Oh, and the premise of this thread is the silliest thing that I have ever seen in this forum, hands down.
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Oh, and the premise of this thread is the silliest thing that I have ever seen in this forum, hands down.
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Oh, and the premise of this thread is the silliest thing that I have ever seen in this forum, hands down.Straight swords are extremely common in martial arts fiction, yet the premiere martial artist class in Pathfinder cannot functionally use any straight sword.
Doesn't seem that silly.
It is when you consider that in no edition of D&D since 1977 has the monk ever been allowed to use a longsword.
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Then again, as someone else pointed out earlier... A longsword is wielded differently then a jian. Which is again used differently then a katana or butterfly sword. And just because you know how to use any of those, doesn't mean you're particularly good with a sabre or rapier. Then there's the fact that it takes specific training to incorporate any given weapon into your martial arts style.
There are feats which allow you to use a longsword as a ki weapon. But until you take the weapon proficiency and other things needed to use a longsword as a ki weapon, you haven't done the training needed to incorporate that weapon into your combat style.
Just as a fighter needs specific training in how to punch and kick effectively while in a fight without exposing himself to increased danger when wearing light armor. You know, taking taking the Improved Unarmed Strike feat.
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It is when you consider that in no edition of D&D since 1977 has the monk ever been allowed to use a longsword.Oh, and the premise of this thread is the silliest thing that I have ever seen in this forum, hands down.Straight swords are extremely common in martial arts fiction, yet the premiere martial artist class in Pathfinder cannot functionally use any straight sword.
Doesn't seem that silly.
In D&D 3.5, monks using longswords was an explicit feature of their flagship setting. It did require one feat to accomplish, but that was it.
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In D&D 3.5, monks using longswords was an explicit feature of their flagship setting. It did require one feat to accomplish, but that was it.It is when you consider that in no edition of D&D since 1977 has the monk ever been allowed to use a longsword.Oh, and the premise of this thread is the silliest thing that I have ever seen in this forum, hands down.Straight swords are extremely common in martial arts fiction, yet the premiere martial artist class in Pathfinder cannot functionally use any straight sword.
Doesn't seem that silly.
Eberron?
Also, Monks can get Scimitars as a monk weapons: Double Steel StrikeECSWhirling Steel StrikeECS: Longswords as a monk weapon
serpent strikeECS : longspear as a monk weapon
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The Jian is basically a finesse weapon, just look at how it's wielded. It has more in common with a rapier then a longsword in terms of use.
A longsword is a hacking, armor-rending weapon. You don't poke and pierce with the thing, and you don't make tight little wrist circles wielding one. You hack, stab and crush with it using a lot of strength. It was designed to be useful against the much better armor in Europe, not the light silks and leathers that gentlemen fencers wore in China.
Very different weapons.
==Aelryinth
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Because katanas are far too powerful and could easily beat any other sword ever also guns.Facepalm. That is complete bull, and you know it.
The reminds me! Katanas can cut bulls in half AND cook the steaks inside while cutting through them!
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with wind blades. They don't even have to touch the bulls! Let's see a German zweihander do that!
==Aelryinth
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Let's not drag cloacae into this.Kahel you are literally the least fun person on this thread, and that's including lemeres the dead bird on a stick.Hey! Are you implying that I have a stick up my bum?
Because I clearly have a cloaca. Or...y'know...the rotten remnants of one. Anyway. Completely different.
This post sponsored by "I know how to pluralize obscure words and you need to see it". Sorry I read that and literally that is all I could think of afterward. lol.
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Because katanas are far too powerful and could easily beat any other sword ever also guns.The fact that someone didn't know your post is a joke is a better joke than your post*
* sorry KC but is true :)
;(
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Let's not drag cloacae into this.This post sponsored by "I know how to pluralize obscure words and you need to see it".
Back off, cloacae are important to me.
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The reminds me! Katanas can cut bulls in half AND cook the steaks inside while cutting through them!Because katanas are far too powerful and could easily beat any other sword ever also guns.Facepalm. That is complete bull, and you know it.
Even more crazy...the primary thing for Ninjas were to jump around and kill things.
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I wish quarterstaffs were finesseable...
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Even more crazy...the primary thing for Ninjas were to jump around and kill things.The reminds me! Katanas can cut bulls in half AND cook the steaks inside while cutting through them!Because katanas are far too powerful and could easily beat any other sword ever also guns.Facepalm. That is complete bull, and you know it.
Except that wasn't actually true. Nor was the idea of ninja using a katana like in the Ninja Gaiden games. In japan ninja were stealth assassins, and would fight (at most) to escape. They weren't armed as well as samurai. Nor did they have as good of training. So they used stealth and trickery.
