Unpopular opinions thread

but you see lad, since they developed the whole body armor that registers hits, they started doing those all out HEMA fights, the guys who will show up dual wielding get their asses whooped consistently by things like those boring two-handed longswords.
Dual wielding was more of a ritual/showoff thing if you mean dual wielding two long arms. It's impractical. And it triggers me a lot, when guys who seen like one movie when a guy flips two katanas, or their dad bought them a kukri for Christmas they will start inserting their shit to every roleplay setting regardless of historical accuracy/decorum/reason. There is a reason why it's a meme, cause those peeps are everywhere, they are obnoxious and we all more or less can relate.
Then again, you may call it wrongfunning, but we got one guy in our medieval europe setting who flips two katanas for no storytelling reason and the GM told him off for it. This guy also happens to use those long words and modulate his voice and generally be quite obnoxious

Sounds like a furfag problem more than a kukri problem. I almost never see people talk about kukris. I'm more of a claymore guy myself but a kukri isn't anywhere near as overhyped and overexposed than a katana.

I don't like mindless undead. I think undead should always be sentient, though some species can be feral and single-minded. They are *people* who came back wrong, and more often than not are suffering because of it.
This means the more lucid species of undead may have the potential to be redeemed by their own choice, but forcing the dead to work for you is always Evil no matter the purpose.
Undead should never be fluffed as mere animated objects or disposable conjurations entirely under a spellcaster's control. Raising the dead should be a taboo for a reason. At the very least, you should ASK THEM if they want to rest in peace or not.
I don't want your fedora-tipping fantasy where a Lawful Good necromancer can walk into town, raise a legion of skeletons from the local graveyard, have them build an orphanage, and no one bats an eye except the mean bigoted church.

Aside from the fact that using two katanas was of different lenght, actually, historical, that dagger and sword was a thing in the whole of europe and that every chinese weapon is meant to be used in pair, so much that if you have no shield and only one weapon the first thing you want to do is using your scabbard as an improvised weapon; this "dual wielding was ritual" bullshit is a lie and not much else. There have been soldiers, warriors, and whatever using weapons in pairs since fucking forever, it just wasn't prominent on battlefields, because of A) standardized weaponry and B) you want a shield for all those hits that are going to arrive from every direction.
... Also I fail to see how you can't use pommel strikes with two weapons. The Hook Sword was basically crafted with hilt attacks in mind, and is a traditionally paired weapon.
The thing about HEMA is aneddotical, and anyway, the only thing that proves is that using one weapon is easier than using two. European fighting stiles were not the only thing in history.

>but we got one guy in our medieval europe setting who flips two katanas for no storytelling reason and the GM told him off for it. This guy also happens to use those long words and modulate his voice and generally be quite obnoxious

>someone is going off-setting!
>DUAL WIELDING IS CLEARLY BAD!
Don't let your rage cloud your mind, Anakin.

What if they're animated emotionless dead outwardly, but inside they're a tortured soul screaming for escape they're not being allowed to have? Which is generally how I see it in traditional fantasy stuff.

Or, the way it works in the homebrew I'm working on, the life energy has to come from somewhere so creating undead requires equal sacrifice. So a necromancers lair always ends up a barren wasteland bereft of life because he sucked it all up to create skeleton minions?

>2nd Kraut Chimpout
first one better be the Thirty Years War, because WW1 was a Serb Chimpout

The main reason would simply be cultural significance.
When a samurai, who at their height were practically just a country wide SWAT force more than anything, came into town, they'd be carrying their katanas and talking about how their katana represented that they were an honorable samurai and could fuck people up with them, so all the commoners who had never seen a fight, as well as future samurai, glorified the weapon that they DID see instead of the one they didn't.

Imagine if every soldier you ever saw open carried around a Desert Eagle, they were the only ones allowed to have them, and they never really talked about the M16s. You'd eventually figure that soldiers literally went out there and fought with D.Eagle pistols instead of rifles and the gunslinger tropes from the wild west would live on.

I think HEMA is not anecdotal at all desu. I think the thing about a controlled environment, where people of similar skill level can square off against each other using different weapons and the blows delivered can be measured, it gets bit more scientific than you'd say.

Also, there is a part in my post where I mention using two long arms as a silly idea. Long arm and a short arm is absolutely legit and I never spoke against it.

