Do Force Swords Break Weapons?

This feels like one of the questions that has an obvious answer: duh, yes, force swords destroy weapons.  End of story.  Why are we even talking about this?

Well, because force swords destroying all other melee weapons causes some problems, mainly in that it destroys a great deal of melee variety.  Why use anything but a force sword in melee once the force sword becomes available?  Star Wars itself doesn't have a good answer, as I learned as I looked for art for this post, because a shocking number of weapons in Star Wars just stand up perfectly fine to a lightsaber, because of (mutter mutter cortosis something something beskar).  So even Star Wars is aware of the need for a variety of weapons in melee, and the need for them to stand up to a force sword equivalent, or your melee fights become boring.

This has been a question I've had for awhile, and was the topic of a previous post, but I found that the answer to the question above isn't what I thought it was.  It's a short hand that a lot of people use, because force swords effectively destroy weapons, but it's not actually certain.  Instead, it's a convenient shorthand.  I believe I already addressed this years ago back in Iteration 2, where I proved that you can basically ignore the following detailed rules, but they do matter if we want to make melee weapons "realistically" viable (as much as realism matters in a setting that uses super-science melee weapons).

So, let's dive in and see if we can explore some ways to handle this more realistically without bogging the game down.

What Force Swords Actually Do

The blade cannot break, and damages any weapon or body part it parries or which parries or blocks it. 

--B274

So, in reality, Force Swords don't destroy weapons, they damage them. This naturally means that, rules as written, we should drag out our copy of Low-Tech Companion 2 every time someone parries a vibro-machete with their force sword, and roll for damage and track the weapon's HP.  Which is tedious, that's why we don't do it.  So we short-hand it away, but let's explore the specific details of what's actually going on here.

Let's look at three weapons: a broadsword, a staff, and a polearm like a halberd.  We can check LTC2 and find their DR and HP and then determine what a force sword would do to each.  

• A broadsword has DR 6 and 11 HP
• A halberd has DR 4 and 18 HP
• A staff has DR 2 and 12 HP.

For damage, everything about weapon damage points us to the basic rules on B483.  Thus, if we strike each with a force sword, the force sword will inflict a base of about 28 damage, and the weapons will have an effective DR of 1. This means that:

• the broadsword is at -17 HP
• the halberd is at -10 HP
• the staff is at -16 HP

Per the rules for weapons, they should all have "reduced effectiveness," whatever that means (penalty to hit? Reduced damage) and they should roll HT (12, I believe) each second they're used or they'll be "disabled."  The broadsword and staff need to roll HT or be destroyed.  So in principle, it's completely possible that your weapon will still be intact enough to keep using (at a reduced effectiveness), though another couple of attacks like that and the weapon will be surely destroyed. We can greatly simplify this with mook rules and say if they drop below 0 HP, they're just out of the game, and the specifics aren't that important (though this makes a "fragile" weapon, like a sword made of tempered glass, less interesting).

So, we're back to "Yes, a force sword destroys weapons.  Maybe not technically in one hit, but practically, a single hit will render them either immediately useless or they'll soon be useless."

Case closed. Or...

Full Metal Weapons

Fantasy Tech 2 offers the option for full metal weapons, a wonderful fantasy conceit.  This doesn't make much of a difference for us: our halberd and staff gets a DR of 6 and a couple extra HP, in practice.  But then the book asks "What metal?" and launches into a long discussion of silver.

But what about ultra-tech metals?  What about a nanpolymer weapon, or a diamondoid weapon? I'll focus on generic UT materials, rather than Psi-Wars materials for this discussion, but you can extrapolate this idea onto anything.  The problem is we don't really know what the DR of such a weapon would be.  We can guess though. Note that weapons just increase in mass as they change material, so the volume likely stays the same, and bronze vs iron vs steel makes no difference per LTC2 (though they make a difference to the actual ability of the weapon to resist breakage, which we'll come back to).  But we could at DR per lb, assuming all have the same volume and weight, for a given material in Pyramid #3/52 "Low-Tech Armor Design." It's not perfect, but it should give us a general sense.

