Intermission: Making Swords Pokier

The Basics

The Thrust vs Swing argument - debate, comparison - is a long and storied one. Much of it stems from the confusion around what damage actually means in GURPS, which is a difficult question to answer. In fact, it's already half-answered. The damage of high-tech guns and bullets is well-documented. By defining 1" of RHA steel as having DR 70, we can use the penetration energy of the projectile and its other properties (expressed as a long and complicated formula), below, to calculate its penetration and its damage. 

Penetration Damage (points) = sqrt(KE1.04/Xsect0.314)/13.3926 and 

Wound Channel Damage (points) = MV × Xsect* x 26,220 where

Xsect* = (1-V/600) ×π(Bore/2)2 + (V2)/216,000 ×Bore2 ×(Aspect Ratio)

(From http://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=2794)

Ugly. Regardless, it's a system, and it works. What we have for low-tech damage - fists and melee weapons - is more arbitrary. Whether or not it works is another question. Muscle-powered damage is split into thrust and swing, where swing damage is generally (though not always - it breaks down a little at high levels) approximately equal to thrust damage x 1.5. This multiplier represents the lever effect of accelerating something through an arc to gain more momentum. The values given for swing and thrust damage at a given ST are then affected by the damage modifier of individual weapons, which tends to be more pronounced for swinging weapons. A small knife swings for sw-3; a greataxe swings for sw+4. That's without going into weapon quality modifiers, like fine and very fine, which only really affect edged weapons to represent better metallurgy - a fine sword is harder and holds an edge better than a regular one without being more brittle. 

After this comes wounding modifiers. A living target's torso takes 2x damage from impaling attacks, 1.5x damage from cutting attacks and 1x damage from crushing attacks. Other hit locations have other multipliers, but perhaps the only relevant ones to this discussion are the vitals and eyes, neither of which can be hit by cutting and crushing attacks and offer 3x and 4x multipliers to the skilled. Impaling damage tends to come from thrusting attacks, and cutting and crushing from swinging attacks; there are exceptions, although swing/impaling attacks have their own intricacies, including an annoying propensity to get stuck. Attacks to the torso start out fairly balanced but swinging damage outstrips thrusting as ST increases. This is not helped by the tendency in fantasy to bring in creatures which have no important organs (or even recognisable bodily structures) to speak of, such as skeletons, slimes and golems, which give impaling damage a x1 or even a x0.5 multiplier. When fighting a tree, the wise man doesn't bring a spear. This makes swords and axes the de facto kings of Dungeon Fantasy, which is perhaps a little boring.

So what's the problem?

The desire for rescaled damage came from a number of places, but we'll note two. 

Firstly, I like spears, and their near-complete obsolescence in Dungeon Fantasy makes me sad. This has mellowed a little since I've reconsidered the problem; as suggested below, spears (and thrusting weapons in general) were never for defeating armour in the first place. Much of my love for them comes from their versatility, value for money and ease of use, and the fact that they can't one-shot a stone golem doesn't detract from that. I firmly believe they still have a role in DF - for skirmishers and rear-line troops, to harass, limit options at the longer melee ranges and potentially throw when the situation arises. Their use behind a shield and in the reverse grip is nice, but not optimal, and the 'master of none' is poorly represented in GURPS anyway.

Secondly, in my DF campaign of some years ago, the incredibly rich swashbuckler dominated the combat. We'll leave the Wealth aside for a moment, as that would improve any character. Weapon Master made her able to out-damage anyone else in the party, largely because it offers the double whammy of easier Rapid Strikes and increased damage for swings. For example:

• A skill-24, ST 13 swashbuckler without Weapon Master (if such a thing were to exist) and with a standard edged rapier can put out 3 attacks at skill 12, dealing 2d-1 per attack. That's an average of 6 per strike, tripled for number of attacks, then multiplied by a 75% chance to hit for an expected 13.5 cut per round. Highly respectable, and on par with a single 3d-1 swing with a big axe. The swashbuckler has the edge (heh) with multiple, poorly armoured enemies, and can sell skill for better hit locations, while the barbarian is more suited to hacking through a single big target, so there's a number of combat niches available.
• The same swashbuckler with Weapon Master can put out five attacks at skill 12, dealing 2d+3 per attack with the +2/die damage bonus. That averages 10 per strike, quintupled for number of attacks, multiplied by 75%: 37.5 cut per round. A barbarian simply can't keep up with that; opponents with high defences are rapidly overwhelmed, opponents with high DR get chipped down within seconds, and opponents with neither get blended into a fine paste. And that's without considering crits!

