I'd been assuming for a while that monofilament swords were superior to regular swords, due to having the super-sharp monofilament edge (I thought it was this way in earlier editions). But I just looked up the stats and a monofilament sword has the same damage and AP as a katana. It's also cheaper, though its Availability is higher.

So, am I missing something? Why would anyone bother getting a monofilament sword, since it is harder to find, but doesn't offer any advantages over a katana?

If it's like they were in SR3, the real (marginal) advantage is that it's one-handed.

~J

Well, that's something. Thanks!

Because some of us want a non-asian sword which will cut through a tank.

A KAtana may also be used one-handed...

Keep the Faith

Lots of weapons are like that. Why get a Morrissey Alta when you can get a Colt Manhunter instead? The Manhunter has the same accessories, four more rounds, is over 500 nuyen cheaper, and almost twice as available. There's absolutely no reason to get one stat-wise, but people still do because they like the name or look of it.

It's part of the problem of not sticking to a solid abstract philosophy from start to finish in the rules. All Fireballs and Black Hammer programs are the same (and have customization options available), but every single damn weapon in the same category has to have a different set of stats. To be fair, part of the problem is on the player's side of things here. Way too many get a stick up their ass if some minor field that they know a little about isn't completely accurate to what they've read/experienced. Fireballs and Black Hammer programs don't have to worry about that so much. But oh my God if a pistol isn't accurate to its real world counterpart!

One handed weapons used two-handed gain a +1 DV. Katanas are like regular swords, except for the extra-long hilt, and are made for two-handed use. They have the +1 DV built in. So if you you use a katana one-handed, remember to subtract 1 DV.

So comparing a monofilament sword to a regular sword, you can see they're 1 DV better.

Now you need to commission a monofilament katana.

Personally, I would rule that katanas can be wielded with one hand without penalty. Otherwise, they would be worse than regular swords, either one-handed or two-handed. I think katanas and monofilament swords are both there to represent swords that are a bit better than the "normal" ones.

The monofilament sword is better in a purely fluff way - a monowire edge means that it doesn't need sharpening, and it will probably stand up to heavy wear better than a katana would. Plus, let's face it, katanas can be a bit of a cliche, so it's nice to have an alternative that is as effective.

The problem with swords is despite being legal to carry they are kinda hard to hide.

In any event. In real life not all weapons are created equal. Shadowrun didn't try and balance out every weapon so each one is equally viable. My preference in pistol is for a Ruger Thunderbolt with the standard internal smartgun modification, a firing selection change to let it fire in S/A and a personalized grip. But I also enjoy the Ares Viper Silvergun as it has a built in sound suppression but is still a legal weapon.

To be honest, unless a Katana is made from some mystical Ancient Chinese Secret method, there's no reason it should be a better weapon than the generic Sword. Anymore than a machete, rapier or longsword should be. They're also not worse than a Sword, just different. When wielding a Sword with two hands, you gain a point of DV but lose a point of AP compared to a Katana. And if you do wield a two-handed sword in one hand, it should be worse than a weapon designed to be wielded one-handed, though "worse" is a stretch since the same change occurs, only in reverse. They're different, but not terribly so. It is clearly inferior to a Monofilament Sword, though. But you can rationalize that away as superior technology.

That said, the description for both a Katana and Sword are every bit as clear as the Blades and Unarmed Combat skills are. A Katana is a two-handed sword and a Sword is a one-handed sword. You'll note a lack of any other two-handed swords in the core rulebook, too. That's because Katana is the generic stat for one.

As a GM, I view the difference between katana and mf sword thus: Try to cut a tank with a katana, and I'll laugh at you; cut a tank with a mf sword, and I'll start rolling body.

Didn't the original Street Samurai Catalog have a comment to the effect of "My shoelace has monofilament in it but you don't see me lopping heads off with it."? I took it as a marketing statement. "Here's the high-tech sword of the future! No better than a normal katana, but it's not a katana, and you don't like those Japanese corps buying up all your land and ideas anyway, do you?"

The comment was saying that there's a difference between monofilament and monomolecular (and even the whips aren't that). But it's still a durable sword that you don't need to sharpen, hype or not.

It's Asia Syndrome: any Asian weapon or power will tend to be better than its American/European equivalent. This has little reasonable basis, it's just the way a lot of game designers and gamers think.

