Walking Dad
First Post
D&D really said katanas to be bastardswords of always materwork quality
It isn't only implied, but clearly said.
The Mystery of The katana
D&D really said katanas to be bastardswords of always materwork quality
It isn't only implied, but clearly said.
Having seen a few fights with katana vs. sword and shield and katana vs. longsword, my general feeling is the longsword has a reach advantage and a shield has a defensive advantage.
Tried to find the Swordplay 10 longsword tournament (Had a few Katana practitioners with eastern martial arts backgrounds) but only found the open sword tourney, though there is a bit with some longswords halfway through it wasn't a lot. Lots of rapiers, some sabres and backswords. All of those 1d6 damage weapons.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwWPvX9GP5M]YouTube - Swordplay 10 Compliation Video[/ame]
I'm the dude in jeans, with the blue and green shirts (All my garb was smelly. I felt rather out of place)
Anyway, at the event we did a bit of stuff with Paul Wagner and my friend who is big on the eastern swordplay bit and a few of us experimented. Rapier vs. Katana found the katana simply couldn't deal with the speed or length, but if it did gain a solid bind they could take the rapier out of the fight well enough. Against a shield the katana did not fare so well at all simply because it hasn't got the capacity to reliably hit the front leg if the fellow with the shield is even basically competent; I understand some katanas are longer than others but we had nothing to the longswords length at the event at least. Against the longsword it did averagely but it could be seen that the longsword simply had a length advantage; striking with telling blows and getting out before the katana could strike.
I have nothing against the Katana mind - in fact I'm getting one! But seriously folks, it's a weapon with strengths and weaknesses to be contemplated equally. And imagining they are all of high quality is silly. Have a chat to any reputable sword salesman, and they'll tell you swords came of different qualities from all places and ages.
Masterwork bastard sword? Nah. I'd make it a 1d8 longsword. Masterwork only if it has actually had the thousand fold treatment - I'd imagine most of them didn't!
War maul? I'd take a rapier against it. Battle axe on the other hand, that's a scary weapon to fight against. Don't imagine it's as hilt heavy as a wood axe; real battle axes I've used rely more on the faster strikes = better principle, although I'd still use a sword.. or hell, a shield wall. .
In fantasy settings? Dwarves with masterword bastard swords that are called katanas? fine. I've realized some time back that it's kind of pretentious to try to mix my real fighting knowledge with D+D - my group doesn't understand, and more importantly doesn't care that a Katana is 1d8 or 1d10, so long as they get to play awesome dudes that jump backwards into trees and throw ninja stars.
Tried to find the Swordplay 10 longsword tournament (Had a few Katana practitioners with eastern martial arts backgrounds) but only found the open sword tourney, though there is a bit with some longswords halfway through it wasn't a lot. Lots of rapiers, some sabres and backswords. All of those 1d6 damage weapons
. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwWPvX9GP5M]YouTube - Swordplay 10 Compliation Video[/ame]
I'm the dude in jeans, with the blue and green shirts (All my garb was smelly. I felt rather out of place
)Anyway, at the event we did a bit of stuff with Paul Wagner and my friend who is big on the eastern swordplay bit and a few of us experimented. Rapier vs. Katana found the katana simply couldn't deal with the speed or length, but if it did gain a solid bind they could take the rapier out of the fight well enough. Against a shield the katana did not fare so well at all simply because it hasn't got the capacity to reliably hit the front leg if the fellow with the shield is even basically competent; I understand some katanas are longer than others but we had nothing to the longswords length at the event at least. Against the longsword it did averagely but it could be seen that the longsword simply had a length advantage; striking with telling blows and getting out before the katana could strike.
I have nothing against the Katana mind - in fact I'm getting one! But seriously folks, it's a weapon with strengths and weaknesses to be contemplated equally. And imagining they are all of high quality is silly. Have a chat to any reputable sword salesman, and they'll tell you swords came of different qualities from all places and ages.
Masterwork bastard sword? Nah. I'd make it a 1d8 longsword. Masterwork only if it has actually had the thousand fold treatment - I'd imagine most of them didn't!
