[tenchi2a]

An agile elven noble who is a master duelist with a rapier is just as equally deadly as a bulked up troll merc who has mastered his use of an axe.

All that was represented in previous editions by both strength and net hits contributing to melee damage; both the raw force and how you apply it matters. By removing strength from melee damage, 6e does away with the importance of raw force.

Or to look at it from the other side, it places the emphasis more heavily on the skill of the person using a weapon, which is more accurate to what happens in a fight. A scrawny 10 year old who is highly trained in a combat skill can easily take down a giant bruiser who's not as skilled. I had the bruises to prove it.

Or to put it yet another way "It ain't what you got, it's how you use it." Being jacked won't help you one bit if you don't know how to fight, you're more libel to break your own hand when you punch someone.

That is a load.
Any trained fighter will tell you that An untrained fighter is a wild card and not to be taken lightly at all.
Trained fighting is a "dance" and realizes on on trained patterns and movement.
When dealing with an untrained fighter these patterns and movement are not present so it forces the trained fighter to be on their toes and react more then attack looking for the opening that will come for the others lack of training.
My point is this is not a slam-dunk and many well trained combats have fallen for the trap of underestimating an untrained opponent

[Moonshine Fox]

I will need you to help explain to me how there is any real difference between the commando electing to execute either (it would not be a fight).

I mean, there's more then just a dozen levels of any of the given stats in the world. Even with people having the same stat mechanicly would be rather different outside the dice.

why do we use weapons in the first place?

Because they expand the range of people who can serve as a soldier and still be able to easily kill his target given the variations of battlefield conditions and opponent weaponry. Once weapons had rendered otherwise sub-standard people into effective killers with the application of some modest training with the implement in question, the shift came of making weapons that took less time to train in the use of, allowing one to quickly raise larger armies with the bare training in weapons needed to be a deadly force no matter their background of origin.

If you want to know where strength is most used in a melee fight, it's in the maneuvering a weapon, which relates to the accuracy of your hit and ability to deflect attacks from hitting you. It will also help if you need to do a hard block, which is generally not a good idea to do as that's a good way to break your weapon. Trying to power-smash someone with a weapon, while looking cool, will largely just leave you off balance and exposed from over-committing, and my possibly break your weapon or get it stuck in whatever it does hit.

As I believe Dezmont said, it's gonna feel weird. We've been conditioned by games for several decades now that STR is the be all end all of melee and no other consideration matters. I don't think in the long run it's going to be that much of an issue in game outside of extreme examples.

[Michael Chandra]

We've had separate grunt rules for npcs for a while now. An npc with identical stats is more restricted than a pc. Only the special people get their own proper statblocks with full pc-like condition monitor and individual edge stat.

A civvy has 0 Edge and will run at the first box of damage. An entire group of professional gangers is barely superior and will have just a few points of Edge for the entire group. We know grunts are inferior. John Doe is nothing compared to John Smith.

[Moonshine Fox]

An agile elven noble who is a master duelist with a rapier is just as equally deadly as a bulked up troll merc who has mastered his use of an axe.

All that was represented in previous editions by both strength and net hits contributing to melee damage; both the raw force and how you apply it matters. By removing strength from melee damage, 6e does away with the importance of raw force.

Or to look at it from the other side, it places the emphasis more heavily on the skill of the person using a weapon, which is more accurate to what happens in a fight. A scrawny 10 year old who is highly trained in a combat skill can easily take down a giant bruiser who's not as skilled. I had the bruises to prove it.

Or to put it yet another way "It ain't what you got, it's how you use it." Being jacked won't help you one bit if you don't know how to fight, you're more libel to break your own hand when you punch someone.

