There's a whole lot of other reasons you'd want a sword over a chair. The damage isn't going to be all that great, and in a suitably cinematic fashion the chair will probably break over the person you're trying to hit.Korbel wrote:Oh, OK. But isn't a +1 increase in TN too small difference between fighting with a sword and a chair? That's only one success less (on average), when attacking with 10 dice. I know it might change the tides of battle, but I'd expect a bigger change of chances, when one uses such an unwieldy weapon.
Why use a sword over axe? Well, it's easier to carry!
I don't know if you played TROS, but once they introduced The Flower of Battle, something interesting happened to the weapon stats. They started including 7s and 8s as baseline and what we rapidly learned is that no one wanted to use weapons with ATN7 because they just weren't good enough to compete with parries and shields from other weapons. If you had a ton more dice than the other person, you could just about even the odds, but even then in practice you were often hurting. I don't know anyone that could use the ATN8 stuff. No one ever did. It was just too significant a penalty to be viable.
It might be realistic to start a chair off at ATN8, but what that would ultimately mean is that no one would ever do it in game. You'd never seen someone pick up a bar stool and smash it over another dude's back, because the game makes it too hard to pull off. Worse, when someone decided to do it anyway, the GM has to go look up the stats on a chair.
Keeping it streamlined has a lot more benefits than drawbacks. The GM doesn't need to look up stats on it. It's easy to make a judgement call on damage ("uh, strength+1 blunt.") and then it falls under the general rule that improvised weapons are Disadvantaged. Because the rules are simple and relatively forgiving, the player can get away with deciding that they want to hit someone with a chair and have a reasonable chance of doing it. In my book, that's pretty cool.
Whenever we're faced with a design decision, we try to go with the choice that lets the player do more cool stuff.
Axes were something we played around with quite a bit. Mass weapons and polearms are both swiss-army-knife kinds of weapons. They are tools that are specialized to a particular job, and the Weapon Codex lets you build and customize your axe to purpose, whether that is a light versatile tomahawk style weapon, or a great big nasty chopper. The same thing applies to basically all weapons, but it really shines with mass weapons and polearms with the sheer amount of diversity that existed in real life.EinBein wrote:Sounds very promising
I was a bit unhappy with the way axes were dealt with in TROS. Yes - historically - they may have been a second string, but I'd like to have them at least a viable choice.
Axes haven't felt fleshed out as there were many different techniques for the handling of different shapes, sizes and amounts of blades but only one technique (mass weapon and shield) for the use of all kinds of "mass" weapons (which are at least as diverse as the blades are).
Don't get me wrong, I don't take up the cudgels for more techniques. I would prefer them to be more general in general (either universalizing (try to avoid "general" again) a bit more on the blades end or making them more open to include mass weapons). At least make it feel fair
We kept Mass Weapons as a single proficiency. As much as we looked, the information we came across only ever barely touched the use of axes and hammers, and where they did there was a significant amount of overlap on how they were used by virtue of the way the weapons are - a long haft and a striking surface at the end. If we were going to break them up at all, we'd have wound up doing so by functionality: two-handed mass weapons, Mass weapon and shield, single mass-weapon... But since in terms of techniques, they all do roughly the same things, we went with the above decision: err on the side of players getting to do more with less.
Ultimately, it wound up being broken into Mass Weapons and Polearms. Mass Weapons is a fairly direct art form, chiefly about feeling out your opponent and waiting for that opening to deal a massive, overwhelming blow. That's not to say Mass Weapons have no tricks, but the emphasis rewards a certain play style. Polearms have more tricks up their sleeve and really reward you for keeping an opponent at range. It's more versatile in many ways, but if the enemy gets inside your range then you lose your primary advantage.
Most mass weapons will be Mass by default, but two-handed weapons can be used in either Technique. A Dane Axe thus can wind up being used as a polearm, or a mass weapon. The differences in techniques with it are made evident by the proficiencies and their individual technique choices and emphases.
Swords are very much side-arms. You used them as backup weapons in many cases, freeing you up to carry a more specialized primary weapon. At least in the medieval period and later, axes are specialist weapons. You grab the axe, keep the sword in your belt. Of course, in setting where swords were too expensive, spears become the primary weapon, with axes and short-swords becoming sidearms.hector wrote:That's a fairly good point that many role players forget about: swords were the most common side arm in civilian life, pretty much regardless of the wealth of the person carrying it, for primarily that reason. If you're walking about town, not looking for a fight but wanting to be prepared, a sword at your waist can be out of its scabbard and ready to use in far less time than a battle axe can be pulled out of a belt loop and have whatever it is that protects you from the sharp edges removed so that you can properly hit someone with it. If, of course, you neglect the bits that protect you from the sharp edges, that axe is going to be far less comfortable to wear.Korbel wrote:Why use a sword over axe? Well, it's easier to carry!
It's pretty much the same reason as why people in a civilian environment would carry a buckler over a kite shield; one of those things is far easier to carry around all day than the other...
