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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5699960" data-attributes="member: 54877">Given equal skill, and the presumed relatively light armor worn by both participants wielding those weapons, the rapier user will be at a disadvantage. And not because of any katana being some kind of inherently superior sword nonsense, either. All else being equal, if you are capable of using a longer blade with two hands, and the opponent is stuck with only using one hand, you have an advantage. This would make speed relatively less important, precision about equal, though probably slightly less, and timing even more important. But mainly, it would be about using whatever you had, with whatever mental aspects you could bring to it, to adjust.  Of course, if we presume reasonable intelligence on the part of both, then the katana guy is starting the fight with a wakizasha (sp?), naginata and Japanese longbow, while the rapier guy definitely has a buckler, dagger, and crossbow. They may end up facing each other down to nothing but the one main blade each, but you can obviously imagine a 1,000 different outcomes from those starts. And that doesn't even take into account any armor or firearms options that both might pursue. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /> But I rather wonder if you read my post to the end, given that I already addressed the sports fencing versus real combat discrepancy. The more options you have, the more important the other pieces become. That is, if Int is useful in a 1 on 1, regulated sparring bout, it is even more important in a 1 on 1 deadly combat. I think what throws people off is how much this doesn't apply to relatively green participants. The high school fencers with only a few years training are analogous to green troops. For those, some simple basic training that concentrates mainly on their athletic ability (and heightened physical and mental conditioning) is designed to get them through those first fights with some chance of success. Partly this is because this is the only effective way to train masses quickly, but this is also because mass anything is a chaotic mess where luck is also a huge factor. (Our Salle experimented a few times with picking teams of fencers and fencing in a line, where you could hit anyone, just to see what we would happen. The overwhelming consensus was that this basically nullified most skill, once a person got to the point where they could do basic attacks and parries.) That is, the fact that is sports fencing for points instead of a duel to the death with mixed weapons is less telling than changing from a duel to a melee.</blockquote>

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