A lot of posts since the last one...
But you can't assume that it's not modeled in the game; Toady's post didn't indicate anything about that. He merely said he was testing simultaneous attacks, not which aspects or whether or not the dual-stabbing gave him advantage over other arena contestants.
Yes he did:
I don't have much to say about multiple attacks or how penalties for that would work. It's pretty complicated in the end. Certain things would be easy and effective (say, if you had needles you wanted to poison people with, or light sabers or something), and certain things would be wantonly silly, like a punch+kick maybe. I haven't really addressed this in any satisfactory way, and I'll probably be walking a fairly idiotic line until I actually focus in on combat a bit.
He's saying he doesn't have a system that is at all satisfactory for it yet.
Besides which, consider how many systems Toady has done some preliminary work upon, and then forgotten to ever come back to. When's the last thing that Toady changed, left broken, and then actually came back to fix?
The last one I remember was the mining scarcity, and that took a two-year gap to actually fix. By then, there were people who had only played without scarcity, and they were constantly complaining about not being able to build solid gold pyramids on every single embark, as if that was a perfectly natural thing to have enough gold mined from any random hole in the ground to make a solid gold pyramid.
Hence, it's worth flagging down the obvious pitfalls now, when it doesn't seem like Toady is aware of them, before he makes a mistake and doesn't come back to fix it for years afterwards.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying a double-stab is better, I'm just saying it's not abysmally horrible and nigh-impossible to pull off.
But what I'm saying isn't that it's impossible to pull off, I'm saying
it's not better, and you
agree with that. I'm just saying that there's nothing yet to indicate that Toady is going to code constant double-stabbing not to be better, and he should be warned before he gets too far into coding it that way that it shouldn't be that way.
Also, jumping attacks are taught in some martial arts. A flying side kick is effective, you've got your whole body mass flying at the target. You see superman punches in MMA. Just because they're not like in martial arts movies doesn't mean they don't exist.
You're thinking of unarmed martial arts, which is different from armed martial arts.
I'm talking about the jumping-sword-first attacks you
do see in movies because they're showy, but incredibly stupid, especially if we assume we're dealing with armored adventurers. (Because why wouldn't they be?) Just because you see something in wrestling or wire-fu movies doesn't make it an effective combat technique.
No school of martial arts based around armed combat teaches jumping attacks because it's extremely likely to wind up with you knocked down and struggling to get back up... and the whole point of armor is that you're almost impossible to kill while wearing it
as long as you aren't lying prone on the floor.
You can't make these transitive claims that because jump-kicking someone from behind works between unarmed and unarmored combatants when one combatant is unawares will automatically mean there shouldn't be
anything different against an armed, armored, aware opponent. And that's exactly the claim that's being made because you aren't bothering to make the distinction.
You can't argue dual-wielding is too mentally difficult to be effective because it can be trained and seems competitive. Escrima in particular is brutal and lethal. It seems more about flow then attacking with both hands simultaneously.
When it comes to full armor you can't fight with knives or light swords anyways but you should be able to shield bash and slash/ stab at the same time dual-wielding-wise... of course in DF you could wield two ultra-light one-hit kill adamantine longswords that cleave steel armor and the skill and strength to use them both - what attacks would there be for a shield to block ?
I would think simultaneous dual attacks would have to be handled differently; damage penalty and longer recovery back to balance point as opposed to sword-weaving style's multiple high-speed twice the attack/ defense opportunities at a penalized efficacy.
ugh it's way late...
Escrima, though, is one of those few martial arts that does actually have two weapons... (and is focused, again, on unarmored targets.)
And how does that work? You still only attack with one weapon at a time - you guard or feint with the other one. The only thing a second weapon does is allow for an opportunity to attack, guard, or feint from either side of the body.
And again, the thing I'm arguing here is what you're arguing at the same time - that having two weapons doesn't just mean you deal twice as much HP of damage, and that
concepts like balance are actually considered.