War maul? I'd take a rapier against it
. Battle axe on the other hand, that's a scary weapon to fight against. Don't imagine it's as hilt heavy as a wood axe; real battle axes I've used rely more on the faster strikes = better principle, although I'd still use a sword.. or hell, a shield wall. . In fantasy settings? Dwarves with masterword bastard swords that are called katanas? fine. I've realized some time back that it's kind of pretentious to try to mix my real fighting knowledge with D+D - my group doesn't understand, and more importantly doesn't care that a Katana is 1d8 or 1d10, so long as they get to play awesome dudes that jump backwards into trees and throw ninja stars
.
It is the shape...the Katana is phallic.
Spear is overall the greatest weapon ever used, then the knife.
It is all those damn movies/TV shows that have created it's myth.
Spear is overall the greatest weapon ever used, then the knife.
It is all those damn movies/TV shows that have created it's myth.
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(Psi)SeveredHead
Adventurer
Very true. A knight usually carried at least four weapons: lance, personal weapon (often an axe, poleaxe, etc), sword and dagger. You used them in that order. A dismounted knight, in an actual battle, would often use a shortened lance. I was amazed that some of them would go with two-handed weapons like a poleaxe rather than use a shield.
Neonchameleon
Legend
Soldiers tell tall stories, the Katana looks cool, and it lasted after most other swords.
There's limited romance round the crossbow because they were peasant weapons. They were banned because they could deal with the nobles' armour - and took almost no training. And the spear was more the mass combat than the individual weapon.
There's limited romance round the crossbow because they were peasant weapons. They were banned because they could deal with the nobles' armour - and took almost no training. And the spear was more the mass combat than the individual weapon.
Cor_Malek
First Post
Actually, they got banned mostly because they were a pre-gamebreaker
Finishing off a knight was a really mean feat. You'd rather beat him silly and capture him, getting his stuff and a hefty ransom afterwards from his family.Bows - well, bows were mean. Very hard to impossible (as armour form changed) to do something to the knight, but the horse would have it tough. But it was still cool, using a bow is quite hard. You'd need a lot of effort to train your infantry with it (hence the bow tournaments organized by medieval guilds) to a half decent level, and you'd need to build cultivating this skill into the very core of culture of a nation to use it to it's full potential (England actually managed to pull this one off).
Now a crossbow? You don't need half as much strength*, and only a percentile of time you'd have to spend on learning to fire a bow. And because you can make it more powerful, you really don't need as sophisticated ammunition.
*I've always found baffling the fact that most RPG's either ignore this or even flip it around. I've never fired a crossbow heavier than 4kg - and it had about 130 kg's of pull on it's bow, and lot's of ornaments. With kinda weak, 25-kg bow, you have to hold this strength in your fingers.
As to what's better, katana or a longsword... Well, in the very unlikely event that a knight would face off a samurai - I'm not sure why they'd use their secondary weapons first (or is it tertiary for samurai?). It was largely a "braggin rights" weapon for both, so if it went to trashtalk it could play a role. But still, who'd win? Katanas have bigger mystique, what with cutting the leaf on water, but then again, longsword is not only longer - but also broader. Wait, scratch that - it's an anachronism, a knight would not crack double entendres.
I still like European swords better, especially the bastard, but maybe I'd feel different if I trained kendo, or something.
@ Dausuul: well, maybe not katanas, but other slashing weapons, sure. It's a well established standard to use some kind of slashing weapons when you're not facing heavily armoured opponent - see sabres, scimitars and such. A notable exception to this was a rapier, a exceptionally deadly weapon (which was why in rapier-wielding western Europe, duels were banned much sooner than in sabre-using eastern Europe). Sabre holds much more "stopping power", but with rapier - you can loose the duel, and have the opponent die nevertheless from a fatal internal injury you've dealt in one of the early blows. Not very reassuring when your goal is to live through, but still - it shows how different approach can sort of work.
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billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
There's definitely something here. Fascination with the katana is bound up in fascination with the exotic samurai culture, a culture that saw a government-directed revival among officers of the Imperial Japanese Army - within the span of living generations.
And that samurai culture fetished the hell out of their swords. So, of course, the fascination with that culture then leads to a fascination with the sword as well. And, truth be told, they are fairly fascinating. The rituals involved in making them, the artisanship, the fact that traditional sword makers may be regarded as living national treasures of Japan. That's all pretty fascinating stuff right there. It's not a difficult step to impart upon it (unconsciously or consciously) a certain mythic power, founded or not.
