, stopping the combat.

---
The foot combat began uneventfully. But after about 10 or 12 blows had been exchanged, Jacques suddenly caught hold of his opponent’s polaxe with his right hand, clearing an opening. Holding his weapon in his left hand, he struck Jean 3 times in the face with the tail-spike of his polaxe. Releasing his adversary’s polaxe, Jacques quickly grabbed the plume on Jean’s helmet "and pulled him so rudely that he fell to the ground." The judge, seeing the Sicilian knight stretched out on the ground, immediately stopped the combat.
----

Jacques came against James Douglas (the earl's brother) and swiftly disarmed him, knocking the spear from his grasp. James switched to his polaxe, but Jacques disarmed him again, just as easily. Irate at having lost both his spear and his axe, James drew his dagger and attempted to close, striking repeatedly at Jacques' unarmored face. Jacques held him at bay with his left hand, catching his fingers in the eye-slits of his helmet. Discarding his polaxe, Jacques drew his sword, "...which was a thin estoc, and grasped the blade near the point, so he could use it as a dagger, for he had somehow lost his own." Meanwhile, James had caught hold of his bevor (chin-guard); attempting to thrust at the unarmored palm of James' hand, Jacques lost his sword. Now completely disarmed, Jacques caught his opponent with both hands on his visor, and was in the process of throwing him to the ground when the king stopped the combat.

----

Jacques attempted to continue the fight, but his left hand [got stabbed] failed him. Holding the head of the polaxe under his left armpit, Jacques continued to fight, wielding the tail-spike with his right hand. Realizing the dire straits he was in, Jacques discarded his polaxe and closed to grapple with his opponent. Grabbing the Englishman’s helmet with one hand, and his left arm with the other, Jacques used a wrestling technique to throw Thomas Que. The English squire hit the ground with such force that the visor of his bascinet was buried in the earth. Seeing this, the duke threw down his baton, stopping the combat.
-----
Jacques fought Claude Pitois the next day. The combat was swift; after a few blows, Jacques stepped in and took hold of Claude’s polaxe with his right hand. Clearing an opening, he attempted to strike Claude in the face with the point of his polaxe, which he held in his left hand. But Claude blocked the blow, catching hold of Jacques’ polaxe with his right hand. Releasing his opponent’s weapon, Jacques caught hold of his neck instead. Claude escaped his grip twice, but Jacques finally closed distance and caught his head under his arm "in the wrestling hold known as the Corne-muse (bagpipe)." Once he caught his opponent in this head-lock, he threw him to the ground. Claude landed flat on his back, but caught hold of Jacques as he fell. Losing balance, Jacques fell into a crouch on top of Claude. At this point, the judge threw down his baton. Both combatants retained their axes until the end of the combat.

----

So in the above examples....

-disarming pole weapons seemed to happen often (disarming swords were not mentioned though, perhaps its harder to disarm a smaller weapon?)

-sometimes people fall over and retain their weapons too.

- when the opponent grapples, dropping one's own greatweapon/polearm to counter grapple was a valid response. Holding onto the weapon and striking was also a valid response. Perhaps a degrees of success thing in combat mechanics where fail means you get a stabbing, low success means the opponent must drop their weapon and grapple, high means you bypass their grappling and toss em.

-Apparently you can carry a poleaxe and spear at the same time, I have no idea how they did it...


Heavy combat also has a lot of temporarily stunning hits happen, you gotta follow up to KO/kill 'em or they can recover:

Meanwhile, Herve de Meriadec was fighting the other James Douglas. As the two closed in, James lowered his spear and thrust at Herve's face. However, he missed his mark; instead, his point went through the left sleeve of Herve's surcoat and glanced off of the armor underneath. Herve, stepping within distance, struck Sir James so hard on the head with his polaxe that he knocked him to the ground, stunned, face down.
Herve immediately looked to see whether his companions needed assistance, since that was allowed by the rules. As he did so, Sir James began to recover, rising to his knees. Seeing this, Herve struck him to the ground again with numerous blows of his axe. As he turned to aid his friends, Sir James rose yet again, and the two fought briefly with their polaxes. At this point, seeing the danger that the Scottish knights were in, the king ended the fight.

So for 'more realism' in heavy armor, a stunned/wobbled state should be a core part of combat and not special supernatural monk powers.

[maglag]

So in the above examples....

-disarming pole weapons seemed to happen often (disarming swords were not mentioned though, perhaps its harder to disarm a smaller weapon?)

- when the opponent grapples, dropping one's own greatweapon/polearm to counter grapple was a valid response. Holding onto the weapon and striking was also a valid response. Perhaps a degrees of success thing in combat mechanics where fail means you get a stabbing, low success means the opponent must drop their weapon and grapple, high means you bypass their grappling and toss em.

-Apparently you can carry a poleaxe and spear at the same time, I have no idea how they did it...

They were clearly some sort of throwing spears since they open combat by hurling them at each other so they had to be wieldable in just one hand. You can carry a poleaxe in your other hand, then grab it with both hands for melee combat after your thrown weapon is expended.

