If my character has their bastard sword in one hand and their shield in the other which dice pool (Ref + greatsword or sword&shiled) do they use when attacking or defending with the sword and which dice pool (Ref + sword&shield or greatsword) do they use for defending or attacking with the shield?

Pytorb,

Your Combat Pool is derived from the style of fighting you're using, not really the specific weapons in your hands. If you're righting with a bastard sword and a shield, then use the Sword&Shield style to determine your CP, and keep it for the entire fight unless you somehow lose the shield and start using the sword differently.

Brian.

Man, Brian's like, always right...

Jake

I know, it's eery ;-)

Brian.

Thanks guys I guess I'm just thinking too much along my old WFRP days when that combo was my favourite and not enough on the actual style of how you would fight with that combo. I think my shield will be staying on my horse for use in purely defensive situations from now on.

I was turning over the utility of a shield in TROS in my mind the other day. From all of the discussions on reality it seems a shield is a highly effective thing to have in a battle.

However, mechanically, it doesn't seem all that worth while.

Consider. The DTN of a typical sword is 6. The DTN of a shield is 5. That means when rolling 10 dice in defense, a shield block should get 1 more success than a weapon parry. Ok...except that all shields above a buckler give a CP penalty, the larger ones -2 or more. Well, 10 dice vs TN 6 gives 5 successes. 8 dice (10 -2 die penalty) vs. TN 5 gives 4.8. This is worse than simply using a sword to parry.

Sure the shield gives defensive armor, but alls the attacker has to do is attack an area not protected by the shield (which the attacker is 100% free to do without restriction of any kind...save for counters) and this bonus become moot.

Are the stats for shields really off, or is there some other facet I'm missing. Sure, the shield has the benefit of being immune to binds, but is this really that effective.

Seems to me that a shield should have a TN of 4. Or maybe even TN 3 from a Defensive Stance.

What have others found about the effectiveness of shields in combat?

A fine shield is actually pretty cheap, and can have reduced DTN or CP penalty, or both. It can be used in the block & strike manuever. It can be used to block arrows or parry strikes for a more offensively oriented sword (frex: fine shortsword with reduced thrust ATN.)

In general, it doesn't seem the shield has quite the utility I recall from sparring against one (albeit a wooden mockup with a boffer...)

I don't know how I'd go about fixing that.

I used Bastard Sword and shield once.

I was playing a dwarf and was therefore swinging at people's legs with my handaxe, when it got stuck in a gol's hip.

undaunted, I picked up his sword and finished the fight at a -1cp(?) penalty.

Val, regarding the passive armor rules for shields...
I had a conversation with a certain person about this very rule after discovering and not using the rule correctly.. resulting in the 'death' that my character should have gone through.. and this person said new rules for shields might be had in TFOB.

..But I can neither confirm nor deny that. :-D

Anyways it does makes sense to me that a shield can absorb the impact of a weapon.. and that a shield can be mobile in relation to shield frontage on a character.
A shield is able to be moved in order to do a block-open/strike correct?
then why the hell can I not move it to my groin and to soak some damage from an attack?
-Ingenious

Ingenious wrote:
then why the hell can I not move it to my groin and to soak some damage from an attack?
-Ingenious

Ingenious wrote: I had a conversation with a certain person about this very rule after discovering and not using the rule correctly.. resulting in the 'death' that my character should have gone through.. and this person said new rules for shields might be had in TFOB.

..But I can neither confirm nor deny that. :-D

Strictly speaking, a bastard sword would never be used with a shield. The swords are designed to be wielded one-handed from a horse, or twohanded while dismounted. The grip and pommel get in the way of good sword and shield work.

James

Ralph,

A house rule that makes sense to me that might alleviate some of your issue..

If you block with the shield, and garner any successes, but fail to beat the attacker's roll, add the shield's armor value to the location being defended.

Hence if someone strikes upward at the groin, and I drop the shield to defend, getting 3 successes to the attacker's 5, then the AV of the shield is now considered when touting up damage.

Not perfect, but it definitely adds functionality.

That's an interesting rule Lance. It makes a good bit of sense.

One could argue that the attacker losing 3 successes on his attack comes not from striking the shield but from having to alter his attack to avoid the shield (in fact, that's probably the best description of it)

But it would mean that a) the shields armor value actually matters and gets used, unlike now when it never gets used except when you forget and attack the wrong area, and b) its really simple and intuitive to implement, so even if it isn't completely realistic it would involve little additional complication.

