Bad Historians

 For some fighters, this is the promised land -- though I don't know why.

This is essentially the entire page, though naturally the links are useful to have.  The actual power of this sage ability is minimal at best.  We're merely offering some players, those who choose to specialize in pure combat, the chance to use a second weapon and not forgo the +1 armour class the shield offers.  I found some embittered fights on the stackhouse message boards about how you can't use the shield as a weapon, and that you definitely can't use it as a weapon AND a defense.  So I expect these arguments to bleed over into here, because as I always say, it is impossible on the internet to write anything about armour and weapons without starting a flame war.

That said ...

There is a trope that exists in internet-land that, "If we test something, and we can't make it happen, then it is a myth."  Regarding the use of shields as weapons, I turn now to this page from stackexchange, quote:

"During a reenactment exercise, I was hit with a shield using the flat of it, the sharp edge and the point at the bottom. The shield was accurate in size and weight. It hurt, but not as much as a blow from an axe or sword would, with its leverage and momentum (thankfully, these were less authentic).

"I've also had the privilege of being able to talk to a stunt man who specialises in horse and sword fighting (one of the Devils Horsemen team). He said, "I might push someone back so I can swing with the sword. If they are on top of my shield they deserve it. Swinging out with the shield... I wouldn't, especially if there are a lot of people around." It would create an opportunity for an enemy."

This reminds me of a mythbusters episode, discussing the practicality of a gunman using two pistols, one in each hand, shooting at different targets.  Whereupon the boys try it, mess around with it for their shooting schedule, at most about a week, and decide that "It's useless."

Okay.  This is an immense crock of horseshit.

Let's take an ordinary, every day magic trick.  You want to make a card that is in your hand disappear.  Take note that the linked video here tells you how it is done, but I want you to imagine that there is no teacher in this scenario.  There's no one anywhere that you can call, bring down to your studio or your practice yard, to show you how to make a card disappear.  That knowledge simply isn't available to you.

If you've never seen it done, and you haven't anyone to teach you, can you make a card disappear?  Yes.  Yes you can.  But here's a couple of things you'll want to keep in mind.  1st, you will have to really, really want to perform this illusion, and I mean on levels where you're willing to go without eating or sleeping or doing anything else, and especially not thinking of anything else, because you are going to have to be laser focused on figuring out how the hell you are going to make this happen.

And two, you're going to be at it for a long, long, looooooooooong time.  We are not talking about a week of filming.  We are not talking about messing around for an afternoon.  Even if you watch the video, and see how it is done, you will be at this process for months as you try to strengthen your fingers and your reflexes sufficiently to do a bad job of hiding that card.

So.  I'm curious as to whether or not you can use a shield against me in a fight as a weapon, so I tell you, "Go ahead, give it a try."  We'll call it a "reenactment exercise."  We're not actually reenacting anything, at best we're mocking television and movies, but okay, good enough.  Let me stress, it is a real shield.  And it didn't hurt as much as an axe or a sword.  Let's unpack that a minute.  Is the fellow hitting you with the shield actually trying to kill you?  No.  Has he trained with using an axe and a sword for the last upteen years of his life, because he is really into this stuff?  Yes.  Has he spent that many hours training with a shield?  No.  We know he hasn't, because the narrator here clearly indicates he hasn't ever tried this before.  Does it matter a whit that the sword is "real"?  Would it matter if I said, "I couldn't make this playing card disappear, and mind you, it's a real playing card."

Like the mythbusters, we have proved exactly jack shit.  We have proved that the shield cannot be used as a weapon by people who are not trained, and who are tremendously inexperienced with using the shield as a weapon.  We have proved that people who don't know how to use two guns against two targets are utterly useless in using two guns this way.  Wow.  Bully for us.

You know what?  I can prove, right now, without any trouble at all, that building a bridge is impossible, because I can't do it.

What I really like is when the answer comes back, "Hey, I've been training with weapons for a really long time!"  Or, "I've been shooting guns since I was a child!"  Uh huh.  I've been playing games with cards since I was a child.  Never made one disappear.  The skill here isn't how well you use the weapon.  It is, can you use it in this particular way, which will probably take you about two or three hundred hours of dedicated practice to master?  And that is, if someone shows you how.  If there's no one to show you how, just exactly how would you know what techniques are required?

To which the answer comes back, "Well, maybe, but we know that people didn't actually shoot with two guns in the Old West.  They kept two guns in case one jammed, but they didn't actually shoot with them at the same time."  Or, "If people had used shields as weapons in Olden Times, there'd have been a lot more discussion about it.  The fact that no one ever talked about it proves that it wasn't practical."

These arguments are desperate straw-grabbing, at best.  We don't actually "know" these things.  Bad historians like to pretend that we know this or that about the past, but good historians never forget that it just takes one unearthed book written in the 12th century to blow "what we know" to complete smithereens.  Point in fact, the printing press and the movement from hand weapons to powder weapons happened at just about the same time.  The proliferation of the printing press took about 50 years, to go from "never had one before" to "wow, they're everywhere."  Over those same 50 years, powder weapons went from "gee, that's new," to "what's a mace?"  The period of humans using hand-held weapons and shields in combat coincides with a rather long historical period when most people who knew how to read and write in the West were members of a quiet group of boys who used to mumble verses six times a day while shut away in stone sheds deliberately built far from the rattling mayhem of everyday life.  These boys didn't write hundreds of books about weapons because these boys didn't use weapons ... and most of those who did came from disturbingly broken homes and possessed poor social habits.  Arguing that mercenaries and bandits would have taken time to sit down and write long books with tons of useful pictures describing how to brain an opponent with a shield is a little myopic in polite circles and downright dead-fuck pig-ignorant when speaking accurately.

On the other hand, shooting with two pistols would have happened in the 19th century, when a lot more people could read and write, and there were reporters and such, so if anyone had used two weapons in gunfights, we would have definitely known about that.  People would have written tons of stuff about how amazing it was that ...

Wait a minute.  Hm.  Didn't all those reporters and eye-witnesses in the 19th century go on and on about the prowess that shootists like Wild Bill and Wyatt Earp had?  Gee, I think they did.  Oh but of course, none of that means anything, because when someone writes something that goes against what we can personally prove in the year 2006 or 2014 or 2021, then it's plainly just a load of bullshit.  Things are only true when they're not written about, because then we know that no one's lying.

These arguments that are premised on all this shaky ground are awfully hard to refute, especially as we arbitrarily decide which contemporary sources we're going to accept and which we're not.  Am I saying that Wild Bill Hickok definitely shot six or seven men in a bar fight in the Nebraska territory in 1867?  Hell no.  I wasn't there, or anywhere in 1867, not in Nebraska nor in any of the other places where Hickok purportedly shot multiple folks at the same time, and did so with more than one revolver in his hands.  And neither was anyone else who lived, either then or now, to write absolutely true accounts of such a thing, one way or the other.  Some historian in the present, who says it didn't happen, is making that judgement are exactly the same amount of hearsay that some historian is using that says it did happen.  The difference between bad historians and good historians isn't that good historians use better sources, it's that good historians know that we can't trust any sources.  Not really.  We just do our best, figure out what we can, and wait for somebody to finally reveal that for the past five generations, this one family in Arkansas has been keeping this old leather-covered book, not knowing what it was.  Even then, we'll never really be sure it was written by Hickok.

So when anyone tells you something is true, because we know it from history, you should treat that person like a fellow trying to sell you land in Florida.  That someone, even if they have a television show, is just one big flop-pie of old cow grass.