Something else that's missing is that weapons break/wear down. Spears/poleaxes in particular rely on wooden shafts which aren't exactly indestructible, and even the best sword will eventually get a dull edge after so much hacking.

This reminds me of a weapon master going "Look it doesn't matter how cool it is to stick your weapon's pointy end in the ground, you're just wearing it down."

[Yesterday's Hero]

This also happens a lot in fiction, although the outright loss of a valuable weapon (Mjolnir) is a plot point rather than some random occurrence.

On one of the firsts scenes in Gladiator (2000) Maximus is fighting some barbarians on horseback and he chops some poor dude's head off, leaving his sword stuck on the tree behind the barbarian, so that he has to draw a secondary weapon. I've always felt that emulating that sort of thing should be very important in a game.

[Zaranthan]

I've always felt that emulating that sort of thing should be very important in a game.

It should be very important in CERTAIN TYPES of game. Gritty, count-your-iron-rations games where blades get dull and/or stuck in rib cages, yes. Haphazard bar brawl games where you lose track of your stuff and grab a stool, yes. Four-color comic book games, not so much. Epic adventure with your grandfather's artifact, hell no.

Generally, if weapons aren't potion-level of consumable/expendable, you want the hero losing their sword to be an event. Either they or a named antagonist makes a screen-time-worthy decision to make the sword go away and there's hand wringing and gnashing of teeth.

[Blade]

Getting your weapon stuck inside/under someone can easily happen, especially in a chaotic melee. I think it was in Snow Crash that there was this text about how the art of using a katana in battle isn't about putting it inside someone but about pulling it out before that person's angry friend attacks you. I don't know how true that is, but it seems to make sense.

But more to the point, in medieval combat when your opponent was heavily armored you couldn't cut through his armor with your sword/polearm (except for halberds). There were ways to kill with a sword but they required a level of skill that few people would have. So most of the time, the goal was to get your opponent to fall down so that you could kill him with a dagger. Your sword/polearm was just here to give you reach and/or help you stun your opponent, but you didn't try to kill with it. You used your misericorde (a short dagger specifically designed for this) for this.

[Yesterday's Hero]

I've always felt that emulating that sort of thing should be very important in a game.

It should be very important in CERTAIN TYPES of game.

Did you read the first post? I'm obviously speaking in the context of this discussion ("historical medieval" combat).

Moving on, I think that the main issue with adding this as a subsystem is that it generates a lot of book keeping. You have to incorporate the act of losing the weapon somewhere (probably near or on the attack roll) and then you have to keep track of your secondary attack modes that you must now use and a method of recovery of the first weapon, etc. Is there any precedence of a game that handles this properly?

Edit:
An idea would be:

If your attack roll is exactly as high as your enemies’ AC you roll on the weapon mishap table (perhaps you add you "BAB" or whatever to this roll, high result being beneficial to you or causing detriment to your target and vice versa). This mishap might cause the attack to miss.

Then you may make a class (maybe even the fighter) whose mechanical niche is exploiting this. Rolling on a better table or having a bonus on that roll, for instance. And you also get to roll if your attack exceeds the target's AC by one (or misses by one) and so on.

[OgreBattle]

Getting your weapon stuck inside/under someone can easily happen, especially in a chaotic melee. I think it was in Snow Crash that there was this text about how the art of using a katana in battle isn't about putting it inside someone but about pulling it out before that person's angry friend attacks you. I don't know how true that is, but it seems to make sense.

It's true, but it's been a bit exaggerated in the sense that it's true of all swords but for the last 100 years the katana was a living tradition where senseis drill in correct cut/stab and withdraw techniques.

Matt Easton, a youtube dude who has nice snark-free chats about swords, says katanas are more forgiving to cut clean with than a longsword (I think falchions are too) because they're more specialized for cutting.

yes. Four-color comic book games, not so much

I figure saturday morning cartoon action fits too, you need the GI Joes to not just leave cobra troopers bleeding out from a gut wound, but rather dropping barrels on them. Or Mr. T swinging a 2x4 instead of gutting someone with a machete.

[maglag]

Getting your weapon stuck inside/under someone can easily happen, especially in a chaotic melee. I think it was in Snow Crash that there was this text about how the art of using a katana in battle isn't about putting it inside someone but about pulling it out before that person's angry friend attacks you. I don't know how true that is, but it seems to make sense.

It's true, but it's been a bit exaggerated in the sense that it's true of all swords but for the last 100 years the katana was a living tradition where senseis drill in correct cut/stab and withdraw techniques.

Matt Easton, a youtube dude who has nice snark-free chats about swords, says katanas are more forgiving to cut clean with than a longsword (I think falchions are too) because they're more specialized for cutting.

That's the point of them being curved, ditto for scimitars. You get to cut more flesh while not needing to go so deep. Also reduces blade dulling/chipping since it gives you a lower chance of hitting the hard bones.