Pretty much all real-life fighting styles that involve dual wielding have you use two different weapons, though. Typically, you used a sword in your dominant hand and a smaller weapons in your offhand. Common example is sword + parrying dagger. About the only time you could use two identical weapons would be if you fought with two daggers, since they're light enough that you can ueasily use one in each hand (but dual-wielding daggers isn't very pracitical on an actual battlefield). The idea is that that while it's pretty hard to swim a full-sized sword with your offhand, having a lighter weapon in your offhand lets you use it to parry the enemy's blows or harass them with it.

Medium dual is ok as well. Dual Dao, dueal hatchets. Of course, a ""one and an half"" weapon like a longsword (barely) or a Katana is not going to be paired with another of the same lenght.
And I could say that in my martial arts classes, this doesn't really happen. It is anectodal because it is about one singular controlled enviroment and its way of teaching, not every one of them.
HEMA has done this operation of revamping the mith of europian swordfighting- which is perfectly valid, and pretty interesting as well. I won't call it superior to say, Chinese swordsmanship, but I wouldn't do the opposite as well cause both are two different things that evolved in different context and with different needs.
Most chinese weapons can be paired. Of course. most chinese weapons are not really long- no Dao technique ever teaches you to grab the hilt in both hands. Same with chinese axes and round-head hammers- pretty small weaponry that evolved from a farming context.

Sure, that works. In some editions of D&D it's impossible to resurrect someone whose body is currently an undead creature, so that may be the reason. Your setting's fluff makes sense too.
Basically if there's no meaningful difference between raising a skeleton to sweep floors and just enchanting the broom directly, I'd prefer you didn't have spells to create undead in your setting at all.

WW1 was absolutely a kraut chimpout are you serious?

>Okay serbs if you don't give us all this shit we're going to blow the hell out of Belgrade
>Sure, have all this shit
>Alright well we're still going to blow the hell out of Belgrade

>France and Russia have mobilized their troops but moved them away from the German border so as to avoid provoking further escalation
>Well since German doctrine revolves around striking first I guess we've got ourselves some further escalation.

I like dual wielding in some settings and frames, but I wish there was a way to implement fighting techniques into RPGs that is practical. Sadly, every attempt at this I've seen so far has been too autistic, broken or plain unfun for the GM. Really, do no rpg writers rver think of the fucking GM that has to use this shit for groups of characters? Having dozens of options might be fun if you control your player character, but it's fucking shitty to GM with.

Battlemaster in DnD5E,as far as DnD is involved, gives you a degree of customization of your attacks. Systems with a way to make Called Shots sometimes develop mechanics about them as well- say, playing a Manhunter in Rogue Trader- and they work in melee too. I heard that Legend of the Five Rings has some deep rules on Duels, but i never played it so I can't speak about how it works and if it refers to actual strikes.

>zey are not katahnas, zey arr messers

I still don't get all the hype the messers get.
It is a curved sword. Pretty long, fro two handed use. So is a Katana, a Dadao, a Nandao, and a couple more weapons from all arond the world. I guess the kicker is the crossguard, that makes the messer look both exotic, since it is curved, and "reasonable and realistic" since it has an european crossguard.

It impresses longsword people (perhaps the most common type of HEMA people) because it cuts notably better on the long edge and still thrusts decently, while still handling much the same as what they're used to.

>choppy sword that gurkhas use to remove heads
>more overrated by katanas cutting through buildings/

TO BE FAIR

a katana can actually stab thought plate armour if the user can put their body weight behind it

most well made weapons can go through plate with bodyweight behind them, plate really wasn't all that thick and it didn't turn a knight into a tank

No one was talking shit about katanas, man. For an arms discussion on Veeky Forums this thread has been surprisingly civil and informative.

> bullshit legends about it being thrown around
I'm gonna pretend I misunderstood that and say it really is an exceptional thrown weapon.

Frankly I despise how necromancy is typically depicted as

"I made a skelly!"

I mean, the idea of communicating and trying to force control of spirits is more fascinating to me at least.

They may or may not have been people at one point so having to talk and persuade them to do stuff or psycho analyze them in the same way you would with people seems like something a necromancer aught to be doing.

Stealth in space is every bit as ridiculous as omnipotent AIs and perfect VR within our lifetime. If you take the latter for granted, you can hardly mock the notion of the former.

