Nightshade

I suspect, however, that would be inadequate to satisfy Joseph.

It still seems that, barring two handed use where you can just use the haft as a staff, its far too easy to get up under the business end when you close, and for reasons I stated upthread, I'm dubious of the functionality of choking up on spears of even moderate length.

Part of the problem, of course, is it depends on whether you're dealing with hit locations; if you are, they're handling part of the problem there. Past that, you can easily assume that hitting critical locations is part of what the abstraction of damage rolls in the first place does. Contribution of skill to location is tricky. Almost everyone aims a missile weapon at the torso barring sniping situations, because honestly, playing headshot games is usually counterproductive; you end up missing enough more you could have done the job just with rounds to target. Personally, I think its an element that at least as a standard default is more trouble than its worth, buy YMMV.

I only briefly used even RQ for Glorantha, so I'm perhaps not the best one to ask, but I don't really think it deserves special treatment.

I think a bigger problem is that I haven't observed people have a lot of agreement on what translates as "hard" SF in the past.

I'd gotten the impression the hasta was only used by the triarii with any frequency, and the material I've found seems to be contradictory even there. Certainly most of the entries I can find on the standard Roman kit never mention it (though obviously they must have done _something_ against cavalry rather than just through pila at them.)

If you were going to do that, you'd need to do it for more than guns; almost all piercing weapons are dependent on location for a lot of their damage; its virtually as true of an arrow or an epee as it is of a bullet.

The material I've seen seems to suggest that was a holdover from Greek tactical influence, and as they changed tactics (among other things, changing shield style) it vanished. Naturally, there doesn't seem much information about the specific thought that lead to the process.

Kind of makes my point about the limitations of spears, though. Naturally, this isn't a problem unique to spears; a longsword can be a problem when it gets _really_ close and dirty, which is why in addition to its tool functions, pretty much any serious combatant carries some kind of dagger or knife, too.

I'm afraid I must agree; it was clearly an attempt to slight genericize RQ, and not really a terribly impressive attempt.

Well, I was just attempting to point out it was missing a lot of BRP features; I've personally found the BRP/RQ style advancement a more distinct part of the system than just being percentile skill based; the latter can be found in quite a lot of games to one degree or another (Palladium, outside its combat system is percentile skill as I recall), but the roll-to-advance is rather closer to unique.

I know the disease. I sometimes call myself a were-poster. Well, honestly, at that point they'd pretty much transformed into mounted infantry rather than true cavalry, even if they didn't want to admit it. The problem is that you've got a bunch of back weight that you now need to account for, and that is going to tend to swing when you make the thrusting motion. Find a stick (a broomstick without the broom will do) and grab it up near one end so the short end is in front of you. Thrust with it. I think you'll find the back end tends to flip upward every time you do this. And of course there's plenty of potential for the part behind you to catch on anything that gets at all close to you, such as another combatant. And I'm aware the pilum was a javelin, but my point was that you should ask yourself _why_ a shortspear wasn't a routine part of the Legionnaire's kit; after all, use from a shield wall is one of the things it does best. But by all evidence I've seen, the only ones they sometimes had were longer anti-cavalry weapons when they know they'd be going against horse warriors (and even that I've heard conflicting statements about). The Romans certainly had spearman in their military in their early years, but they apparently abandoned the practice (other than the pilum, of course, but as you note, they didn't seem to use that as a melee weapon much, at least by choice). I have to conclude they also found that in close in formation fighting, it was a liability. Well, at this point I've explained it as best I can. Its a fine weapon as long as you've kept someone at a distance, and a poor one as soon as you haven't. Gygax did seem to have a polearm fetish, but given almost any dangerous piece of metal you can imagine has been stuck on the end of a stick at some point in warfare, I suspect he didn't even get close to exaustive.

In fact, its part of the inspiration for the "Doorways in the Sky" campaign idea I mention in another thread (Heinlein's "Tunnel in the Sky" and a bit of "Stargate" are also in there...)

I went back and looked, and as it turned out, I _was_ crossing AE and CHILL up. However, AE, other than being percentile based still wasn't that BRP like, since the only way to advance skills was to advance the underlying abilities with experience points. I suppose it turns on what's needed to make something like BRP, and I tend to think a little more than percentile based skills is required; if that was it, as I recall, Rolemaster would count.

