Longswords for Halflings in SRD?

[Dracorat]

I will, you too.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Re: creature size vs mass of weapons. When I worked out regularly, I was a beast. My lower body was ridiculously strong for my height- at 5'3" in HS, I could easily leg press 700lbs for 10 reps- but my upper body strength (for certain lifts) was a question mark. While bigger guys could easily grasp the bar for a clean and jerk, I couldn't. My hands were a tad small. Even though I could easily shift the weight (at the time, 220lbs- a mere 30lbs more than my bench press), I invariably dropped the bar at about waist height. A few years and a few growth-spurts later, it was no longer a problem*... But its not like I'm huge now- I'm only 5'7." Yet that 3" difference in height (and proportionate change in hand size) made ALL the difference. And that is far less a difference than between an average human and an average halfling.

By analogy, a creature that is slightly small may be able to handle the weapon, but his grip will not be as secure as the creature for whom it was designed. He might be fine and dandy waving it around...but it might fly out of his hands after the first solid strike in combat.

The hypothetical judge here would ask you to provide RW examples...which would be provided by scale models and demonstrations...which would show the difficulty a small person would have using a weapon sized for someone who is the size of a normal adult, and would also show the awkwardness of downscaled items in the hands of normal adults.

We now also have several people in this thread who have related to you personal experience with ill-sized weapons and cutlery. To a person, they denoted that awkwardness.

But you don't buy it- so be it- play your game with the 3.0 rules. Or make up rules you like.

* There is a weightlifter whose name escapes me who was in the same boat. He entered a strongman competition in which one of the events was to clean & jerk a certain weight fitted on a train axle. He couldn't grip it properly, and kept dropping it. His solution- he got it moving quickly, let it go, and caught it- completing the lift. Pictures of it were published in Muscle & Fitness back in the late 1980's.

 

[Fieari]

By the way, I just want to chip in with a comment about this picture that was linked earlier.

Compare the grip that kid has on his sword with the grip this person has on a medium sized katana (one handed, but the grip doesn't change that much one handed to two handed).

Look at how the kid's thumbs are wrapped around that handle. First thing they taught me when I started learning kendo was that you need to make a V shape with your thumb, and the sword fits in that gap. When doing so, your thumb wraps around the blade and helps stabalize it. This kid can't do that. Note that the adult, can, and in fact, that's why the adult can weild the blade one handed. When gripping the blade, it helps if the back of the handle is grasped partially, by the top part of your palm, not your fingers. The kid HAS to use his fingers exclusively, because his hands aren't big enough.

I agree with Hypersmurf here. I don't know that all these differences would add up to a -2 penalty (on the other hand, outside of form we don't really expect a lot from little kids anyway) but there's no saying that there shouldn't be SOME sort of penalty.


Note that in japan, when kids learn kendo in elementary school, they don't wield adult wakizashi. They weild shinai carefully scaled to their size. Now, this is an expensive route to go, since kids grow so fast you'll have to keep changing weapons as they slowly get bigger, but it illustrates the point, I think.

 

[Storyteller01]

Which is probably where Hype and I disagree. I'm all for some penalty (if one is needed), but a -2 seems to be a bit much considering the weight and grip variences in Medium weapons. Especially as abstracted as system is.

 

[Ranger REG]

What would a judge say if you walked into court saying 'imagine his finger on the trigger' without any other proof?

What race is the judge? Human ... or one of them Small Folk?

How can we present an evidence when a culture of Small Folk no longer exist? And you choose to also theorize as we do for your argument, but using small human child as a benchmark? What child would know of weaponsmithing? Of warfare?

 

[Jhulae]

Rethink that. The toy isn't made for actual combat.

No, I'm not going to rethink it.

The toys are made for small creatures (children). The weapons fit comfortably in their hands. They're not made for 'Medium' creatures (adults), and therefore do not fit comfortably.

Any 'small' culture is going to make weapons that fit comfortably in their hands. While you might not like the resized pictures, if a 'small' culture has weaponsmiths who are going to make weapons, they'll be sized proportionate to that culture, whether they're 33% as large, 50% as large, or whatnot. Even if the weapon looks physically identical, it's going to be proportionately smaller (or larger for a 'large' culture).