In China they were more often rebels, again with no training in how to use a sword. As such they once again had to rely on stealth, trickery, and ambush tactics. Not that they would use a sword even if they could get their hands on a katana. It was a death sentence to be caught with a katana if you weren't a samurai.
Which ties into the origin of shaolin. It was a style developed initially to allow people to defend them self against the samurai since it was illegal to own a weapon. The weapons they were trained to use were all farming tools, things which they would not be killed because of if they had with them. Since the monk class would appear to be based on the shaolin style this should be considered too. You notice the default monk weapons are nearly all farming tools or walking aids.
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Back off, cloacae are important to me.Let's not drag cloacae into this.This post sponsored by "I know how to pluralize obscure words and you need to see it".
You are rather attached to them.
I'm not. I leave mine at home all the time, along with a limb or two. Of course, those aren't always mine.
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Back off, cloacae are important to me.Let's not drag cloacae into this.This post sponsored by "I know how to pluralize obscure words and you need to see it".
You are rather attached to them.
I'm not. I leave mine at home all the time, along with a limb or two. Of course, those aren't always mine.
It's like they say: "The only thing better than your cloaca is someone else's..."
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Even more crazy...the primary thing for Ninjas were to jump around and kill things.The reminds me! Katanas can cut bulls in half AND cook the steaks inside while cutting through them!Because katanas are far too powerful and could easily beat any other sword ever also guns.Facepalm. That is complete bull, and you know it.Except that wasn't actually true. Nor was the idea of ninja using a katana like in the Ninja Gaiden games. In japan ninja were stealth assassins, and would fight (at most) to escape. They weren't armed as well as samurai. Nor did they have as good of training. So they used stealth and trickery.
In China they were more often rebels, again with no training in how to use a sword. As such they once again had to rely on stealth, trickery, and ambush tactics. Not that they would use a sword even if they could get their hands on a katana. It was a death sentence to be caught with a katana if you weren't a samurai.
Which ties into the origin of shaolin. It was a style developed initially to allow people to defend them self against the samurai since it was illegal to own a weapon. The weapons they were trained to use were all farming tools, things which they would not be killed because of if they had with them. Since the monk class would appear to be based on the shaolin style this should be considered too. You notice the default monk weapons are nearly all farming tools or walking aids.
Since we are getting even more informational...
The bestest and most famous Ninjas of our day are four brothers who are green, mean, and full of steam!
They are turtles in a half shell...and only ONE of them wields Katana's.
The others wield nunchucks, sais, and a staff!
They don't kill things in the onscreen portrayals...
But in reality, they are all about jumping around and killing things.
Their master is just as good as Chuck Norris, who killed 500 enemy ninjas with just a flick of his finger!
Chuck Norris is the baddest Ninja of them all though...he doesn't even have to jump around to kill people...he can just look at you wrong and you'll fall down.
He's such a great Ninja, he doesn't even have to wear a mask most of the time!
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They are turtles in a half shell...and only ONE of them wields Katana's.
*Katanae.
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The film versions of the turtles can't even be classified as ninja. I mean, seriously. In the original live action movies a rat learns martial arts from watching it's owner practice kata? Okaaaay, if it's a mutant rat to begin with maybe. But Splinter only learned the combat moves, not ninja techniques.
In the new TMNT live action movie Splinter learns ninjutsu from an illustrated book (basically a comic) then teaches the turtles. What. The. Fork?!
Even in the original black and white comic and the 80's cartoon the turtles aren't actually ninja. While they use stealth on occasion (more often in the comic), they are front line fighters. They engage their enemies in face to face battle, charging from the front.
Ninja would never do this. A ninja's best weapon is nobody knowing they are there. Instead of fighting the Foot clan in the streets, a real ninja would infiltrate Shredder's HQ and assassinate him using poison, or by killing him in his sleep. Ideally without anyone ever knowing what the hell happened till long after the ninja has left the area.
Honestly, the Foot Clan from the first live action movie didn't act much like ninja either. It was more a thieves guild/martial arts monastery.
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Which ties into the origin of shaolin. It was a style developed initially to allow people to defend them self against the samurai since it was illegal to own a weapon.
I don't want to nitpick, but Japan is a pretty long way from Henan province, China. So I guess I do want to nitpick actually.
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The shaolin style did originate in China before migrating to Japan. At least that's what my research showed. Actually, where samurai and the katana first came from is kind of hazy. I personally think it might be a case of parallel development, but there was interaction between the two nations. And the people of Japan we think of as Japanese aren't originally from Japan. They invaded and took over from the native people of the island. So it's quite possible the ancestors of Japanese nobility have come from China.
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Samurai developed in Japan long after Japan had become a stable culture and ethnicity, and have no connection to the interior of China or the development of Shaolin martial arts. The Shaolin temple itself is something like four or five centuries older than the beginning of the samurai class.
