Quoting Margaret Tapley <barnswallow@sbcglobal.net>:
I'd sort of noticed the same thing, just from time spent whacking things with sticks. You can whack a lot of times in 5 seconds if you're fast. So our guess is that 1 turn, in melee combat, actually
Yes, you can. But you can't keep up the speed if you're making actual attacks, as opposed to just whacking away. An attack with intent is a fair bit slower. Not 1 in 5 slower, but slower. A number of years ago, there was a magazine called The Bujin, which was for Japanese sowrd guys. One article they had was on measuring cutting speed. They set up a couple lasers and measured sword speed. They also measured for a number of alternative weapons. The fastest weapon? The yardstick. The slowest? Sharp katana. Second fastest? Single hand SCA rattan broadsword. In gneral, the more dangerous the weapon, the slower the cut. The most revealing analysis wasn't the cut speed, however. Their study found that the variance in cut speed for a particular weapon by a particular person was inversely proportional to their years of experience. New guys were all over the place for speed, old vets cut in a narrow speed range. But cutting speed doesn't really matter all that much in real combat, as long as its sufficient. It's only one component of combat. If you look at John Boyd's OODA loop, cutting speed only affects Action. Old guys, like me, may not have the fastest blade, but we can Observe, Orient, and Decide much faster than a novice, which means that a lack of speed isn't a big problem, as long as I have some minimum level of speed. Old guys get to the point where they act a lot faster than new guys, which sounds a lot like having a higher DX, doesn't it? Boyd's theory is that if your loop is faster than the other guy's, at some point he's working off of old information, and what you're doing looks like magic. If you like your Sci-Fi, you can also read The Musashi Flex by Steve Perry. Its climax is between 2 guys, one of whom is faster than human, the other of whom knows what the first guy is going to do.
Neil Gilmore raito@raito.com ===== Post to the entire list by writing to tft@brainiac.com. Unsubscribe by mailing to majordomo@brainiac.com with the message body "unsubscribe tft"