[OgreBattle]

Another example of needing a subweapon... Fiore's polearm advice includes having a special hollow poleaxe filled with eyeball melting poison


"This pollaxe of mine is full of powder and the said pollaxe has holes around. And this powder is so strong and corrosive that immediately as it touches the eye, the man can not open it in any way, and maybe will not be able to see anymore. And I am a heavy (ponderosa), cruel and mortal pollaxe, better blows I make than other manual weapons. And if I fail the first strike that I come to do, the pollaxe will damage me and is no more of any use. And if I fiercely make the first blow, I avoid troubles of all the other manual weapons . And if I am with good weapons [armour?] well accompanied for my defence I take the pulsativa guards of sword. Very noble Signore, my Signor Marchese, there are a lot of things in this book, such maliciousness you would not do. But to know better, be pleased to see them."

Fiore then gives the recipe afterwards, says there are many other blinding clouds people use but his recipe is the best.

[souran]

Back up weapons are not actually not common. I am not trying to disparage the OP but "back-up" weapons tend to be a very marginal thing.

Modern soldiers don't carry a bunch of weapons. In fact, you can go and see a bunch of Quora questions about why soldier's don't carry sidearms. The answer is that carrying a back-up weapon is not as weight efficient as carrying extra ammo for your primary weapon. Why carry a weapon you are unlikely to use? If you have spent most of your training time on a particular weapon, why bring a secondary weapon with which you are less familiar than more ammo for the primary weapon.

Even tier 1 operators don't often roll with a back-up weapon. Unless it has some special purpose (breaching shotgun, side-arm for a "sniper" for CQB, etc.)

Honestly, the one group that often has "back-up" weapons in the U.S. are the police. This is because the police expect to encounter unplanned situations (specifically, more situations where they could lose or have their primary weapon removed). However, the police are the group least likely to actually use the weapons they are given.

Wierdly, swords are a pretty good weapon to be talking about as a "back-up". Mostly, swords ARE the back up weapon, or it might be better to say that they served a role more like that of pistols today. The katana is a hugely important part of a samuari's kit, but not because it is his main weapon in battle (that would be the bow), but because samurai were allowed to bring katana's to places where bringing a bow wouldn't be allowed.

[Iduno]

Generally, if weapons aren't potion-level of consumable/expendable, you want the hero losing their sword to be an event. Either they or a named antagonist makes a screen-time-worthy decision to make the sword go away and there's hand wringing and gnashing of teeth.

Losing your weapon forever should almost never happen, but losing it until the end of the fight, with the foreknowledge that a back-up weapon is a good idea? Not so bad.

[Stahlseele]

What do you mean, you only stick with one weapon in Shadowrun? O.o
If you do not own a complete arsenal, you are doing it wrong.
And if you do not take a veritable collection of weapons with you on a run, you are doing it stupidly wrong.
The Troll-Bow. Because of course. Silent Sniping with a legal to own sports implement.
An electroshock taser. A Dart-Pistol. For quietish non lethal takedowns over short distance.
A Shotgun with Gel slugs loaded into it to knock fools over and maybe take them out without being too lethal.
A set of knuckle-dusters, and an electric stun glove for when things get a bit too personal or you just want to do it without too much flashyness on the streets . .
A retractable baton or collapsible staff for close combat with a reach bonus and beating people to a pulp instead of killing them, thanks the the SR damage system . .
A heavy Pistol, preferably burst fire capable. Load with Flechette or ExEx for being really nasty on close to medium ground.
Maybe an SMG if you want to make many many holes.
An Assault-Rifle if you do not actually like getting close to what you are going to shoot at.
And of course, as of SR4 or 5, you can hide even more on your body using memory steel for blades that transform into belts.
Or you use actual chains as belts and whips.
And while we are at it, that is only what you can and often should have ON your body.
Now SR has weapons you can build into your body. Improved muscle, armor, Bones for more crunch. Or firearms or biological weapons.
But now we are getting into specialized circumstances.
A hunting rifle with dart rounds filled with something nasty.
Like DMSO and Ghoul-Puree . . Or if you are a really sadistic bastard, HYPER.
Or a fluid-gun, filled with slip-spray or a foam/glue thrower.
Or a Net-Gun. So so usefull and fun when done right!

And then we get to the actual fun stuff where you are paid to do something very loud and flashy and obvious.
You want an automatic grenade launcher! Spinning Death-Blossom!
Or for more range, a guided missle launcher.

Laser and Gauss-Rifles are cool but usually either useless or total overpriced overkill . .

And why stop with stuff in or on your body?
Drones can carry weapons too! And fly!
Flying Guns that obey your commands!

[Chamomile]

The lack of backup weapons is a modern thing, for a couple of reasons.

1) A carbine is pretty useful in all situations and is effective out to the range where combats usually begin. Unlike a halberd, a carbine doesn't have a narrow ring of effective range that an enemy can plausibly slip through, but instead a massive field that goes from "one foot away from the soldier" to "the range at which enemy combatants spot one another and engage 90% of the time." To the extent that carrying a backup weapon is at all advisable, it's to carry a knife for if someone somehow manages to get into that one-ish foot range where bringing your carbine around on them is hard.

2) Modern weapons take ammo. If you pack a pistol, that's one or two less magazines you're packing instead. If you pack a sword, you are not sacrificing ammo for your halberd.