Have you tried the rule? My concern now would be that it might make shields TOO effective. With a single success on a defense roll you are adding a heck of alot of armor protection. Concievably with a TN of 5 one could defend every attack with only 2-3 dice, relying on the armor of the shield plus regular armor to stop any blow cold...

Wolfen wrote: Ralph,

A house rule that makes sense to me that might alleviate some of your issue..

If you block with the shield, and garner any successes, but fail to beat the attacker's roll, add the shield's armor value to the location being defended.

Hence if someone strikes upward at the groin, and I drop the shield to defend, getting 3 successes to the attacker's 5, then the AV of the shield is now considered when touting up damage.

Not perfect, but it definitely adds functionality.

Ralph wrote:

"Ok...except that all shields above a buckler give a CP penalty, the larger ones -2 or more. Well, 10 dice vs TN 6 gives 5 successes. 8 dice (10 -2 die penalty) vs. TN 5 gives 4.8. This is worse than simply using a sword to parry. "

Actually, from what I remember, the buckler is NOT the only shield without a CP penalty. A small round shield also does not have a CP penalty, but it may have a move penalty.

You could rule that shields don't give full AV on a partially succesful block, just a point or two. Experiment and see what happens.

I am curious to see how much and what changes for shields in TFOB. I don't think the shield rules are perfect, but they seem (like just about everything else in TROS) to be easily tweakable.

-Alan

I can't speak with a *lot* of real world experience.. But about the only way I know to take down a shieldman is to *not* hit the shield. The SCA has essentially unbreakable shields, but so does TRoS.

There is a reason why most SCA fighters start out "sword and board" It's a highly defensive style, and a highly effective one.

Jake would probably be better able to tell how realistic this is, but it mirrors my experience pretty damned well.

I would probably also add the caveat that this rule does not take effect if you feint (because the shield isn't really where the attack is going to be..), and it also allows for shields to be bound, or double strikes, etc.

Good points Lance.

However...and this is just the mental imagining of how it would work in play...not actual play.

It's a highly defensive style

I think the deal with this is that most Fechtbuchs don't teach much if anything about the shield, (in fact really only I33 focuses on them and then only bucklers) and as a result, the Fencing schools which are the source of real life information for this combat system do not really empahsise them.

I am probably one of the few people who does WMA these days that has a lot (more than 10 yrs) of experience with the shield in full contact WMA sparring, and I can say for a fact, you can indeed use them in a very offensive manner, utilizing the bind and strike particularly.

On the other hand, you still do lose initiative to an opponent with a longer reached weapon, and it takes a lot of experience to be really effective with the shield. In the hands of someone fairly new, it can be worse than useless, because it grants a false sense of security and also blocks your vision of your opponent to some degree.

As for coverage, generally when facing a large shield you can only strike at their head and shoulders, their lower legs and feet, or wait for them to strike and catch them with a counter on their attacking arm or their body.

One of the other standard techniques is to feint high and attack low, or the other way around.

This is born out by forensic / archeoligical evidence. For example the majority of the skelletons on the Wisby battlefield had injuries to their lower left legs.

JR

Example of aggressive use of the shield against a longer weapon

http://bellsouthpwp.net/d/e/deodand23/shield2.mpg

Certainly sword and shield is highly offensive style. In fact if you become defensive with it you will be in more problems. It is then easy to get in on them and use the shield to tie them up. Another tactic is to grab their shield to help push or pull them off balance. Even when a centre grip shield, you find that people don't want to let go of it even when they feel themsleves being pulled around by it.

One can use the shield to redirect attacks while moving inside the range of an opponents weapon, as shown in the clip. You can use it to hit with, using edge, flat, and boss if a centre grip shield.

Talhoffer shows the use of the judicial dueling shield in combination with a sword, and their it is used pretty offensively. The main reason for it not being more featured, is that by the time most of the manuals are being written, the shield is not really being used by the classes, at whom the manuals are being aimed.

All the best

JW

In fairness to wolfen though, re: the SCA practices he mentions, it is easier to parry or deflect a blow with a shield than it is with a sword, which is indeed why many SCA fighters start out with sword and shield. It is of course doubly so when fighting by SCA rules which I believe prohibit attacking the lower legs!

It's also similarly skewed in LARP where you cannot attack the head.

JR

I was actually going to mention that, Bob. That is one of the aspects that makes SCA heavy fighting more "sport" than martial art.

But even so, I think you're definitely underestimating the value of a defensive style. In a style where the only parts you're available to be hit are the legs, head and one arm until you extend yourself, it's fairly easy to defend until your opponent gives you a proper opening for a counter. There are definitely weaknesses to such a strategy, but there are weaknesses to any strategy.