Japanese feudal culture is actually dramatically different from that of Imperial China, and the Japanese are more related to Korean and North Asian peoples than Chinese; ultimately Chinese civilization is a whole lot older than Japan, even by legendary reckoning. The Japanese adapted Chinese things like writing and metalworking, but the samurai as a class developed from the strictly controlled servants/guards of Japanese warlords. Really, samurai are even farther from bureaucratic Chinese nobility than they are from western feudal warriors, and they're a lot less like knights than people often realize.
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At least that's what my research showed. Actually, where samurai and the katana first came from is kind of hazy.
Er, wait, what?
The samurai originated from the earlier "bushi" in Japan after the Taika reforms of 646 CE, which established the first large fiefdoms (and by extension, the need for a warrior caste serving large landholders).
The earliest katana -- single-edged, curved swords -- developed a little later, in the 700s. The classic katana developed in the Murumachi period (1300), which is also when we find the first attestations of the word (as opposed to "tachi," which simply meant "sword" and would have applied equally to a 16th century rapier.)
The laws against owning weapons that led to the development of karate and similar Okinawan fighting styles are almost purely Japanese and date to the 1600s.
The Shaolin monastery was founded in approximately 400 AC, and the martial arts tradition there is traditionally attributed to Da Mo/Bodhidharma at about the same time (although many scholars do not actually accept this tradition as factual). At that time, China was suffering from widespread civil unrest under the Northern and Southern dynasties, so the idea that the government would either be interested in or able to restrict weapons is simply ludicrous.
And the Chinese never had "ninja" at all.
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Only if you know absolutely nothing whatsoever about either swords or armor.
Um, have you ever used a jian?
There's actually a fairly substantial difference between the techniques used for a heavy cutting blade and a light thrusting blade, even if it's not light enough to qualify as an actual rapier.
The Western long sword (actually, the arming sword; the longsword was misnamed by Gygax and the error has persisted) is rather definitely a heavy slashing blade -- many of the samples that we have don't even have sharpened tips.
The jian is a hybrid weapon designed primarily for thrusting or for slashes at exposed skin. It typically weighed about 800g (roughly 2/3 as much as a typical arming sword), with a very light tip.
And while you're right that cleaving through plate armor wasn't high on the list of any swordsman's priorities, so-called "percussive cuts" (basically, hit the armor hard enough to cause and injury, even through light armor like chain mail) are a key technique in fighting with an arming sword. By contrast, although jian forms include a few percussive cuts, there are many more thrusts and draw cuts, because the blade was better suited for that. Similarly, jian parrying techniques are much more similar to the parries with a fencing weapon than the arming sword's are.
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A sword doesn't have to be able to slice through armor to be more effective against it. It just has to be able to apply force through it, or be capable of being thrust through a weak-point. Hopefully without breaking or wrecking an edge too sharp to survive the abuse.
In our homebrew setting we made the jian an exotic one-handed finessable piercing + slashing weapon with a 1d6 damage dice for Medium and a 19-20/x3 crit range. It also has that thing rapiers have where you don't get any perks for two-handing it.
Been discussing with my home group whether or not to just make it a plain light weapon from the get-go, but unsure.
The problem with calling anything a finesse weapon in real life contexts is that basically every weapon requires both strength and dexterity to wield effectively.
That said the OP has it wrong. Traditional jian are much more comparable to a short sword and if a player wanted to use one in Pathfinder I'd probably point them there and monks do have proficiency in that.
I guess there is a point to be made though about that proficiency being not worth much given that monks can't flurry with it though.
There were larger jian more comparable to longswords or even bigger than that, but from my understanding those are a lot rarer and not the kind you usually see in film.
In our group we've made both getting dex-to-hit with melee weapons and dex-to-damage much easier to come by, but we've also houseruled that Str penalties still apply if your Str is below 10. It's very idiosyncratic, but for us it's managed to strike just the right note of verisimilitude where we're fine with everything going off dex if you invest in a feat.
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That said the OP has it wrong. Traditional jian are much more comparable to a short sword and if a player wanted to use one in Pathfinder I'd probably point them there and monks do have proficiency in that.
Meh. In real life, "short sword" is one of the worst-defined terms out there, being used for everything from the Greek xiphos through the Italian side-sword to the modern Bowie knife. In Pathfinder, it's not much better, since it's used for any sword-form less than two feet long.
... but a typical jian has a blade between 28 and 32 inches. So it's not as short as a Pathfinder shortsword.
Of course, a Pathfinder longsword has a 38 inch blade. So the jian doesn't fit that, either. At some level, one needs to accept that the weapon classifications, like hit points, are an abstraction.
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Of course, a Pathfinder longsword has a 38 inch blade. So the jian doesn't fit that, either. At some level, one needs to accept that the weapon classifications, like hit points, are an abstraction.