I think modernizing the cyberpunk genre is the worst thing a human can do

>It is a curved sword. Pretty long, fro two handed use.
That would be a specific messer then, most common messers were more in the one-handed 75-80cm long range.

Playing psychopomp with dead spirits isn't really important enough to the culture of gamers for them to be interested in that.

Our culture is far more about the living, than the dead, so our only interest would be when the dead actively intrude into our world, as mouldy, gross, smashable corpses (they have to be smashable because a good half of the party is going to be pissed standing around while Johhny Silksleeves the wizard stands around having fits and telling us the long list of his invisible friend's demands.)

What about ghosts though? I mean surely shit like the Ring is in the realm of popculture that playing someone who regularly deals with vengeful spirits is worth playing (more so when you can leverage them to do stuff).

I can't remember the name of the show but it was about a famly of morticians and occasionally the one guy would have conversations with the people he was working on.

Far beyond the typical faggot elf song dirt farmer medievel europenis hammer Mchammersong settings being a psychopomp is a valid character concept

>Nip carriers
>good
You get one

They were death traps with terrible fire control, thin decks and closed walls/storage. Bombs were literally amplified when they exploded like dropping a firecracker in a bucket because the force has no where to go.

Nips had one good navy plane in the zero that was invalidated by American energy fighters and dive bombers when the wildcat became the hellcat.
They have always sucked at war and literally relief on divine intervention to win almost anything (and they're somehow proud of that).

They were better than the burger carriers.

Don't forget
>muh never lost a war in 2k years
>got their asses kicked during all of their foreign adventures that they had before westernizing

This, the Yumi became obsolete sooner. The Katana stayed useful even after the introduction of gunpowder.

No they weren't American carriers had open decks so they were easy to repair and allowed for better fire control without making dive bombers twice as effective.
They also allowed for faster response because they could fit planes before bringing them to the main deck.

Eh at least they had tons of them...

>What about ghosts though?

Again, modern cultural differences make it either pointless or unappealing to play, you either end up with:

Ghostbusters where everyone just busts in the door and shoot the bad buys with beam guns and lock them in dimension prison forever (because the dead have no rights) at which point you wonder in meta why we don't just refluff the dead as demons so we don't feel awkward about bullying great-grandma.

OR you end up with the Shadowrunner problem of "what the fuck do we do with the decker while he's dicking around in cyberspace?" The difference being, that a decker can make us money and keep the police off our tail, while the psychopomp is going to first need to convince half the party that "A. The afterlife exists, B. The spirits are angry, C. We can somehow profit from fucking with this dangerous shit most of us cannot see or understand, D. Moving to Russia and changing our names won't help us evade the voodoo ghost pirates."

I dislike the overhype of swords in general. You'd never use a normal sword in 1v1 combat between two knights, you need something blunt with a heavier head like a warhammer, small hammer or a poleaxe to actually injure each other.

In general, i think warhammers are underutilized in fantasy settings in favor of "muh swords cutting through five people in one swing" - especially in fantasy books.

You can open cans just fine with a stiff sword, it just takes more work and probably some wrestling.

>tfw I own one of these and I hardly ever use it for anything proper

Where's that Russio-Japanese war pasta when you need it. They may have fucked up in WWII, but they kicked Russia's ass pretty hard.

EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP

HERE'S THE TRUTH:

THE SWORD IN OP PIC LOOKS REALLY FUCKING UGLY AS FUCK AND ALSO REALLY FUCKING DUMB

IT LOOKS LIKE A RETARDED KNIFE

IF A KNIFE COULD HAVE A MENTAL DISABILITY IT WOULD LOOK LIKE THAT

THEREFORE, NO MATTER THE AMOUNT OF HYPE IT GETS IN A ROLE PLAYING GAME, IT'S EXCESSIVE.

ROLE PLAYING GAMES ARE ABOUT LIVING OUT SOME FANTASIES, EVEN WHEN THEY'RE GRIM ONES.

IF YOU FANTASIZE ABOUT THOSE RETARDO-SWORDS, REGARDLESS OF THEIR ACTUAL EFFICIENCY AT ANYTHING, THEN THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOUR BRAIN.

