Ramble on weapons and armour.

Hi Guys,

When I was growing up playing D&D, I never even dreamed that the writers of the game hadn't done any research into weapons and armour.... It turns out that they either really hadn't or had and decided to ignore their findings.

I thought the following might be of interest. This is going to be a little incoherent though as I once again find myself posting in the middle of the night:

A long sword is a two handed weapon and there is no reason at all why it should get a damage bonus over any other weapon. Anything with an axe blade makes far more sense for a bonus and particularly so against armour.

Interestingly, weapons capable of penetrating armour had a nasty habit of getting stuck, hence the attractiveness of (certain types) of maces and hammers against plate armour. These could cause concussive and compressive damage  without getting stuck.   

Plate armour is far less cumbersome than a maile shirt.(walk around in one of each for 5 minutes and you'll know) Plate is built for the individual and it's rigidity makes it self supporting to a degree. A mail shirt is worn with tight belt to get as much of it's weight  as possible on the hips. Otherwise, the whole thing is supported by the shoulders. (which hurts)

When it comes to encumbrance, IMHO, this stat should be a combination of weight and awkwardness. The beauty of a short sword (which often had a blade well over 30 inches!) is that it can be easily sheathed out of the way. Shields? Not so much and that pole arm is downright annoying. :)


Swords in general are backup weapons by the early medieval period because they are useless against most decent armour/helmets/vambraces etc unless used to thrust at weak points....and even then... Manuals from the 1500s are full of pictures of knights in full harness going at each other with long swords. They hold them like bayoneted rifles and thrust at the armpits/wrestle & try to break limbs. Often, an armoured fight was finished on the ground with daggers!

In a civilian or town setting of course short swords, small maces, daggers (eventually rapiers) become the weapon of choice due to ease of carry and also social acceptability for carry. (this progression finished up with smallswords and their ilk and eventually walking sticks)

A sword should be about 20 times the cost of an axe or mace. They are much harder to make, require superior tempering, involve more costly steel, and take a long time to forge. They also require a lot more looking after.

Incidentally, sword (or any one handed weapon) and buckler is a vastly superior weapon system to sword alone as one can make attacks with the buckler positioned to deny a counter-cut to the sword arm. You don't really block with a buckler most of the time but use it to close a line of counterattack. If you fight someone with a shield with sword alone or sword and buckler, you are toast.

Shields by the way are mostly held edge on and are used to completely close what would otherwise be an open line of attack. Often, shields are engaged in order to open a line of for a weapon. If you hold your shield face to the enemy, he will engage with his edge at one of yours and open you up.

People arguably stopped using shields because armour became good enough that it could soak up a blow from a one handed weapon. Two handed weapons then dominated the battlefield. Gunpowder then rendered armour mostly obsolete as all but the very heaviest could now be penetrated with an arquebus ball.

Speaking about bows, I have seen a 90lb bow with an arrow that has a bodkin point,  shot at 2mm mild steel helmet at point blank range.  It didn't penetrate. Even if we were talking thinner steel than this, you have to get through the padded arming cap as well...

A crossbow (which I realise isn't in the game) is another matter. We are talking about a heavier projectile fired from a bow with many times the pull, far more accurately. Hitting anything with a bow is really really hard. (Medieval Archery is frustratingly hard) I am told that a crossbow is relatively easy. 

Encumbrance aside, the underlying problem for me here is that D&D allows weapons and armour options from a stretch of time (in Europe at least) that covers (conservatively) about 7 or 800 years of what was a desperate arms race.

I will be hacking my games and setting them in the Dark Ages for the most part to get around this. (also allowing me to add an awesome Viking feel to things) Folks will mostly have spears, shields and light armour along with axes (+throwing), shortswords, Javelins, daggers, staves and self bows. There will be no plate armour, most of the polearms will go, and there will be no long bows or cross bows. 

Hope this is of interest. I've spent years working with translations/transcriptions of ancient fight manuals and reconstructing the systems and thought I'd share.

Cheers,

Stu.   

What I took away from your article is that the increased availability and quality of armor drove changes in weapon preference until armor was rendered moot by late model crossbows and early firearms.   

Given that 'to hit' and 'damage' are abstracted in DW, I don't think you'd want to try implementing that in the rules.  However, I could totally see writing a couple of custom equipment lists that people could opt to use in their game from the outset, which modulated the dominant style of warfare in a historically 'accurate' way.  A dark ages equipment list could reflect scarcity of good armor (very expensive) and inadequacy of primitive armor while giving bonuses/tags to weapons good against unarmored opponents.  Meanwhile, a pre-renaissance era equipment list might reflect the heaviness of armor and the lethality of crossbow bolts and arquebus balls.

Thanks for the deep analysis of historical precedent in arms and armour use and effectiveness Stu! Most enlightening :)

But I'm with Marshall, if that works for you and DW, then great! For most of us though, we aren't trying to simulate medieval or dark age or rennaissance accuracy. We are simply using whatever cues from our actual history and favourite fantasy tropes to inform our roleplay in an mechanically abstracted (but richly detailed fictionally) way via the narrative cues given on the equipment lists. Modify the tags to fit your vision and you won't break the game at all, just change the narrative and mechanical cause and effect of those arms and armour within your conversation at the table. This is awesome!

I like the idea of lists that represent a 'cultural analogue'. Why stop at historical influences? You could have an Elvish list or Dwarvish for instance, or get quite avant-guard and use such debateable D&D tropes as Dragonborn or Tiefling.