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Re: (TFT) Reality vs. Game Mechanics



There's a similar phenomenon at work in the bow section of the weapons table. A longbow doesn't necessarily do more damage than a horse bow. The bow that does more damage is the bow that shoots an arrow harder, which means the bow with a heavier draw weight, regardless of style. (Someone, somewhere, had a formula for how much damage a bow does per ST of the user, reflecting draw weight, but I've unfortunately forgotten what it was, and whose brilliant idea.)

In the end it looks like SJ just decided to use names of weapons based on how powerful they sounded, rather than how accurately they reflect reality. The problem could be fixed by just renaming weapons things like, "Sword wielded by a ST X figure", or "Wimpy Sword" vs. "Giant Honking Sword". But that just doesn't have the same ring to it.

As far as rapiers and Two Weapons... if you have that talent, you should be able to wield any two weapons you have the ST for (given practice with that particular combination). If you're ST 20-odd and can wield two Giant Honking Normally-Two-Handed Swords (aka greatswords), why not? PC's with that many attribute points are death- on-legs anyway.

I'd be interested in hearing your opinion on the relative merits/ drawbacks of axes vs. swords, and how that could be reflected in terms of game mechanics.

- Meg

On Oct 7, 2011, at 11:23 AM, PvK wrote:

Seems to me the low-end TFT "Rapier" is more like what was called a small sword than a rapier. It does seem inaccurate to have a late fencing weapon included on a medieval sword list as simply the wimpiest sword, with no redeeming qualities except that you could do Fencing/Two Weapons with it (for an obviously bogus reason in the Two Weapons Talent - clearly Earth Florentine teaching habits have no reason to have anything to do with Cidri).

Also seems to me that the weights are clearly not historically nor physically accurate. One might try to rationalize them in terms of "effective weight", to support the trade-off between cost and weight which is really there for color and game balance rather than for realism, it seems to me. I would prefer to use real weights, but I do think there are other differences between swords and axes in terms of cost and performance which TFT fails to capture. (GURPS tries and it seems to me does a much more accurate and detailed/ cumbersome job, but isn't perfectly accurate either.)
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