okay new social experiment reblog and put in the tags what kind of weapon you were convinced you were meant to wield when you were younger and what it changed to later. for me it was a bow and arrow to metal gauntlets
went from bowstaff as a kid to spear or another polearm
i still like the shaft length for reach and double edged attack frequency but having a blade on one or both ends definitely helps
However if we’re talking weapons for self defense instead of for open battle, then my answer changed from a sword to a reinforced kyteshield made from modern materials.
Shoutouts to the YouTube channel Shadiversity for convincing me on how useful shields are, even in this day and age.
I mean just look at what riot gear looks like and now try to tell me shields and armor aren’t a thing anymore. You can’t? Thought so!
Encyclopedic polearm typology from Gary Gygax’s “Appendix T: The Nomenclature of Polearms” in Unearthed Arcana, TSR, 1985 – ten years after hisStrategic Reviewarticle, 7 years after listing all these names in the Players Handbook without explaining what he meant. Still no picture of the Bohemian earspoon, but his text describes it as a variant partisan.
Encyclopedic polearm typology from Gary Gygax’s “Appendix T: The Nomenclature of Polearms” in Unearthed Arcana, TSR, 1985 – ten years after hisStrategic Reviewarticle, 7 years after listing all these names in the Players Handbook without explaining what he meant. Still no picture of the Bohemian earspoon, but his text describes it as a variant partisan.
Because polearms are so woefully underrated in the tabletop world.
Proposed quirky villain squad naming theme: that one equipment table from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition that’s literally nothing but increasingly obscure medieval French polearms.
My five greatest warriors: Glaive, Guisarme, Ranseur, Voulge… and Bill
They occasionally bond into one giant warrior with a monstrosity of a compound name.
They can combine in various grotesquely hyphenated configurations. Oddly, Glaive-Guisarme has a completely different personality from Guisarme-Glaive.
For the benefit of those who’ve asked for context, here are the main weapon tables from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition:
Many of the statistics that appear here may be unfamiliar to players of the game’s current iteration; this is because, the protestations of certain vocal critics notwithstanding, the edition history of Dungeons & Dragons is not that of one game, but of half a dozen completely different games in a trenchcoat.
(And that half a dozen is a conservative estimate; Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition is arguably either the third or fourth major revision of D&D, depending on how you count!)
More to the point, however, one should require no familiarity with the particulars of 1st Edition to notice that, of the forty-odd weapons represented in these tables, twenty are polearms of some description: the bardiche, bec de corbin, bill-guisarme, fauchard, fauchard-fork, fork (military), glaive, glaive-guisarme, guisarme, guisarme-voulge, halberd, hammer (lucern), lance, partisan, pike (awl), ranseur, spear, spetum, trident and voulge. Indeed, fully 10% of all weapons for which statistics are given consist of combinations of the guisarme with various other polearms.
(One may also note that, in spite of indicating that the bill hook should use the same statistics as a guisarme, a combination guisarme/bill hook is given its own separate stat line. I’m not 100% sure what that’s about.)
