Claire Ryan's Blog, page 11

Accuracy in Dungeons & Dragons Combat: Hit Points

Those of you that are familiar with Dungeons & Dragons and real swordplay are probably screaming at me right now. Don’t break out the torches and pitchforks just yet! I’m going somewhere with this, I promise. First of all, let’s have an explanation for the non-roleplayers in the audience.

D&D is a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game (RPG) that’s been around for decades. It’s THE game, in fact – the one that started it all way back in the 1970’s, if I recall right. In D&D, you’ve got a group of players, maybe four to six people, and a gamesmaster (GM) who runs the actual game. Each player has a sheet that describes a character, and during the game, the player pretends to be that character as the GM describes the players’ surroundings and how those surroundings react to their actions. So Dungeons & Dragons, and roleplaying in general, is like collaborative story-telling, which each player playing a character in the story, and the GM providing all the non-character-related stuff. It’s all hilarious fun, especially when the players go completely off-plot and everything gets invariably silly.

Now – D&D has a lot of swordplay in it, seeing as it’s a fantasy game. Due to its collaborative nature, it’s also got rules for combat with different weapons. Some of these make no sense – but some of them do, in rather unusual ways.

Hit Points

Everyone in D&D, from the players to the other characters they encounter during the game, has hit points. These are simply a number of points that relate to their health – once their hit points are reduced to zero, the player falls unconscious and eventually dies unless they get some help. So hit points are very important in combat, because each weapon does a different amount of damage to hit points.

Here’s a photo of a weapons table from my D&D 3rd Edition Player’s Manual, showing a bunch of different weapons, their cost, and their damage. The ‘gp’ column is the cost, in gold pieces, and the column with stuff like 1d10, 2d4, etc is their damage. The ‘d’ refers to the die type, so ‘1d8′ means ‘Roll one eight-sided die to determine the damage of this weapon’. This adds variability – so, for example, a longsword can do between one and eight points of damage on a single hit.

So why is this important? Well, it means that even a weak character can potentially survive a hit from a longsword. Player characters typically become more powerful over the course of the game, because they gain experience and better weapons/armor (and of course there are rules for that as well), but a starting character that’s not all that tough may have, say, six hit points, and a similar character that IS quite tough may have twelve or more. A single hit from a longsword would have to be quite lucky to take down the weaker character, and it would never take down the tougher one unless there were extenuating circumstances.

This is actually quite interesting because of the prevailing myth of the ‘one-hit kill’, especially in stuff like video games and movies. People tend to think that a single strike with a sword means instant death, when historical records show that plenty of people fought duels, were run through several times, and survived. Of course, there are also records of people falling over and dying instantly from blows to the head or the chest, so the ‘one-hit kill’ is certainly possible, if nothing else. But it’s not a guaranteed thing. The human body has a remarkable capacity to just keep going in spite of tremendous injuries.

Funnily enough, this is exactly how it works in D&D – a surprising case of truth in fiction!

This is not to say that all combat in Dungeons & Dragons, or even in RPGs in general, is accurate – by and large, it’s not, and I’ll likely talk about that some more later. But it’s not all completely unrealistic, and it’s certainly not as silly as many examples we see in other mediums. RPGs have a vested interest in keeping the players alive long enough to tell the story, and this naturally means somewhat less silliness is allowed.

More required reading on this: The Dubious Quick Kill, Part 1 & Part 2, which discusses various historical duels and the effects of different wounds.

Skallagrim’s video discussing the one hit kill:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f88E...

Related Posts:

Drizzt Do’Urden and the Infamous Parry
About Daggers and Grips in the Medieval Treatises
Being a Swordfighter
Let’s Talk about the Bind
Why Swords of Power(TM) Don’t Work

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About Daggers and Grips in the Medieval Treatises

Further to what I was blathering on about yesterday – here’s Matt Easton talking about the ice-pick grip versus the hammer grip. Some great information on why either grip can be used, and some historical context for both.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVhQb...

Related Posts:

A video on strength in swordplay
Being a Swordfighter
Let’s Talk about the Bind
Why Swords of Power(TM) Don’t Work
The Swordmaster Trope

The post About Daggers and Grips in the Medieval Treatises appeared first on Raynfall.

