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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2095659" data-attributes="member: 27012">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.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.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.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. 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.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.</blockquote>

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