Equipping a modern soldier with both a rifle and a pistol is mostly a waste of carry weight, but equipping a medieval soldier with a longbow, a halberd, a long sword, and a dagger is perfectly reasonable. If you're going to take one of those away, probably start with the longbow in order to discourage them from breaking formation to return fire on enemy missile troops, since breaking an infantry formation is what enemy missile troops are usually trying to do in the first place (give the longbows to your own dedicated missile troops instead).

[souran]

The lack of backup weapons is a modern thing, for a couple of reasons.

1) A carbine is pretty useful in all situations and is effective out to the range where combats usually begin. Unlike a halberd, a carbine doesn't have a narrow ring of effective range that an enemy can plausibly slip through, but instead a massive field that goes from "one foot away from the soldier" to "the range at which enemy combatants spot one another and engage 90% of the time." To the extent that carrying a backup weapon is at all advisable, it's to carry a knife for if someone somehow manages to get into that one-ish foot range where bringing your carbine around on them is hard.

2) Modern weapons take ammo. If you pack a pistol, that's one or two less magazines you're packing instead. If you pack a sword, you are not sacrificing ammo for your halberd.

Equipping a modern soldier with both a rifle and a pistol is mostly a waste of carry weight, but equipping a medieval soldier with a longbow, a halberd, a long sword, and a dagger is perfectly reasonable. If you're going to take one of those away, probably start with the longbow in order to discourage them from breaking formation to return fire on enemy missile troops, since breaking an infantry formation is what enemy missile troops are usually trying to do in the first place (give the longbows to your own dedicated missile troops instead).

Soldiering in antiquity was expensive. Most soldier's didn't have more than 1 weapon because if you could afford to produce 2 weapons you gave 1 each to two people.

That said, the weapons you list show a misunderstanding of weapons for a purpose vs. weapons as a backup. The Byzantine skoutatoi were armed with sword, spear, and shield (and named for their oval shield). However, the sword was not the "backup" to the spear. They fought in a shield wall and the spearmen fought in the front rank. The rear ranks used their swords after the collapse of the opponents shield wall, or killed enemies who had become dismounted. The sword was for a different purpose than the spear, it was not the back-up.

Similarly, a wealthy knight in north western europe probably would own a sword, a pole arm, a bow, a dagger, and a lance. He may even own one or two more weapons.

However, which weapons he arms with each day depend on what he is doing. If he is fighting dismounted he takes the poleaxe, and a dirk or spiked hammer for penetrating armor. These later weapons are not "backups" they are necessary to kill his opponents in armor. If he is on campaign and "fighting in the van", he arms with a lance, but because the tucked lances break he carries another weapon that is good from horseback. This is the closest to a "backup" weapon and it has more to do with one weapon being one use only.

If he is taking a ride with his lord through his the lands they own he probably doesn't wear armor and carries a sword and a knife, but he carries the knife because for most of human history adult men carried a knife of some sort on themselves daily.

The OP has some good material on tourney situations where they people fight with each item in their arsenal. Certainly, a good warrior of any era is proficient with a variety of weapons for different applications. However, when actually fighting, that is going to get reduced to a minimum. The rest of it is going to stay with the baggage train.

[Chamomile]

These later weapons are not "backups" they are necessary to kill his opponents in armor.

"These weapons aren't backups, they're alternative armaments that he falls back upon when his primary weapon is ineffective!" What do you think a backup weapon is? It's not a weapon you resort to when you lose your first one, because that would obviously just be a second copy of your primary weapon.

[Whipstitch]

There's obvious room for improvement but SR4 actually stumbled ass backwards into allowing you to be pretty good with back up weapons by virtue of its weapon categories and defaulting system. For open combat you obviously wanted to run one gun skill and treat it like Sex Panther, but each skill category had half-decent options for low and high armor targets and any Street Samurai with self-respect was going to roll onto the scene with a 7 Agility and a Smartlink or Laser Sight and enough Stealth skills to get the drop on people in a fair amount of situations. Combine that with the nature of the damage system and you end up with a situation where in Street Samurai duels you both use your signature weapons in order to overcome each other's defenses but in other scenarios you can often get away with prioritizing other qualities like AoE, concealment or sheer Armor Penetration. I've always felt like pocket pistols in particular are in a pretty good spot thematically; if you're not James Bond they're pretty shitty in active firefight but they're fine even without much Pistols skill if you're just going to say "What's that over there?" and then plug the guy twice in the back with some stick 'n' shock.

[Thaluikhain]

Modern soldiers don't carry a bunch of weapons. In fact, you can go and see a bunch of Quora questions about why soldier's don't carry sidearms. The answer is that carrying a back-up weapon is not as weight efficient as carrying extra ammo for your primary weapon. Why carry a weapon you are unlikely to use? If you have spent most of your training time on a particular weapon, why bring a secondary weapon with which you are less familiar than more ammo for the primary weapon.

Even tier 1 operators don't often roll with a back-up weapon. Unless it has some special purpose (breaching shotgun, side-arm for a "sniper" for CQB, etc.)