Oh absolutely, but being a shorter weapon and with the types of movement normally associated with it I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that short sword stats might be a good way to emulate it.
To be honest I'd personally rather see them abstract weapons even more. Like instead of making new stats for wakizashis and katanas like the did I think it would have been prudent just to say "they're short/long swords'. Could do that for a lot of weapons.
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Native Japanese were conquered long ago by invaders of basically Mongolian descent (well before the age of Khans). The samurai caste system was basically a way of enforcing the differences between the conquered natives and the conquerors, but intermarrying has blurred the effect. Modern Japanese are the descendents of that.
The Ainu people are also natives of Japan, and were also conquered and discriminated against.
==Aelryinth
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Of course, a Pathfinder longsword has a 38 inch blade. So the jian doesn't fit that, either. At some level, one needs to accept that the weapon classifications, like hit points, are an abstraction.Oh absolutely, but being a shorter weapon and with the types of movement normally associated with it I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that short sword stats might be a good way to emulate it.
To be honest I'd personally rather see them abstract weapons even more. Like instead of making new stats for wakizashis and katanas like the did I think it would have been prudent just to say "they're short/long swords'. Could do that for a lot of weapons.
One of the more unbalancing effects in the game is weapon stats. the power of critical hits and increased threat range cause such weapons to overpower standard and time-tested 'superior' weapons.
Nobody used falcata in war after the Roman era, because it's a sucky weapon. YOU want a sword, you use a sword. You want an axe, use an axe. But PF would have us believe it is the best base weapon in the game (blame Monte Cook for making swordaxes's uber in his campaign world). Likewise, that a scythe would be an effective combat weapon, which is hilarious. Farmers beat their scythes into polearms because scythes SUCKED as weapons.
I actually like the 4e take on weapons...roll a die, they all have the same threat range and crit power. Better weapons are better weapons, but some will have versatility in use.
==Aelryinth
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Regarding Rapiers, I think the problem is that a lot of people think foil when they say rapier
Likewise, that a scythe would be an effective combat weapon, which is hilarious. Farmers beat their scythes into polearms because scythes SUCKED as weapons.
To be fair, the description of the scythe in PF does mention rotating the blade to make it function more like a halberd or glaive.
Most people just ignore that.. and while I generally agree, the use of the Scythe as a premiere CdG weapon is really fluffy even if unrealistic. I like it.
I actually like the 4e take on weapons...roll a die, they all have the same threat range and crit power. Better weapons are better weapons, but some will have versatility in use.
4e has a lot of its own issues. Like rapiers being so incredibly dominant. And that damn war shovel.
That said, given how badly Pathfinder models weapons (as you pointed out) and frankly how limited weapon choice would be if it did accurately model them, I think I'd rather see fewer, more generic weapon categories and more openness for how you fluff it.
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4e has a lot of its own issues. Like rapiers being so incredibly dominant. And that damn war shovel.That said, given how badly Pathfinder models weapons (as you pointed out) and frankly how limited weapon choice would be if it did accurately model them, I think I'd rather see fewer, more generic weapon categories and more openness for how you fluff it.
I like the idea of abstracting too, especially since there are probably some real-world weapons that are just plain funky.
For Pathfinder, I think the reason high crit-range weapons are nastier is the whole critical feat setup. Which means if you like dealing out those special effects, put away that warhammer; you're using a scimitar and liking it. Even if bludgeoning is the most fun damage type in the game.
Thinking on it, the 'monk' weapons seem to be really out-there 'martial arts' weapons. Even though one could argue that someone swinging a jian or katana is a martial artist of some sort, it's things like sai, tonfas, three-section staves, and other things that bring out people moaning about the 'superior oriental weapon' trope, both for and against.
(Then again, by the rules, my Cheliax-raised martial knows how to use that three-section staff if she ever gets her hands on one!)
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Likewise, that a scythe would be an effective combat weapon, which is hilarious. Farmers beat their scythes into polearms because scythes SUCKED as weapons.
Scythes have some theoretical advantages. They could be wielded similarly to picks (ie- stabbing the guy, rather than having the stupid idea of trying to cut him with the blade that faces towards yourself). The relative length makes it awkward to block, since stopping the shaft could still result in a foot of blade in your face.
Of course...yeah...trying to use a random scythe is a terrible idea. MAybe a nice conversion of the lade into a more regular polearm by turning it 90 degrees. Not perfect as a base for a blade... but hey, polearms. Those typically have actual advantages of reach, leverage, and weight. So worth trying out if you want a peasant rebellion and have a couple weeks to get the smith to bend the blades while everyone else gets proper straight shafts.
I would love for the game to get more spotlight for warscythes. Outside of the fauchard, which is just a fancy exotic weapon.