How effective is a mace against unarmored or lightly armored targets...

How effective is a mace against unarmored or lightly armored targets? If you bap a peasant in the chest with one what sort of injury would you expect to see?

Take a quick think about the human skeleton, then get back to us with what YOU think.

I dunno, tissue damage and a shattered sternum?

more like death

I suppose it depends on what you mean by a "bap."

Suffice to say, the object in question was designed with the express purpose of breaking stuff, and does it quite well.

I feel like you'd have a better chance of surviving a hit from a mace than getting run through with a sword brand sword.

It's lethal. I'm not really sure, but I think a horrible gash from a sword on an unarmoured person would be worse than broken bones, should someone escape, so I might put swords on top for peasant killing, but a mace on an unarmoured person is still gonna fuck em up.

Good solid hit.

Maybe, but a sword can glance off of bone, or just bounce if you fuck it up bad enough with your swing.

With a mace, if they don't stop it from hitting them, they WILL be getting fucked up.

Alright, makes sense. RIP peasant.

And I feel like you would not be capable of fighting back much and out of combat if either hit you.

Also, getting run through by a sword is apparently not quite as instantly lethal as one would believe.

Keep in mind that when you shatter a bone, it doesn't stay in place. Where do those bits of sternum go? Peasant has a lot of important stuff right behind it.

Stick and stones may break my bones
But club and mace will stretch your ass

Could easily mean a broken rib leading to a punctured lung. Could mean internal bleeding. Pneumothorax. Loads of shit could happen.

Yeah, no argument there. You're out of the game with either option.

Unless you're a dire peasant.

Sternum breaks. Very likely crush or impale his lungs and heart.

Or her. If it's a girl peasant.

But you shouldn't hit the chest on a girl peasant, aim for the legs so they can't run, then put them in the Sexy Loot Pile to go in the Sexy Fun Treasure Hoard.

People usually aren't very attentive lovers if they have a pair of broken femurs.

Well they're more attentive than if they had a broken heart or broken lungs

You don't have to hit a woman full strength, just enough to let her know who's boss. As she convalesces, Stockholm Syndrome virtually guarantees she'll fall in love with you too.

Martials can cast Charm Person too

>maces are stronger against armor than against unarmored people
I never understood this. They shouldn't be "stronger", they should just be less weak. Doing 5 damage to a Peasant but 6 to a knight because he wears armor is dumb. It should do 4 to the knight, while a sword that does 5 to a Peasant should do 3 to a knight, or only do damage on an accurate or a critical hit if the armor is really good. The tradeoff is swords being way quicker and often having more reach.

As for OP's question: That there peasant would be killed pretty darn dead. Bop a guy in the chest with a good swing of your pic and you'll cave the entire thing in, destroying or damaging half of the poor sod's internal organs in the process. With a sword it'll take a while to bleed out and won't do much to bones unless it's Dragonslayer-Tier huge, making it way too heavy to use, but a mace will just straight up kill you with very little chance of medical recovery, even in modern times. It's way harder to remove a billion pieces of bone splinters from perforated organs and then remodel the entire sternum, all while trying to make sure the patient doesn't die on the spot due to heart injury, internal bleeding or failing to breathe using his new Swiss cheese lung, than it is to close up a nice clean stab or slash.

They're not stronger on armored people vs. unarmored, they're stronger on armored people vs. a sword.

That's okay then. I'm just kinda damaged in regards to this question thanks to a guy I know.

Only if they're over 5'10.

Basically any medieval weapon is heinously lethal against lightly armored/unarmored targets.

It's just that rpg mechanics generally don't go for high lethality.

Think about it. A not uncommon cause of death for a normal person involves falling over and hitting their head. On the ground.

When someone actually swings something with full force and a focused striking surface at us we get seriously messed up.

Remember that a mace is only a "blunt weapon" in videogames, it's pretty fucking pointy. It'll crack your head open like an egg or absolutely maul whatever soft tissue it connects with, and break bones like nothing.

But the average rpg doesn't exactly bother with realistic consequences of getting your collarbone broken or your sternum shattered.

this
A sword is actually really shit against most kinds of real armour. Maces and warhammers are LESS shit, not magical can openers.

A realistic combat scenario involving using a mace or warhammer against someone with plate armor basically revolves around ringing his bell until he falls over and your mates pull his helmet off and stabs him in the mouth. It does NOT involve making big holes in his armour, at least not with anything you can throw at him one-handed. Some burly peasant windmill slamming the fluke of a halberd or the beak of a poleaxe into the thinner armour on the limbs on the other hand might very well accomplish that.

Remember that the helmet is the thickest piece of armour. The best way of defeating it is to remove it, even the pick side on a warhammer is unlikely to make holes in anything but the thinner armour pieces like on the arms, you used the hammer side and tried to pound the poor guy senseless so that you could rondel-fuck him in the eyehole once he stopped moving around as much.