Exotic Weapons in Fantasy Adventure

So, part of the reason why I started training in the salle is that I needed to know how to fight, like I’ve said before. But I also needed to know the limits and purposes of various weapons – whether a dagger would be effective against a polearm or a longsword, what techniques would be appropriate in a pitched battle, that kind of thing. I wanted to avoid ‘unrealistic’ representations of combat.

Of course, I’ve since realized that it really doesn’t matter as long as the combat serves the story, but I still appreciate the richness of my education, and how it allows me to write combat with more conviction. It informs how and why things work the way they do, in armies and in one-on-one fights, when I’m doing world-building. But it presents a whole host of problems when you realize that the fantasy weapons you’ve spent so much time on are now completely wrong!

The Daggers

One of the main characters in the Novel uses a pair of daggers. At first, I established that she wielded them in an ice-pick grip (blade pointing down), with lots of slashes and dodging and whatnot. I swiftly realized that this just didn’t work.

The problem is mainly with the exclusive use of the ice-pick grip – someone highly trained would never compromise their safety by sticking rigidly to one grip or another, and in combat it’s certainly not superior to the usual hammer grip, where the blade is pointed up. They have their advantages and disadvantages, nothing more, and both are represented in the medieval treatises.

My initial problem was that this character needed something to distinguish her from others. Her blades and style of fighting had to be something out of the ordinary. I was also constrained by material – I’d established that her blades were heirlooms, created from possibly-magical-crystal, and unbreakable.

Remember when I said that swords need to have a compromise between hardness and flexibility? I’d effectively written myself into a corner there. These crystal daggers couldn’t flex on impact. They couldn’t be used like normal daggers! A workshop I took on knife-fighting only solidified how much trouble I was in at this point.

The Solution

I spent far, far too long thinking about this, before hitting on the perfect solution almost by accident.

The sai! Or more specifically, sai daggers.

The more I thought about it, the more everything seemed to fit. Sais are wielded as a pair; used for a range of different techniques; in various grips, point up and down. The central prong of the typical sai is not a blade, per se – it’s usually rounded or, more importantly, faceted!

After I did some reading on it, and watched some videos on sai-fighting, I knew I had the right weapon. I could easily imagine a pair of bright, octagonal crystals, coming to a point, and bound into a pair of curved steel crossguards. These would not be slashing weapons – they would be used for disarming, for trapping and breaking other weapons, and for the precision thrust through a fleshy body part, thus solving my problem of the blade needing to flex on impact. Perfect weapons for this character, especially considering how versatile they are.

You can also throw them! Sai-throwing is a rare case of Truth in Fiction. It’s an accepted technique to throw a sai, to great effect, against an opponent with a longer weapon 20-30 feet away.

Fantasy weapons, especially when they’re based on something out of the ordinary, tend to fall into the trap of being silly as all hell when the author really just wanted them to be unique. Sometimes, though, uniqueness is overrated, and it’s best to stick with what has a proven history of working. Keep it simple!

Related Posts:

Grimdarkness in Fantasy
The Swordplay of Lord of the Rings

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Being a Swordfighter

Today, I will have been a swordfighter for exactly one year.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve been one forever, and sometimes it feels like only a moment. I can remember feeling very out of place, initially, when I first stepped into the Warrior Fundamentals class in Academie Duello. That lasted until I actually picked up a longsword, and truly began to learn.

I’ve been in Vancouver for four years. Time, opportunity, and, cheesy as it sounds, a New Year’s resolution finally got me in the salle; I needed the exercise, above all else, but I also needed knowledge. I write fantasy adventure, the kind of stuff that wouldn’t look out of place next to Lord of the Rings, and there’s only so far you can go with fight scenes before you really need some actual experience of fighting.

I’m not sure what I expected. What I found, though, is that there is a difference between learning how to swing a long piece of steel, and actually being a swordfighter.

We learned the school salute – Arte, Ardore, Onore – before making a single strike. Arte: the art, the skill of the sword. Ardore: the passion, the love of the sword. Onore: the honour, the respect for the sword. Then on to the basics; how to hold it, how to stand, the first simple guards. The phrase “Pretend you’re a haughty Italian noble from the 16th century” was used more than once.

We learned how to use the sword, as described in the old instruction manuals from the Middle Ages. But we also learned why – why turn the true edge out like so, why parry on the forte of the blade, why this crossing is good and this one is bad. Every class in Academie Duello involves the theory and the history as well as the practice, on the assumption that merely knowing the practice is not enough. Sometimes the best part of a class is doing nothing but listening while the instructor talks about some aspect of swordplay from Capo Ferro.