That is a load.
Any trained fighter will tell you that An untrained fighter is a wild card and not to be taken lightly at all.
Trained fighting is a "dance" and realizes on on trained patterns and movement.
When dealing with an untrained fighter these patterns and movement are not present so it forces the trained fighter to be on their toes and react more then attack looking for the opening that will come for the others lack of training.
My point is this is not a slam-dunk and many well trained combats have fallen for the trap of underestimating an untrained opponent

Yes, I am more then aware of this as I am a trained fighter. An untrained one can be dangerous, if they land the 'lucky blow' as has been pointed out in example already in the last few posts. Such a lucky blow is likely to happen exactly once as they will make the mistake of putting their all into the attack and leaving themselves off-balance and completely exposed for a counter attack. If they are attacking with a weapon, it is also quite likely they won't be holding it right, therefor lessening the effect of their assault, or if unarmed, hurt or break their own hand because they don't know how to throw a punch in a way and at such a place as to not do so.

The "dance" of fighting is the complex equation of physics, which despite what was said earlier, has a rather large number of variables besides just 'F'. There is also: a, ΣF, m, v_f and so on.

[Shinobi Killfist]

I think people are mistaking exaggeration for effect and corner cases. Exaggerated examples are being used to illustrate a core issue. It’s not extreme case only it’s a sliding scale.  People will bump into this routinely. And in a world where superhumans
Interact with regular humans even the extremes will occur frequently.

[adzling]

Because they expand the range of people who can serve as a soldier and still be able to easily kill his target given the variations of battlefield conditions and opponent weaponry. Once weapons had rendered otherwise sub-standard people into effective killers with the application of some modest training with the implement in question, the shift came of making weapons that took less time to train in the use of, allowing one to quickly raise larger armies with the bare training in weapons needed to be a deadly force no matter their background of origin.

that's a complete non-sequitar and a great example of attempting to rationalize away how the universe works.

if your example was true then the highly skilled folks would abandon weapons and use their fists, relegating weapons to the low-skilled peasants.

clearly that's B.S.

please stop, it just looks silly.

[Moonshine Fox]

An agile elven noble who is a master duelist with a rapier is just as equally deadly as a bulked up troll merc who has mastered his use of an axe.

All that was represented in previous editions by both strength and net hits contributing to melee damage; both the raw force and how you apply it matters. By removing strength from melee damage, 6e does away with the importance of raw force.

Or to look at it from the other side, it places the emphasis more heavily on the skill of the person using a weapon, which is more accurate to what happens in a fight. A scrawny 10 year old who is highly trained in a combat skill can easily take down a giant bruiser who's not as skilled. I had the bruises to prove it.

Or to put it yet another way "It ain't what you got, it's how you use it." Being jacked won't help you one bit if you don't know how to fight, you're more libel to break your own hand when you punch someone.

That’s what skill dice are for. To represent skill. Though I’m not sure I agree with your premise. Generally if a person has you on strength to any significant degree you don’t have to just be better than them. But a lot better than them. As much as I love the 3 ninjas movies they aren’t particularly realistic.

Simplification that would have actually worked here is flip the stats. Agility adds to attack value. Strength is your dice pool. Give unarmed a base damage of 1.

Kinda, the problem is that every weapon and fighting style have a different relation to just how useful power is to them over motion. Some like hammers or karate do owe more to power, while ones like the rapier or Jiu Jitsu use it very little. I wasn't joking about the scrawny 10 year old throwing my giant bruiser self around, he was high ranked in jiu jitsu and turned my every attempt at a hit into a lock or throw with a few simple turns of wrist and leg. Learned a lot from him and his father who was teaching the class.

Flipping the two and setting unarmed damage does sound like a pretty solid idea. Definitely good for houserule territory.

[Moonshine Fox]

Because they expand the range of people who can serve as a soldier and still be able to easily kill his target given the variations of battlefield conditions and opponent weaponry. Once weapons had rendered otherwise sub-standard people into effective killers with the application of some modest training with the implement in question, the shift came of making weapons that took less time to train in the use of, allowing one to quickly raise larger armies with the bare training in weapons needed to be a deadly force no matter their background of origin.

if your example was true then the highly skilled folks would abandon weapons and use their fists, relegating weapons to the low-skilled peasants.