The average rpg is basically greatly underplaying how effective armour is, and how easy you are to kill without it.

A mace isn't that powerful, you'll do a lot of damage but you wouldn't cave in someone's chest.

Dude, it's basically a metal baseball bat with the weight more optimized for killing a fucker and pointy bits at the end for cracking hard things like BONES.

Have you ever contemplated what a metal bat can do to a person?

You can crack someone's sternum and break ribs with a fucking carpenters hammer. A mace has a longer shaft, a pointier striking surface and more weight in the head than that hammer.

Unless the person you're hitting is a space marine, you can absolutely cave in someone's chest. Is it realistic for that to happen in a combat scenario? Not really. Unless the guy has both hands in the air and is running right into your swing.

Maybe with have different ideas on what cave in means.

Well I'm assuming that it means pushing in the surface you're hitting.

Not flattening a persons entire torso. Because you know. That would be really stupid. And kinda tricky to do with something smaller than a car.

A mace wouldn't punch that far into a persons chest, its pretty broad and the flanges are more for grip than penetration.

>more for grip
flanged for her pleasure?

In general a mace is a pretty shitty weapon. Force is distributed across the flanges that, in effect, work like a bunch of different, blunt blades. The advantages are durability and heft. The mace can be used to strike hard, careless blows repeatedly without suffering damage. When fighting someone with armor you won't be able to cut, the added mass makes for a desirable alternative to a lighter weapon as well.

Striking the chest with a swing from the wrist would cause bruising and possibly compression cuts. Getting the hips and rest of the arm into it could swing hard enough to break the ribs. A powerful enough swing could drive the broken ribs into vital organs or blood vessels and cause death.

In general though, you wouldn't do that. You'd land a glancing blow or onto the arms because people defend themselves, and when you go for the heavy, unbalanced swing the mace demands you get stabbed and die.

So the mace is best used from horseback, when you have armor. Saves your sword from abuse and it's a good choice for swinging down after you are among unmounted foes following a charge with a lance.

So this is what you can do with a normal framing type hammer, the kind you usually find in a normal persons toolbox is about 20 ounces and the handle around 12 inches.

A flanged mace, with a hollow handle, can easily be over 50 ounces, most of which will be in the head, with a handle that can sit in the 24-30 inch region.

I'll let you guys think a bit about those numbers.

At the end of the day there is a reason knights before longswords/poleaxes carried both an arming sword and a mace or warhammer.

They are better at different things. That said warhammers are much cooler than maces.

...

DELETE THIS

Hammer has smaller striking surface. It should deliver more powerful blows to smaller area.

Except the flanges of the mace are narrower, and powered by the comparatively much greater weight and swing speed.

It'd fuckin hurt and kill you maybe I reckon

>I don't know what I'm talking about

A mace isn't a giant flat bit of steel hitting you. It has points all over the place to concentrate the hit into. Did you even look at the OP?

They help connect the hit with armor. It was an improvement over old smooth headed maces.
>much greater swing speed
This is not how physics works.

>This is not how physics works.

Yes it is you fucking retard, a longer handle translates into higher velocities at the business end. It's why polearms were king once people started wearing plate, they weren't outrageously heavy, they didn't need to be since the longer haft gave the weapons a much higher impact speed.

For the same reason a mace with a 30 inch handle is going to hit you at a higher speed than a hammer with a 12 inch handle.

>It has points all over the place to concentrate the hit into
You really don't know what you are talking about. Force is delivered through ribs or wings.

Can you at least fucking look at the picture in the op. Whatever you want to call the flanges, they have points.

>a longer handle
>polearms
Show me where we mentioned handle, retard.
And to the contrary of your idiocity, polehammer was a well-known weapon. Polemace is from realm of your fantasy.

>Force is delivered through ribs or wings.
right, but those wings taper into points for a reason.

Do you think if they were rounded and not pointed it wouldn't be any different?

>ITT: people argue that getting hit by a mace isn't that bad, even though people get killed by baseball accidents, falling over, and get their ribs broken by punches and their heads cracked by hammers all the fucking time.

Jesus guys, it's a fucking weapon, it's going to fuck you up. D&D rules knowledge does not actually translate directly into functional knowledge about injuries.

Handle was mentioned in the fucking post you replied to with your idiocy, where it was compared to that of the hammer, that you tried to argue was more dangerous because hurdidurr smaller striking surface.

And I never once mentioned a polemace (even though a morgenstern is pretty much that), I was making a point about longer handles translating into higher impact speeds you moron.

If you can crack someones' head open with a 20oz hammer with a 12 inch handle, a 50oz mace with a 24 inch handle is going to push your shit in catastrophically.