Honestly, the one group that often has "back-up" weapons in the U.S. are the police. This is because the police expect to encounter unplanned situations (specifically, more situations where they could lose or have their primary weapon removed). However, the police are the group least likely to actually use the weapons they are given.

Er, do you have a source for that? Specifically, for US military not carrying back-ups weapons. While many militaries don't, for the reasons you've given, the US is somewhat unusual in issuing sidearms, and that's something they've done for quite a long time, for reasons I've never been quite sure of. I believe police have secondary weapons less due to fears about being disarmed, and more due to operating almost exclusively in CQB environments where pistols might actually be useful. (EDIT: Was thinking of SWAT and the like there, on reflection you might mean more ordinary police, fair enough)

Having said that, lots of places still issue bayonets, but with the expectation they are unlikely to be used in combat.

Soldiering in antiquity was expensive. Most soldier's didn't have more than 1 weapon because if you could afford to produce 2 weapons you gave 1 each to two people.

Disagree there. You might only have one spear or sword, but you'd need to carry a knife as a multi-purpose tool for day to day stuff, and that makes a back-up weapon.

And, again, bayonets have been round for centuries.

[maglag]

Modern soldiers don't carry a bunch of weapons. In fact, you can go and see a bunch of Quora questions about why soldier's don't carry sidearms. The answer is that carrying a back-up weapon is not as weight efficient as carrying extra ammo for your primary weapon. Why carry a weapon you are unlikely to use? If you have spent most of your training time on a particular weapon, why bring a secondary weapon with which you are less familiar than more ammo for the primary weapon.

Even tier 1 operators don't often roll with a back-up weapon. Unless it has some special purpose (breaching shotgun, side-arm for a "sniper" for CQB, etc.)

Honestly, the one group that often has "back-up" weapons in the U.S. are the police. This is because the police expect to encounter unplanned situations (specifically, more situations where they could lose or have their primary weapon removed). However, the police are the group least likely to actually use the weapons they are given.

Er, do you have a source for that? Specifically, for US military not carrying back-ups weapons. While many militaries don't, for the reasons you've given, the US is somewhat unusual in issuing sidearms, and that's something they've done for quite a long time, for reasons I've never been quite sure of. I believe police have secondary weapons less due to fears about being disarmed, and more due to operating almost exclusively in CQB environments where pistols might actually be useful. (EDIT: Was thinking of SWAT and the like there, on reflection you might mean more ordinary police, fair enough)

Modern soldiers also carry grenades standard as back-up weapons, pretty handy when your target is hiding behind cover or there's a suspicious room.

Soldiering in antiquity was expensive. Most soldier's didn't have more than 1 weapon because if you could afford to produce 2 weapons you gave 1 each to two people.

Disagree there. You might only have one spear or sword, but you'd need to carry a knife as a multi-purpose tool for day to day stuff, and that makes a back-up weapon.

And, again, bayonets have been round for centuries.

Hammers, clubs and axes were often easy to get hold of too and also doubled as tools (well clubs not so much but would be the easiest to get).

[Judging__Eagle]

And, again, bayonets have been round for centuries.

The bayonet will only go out of fashion when sharpened minerals are not a viable way to kill an opposing creature; and soldiers no longer have use for a knife as a wilderness survival tool.

I think that the "problem" with backups isn't that the games people want them to be used somehow don't incentivize their existence. Rather, I believe that a large part of it has to do with the fact that a combination of factors exist:

[*]The differences between weapons & their ideal application aren't large enough.

Bows don't deal the amount of damage that would make every martial character carry a bow as their primary armament.

Likewise swords are treated in a generally ridiculous manner (slashing damage, but no bludgeoning damage; compounded by the misconception that a sword's greatest injury is lacerations, not fractures); and the majority of bludgeoning weapons are treated as afterthoughts (when in reality, they were the go-to option for fighting people in heavier & heavier armour).

[*] The players themselves are unimaginative as fuck, and don't think that having different weapons could benefit them in any way shape or form

[*] The magic item economies of kitchensink fantasy RPGs make every magical weapon past the primary one that a character owns result in a lost opportunity for non-weapon magic items.

To solve these sort of issues:

Make weapons truly different

A mace either: Grants a bonus To-Hit. To reflect the fact that it doesn't care if you're wearing heavy armour, it'll transmit its concussive force straight into the target

A spear could: ... do a lot of things, spears are largely better than swords even in individual combat, and only when dealing with12' greatspears or 14'-16' sarissa are they going to be not quite nimble enough to kill a sword user in an open field. Either grant AC, or a bonus To-Hit. If not both

A sword could: honestly, grant some sort of defense bonus; also count as dealing bludgeoning & slashing damage; also piercing damage b/c you know, swords have points. I could see a case for swords having three To-Hit/AC Bonus/Damage profiles for their three styles of damage:

Some rough spitballed examples that I've barely thought about how well they interact:

[the reason I'm not happy about these outlines: they make an already boring & fiddly thing even more fiddly & boring, specifically b/c players will have to declare how they're using their weapons attack-to-attack or round-to-round. However this does make physical attacks a lot more interesting than they would be by default]