Personally, I learned that longswords may not feel heavy at first, but they will after you’ve had to use them for an hour. The soreness fades, however, long before you step onto the training floor again. You take it as fair payment for just being there, and being a part of the class, a part of the community.

The Duello community is small, vibrant, joyful, and sometimes very silly. We chatter over Facebook about this new video, or that particular technique, or look-at-my-new-sword-isn’t-it-pretty, or would-lightsabers-work-no-really. In the salle, we talk about the class, and what we’re doing next, and… anything, really. Sometimes lightsabers are involved. But we’re all there for the same reasons, and we all hold the same swords, and every pass is another opportunity to become better than we were yesterday. We compete against no one but ourselves, and share the joy of the Art. All of us, together.

There came a point, and I’m not sure when, that I stood on the training floor, took up a guard, and realized that I knew. Not everything, but enough to stand like so, and hold the sword like so, because of a hundred small things that I had learned that suddenly clicked together with the knowledge of how and why delivered from centuries before. For a moment, I could look back and see a line of fencers hundreds of years long, who lived and learned and died by the sword, all so that I could be here.

Knowing that, feeling that – it changes you. Picking up the sword and walking into the salle changes you. You stand a little taller, hold your head up a little higher, knowing that you carry one of the oldest human legacies in your hands.

In one more year, I doubt I’ll even have gotten as far as Blue Cord. I am mostly okay with that. The progression is slow, and demanding. But… I am a swordfighter. I will be a swordfighter no matter my level. And every day, in so many ways, I carry the power of the Art in the back of my mind, even if I don’t actually have a sword in my hand.

Related Posts:

Let’s Talk about the Bind
Why Swords of Power(TM) Don’t Work
The Swordmaster Trope
Video Games Swordfighting Fun
Let’s talk about sword weight!

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Fifty Shades of Crap

FSOG (Fifty Shades of Grey) is, hands down, one of the worst things to ever happen to the BDSM scene, even though it’s probably one of the best things to happen to erotica writers. With the movie coming out soon, I feel like I should do my part and rant like it’s 1999 on just how utterly BLEARGH this whole series is.

Allll the BLEARGHs. I’m not so good with words any time I ever get onto the topic of Fifty Shades.

The Abuse

Better people than I have spelled out, in excruciating detail, why this series is one long abuse-fest from start to finish. I also have it on good authority from the various people I know who are involved in the scene that it’s abuse. Once again: Fifty Shades is ABUSE. It’s pretending to be romance, but it was written by an author who got her ideas about BDSM from random Google searches, as far as I know. She didn’t actually consult anyone who knows shit about real BDSM. What’s presented as BDSM in those books is what assholes and idiots think BDSM is, which is people being ordered about, getting hurt, and somehow they like it.

I can’t even possibly describe just how offensive that is. I can’t describe how much it’s lacking the emotional and psychological context of BDSM. It’s dressing up the most superficial, surface level aspect of fetish and presenting it as the whole. It’s as if someone wrote a book that described football as ‘a bunch of guys throwing a pigskin around and running into each other’ and treated that as the real deal. (Convenient Super Bowl reference GO!)

Anyway – I hope you get the idea. I have not heard of a single person who’s involved with the BDSM scene reacting to Fifty Shades with anything less than complete horror. Take that as a sign, if you will, of just how horrible this series is, no matter how hot you think the sex is.

But on the flip side…

See, the problem with FSOG is that it blew the ebook floodgates for erotica writers wide open. It was the breakout hit, the one that got the ball rolling and showed everyone that porn for women (even really shitty porn) could sell like the last iced frappachino in Hades. Since it was published, the market for erotica on Amazon and elsewhere has not so much taken off as erupted with the force of Mount St Helens, powered by the wrath of Lucifer and his need for cold, coffee-based drinks. I am seriously not kidding when I say that there are plenty of erotica writers out there making an absolutely obscene amount of money, now that women know that there is porn on Amazon and they can buy it and read it discreetly on their Kindles. Fifty Shades made it okay, as it were, to go looking for it.

I mean, I gotta give it credit for that much even though the series itself can be charitably described as ‘romance as enacted by aliens who have had BDSM explained to them by someone who saw a set of handcuffs once.’

The Movie

And now we come to the movie. The horrible, horrible movie.

