i always thought said didn't matter but sais matter a lot
remind me again why i invited you? look i get it you love the idea of
your pocket-sized heroine kicking butts and taking names with a really big sword or a quarterstaff or
some other thing that strictly speaking requires leverage and upper body strength and not smacking
it off the floor all the time to get the most out of it well i'm not going to tell you that
the visual isn't neat and also it's fiction and so technically you can do what you want
but if veracity is a concern for you and you don't particularly fancy going the magically or
scientifically enhanced strength route this video is here to help also if you're looking for a place
to plan organize and write your fiction then this video is sponsored by campfire but more on that
anon. i borrowed both a short person and a tall person who owns a lot of weapons and we tested out
various different things for your education but let's be real mostly for your amusement yes but
who are you lady i'm jill bearup you may know who i am but i'm an actor combatant which means i am
certifiably able to hit people this is Jack Stockdale he is a fencing instructor and also
a bunch of other things which may have appeared on the screen right now and this is Lily Grace
she once hit me in the head with some nunchucks that's not some press of his jacks uh one time she
broke a toe and didn't realize that's better okay on with the show the bodice dagger it's so teeny
you can hide it you can wear it on your person pretty subtly it would be very difficult to get
hold of with another weapon very easy weapon to just slip out do some very very close range damage
people who are short and not particularly muscular and otherwise physically unintimidating can be
overlooked sometimes literally and that can be to your advantage if you are more skilled than
you appear that being said in a straight up unarmed fight if you are very short you are at
a distinct disadvantage that's why the element of surprise and possibly poisoned blades might
be a good shot for you maybe not very fair but very effective but you do have the option to
use weapons which are bigger and also less lethal for example there's always sad or sais don't at me
i've seen both used and they come in shorter sizes for shorter people which is a definite plus this
is defensive against a bladed weapon without themselves being bladed you can block a sharp
blade with those but you wouldn't cut your opponent necessarily when uh when countering
the slightly complex hilt is great for locking in a blade if you can especially if you can get both
of them on the blade at the same time i'm not going to get into their history here but from
a storytelling point of view it's very much a weapon that says i'm not going to start a fight
but if you do i'm perfectly willing to finish it for a character who's on a battlefield though
unless you're really trying to make a point about something you don't want them sneaking about with
a dagger or with a generally non-lethal weapon maximum damage is the order of the day one of my
personal favorite weapons is the uh the warhammer or the horseman's hammer and this thing does one
thing very very well and that's break through things that are not meant to be broken this is
plenty long enough to go through some... a lot of different types of armor. A horseman's hammer is
nasty and effective but still maybe not the best choice for a shorter person that said if you are
about averagely tall for a woman like i am and you maybe do some supplementary weightlifting
just saying you may well be fine You want a go? [laughter] it's fun!
but if you're shorter and less strong it's going to be an issue at this length anyway.
It wouldn't be an issue for you if that was a two-handed one. it's a really nasty piece
of kit though so if your character is not unusually short or is short but is reasonably
strong and wants to do an awful lot of damage in a very effective manner then might be a good
choice particularly if they apply some skill to the problem. Swords are great for parrying!
if you're able to properly handle a horseman's hammer... just just try and parry it [argh!]
when you know how to handle the weight you can change the direction of the weapon fairly fairly
efficiently. Jack showing us up there with his knowledge and skills how very dare he anyway in an
unarmed fight there's a very clear reach advantage for the taller person and that remains true even
when you have an edged weapon but if you're using a dueling weapon like a smallsword or in this case
a smallsword hilt with a fencing epee blade attached to it for stage combat safety you
can mitigate those disadvantages somewhat. with height and reach advantage it's really useful with
a with a weapon that can basically knock the life out of you with just maybe three fingers worth of
penetration um for example if you were to uh just with a slightly cocked wrist attack to my low line
my my reach advantage is really useful there
and stabbed. Rude you don't have to be the tallest person in the world to use
properly but stop hits which is that one using the uh the same time that the opponent attacks
to launch an attack or high hand and a low point i can do the same thing with opposition.
And yes if you're wondering i did just notice that Jack has a longer blade than mine but never
mind the point still stands. and for that one you don't exactly need the reach advantage but
it does help! with the smallsword the thing that you're relying on really other than flashy
bladework and techniques is distance and timing if you need to make up more distance to launch
an attack that's a disadvantage if your timing's still good you can make up for the difference.
