Introduction to Personal Weaponry [Monday, second period]

[furious-maximus.livejournal.com]

This week the first thing most people would notice as they arrived was that one of the walls was covered with targets. Nothing fancy, just big circles with bulls-eyes.

"Using your brilliant observational skills, I'm sure that some of you have already guessed the topic of today's class: throwing things." Max grinned. "As with any fighting technique, there are advantages and disadvantages to throwing things at people."

"Advantage one." Max grabbed a baseball from his desk and sent it sailing toward the wall. He wasn't really aiming, so he was lucky to hit a target at all. "You can hit someone from a pretty fair distance. Farther away than they're going to be able to hit you with a sword or a spear or something for sure."

"Advantage two." This time Max grabbed a... computer printer? He sent that toward the targets as well. "You can throw just about anything. That isn't to say that just anything makes a good weapon for throwing, but it does make it a flexible sort of skill to have."

"The main disadvantages are that anything you throw, you're no longer holding, so if you throw your sword you're suddenly unarmed; no matter how good you are, a thrown weapon never hits with as much power as one you're holding; and throwing stuff takes a lot of practice to get right. A lot of practice. And each different thing you throw requires you to relearn your techniques all over again."

"There are two main ways to throw things, differentiated by which axis they rotate around in the air." Max grabbed a knife and held it up. "Knives are common thrown weapons, and they rotate end-to-end when thrown properly." He tossed the knife upward to let it flip a few times before catching it by the blade. "The trick to throwing this sort of weapon is to get very familiar with the way they fly. You have to learn how to control the rotation so that no matter how far away your target is, the blade hits point-first. Because if you're going to give up your weapon, it better be effective." Max threw the blade hard enough to bury it in the target. "Like that. Not like this." He grabbed another knife and threw it just as hard, but this time it hit sideways and clattered to the floor.

"You use this technique for most small objects," Max explained, grabbing another baseball. "For one thing, most weapons aren't balanced around their center point which makes this more awkward. On top of that, if something gets too big then the time it takes to flip end-for-end gets too long and the chance of you hitting with the pointy end goes down. Also, something the size of a spear would be pretty awkward to throw like this." He hurled the ball at one of the targets.

"Which brings us to the other technique, which is rotating along the longest axis of the weapon." Max grinned and grabbed a spear. "The spear is a pretty classic example of this sort of thing," he explained, hefting it in his hands and spinning it a few times to demonstrate. "But you can actually use this for a number of different things. Like the polearms we looked at last week," Max smirked, "or swords."

To demonstrate, Max grabbed a long sword and shifted his grip so that he was holding it backwards, blade extending out from the bottom of his fist. He drew it up to his ear, holding it like a spear that had lost its shaft, and threw it. It spun as it flew forward, drilling into the target.

"And, finally, I should mention that some weapons are specifically designed to be thrown. Since this involves rebalancing them for smooth and stable flight, it's very rare for a weapon of this type to be as effective when it's not thrown. The perfect balance for throwing is not the perfect balance for fighting."

"Okay, that's enough talking. Today's activity is for each of you to pick a moddable weapon and spend the rest of the period practicing with it. Remember, it takes time to get comfortable with a specific object, so it's going to take some time. You're welcome to ask for help or offer advice to one another, too."