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Comments
I'm just saying. Magic beats weapons any day.
Magic and hokey religions ain't no match for a trusty revolver at your hip.
Guns can outclass most lower-level offensive spells, but I'd pick Meteor Swarm over an AK-47 any day.
That depends on how Meteor Swarm works.
Meteor swarm is a very powerful and spectacular spell that is similar to fireball in many aspects. When you cast it, four 2- foot-diameter spheres spring from your outstretched hand and streak in straight lines to the spots you select. The meteor spheres leave a fiery trail of sparks.
If you aim a sphere at a specific creature, you may make a ranged touch attack to strike the target with the meteor. Any creature struck by one of these spheres takes 2d6 points of bludgeoning damage (no save) and receives no saving throw against the sphere’s fire damage (see below). If a targeted sphere misses its target, it simply explodes at the nearest corner of the target’s space. You may aim more than one meteor at the same target.
Once a sphere reaches its destination, it explodes in a 40-foot-radius spread, dealing 6d6 points of fire damage to each creature in the area. If a creature is within the area of more than one sphere, it must save separately against each. (Fire resistance applies to each sphere’s damage individually.)
That's kind of saying that an artillery emplacement has more destructive potential than an assault rifle.
Which stands to reason, but you might also note that artillery isn't the primary weapon of contemporary warfare, and not due to a lack of functioning weapons or munitions.
So basically, swords are more efficient than magic?
^^ Depending on the context (and the style of magic). You don't need insight into the esoteria of the corporeal plane and decades of meditative study to defeat someone with a sword -- you can fight proficiently after about six months of training with the right method.
Besides, the current paradigm of fireball magic is relatively recent. Most folklore and legend had different applications for magic, because it stood to reason that if magic existed (as they often believed it did) and could do that kind of stuff, why were mundane weapons so useful? Modern fantasy ideas of magic have more to do with the superhero genre than mythology or folklore. There's not anything wrong with that, as such, but you'll find that the root of all these modern fantasy ideas is very modern American, and far removed from the context of mythology, legend and folklore from which a lot of the root thematic concepts originate.
As opposed to gunning him down with an AK? That's not exactly subtle either.
Eelek: As opposed to a precision strike with a high-powered long range rifle. Or get in close with a derringer or a sawn-off shotgun. Or hell, just slit his throat with a butterfly knife.
All of those solutions are murder, but they won't make you a MASS murderer.
^^ The point is less subtlety and more collatoral damage. Assassination is pretty dirty business to begin with, but I doubt even an assassin wants a massacre on their hands.
Also, I'm not sure whether I'm spelling "collatoral" wrong or whether my browser is simply unaware that the word exists.
^ Exactly. Or even cursing them with bad luck, of all things.
Magic is cooler.
So...offensive magic is better if you want to kill a bunch of people, but if you want to kill one person weapons are the way to go?
To me, magic is such a strange, fluid, fascinating thing, with all types and disciplines having very little in common, that whenever people lump Vancian spellcasting with Potter wizardry or Allomancy I get quite cross.
Magic is NOT cooler. Because none of you have seen what I've seen, done what I've done. None of you know what "magic" really is.
Is it wrong that I expected a boss battle immediately after you said this?
And Vancian magic is complete bullshit, yes.
I know what magic is, fool.
Oh jesus Magic Man.
That's a bit casual. I mean, most wars don't even have "kill a bunch of people" as their objective, that act being a roadblock on the path to economic or ideological dominance. Violence is seldom neat or controlled enough to make a call, and in any case, magic has applications that go far beyond blowing things up.
Let's say I'm King Alex of Madassia and I'm at war with King Juan of Mexico. I have spellcasters at my disposal who can use magic for a variety of purposes. I could instruct them to blow up Juan's shit, but there's no guarantee that's the most efficient or economical use of my wizards. After all, I'd probably have to deploy them on the battlefield, where they'd be prime targets. Why not get them to cast hasting spells on horses and carts, so my cavalry and supply lines can move more quickly? Why not have them glyph growing signs into farmable land, giving me access to more supplies? Why not have them conjure violent storms in Juan's ports, giving me dominance of the sea? Perhaps I could order them to cleanse steel of impurities, so my armouries could produce better weapons and armour. I could curse Juan's crops, plague his livestock and insult his mother from afar.