So WM nearly triples - or more, given crits - damage output, even before considering increases to defence. 20 points for mastering a single weapon is expensive, sure, but given that the edged rapier is arguably the best weapon available, why take anything else? I like swashbucklers, and I think they have a niche, but I also like knights and barbarians, and I don't want swashbucklers to become a silver NutriBullet. What to do about this? 

What have we tried?

Many words have been written on rescaling swing and thrust damage to bring them more in line with what the author thinks is reality, or at least realistic. In Pyramid 3/83's "Knowing Your Own Strength", Sean Punch asserts that "levers help, but thrusting is the traditional way to pierce armour," thus justifying bringing swing back down into line with thrust. That was part of a more wide-ranging attempt to rationalise ST in GURPS by hacking it all out and replacing it with a logarithmic system, which might work, but not without rejiggering the whole system. More pertinently, is it actually true? Yes, the estoc and stiletto were invented to pierce, as simply hacking at people with a one-handed sword was losing its effectiveness against more and better armour, but swinging big sticks - mauls, warhammers, and maces - stayed in fashion as long as plate did. It's a brave fighter who would go up against someone in full plate, or even mail, with a stiletto or an estoc. Arguably a suicidal one. For sure, get that side mount and draw your misericord, but the main tactic was battering through armour rather than relying on slipping through it. 

One way I've considered reducing this disparity is with the Blunt Trauma and Edged Weapons rule on LT102, here referred to as Edge Protection. This models the difficulty in slicing through armour by using twice the armour's DR as a guide; if the attack would break through the higher value, it has actually chopped through the armour and can get its higher wounding multiplier. If it's higher than the DR of the armour but not higher than twice its DR, this damage is reduced by the DR and then doesn't get its wounding multiplier; it's blunt trauma. If it fails to pierce the actual DR, of course, no damage goes through. I did a little modelling on using this option. While it did produce a change at the high end of DR, this typically came into effect one or two points before thrust damage was bounced entirely. Swing damage dominated before Edge Protection reduced injury, and it dominated afterwards, just a little less than it would have vanilla. And that's to be expected - Edge Protection was (presumably) written to make metal armour more realistic in behaviour rather than rescale damage, and the emphasis on poison suggests to me that it started out in life as a house rule to prevent beefy assassins from just bashing a man in plate with an axe, getting one point of damage through, and relying on the blackblade venom to do the rest of the work.

Other, more consistent, bloggers have also (many years ago, now) composed new damage tables, such as No School Grognard here. I tried running this in a game; even putting aside the need to recalculate ST for every monster in the bestiary (now at ~200 monsters and growing!), we rapidly ran into the issue of DR outpacing damage. Every orc and skeleton was critfishing to hurt the knight in plate, and that's just frustrating. I spent far too much time trying to find alternatives - including having swarms of rats chew through straps on armour - before eventually giving up and rebooting the campaign with regular swing damage. Besides, we like rolling lots of dice!

So what's your solution, wise guy?

The solution I present is this: make Rapid Strikes use thrust damage. 

Here's my reasoning. The extra damage for swinging a weapon is explicitly because "they take extra time to apply ST through a long arc, increasing momentum. This makes swings slower than thrusts" (MA110, emphasis mine). Now, we can make allowances for high skill - even fantastically high skill, enhanced by magic in the air, or whatever - but I struggle to swing even my unencumbered arm through an arc of a foot or so more than once in a second, and I would still consider that too short to apply any significant impulse over the initial thrust. The specific length of the arc that qualifies for swing damage is beyond the scope of this essay, but swinging fast enough to achieve that five times per second is more than fantastical - it's unimaginable. Even without Weapon Master the main purpose of high skill is to buy more Rapid Strikes (if they're available), and even three attacks per second is difficult, if not impossible to picture. It just doesn't pass my smell test. To attack that fast you must be sacrificing damage (or warping space-time, as pictured below), and restricting Rapid Strikes to Tip Slashes (or thrust attacks in general) is a solid way of representing that.

