As for the clarification on the length of daggers.. yay for the Britannica:
Dagger, short stabbing knife, ostensibly the diminutive of the sword, though in ancient and medieval times the distinction between a long dagger and a short sword was often obscure. From approximately 1300 the European dagger was consistently differentiated from the sword; in the 16th century a school of fencing developed in which a specially designed dagger with a large guard was held in the left hand and used for parrying.
Its convenient size made the dagger inconspicuous to wear and easy to draw, giving it advantages over the sword in many situations. The types include the wavy-bladed Malayan kris, the short, curved kurki used by the Gurkhas, the Hindu katar with its flat triangular blade, and innumerable others.
There is no set length for a dagger, the only thing that defines it would be 'easy to conceal' since all kinds of daggers are also commonly used as slashing weapon, even though they were initially and mainly designed for stabbing.
Wikipedia says
Daggers may be differentiated from knives on the basis that daggers are intended primarily for stabbing whereas knives are usually single-edged and intended mostly for cutting. However, many knives and daggers are capable of either stabbing or cutting.
...which makes it even more vague to actually define a dagger, other than 'easy to conceal'.
As I can make up: there's no length requirement, there's no edge requirement, and there's no purpose requirement for a dagger. In other words: it all depends on the designer/smith of a bladed weapon to call it a dagger or sword (or knife - or are Legolas' knives actually daggers? WTF?). The one thing I can make up is that they're very versatile.
Considering there's no actual defining length difference between daggers and swords, I don't worry so much about getting neat weapons for my rogue even though they're not named long swords.
As for rogues and
being able to use long swords (yay! back to topic!): I'd love to be able to wield a single longsword as my only weapon as a rogue, duelist style. No shield, no off-hand weapon. Just one blade, one purpose. Of course, there should be special skills for this such as a passive attack speed increase, higher chance and more damage on critical hits and increased chance to parry. The use of a single (long) blade that can be wielded with a single hand leaves much open to agility, quickness and dodging - at least as much as using two shorter blades.
That said, a rogue dual-wielding long swords? Nah - that would completely defeat the purpose of the nimble agile dextrous and quick rogue in my view.
(edited for style & grammar)
Modifié par Jazharah, 26 janvier 2011 - 11:45 .
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