IF THEIR ALLEGED PRACTICALITY MAKES YOU OVERLOOK HOW FUCKING UGLY THEY ARE, THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOU AS A PERSON

AND THAT THING IS YOUR TASTE

>You'd never use a normal sword in 1v1 combat between two knights
If it's 1vs1, then it's a pre-arranged fights, and many of those involved swords, just as much as poleaxes. Check the feats of Jacques de Lalaing for instance. Swords are hyped because everybody needs them, regardless of their roles, which is not the case for large blunt weapons for instance. Swords are the proper jack of all trades, that's why they are always useful somehow.

But you don't want to eat what's inside a plate armour, you want to destroy it. Using a kitchen knife to first pry it open and then slice it would be counter productive to just smashing it with a hammer.

It's pretty much because every culture in the world at the moment descended from one with sword wielding nobility.
If say in history, some Zulu-like Impi using tribe took over Africa, the persians took over the middle east with the power of the immortals, and the greeks took over Europe because hoplites were unstoppable, and the samurai carried around their naginatas instead of giving them to their woman thuse turning their main war weapon after the bow into a girl's weapon then media would never shut up about how great and noble polearms are, and how a persian immortal could stab through 5 fully armored knights by stabbing through them with ONE HAND and shit like that.

Media basically just grabs the same nobility stuff from old history and continues to swing it around because that's what people know from history.

Found it.

Doesn't really help if after couple years of fighting you run out of pilots capable of doing anything more complicated than flying towards an enemy ship and crashing.

What kind of man doesn't eat his enemies...

Jian are the most aesthetically pleasing swords ever made.

That's my unpopular opinion.

>first pry it open and then slice it

The action taken is either a stabbing one (half-swording) or a piercing one (murder stroke [damn Germany u scary]). No one actually tries to take off the opponent's armor before striking him because that's a colossal waste of time.

But the murder stroke (mordhau) is literally turning your sword around to give it the properties of a warhammer by bashing someones skull in with the pommel.

Maybe if you get a tacticool donut steel one, and maybe if you try to use it as a sword or dual wield it, but if you think a genuine Kukuri isn't aesthetic as fuck, then you are the one with shit taste.

>with the pommel.

You're supposed to be hitting them with the crossguard.

Without bothering to go trawl through the manuals to see if anything is said about it, I think the guard may be at least as much intended striking bit as the pommel. It will often concentrate the force far more, and by virtue of projecting out a good deal it may end up hitting first regardless (I've managed to cause a guy some pretty significant pain trying to give him a bit of a bump with the pommel, but instead jabbing the guard into a rib).

Some swords would take it a bit further of course, but I doubt we need to consider such outliers for use of the more normal ones. Though speaking of outliers, I wonder if the use of the mordhau might not be such in itself to a large degree.

Of course, to stick to the subject at hand, regardless of whether you strike with guard or pommel, it won't be to make the enemy's armour fall off.

" technique of holding the sword inverted, with both hands gripping the blade, and hitting the opponent with the pommel or crossguard."

Both are acceptable.

>crossguard
>pommel
both are valid really, but you'd use them with a typical halfsword grip much more than by going for both hands on the blade actually.

>trick weapon.jpg

Here's a depiction of a spiked pommel and pointy crossguard founded in the sword in armor section of the Flower of Battle as an example.

But the entire point of mordhau is that it's more effective to use something blunt to really wreck someone in armour. And that was my original point.

>using the same system for PCs as it does for NPCs
You're playing a garbage system

I suspect the point is to use the switched-around balance to hit with a lot more impact than you otherwise would. Simply spreading out the force of the hit isn't going to somehow help you defeat armour. And thus we can get "blunt" weapons like this one. Even flanged maces tend to have assorted nobs and points sticking out.

The notion that blunt weapons are particularly for anti-armour work may be a bit exaggerated (both in that these weapons may have been seen as less specialised than that, and also in that most armour will still provide a significant increase in survivability against these weapons), though coming form the kernel of truth that since armour will tend to negate any edge, there's no use having one, and as violent impacts against hard metal is on the menu, said edge probably wouldn't have a brilliant lifespan anyway.

>Austria annexes territory occupied from Ottomemes
>this angers the Serb
>Serbs kill Austria's future king
>Austria gives ultimatum
>Serbs debate ultimatum
>Austria declares war
>Germany tries to persuade Russia and France to not involve themselves
>Russia declines, France doesn't answer while mobilizing their army
>Germany attacks both first

And that's how it started

I really wish I could remember the name of this graphic novel I saw. Something Macabe. Essentially a washed up police officer and drug addict who can see monsters and ghosts and becomes a P.I./slayer

There is an instance when he's approached by the ghost of an old mobster who can't pass on because his girlfriend is stuck in a casino with other ghost mobsters. They won't let him in and they won't let her out. So he goes in and bargins for her release and the ghost mobster gives him the location to a stash of guns and money he had when he was alive.

