Over at the SJ Games forum I opened a dialogue about a manner in which the Spear, Staff, and Polearms could be simplified. There was a fair representation of for and against, with the positions being pretty understandable.
The whole idea was to reduce the number of skills with significant overlap in the same vein that Pyramid #3/65: Alternate GURPS III had done with the Guns skill: by creating a single skill housing the overlapping weapons and introducing Familiarities to replace where before were Skill Defaults.
This appealed to many members of the forum, but others did not find it agreeable, and suggested alternatives. Some considered folding one skill into another (resulting in two skills instead of three, vice my one), while others suggested taking the reverse approach and actually adding more skills.
The latter one spawned off a point that the Staff and Polearm skills pretty much cover the weapons just in a two-handed role, while Spear's claim to fame was that it also allowed some spears to be used in one hand. We'll get to that in a bit.
Specialized Stickers
As I mentioned in my original post, a lot can be said for keeping skills separate to allow characters to increase their degree of uniqueness. The Wing-Chun trained warrior and his 6 1/2 point pole then has a further degree of separation from the Xingyiquan trained spearman in his party. We are roleplayers; we like to be unique. We want our characters to stand out (says the guy who meticulously designs his characters to be pretty normal and believable representatives of the setting he's in).
I did address some approaches to making your Staff chick, Spear guy and Glaive man to be distinct, even if you went "whole hog" and took my Hafted skill to the table: Stick to weapons you personally want to use, focus on combat maneuvers that minimize your weaknesses and plays to the strengths of how you envision your character fighting, select a weapon bond, or perhaps create some kind of Advantage that distinguishes your specialization with a damage bonus or something - a spin off of Weapon Master and or Weapon Bond. Probably others that would do it, too.One interesting idea that kept coming up was Optional Specialization, which is a core rule given right before the skills on B169. The basic ideas (as I caught them) were as such:
- Spear/A can be specialized into Spear/E (One Handed) and Spear/E (Two Handed). This is RAW Spear. You can still take Spear/A to do both (functioning like RAW).
- Spear/Staff are combined into one Average or Hard skill, and you can specialize as a Spearman or Staffguy from there.
- Hafted, my skill which rolls Spear, Staff, and Polearm together, specializes in each of the former can be taken.
These are all fine ideas, and if someone finds them more appealing then they should use them. The beauty of house rules (or houserules) are that they can reflect your perception of reality and your playstyle exactly as you'd like. So long as they have some kind of math or other reasoning to back them, you're pretty much set. Depending on your setting, it could be that Spear and Staff and Polearm really ARE worlds apart theoretically and practically, such that they need to be discreet skills.
Specializing from my latter one may be a problem, as it would ostensibly make the components DX/E, as I didn't envision Hafted being a Hard skill. For the first one, there are reasons (which we'll get to) you'd want to be distinct about how many hands grip your shaft. For the second, maybe you really do just want to express focus on one or the other.
This is a bit similar to a thread I posted up on the SJ Games forums years ago about how to make "military" swordsmanship like Gunto soho different from other forms of swordsmanship (man, has it really been FIVE years? You'd think I'd know something about GURPS by now. Must be all those dank memes).
The Spear in (One) Hand
It was brought up, however, that one-handed spear fighting may not actually BE "Spear", in the strictest sense. I'd more or less forgotten about the spear in one hand, as my mind was focused on it's similarities to staff and polearm (probably because of my recent fixation on Bayonet combat!) I believe I expected to handle it as a familiarity from Hafted; extra -2 or so until you're familiar with the various considerations of carrying a weapon in one hand that you ordinarily do not.One-handed-ness is in reality largely a function of the weapon, though GURPS does have skills for discreetly one or two handed versions of many weapons. A few wobble between the two - katanas and spears, for example - and either swap between the skills (katana between Broadsword and Two-Handed Sword), or have a different stat line within the same skill (spears).
It is entirely conceivable that a character concept could involve only having learned how to fight with a spear in two hands, having come from a culture where the shield was relatively unknown or unavailable. Maybe your infantry type simply isn't issued them, or you're armored beyond the need. Usually this is what allows you to safely and effectively focus on using pole weapons (mostly to fight other guys armored up like you), but that doesn't always happen.
Conversely, lightly trained militia forces or even citizen-soldiers like the Greek Hoplites may basically never truly train to use their spear two handed. When a shield-and-spear wielding character loses his shield, he should bug out, not change grips. A gap in the shield line is a gap in the unit's armor, and training them to use their spear in two hands is just going to encourage them to be a liability.
It's entirely probable that a GM or Player may want to express their ability with a weapon by using different skills instead of a familiarity. It would be Believable Storytelling. You could also just roleplay it, depending on what skills actually allow you to do, and ignore any alternative. If you took Shield and Spear as skills, you are functionally stronger using both anyways.
Similar to the link above, however, it's possible that Spear really means you hold it in two hands, and a single-handed spear is really just a form of Rapier, or some such. These are different motor skills, though I would fathom from my dabblings that doing it two handed is easier than with just one. Shield's really just buy you more Committed Attack options and the like.
More than one way to fight with a stick!
Xingyi's Quiang forms isn't Fiore's Lancia. This is true; Xingyi's spear forms use strikes, whereas Fiore's Lancia does not. This is because of context - in spite of showing unarmored fighters, Fiore's spear section is really about armored combat. Xingyiquan's spear is not. So really this is a poor example, but whatever.
Just because you've trained with a spear doesn't mean you've trained to use it as both a striking and thrusting capacity. Plenty of reason for that: Doctrine, quality of equipment, effectiveness of the attack. If I was in a fight for my life, armed only with a spear, you had better believe I'd put more faith in killing the opponent quickly using the pointy end rather than any other dull or edged part of the weapon. My knowledge of striking with any part of it becomes largely irrelevant. The problem arises when I smite him and acquire his halberd...familiarity may not be enough to express my (in)ability to competently hit someone with anything other than a sharp tip.
Even pure polearms aren't quite immune; while we think of something like a Halberd, it also includes the potentially point-free Dane axe.
This is an argument for either the specialization model (hafted) or just editing the skills as they are to split out striking and thrusting; yet another way for expressing how training in long-stick weapons overlap.
You'd more or less keep the three skills, with perhaps a name change. "Spear" would become expressly the training of stabbing someone with a long pole weapon. "Staff" would become expressly striking with a long pole weapon. "Polearm" would be combined training in the two. The weapon tables would basically bleed into each other, and default would be something like -2 or -4. Difficulty could change around, similar to the one hand, two hand spear ideas.We do have the Pummel option from Martial Arts for occasional checks with the butt of any weapon; you can't really improve it, since it isn't something you train so much as an instinctive reaction. Similarly, Tip Slash allows you to use a thrusting only weapon to deal some slash style damage when needed.
Closings
This post isn't really about declaring a sweeping solution for everyone. It's just a way to offer up some comparison to some of the outcomes of my last proposition. Maybe someone would find it easier to peruse this blog for this information, or maybe it would be easier for someone to Google up in the future. Maybe it's just a way for me to (maybe) increase my writing skill. It is 200 hours per point, you know.
This is where forums and other social venues really have value, since we can toss up ideas at our various levels of expertise with the system and have others help refine it or debate points either fine or broad. I'd have to say the SJ Games forum is probably the most involved when addressing these things, and are largely free of vitriol and other negativity that kept me from returning to certain other games related forums.
Cheers!
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