Sunday morning, after breakfast. Claudia is still looking for a hotel. I’m thinking about knights.
After yesterday’s game I really need to think about the use of lances. Here’s what I know:
The Swiss mercenaries did not like to wear armour since it slowed you down and that’s bad for plundering and keeping up with others.
The front row with the pikes wore metal armour (the cuirass).
Pike, lance, spear? For our purposes they’re all the same: they’re cheap weapons to stab people from a distance. They’re long and can’t be thrown. It makes sense to differentiate the skills of lance and pike wielding: one is the use of the weapon on horse, the other is the use of the weapon on foot – but we’re still talking about the same weapon, a spear. I’m going to try and use the word spear throughout.
The spears we’re interested in were up to 5m long, like the Macedonian sarissa, and thus longer than the spears a knight might wield. That’s why this fighting style ended the dominance of armoured knights.
Detail from the Battle of Dorneck 1499
Detail from the Battle of Dorneck 1499
This massed group of spears, halberds, two-handed swords, backed up by small swords and long knives will eventually be beaten by well coordinated troops using artillery and muskets, and those in turn will get beaten by the mass production of rifles and mass national conscription. But we’re not there yet. Let’s get back to pikes vs. lances. I mean spears.
As soon as armies clashed, the main problem is finding an opening in the ranks of spear wielding opponents. Once that is found, halberdiers and mercenaries with two-handed swords would push in and widen the gap.
In Traveller-like systems, reducing an attribute to zero already has people falling unconscious. So all you need to do is deal 7 or 8 points of damage to open that gap. There is very little difference between dealing 3d6 damage and dealing 10d6 damage on the first round. Later, of course, when we’re talking about recovery or death, that does make a difference. But right now, when two armies meet, it makes no difference.
So how about this: when you’re on a horse, the spear deals 3d6 damage. A spear usually deals 2d6 damage. When setting a spear against a charge, it deals 3d6 damage.
In the first round, the order is 1. spears set against a charge, 2. spears, 3. everybody else. In the second round, we’re too close for spears. Time for the knives to come out.
When you’re on horseback, and in melee, small swords and long knives cannot hurt you. You’re too close for the use of spears. The only thing that can hurt you now are halberds: they can be used to pull you from the horse. In turn, the only weapon that you might have used against the peasants surrounding you is a long sword or a sabre. But we can do without and say that what needs to happen now is that you ride back and your squire hands you your next spear. And you charge again.
I’m still not sure where player characters would get their armour from, and what the effect would be. Damage reduction? Making it more difficult to hit you? Roll 3d6 for your attack instead of 2d6 sounds good to me! And that would explain why it’s important to have to-hit values that are greater than 12. Those are good against armoured opponents.
It seems to me that the Zeughaus (the armoury) is where the towns and cities kept the metal armour and weapons for their militias and the armies they sent off to fight in foreign wars as mercenaries. Thus, ex-mercenaries don’t own armour. Perhaps if you’re a noble (Status 11+?), and you know how to ride, and you know how to wield a lance, then you’re a knight and you might still have your armour. It could be a reward for the warrior career?
Then again, it might be simpler to try and keep the game free of armour.
This is why Helmbarten (“Halberts”) doesn’t have armour. The stories we tell are not about charging knights and the front rows of the Gewalthaufen (the “violent bunch”). – 2022-02-10 No armour in Helmbarten!
2022-02-10 No armour in Helmbarten!
Oops! 😅
Anyway, the first session went well. I was afraid we’d see a player rolling on a single career for as long as possible, trying to really push their skills, but instead people tried to spread out their skill selection. Works for me!
The “heroes” arrive, each for their own reasons… – Session Report #1
I think I do need a solution for two unarmoured knights on horseback with lances against a giant, though.
Dagobert is not strong but dextrous, so he rolls 2d6 ≤ Dexterity 8 + Lance-1 + Riding-1 = 10 and maybe deals 3d6. Gundehard is strong but not dextrous, so he rolls 2d6 ≤ Strength 11 + Lance-2 + Riding-3 and definitely deals 3d6. The giant has an endurance of 8d6 so it probably survives the initial attack. Its to-hit characteristic is 1d6+8, so let’s assume 11 or 12. It hits back no problem and deals 4d6 damage. That sounds like a devastating blow to one of the two knights unless they can soften it up a bit, like use tactics to gain an extra free round at the beginning of the fight, or distract it somehow, etc. We’ll see. All I can say is that it’s going to be tough in a straight fight.
