Nightshade

That seems unsupported by several of these items. When you see swordlike blades attached to wooden hilts in exactly the same fashion axe blades are, or things that look like nothing so much as axeblades with a knife or sword style hilt, to suggest that there is no crossover evolution is simply not supportable.

If you ask whether I'm going to go to the trouble of searching for citation pointers, no I'm not.

You see just that among a number of Asian forms. It can be argued which direction the influence goes (where they attempts to make axes more knifelike or knives more axelike?) but to suggest that suggest things such as the cleaver-like swords don't have a relationship to axes is simply nonsensical.

Depends on whether the training was with it as a standalone or primarily with shield. As a standalone, you're almost certainly right. With shield, its almost impossible to do much with the haft.

Most of the ones you see are in Asia, but there's remnents of it in a lot of the more utility-oriented blade forms such as the machete and the kukri.

Sorry, I was thinking iron when I said that, not bronze. The biggest problem with bronze was its expense; its not until you get to some of the primitive steels that you actually get any better an edge (if anything iron, holds its edge worse than bronze, and is vulnerable to corrosion to boot). But of course the difference does matter in terms of accessibility, as iron weapons would have been far cheaper than bronze (and once located, iron is easier to find than either of the two component metals of bronze in most areas, making it even cheaper preportionately).

And all of them fell progressively out of favor as use outside of horseback and formation fighting almost precisely as better choices of close in weapons became available.

Read what I wrote again: both are true because swords evolve from both knives _and axes_. There's enough interim forms to indicate that.

I'm aware of Yrth, but I don't have much evidence its a special draw for GURPS players.

Actually, they're as close to professionals as exist in the modern world, given they were instructors in general martial arts and sojutsu in specific. Given they've actually at least made actual use of the spear (albiet not out for blood) again, I have to consider their information _at least_ as valid as historical interpetation. I none the less feel its my obligation to explain _why_ I find your counterargument dubious. Even bronze swords were, shall we say, not as good as they could be. Bronze isn't brittle but it also doesn't hold an edge worth a damn unless you work it constantly. Now an razor edge isn't a critical element in a sword (in fact, when used against armor too much of one is pretty much useless), but the worse an edge you have, the less any benefit shows against an axe. As to clubs--I've never claimed spears are unattractive compared to clubs/maces. I've also seen little sign that's true in the game, so its not terribly relevant to the topic at hand. The bow is a complex case; decent horse archery is, by all evidence I have, a hard skill to learn, and for self-evident reasons, it pretty much precludes a shield. Barring certain sorts of light cavalry, I don't really see much sign its compareable in its impact to the spear in that situation. (Obviously, you can make the same comment about the horse pistol to some degree, but by the time it became dominant armor was becoming less and less important and anything you'd consider heavy cavalry was on its way out anyway). That's quite true, but the reality is that you still have a lot of armies that didn't attempt to keep tight formations once initial contact was made. That was, in fact, one of the distinctive traits of the Romans, and was followed, at best erratically, even by many medievel armies. Of course part of this turns on what one classes as "professional"; I'm not sure I'd class most medievel armies as professional. None the less, the issue still was once things got in close and dirty, anything but extremely short spears (like the late Zulu assegai) was a liability. It was great as long as you could keep a hedgehog intact or the equvilent, but insufficent past that. Given that's almost entirely parallel to the choices presented to a typical RQ PC, its also what's relevant to the discussion at hand. As I said, its not that tidy; in particular, if you study weapons from Asia, you'll see interim cases where there are weapons that seem to be transitioning from axes to swords, presumeably for the reasons I mentioned in another post. Axes and maces, because of their movement arm, are intrinsically unwieldy. The degree of that unwieldiness varies, but its an issue with almost all use, and the tradeoff against light-to-medium armored opponets are not ideal. I don't think it does, because weapons don't disappear immediately just because there's a better weapon; they have to become actively counterproductive before that happens. The spear has its virtues in terms of keeping someone at a distance, and in terms of ease of use; as such, it survived beyond the axe and the mace (and in fact, is likely only semi-obsolete now because modern firearms are generally too flimsy to be used with bayonets well) as weapons. But that didn't mean it was as good a general use weapon as others available by the medievel period. The one isn't required for the other.

"Just choke up on it" is overly blaise; doing so has some serious effects on wieldiness as I've seen when watching martial arts students train with them. Some of this can be overcome if one is trained to also use the haft effectively, but that's effectively a seperate skill (mostly staff work) than using the working end. I don't doubt knights sometimes did so, but I have no evidence they were considered anything but a secondary weapon off horseback and outside of formations. Hunting usage is an entirely different issue than war usage; among other things the reach issue becomes a very serious consideration there (especially with boar).