[my line of thinking is that, a creature gets "up to" +4(?) split between AC, To-Hit, Critical Range, Critical Multipliers for their three damage types, but weapons that lack a damage type can use those unspent bonuses on the types of damage they can deal, so a sword is 'balanced' in all three damage modes, a Scimitar is great at chopping but can't pierce, while a mace fucks people up in Bludgeoning mode & doesn't grant defense bonuses nor can it pierce [edit Jan 12 2019; of course you can parry or deflect w/ a mace; shields/weapons should also grant their bonuses to Touch AC, suddenly the shield-using warrior fighting a wizard from source material . Two handed weapons grant larger bonuses & bonuses vs 1-handed weapons, b/c Shields should also be a lot more fucking powerful than they have been in D&D]

Arming Sword 1d8/19-20/x2 {Slashing: +3 AC/+1 To-Hit; Bludgeoning: +1AC/+3 To-Hit; Piercing: +2AC/+2 To-Hit}

Scimitar 1d6/18-20/x2 {Slashing: +4 AC/+2 To-Hit; Bludgeoning: +2 AC/+5 To-Hit; Piercing: Null}

Light Mace 1d6/x2 {Slashing: +3 AC/-1 To-Hit, Bludgeoning: +6 To-Hit [1d6/19-20/x3], Piercing: Null}

Spear 1d8/x3 {Slashing: +2 AC/+3 To-Hit, Bludgeoning: +1 AC/+4 To-Hit, Piercing: +3 AC/+2 To-Hit}; Two-Handed*

Greatsword 2d6/19-20/x2 {Slashing: +3 AC/+1 To-Hit; Bludgoeining: +1 AC/+4 To-Hit; Piercing: +2 AC/+2 To-Hit}; Two-Handed*

*: Two-Handed Weapon Bonus: Unarmed & 1-handed weapon attacks by creatures your size or smaller provoke Attacks of Opportunity

Buckler: You gain an AC Bonus equal to 1/2 your currently wielded weapons Attack Bonus, against a number of physical attacks equal to your Attacks of Opportunity per Round, so long as you are not Flat-Footed

Small Shield: You gain a +2 Bonus to Armour Class, so long as you are not Flat-Footed

Large Shield: You gain a +4 Bonus to Armour Class, so long as you are not Flat-Footed

Tower Shield: You gain 30% Miss Chance against physical attacks you aren't Flat-Footed against

[Note: Shields should grant their AC bonus to Touch AC, so long as they are not flat-footed]

A Bow/Crossbow could: I'm fine with them dealing x2 as many damage dice out of the box. A longbow just deals 2d8 damage, it's able to kill a horse in a single shot & no one should cry foul.

I'm possibly fine w/ a bow dealing x3 the damage of a 'comparable' melee weapon. The Norse views bows as "cowardly" for being so lethal (not like they didn't use them in professional armies, they just didn't lean heavy on them), while the Japanese viewed bows as "noble" weapons reserved for the elite.

I'd also be fine with Slings being a lot more close to historic levels of power, instead of D&D's "balanced" notions of power. A sling can kill a man in 15th century plate armour (e.g. Aztecs vs Conquistadors); and if you want to go by Judeo-Christian mythos: are capable of killing bears or lions. As well as being able to drop an Ogre (or Phillistine) into their -0 HP count for a Coup de Grace.

Sling: Swift Action to Load, Move action to wind up, Swift Action to maintain Wind Up if not fired immediately, Standard Action to fire. For every round that it is swung, the Sling's base damage is added to the final damage roll; to a maximum amount of times equal to 1/2 the users strength bonus or Base Attack Bonus (whichever is lower) 1d4/18-20/x3 + Strength Bonus

[*] To make players think more imaginatively about weapons; the weapons themselves can't boil down to "use a longsword, or greatsword; unless you need to fight Skeletons (use a warhammer/heavy mace/greatclub) or Manticores (carry javelins/darts/sling/crossbow/bow)




Ultimately, the reason kitchensink fantasy RPGs have people act unimaginatively about weapons, is that they weren't given imaginative rules in the first place. They're simplified as fuck because the designers are trying to corral players into acting in a cookie-cutter fashion, and that was the intent all along.

In 3e D&D specifically, people like Monte Cook emphasized that "game mastery" would make people pick the non-shitty weapons. Which is a horrible way of thinking, because at that point, why even include weapons that are mechanical/tactical dead-ends in the first place?

[Pariah Dog]

I think the whole "Backup weapon" thing at least as far as modern setting goes stems mostly from Video games where you run out of ammo on your primary weapon and its faster to pull a pistol and shoot the guy 1-2 more times than it is to reload the primary.

[Whipstitch]

It's not just video games since weaponry is costume design. What people have on them tells you things about the character.

Let's take Colonel John "Not A Civilian" Matrix as an example:



His role in the movie is to be a human aimbot who spouts cheesy one liners. Nobody is surprised by this development because he's got an ass ton of guns and is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

[Eikre]

Getting your weapon stuck inside/under someone can easily happen, especially in a chaotic melee. I think it was in Snow Crash that there was this text about how the art of using a katana in battle isn't about putting it inside someone but about pulling it out before that person's angry friend attacks you. I don't know how true that is, but it seems to make sense.

