The "Shields Shall Be Splintered" rules by Brian Murphy are popular amongst OSR bloggers. Basically the player's shield is splintered apart in battle before they are defeated. A nice simple rule that provides for more character longevity... but really one that's more cinematic than historic in origin.
Here's some footage of the Samurai Kanabō a weapon designed for breaking armour being used against a Viking Shield and a Spartan Shield with the user going all out trying to break the shields.
This is why I don't use the Shields Shall Be Splintered rules in my own games. :)
Go to 05:55 in the video to see the part about Shields.
6 comments:
I love that the first thing that I hear when I start that video is "Deploy attack bot!"
I like when he says "zero damage".
thanks for the video.
If I heard correctly, they said the Viking shield was meant to be more ablative and prone to come apart than the Spartan, so maybe with that kind of technology splintering shields is realistic after all...
@Roger: More than the Spartan shield, yes. That's not the same as splintering left right and centre. You saw it take the hit from the Kanabō. That guy wanted that shield to splinter into a cloud of toothpicks really badly and it didn't.
Deadliest Warrior was a lot better than I was expecting, thanks for sharing.
As I recall the quasi-historical evidence to back up the Shields Shall Be Splintered rule was that Vikings would carry three shields into a duel expecting them to be splintered.
We see in the video that the viking shield is rendered useless after that one swing. Not wooden shrapnel but still useless for further hits. It seems like you could very easily adapt the Splintered rule to apply to bucklers/targe only. Just a thought.
What the club-wielder is skipping is the Viking or Spartan spears. If you run up and try to baseball smash somebody's shield you're likely to get skewered.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixm6sXe1TYE
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