Skill matters a lot more when using a weapon like a smallsword if you're unarmed as the
smaller weaker person your best bet is like not to be there really but if it turns out that you
have to fight you have no reach advantage and you probably don't have a power advantage either
that said you do have a larger target area and a lot of important things within fairly
easy reach. you've got your liver you've got your kidneys in the back your stomach
is there all of Jack's important stuff is here. and i keep one more a little lower. and then
there's one a little lower. yeah you have a lower center of gravity- and i'm not Ip man
and as a shorter person you can also duck much more easily. if your opponent is unskilled and
you are very skilled then you may well be able to throw them around like a ragdoll
but if you aren't... ehh but anyway with a sword
the geometry of the weapon means that i am losing a couple
of inches of reach but i can lower my stance as before lily is going to be more stable than
jack with a lower stance which is an advantage if you're on slippery ground and you only really
need to get one good hit in but there does come a point when weapons just get too long or too heavy
for shorter people to use comfortably. I have the sword of gryffindor?
probably still too heavy for me i would like to point out this juncture that i
really don't enjoy arming sword it's a combination of all my least favorite things honestly.
It's much harder than a two-handed sword to change the direction
you kind of have to go where the weapon's telling you to go sometimes.
On the other hand for some reason i am growing in appreciation of rapier. True, rapier is a weapon
that really loves your wrists and forearms and just arms and hands in general really.
It is beautiful but also it's not the most shorty friendly weapon out there let's go with that.
A way that the the short person can negate the reach advantage is to come into close quarters
but since this is a weapon that relies mostly on the point if we did come into close quarters
it's kind of difficult to use the point to attack you can do it but it's it's not ideal.
This is now getting rather heavy i've got far less control with this than i do with a
smallsword or a single sword so for example if i wanted to do something to Jack with point control
i have to do a far bigger loop than jill does to do that
that's really good actually thanks!
If you have or can train yourself to have reasonably strong forearms and wrists then
rapier might be a pretty good weapon for you but if you're short or female or both there
is going to be like an absolute ceiling on the amount of strength that you can
achieve and thus how much control you can have particularly because you're going to have smaller
hands on top of everything else. if i were the strongest woman in my age bracket in terms of
grip strength i would still be weaker than three quarters of men of equivalent age c'est la vie
plus if you're particularly short uh the way that swords are weighted is also going to work
against you sport fencing cool cavalry saber uh so this is the one that nearly broke your arm
last time. yes it is.
Longswords can work but there is a floor so to speak on height. Longswords are supposed
to come out to your armpit which this one kind of does on me so that's nice i prefer longswords
to arming sword because it's not twice as heavy but you get two times as many hands.
I don't like long sword not two hands for me for me i'm pretty sure you could fit four there.
If you can find an appropriately sized weapon for you then skill can to a certain extent make
up for a lack of power and reach case in point my sais! these are
size 15 inches and the standard is 18 inches make sure your weapon is the right
size and you can use pretty much anything. But don't go too nuts on thinking that you
just need reach because for a shorter person a quarterstaff is very long and keeps people away
from you but it's honestly not the best choice. Bludgeoning weapons ones that don't have an edge
or a point bludgeoning weapons give people who are both taller but also stronger a more significant
advantage because the more power you can generate through this is more directly related to how much
damage you're gonna do with it which is still true for an edged weapon but also if you can hit
someone with enough power with an edged weapon you can still kill them that's not a massive amount
of power. And the amount of distance that's travelling just velocity of the point when
it hits pretty considerable whereas if you're having a if you have a shorter weapon because
you can't really use a longer weapon uh the amount of power generated isn't isn't quite as much
not even worried. Its still gonna suck... Even if you can use the longer staff the amount
of force that i can generate is considerably less than someone like Jack the advantage is that you
don't have to worry about weight: so with swords there tends to be a balance with staff it's all
one weight the whole way through that's true
so if you're a short person you just have to find the staff that's the right height for you.
side note the preponderance of women in fiction who fight with staffs is interesting to me i
wonder if it's because staffs can be used as a walking stick as well and so it's less obviously a
weapon and so it might fit if they're like a healy tree huggy type. I mean a staff does keep people
out of arm's reach but honestly you'd be better with a spear because then you could stick them
with a pointy end while still staying out of their reach. I mean the reach advantage of the staff
is cool but the relative lack of power generation might be an issue. Is it common to have characters
who are healers but also the staff chick? You know even if it isn't you're never gonna be able to
unsee that now you're welcome. Of course there is a leverage disadvantage with longer weapons
as jack and lily will now demonstrate i'm not saying bodice dagger versus staff is going to
be fun for the holder of the bodice dagger unless as demonstrated you're willing to be
very fast and get in very close very quickly but leverage it's a thing. Anyway i mentioned spears
oh that's really light it is!
I like it why is it making a rattling noise?
It's a training spear like if it rattles it means you're not moving it right.
So i asked jack and lily their opinions on good weapons for shorter people or in lily's case i
asked her which weapons do you prefer to use I prefer to fight with anything that gives
me control I'm already at a disadvantage because of my height i have to cover a lot more distance
than my opponents so any weapon that gives me more control over what i'm doing point work for example
kind of takes away any other disadvantage so these are good daggers are good karambit
knife and rope is really good so fun
Jack had an additional thought which is less useful for stage but might be more
useful for realism in fiction in general and that is long weapons like the spear!