"Good" Bronze clocks in at 0.6 lb per DR and 68 DR/inch.  "Good" Iron comes in at 0.6 lb per DR and 68 DR/inch, and "Strong" steel come sin 0.58 lb per di, and 70 DR/inch.  This all passes the smell test or more-or-less having the same DR and weight for all various weapons, with quality having more to do with how good an edge they can keep.

If use the ratio to extrapolate further and use the materials of Pryamid #3/96 "Ultra-Tech Weapon Design", we see Advanced Nanocomposite is 0.08 lbs per DR, that Dimaondoid is 0.06 lbs per DR and Hyperdense is 0.04 lbs per DR.  If we use this as a ratio to derive our DR, we get a "full metal" DR for nanocomposite of 45, diamondoid has 60, and hyperdense has 90.  This creates a very different scenario! Assuming the same HP, after being hit with a force sword:

• A nanocomposite sword has -8 HP
• A diamondoid sword has -5 HP
• A hyperdense sword has 1 HP(!)

In all cases, the sword is reduced in effectiveness, but the hyperdense sword is still usable.  A hypothetical hyperdense or diamondoid hablerd with 20 HP wouldn't even be reduced in effectiveness after a single hit!  Now, subsequent hits will continue to damage the weapon, so it's still a matter of time.  This raises a sort of worst case scenario: the weapon is niether realistically immune, nor realistically instantly destroyed. You'd want to track damage.  This means that using such a weapon is unlikely to be a practical thing (why make an expensive, diamondoid halberd if you know a force sword wielder will destroy it) but it's very much the sort of thing mooks might do ("hey, it's cheaper than a force sword!") and that's sort of the worst possible scenario where you have ten unimportant guys fighting one cybersamurai, but you have to stop after every parry to calculate the damage to their weapons.

So, the obvious conclusion is just to handwave it away again and just say "Look, it's destroyed." This becomes shakier, but the average player is likely to accept him: the prospects for his hyperdense vibro sword aren't great, so he won't bother with one, and he doesn't want the game bogged down by recalculating weapon HP all the time. And yet...

Beam-Adapted Weapon DR

So, on UT190, we have "beam-adapted armor." Now, technically, this requires the protected armor to take damage from a particular form of attack to optimize itself against that attack, and "force sword" is not explicitly listed among the types. However, it seems perfectly plausible to call force swords a "beam weapon," and it's also plausible to argue that if something can become optimized, it can start optimized, and thus have triple DR against force swords.  This is also more practical for weapons than for armor, as it's $1000 per pound.  So a three lb broadsword runs $3000 for triple DR.

With normal DR, this is only 18 and not even worth talking about, but nanocomposite jumps up to 120 DR, Diamondoid up to 180 and hyperdense to 270.  This means after a single hit, a beam-adapted nanocomposite broadsword has only taken an average of 4 damage, and the diamondoid and hyperdense average zero damage. In fact, against beam-adapted diamondoid, we have only a 4% chance of doing any damage at all!

This is also surprisingly practical. Technically, diamondoid costs $50 per lb at TL 11, which is the same price as "good steel" at TL 3, so the weapon price stays the same, but I think it's plausible to double the cost, or to fold it into the idea of a "superfine" TL 11 blade. A super-fine vibro sword  is 30x the price, thus $15,000, and adding beam-adaption is only $3000 more, which is barely an increase. The result is an $18,000 blade that can parry a force sword and deals sw+1d+2 (5) damage. It deals less absolute damage than a force sword and caps out at around 6d+4(5) cut at ST 30, which means the most armor it can penetrate is 125 on average (worse than a force sword) but it deals an average of 38 damage to an unarmored target, which is, on average, objectively better than a force sword, and it can parry a force sword, but does not automatically damage weapons it hits, and is almost twice as expensive, making this a questionable, but plausible challenge to the force sword.

