Bronze vs. Iron vs. Steel

[John Morrow]

I could shatter an iron sword into shards by hitting a pig carcass with it. All I'd have to do is make the blade out of cast iron. I could also bend a steel sword into a right angle over a pig carcass; I'd need a sword with a mild steel blade.

All true. And that's why the grade of the iron matters. The early iron was pretty crummy quality.

The copper-tin bronze alloy was fairly standard (roughly 8 parts copper to 1 part tin). There was also the more dangerous arsenic-copper bronze which some speculate led to lame and sickly blacksmith gods (e.g., Vulcan). But in either case, they couldn't control the hardness of the bronze by controlling the carbon content and a lot of it was simply cast in forms (e.g., the Naue Type II bronze sword). The hardness of copper can be controlled by hammering but it get's brittle pretty quickly. The bronze is always somewhat soft.

Compare this against a Dark Age pattern-forged blade. The test of such a weapon was for the swordsmith to bend it in a vice, such that the tip of the blade touched the pommel. If he did that and the weapon sprang back perfectly into shape, it was deemed a worthy sword and he signed his name on the tang. If it broke or bent, he reforged it.

Well, that's what I meant by a soft core and a hard edge. That's what you get with a pattern-forged sword. You can get a similar effect out of folding and tempering. You just don't get that with the early iron swords or even in the crummy mass-produced tools and weapons of that period. It takes a whole lot of effort to produce a pattern-forged or folded blade.

But most modern fantasy movies (and thus most modern fantasy novels and RPGs) are used to seeing modern steel blades and assume that swords are all as strong and flexible as modern blades. If the "standard" D&D sword is as strong as a Toledo steel blade or katana, then, yes it's far superior to an iron or bronze sword. And if D&D characters were using basic cast-iron or hammered swords, sundering and broken weapons would be a far bigger part of the game. D&D assumes steel weapons. Modern steel weapons, in fact, in my opinon.

This is one of the main reasons why the Japanese swordfighting techniques do not emphasise blade-on-blade contact - the weapons weren't designed to cope with parrying.)

A lot of blades aren't, including that bronze Naue Type II. Of course spears were also quite common for a reason, a point that the movie Troy pays some lip-service to. But there would be no "fencing" with a bronze sword. It would last for one parry and you'd have a sword bent like a boomerang. If you used a crude iron sword, you'd either shatter your blade or wind up with the same boomerang.

Anyway, I can certainly imagine someone making a bronze sword and bending it into a right angle; you could do that with steel too. The problem is the vagueness of the terminology. What grade of bronze or steel?

Bronze isn't really like steel in that regard, to my knowledge, because the hardness of bronze isn't controlled by carbon content. Bronze is bronze, which is another way that bronze was superior to the early iron. It was consistent and predictable where iron might be more or less brittle until they learned how to better control the carbon content and impurities.

This is the result of annealing, which process forms a kind of crystalline structure in the outer part of the steel, increasing its structural integrity. The Europeans actually seem to have discovered annealing before the Japanese did, which is in keeping with the general superiority of European sword-forging over the Japanese of the same period.

Katanas were works of art, but they were the result of taking one relatively primitive technique to extremes.

Actually, the differences reflect modern stereotypes of Europeans and Japanese pretty well. The Europeans came up with new processes while the Japanese perfected what they knew to an art form.

The Samurai were amazing warriors, no doubt about that, but they excelled despite their inferior weapons technology, not because of it.

Well, they also did benefit from the fact that they also primarily battled other Samurai. Things would have been very different if Europe had been more insular or the Japanese subjected to many more external invasions. Each culture is a product of its historical experiences.

 

[John Morrow]

Depends on the locality... some places have more iron ore, some have more copper, some have more tin.