Eh, seems to me the arts of using a katana include a perfect drawing-cut in muscle memory so that you never meet the coefficient of static friction in the first place, and also learning to draw it into an immediate strike because you're either already in the middle of a fight where you dropped your spear or you're otherwise being ambushed in a civil setting and there's not a lot of time to fuck around.

But the gist of the notion has some truth to it-

But more to the point, in medieval combat when your opponent was heavily armored you couldn't cut through his armor with your sword/polearm (except for halberds). There were ways to kill with a sword but they required a level of skill that few people would have. So most of the time, the goal was to get your opponent to fall down so that you could kill him with a dagger. Your sword/polearm was just here to give you reach and/or help you stun your opponent, but you didn't try to kill with it. You used your misericorde (a short dagger specifically designed for this) for this.

In medieval combat where your opponent is heavily armored, you're almost certainly on battlefield with like a hundred other guys who are also equally armored, and excluding them from your combat calculus is going to get your neck broken by a horse. This is kind of literally what your first paragraph was getting at. Taking out a little butchery knife to kill one specific guy is a nice option to have, particularly because you might end up in a grapple regardless, but it's not a consistent thing to show up to a fight in this setting with a plan to drop all your main combat weapons. Spears, swords, and hammer all work perfectly fine to kill men in armor, and fighting men from this time period made affirmative and well-attested efforts to practice the ways of doing that.

Try to remember that every fight has victory conditions, and those are not congruent with kill-counts. You're there to break formations, exact casualties, shatter moral, and incite a rout or surrender. You have a lot of other tools to do this: Harassment from afar with missiles, driving people from their horsebacks, inflicting nonlethal injury, dispersing less well-equipped enemy auxiliaries, and tactical maneuvering into apparently unassailable positions. It kind of doesn't matter if the blow to a knight's helmeted head kills him if it rattles his senses and drops him in the mud where he twists an ankle and is left behind by the rest of the cavalry without any other friendly contingents to hook up with. And slapping his temple with a few pounds of iron may kill him anyway.

I feel that people have a huge blind spot for confrontations that don't run to a TPK for one side or the other. It's like everyone is still on a JRPG narrative epistemology where the only interesting outcomes must be personally imposed by the story's architect.

Soldiering in antiquity was expensive. Most soldier's didn't have more than 1 weapon because if you could afford to produce 2 weapons you gave 1 each to two people.

It varies. During vast swaths of history, the duty to arm was imposed on the soldiers themselves. Those guys (knights, citizen soldiers, whatever) wouldn't be making a choice to arm themselves twice or arm themselves and one other guy once, they would be making a choice to pay more out-of-pocket for unnecessary and heavy bullshit, and if they're living in one of the societies with a modicum of military discipline, their commanders are interested in drilling them with some particular set of weapons and turning them into a cohesive force with a few reliable modes of combat, not in taking a rag-tag bunch of mismatched fighters or in fielding complaints about how the back-to-school shopping list included a bunch of horseshit that nobody is ever going to need or want.

Also, at the end of the Bronze Age there were some places with enormous factory-foundries that just shat that stuff out for anyone that wanted it. The limit on quality was technological and the real upper limit on quantity was in manpower.

If he is taking a ride with his lord through his the lands they own he probably doesn't wear armor and carries a sword and a knife, but he carries the knife because for most of human history adult men carried a knife of some sort on themselves daily.

Furthermore, people were not super jazzed to see men showing up dressed with an emphasis of violence, a lot of the time. Even in medieval societies there were frequently laws or folkways about minimizing your battle-readiness in polite company. For instance, in continental Europe during the middle of the last millennium, it was popular to wear not just the sword at your hip but also a long knife behind the small of your back (and it was definitely considered a principle fighting implement, that shit is definitely in the manuals) but I know there were several German electorates that banned carrying both at once on the reasoning that you would only desire two weapons if you were determined to fight and not just preparing for the worst.

The contrast set with D&D murderhobos who live, eat, and fuck in their armor is an exercise left to the reader.

While many militaries don't, for the reasons you've given, the US is somewhat unusual in issuing sidearms, and that's something they've done for quite a long time, for reasons I've never been quite sure of. I believe police have secondary weapons less due to fears about being disarmed, and more due to operating almost exclusively in CQB environments where pistols might actually be useful. (EDIT: Was thinking of SWAT and the like there, on reflection you might mean more ordinary police, fair enough)

I'm not going to pretend to be an authority on this one but I've heard it mentioned that in WWI the American officers had a strange propensity to carry big fuck-off .45s, much in contrast to the little .32s that the Europeans packed, and that the antecedent was the in-living-memory use of the Army out on the frontier where officers planned for unanticipated hostile situations in which they actually had to blow a motherfucker away, whereas the Europeans officers thought more about them as the point-blank means of executing a subordinate who refused to go over the top before anyone else started getting the same ideas.