Of course, there are some other options, like a beam adapted all-metal Axe, which has a higher ultimate cap on damage (7d+3(5), for an average penetration of 140, like the force sword, but an average of 42 injury vs an unarmored target), is about a tenth the price (a full-diamondoid vibro axe will clock in between $6000 and $12,000 depending on how you choose to calculate the price modifiers) and we can argue for cheaper beam adaption (we don't need the adaptability; it's fine if we optimize it against a single form of attack, the force sword, so perhaps we could halve the cost), and we can get this into something practical.

Of course, this largely goes in the opposite direction, creating a weapon that is practically immune to the force sword, so we're better off just not tracking damage again and we just ignore the fact that the force sword breaks weapons.  Beam-Adapted TL 11 melee weapons can ignore force sword damage, and everything else is destroyed.  That's the easiest way to handle it.  Of course, if everything is beam adapted, then force swords lose a lot of their luster, and people start wondering why soldiers don't just wear beam-adapted armor (though the answer there is "price."  A Beam Adapted military cybersuit is adds $50,000 to the price tag, doubling its price).

The Broken (Nanocomposite) Blade

Frankly, though, it's annoying that we have DR, HP, and breakage stats all floating around as separate systems.  If you parry a force sword with your vibro-sword, you roll damage and check against the DR and HP, but if you parry it a mecha-tetsubo with your vibro-sword, you roll against breakage.  Fortunately, the exemplary Douglas Cole has our back, and wrote the Broken Blade in Pryamid #3/87.

In this variation, a beam-adapted, nanocomposite vibro-sword has an ST of 10, a defense breakage threshold of 10 (or a defense safety limit of 1d+4), an attack damage threshold of 15 (or attack safety limit of 2d+3).  The failure increment is 2.  If we're going with the rules for basic superfine weapons, we can probably treat our weapons as HT 18 for the purposes of the Broken Blade.

This means we can defend against a blow that deals up to 14 and prevent damage with a roll of 16 or less, and we don't get to a 50% chance of failure until we block an attack that deals 28 damage, or more practically up to 8d.  On an attack, we can safely inflict up to 6d damage (not counting the +1d+1 vibro bonus) without really worrying about damage, and up to 9d+1 before we get to a 50% chance of . And note that a failure here erodes the HT of the weapon! Thus if we make that massive attack and roll a 16, we fail by 6, and our weapon drops to HT 12, rather than shatters, and that's pretty much a worse case scenario.  We're slowly destroying the weapon, rather than instantly shattering it.

That's nice and all, but what about the force sword? That was our original intent!  Well, if our beam-adapted nanocomposite weapon has DR 120, then the average blow deals 4 damage and reduces the HT by 2, though it says nothing about actually breaking the weapon, thus again we're back to a slow erosion of a weapon, rather than the immediate shattering of one.

These rules tell us some interesting things.  First, an ultra-tech weapon can "support" far more damage than the triple ST typically noted before they start to run into problems.  They can also block some pretty effective damage, which matters if we're going to parry bullets and beams with these (which we should, in a space opera setting: if you can do it with a force sword, why not with your ceramic katana?). I also like the rule about "making skill count" in that you can turn the blade in certain ways to protect it, or to make sure that it presents as much of the right surface as possible. This is perhaps the most interesting revelation here, especially since it opens up the possibility of yet another technique that melee fighters could invest in to defeat force swords.

"Breakage Rolls are Tedious"

One of my readers rolled their virtual eyes at this discussion, rightly pointing out the tediousness of weapon breakage rolls. I happen to like it in some genres, like certain types of fantasy and especially chambara where characters throw around ridiculous ST behind blades, and the state of your blade is deeply important to you.

