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Originally Posted by RMS
That doesn't surprise me. There's a lot of misinformation on how actual combat works floating around due to reenactors. Just keep in mind that your sources here are hobbiests, not professionals. They frequently don't have the correct techniques, or even technology, for a specific era.
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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.
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Oh, and it's your choice whether to listen to me or not. It doesn't affect me one way or the other. (You could argue there's a little difference here and there with a specific sword design and technique vs. a specific spear and technique, but any blanket statement is impossible.)
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I none the less feel its my obligation to explain _why_ I find your counterargument dubious.
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Sure, a spear can be created without metal, which is a bonus. So can an axe or a club/mace for that matter. However, metallurgy is advanced enough to produce swords for over 3000 years now, so I'm willing to skip the time periods before casting bronze was developed.
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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.
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Don't forget the bow as a dominate horseback weapon and the javelin (still a spear, granted). Both saw large scale horseback use throughout history.
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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).
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All premodern professional armies base their core around disciplined formation fighting. The exact details of this vary significantly, and obviously some formations have advantages on one environment over another. This carries well into the era of firearms dominating the battlefield and doesn't totally dissappear until the 20th Century.
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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.
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As already mentioned, swords develop from knives. Maces and axes have their own parallel evolution, but both start as tools that are adopted for warfare on and off. Spears are the only weapon, I can think of, that starts and ends as a weapon: granted initially a hunting weapon.
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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.
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The issue is more that spears are used in abundance (by more than just militia) in time periods when metallurgy is sufficient to build excellent swords. Obviously, there is a time when it's possible to build a spear and not a sword, but that's not what this conversation has ever been about and it completely misses the point.
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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.
Weapon damage
October 22nd, 2007
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