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Original post by swiftcoder Quote: Original post by HunterCyprus93 If a person swings a weapon at you, be it a sword, mace, or fires a projectile at you, you must be strong enough to repel or absorb the attack.. However, if you are able to move quickly enough to catch their weapon at an angle, it can be deflected with very little strength - think of the circular parries in épée: it is more efficient to use your opponent's strength against him, and it increases the likelihood that he loses balance and provides an opening for a counter.

This may be true, but I was speaking of blocking with a shield in that first half of my post.

And also, the parrying that most people think sword-fighting consists of is fencing. Most sword-fights didn't last close to how long a fencing match would (with 2 decently skilled fighters who are unarmored). Generally this was because the weapons were slightly heavier (not sure how much over an epee or rapier) and you wanted to end your fights quickly. One or two parries and a counter and the fight was usually over. The parries were less graceful and involved a little more strength, and their primary purpose was to throw your opponent off balance, as well as to open them up for that counter.

Of course, every parry is going to be a little different depending on the angle of attack your opponent is coming at, as well as the angle you are moving to defend from. Some of these will use less strength as the angle is better for deflection, while more will use more strength. I will agree that most parries will benefit from agility and manual dexterity most. Without and semblance of strength though (in the real life sense), you won't be able to move the weapon into position for those parries.

No update yet?

After considering it some more and reading the other responses, I've got a more complex view on it. I think parrying is deflecting the enemy's weapon with your weapon, and blocking is simply stopping the enemy's weapon in its tracks. So blocking could really be done with either a weapon or a shield. Shields can also deflect blows as well, however, but for some reason I don't think of that as parrying. Of course, I'm far from an expert on combat terminology, so this is all just conjecture on my part.

But, in any case, I think the most insightful post is this:

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Original post by HunterCyprus93 Of course, these points are only relevant depending on how realistic you want to make your game.

Or put another way, how simplistic you want to make your game. You could just lump the chances to block, parry, and dodge the enemy attack into a single evade stat. The more complex the interactions between base stats and derived stats, the more difficult it will become to balance the game.

On the other hand, as BreathOfLife mentioned, it's sort of irksome when you can just pump up one stat and become unstoppable. It must be a difficult task for game designers, because balanced characters are almost never better to have than completely lopsided, single-purpose characters. I'm not sure whether the way to do this is to make the derived stats depend on several of the base stats or not. For example, the more intelligent fighter in a duel might be better able to anticipate their opponents attacks and evade them, and a more spirited fighter might have higher damage because their bodies generate more adrenaline in battle.

If you are attempting to keep from getting superior characters through single stat abuse, you can always drop realism a little. If I were designing a system that takes into account parrying and/or blocking, I would assign a different stat to either of them. Some of these sub-stats would be governed by multiple main stats, but for the above dropping of realism, you can narrow them down to one for each type of defensive maneuver you would like to have.

Example:
Blocking = Absorbing the blow instead of deflecting = Physical Strength
Parrying = Deflecting the blow instead of absorbing = Physical Dexterity
Dodging = Making the blow completely miss you = Physical Agility

This of course is if you only use part of the definition of Dexterity, which is "Skill and grace in physical movement, especially in the use of the hands" (Dictionary.com).

These stats would also play into other sub-stats. Strength could also govern damage, dexterity could cover accuracy, while agility covers swing speed (due to being able to position one's feet and body).

This brings up another gray area though, if you are swinging faster, aren't you hitting harder? I don't know all of the physics behind this but I believe that most of the time the faster an object moves, the more pounds per square inch of pressure it is placing on the impact point (Physics guru's, please correct me if I'm wrong).

Essentially, you are going to have play-test your mechanics into the ground. The more stats and sub-stats you add, the more they become twisted together. One of the best ways to go with this though, can be as easy as KISS.

Edit: If no one can tell, I have been bashing my head into a wall attempting to design a statistics and combat system myself lately (lately being... 6 months of testing and drawing board work).

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Original post by HunterCyprus93 This may be true, but I was speaking of blocking with a shield in that first half of my post.