Rrrrriiiiggghht. Someone with years of training in a weapon is better then someone with a few weeks of training.

[Lormyr]

The shadowrunners with all 1s for physical stats and no Close Combat skill still has in-universe advantage over pedestrians/fat nerds/whatever-term-you-want-to-use that also have those same stats in that they ARE SHADOWRUNNERS.

I suppose we will have to agree to disagree. For me, in order for that character to have an advantage over the guy with a 0 skill, he'd need a 1.

I mean, there's more then just a dozen levels of any of the given stats in the world. Even with people having the same stat mechanicly would be rather different outside the dice.

Of course. Flavor, story, experience, and all that. But in order that "more" to make a mechanical difference, it would need to be reflected mechanically with a different value. Your unarmed close combat 4 is krav maga, his unarmed close combat 4 is lethwei. Other guys close combat 3 (insert here) is not equal to the other 2 guys 4 under any circumstances because he has a 3.

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

The shadowrunners with all 1s for physical stats and no Close Combat skill still has in-universe advantage over pedestrians/fat nerds/whatever-term-you-want-to-use that also have those same stats in that they ARE SHADOWRUNNERS.

I suppose we will have to agree to disagree. For me, in order for that character to have an advantage over the guy with a 0 skill, he'd need a 1.

Well like I said upthread, I don't think it's out of bounds to say that the Shadowrunner with poor stats and low/no skill at least uses the proper form and technique as seen from the example of colleagues, teammates, and competent opposition so as to "earn" the DV that presumes competence... should they miraculously manage to even hit in the first place.  Comic Book Guy NPC who does not benefit from familiarity with actual experts can reasonably be given a DV penalty where you wouldn't do the same for a PC runner.  And/or say that the NPC is giving away situational edge due to his non-professional manner of attacking.

[tenchi2a]

The facts remain that the same person using a sword is always going to do more damage then with his punch.
The rule do not reflect this so they are badly written.
There is no justification for this, it was a decision made by the writes to fit into this badly written combat system.
While I agree that DEX (hand-eye coordination) is a factor in landing a blow and to an extent hitting a vital area.
Most if not all melee weapons gain cutting/hitting/piercing power from the strength of the user, to say otherwise is to buck suspension of disbelief to defend a decision made for purely system related reasons.
From what I can get from the information having weapons use STR brakes the new low damage system they are using to get rid of the Armor adding to soak issues.

[Marcus]

Apparently some are not convinced so maybe this is going somewhere.

Look Weapons function as a component of a system. A castle was a weapon system just as much as Missile is today. It's not a coincidence that every basic military training begins with strength and conditioning train.  Strength matters, speed matters, endurance matters, skills with arms matters. But 5 barely trained guys will beat 1 well trained guy, thus we have armies.

How hard you hit someone with something does matter, and strength directly effects that. I have fenced and practice various martial arts just like plenty others on here. In fencing speed is great but strength is important to, sure every fencer can give you the it take less the 1lb pressure on a point line. However when it comes to a beat, if you want it to work better be strong enough to move their arm.  You want that parry to work, mechanical advantage is very helpful a weaker person can block a stronger one, but if they are enough stronger they will still hit. I've seen it plenty of times. Saying strength has no application is wrong, just as wrong as saying strength is everything to melee.

It's fairly obvious these changes were made b/c cause they painted themselves into a corner on damage codes. You can't argue they don't think str matters b/c unarmed is str based. Thus we are left with ridiculous system reality of a str 9 troll picking up a great axe and suddenly doing less damage then when he punches someone.  If that doesn't bug you then there is just no helping you, cause you ether just won't admit it and/or you're going to blindly follow the system regardless of what is said.

[Ghost Rigger]

Kinda, the problem is that every weapon and fighting style have a different relation to just how useful power is to them over motion. Some like hammers or karate do owe more to power, while ones like the rapier or Jiu Jitsu use it very little. I wasn't joking about the scrawny 10 year old throwing my giant bruiser self around, he was high ranked in jiu jitsu and turned my every attempt at a hit into a lock or throw with a few simple turns of wrist and leg. Learned a lot from him and his father who was teaching the class.

