Naked Steel and Ambition Part 1: Gripping a blade in bare hands?

Would you ever grab a sharp blade with your bare hands?

When an armored knight faces another armored knight, rarely does it resemble the battles so often depicted in film and television. Penetrating metal armor with a metal weapon is a near impossibility. Fortunately, as Martial Arts states, the fighting manuals from the 14th and 15th centuries have the answer to how you would use a sword to deal with an armored man.

There are two alternate grip styles that are common in these manuals. One is called Halfswording, which involves putting one's off hand on the blade of the sword, converting it into a short-ranged spear that can target gaps in armor or smash the target with the pommel, or be wrapped around the target for grappling. This is simulated by the Defensive Grip rules in Martial Arts.

The other is called the Battering Point, and it involves putting both hands on the blade of the sword, and swinging the entire thing as a mace, or as a pick, using the sharpened crossguard or the pommel as an impact surface to wound the target through their armor. As far as I know, there are no rules for this in Martial Arts. It is referenced obliquely, but no rules are given for employing it.

At this point, you may be thinking, merely from watching and looking at this, something along the lines of "How in God's name do they not cut themselves?" Or perhaps  "Surely they must have been wearing gloves, or wearing gauntlets?" Indeed, Martial Arts is no different - at two points it subscribes to the belief that doing this is somehow ill-advised. Performing a Choke Hold with an edged weapon, by wrapping it around their neck in the half-sword grip, requires a DX roll, the consequences for failure being thrust cutting damage to the wielder's own hands (Martial Arts, p69). The description for the Hook technique implies that any sane user would be wearing gauntlets to attempt to grasp the blade as described in the fighting manuals. The general omission of rules for the blade-holding grip also strike me as a result of the incredulity this concept faces from those of us who have never studied knightly martial arts. This idea must surely be fanciful, ludicrous, or insanely dangerous, so many people have told me.

Sad to say, these people are wrong. Edged weapons are not lightsabers - they do not cut from simply being in contact. The principle can be understood if you've ever cleaned a combat knife, or even if you've ever cut bread or an undercooked steak - simply pressing on the meat or bread does not cut it, it crushes it. It is the lateral motion of slicing, or sawing, or hewing that causes damage, not simply being in contact with the edge.

The secret to this, in real life, is as simple as gripping the blade like a guitar. Grip with the fingers and flat of the palm, and grip firmly, so the sword does not slide around in your hands, and you have a grip that will never cut you. 

There could be some argument that a slip-up in this condition could be dangerous, and could cut your hand. But could any injury sustained from the blade simply moving along your hand really take you out of the fight? I doubt any such injury would be worth more than a single point of damage. When adrenaline is going, a mere cut on your hand is a small price to pay for the tactical flexibility these stances and grips give you.

I feel that fighting manuals would not continually depict this kind of grip if it was at all dangerous to an experienced user. It's certainly no more dangerous than holding an edged weapon by the hilt is, which already places the user at risk regardless of where his hands are. The slew of accidents, minor and not so minor, that anyone who works around knives can attest to, is certainly proof of that. You could drop a sharp weapon and injure yourself, or even fall atop it, yet GURPS doesn't ask you to make a DX roll to avoid impaling yourself if you fall down while holding a weapon. Such catastrophic self-injury is best reserved for critical failures to begin with.

The fixes here are quite simple, and actually make things less complex.

-Self-injury is impossible if a character trying a blade-gripping technique or stance has combat skills and familiarity with the weapon in question. Do away with all references to it.

-At the GM's option, if a character has no combat skills or is unfamiliar with a given weapon and has a hand on the blade of any sort, roll a DX check after each combat turn in which the character used the sword to parry or attack. Failure means 1 point of cutting damage to the hand. Palm armor protects normally. This can add up over time (consider crippling the hand if aggregated injury exceeds HP/3), making halfswording for a complete novice a bad idea.

In the next post on Naked Steel and Ambition, we'll cover the two types of grip and how to make them more true to the 15th century armored combat paradigm in GURPS rules. Until then, may your hand feel nothing but firm steel!