This is getting tangential, but it's interesting to think that, for a lot of police, long-arms are the secondary weapon. They keep them situated in their cars so and take them into situations like active shooting events where the threshold for violence is already exceeded before they show up. Even in the times we live in, highly militarized beat cops aren't a popular sight, but the programs for shitting all over local jurisdictions with military overstock means that there's little cost to have the option, plus the current consensus on mass shooters is that they fold pretty quickly when they meet armed push-back so the doctrine in most places is for the first responders to go in immediately instead of waiting for SWAT like they would with other premeditated bloodbaths.

In 3e D&D specifically, people like Monte Cook emphasized that "game mastery" would make people pick the non-shitty weapons. Which is a horrible way of thinking, because at that point, why even include weapons that are mechanical/tactical dead-ends in the first place?

When Monte Cook said it I think it was a hedge against people holding him accountable if anything turned out to be too shitty or had insufficient notation explaining how you're supposed to use it. But it's not stupid to model lots of marginal or inferior options for the simulation, with the expectation that the mechanic will still lead people to and reward them for mostly playing towards the the nominal aesthetics. That said, your design mastery will need to be sufficient that the cookie cutter party isn't Carries Seven Barstools Because She Only Throws Barstools Woman, The Ninja That You Can't See Except For If You're Pooping Right Now For Some Reason, Anthropomorphic Dumbo Octopus, and a Swamp Wizard (*bucketmancer after swamps are removed in unofficial errata via twitter post).

[deaddmwalking]

I think there are contradictory desires with weapons. A lot of it is aesthetic - if you imagine your character using a halberd (or you find a cool mini with a halberd) you want halberds to be a viable choice. On the other hand, if halberds are always the best weapon, when you choose a character with a sword (or two swords) you want that to be a viable choice.

If you allow characters to invest resources to make a weapon 'awesome' for them (ie, a specialized character does 1d12 damage with their weapon regardless of the base damage profile), they have no reason to use any other weapons.

Differences between slashing/piercing/bludgeoning basically don't matter - very few creatures have a DR that is affected by one or the other, and most that do have relatively small amounts of it. Having a specialized rakshasa killing weapon might be worthwhile, but switching from a greatsword to a club doesn't make sense when you're fighting skeletons.

There are things you can do with weapon special abilities to make them potentially better choices - a halberd could have lower damage than a greataxe, but if it also offers advantages with trip/disarm/reach in some combination it might be worthwhile to switch between them - using the halberd in most cases and switching to the higher damage weapon when necessary. Likewise, if switching between using a weapon one- and two-handed is possible, having that as a primary weapon makes sense and if you don't care about AC you can shoulder your shield and switch the way you hold it or pull out the heavier weapon... In any case, if you're using anything like wealth by level (and you probably shouldn't), additional weapons shouldn't count toward your wealth limit.

[Ignimortis]

If there are "skill levels" for weapon use and yet you also want people to use many weapons effectively, roll as many things as possible into one.

I hate to praise White Wolf, but they actually got it right with the Brawl-Firearms/Archery-Melee divide. That's about the right level of granularity for a system that expects different characters to be good at different things, but also doesn't punish you for ditching your sword for a knife. Making an omnidisciplinary weapon specialist is still not that easy, but you can get there pretty quickly compared to other systems.

Shadowrun runs afoul of this with half a dozen or more weapon skills which mean that a streetsam is supposed to be good at 3 or 4 skills before even factoring utility in. That's just dumb, and even if you care about above-average granularity, you should at least compress SR skills into Blunt (clubs, staves, chains)/Edged (axes, swords, knives)/Unarmed for melee combat and Handguns (basically any 1h gun like a pistol or an SMG)/Longarms (basically any rifle/shotgun)/Heavy Weapons (assault cannons and grenade launchers and RPGs) for ranged combat, plus Gunnery (turrets and other non-manually transported weapons) on the side. Any more than that, and you've just screwed combat specialists out of skills.

D&D 3.5 also has this problem with the Weapon Focus lines (even if they didn't suck), but at least that can be partly fixed with "weapon groups", which mean that your halberd skills can be also used with a spear or a pike and maybe even a greataxe if you squint.

However, overdoing it is also bad - otherwise you have something like 5e where every weapon has a binary switch of Proficiency, and that's it. So a wizard and a fighter are equally as good at fighting with a dagger without any investment. That's just dumb.

[OgreBattle]

I think there are contradictory desires with weapons. A lot of it is aesthetic - if you imagine your character using a halberd (or you find a cool mini with a halberd)

Dang that's a great point, when you've got a cool mini with a certain weapon you kinda want to keep on using just that weapon.

Differences between slashing/piercing/bludgeoning basically don't matter

Going on that tangent, making that difference matter should be on the defense side of things. Say a two layered defense

1st layer Force/Toughness: does the hit rattle you through your armor/helmet/skull via force of the blow? Hammering weapons are great at this. Toughness failing means you're rattled.

2nd layer Bloodied/Armor Save: does the attack slice n' bloody you up? Edged and pointed weapons are good at this.

So plate armor greatly increases your armor save, but your toughness is not that high. You first test to see if you're rattled, then test to see if your also bloodied. So you can get hit by a hammer to the head and be rattled, but not bloodied