The reason that i i said longer weapons is if you can negate or one-up the opponent's reach
advantage even with a weapon that you can use and it's not just a weapon that's way oversized
like a properly weighted spear and your opponent has something like this it's real good.
This is especially true if your opponent has a shorter weapon say a sword even with
the leverage disadvantage we discussed earlier I have to make up a lot more distance because
my opponent has a longer weapon despite me being taller that gives lily a lot more chances to hit
me while i'm trying to close the distance [stab, skips off merrily]
spears have the disadvantage of being seen as a bit dishonorable from a fictional standpoint
and from a theatrical perspective... well stages are only so big. With a staff you can hold it
relatively close in though you don't have to but with a spear it's very much a stick em with
a pointy end kind of thing and if you have two people using spears they're going to be quite
far apart which is fine if your stage is enormous but if you're on a community theatre stage one of
you might end up in the wings and even in film getting two people who are within spear distance
in the frame is well not a challenge but they might end up a bit smaller than the filmmaker
might otherwise prefer. I mean this happens to a certain extent with swords as well but swords are
significantly shorter than spears generally speaking still having now tried a spear myself
I'm thinking they're a bit under-appreciated. Same with shields to be honest we didn't use
any shields in our experiments and they're not particularly popular in film especially but you
know they are very useful from an actual martial standpoint they're brilliant because they hide
the person's body and head from view it makes it very hard to hit them unfortunately they hide the
person's body and head from view which makes it hard to see them which is a bit of a disadvantage
in a visual medium it's fine in a book because you have to imagine everything in your head anyway but
not so much for stage or film to be honest there are ways around this problem and it's not a
reason to never use shields ever but if you were wondering why they seem to be less popular than
they should be well that's one of the reasons. But let's move on because while we've been generally
increasing in size as the video has gone on there is one sword which we haven't tried yet!
Like without meaning to be funny about it I made them save this one for last because i think it's
going to be funniest and i'm a mean person so there we go come on what have you got for us?
this very very large sword i don't even know if it fits in the frame
it does now In the frame?
Yeah this is a very long weapon and it can be used like a spear by holding it below the uh
the second set of crossguards. Lily? see if this is appropriately weighted for you
Can barely lift it let alone use it this weapon is the same size as me
it's fairly taller than you actually That weapon is the same size as me
the greatsword is very fun but not light i'm not gonna say it's impossible for
me to wield but you can see that i'm struggling a little bit as always more
practice would make me faster more practice would probably make me generally better but
my absolute ceiling for effectiveness is not going to be as high as someone who is
taller and stronger than i am that's just life really and if you're 4 foot 11 like lily is
and for a short person there's only one thing this is good for social distancing
that's not to say you can be amazing at fighting and also short but the point (heh) of weapons
is to act as force multipliers and if you are smaller then you have less force to start with and
especially if you are likely to be considerably weaker than your opponent either because of sex
or age or disability or whatever you want every advantage you can get for example if you're like
my former work colleague who cannot really use her left arm very effectively after cancer treatment
then a two-handed weapon is really not going to be much use to you i mean let's all agree to keep
Janis off the battlefield in general but you take my point being shorter is not all disadvantages
there are things which you can use to your benefit like having a lower centre of gravity
being able to duck more easily and having a smaller target overall but there just aren't
advantages to being weaker in a fight. There are advantages to being more skilled and skill can
overcome strength and in fiction skill usually does overcome strength but that isn't always
the way it works in real life as I have seen in fencing more than once it is entirely possible
for a less skilled opponent to beat a more skilled opponent because they have a strength advantage.
I like to think of things like the other foil or some types of rapier almost in the context of dnd
like you don't need to do much damage you don't need much power generation
you literally have to put 500 grams of force anywhere where there's something important
so you can essentially take points off your damage and put it into your to hit bonus.
For example you wouldn't really be able to do with a you know a two-handed long sword uh well
some types of two-handed long sword but with a foil you can do like compound attacks with three
feints you know preparations and different steps and very subtle distance and timing
management that you just wouldn't be able to do with certain other weapons
which takes us nicely into helping you with your project be they writing fiction writing
screenplays or writing an elaborate world for your ttrpg campaign not that your players are going to
care about it they just want to know if they can get adamantine swords but anyway more than 150 000
writers use campfire to organize their stories and it is free for smaller projects and frankly
who does not love free you can organize your stories in campfire write with modules like maps
character sheets timelines relationship webs and a manuscript editor which lets you reference your
notes while you're writing. campfire also contains campfire learn which is their educational resource
and campfire explore where you can look at other people's stories and have other people look at
yours. It's free to create an account and you can access everything from the start if you
have a smaller project and if you have a bigger project and you find yourself needing more stuff
you can buy it either as a monthly subscription for as little as 50 cents a month or you can buy
whatever you need as a one-off purchase and then you never have to think about it
again. Write better stories faster with campfire by clicking the link that's in
this screen and also the pinned comment and also the description and regardless i
hope you find our experiments useful and i'll see you next time [cat!]