If you were wearing full plate, a shield wasn't nearly as valuable. Most of the blows you'd use the shield to deflect would just bounce off the armor anyway. That being the case, there's a lot to be said for discarding that bulky, clumsy thing in favor of a longer weapon and a better grip.
If you have a problem with it, you could make an actual post that contributes something, and take the discussion in a direction more to your liking.
No? Okay then.
(And if you don't like armchair medievalists, you're on the wrong forum.)
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Celebrim
Legend
Because one of the defining characteristics of Western Civilization since at least Roman Times is that unlike pretty much any other wide ranging culture in the world, and in direct opposition to typical tribal cultures, Western Civilization is self-deprecating. That is to say, you can pretty much be sure that you are influenced by Western Civlization if you are always going around saying, "We suck. Everyone else is better, smarter, and more virtuous than we are."
The good part of this cultural trait is that it makes the culture as a whole self-reflective in a way that most cultures aren't. That is to say, Western Cultures tend to be more aware of their own flaws - in some cases even hyper-aware of them. And it also tends to make Western Culture much more willing to adapt and learn from other cultures it encounters (a trait it shares, quite interestingly, with the Japanese culture).
The downside of this trait is that we tend to romanticize anything we discover in another culture which is novel. And in this case, that means we develop this whole mythology around eastern martial arts generally and katana's specifically that elevates them from being merely a highly refined art, to something supernatural magical and simply better than anything that the West could possibly do.
What I think is more likely the case is that Western melee arts - both armed and unarmed - had been largely depricated and considered increasingly obselete by the time the West really encountered the East. In the West, martial arts had been replaced as essential war making skills by marksmenship and close formations. This was particularly true in the west post firearms, but the West's whole theory of war making was more centered on formations and logistics than in Japan - where it stayed centered on personal prowess and the prowess of your weapons. So when the West really encountered the East, not only was it encountering a society which had had more time to refine melee arts by virtue of putting them into use over a longer period, but at a time when its only melee arts had decayed been reduced essentially to hobbies and sports for aristocrats. So suddenly discovering this 'new technology' at a time when in the west its own technical investment in melee combat had diminished made eastern martial arts seem doubly cool and magnified the usual Western responce to anything novel in another culture.
Of course what we have since discovered is that we weren't as technically backward as we thought, and that being impressed with karate and katanas was roughly the same as the Chinese being impressed by Western mechanical clocks. We'd independently invented that stuff (or its equivalent) hundreds of years previously and forgotten we'd done so.
You can see the same sort of thing playing out in for example, romanticizing the Mauri, which really is to early stone age martial arts, what the Samurii is to Steel Age.
The good part of this cultural trait is that it makes the culture as a whole self-reflective in a way that most cultures aren't. That is to say, Western Cultures tend to be more aware of their own flaws - in some cases even hyper-aware of them. And it also tends to make Western Culture much more willing to adapt and learn from other cultures it encounters (a trait it shares, quite interestingly, with the Japanese culture).
The downside of this trait is that we tend to romanticize anything we discover in another culture which is novel. And in this case, that means we develop this whole mythology around eastern martial arts generally and katana's specifically that elevates them from being merely a highly refined art, to something supernatural magical and simply better than anything that the West could possibly do.
What I think is more likely the case is that Western melee arts - both armed and unarmed - had been largely depricated and considered increasingly obselete by the time the West really encountered the East. In the West, martial arts had been replaced as essential war making skills by marksmenship and close formations. This was particularly true in the west post firearms, but the West's whole theory of war making was more centered on formations and logistics than in Japan - where it stayed centered on personal prowess and the prowess of your weapons. So when the West really encountered the East, not only was it encountering a society which had had more time to refine melee arts by virtue of putting them into use over a longer period, but at a time when its only melee arts had decayed been reduced essentially to hobbies and sports for aristocrats. So suddenly discovering this 'new technology' at a time when in the west its own technical investment in melee combat had diminished made eastern martial arts seem doubly cool and magnified the usual Western responce to anything novel in another culture.
Of course what we have since discovered is that we weren't as technically backward as we thought, and that being impressed with karate and katanas was roughly the same as the Chinese being impressed by Western mechanical clocks. We'd independently invented that stuff (or its equivalent) hundreds of years previously and forgotten we'd done so.
You can see the same sort of thing playing out in for example, romanticizing the Mauri, which really is to early stone age martial arts, what the Samurii is to Steel Age.
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