Space opera isn't one of those genres.  Blowing through a bunch of minion weapons makes perfect sense, and not having your weapon blown through makes sense too.  But I feel like there should be a middle ground where we acknowledge the supremacy of the force sword while still allowing the more low-tech melee fighter to continue to remain viable.  Perhaps a Nehudese tomahawk is sufficiently robust that a skilled fighter can still attack a few times through a force sword parry, and a Shinjurai ceramic katan can _generally_ stand up to a force sword, barring some devastating mistake.  But I don't want to roll to hit and then roll to parry and then roll damage and then roll HT.  GURPS has too many rolls as it is.

What we need is a way to say "This interests now, or it doesn't." What we need is a Ham Clause. There are several times when we actually care about weapon breakage:

• I expect if some punk attacks a space knight with a wrench of a cheap knife that a parry will destroy their weapon (mook weapons)
• I expect that if a space knight explicitly attacks a weapon, he'll destroy (or at least damage) it.
• I think sometimes a "heroic" weapon should break or be damaged under the assault of a force sword, and the wielder should be aware of the risk, but still be willing to use it.

It seems to me, and this is just my musings here, that we could do something like have three levels of melee weapons: normal melee weapons, "beam-hardened" melee weapons, and "beam-immune" weapons, and we have two levels of "damaged:" damaged (-2 to hit, and -1 damage per die) and destroyed. If you damage a damaged weapon, you destroy it.  

Normal weapons in the hands of mooks are destroyed automatically if they parry or are parried by a force sword, while normal weapons in the hands of named characters are damaged in such cases, unless they're deliberately targeted.

Immune weapons cannot be destroyed by a force sword.  They'd be very special weapons.

In the hands of a named character, hardened weapons would only be damaged if targeted directly, or the opponent can pay an impulse buy point after their attack is parried or they parry an attack to damage the weapon, or once per session, the GM can declare that the parry or attack damaged the weapon.  In all cases, the character with the hardened weapon can spend an Impulse Buy point to "buy off" the damage (they got "lucky" and the weapon resisted the attack). In all cases, if the character wielding the weapon is a minion, read "damaged" as "destroyed."  Thus, there's always a chance that your weapon will be damaged or destroyed, but it's less likely and we don't have to have extra rolls.  Instead, the GM or a PC can force the issue, either with direct attacks or by spending impulse buys, and a character wielding such a weapon can continue to use their weapon by paying a different consequence (an impulse buy point, draining their luck as they ward off attack after attack).

We can also add a technique, Geometric Deflection, which is a Hard technique that defaults to Melee Skill -6 and cannot be purchased higher than Melee Skill-2.  If the character uses the technique when making their attacks or their parries (half the penalty in the case of a parry: thus a character at full penalty parries at -3, while a character who has bought it up as much as they can parries at -1), then weapon counts as one degree more robust: a normal weapon is Beam-Hardened, and a Beam-Hardened weapon is Beam-Immune.  This represents presenting the best surfaces when parrying or making attacks to minimize damage to the weapon at the risk of failing completely.  I arrived at the numbers by treating it like a Neurolash Ward Parry (which I should extend to an attack as well!) which should be -2 to hit and -1 to parry, and added an additional layer of -4/-2 on it, which is the equivalent of making an All-Out Dodge, All-Out Attack or Telegraphic attack to eliminate.

I think this would give a cyberninja with a ceramic vibro-katana a decent chance of fighting against a space knight: they have the skills necessary to preserve their blade, and if they don't, the worst that is likely to happen is a damaged weapon at some point during the fight, rather than guaranteed weapon destruction like the simpler form of rules result in, or tedious multi-rolls that the rest of GURPS demands.

We can also extend this to the rest of melee weapon breakage rules: if you parry an attack that does more than a certain amount of damage (such as parrying a blaster rifle shot, or a giant mutant's mecha-tetsubo) or when you wield a weapon to do too much damage (a psychometabolic character with super-human ST who power-blows with their ceramic katana) can also use these rules to allow weapon damage or breakage to remain a potential danager, without slowing the game down or requiring additional rolls.