Thoughts? How do other medieval Traveller variants or Cepheus Engine variants handle it?
#RPG #Halberts #2d6
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
⁂
Maybe you could create a table of weapon versus armor and range (and mounts!) where you look up roll modifier and damage?! 😆
– Björn Buckwalter 2022-02-21 12:30 UTC
---
Aaargh, you hit where it hurts! 😫
It… it does sound appealing!
– Alex 2022-02-21 13:17 UTC
---
I’m thinking a long list of conditions…
If you’re mounted on a horse, you can only be reached by pole arms, that is spears or halberds as the horse keeps people away.
How dangerous is trampling? Perhaps the horse should get a separate attack when in melee as it surely kicks out. But when I said for a charge, the knight does 3d6 damage, and then can’t attack in melee, expect now the horse can, and still does 3d6 damage, then perhaps we should just keep it that way. Knights deal 3d6 damage with their spear when they charge, and if their horse can trample the opposition (not giants and dragons!) then the knight does 3d6 damage with their horse in melee.
There is no “pulling down” a knight using a halberd: it just deals damage on a hit and the knight then falls off the horse when they lose consciousness.
It sort of makes sense: knights are best if they can charge into people that don’t maintain a disciplined spear wall – flanking armies, riding down the fleeing, that kind of thing.
– Alex 2022-02-21 13:29 UTC
---
Excellent discussion:
But there is one thing I don’t understand, it’s his passion for the pike in his new game. I cannot imagine the fighter of an adventuring party wielding a pike, since, as soon as the adversary gets inside, the pike is defeated. – Lance Halberd Pike
Perhaps yet another point in favour of dropping the whole issue of knights charging formations. Let’s just say that Halberts picks a particular point in time and a particular place in the arms race: when knights still exist, but pikes in tight formations start to break their dominance on the battlefield. If the game focuses on individuals and small groups, however, that doesn’t have to concern us and the pike is basically not a weapon anybody would be carrying around. It would only ever be useful in a formation, in defence against charging knights, and we don’t care.
We do care about charging knights fighting bandits, dragons and giants, however. 😀
– Alex 2022-02-22 12:54 UTC
---
Perhaps overthinking it, again. But… Now I’m thinking that strictly from a game perspective, perhaps we have the first round go in in order of weapon reach: pike > lance > spear > halberd > epee > knife, and in the next round, start with the shortest and go the other way (and hopefully the fight is over after two rounds).
Let me think of how the weapons compare:
– Alex 2022-02-22 22:38 UTC
---
On Mastodon, @jmettraux argued:
although, in the battle of Sempach (1386), the austrian knights dismounted. Could their lances have inspired the swiss pike?
He linked to this long discussion on Quora:
So, there you have it. I wish I could say that “a spear is designed for fighting on foot, while a lance is designed for fighting on horseback” or “a spear has a shaft of this shape, while a lance has a shaft of this shape,” or even “lances always have vamplates,” but … in my opinion, speaking as an English-speaking historical martial artist, those statements simply aren’t true. – What is a difference between a spear and a lance?
What is a difference between a spear and a lance?
So what I did in Helmbarten, the German rules: I replaced bow with crossbow, I removed lance, and I use weapon length rules for the beginning of a fight. In the first round, the order is magic → spear → halberd → épée → knife → crossbow. The crossbow can only be fired once in a fight. In the second round, the order reverses: knife → épée → halberd → spear → magic. In all subsequent rounds, everything happens simultaneously.
The weapon benefits are therefore:
If somebody has metal armour, it’s a difficult attack and requires 3d6.
If you successfully use Tactics, your side can gain a surprise round in which the opposition cannot strike back.
– Alex 2022-02-23 07:19 UTC
---
OK, another round of talking with Peter F. and I’ve reverted my changes again. I did keep the crossbow instead of the bow, but now all weapons act at the same time. Two reasons: it’s different, and it makes combat unpredictable. Plus: if two people threaten each other, they are afraid and don’t necessarily think of how long their weapons are. In many martial arts you practice fighting against the longer weapon. Two people facing each other but not moving in are not fighting. When they attack each other, it may very well be that the longer weapon strikes first, but in this game, even a mortal wound does not prevent you from one last desperate stab at your foe.
I need to repeat this to myself. This is a game where surviving combat is a question of luck and superior numbers, not of longer weapons. Furthermore, the “Lance” allows you to use a spear on a horse, and “Spear” allows you to use a pike or a spear on foot. That’s it. A lance is a spear but the skill is not the same.
– Alex 2022-02-23 21:48 UTC