All that blather about how katanas are made through some mystical metal-folding method that produces a superior edge ignores the following:
1) This process was also practiced in Damascus and Toledo, and possibly invented in India (I should check reference though)
2) Only the most expensive katanas are really all that good; cheapass swords-for-poor-samurai aren't all that special.

The awe in which some people holds katanas is due to comparing Masterwork Katana to Regular Sword, to use terminology from a game system we will not name.

This being the future, what about the following:
1) Weapons forged with futuristic metalwork that is far stronger - or not even made of metal
2) Monofilament katana (why not stack awesomeness?)

The process of making a katana is similar to that of the Anglo-Saxon sword. After finding bog iron it is then melted down into pig iron rods. The metal rods are folded and beaten (cold forged) so that the impurities in the bog iron are pushed out and the iron and carbon would fuse to make steel.

However this is a long process with a questionable possibility of making a good sword. This why we have phrases like "battle tested" and "battle forged", indicating that usually the sword might shatter, break in half or bend in the middle when used in the the very important age old practice of killing people.

It was only much later on with the advent of extensive commerce that better iron became available and also metal forging techniques.

I think i remember some tv documentation actually testing both an old style katana and an old style damascus sword by putting parts of them into a bath of acid. Actually, the Damascus Sword was still partly there after some time, whereas the Katana-Part had completely dissolved. But i am not sure. Furthermore, they mentioned that the Damascus Swords cannot be made anymore, as the metal used way back when is nowhere to be found anymore as of today.
And why the hell did modern technology not make things like 100.000 folds and thus impossibly awesome weapons a reality as of yet?
Titan/Aluminium-Alloy with ceramics for light-weight and durable material and then using the real dikote stuff to make it hard as a diamond?

The '100,000 folds' method should really be more common in a society with robot labor.

I seem to remember monowire (and Dikote...anybody remember what the rules for Dikote were?) giving some fairly obscene advantages in 2nd Edition. I imagine it was removed due to the Lightsaber effect, where no armor could really stop it. It's probably only in the rules as a nod to the old editions, and a way to make sure the nerf sticks - if they just didn't list it, players would insist it still follows the old rules.

As a GM, I'd at least try to give it more flavor, like AKWeaponsSpecialist suggested; I once allowed a player to slice a chainlink fence open in one swing without even rolling. Why? Because it was awesome, it was a perfectly in-character way around a minor obstacle, the player got to be awesome, and honestly he could have auto-successed if I required the roll anyway. But he didn't have to roll, because his monofilament sword went *right through the chainlink*! (o.o)

In game terms though, strictly rule wise? It's a legacy item that no longer grants a real advantage.

Dikote ain't in there anymore as of SR4.
In SR3, it gave +1 Power and +1 Damage on bladed Weapons.
+1 Power on all other close combat weapons.
+1 Impact/Ballistic if applied to Armor.
Lowered Barrier rating to 1x instead of the 2x you usually had when attacking barriers in close combat.

Yes, it was hillariously overpowered. Yes it was awesome.

IRL, you don't have all that many high-tech swords because there isn't a very big market for it. I mean, who uses swords when you have guns?

But in SR, of course industrial super-swords aren't just cool, they make sense as power foci (except for the scary Object Resistance.)

Hmm. I should look into making a fold-able memory plastic monofilament blade. Something that you can roll up into your sleeve and carry through a metal detector.

There's the "quiet" argument for swords, but I'd say that the blood spill tends to offset that advantage.
"No ammo consumption" is just being cheap on the wrong thing - range and speed are worth something.

No, I really can't come up with anything other than power foci to convince me swords are competitive. But they're still cool, and have built-in intimidation factor.

And that is why the 100,000 folds does not happen. Any civilization with enough technology to do it, has no need to do it.

<groans>

The point is the end opposite of the pommel....aka. the part you stab people with

Sorry couldn't resist.

If this was JackPoint and there was any justice in the world, you would SO much rep for that.

Oh god, SR4 includes Whuffie?

~J

Because the repeated folding is not needed for a good blade, it was born out of the necessity to make usable steel from inconvenient source materials.

The steel Japanese smiths used is made out of these lumps, which contain a whole lot of impurities you don't want while the stuff you do want is distributed very unevenly. The repeated folding and welding simply served to remove these impurities and evenly distribute carbon and other benefitial elements.
With today's metallurgy, steel with the exact percentages of alloy elements you want is available by the meter, better and more consistent than the best steelmakers of old could ever have produced.