Point being, if the fact you have voodoo mobsters chasing your ass with spirits that proves: A) the afterlife is a real thing, B) you can make money on the side doing excorsims and solving problems for ghost bros, C) you need someone who can deal with ghost because you can't.

>Austria gives ultimatum
That ultimatum consisted of ten points that basically meant "we take over your country for an undecided period of time". The Serbs agreed to nine points, while leaving the 10th point open to discussion. The Germans pretty much pushed the Austrians to declaring war over this (while the ultimatum itself had been specifically designed to be unacceptable) by giving the Austrians carte blanche support. Not even a "if someone declares war on you, we back you up" agreement, but a "do whatever you want, we're with you" guarantee.

Trust a fritz, prepare for shitz.
Trust a boche, get punched in the crotch.
Trust a kraut, get blown the fuck out.
Trust a jerry, never again be merry.

Only even slightly trustworthy big European nation is France, and even then it is limited to you being able to be sure that no matter what happens French will continue being arrogant cunts.

>Not the finns being introverts
>Not the swiss being jews
>Not the swedes being smug
>Not the danes being goofy

cmon user, are you even trying? These are all things you can trust.

>Not the swedes being smug
the only thing they're smug about is their collective suicide.

our military history and scientific achievements

>Most players are too stupid and murderhoboish to be trusted with choices, which should ideally be concentrated in the hands of the few responsible players.
>Most people have no fucking clue what a "sandbox" game is, and when they try to make one, they just either give the players a lot of options, or lazily worldbuild. Neither are sandboxes, and both tend to be crap.
>When you do make a sandbox, you often need some kind of structure to it (but you have to make it immersive structure, not narrative structure) or your party will wander off in 6 different directions.
>Rule 0 is a good thing and should be heavily employed, but should be employed to grease the wheels for things that your rules set doesn't do well or won't do well in this particular instance, not to save or damn a particular character.

>not to save or damn a particular character.
I agree on the latter, but the former? Stupid mistakes should be punished, but a good DM will be lenient when a character just has incredibly shitty rolls. A campaign isn't exactly immersive when the four guys facing the BBEG aren't the same four guys who once met in a tavern.

Saving characters is fine, as long as you don't frame it as a guarantee for survival no matter what.

Messers were knives, not swords. That's why they were so popular, an average citizen could own one.

>It's not a sword, it's a really large knife
I can't believe that excuse actually worked

>(but you have to make it immersive structure, not narrative structure)
So what would you describe immersive structure as?

>samurai mostly were archers
>hype up their swords
But that is simply not true. Samurai were mostly archers until the Edo period, where A) bows were mostly fazed out in favor of guns and B) Samurai changed from essentially knights fighting in large-scale battles mostly off horse back, to administrators and personal bodyguards. Katana was not even a battle-oriented weapon, it was a personal defense weapon that really started shining only when most of the violent encounters were limited to small local conflicts. The few actual wars that happened past the unification of Japan were mostly peasant uprisings that were dispatched with rifles and cannons, not with swords or bows.

The popular image of a samurai - or lets face it, more often than not a ronin - lone man with two swords wandering the land looking for fights - and his association the katana is just completely DIFFERENT era than the image of the armor-wearing horse-rider with a bow. Like, by two or three centuries.

Samurai did really wear katana's and there was a huge cult around the weapon too. It's just not medieval image, it's 17-19th century thing.
So the association and the cult around the weapon is not inaccurate or illogical. It was - at certain time - THE weapon of choice, as well as a literal STATUS SYMBOL. I mean the fucking point was that past katanagari, literally only Samurai were officially allowed to carry swords around to begin with. It's how you could tell someone is a samurai: by the sword by his side.

>but you have to make it immersive structure, not narrative structure
That is a contradiction in terms. If it's immersive then it IS narrative. I understand the point you are trying to make: propelling the experience via internal structure and rulesets, rather than through linear plot events, but narrative, unlike a plot, does not have to be linear. Narrative is the whole summary of what you are trying to communicate (through many possible means) and immersion is where people find themselves deeply drawn into the NARRATIVE that you conveyed. There is no such thing as non-narrative immersion: narrative is literally the thing you get immersed in.