Fair enough, although a small shield can also be used to deflect - full shields a little too cumbersome ;)

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Generally this was because the weapons were slightly heavier (not sure how much over an epee or rapier) and you wanted to end your fights quickly. One or two parries and a counter and the fight was usually over. The parries were less graceful and involved a little more strength, and their primary purpose was to throw your opponent off balance, as well as to open them up for that counter.

It pretty much depends on the period and style - a rapier isn't much heavier than an épée, and parries very effectively, but a broadsword is extremely heavy, and as your arm tires, you are pretty much forced into a hack-and-block routine.

Which brings up another point of realism - different weapons should have difference parry/block modifiers. A light weapon such as a rapier is next to useless in defending against a broadsword (will break if it attempts to stop the blade), while a pike is useless at parrying a rapier (too unwieldy to block in time).

Id like to address a few points that are getting under my skin, first a few that were in response to my last post though.

Six year olds don't fight with swords wearing armour. They never did, not even in fantasy gaming land.

If a mace could shatter an arm through a proper shield place, no one would have survived medieval war times with their left arm intact. You have a shield for a reason, if it didn't work, you wouldn't be holding it. Please keep in mind that you would probably have a hard time swinging a heavy hammer hard enough to shatter an arm and that is with out layers of padding, armour and a shield distributing the force and absorbing it. In the real world, a sword blow to armour didn't hurt you, it was when you got knocked down and stabbed in the neck between the armour plates that you died. That and armour was too expensive for everyone to have so many died from too little protection. But no, a mace was weldable, and that means it was no more than maybe 10 pounds, and that is as heavy and the most giant claymores were. yes, the tall as a man beastly claymores were only maybe 10 pounds. Most swords were 3-6 pounds.

On that last note, I'd like to mention that while a parry without force doesn't do anything, a parry without placement doesn't either. Lets give the fighter the benefit of the doubt and assume he has toned muscles that don't allow his fragile bones to shatter, that he isn't 6, that he knows how to place and angle his weapon to effectively parry and push it to actually move the other weapon out of the way, and that his arm isn't going to get tired anytime soon.

After all, is the player a 6 year old with the bones of a 90 year old and the swordsmanship of a fencer or does he actually have a 15-20 years of training with real weapons from the best in the kingdom because he is the prince and expected to defend himself from challengers and defend the kingdom from invaders?

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Original post by swiftcoder It pretty much depends on the period and style - a rapier isn't much heavier than an épée, and parries very effectively, but a broadsword is extremely heavy, and as your arm tires, you are pretty much forced into a hack-and-block routine.

I REALLY would love to know where people get these strange ideas of how 2-2.5lbs is some how so easy to swing around all day, but 2-3lbs is god awful to swing and you need to be some superman to swing it more than a few times.

Can you come up with a reference to a dig sight for an extremely heavy broadsword?

I think he means a greatsword or doppelhander. It's a common error.

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Original post by Delphinus I think he means a greatsword or doppelhander. It's a common error.

Yeah, sorry. I was actually thinking more along the lines of a 2-handed claymore (5-6 lbs) when I wrote that - think the final battle in braveheart [smile]

Still, Talroth has a point in that when you have trained with a weapon for a long time, the weight is largely irrelevant. However, momentum plays a large part, and makes it much harder to change the direction of a heavier sword, making them vulnerable to quick deceives and circular parries from a lighter blade.

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Original post by Delphinus I think he means a greatsword or doppelhander. It's a common error.

Even then they're rarely more than 8lbs, and are used more as spears in most moves than they are as swords. (There are some examples I was aware of that were 10 or 11 lbs, but the researchers presenting them suggested they were more borderline ceremonial in function than to be used as a practical weapon, and any examples that weighed more were so tricked out in ornamentation, that they were never meant for the battlefield, and showed no signs of doing so.)

I think William (you know, the one that ran a muck in England) had a claymore that was 10lb. That is the heaviest sword I have heard of as an actual example of being used. Most swords were 5lbs or less and very well balanced such that holding it out straight was almost no harder than holding the whole weight directly in hand. By comparison rapiers and epees are very whippy and too light and flimsy to actually hold any force. The only reason you can parry with one in the first place is you are hitting foil to foil. A real sword against another real sword is perfectly fine as for parries.