You should also consider that a lot of SCA techniques are more geared toward melee combat. What works in one-on-one dueling doesn't work nearly the same way in the press of melee. Even a longsworder, or someone with a lighter shield doesn't have the easy mobility to take advantage of the shieldman's defensive tactics. Additionally, it's more difficult to even get close because of the spearmen, and if you were to drop your sword to go for a lower leg, you'd be breaking the line between your own body and your opponent's weapon.

Where the tactics of a melee change the situation, some of the thinsg I have mentioned workery well with the shield. Drivong my shield into my opponents works btter here as they are less able to move with it and then often find themselves restricted and blocked by their own shield, leaving them easier to thrust at or hit. Grabbing and pulling the shield top down works very well to. This is a tactic described by Tacitus, as being used by Germanic tribesmen, when attempting to break the roman formations.

I'm gonna pop in for a minute...

The original (like, 1999) shield rules for TROS were written to discourage shield use, because they're not as glamorous. For the first printing I tried to remedy that, and again even more in the second, but I have to agree that shields are much more useful IRL than often pans out in TROS.

But not as much as some would propose.

First, ditch the CP penalties for heaters and smaller. Using the shield is part of your Proficiency, and you shouldn't be penalized for it.

Second, there's a set of "favoring" rules coming out in TFOB which will account more for what your shield defends at any given time. I like them. What's funny is that Brian wrote them for shield and I wrote them for swords and the like, and the two rules ended up being almost identical.

Third, I suppose that you could drop the DTN to 4, but I'm not going to. In TROS (even as it stands), the big advantage to the shield isn't its defensive properties, but the maneuvers that it opens up--simultaneous blocking and striking, bind-and-strike, etc.

Jake

How about instead of a CP penalty, force the player with a shield to reserve a minimum amount of CP on Defense?

JR

Jake Norwood wrote:

Second, there's a set of "favoring" rules coming out in TFOB

Drifter Bob wrote: [...] This is born out by forensic / archeoligical evidence. For example the majority of the skelletons on the Wisby battlefield had injuries to their lower left legs.

JR

toli wrote:

Jake Norwood wrote:

Second, there's a set of "favoring" rules coming out in TFOB

What exactly do you mean by favoring. Do you mean preferentially defending certain body areas more than others?

Drifter Bob wrote: How about instead of a CP penalty, force the player with a shield to reserve a minimum amount of CP on Defense?

quot;[MKF]Kapten]
Just a minor nitpick: The town's name is Visby with a "V". It still exists (with the same ringwall as the one the battle was fought outside intact).

have a feeling that the roots of the problem lies in the way they are taught to speak English...

'the english language not having the right sounds'
That's subjective my friend. I could say Norweigians can't speak with 'right sounds' too.. but then I'd be insulting my ancestry..etc.

Back to the point of this thread.(And pardon the over-analysis)
I think sword and shield is far more effective than you might think.
It's got a very low DTN(ties for the lowest), and that used in conjunction with a simultaneous block/strike attack makes for an impressive exchange of blows.. where-by you might completely block the opponent's attack(using 50% of your CP, or even 25% of it).. and then spending the rest on the attack..(in the case of using this in the second exchange, and therefore wanting to use the rest of the CP)
But even in an active defense a shield is a bitch to attack..
The character can block on the first exchange.. put 7 dice into it.. and win the margin more times than not. Even if this leaves you with 3 dice left..you might lose initiative that time.. but then you're back to actively blocking.
This works well when fighting someone and you are trying to gauge your opponent's combat pool.. You can start off by blocking in the first exchange with 90% of your CP.. and lower that each first exchange.. until you get hit..or you hit your opponent.
Also.. one might use a shield in an attempt to wait out a fight(in the case of outclassed PC's).. defend defend defend.. until whoever has the higher EN score wins. That endurance rule is a beast of a game mechanic.

It's super for defense yes. It also frees up dice for an attack also. You can block and defend at the same time. And due to the low DTN, your opponents will have to put more into their attacks to hit you.. thus possibly leaving them wide open with no dice to defend with..

Couple this with a high TO, EN, and plate... and you will be nearly unstoppable. (You're still vulnerable to missile attacks that you can not see and actively defend..)(And also big, gigantic CP Penalties for the type of shield you use and for the plate..) Especially feints.. with someone really skilled in feinting.. shit. It'd be like me trying to play some basketball against Kobe Bryant.. he'd fake me out of my shoes.

-Ingenious