Request: Wielding sticks as swords

[Alexander]

There are many examples in the real world of wielding sticks of varying lengths as swords, often for practice or sparring purposes. See the singlestick and the jo stick as western and eastern examples.

I would like to request a way for a character with Swords skill to wield various sticks as swords for skill calculation purposes. Using one in such a way would certainly not be as effective as a real sword for damage, and would only do bludgeoning damage. To provide some examples: a quarterstaff would be wielded as a blunted bludgeoning greatsword, a walking-stick as a longsword, a cane as a shortsword.

Though I do not believe it should be necessary, I would be willing to spend an ability point on this for the sake of some story development my character has been going through.

[Zeldryn]

+1 to this.

Just because it'd be fun and cool as all the heck in addition to the above. I just love the idea of it.

[Rias]

Per today's changelog: The GRIP command can now be used to set the "stickswords" grip option between "auto" or "sword". When set to "sword", applicable stick-like weapons will be wielded using the wielder's Swords skill rather than its default weapon skill association.

[Squeak]

Now we just need room emotes of children running around Shadgard having "sticksword fights" and generally being nuisances.

[jerc]

This is awesome!

Is there some indication as to whether or not a weapon is sword-grippable? I'm not seeing it on a quarterstaff despite being able to get sword practice with it. And do other players get any indication that someone is using a stick as a sword?

Also, can we get large bones added to the list of sword-grippable weapons?

Edit: Looks like both small and large hafts are sword-grippable, but not poles. Seems like they should be as well!

Edit2: Maybe large straight branches too?

[jerc]

How does this interact with weapon focus abilities? Should we be seeing rerolls from sword focus, and should sword focus enable the weapon's multi-strike instead of its "natural" weapon class focus?

[Rias]

The implementation is pretty hacky at the moment, but what I plan to do is have it wield the "stick" weapon as a wooden version of a different type of weapon. If you're wielding a quarterstaff as a greatsword, then you're ... holding and swinging it like a greatsword, not like a staff, so it won't be getting the same multiple strikes and large parry bonus as if it were being wielded as a staff. I'm still deciding if I want to just have them function as wooden versions of greatsword, longsword, shortsword, etc. which would have an extremely low sharpness value and do very low slash/pierce/hack damage, or set up their own special weapon templates for it. I'm leaning toward the former. Then the sword weapon focus would be applied to their use in this way.

In any case, keep in mind that this isn't intended to be a viable alternative use of these weapons that keeps up with how effective they'd be when wielded with their dedicated weapon skill, but rather a niche use for something like practice/sparring, or an effective improvised parrying tool in a pinch if one happens to have Sword skill rather than the associated weapon skill.