No seriously- I started researching how to perform such a maneuver and I couldn't even find a fucking image for it, much less a treatise.
By "trip" I'm talking a weapon based melee combat maneuver that results in making your opponent prone. It must be distinct from 1) hitting your opponent so hard they just fall down from the force of the blow and 2) getting into a grapple briefly and throwing them.
I can find no evidence this is actually a thing that happens. The most I could find is that HEMA bans tripping your opponent- but that could easily be referring to a grappling maneuver.
Attacking the legs generally provokes since an ordinary weapon cannot easily reach the legs without you exposing yourself. Using a spear or staff seems unlikely to result in a successful application of leverage without closing in and throwing your opponent over the stick. I have found no treatises, videos, or images outlining such a maneuver.
>Attacking the legs generally provokes since an ordinary weapon cannot easily reach the legs without you exposing yourself. That's wrong and you're stupid. You're going to be swinging at the guy no matter where you're aiming. You're open anyway.
Levi Wood
There aren't any weapon based trips because if you can sweep someone's legs out from under them with your sword or halberd or whatever you can also just fucking cut them.
Just assume that the weapon is used to close the distance where the character then does a judo throw or some shit instead, this also explains why they don't take damage despite being attacked with a weapon
Caleb Collins
Yes I know. That is why I'm trying to figure out reality.
Reach starts from the shoulder. Legs are a full meter more distant from shoulder height than your opponents torso. Bending over to strike them means you are not guarding your head.
Plausible. I've already been informed that there are no disarms that do not involve grappling. My key purpose in asking I suppose concerns the use of reach weapons. If tripping necessitates grappling then you cannot do so at the end of a spear or staff. And sometimes this is relevant for the purposes of live capture or disabling a heavily armored opponent.
Noah Bennett
Rolemaster has a background ability allowing trained soldiers to make an additional "martial arts sweep attack" when using a polearm. This basically reflects using the butt of the weapon's haft in a secondary strike to the opponent's legs...
Thomas Thompson
striking period means you arent guarding
Hudson Morgan
Bullshit. You are fully capable of striking someone in the legs with a weapon in hand without bending over. And if you really need that extra reach, bend your fucking knees. Do you just not know how a body functions?
Alexander Reyes
step 1: get retainer to get on their hands and knees behind the target Step 2: hit the target so they are forced to try and step backwards to retain their balance, only to trip over the retainer Step 3: beat the retainer for daring to trip a person of higher station than them, even if that person were your enemy.
This is the state of Veeky Forums. Look at it and despair.
Jaxon Bell
It's called a "shove". You probably experienced it a lot when the regular nerds at school beat you up for lunch money. Jesus Christ in heaven.
William Bell
Here are three variant polearms intended to entangle and unbalance foes for non-lethal takedowns.
Isaac Richardson
>table top gaming
Thomas Flores
Here's pictured a European unbalancing move by holding the sword blade with gauntlets and pulling with the handguard to unbalance trip or disarm the opponent.
Gabriel Turner
ah! Excellent! Thank you so much user. I had great difficulty finding such a thing in my own search, but admittedly my google-fu is weak.
David Taylor
So following up on this- a trip can be performed with any weapon it seems. The takeaway is that there is no such thing as a "trip weapon". Is that correct?
James Stewart
A non-lethal takedown is always the most silent takedown.
Kayden Mitchell
>I started researching how to perform such a maneuver and I couldn't even find a fucking image for it, much less a treatise.
And then there's the tons of unarmed techniques that also work while holding weapons.
Levi Smith
Some of the polearm stuff matches the unreasonably specific definition of a trip specified by the OP.
Josiah Sanchez
>tons of unarmed techniques For my purposes, I'm basically examining the proposal that all "trips" get resolved as grapples. For most of the sword techniques, it basically looks to be of the format "parry his weapon with yours, close the distance, then throw him like you would in a judo match".
One case where this is explicitly not the case is polearms. Hence >the unreasonably specific definition of a trip specified by the OP
Jeremiah Rodriguez
there's usually rules for fighters and knights to have retainer NPCs they control.
The glaive (not the krull one) has, in addition to a sort of tin-opener spike general had a hook for grabbing mounted knights and pulling them off, where hte tin-open attachment could be applied to the poor knight as he struggled to stand up with all his super heavy plate armor on.
Jack Barnes
>It must be distinct from ... getting into a grapple briefly and throwing them.
It is unreasonable to exclude everything termed a grappling technique in HEMA, as much of that certainly would not fit in the D&D definition of a grapple.
Ryder Allen
>For most of the sword techniques, it basically looks to be of the format "parry his weapon with yours, close the distance, then throw him like you would in a judo match". Except for all of the ones where you use your sword for leverage
> I'm basically examining the proposal that all "trips" get resolved as grapples. What will you do differently that won't work out to be essentially the same as the current system?
Leo Clark
Instead of saying "i attack" and rolling a die why not say what your character is doing in that attack that could trip the target on a successful role? Roleplaying > rollplaying
Landon Gonzalez
>there's usually rules for fighters and knights to have retainer NPCs they control.
No user. The maneuver described there is sometimes called a "table top". I wasn't disputing the mechanical possibility of such a maneuver.
Oliver Torres
People not knowing what jujitsu is. >Feels bad man
Eli King
Yer a Pathfinder user, aren't you ?
Samuel Johnson
GURPS, as always, has the answer...