And, as for your pictuers of a child holding a wakizashi.. Yay for him! He can hold it. I'd like to see him fight someone with it and see how well he can hold onto it when it's being parried and when he's using it to parry. That is what the penalty represents, since combat in d20 is so abstract. If he has to use more concentration and focus to just keep the weapon in his hand, he's being distracted (or, in d20, incurring a penalty).

And, as for derringers... Notoriously inaccurate and short ranged, which was why they were used as a backup weapon only. And, they probably would incur a penalty in d20 if accurately portrayed.

 

[billd91]

A human and a halfling both strike with the same power in combat, as represented by their identical strength bonuses (a 14 str gives a +2 to damage regardless of size).

Except for one thing. That halfling really has a 16 by the point-buy or the roll. A small character (halflings and gnomes, at least) has to have a higher strength to generate the same striking power in combat than someone larger. He actually has to be stronger for his body type/size to do so than someone larger.

The chimpanzee is out of whack to use as a halfling comparison. For one thing, he's got... wait for it... monkey grip. :rimshot:
He also, quite arguably, has powerful build and a strength racial bonus to boot. He's not much like a halfling at all. The proportions and bone structure are all wrong.

Ultimately, it's not entirely a question of the weight of the weapon. It's a question of its size and proportion relative to the size and proportion of someone off-size. -2 isn't an unfair penalty at all in the grand scheme of things, nor is the damage difference. Besides, that -2 really becomes a -1 when the wielder is smaller because they get that inherent size bonus to hit.

And when using real-world examples, you have to be careful. The chimpanzee isn't human proportioned at all. It's very hard to make a judgement how its capabilities would compare to a human shrunk down (or the chimp expanded). And with respect to claims that kids train with adult-sized weapon in martial arts... how do you know they aren't suffering a size penalty? It can't be quantified in real life as precisely as the general problems of using off-sizes stuff can be modeled in a set of game rules.

 

[Sledge]

Established earlier, a chimp averages between 2.29 to 3.29 feet in height. Fits for a small creature. Heavy or not, it's a small creature that can grapple a nd medium creature. If the medium creature thought he wasn't going to be harmed, he wouldn't have run. If you listen to the commentator, the human suffered some extensive damage.

That of course is their quadrupedal height.... Yes the man who only attempted to evade suffered some injuries... his face was bit and his finger was hurt. That was it.

The pic is to show that a small creature can hold the weapon. As Hype pointed out, halflings are not the same as human children. Give the weapon to a small creature with near equivalent strength, and the situation changes.

Also keep in mind that in the pic, the child is posing. There's nothing in the pic that indicates he HAS to use both hands.

Others have shown the problem of the child's grip. The problem is that this isn't my pic. The pic was posted to prove that a child could use it the same as an adult, which it doesn't actually show.

 

[kenobi65]

Established earlier, a chimp averages between 2.29 to 3.29 feet in height. Fits for a small creature. Heavy or not, it's a small creature that can grapple a nd medium creature. If the medium creature thought he wasn't going to be harmed, he wouldn't have run. If you listen to the commentator, the human suffered some extensive damage.

I'm not sure that a chimpanzee works as a good example here.

Even if the height of a chimp qualifies it as a Small creature, I think its hands are pretty big. In googling "chimpanzee hand size", I found this -- a life-cast of a chimp's hand:
http://www.boneclones.com/LC-23.htm

According to the description of this item, the hand cast is 9" long. I'm an adult male human, almost 6' tall, and I don't have small hands...but my hands are also about 9" long, from the tip of my middle finger to the wrist joint (which is what the hand cast of the chip is).

So, unless that replica chimp hand is from a particularly huge example of chimpdom, it appears that chimps have hands that are pretty close in size to human hands, despite chimps being only about half the height of humans. (In other words, in the tongue-in-cheek words of billd91, chimps might well have Monkey Grip as a racial feat.)

On the other hand (pun not intended ), all the official illustrations that we've seen of halflings and gnomes certainly makes them appear to be pretty much proportional to humans, just smaller...and that includes their hands.

If someone had a video of a 3-foot-tall primate, with hands that were proportional to a human's, wielding some human weapon in a competent fashion, that'd be a different story.

 

[Delta]

And bring back weapon speed factors, too. It only makes sense that someone with a short sword would attack quicker than a battle axe. (Cue SCA videos.)