![]() I don't joke when I say you're better off wielding a katana like a fishing pole than something a game character would do.Break? You mean 'bend' right?Īnd swords made of spring steel will not bend either.Swords of any type can break as a result metal fatigue, and so-called "spring steel," loses the ability to snap back into place with time and stress until either it shatters or the bend becomes permanent (spring steel is trash, incidentally). If you aren't properly trained with that it'll break rather quickly. The most egregious sin though is the katana. You don't parry with blades all that much because they tend yo break. (The only reason I brought up realism earlier was to note that in terms of shield stances snd design, Emo Elf in the OP already isn't any better than Soulsguy, so that's not an excuse for being less cool.) Nods towards reality are cool, but once you get into the particulars, it can get real stupid, real fast. In general, I feel it can't be done, and attempts to move away from abstraction and towards realism often just end up being surreal in new, interesting ways. That said, I am not advocating for "realistic" combat in a game like this. It gets the Medieval Combat Nerd in me going, and that makes me happy. Pillars in general draws a lot of its aesthetic from the Renaissance and high medieval, and I think it's a lot cooler than the aesthetic of Standard European Fantasy for its trouble. There's something to be said for realism in any milieu, if only because it's involving and because the past is actually a really fascinating place with a lot of cool stuff to draw upon. I don't see how real life depiction correlate with a "fantasy" game in the manor that it has to be realistic.Eh, yes and no. For all that Dark Souls Guy is rockin' it up there, his shield is ridiculously impractical and is mostly just a giant lever with which to dislocate his should and floor him. Incidentally, the size of shields tends to be negatively correlated with the protective quality of armor - once you get plate, or even mail, you're generally well-protected enough that a smaller shield that can be brought to bear in the bind or even at grappling range tends to be more effective. ![]() The closest thing in the post-Roman European milieu to the eponymous tower shield was the the actual kite shield, a family of design from the late Dark Ages and early medieval, which had a distinctive teardrop shape to minimize weight relative to protection and to make the shield harder to grab and control. The classical Greeks did use some very large shields, but in the context of Greek phalanx, and in keeping with the large shields sometimes seen in aboriginal warfare, these were usually comprised of a wooden frame with leather or hide stretched across the surface. To the best of my knowledge, the "tower shield" of Standard European Fantasy is almost entirely an RPG-ism - likely inspired by misunderstood depictions of the pavise, which is more of a semi-portable man-sized fortification than a shield in the conventional sense. ![]() Incidentally, that is how both types of shields were properly held. You are aware that the first picture shows a tower shield and the second shows a kite shield?
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