Today's steel using technologies such as laser cutting will create a blade which is sharper, of better quality than any sword before 1890. Repeated folding is unnecessary for the materials technology available.

The lumps you refer to is bog iron.

Bog Iron - Wikipedia article
Iron production in the Norse era

Nope, the name is tamahagane and they actually are the intermediate product, the source material is iron sand.

It should be noted that this isn't just a translation issue; bog iron, as the name implies, develops in bogs and swamps, while 玉鋼 is formed from iron-bearing sand ("black sand" in English).

Edit: way to repeat what Sengir just said, me.

~J

Cool. I learn something new. I just know a bit about Anglo-Saxon sword makign and not so much about japanese sword making.

I stand corrected

That and the other reason why Japanese sword smiths used "folded metal" swords, is because " soft" iron tends to keep an edge on the blade far longer than a "hard" iron sword.Although, at the same time a "soft" iron sword tends to be way more malleable and brittle when compared to a "hard" iron sword.

"Hard" iron swords however tend to lose their edge very quickly. Again, there is a trade off involved, "hard" iron swords had the annoying tendency to very rarely break.

So, Japanese sword smiths learned to "fold" the steel which combined the two properties together.

Anglo-Saxon weapon smithing never reached this conclusion for some reason or another.Hence, why most European swords were used primarily as a hacking tool instead of slashing (which the katana was used for for.)

It was my understanding that European armor also tended to be more durable than its asian counterpart and therefore made slashing cuts less effective.

That can be traced back to difference in materials in Europe vs. Japanese medieval societies.

Actually, a few years ago a steel manufacturing found a way to duplicate the Damascus steel. They found that if you melted down steel cable and reshaped the steel you got the same effect as a Damascus blade.

You are confusing two concepts here:
1.) Folding and hammering the steel. This is done to remove impurities and excess carbon as well as to "stir" the alloy elements in the steel.
1.1) Putting several layers of different steel together and then fold and weld them a few times. Originally this was done to create a good average of durbale but soft and hard but brittle steel, today it is done for purely aesthetic reasons...often with stuff like nickel to create nice contrasts between the layers without regard for the quality of the blade.
2.) Crafting a blade from different layers of different kinds of steel. The easiest example is a blade with hard+brittle steel in the middle, "sandwiched" with softer steel at the sides to create a blade which is both sharp at the edge and does not break once you hit somebody with it. This is what the japanese swordsmiths truly excelled at


Japanese and Anglo-Saxon sword were simply made for different battlefields. Kinda like an elf with agility 20 and a BB gun vs. a clumsy troll with an assault cannon

Sorry, but I think you misunderstood everything.


Sometimes, you have dumb things down just a bit for others to get a complicated and complex concept, like Japanese sword smithing.

So hurrah for the interwebs and the anonymity that it grants us all.

I think thing about folding isn't cold forge folding to get impurities out. Pretty much everyone did that. Folding iron with different amounts of carbon. Creating layers of brittleness and spring to create a sword with both a cutting edge that lasts and flexibility overall so it didn't break.

For the Katana it was used for that purpose and for the curve of the sword. One of the reasons the aesthetics of a Katana is so pleasing is that the curve is a natural curve which occurs when two or more metals with different amounts of carbon is finally cooled with water (and clay for the Katana). The metals contract and crystalize differently creating a curve.

The precise amounts of the different metals the sword is forged with as it goes up the shaft is important in this process. It becomes a real art-form to create a Katana using the folding method.

I've always thought that the reason a katana and a mono sword had the same stat is that they are both forged using different materials within the shaft of the blade itself.

For the mono sword it is a different "monofilament" material on the edge and a flexible metal for the body of the sword.

The katana is the same where the edge is a very brittle metal that you could sharpen to a razor's edge.

The thing I love most about katana are the wavy temper lines created from where the two different types of steel -- the back of the blade and the edge of the blade -- are folded over each other. These are called hamon, and each one is essentially unique:

Hamon types

Monk delivers the goods. Also, that's why folding loses its benefits if done too much. Eventually the folded steel becomes too uniform and ceases to operate as folded steel should.