I've currently got several campaign ideas that are churning their way through the selection process for the next game we run. Some aren't particularly appropriate for BRP for one reason or another, or have a dedicated game system we'd likely use if their chosen. A few have BRP as one of the possible systems for selection, though: Urath: A parallel of modern day earth, where magic rather than technology is the dominant paradigm (though it doesn't entirely make up the difference). Society starts to fray as an invasion from the Chaos halfwordl throwss off the social order. The Dark Ages: After the fall of Rome in a mystical version of our past, the Dark Age is coming, but you and your friends will do their best to protect your community from the forces that plan to take advantage of that, both human and nonhuman. Doorways in the Sky: A game of exploration and political/military manuevering set in a future where the starts are reached by walking through stargates, and humanity is cometing with other races for stellar turf.

That's actually a pretty sound method from where I sit.

While percentile based, AE wasn't really very BRP-like; as I recall, it had experience points and only three skill levels (I could be confusing the latter with the second version of CHILL, which was also percentile based).

That's perfectly reasonable, but I'm still not going to do a bunch of websearching just to make an RPG board argument right and proper. Its just not worth it to me.

Perhaps, but I think there's a difference between a genre attracting someone and a setting. After all, BRPs had a lot of fantasy genre games, but that's presumeably not enough by itself.

And I should have qualfied that GURPS has had quite a few licensed products over the years, too. I don't know how much influence that's had on its success, but it never seemed to be the primary draw among the GURPS fans I've encountered.

That wouldn't be suprising, as some of the weapons I was refering to are Indian (I was using "Asian" rather broadly). There are some that are essentially impossible to call sword or axe; they're swordlike in that they possess a distinct blad that proceeds off the top of the weapon, often with some back edge, but they're hafted and are clearly primarily chopping weapons (to the degree they're really weapons in the normal sense at all).

Yes. You also see the inverse, which is, of course, very top-blade-heavy swords (though most of those were apparently used as executioner's tools rather than weapons). Well, of course. That's why there's any contraversy on the subject.

I don't believe I contradicted this, though as I noted, it only works well for light cavalry. I believe you're misinterpeting what RSM was saying there.

I appreciate your certainty, but I do not see that as the case, nor does my reading support it.

In the case of many of these, its directly derived from traditional sojutsu instruction that, as far as I know, has never lapsed in Japan from the period when its a functional art. Now you can always argue that stylization has crept in, but at that point, no one in the modern world knows anything about fighting with a melee weapon by that standard. I'll admit I thoroughly mangled that part of the argument by conflating iron and bronze in that paragraph; the issue with bronze was not its functionality but its cost. Bronze does corrode (because copper does) but if properly cast its far more resistant to it than most steels, let alone simple cast iron. Well, at least with horse pistols one had one advantage; they only needed one hand to fire. I do agree it was probably not a trivial task, and I suspect from what I've read that if not fired into mass targets, hitting was, shall we say, probably hit or miss (I've never seen an indication whether horse pistols were used exclusively with ball, or sometimes fired shot; if the latter, that certainly would have helped as its a bit more forgiving). Oh, of course not. As best I can tell it was en passant attacks. I think I wasn't clear; what I was suggesting was that the Roman Army was, in fact, rather distinctive just _because_ it did so so well. In fact, it appears its tactical doctrine virtually depended on that. The benefit of a shield wall was known even then, and the particular tactics used made the most of it. What I'm questioning was how many _other_ armies were nearly as good about that, including most that came after them. And that was my point; that consistent formation fighting was not the whole issue there. I'm afraid I have to disagree, at least when used with a shield. Even moderate length spears become rather unwieldy when used up close; the haft has to go somewhere and when not braced with the other hand, the somewhere is often not ideal for using it as a weapon. As I mentioned elsewhere, if used by those who used them primarily alone, I expect staff-like techniques made up some of the difference (as it does in sojutsu), but its hard to picture this working well with a shield still present. I don't think it is at all a coincidence that the pilum was used a throwing weapon rather than one used normally in melee. I'm not speaking about the really long ones here; obviously those would be completely disfunctional at close ranges--but at moderate length ones in the 4-6' range. All the demonstrations I've seen suggest that most one handed techniques for spears in that size or longer are simply not very wieldy with one hand (obviously they _can_ be used with one, or shield and spear wouldn't be possible, but its notable that in that situation the usage is aided by the extra defensive capability of the shield to make up for some of its shortcomings). That may be part of the explanation, but in some cases that doesn't seem the whole one; there are also heavy early swords that appear to be simply axes with most of the haft removed. (Of course none of this is is ever really tidy; polearms are hard to evaluate if the spear or the axe is their primary progenitor in some cases, as some appear like spears with more axelike blades, or axes with unusually long hafts, or even both. To some extent weapon categorization is often arbitrary). My apologies if I've gone at greater length than was you interest; for what its worth I thought you raised a number of good points.