Editing Sword (section)

== Dissection of swords in battle == 
Because swords are so versatile, it's best to go over a few of their various benefits to the user and why they're so commonly used:

*'''Balance:''' To start off, most combat swords have their center of mass near the handle. This means you have much better control over their movement than with any other weapon, able to stop it or change the movement angle much faster. However this same balance has a double edge, thanks to their good balance a sword can't hit as hard as an unbalanced weapon since you have less weight and mass at the point of impact. It's why relatively untrained axemen and halberds are still a strong threat, the heavy weight of the head means that when you hit, you hit hard, even if it is hard to change your blow's speed or angle and it's why swordsmen need more training than with other weapons.

*'''Defense:''' Swords also offer more protection than most other weapons - most swords are one handed, so it's easy to use a shield with most types. You can also use them to parry other weapons if you're really desperate, however parrying anything but another sword is generally difficult and/or dangerous. Spears, pole-arms, and other weapons designed for thrusting (including some swords) are hard to parry, weapons that have gathered huge momentum, such as axes or maces, would have a high chance of damaging either your weapon or your hand, or throwing you off your balance and flails (at full speed) can hardly be parried at all, but that's to be expected given it's their main shtick. However the sword shines in attacking first before they build up the momentum which the sword's superior agility can allow. Or, if you are skilled enough, you can try to redirect their momentum so their weapon misses you instead of parrying it head-on with your edge and then counter-attack while they are trying to recover. Most swords also usually include crossguards to protect the hands of anybody using them unlike... pretty much every other common weapon.

*'''Training Time:''' One of the worst things about swords, they require more skill than most other close combat weapons, and while untrained militiamen with spears, halberds, or axes still could be a threatening foes, untrained men with swords possess a danger mainly to themselves. While high skill floor is a definite disadvantage, skill ceiling with a sword fighting is also much higher than with most other weapons, meaning if you can dump a lot of time into training sword, that training would give you more result - one more reason for it to be a staple weapon of warrior/noble classes in most culture. Additionally, a sword is just a sharp metal stick with a handle, so if you manage to master it, most of the core swordsmanship skills and martial art basics in general transfer well to other long, shafted weapons like axes, spears and quarterstaves, if you decide to train in using them.

*'''Space:''' One-handed swords require much less space to build momentum, so you can effectively use them in a tight shoulder-to-shoulder formation (unlike axes, maces and hammers), even two-handed swords will usually have a Ricasso (an unsharpened part of the blade immediately above the crossguard) which can be used to allow them to fight better in close quarters and even if they don't, they still don't require nearly as much space as great axes or two-handed warhammers and if you're really hard pressed (let's say somebody comes at you in armor), a fighting technique of the time was to just hold your sword by the blade and just clobber your opponent with the guard (a German technique called "mordhau" meaning "murder stroke"). Or you could hold the sword in the middle (even though it's sharp, it's okay if you use gloves; it's called half-swording) and use it like a makeshift short spear, doing quick jabs with its point or trying to wrestle your opponent to the ground by using your sword as a lever. All of these are fairly good techniques for very close quarters combat, and can be seen in historical manuals (yes, ''manuals'').

*'''Availability and Reliability:''' Swords ran the gamut between very cheap and very expensive, more so than pretty much any other weapon of the time. Using England in the middle ages as an example, a sword could cost between 3 pence and thousands of pounds. A line archer made 3 pence a day on average while a professional archer made around 10. This means that the cheapest of swords were extremely affordable for pretty much anyone who actually needed them (remember, mythical beasts didn't tend to run around in real life), even if the sword was of lower quality it was still a tool of war and useable. Depending on the period of time and region, swords were legally made "nobility only" weapons of status, though in practice many people got around this through rule lawyering, most commonly by simply calling a particular type of sword a "big knife." Fun-fact: the rapier (commonly thought of as a nobility-only dueling sword) was an extremely common back-up weapon for soldiers.

*'''Lethality:''' How a sword kills is entirely dependent on the type of sword that it is (this will be covered more later). The main types of damage they inflict could be divided into three categories:
:*''Slashing'' deals huge, extremely painful and bleeding wounds. The pain alone would incapacitate most foes, leaving them to the finishing blow, and if you didn't finish them, they would just bleed to death in a matter of minutes. It's effective against opponents with partial armor, prevalent through most of the history, as limb hits are just as painful and lethal as body hits, and limbs are usually more exposed, and if your opponent happen to have no chest piece, disemboweling becomes a nice effective option. Two main issues with slashing is that pretty much any armor renders it completely useless, and that opponents with high enough pain tolerance (Berzerkers and Mameluks did it through painkiller drugs) can continue fighting for minutes even with their lethal wounds, taking their killers (and likely more poor bastards) with them.
:*''Stabs'' from a sword on the on the other hand can be instantly fatal since if you hit someone pretty much anywhere on the torso you are almost guaranteed to hit an organ that's full of blood like a liver or a kidney, and then have the blood pour out of the big hole you just made in them. The issue with stabs is if your opponent wears any kind of metal armor on his torso (like all soldiers worth their salt before the age of the musketeer), your stabs generally cannot do shit unless you manage to get that sharp point between the gaps between the plates. Another issue with stabs is that they lack in stopping power, and while they're considerably more immediately lethal than any other attacking move other than chopping the head off, they're not ''instantly'' lethal, so they guy you've just impaled on your sword still have few seconds to take you with him if he's angry, crazy or high enough.
:*''Half-swording'', or grabbing your sword by the blade and stabbing it at the enemy like a spear. It may seem utterly retarded at first, and you need a bit of practice not to cut off your fingers, but works surprisingly well against armoured opponent. If you encounter an enemy in full plate, chain-mail, or a fully padded gamberson, you'd better forget about hitting him with a blade, as it would only serve to damage your weapon, as swords don't cut through metal well. Like at all. You'd be far better with ''bashing'' him with a pommel with a related half-swording technique known as "mordhau" (German for "deathblow"). Alternatively called Mordstreich or Mordschlag, it consists of holding your sword by the blade with both hands while the pommel is facing forward, and bashing your enemy with a pommel or a cross-guard like a makeshift mace or warhammer respectively. A good tactic would be using the mordhau to either beat your armored opponent senseless (assuming your sword doesn't have a sharpened crossguard to pierce stressed metal like a pickax) or snag his leg by the crossguard and pull to trip him before flipping the blade and half-swording it to stab into any gaps in their armor such as joints or the neck. The two techniques were infamous to the point that swordsmanship manuals had whole pages dedicated to countering half-swording and mordhau techniques. By the end of the Medieval period, when plate became widespread, pommels and cross guards became arguably more important than the blade itself, especially if you want to [[Meme|End Him Rightly]]. And if you hold your sword with the main hand on the handle and the off-hand on the blade close to the tip you get a short spear or a dagger with a very long handle, that you can jam between the plates of your opponent's armor. It was also a good way to use the Zweihander against pike and halberd formations: You used the long blade to cast the pikes aside, and when you're inside the ranks you switch to half-swording and started slashing and stabbing around.
:*"Chopping" is more common in axes, but the element is still present in some swords. The chopping value of a heavy, weighted sword allows it to slice through tissue and bone, cutting off part or all or a limb or neck. In areas with plentiful armour, this feature is less effective and therefore less common. However, warm areas such as Southeast Asia have machete-like blades intended to do just that.