There is NO possible way that this movie is going to be good, if they’re following the books. The only chance it’s got is if the screenwriter recognized that the books are total shit, and changed fundamental things in the movie to take the premise of FSOG and turn it into, y’know, a story that makes sense with characters that act like they’re human, i.e. NOT FSOG. If they’re actually following the books, though? Forget it. FORGET IT. Not gonna happen. What we’ll get on the screen will be a giant pile of offensive asshattery the like of which will finally take the title of Worst Movie Ever from Battlefield: Earth.

There’s a couple of reasons why I think this. Let’s count the ways:

It’s got an R rating. The whole draw of FSOG is the porn. An R rating = NO PORN. You’ll get a lot of carefully filmed camera angles and a lot less sex than in the books. There will probably be no actual fucking.
The plot of the books is NONSENSE. It’s got plot holes you could drive an oil tanker through. No porn means this stupid plot is going to have to carry the movie, which it will not and which will disappoint the hell out of you.
FSOG is porn for women. Hollywood may know how to make movies, but it doesn’t know or understand how to make a movie that turns women on. The most we’ve gotten up to this point in terms of ‘pandering to the female gaze’ is guys with their shirts off doing normal activites, for gods’ sake! That’s supposed to be progress, people. That’s supposed to be titillating for women. And now a studio is going to make a movie that REQUIRES its main actor to be turned into a sex object for the sole benefit of womens’ libidos? No offense to Sam Taylor-Johnson (the director) but her work to date has been mostly arthouse stuff, and Fifty Shades needs someone like Erika Lust who actually understands what porn for women should look like.
Seriously, come back to me when you’ve gotten as far as slow pans around the guy’s crotch and ass, and MAYBE that’ll be considered female-gaze-worthy if he’s also lounging around on a couch wearing knee-high boots and making ‘come hither’ faces at the camera.

In short: this is a bad book series and it will never, ever be redeemed, and all it’s got going for it is the fact that a few lucky breaks turned it into a bestseller and helped kickstart a massive erotica publishing revolution. The movie may or may not suck on the same level, but personally I think it’s more likely that science will someday produce a viable pig-pterodactyl hybrid than the Fifty Shades movie will be good.

Related Posts:

An Author’s Life, or Why I will Never Do a Kickstarter
Drizzt Do’Urden and the Infamous Parry

The post Fifty Shades of Crap appeared first on Raynfall.

Quick Update

I’ve been moving apartments all weekend! Back to my usual schedule tomorrow, I hope. I promise you something interesting on *dun dun DUN* Fifty Shades of Grey.

I bet those of you who know me can guess what THAT will be.

Heheheheheh.

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Let’s Talk about the Bind

Two fighters size each other up. They strike and parry, back and forth, then their swords lock together dramatically as they hurl snappy one-liners at each other. They shove and circle around, and split apart again, and the fight continues!

Except… nah. This is the Hollywood parry, something you’ll see in all the Star Wars movies at least. Like many things in Hollywood, it’s not a bad thing because it’s unrealistic (though it is that) but because it’s boring and stupidly overused.

Being Unrealistic

Okay, lightsabers get an almost-pass here because we’ve never seen them slide – so as far as I know, they don’t. They just bind and stick together. (I don’t know who thought sticky swords was a good idea, but okay, let’s run with it.) Star Wars goes hog-wild with this particular trope as a result, and you do get to see some of the most egregious examples in the prequels.

In actual fencing, with any weapon I know of, this stuff just doesn’t happen. Why? Because, as I’m so fond of saying, swords behave like big steel levers, and their lever quality is what wins fights, not sharpness.

Let’s take a longsword. Let’s say you strike and your opponent parries. One of you, assuming you both actually know how to use a sword and are NOT just flailing around like a baseball player, will win the crossing and catch the other’s flat on their edge, and the caught sword will slide down to the crossguard unless the fighter disengages and counter attacks.

What the losing fighter will NOT do is step in and start shoving with the sword. There is literally no point to doing this. What we’re taught is that this is misura strettissima, the closest measure, and getting into a shoving match is wasting a good opportunity to grapple your opponent. There are so many other things you could do – grab their sword and pommel-strike them. Trap their sword and throw them. Grab their arm, twist the sword out of their grip, and slap them silly with it.

Half-swording, guys. It’s for life, not just for Christmas.