When you have something that forces the characters to stay together but isn't leading in any one particular adventuring direction.

So, for instance, they could all be on the same island or planet that's hard to get off of. That would be something within the game setting that's encouraging them to stick together.

But it's not a narrative push for them to stay together, such as some sort of Big Bad targeting them, or them being the Chosen Heroes.

Aren't SWAT forces usually countrywide?

It was an all-European chimpout. The Serbs only triggered the mess

>That is a contradiction in terms. If it's immersive then it IS narrative.

No it isn't.

>I understand the point you are trying to make: propelling the experience via internal structure and rulesets, rather than through linear plot events

No, that isn't. I'm saying that what should propel the experience in the case of a sandbox (and not necessarily other cases) shouldn't be dramatic, because the dramatic narration in a sandbox comes from the players, and not from the GM. Rather, it should be other things, just how the world is built in general, that pushes the characters together.

>but narrative, unlike a plot, does not have to be linear.

Neither need to be linear.

>Narrative is the whole summary of what you are trying to communicate

Again, no. Narrative is a sub-set of the totality of what you're trying to communicate; specifically the dramatic portion of your communication, how some sense of tension rises and hopefully gets resolved. You can have stuff that is not narrative, and yes, it should be immersing. You can get immersed in a detailed description of a field, but it's not part of any sort of narrative, at least not in the normal sort of story.

If we're talking about D&D they're good for crit builds.

>A sword - a *slashing* sword - could stab through full plate with someone's body weight behind them.

I highly doubt it.

At their height under the shogunate, one out of every ten men was a samurai. in Japan.
But they're too heavily armed to just be regular police.

Yeah, how dare those serbs protect their territorial integrity against the German Austrians?

Your chronology limps like it had taken an arrow to the knee.

Japanese warfare shifted from focusing on horse archers to becoming more of an infantry affair long before the Edo period, by the Sengoku Jidai the transformation was largely complete, with the warriors with deeper pockets and greater status tending to shock cavalry or just officer positions.

Guns were then tossed into that, and ended up being utterly instrumental in the wars that ended the Sengoku period and brought the Edo period into being. Once that had happened the use of guns diminished greatly, since they had brought the Tokugawa to power they could reverse that, and the Tokugawa rulers wanted to make damn sure that didn't happen.

And for fucks sake, a side-arm in a "mediaeval" battle is a completely different thing from the mostly dead weight you have if you give a modern soldier a pistol. Doesn't matter if you have a bow, a musket, a lance, a halberd, or whatever, you also bring a sidearm, because none of those are nearly as multi-purpose as an assault rifle, and the sword has been humanity's favourite here. So the katana was definitely a weapon fit for the battlefield, and battlefield realities drove its adaptation up through the ranks.

You have managed to grasp that things changed in general, but then you still present the Edo period use of the sword as the one way it was done.

Didn't the nips have double deck carriers too? I'm not a history buff but I think I remember pictures of those

>And for fucks sake, a side-arm in a "mediaeval" battle is a completely different thing from the mostly dead weight you have if you give a modern soldier a pistol.
How is a pistol dead weight? If I were a soldier, I'd rather have one on my than not. It weighs close to nothing, with a good holster you don't even know it's there and it's a nice "just in case" weapon.

>thinking that double deck would be enough for ijn

M8, nips went with fucking triple decks.

>who at their height were practically just a country wide SWAT force more than anything, came into town

In the Edo period they were clerks and bureaucrats far more than police. Before that they were warriors. They've never really done police.

It takes a lot of firepower if you want the beancounters to deal with peasant uprisings.

>How is a pistol dead weight?

Because you have been issued something much better, and you're already carrying too much shit so fuck another two pounds of just in case comfort blanket.

You know if they remove the 2 pound pistol the brass will just replace it with 4 more pounds of pointless shit.

From my own experience in infantry: the reason you aren't issues a pistol is because under most circumstances, if you've gotten yourself in a situation where you got to use one it probably won't help you anymore.

From the experience of a friend who was a combat engineer: those guys DO get issued pistols because it's not always convenient to use the rifle under the conditions they may find themselves in.

>English sword with Down's syndrome.