Adrian Hernandez
>What will you do differently that won't work out to be essentially the same as the current system? The silence is deafening
Oliver Thompson
(Using what I remember from D&D mechanics) You could make a trip attempt with any weapon, if you failed you were overpowered and tripped instead. A "trip" weapon had the option to drop the weapon instead of having yourself tripped if you failed the check. That might help you figure out what a real trip weapon would be but in theory the regular trip does have you touching and the trip weapon is without you touching.
James Ortiz
L5R has Knockdown maneuver that works with every weapon, inflicts normal weapon damage and forces the opponent to roll Strength against you or get knocked down.
Henry Thompson
Oh! then it's a good joke, or something.
Nolan Sanchez
You have to fail by a pretty good margin to get tripped back
Nolan Davis
Right. Knockdown makes sense, but isn't exactly a trip. Hence why it violated criteria 1.
Yeah, DnD is exactly what I have cause to doubt. Though if we go with that, it basically means that ordinary trips are baaasically grapples and some weapons let you range grapple, and disengage from said grapple by dropping the weapon? That makes sense.
GURPS doesn't seem to think it makes you drop your weapon or trip you in return upon failure. But then again how knowledgeable is GURPS really? I wish I had riddle of steel to weigh in on this.
>The silence is deafening Not that you'd be listening regardless.
No. Then I'd just use a CMB/CMD and call it done. I'm going for something less shite- which is simultaneously the mandatory advice of Veeky Forums and also the surest way to get it to ridicule you.
Christopher Morris
>Not that you'd be listening regardless. Based on what? My reaction to nothing happening?
Camden Lopez
I've never seen anyone get their legs swept in MMA or all my years mastering the Katana. Tripping is something you do as a trap or a trick, but strong combatants have their feet firmly planted
It doesn't come up a lot in MMA because leg sweeps are suboptimal in that format.
Tyler Ross
>Instead of saying "i attack" and rolling a die why not say what your character is doing in that attack that could trip the target on a successful role? Because most DM's and players who have played 3.PF grew up during an era where trip attacks were either hot garbage, risky as fuck to perform, or both and doing something without a feat meant that you were eating an AoO.
It takes a lot of unlearn bad habits, which is why people complain about 5e having no combat options while ignoring the fact that they can, by RAW, give anyone who attacks them disadvantage by spending an action to Dodge.
Nathaniel Kelly
Not if you're doing it right
Jaxon Price
5e is a gay game for babies
Evan Roberts
>Here's pictured a European unbalancing move by holding the sword blade with gauntlets and pulling with the handguard to unbalance trip or disarm the opponent.
Actually that's a picture of a dude using his sword as mace against an armored opponent with the goal of inflicting enough blunt force trauma to kill him. It's from a fairly well known ancient treatise on sword fightan.
Also called a mordhau if you're a neckbeard HEMA autist.
Michael Perry
from the world of warcraft rpg
Jackson Cruz
>LaughingGunlancer.jpg
Isaiah Roberts
People typically wore armour on their legs in order to avoid getting fucked up by the otherwise very common phenomenon of getting attacked in the legs.
Although admittedly, the point of attacking the legs is not to "trip" but to incapacitate..
Owen Torres
>But then again how knowledgeable is GURPS really? Pretty knowledgeable, I'd say...
Parker Gutierrez
Speaking of a perspective of a (form, haven't trained for years due to moving into a city without a club) HEMA practitioner: It's not impossible but hard to pull of and ineffective for a number of reasons.
If you want to trip someone, you need to hit as far below of their centre of mass as you can. Attacks to the knee and thighs are common and don't open you up to much. Attacks below the knee are more risky, if you do it you better have a good reason to and the upper hand at that moment.
If your opponent has a remotely firm battlestance you still need A LOT of force to unbalance them. Humans are pretty good at standing upright. Does his weight rest on the back leg? Forget about it without stepping into him. His his weight equally distributed? Maybe possible, but still unlikely. There's a reason why martial arts generally use leverage to take opponents to the ground. It just doesn't work well otherwise.
If you can land a blow with your weapon why aim to trip them in the first place, when you can aim to injure them?
Combine all those factors together and it's not a very sensible goal to trip an opponent with nothing but a weapon attack.
Couldn't find a non-McNinja edition for using a staff to accomplish the same thing, but it's incredibly possible and quite easy to do. My friends and I used to do it just fucking around, and none of us are martial artists or trained fighters.
There's about a billion other similar variations. Also, your idea of "brief grapple" is too broad. What differentiates a full-attack from a regular attack? Hitting a thing with a sword vs. hitting a thing with a sword harder isn't really different, right?
It's different because the system says so. Regardless, the leg-sweep/trip attack is a pretty common idea throughout history, as long as you aren't being overly pedantic or semantic about how to define it.
Brayden Sanchez
Wizards of the Coast hate (HATE) martial characters.
Whereas, say, a Wizard could cause damage and blow multiple targets away and make them land prone and possibly with status ailments, a Fighter has to take two turns just to shove someone to the ground for no (zero [0]) damage.
Nicholas Martin
That's how Daniel-san post
Isaac Cook
>thread about trip attacks >2 off getting dubtrips What's it like to be such a failure OP?
Jackson Taylor
That's a good thing about GURPS, regardless of what you think about the system, the sourcebooks are usually well researched by people who generally know what they're talking about. I don't play GURPS, but the amount of sourcebooks I have for pilferring is embarrassing...
Not a HEMA-practitioner, but I have done a fair amount of pyjamas-style spears and polearms. The bopping of legs and feet, specially when you have a reach advantage, is real.