Well, in any realistic scientific setting (and, yes, I know most D&D settings are pure fantasy), the proportion isn't arbitrary. The reason there is so much iron on Earth relates to the composition of the planet (our nice heavy iron core that may contribute to our useful magnetic field) and the fact that iron is the common byproduct of fusion during a supernova (iron is the point at which fusion stops making energy and starts to consume it if you make heavier metals, so once a star starts fuzing iron into other elements, it collapses). Iron will almost always be more common than copper or tin on any realistic world because its more common in the universe. If someone is interested in realism, they should also look at the raw ores and the geological formations where they are found. Tin, copper, and iron are all found in certain types of formations.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

OK, to break this down to game-related info, is the following true?

Bronze = more expensive than steel, lower hardness than steel
Iron = same hardness as steel, lower hit points than steel

 

[tarchon]

Well, y'know, that's the thing about bronze... it *doesn't rust*.

It builds up patina, even if it is usually a little more corrosion-resistant than iron. Salt is bronze's deadliest enemy, and that will eat through it in years or less.

Bronze and ferrous sword-making technologies are radically different, so it's difficult to compare them directly in many respects. Bronze usually seems to have come down on the slashing side of the slashing/stabbing controvery, so that might reflect differing qualities of the material. It definitely was a more flexible alloy system because it could be melted and proportions controlled. I would guess in most cases, the transition was originally motivated by economics, since early iron weapons were obviously inferior to advanced bronze weapons. Good steel holds an edge better, but good bronze beats bad iron.

Late bronze technologies also seem to have taken more advantage of chemical surface treatments like these guys:
http://www.bmy.com.cn/english/dxbq/L112p.htm
http://chineseswords2.freewebspace.com/custom2.html
The Romans also had worked out how to silver-coat bronze in order to debase their coinage more stealthily.

Bronze is also about 5-10% denser than iron, so combined with the lesser stiffness (requiring thicker cross-sections), iron might have also been preferred just for lightness.

For game purposes, I guess the differences would show up more if you kept track of details like weapon maintenance. I'm not sure if any of the combat statistics would be different enough to show up with d20 resolution.

 

[John Morrow]

Bronze = more expensive than steel, lower hardness than steel
Iron = same hardness as steel, lower hit points than steel

What D&D doesn't simulate well is the fact that you can bend a bronze or soft iron sword without breaking it and bend it back with your foot. If you want a quick and dirty way of looking at it,

High-Carbon Iron = Same Hardness as Steel but half the hit points or more.
Low-Carbon Soft Iron or Bronze = Hardness 7 but the same number of hit points.

You also might want to reduce the damage of the soft iron and bronze to reflect the softer metal's poorer ability to hold an edge, but that's optional, at least after the first time it does or takes damage.

If you want to simulate the "bending" problem, any sundering attack that does hit points to a soft iron or bronze weapon bends it (turning it into an "improvised weapon") but it can be bent back (and, say, up 3 to three hit points restored) by taking a move action that provokes an Attack of Opportunity to bend it back into shape.

Like I said, the above is quick and dirty and I'm sure that other people will come up with other ideas. That's also probably a lot more accuracy than most people will want in their D&D game.

 

[John Morrow]

Bronze usually seems to have come down on the slashing side of the slashing/stabbing controvery, so that might reflect differing qualities of the material.

I don't think that's true at all. Before the Naue Type II came into common use, they find blades that they call "rapiers" because they have long narrow pointed blades clearly for thrusting. The Mycenaean "rapiers" didn't even have a proper tang and were riveted to the handle. They definitely could not handle hacking. There was also plenty of bronze used for spear points, axes, and arrowheads.

To at least some degree, it's the fact that long iron and bronze weapons were so delicate that made wood-hafted weapons viable for so long. One way to handle this is to make many of the ancient weapons spear tips, axe heads, and arrowheads and the bronze that was turned to into swords was all made magical to make it strong enough for conventional fantasy pseudo-Medieval swordplay.

Good steel holds an edge better, but good bronze beats bad iron.

That pretty much sums the whole thing up in one neat sentence.

(Edit: That said, I think D&D uses a "steel standard", not an iron standard. That, and steel can also be made more spring-like than bronze, too.)

