You'll probably laugh, but I prefer to say simwood, perfected for spring, density and hardness. That's why the Japanese Bo does more damage, they have better plastic. I mean, carrying around real wood might get you killed by all those tree huggers.

No one's said it yet? Guess I have to.
He's probably compensating for something.

I'm pretty sure they're not suggesting that it is in fact a polearm. That being said, the way it is used bears a lot more resemblance to a polearm than a sword.

Edward: Stainless steel?

~J

Damn, that would be heavy...

I was thinking more Damascus or Carbon, maybe (and even the Carbon would be a tad heavy for a No Dachi).

It isn't, but any sword using it I've ever seen is significantly thicker than usual; I'm assuming that this is due to material brittleness, though it could just be that people using stainless are making bad swords anyway.

~J

Or maybe...

Just maybe...

IT WASN'T FOLDED ENOUGH!

(Guffaw. I make fun of myself now. I'm so cool.)

Odds are this is stainless.

~J

But fundamentally you don't need a "good" pair of nunchucks to beat someone to a mass of broken and swollen flesh. There's no reason at all that a 10 dollar pair from a Chinatown tourist trap can't cause grevious physical harm or death to someone. They might not be durable in the long haul, but they are perfectly usable as weapons. All that's important from the perspecive of the mechanics of the weapon is that you have the two pieces of wood joined by flexible cord so that you can get a powerful torque when spinning the weapon.

The same thing works for knives, too. Sure, you can spend hundreds of dollars on a well tempered and well formed combat knife that you could keep for years, but that dosen't mean that a skilled knife person who attacks you with a 20 dollar chef's knife isn't still quite capable of killing you in exactly the same way. Maybe the chef's knife won't hold up as well to the stress of combat but that dosen't mean that if you want to go kill someone with a knife in the context of SR you should be forced to pay the price of a cougar fineblade (analagous to the ridiculous 100 nuyen MSRP for nunchaku) when all that you theoretically need is the 30 nuyen Knife (would be analagous to a cheap 10 dollar pair of nunchucks).

Anybody seen the episode of Conan O'brien when he was doing funny ads and one of them was for an aluminum bat called "The Rent Collector"?

If anybody can find that bat for me, I'll give you my first born.

That being exactly what I said, I'm left to wonder why you put in the "unsure where you got your info" comment

The reason I don't have a problem with it is that for a Shadowrunner any price in the low hundreds of nuyen is essentially nonexistent.

~J

I'd second that. Stage combat is all about aiming for your opponent's blade instead of his body. You see a lot more in terms of direct blocks and blade attacks than you would ever see in a real fight, so the wear and tear on a stage blade is astronomically higher than on a live one. In fact, and I'm sure the SCA boys will back me up on this, when I actually studied (briefly) live broadsword combat I was surprised how much of it was avoidance and, at best, deflection as opposed to blocks and parries.

Right, but when we're talking about three section staffs or nunchaku, the degree of deadness caused by a cheap pair or an expensive pair makes very little difference. The only difference I can forsee would be in terms of long-term durability.

All that you need to create deadness with nunchaku is a hard material and the central chain so that you can get a lot of torque on your swing. It dosen't make a huge difference whether the material is some cheap metal or wood, or whether you've got a chain or a cord in the middle. Either one can do the job equally well if you know how to swing the sticks.

It's made a difference for me in the past when using the Priorities System and giving myself 500 nuyen starting cash so as to squeeze out every last attribute and skill point that I can. When a simple pair of nuchaku takes up 20% of your starting resources when it really really shouldn't, it's kind of disheartening.

Yes I've used nunchaku before, both foam practice ones and hardwood w. connecting chain. I wouldn't consider myself an expert, but I've definitely logged a number of hours in nunchaku practice.

My point still stands. Even if you don't trust a cheap pair it dosen't mean you can't use them two or three times to beat someone down. Would you want to use a cheap pair to try and parry someone swinging a stick at you repeatedly? No, probably not. Would you want to keep your cheap pair after completeing a shadowrun where you beat down 5 people with it? Well, if you can afford to it would be better to get a new one, or just switch to one of your replacement cheap pairs. But a cheap pair can still be perfectly functional in the short run.

It's like a cheap made-in-China stainless steel balisong. You can buy something like that for maybe 20 dollars from a store (cheaper than the 30 nuyen for the Knife from SR3, incidentally). So, we have a sharp stainless steel balisong. IF I keep this balisong for like a year and I'm always practicing my passes on it, might not the really cheap rivets holding the balisong together come undone causing the blade to go flying across the room or possibly into me? Yes. But can a 20 dollar balisong make someone very dead in a vicious attack? Yes, no worse than a high quality balisong if we're talking about the first or second use. (Furthermore, traditionally balisong weren't even always high quality anyway.)

The inflated prices make a difference when you consider that some really poor characters will have 500 nuyen starting cash, and when you consider how the price of some of these weapons is multiplied by street index or things like that.

150 nuyen manrikigusari with a street index of 2 is offensively stupid, for example. Why would anyone pay around 300 nuyen for a short length of chain with a small weight on either end? Why should this very simple tool potentially eat up 150 nuyen out of 500 nuyen of starting cash of a really poor character? All that you need to make a perfectly servicable manrikigusari is to go to a hardware store, buy two cheap padlocks, and a short length of chain. That is never ever going to add up to anything like 150 nuyen in terms of price and I can hardly imagine there being a street index on that sort of thing.

My only conclusion is that the authors of CC got ripped off in Chinatown tourist traps too many times when buying martial arts weapons that were festooned with red tassels and had drawings of dragons all over them.

Ignoring the fact that you've got a point about them being overpriced, I can't begin to imagine how horribly weighted these would be. You and I clearly have different definitions of "perfectly servicable".

~J

Well a lot of manrikigusari techniques have to do with entangling, strangulation, and throwing following an arm entanglement rather than chainwhipping. Your percussive attacks might be a little bit akward but most of your repetoire would be perfectly workable, since the cheap padlocks in that case would be there mostly to help you have a really firm grip on the ends of your chain. And akward or not you could still certainly chain whip someone most injuriously with your padlocks if you absolutely had to; it's not like swinging a padlock at the end of a chain at someone is harmless.

Arethusa: if this board had a Reputation/Karma system, I'd +rep you for your awesome quip.