Even for weapons that ostensibly don’t involve these shenanigans, shoving with the sword is simply dumb if only because this kind of bind means your sword is pointed at the sky, and not at your opponent.

What if it’s edge on edge?

Sigh.

Okay, look. I’ve already talked about the properties of the sword, i.e. the whole hardness vs. flexibility thing. Swords take edge damage every time they’re used, as we all know, as they have to be able to yield a little bit to avoid shattering on impact. To bind, stick, and start shoving, you need some pretty silly conditions to be fulfilled.

Both opponents must be roughly equal strength. (Otherwise one will overpower the other and there will be no bind.)
They have to strike at the same time. (If one strikes and the other parries, the swords will slide and not bind.)
Their swords have to have roughly the same metallurgic properties at the point of impact, such that both get a notch in them. (If one sword is better than the other, it will not get a notch and the swords will slide and not bind.)
The notch must be big enough to hold the swords in place against friction and the strength of two people. (If they’re not big enough, the swords will slide and not bind.)
The swords must somehow not bounce off each other. (A bounce, which happens a lot, means no bind is possible at that moment.)
The swords must remain stuck together in spite of two people’s shifting weights and attempts to gain the upper hand.

I will say this much – I’ve never seen this kind of bind in a year of fighting with a longsword, and it’s sometimes mentioned as being this silly Hollywood thing in the salle.

Being Overused

And how! Hollywood loves it because it gives actors a chance to toss out a few lines or some strained looks in the middle of the action. But it’s just boring, at this point. It’s a huge, lurking cliche that won’t go away and is almost never, ever done well. It’s there because actors want to make sure that people can see their faces, and how good they are at acting.

It also means that other opportunities for characterization are lost, and fight scenes become predictable and tired. Once again, I have to go back to Inigo Montoya versus the Man in Black for an example of the bind done well – they spend the fight tossing quips at each other anyway, but then Montoya catches the Man in Black on the edge of the Cliffs of Insanity and binds him – not sword to sword, but body to body – while he tries to shove him off into the sea. The tone changes subtly, and you can hear the struggle in the Man in Black’s voice as he delivers the line “There is something I ought to tell you…” in the middle of the bind, and then – hah HAH! Reversal! “I’m not left-handed either!”

That’s the way it should be, not this ‘let’s hold our swords together and grimace at each other for a second’.

There are almost too many terrible examples to point out in comparison, but I have to give it to Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. That fight between Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. That WHOLE FIGHT is a testament to the fact that money can’t buy good directing or writing. A complete clusterfuck is about the most apt description I can give it, and the binds are just one element of inane silliness in a mountain of inane silliness.

Hey filmmakers, would it be possible for you to quit this shit, hire a fight director, and do something better? Pretty please?

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Lars Anderson – not a revolutionary in archery

Okay, remember how I posted about Lars Anderson? He’s the archer whose video has been blowing up the interwebs for the last few days. I would be remiss if I didn’t now post an update, after hearing from the experts.

As I’ve mentioned before, I train swordplay in Academie Duello. I’ve also had the opportunity to pick up an archery class with Patricia Gonsalves of Lykopis Archery. And it was awesome! I was so stoked about it that I was already pricing up a bow of my own. Then Lars’ video came out, and I had to pick my jaw up off the floor – but. BUT. The first thing on my mind was “What do the experts think?”

I’m doubly glad that, if I need to know anything at all about medieval weaponry, I’m at most one conversation or Facebook post away from getting an informed opinion.

So here’s the deal, my friends – Lars is good, but he ain’t no wunderkind, and most of the stuff he says in the narration is… eh, not really accurate. Check out Jim McQuarrie over on Geek Dad talking about it. Patricia comments on the same article here. Here’s Anna Maltese, another traditional archer, talking about it. Here’s Mike Loades talking about it. These are not just random people – Patricia is a master archer, Mike is a military historian.

Guys, when the experts, who have spent a large chunk of their lives studying a subject, tell you that the stuff some guy says in a Youtube video isn’t really true, then you sit up and take notice of that. So read the links above, okay? Listen to what they say. I’m still getting a bow, by the way – I’m still super stoked to do archery. But I want to learn from the people who really know it.

The speed and trickshot stuff is still really, really impressive, but it’s no revolution.

 

Added by date 01/27/2015: And now Patricia has weighed in on the Lykopis blog. More required reading!