>muh flanged mace versus modern toolbox hammer
No point arguing against idiot like you

what.

you are aware that the original point was that a carpenters hammer should "deliver more powerful blows to a smaller area"

Flanged mace like in your pic? You probably break skin, maybe dig the head into their flesh and rip some out (they are designed to bite into armour in a similiar manner) and you probably break a bunch of shit.

Most other things people call a "mace"? You could break bones with enough effort, but your more likely going to fiercely bruise them, cause a shitload of pain, and knock the wind out of them. Bare in mind that round headed maces and basically anything that didn't "bite" are chosen as policing weapons throughout history and even in modern times specifically because they were less likely to kill. Blackjacks, tonfa, the japanese jutte, and modern nightstick are all maces, and in many western cultures the mace/scepter became a symbol of authority and law.

The preconception of maces being universal anti-armor weapons seems to come exclusively from the flanged mace, which strikes with force at one of many smaller surface areas to compound the force. It's easier to consider them cool-ass radial warhammers.

Take a metal pole, smack yourself in the head with it

Remember that most weapons portrayed as "bludgeoning" in roleplay games really work by piercing or stabbing into armor, its just that instead of being used with a thrust like stabbing with a sword or spear, you get all the extra omph of momentum with a swing. Warhammers and all that shit mostly used the pointy bits they always came with, with the flatter bits just being a less pointy gauge of pointyness.

Real armor was typically reinforced with padding to cusion blows and permit some dampening, allowing armor to recoil, dampen, and deflect. On top of that, people often seem to take for granted that humans are endoskeletal, and thus are REALLY, REALLY resistant to blunt force. Sure, enough energy can make stuff snap or rupture inside of us, but bare in mind that exoskeletal creatures can be dramatically killed by relatively insagnificant blunt forces- a tarantuala will straight up explode if you drop it from like three times it's height off the ground, whereas a person falling three person lengths is ussually pissed off and bruised, but they don't explode.

What I'm saying is that giant man-sized spiders are probably just as afraid of a good punch as you are of being hit by a scimitar cut to the stomach, and that one day I hope to see men fistfighting genetically enlarged arthopods on television. Also something about maces I guess.

>a person falling three person lengths is ussually pissed off and bruised

It's enough for a bad landing to break bones and joints.

Skulls if it's bad enough.

>A realistic combat scenario involving using a mace or warhammer against someone with plate armor basically revolves around ringing his bell until he falls over and your mates pull his helmet off and stabs him in the mouth. It does NOT involve making big holes in his armour, at least not with anything you can throw at him one-handed.
This is actually the winning strategy for sword in armor as well. All the half-sword stabbing action is just a credible distraction to work toward the goal of punching him in the head with your pommel until you can knock him over and stab him in the face.

>Remember that most weapons portrayed as "bludgeoning" in roleplay games really work by piercing or stabbing into armor
I think you're missing the point of the pointy bits. They're not there explicitly to picture or damage armor, they're there to bite in and keep the blow from being deflected. They sell function by percussion despite the points/flanges .

>a tarantuala will straight up explode if you drop it from like three times it's height off the ground,
What, really ?

But not explode

I don't think I missed that. I think I explicitly said that in my earlier post. The defensive benefit of rigid armors were their deflective properties first and foremost. The fact that a strike head on a "bludgeoning" weapon operated on a modified version of the principle of a piercing weapon in order to get that first bite is what I was getting at.

Imagine trying to smack somebody wearing plate with a hammer with a wide, totally flat strike surface, it's just not going to work the same on that person. In fact, if you didn't follow through with something like that on a soft target, it may well be significantly less lethal than a propper warhammer of similiar mass because the wider distribution of force.

Like the snowshoe principle. It's just distribution and effieciency of energy.

Even if you are joking that's still pretty tasteless.

Even one that's intended to be wieldy and snappy is still about that heavy, and will break bones readily.

And even a sturdy kid can kill a grown man by hitting them in the head with a stick or baseball bat.

>pound the poor guy senseless so that you could rondel-fuck him in the eyehole

Oxygen air levels aren't the only reasons Arthopods don't grow too big no more user. Size/weight ratio does funny things when your skin is like an eggshell and you don't have bones.

once you're dead does it really matter if one weapon kills you more dead?
A good hit with even just a stout branch can be fatal. Any purpose built weapn is just going to fuck you up in one way or another.

Why don't we have rocket-propelled maces for anti-tank weapons? Seems like they would be cheaper than whatever the fuck goes into making a LAW

The big thing with bladed sharp stuff isn't so much that it's a more dead killy weapon when they wound somebody versus whacking them with a 2x4 and wounding them, it's that it's easier to wound somebody with a blade. If I apply one pound of pressure on your stomach with a mace, you're going to ask me not to do that. If I do that with a sword, I have inserted a sword into you.

Killing humans has two metagames: least amount of effort and distance.

Spear, gun, drone tac strike.

we basically do. Though they're Sabot rounds shot out of a tanks gun.
But the fundamentals of how they deal with arnour are the same.