As to why anyone would use blades in SR4, well, there are a few reasons beyond the obvious aesthetic ones. First and foremost being what we discussed the other week, namely poisoning your blades. Though, you're still better off in that regard by using a throwing weapon as an adept. But for non adepts, it's still a way to even things out a little by packing double (or more, lol ringu) damage into an attack which takes up 2 simple actions.

the katana being better is kind of a hold-over from older editions when there was the pop-culture fear/belief that japanese culture was going to take over the world. (c.f. 1980's society)

I generally hand wave it away as 'katana' representing any superior crafted bastard sword regardless of exact type (katana having become slang synonymous with a 'really sweet' hand a half blade.) and sword being the mass produced kind.

monofilament swords of course also being mass produced but having the monofilament edging for the always sharp advantage and generally being not being a custom job / superior crafting / family heirloom.

*bows* Why thank you sir

Actually, both iconographic sources and the surviving manuals we have show a clear preference for stabbing when using swords. Against European armor most slashing weapons were fairly ineffective when compared to a puncturing thrust... however you are only thinking of war swords: if you look at many of the civilian swords, they are very much slashing weapons (though they were considered "large knives" rather than actual swords).

Western weapons were very varied, you cannot lump them all together.

Oh, and you are miss-using the word "hack:"
Hack-- to cut or sever with repeated irregular or unskillful blows
Slash--to lash out, cut, or thrash about with or as if with an edged blade

Unless you intend to imply that anyone who uses a Western weapon is unskilled... if so, I suggest you go to a local ARMA or SSG chapter and tell them that.

The longstanding assumption that European swords were effectively big metal, flattened, baseball bats. Slashing requires something with an edge; hacking is what you do with your kinda dull cleaver or hachet.

Anyway, yeah. I don't care how much your sword (or any edged) weapon sucks: unless your a moron you spend some time putting an edge on it. On the other hand, by the end of a battle (if your lucky enough to survive repeated encounters) I can imagine having a blunted weapon, specially if fighting against decent armor. *shrug*

But there is an old saying that goes along the lines of: "about as much fun as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick." It doesn't take a whole lot of point, to get the meaning across.

bah, swords are for posers, the unexpected knife between the ribs, tho...

The "blunt" idea was the result of some really shoddy scholarship about those times that came out of the 19th century; when you had a bunch of scrawny museum curators who had never actually tried to study the kinesthetics behind swordsmanship and who thought a four-pound sword was heavy were trying to explain how the swords worked... it failed, and rather epically; and modern scholars are still trying to repair the damage.

"Blunt" and "sharp" are fairly relative terms. Again, iconographic and textual sources show that Western swords were perfectly capable of severing limbs in one blow or cutting the heads off of polearms. In fact, I know some guys in ARMA who took a blunt (as in, intentionally blunted) longsword and cut a (full) water-jug in two, and the cut was fairly clean.

Actually, my understanding is that while you can sharpen a katana to a finer edge; a longsword will hold its sharpest edge longer... though I can't source that one, perhaps sqir666 would know more about that... what I do know is that a longsword will puncture things that would shatter a katana; not just because it is a straight blade, but also because its steel flexes more (which keeps it from breaking). I have yet to see a katana that could flex more the 45 degrees, and I know a couple of guys who have longswords that can without problem.

There is nothing really complex about it. The folding is part of the process to create the steel used as raw material by the swordsmith.
What the smith does is taking various types of steel and walding them together in a carefully designed pattern (Pic from the German Wikipedia, dark blue = hard steel, lighter blue = ductile steel) to form a blade. This contruction is NOT folded again, as this would destroy the pattern. The idea behing this was not to combine the porperties of the different steels, but to use the different properties with a clever construction.


Randomly putting together different layers of steel to form something like this is a different technology, because it just wildly mixes the different steel layers instead of putting each steel at exactly the right place. Of course it is still far better than the "normal" steel people had back then, which made this technology popular especially in Europe. And it's nice to look at, which makes sure that it is still popular today

Your typical European longsword is double edged, compared to the Katana's single-edge and hence allows for some more versatility.

Western martial arts are IMO highly underrated, but then again who cares? There was another reason for the re-development of melee weapons due to spirits, but I'm not sure what it was?

Melee weapon Reach bonuses are applied when using Willpower to attack a spirit.

~J

In the end, you're probably better off with a really good gun and a Cougar Fineblade if you need a edged weapon...

but then there is always the scenario...what if you run out of ammo and the enemy is to strong for a cougar fine blade to cut it (sorry couldn´t help pulling that one :3)