> And the reason I poo-pooed it was that David Dunham
> had convinced me that
> "Close Combat" is the ability to hurt people -
> that's all it does. So what
> if you are hurting them with a long pointy thing or
> a short heavy one?
FWIW (maybe not much), a couple of points here.
"Swords" campaign: we're all Humakti, it can be a bit combat-heavy. No-one's ever even discussed the CC bit of the rules, though other bits have been discussed and HQ-like house rules adopted. As far as we're concerned, it isn't "broken". (And most of our concerns with other bits of rules have been that they make our PCs *too* powerful: mini-maxers we're not!) We have passionate IC debates about the mythic sigificance of swords against other weapons, but then just use CC in OOC statements without bothering to specify what weapon we're using.
In my (non-expert) experience with competitive steel combat (blunted weapons, all blows pulled), general CC ability is vastly more important than experience with a particular weapon type.
Experience in *facing* a particular weapon type is often more relevant than experience in *using* one: ("he's armed with a two-ended axe? He's spinning it? What the **** do I do against that???"). General CC ability *might* say "against a two-ended weapon, use a shield, if you block the centre of the weapon you can trap it." Choosing your weapon combination depending on what you're facing is all part of CC.
And experience with using *that* particular weapon would also count for about a +/- 2 modifier: my sword, (32" blade, 3 lbs, balance point 3" in front of guard), handles completely differently from that of a friend (29" blade, 2.5 lbs, balance point at about 2"). It would take me a while to use a different sword with confidence. A more experienced fighter would adapt faster. But having rules for this would be silly. Unless you're going to get down to a ridiculous level of simulationist detail, the current CC rules work.
That being said, all other new rules mentioned for HQ have seemed to be intelligent improvements, and I'll believe that these follow the same pattern until proved otherwise. The proof of the pudding will be in the hitting (or something like that).
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