Flipping the two and setting unarmed damage does sound like a pretty solid idea. Definitely good for houserule territory.

Did that ten year old also break each of your limbs, then shatter your skull with a single punch? Because this discussion is about damage, not grappling.

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

...You can't argue they don't think str matters b/c unarmed is str based. Thus we are left with ridiculous system reality of a str 9 troll picking up a great axe and suddenly doing less damage then when he punches someone.  If that doesn't bug you then there is just no helping you, cause you ether just won't admit it and/or you're going to blindly follow the system regardless of what is said.

Well, yes I do agree that there's a problem with doing less damage with an ostensibly lethal melee weapon than without one via an unarmed attack.  Granted, you have to have superhuman strength for that to be an issue... but since superhuman strength is so easy to achieve for a character yes I agree this is a real problem in the rules since it imo reasonably goes from being an uncovered corner case to being legit problem.  Should your DV go down because you picked up a weapon? On that, yeah I agree there's an issue.  I'm a lot less vocal on that aspect because what I might be able to add to the conversation is not something I can talk about publicly.  So I've been trying to avoid that angle entirely.

That's a related concept, but still distinct from what I HAVE been defending: fixed weapon DVs that don't reflect disparate physical capabilities.  I'm fine with fixed weapon DVs because
1) STR was already marginalized in 5e melee combat... if you were a melee specialist you had little reason to use anything other than a Monofilament Whip and/or Stun Gloves.
2) If you are willingly engaging in close combat, odds are excellent that you meant to do it and you built your character for it.  If you didn't build for close combat (say, you're a fat nerdy decker) you're probably attempting something OTHER than close combat with a nearby enemy.  Like, oh, running away?  Bricking drek? Anything BUT trying to take him on in a knife fight really...
3) If you have drek for strength, you probably don't have drek for Agility. Which in broad strokes, is "just as good" for causing meaningful damage. What you lack in power, you gain in hitting something vital.  It's good enough for RPG purposes. anyway.  (The assumption works less well on things unlikely to suffer "critical damage" like barriers, but still I'm fine with the idea in the name of streamlining.  YMMV. If so, go ahead and give a DV penalty to someone trying to use a weapon to chop through an armored bulkhead with 1 strength.  It's well within the spirit of the rules.)

[Shinobi Killfist]

Apparently some are not convinced so maybe this is going somewhere.

Look Weapons function as a component of a system. A castle was a weapon system just as much as Missile is today. It's not a coincidence that every basic military training begins with strength and conditioning train.  Strength matters, speed matters, endurance matters, skills with arms matters. But 5 barely trained guys will beat 1 well trained guy, thus we have armies.

How hard you hit someone with something does matter, and strength directly effects that. I have fenced and practice various martial arts just like plenty others on here. In fencing speed is great but strength is important to, sure every fencer can give you the it take less the 1lb pressure on a point line. However when it comes to a beat, if you want it to work better be strong enough to move their arm.  You want that parry to work, mechanical advantage is very helpful a weaker person can block a stronger one, but if they are enough stronger they will still hit. I've seen it plenty of times. Saying strength has no application is wrong, just as wrong as saying strength is everything to melee.

It's fairly obvious these changes were made b/c cause they painted themselves into a corner on damage codes. You can't argue they don't think str matters b/c unarmed is str based. Thus we are left with ridiculous system reality of a str 9 troll picking up a great axe and suddenly doing less damage then when he punches someone.  If that doesn't bug you then there is just no helping you, cause you ether just won't admit it and/or you're going to blindly follow the system regardless of what is said.

I’d add in a 8 stat system strength isn’t just weight lifting, it covers a range of concepts including speed. It’s why running was linked to it. It’s not just your bench press. It’s your explosive action stat. Want to get your fist to face faster so their block doesn’t get there in time. That’s strength.