Anyway, another major area where RPG's have veered away from an interesting reality is martial arts, specifically European martial arts which somewhat amazingly, tens of thousands of people who spend their weekends pretending to be knights and paladins, swashbucking pirates and "cunninge thieves" have never even heard of. Our characters wield swords and spears and quarter staves but most of us have absolutely no idea what a sword or a spear or a quarter staff was really like let alone how they were used.
The rediscovery of Historical European Martial Arts first began to slowly percolate into modern consciousness back in the 1990s, today it is a booming world-wide phenomenon. The sword-fighting techniques written down in books as far back as the 1300s are extremeley effective and are now pretty well understood, though we are still only scratching the surface.
Perhaps more surprisingly for many people, HEMA as it's now known has become a respected martial art, widely understood to be every bit as lethal as anything ever taught to a samurai.
Gary Gygax did some fairly good research on weapons back around the time he wrote the DmG but nobody back then really understood how sword fighting actually worked and the attempts to make up realistic combat were mostly focused on highly complex wound systems which slowed the game to a crawl. The closes thing most people ever saw to medieval combat was re-enactors at a Ren Faire or the SCA.... or a Monty Python movie. Most gamers turned away from what they thought was the reality of medieval combat and never looked back, after all, everybody knows only the samurai had any real technique in how they fought, right? Knights carried great clumsy ten pound "broadswords" they just hewed dents into each others armor with, right?
Well, no, thats wrong. HEMA is extremely sophisticated and effective and it's now pretty well understood. There are about 30 major HEMA groups worldwide now, and I don't even know how many schools, dozens I believe. A few RPG enthusiasts know about this, but most don't. So I think it's time I'd like to introduce DnD to the new reality..
To convey an idea of what is going on now, here are some videos depicting messer fighting techniques written down in books 500 years ago. A messer was kind of like a medieval machete... a very common weapon you probably aren't very familiar with since they never have them in movies or video games, or RPG's. The word actually means 'knife' but think of it as a kind of a light falchion, though some were quite large called "grossemessers" or "kriegmessers" and used with two-hands, something like a slightly butch katana.
You can see one depicted in this old woodcut, these men are in HEMA fencing guards.
Here is a photo of a real one from about 1520
And this is a similar weapon called a 'schwisersabel' used in Switzerland.
Anyway, these videeos deal with the smaller machete sized weapon. This one is clever because they show you some quotes from the book, followed by the original drawings, then live action of HEMA fighters demonstrating the technique depicted. It's all done nice and slow so you can see the technique.
*snip*
). I'd be happy to write up a full review at some point, after trying out a few combats with the system.