Related Posts:

Archery Level: Godlike
Research and Development
The Brave New World
The Nature of a New Medium

The post Lars Anderson – not a revolutionary in archery appeared first on Raynfall.

Why Swords of Power(TM) Don’t Work

Here’s a thought – what do you think of as the ultimate sword?

This is another trope that shows up quite often in all kinds of media: the concept of the ultimate blade, the Sword of Power, the mystical weapon before which all others go crying to their mommies. Frequently it’s got some kind of marking or decoration to distinguish it from others as well, and it’s either in the hands of the bad guy, or it’s stuck in a dungeon somewhere (the Legend of Zelda option), or it’s being hidden or carried around by someone ‘worthy’.

Usual caveats aside regarding the possibility of magic, otherworldly technology, or other Super Special Secret Sauce(TM), this is another trope that, unfortunately, doesn’t work in real life. There’s no such thing as one sword to rule them all. A sword is made in a particular shape because it’s a compromise around what’s feasible with the materials at hand, and its eventual purpose. It’s all about what you give up in order to get an advantage elsewhere.

So let’s start with size

Are bigger swords better? Eh… no. Not necessarily. I know this from experience. What you get from a bigger sword – more momentum in the swing, longer reach, and in theory more protection from a large crossguard – is balanced by the sheer effort involved in moving it. Bigger means heavier, and it means slower regardless of your own strength. Bigger means more inertia to overcome. Bigger means longer, and longer means you may just dig the sword tip into the ground unless you adjust your technique to handle it.

Smaller and shorter means you sacrifice reach and power for maneuverability and speed.

How about shape?

Swords can be either straight or curved to some degree. A curve makes the sword excellent for cutting, like in a horizontal slash, and you see that a lot in techniques that use duelling sabres, for example. But the curve that improves the cut also weakens the sword in the thrust, because not all of the wielder’s energy can be transmitted efficiently down the blade. A straight sword designed for thrusting – the rapier, of course – excels at it, but it can’t deliver a cut anything like a sabre can.

If you ever take a look at pictures of cavalry swords, for example, a lot of them tend to be curved – presumably because cutting slashes were more effective from horseback than thrusts.

Materials

The notion of the sword that can cut through anything (lightsabers aside) is a particularly prevalent one. But in reality, such a sword probably doesn’t and can’t exist, because all sword blades are a compromise between hardness and flexibility.

You wouldn’t think that flexibility is important, but think for a moment about how swords are meant to be used. (Warning: Physics!) The blade delivers kinetic energy from the arms of the wielder to the target at the point of contact, with the intention being that the point of contact is as fine as possible in order to focus the energy and do the most damage. Ideally, as much energy as possible will go into that damage. But if the point of contact is hard, like when a sword meets another sword, or meets armour, then the energy is dissipated elsewhere – like, up through the blade and into the hands of the wielder.

Try it out with a steel pipe, or something designed to be very rigid, if you don’t believe me. Tap it off something hard, like the ground, and you’ll feel the shock in your hands. Now imagine that it’s scaled up to the power of a sword meeting another sword at high speed, and it’ll become flat out painful. It could even knock the sword right out of your hands!

This is why flexibility matters. A sword must be hard enough to do damage, but not so hard that it can’t flex under an impact and dump the excess energy instead of hurting or disarming the wielder.

Hardness also matters when you’re looking at the edge of a sword. The edge needs to be sharp to focus all that lovely damaging energy, but if it’s too sharp and too hard, then the blade will dissipate excess energy by shattering into pieces. (Note: this is why no one makes swords out of diamond, in spite of the fact that diamonds are the hardest mineral.)

The best way to think about this is to view the sword blade as something that has to be capable of delivering and absorbing kinetic energy. Hard things deliver energy very well, because being hard means you don’t yield in the impact. But flexible things absorb energy very well, because being flexible means you do yield in the impact. And a sword blade has to do both at the same time without sacrificing too much either way.

Again: Super Secret Magical Special Sauce that makes physics irrelevant negates all of this. I’m just talking about actual real world stuff. Someday, though, I’d like to read about a Sword of Power that’s literally just a long, sharp, pointy thing.

Related Posts:

The Swordmaster Trope
Video Games Swordfighting Fun
Let’s talk about sword weight!
A video on strength in swordplay
Lightsaber Ballet

The post Why Swords of Power(TM) Don’t Work appeared first on Raynfall.

