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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mal Malenkirk" data-source="post: 4203148" data-attributes="member: 834">Actually, halfsword techniques were primarily used to punch through armour more efficiently. When wielding the sword that way, you were essentially using a spear.  ''The great damage'' of the sword isn't an issue.  Forget D&D and action movie for a moment : The human body is fragile.  If you beat the armour, your opponent is dead.  And when a guy wore thick armour, swings were wasted energy.  You weren't going throug plate that way, no matter how hard you swung.  So you would grab your greatsword toward the middle, slam your handle in his helmet, thus stunning him, then you would thrust the tip of your sword through the weak spot in the armpit, exploit his shock by ramming into him and bringing the fight to the ground, release one hand on your blade, draw a stiletto and slip it throug the helmet and kill the sucker.*  For example.Not a single melee weapon in the history of mankind has ever been developped with the idea that you needed to inflict ''Great damage''.  Just with the idea that you needed to kill your opponent before he could do the same to you.  That's why if you removed armour from the equation, you would prefer a rapier to a greatsword.  And if you were fighting in packed tavern, you would prefer a dagger to a rapier.  All these weapon would kill you in one blow if they strike true and so the only concern was, and has ever been, how best to deliver that one killing blow.Now this is D&D and we have HP and rapiers are allowed to be used against heavy armour without penalty.  That's fine, that's fantasy, that's a game.  But it makes many of you forget what a weapon was really designed for.  Not whittling away HP.  Killing.Seems a small nuance but, and no offense to the quoted poster, it results in really weird evaluation of how a weapon is supposed to be used.  As far as I'm concerned, you have to see a D&D fight as an abstraction of many maneuvers.  Not all of them would intuitively be worth 2D6 but overall, a guy using a 2-hander is hardly just swinging.  We approximate his damage as 2D6 but let's not get hanged up on that and decide it must means he's only doing big swings.</blockquote>

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