Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Drifter Bob" data-source="post: 1729509" data-attributes="member: 17723">Just incidentally, if you are talking about something from the medieval period or on the actual military battlefields of the Renaissance such as a longsword or arming sword fencing (bastard / greatsword or longsword in D&D terms) a bind in a practical sense means whenever you are pushing against the other weapon for a moment.  If you are controlling the bind it generally means you have both the initiative in terms of timing, and your strong (the base or first third of your blade) against his center or weak third of his blade, and you are normally pushing it aside to follow up with a cut or thrust against him.  A lot of times in a practical sense it means you have stopped his momentum cold and are controlling the pace of the fight, albiet for just a moment.A 'beat' by contrast is when you simply knock his weapon aside, also often regaining initiative in the process.There are many maneuvers which lead from the bind in the books of the old masters: windings, disengages and twitch cuts, push-over thrusts, grappling and all kinds of halfswording options, but from my experience with sparring it doesn't happen all that often with two handed swords, maybe once every few bouts, though that depends on the fighting styles of the antagonists.  When it does it opens up a very interesting range of options!  It is more frequent when fighting with other weapon combinations, sword and dagger especially, or when fighting against pole arms such as spears.   It also seems to happen more often fighting in harness (heavy armor) than unarmored.With the latter in particular, if you are using a shorter weapon, you will often try to 'bind' a spear, staff or pole-arm to the side, above, or (best of all) down while you rush in, closing the distance for a kill.The Hollywood cliche of a bind is where you see in many (especially old) swashbuckling movies when both fencers are pushing against each others blades strong against strong for what seems like an eternity in actual fighting time (5 to 10 seconds or more), often to pause and pronounce some pithy dialogue .... I've almost never seen a bind like that in real life, they usually resolve in one way or another within a very short time indeed, rarely for more than half a second.As for traps and using the hilt to disarm and such, I think that is much more prevalent with modern sport fencing than with medieval or Renaissance military techniques, though some what more so with Renaissance era civilian cut-and-thrust weapons such as rapiers/ sideswords with complex hilts.J</blockquote>

Verification