Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DracoSuave" data-source="post: 4966395" data-attributes="member: 71571">I'm not about to think that... except of course in the realm of fiction where such things -are- possible.  Like it or not, D&D is informed by what is cool and impressive in action movies, not by what works in period battles.So the question is, can you flank random joe-blow mook with two spears?  Yes.  And D&D covers that by making him a minion and you just took him down in one hit anyways.  Maybe that's narrated by being stuck in that situation.But can you flank Jet Li in this situation?  Hell no.  This is when he starts leaping  and using your spears against you and then kicking you in your face.  The man has -exploits- yo.  Exploits.  This is more accurate to what D&D combat is like.But then, what if it's Takeshi Kaneshiro and Chow Yun Fat surrounding Jet Li?  Yes.  Because this is now Paragon level, and they have Polearm Gamble in their favored trained weapons.The rules are fine at representing what it is they're supposed to represent; high superheroic fantasy action.More accurately, however, the long weapon was not the ultimate weapon on the battlefield.  It was designed to be used against armor, yes, but it wasn't the reach that was important so much as the versitility.  A halbard wasn't good because it was long and had reach, it was good because it had -leverage-.  It had a spear for jabbing into armor, the axe was designed not for hacking so much, but for digging into armor plates, and the butt end of the halbard was -also- a weapon. However, such a weapon needed to keep moving.  If you held it out, joust style, a shield user would simply deflect the weapon to your right leaving you open and defenseless.  Someone using a twohanded sword could disarm you as well, from range.  It's top-heaviness tended to be a liability, which is why it was used by militia rather than by higher order fighters.  It was meant to be a weapon that 'gets lucky' in mass quantity rather than one that requires skill.  A peasantry with halbards will take down more knights than a peasantry with swords, but a knight with a halbard is less capable than a knight with a sword.</blockquote>

Verification