The Swordmaster Trope

So here’s the common trope: there is a master swordsman. This swordsman has a single Sword of Power(TM) and has never been defeated in battle. There can be only one, etc etc. The swordsman will face many opponents with many different kinds of weapons, and emerge victorious every time.

Duncan McCloud from Highlander. Too many examples from anime and manga to count. Jaime Lannister from A Game of Thrones, apparently. Drizzt Do’Urden. Zorro. They just pop up everywhere, when you think about it. The idea of the swordmaster is a very powerful, romantic one.

The problem is that one swordmaster does not an army make, and although it serves for good storytelling SOMETIMES, it doesn’t make for good tactics.

One Sword Against Many

Part of the trope that’s most problematic is the idea that one highly skilled individual could hold off an army. And… nope. Can’t be done. One single person could take several others in a fight, if they had the right weapon and skills, but the idea of one sword against many is, well, fantasy. It requires magic, or high tech, or [insert whatever special sauce you like here]. But skill alone, in a world governed by normal physics, means that one skilled individual will become a speedbump, absent very particular conditions. “Very Particular Conditions” include stuff like intimidation, guerilla tactics, shock and awe, a confined space – there are instances of a single soldier tearing up opposing forces of dozens or even over a hundred others by surprise and terror alone. But those instances are rare, and I don’t know of any that involve swords alone. (This is not to say that it never happened, just that I haven’t been able to find any examples.)

There are physics in play with swordfighting that dictate just what you can do with your big steel lever. Even a swordmaster with a superior sword will not be able to move the blade fast enough to defeat, say, ten guys with spears and far better reach. They might kill one or two, yes, but after that they’re getting pinned to the ground.

The Ultimate Sword

Hahahahahahaha No. There is no such thing. Short of adding some special secret sauce, there is no such thing as the bestest sword ever. If there was, then the design would have taken over everywhere, and obviously that isn’t the case when we look at history. Swords are incredibly varied, and they have different things that they’re good at. A katana or sabre is great at cutting, but a rapier is far superior for thrusting. One swordmaster against another with a different weapon is all well and good, and it makes for interesting fights, but the situation doesn’t always allow for fairness! A longsword versus a rapier on the battlefield favors the longsword, whereas the same in a formal duel favours the rapier, solely because the weapons were designed to be used in different situations.

Materials are another story too. Meteoric iron? Total nonsense unless you’re going to say that it’s magical. It was only used for actual historical weapons until people figured out how to smelt iron ore. Folding the blade a thousand times for a Japanese katana? Pfft – the Vikings were making pattern welded blades centuries before. (I’ll talk about this in another post, probably.)

Having the Right Weapon

See, this is part of the issue I have with the trope – it tends to glorify the sword above other weapons without recognizing that, by and large, swords are not the optimal weapon to have in every situation. Ancient armies had a number of weapons for different purposes, and their choice of weapon was dictated as much by logistics as by tactics. For example: swords were good all-rounders for large, massed melees, but a flanged mace was a better choice for crushing armour. Spears and pikes worked well against cavalry charges. Bills, or billhooks, were perfect for dragging horsemen down, especially heavy cavalry. Rondel daggers were perfect for stabbing through the gaps in plate armour.

This doesn’t even mention the popularity of ranged weapons – javelins, slings, bows, oh my! They were all part of the army, and they all had their place and their purpose.

Good vs. Bad Storytelling

The trope of the unbeatable swordmaster is not bad, per se. But it falls down simply because it’s over-used. As a method of distinguishing and elevating the protagonist, it tends to get very predictable, very fast – and it leads to predictable plot elements. I think it’s better used as a base – a jumping off point, as it were – that can be expanded in other directions. The trope just has this awful tendency to fall into the territory of lone elite; misanthropic, set apart by talent/skill/experience, the constant test against others who practice the same skills, the unwillingness to fight… You get the idea. The concept of the ultimate warrior becomes the whole of the character, instead of one aspect of the character.

Funny thing, though – one of the characters in my book is a swordmaster. I got to thinking about a lot of this simply in the process of character development. Hopefully I’ve managed not to fall into the trope myself!

Related Posts:

Let’s talk about sword weight!
Syrio Forel vs. The Lannister Guards
On plate armour, movement, and fighting with longswords
Video Games Swordfighting Fun
A video on strength in swordplay

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