Or I could blow some shit up, which could also be accomplished with war machines, or just dudes with fire.
Or just one curse of a natural disaster.
Or just one nuke.
Personally I feel that "magic" and "weaponry" are such broad categories that it's impossible to have a meaningful discussion about either on the whole, much less comparisons of the two.
Generally, things get adapted when they're introduced into an environment. It took just a few years to realize the ineffectiveness of trench warfare going from WW1 to WW2, to imagine that the entirely of Medieval society would develop in much the same measure given the reality breaking concept of magic and different sentient races is kind of uncreative in terms of fantastical stories, now wouldn't you say.
This is basically the root from which I am arguing from.
That's a worthy consideration, but in real life, it took hundreds of years for swords, specifically, to be phased out after the advent of large social, economic and technological changes that heralded their disuse. The more likely result is that the designs of conventional weapons would change in order to adapt to new conditions, and they'd do so relatively slowly. One thing to note is that the introduction of plate armour as common on the battlefield changed sword designs, for instance, very little. They become more acutely tapered and began to work mass weapon elements into their guards and pommels, but otherwise kept the same general shape and length -- despite the huge changes that plate armour brought to face-to-face, immediate range combat.
Rather than phasing out swords and daggers entirely c.1350, when plate armour became a more fully-developed piece of equipment, we merely see changes in how they were designed and applied. A high-power firearm might be a good response to plate armour, but that requires technologies like rifling, shaped rounds, a covered chamber for accelerant and an accelerant that will deliver enough energy into the round for it to pierce plate steel. So even if a high-powered, easy-to-use range weapon like a relatively modern rifle is close to an optimal solution, there needs to be creativity to drive its initial design, testing, iteration, and an economy that supports the use of this new technology. In history, this didn't really come about in full force for about two hundred years after the introduction of plate armour, and even then, plate cuirasses, helmets, gauntlets and greaves continued to be worn almost until the industrialisation of warfare.
Look at Kingkiller Chronicles, where sygaldry allows fridges and electric-like lamps where folks haven't discovered gunpowder. Or Way of Kings, where visible spren that appear near wounds and death leads to germ theory and antiseptics at a semi-medieval time.
That's my favorite thing about fantasy; not the magic or the swords or the kingdoms; it's how the rules have been changed and the world can go in any direction it pleases.
I'll just say, if you don't like swords being ubiquitous in generic fantasy, try fantasy that is not generic. Say, based on the Bronze Age, or a resource-limited society. Or even based on something like ancient Rome and the barbarians.
But...all those societies had militaries that employed swords as primary weapons.
I'd expect that a typical barbarian would be more likely to wield an axe or a spear in battle, and if he has any status weapon, it's not going to be a sword - because swords were expensive and so not for everyone - but rather a long knife, like the seax of the Saxons. The Romans also used swords, but these weren't status symbols as well, more like tools of trade. I may be wrong at history, but since this is fantasy, we don't have to be too strict on history and make some deliberate mistakes for sake of the story. So, picture a society where swords are used by the military on one side, and by the rich and noble on the other. That would, I guess, reduce their presence in favour of knives and daggers on one side, and axes and clubs on the other.
By the way, does macuahuitl count as a sword?
And a fun fact: clubs were produced by shoving sharp pieces of rock into the trunk of a young tree, letting it grow so the shards are fixed in place, then cutting the tree down and making the club out of it. That actually made me think of macuahuitl, but I mention this as an example of what can go on in that resource-limited case.
The macuahuitl totally counts as a sword, even if it's only half a sword.
And I made no mention of swords as status symbols, merely that the sword had a heavy presence in all of your examples.
On the other hand, it was the tribes of Classical Antiquity that first discovered pattern-welding and created the first "medieval" swords, made of proper steel rather than iron. Pretty much the rocket science of the time. Such a weapon would be beyond the means of your average tribesman, but something like 10% of those that identify as warriors having one seems reasonable. Even the Romans thought that "barbarian" swords were pretty awesome, and Roman leaders tended to suffer from pathological aggression against anyone who didn't wear a toga (citation needed).