Sasaki Kojirou demonstrates what 3 swings in a second would look like.
Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works, Ufotable (2014)

But wait, GM, I hear you cry - what about the fuzzy definition of a Rapid Strike? The swing isn't necessarily occurring multiple times per second; it might be "a single motion that connects more than once… a sword cut calculated to hit two legs at once" (MA127). Maybe a swashbuckler is just that good that they can angle a stroke to pass through five points on an enemy at once. Putting aside the statement in the same sidebar that a Rapid Strike is, in fact, normally multiple distinct attacks, this still doesn't check. Cutting deep enough to do swing damage means you're inevitably losing some strength in the swing as you go; a shallower cut to maintain velocity would do less damage by default. You could game out the former by adapting Extreme Dismemberment (MA136) and penalising later attacks by the damage of the previous ones, but that's long and finicky and meant for fight-ending, cinematic flourishes - not events that happen, literally, multiple times per second in the average DF fight*. Just start with a lower damage and apply it equally.

I'm fairly agnostic about whether the attacks should be considered as just using the thrust scaling, i.e. turning sw cut into thr cut, or making the attacks specifically Tip Slashes as on MA113, i.e. turning sw cut into thr-1 cut (both using the edged rapier damage line of sw cut/thr+1 imp). The distinction is a reasonably fine one and I lean to the lower damage for two reasons. First, I think an ST 13 swashbuckler should struggle to pierce maille with a rapier by tickling the opponent's armoured belly; that's a WM feat if ever I saw one. If you want to attack an armoured man, poke him in the eyes - that's what all that skill is there for. Second, fencing weapons get a disproportionate boost to defences over the big ol' clunky broadsword. Starting at Parry 15, a fencing WM gets four good parries (15/14/13/12) - defining "good" as ≥12 - against a regular sword WM's two (15/13).

What else could we do?

An alternative could be just ending with one Rapid Strike: capping it at two strikes. I think ditching Multiple Rapid Strike entirely is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Swashbucklers should be able to attack lots of times per turn, both to cut down fodder and to batter down defences. What they shouldn't be able to do is cut down fodder, use their high Move to get to the more heavily armoured opponents, and slice them to ribbons before the knight or barbarian has achieved their first swing. Another alternative would be simply preventing swashbucklers from doing swing damage by removing the edged rapier family from the allowed weapons list. While I like the other fencing weapons, making swashbucklers not only suboptimal but near-useless against Homogenous enemies strikes me as punitive. Swing damage should be an option for a swashbuckler - they pay through the nose for it, after all - but one tool among many, not a 4lb lump hammer for every nail-looking monster in the book.

Conclusion

In short, restricting Rapid Strikes to thrust damage rather than full swings serves four purposes. 

1. It's very much in-genre; Zorro does Tip Slashes, not full-on chops, and little swishy slashes (or rapid jabs) are easier to picture in the theatre of the mind. 
2. It retains the large number of Rapid Strikes that characterise a swashbuckler and leaves swing damage as an option, while also encouraging more considered use of the weapon. The emphasis is once again returned to the swashbuckler's prowess in multiple, well-aimed strikes, rather than buzz-sawing through a heavy plate cuirass five times in the time it takes to say "en garde".
3. It goes some way to reducing the have/have not split of Weapon Master. The Weapon Master swashbuckler in the example above goes down to doing 1d+1, average 5, x5, x0.75 = 18.75 cut per round - still better than the barbarian against unarmoured foes, and much better at deleting fodder, but quickly coming up against a barrier when the big boys in plate show up. 
4. It helps slow down character scaling. An ST 13 swashbuckler swinging for 2d-1 is only 40 points - or 20, with Striking ST - from swinging for 3d-1, and that extra die brings with it an extra +2, which also benefits from the damage multiplier that is attacking so many times a turn. The same WM swashbuckler goes up to averaging 15 per strike, increasing DPS to 56 cut! Making the Rapid Strike damage thrust-based means the same swashbuckler needs to hit ST 19 to increase that per-die bonus.

*Heck, I wouldn't touch Extreme Dismemberment with a ten-foot bargepole, even as written. Who cares that I dealt 3 points of injury to the other arm - your arm's off! It's in the same category of rules as Black Powder Guns from Tactical Shooting, p16 - if this lengthy sequence of unlikely events occurs, you have a miniscule chance of achieving something entirely inconsequential.