 

[John Morrow]

The legacy of the ancients is a D&D staple. I mean there all these underground fortifications AKA dungeons right? And they're well stocked with magic items and gold and so forth. With the greater availability of magic items on the surface it's perhaps been lessened in 3rd ed but it's an important part of both Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms. Possibly Eberron too, I'm not sure if the civilisation of the giants had better stuff or not.

If that's the sort of game you want, then I don't think your ancients should have been making bronze weapons. They should have made weapons out of mithril, adamandium, cold iron, and other exotic materials. And just as the real world shifted from bronze to iron because the iron was cheaper and more plentiful, not better, the modern fantasy world shifted to steel because the mitril and adamantium became rare and the cold iron was either all consumed (if it was a meteoric elemental iron/nickel alloy that came from only one place) or the techniques for working it have been lost. Either way, that would give you our "ancients were better and used a different metal" feel without going back to bronze. And as someone suggested that types of weapons evolve, perhaps all of those adamantium and mithril weapons are only of certain types which were popular thousands of years ago.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

That's actually the opposite of what I want.

I want a measurable progress from the time of the ancients, since I do not presuppose that all things ancient were better. They might have been better in some things, depending on the culture, but there wasn't an across-the-board awesomeness, as per LotR's elves.

 

[SWBaxter]

I was looking at Goodman Games' newly announced DCC, "Legacy of the Savage Kings." Exploring old ruins is a D&D staple, but, perhaps taking a cue from Tolkein, weapons pulled out of ancient ruins tend to be about as good as the ones made in the characters' modern day, or even better.

Now, this is great for special weapons, but it seems a little strange from the standpoint of a world full of intelligent living beings.

Not really. Traditional Tolkien-style fantasy worlds postulate some kind of past golden age when near-perfect godlike beings (such as Tolkien's elves) ruled the world with breathtakingly advanced technology and magic. Then it somehow all went south, and the succeeding dark age where comparitively ignorant successors muck up the world is the modern day setting. That doesn't really match reality all that well, but then again it's not really supposed to.

Has anyone, perhaps, thought of having ancient weapons be of less-impressive metals, like bronze or iron? What did you do to mechanically model the older weapons, if so?

I recommend From Stone to Steel, from Monkeygod Enterprises, as a good resource for these kinds of issues. One of the interesting points is that unless you're interested in keeping track of weapon and armour degradation via hardness and hit points, the major differences are going to be in the types of weapons used, rather than game stats.

I was also thinking that smelting steel might originally have been one of the dwarven nation's "treasures." Would the secret of creating steel be important enough to go to war over, or was the development of it over iron a historical footnote for the most part?

It was more evolutionary than revolutionary, since historically there were a whole bunch of cultures and nations trading and warring with one another, and the development and refinement of steel cross-pollinated through many of them with all the incremental advances adding up. But in a fantasy world where just one nation had steel while everybody else was using bronze or even non-metal weapons and armour, it'd probably be a pretty huge advantage.

 

[SWBaxter]

That's because people are looking for a ready reason why the Iron Age replaced the Bronze Age and it makes sense to assume that the Iron was better. There reality, as I understand it from reading about Bronze Age weaponry, is that the early Iron was either only about as good as or even inferior to the Bronze but the Bronze was an allow that required Tin and both Copper and Tin were much harder to get than Iron, which was relatively easy to find and process. Basically, the key wasn't that the early Iron was superior to the Bronze but that it was a lot more plentiful and cheaper than Bronze.

Well, kind of, but of course it's more complicated than that. In the Mediterranean basin and on over to at least Mesopotamia, where many of the oldest civilizations were concentrated, tin and copper (the metals used to make bronze) were easily accessible, and so were used to make armour and weapons. Some adjoining ancient peoples - the Hittites, for example - had little access to bronze, but did mess around with iron. But it wasn't until the easily accessible tin and copper deposits ran out that the bronze age civilizations started to work with iron. So during its heyday, bronze would be cheaper than iron, at least in those civilizations that control the tin and copper mines. Then eventually declining supply leads to exploitation of different metals, which are initially harder to exploit but are actually available in much greater quantities.