Both are true. Swords certainly show a relationship to knives, but they also are a progression of the idea of focused force. A basic mace delivers force in an extremely broad fashion (spikes confuse this, but they still tend to spread the force around); the axe does the job better, but still has wieldiness issues because its mass is not really balanced. The cutting sword is (at least with simple material technology) the ultimate derivation of concept; it provides the best comprimise of force over area against anything but completely rigid armors, while still staying comparatively wieldy.

Champions wasn't a setting; it was a genre. There really wasn't a coherent Champions universe for most of the life of the game. MERP was not a Hero product. In fact, Hero has never had particularly distinct settings until Steve Long got the line. Same, far as I can tell for GURPS. Its a little muddier with BESM because it had a lot of licensed products, but all evidence I had was they weren't the dominant issue with its fandom.

That's probably more along the line of what I'm talking about (though double-tapping is a bit of a special case, as there's evidence it effectively _ups_ the rounds-to-target).

Many of those aren't applicable in the cases I'm refering to; in some cases you've had this happen in things like a criminal and a bailiff exchanging shots in a well lit courtroom with both of them standing there and minimal cover. It might be handled by simply having a rapid-fire penalty though; it just needs to be halfway steep.

I'm just saying that simply upping the rate of fire without addressing it may, in fact, essentially make the game _less_ realistic (and have some undesireable play-balance issues on giving even more benefit to people who get off the first shots). It probably pays to not get carried away with ROF issues if you aren't going to downgrade accuracy. One way to do so is to not, as you say, actually roll for every shot, but take some kind of autofire like mechanic; and of course, suppression fire should be done differently, too.

That's kind of the tact at least one version of the RQM rules used, and its probably as good a solution as you're going to find. I may try it next time I'm running something BRP-ish.

And truth is, both work okay; I prefer the distinction, but then, I tended to prefer RQ's level of detail over most of the simplifications in other versions of BRP.

The problem is that there's no difference in most versions between a crit and a special against an unarmored, or even a lightly armored enough target. Most of the fixes for this seem excessive, though (double damage, for example).

Personally, for a game that supposedly had no elves, Talislanta always seemed to have a number of races that added up to variations on elves. That doesn't mean it didn't have some genuinely original races too, but it struck me as "methinks the designers do protest to much."

There was a fantasy game called Element Masters in its first edition and Gatewar in its second which was clearly RuneQuest with the serial numbers filed off and a few small differences.

I just got the implication from the phrasing that it meant the mechanics didn't have an effect, and I'm not willing to cede that. I'd be hard pressed to speculate on that. There are certainly relatively successful games that don't have a well known setting; you mentioned GURPS, but Hero also landed in this area, and until its crash which had relatively little to do with its popularity, BESM. But that doesn't mean setting doesn't have some heft in the success of a game.

I personally prefer to keep both a special and a critical result; the former provides more of a tool for weapon type differnces (since it can trigger the various special results for bashing, slashing and impaling weapons) while it doesn't overly gust really severe results, which are reserved for criticals. The only thing I _do_ wish is that there was a more consistent way to handle criticals; treating it differently against armored and unarmored foes is ugly, but you get border conditions where crits mean less and less the less armor the target has.

One thing about firearms you need to watch out for, however, is that high rates of fire are often accompanied by, honestly, amazingly crappy accuracy in actual combat (which is why the mediocre rates of fire in even a strike rank using game aren't entirely painful); in particular, its been estimated by police that the average amount of hits even by trained police in firefights is about one in six; even in realtively good conditions and/or quite close quarters you often get an amazing number of rounds going everywhere but the target.

Not from where I sit. This disagrees with the statements I've heard on the matter from everyone who's ever trained with both swords and spears (usually in a martial arts context) so you'll excuse me if I take it dubiously. I didn't say that was the only reason, but its often a big reason. An effective spear doesn't even really require metal, something you can't say about a sword or really an axe. Lances are the only really effective horseback weapon until you get horse pistols, and pikes were formation weapons; I'd never deny the benefit of spears as a formation weapon, but that says little about their benefit as an individual weapon. Formation fighting has hardly been the only form of warfare, especially the tight formations necessary for effective shield walls and spear use. In fact, its effectively disfunctional in certain environments. You don't think this happens to have anything to do with the fact that the sword requires effective metallurgy and a spear doesn't? Maces and axes have limited life because in the end, they are an evolutionary trend toward the sword; they kept some benefit in certain periods because they all interact slightly differently with different types of armor. But of course the sword isn't going to have as long a history as the spear; a spear requires a relatively straight stick and something to sharpen the end with, in the end. The closest you can get to a sword at the same technology level is a club. Some late period swords are relatively effecient at both (the saber wasn't bad at either though it was a better slashing weapon), but the realities of armor tended to limit it before that, because a slashing weapon had to have some heft behind it to do anything to an armored location, and a heavy sword is a lousy thrusting weapon. (This is primarily an issue with longswords; shortswords seem to get much more complicated in this area, though they still tend to lean one way or another).