It is later.
Fixation on realism, especially for the combat system in this game, is misplaced. The game is not meant to be a HEMA simulator or such. It’s built around the stories about a near super human warrior in an era of gods and monsters.
If we focus on what the soft weaklings in our modern waking world are capable of, we will have completely missed what is realistic in the context of the setting.

But even if we want to focus on verisimilitude, we run into an issue.
An issue most people won’t comprehend because popular media (be it live action or animated) pretends that armour is paper maché.
This one has trained and contested in armour. It is significantly utile, both in preventing injuries and in sapping the force of a blow so that it has less impact.
But even without armour, some attacks are higher commitment, but also cannot be just swatted away.
Point of fact, there is a maneuver called a stop thrust that explicitly uses the uninterrupted momentum of the enemy’s attack to impaled them. Not stop the attack, because that’s not how a hit from such a weapon would work.

If we want to go down the route of realism, it invites a thousand and one complications and nuances that may be more than the system (which uses attack patterns that vary from okish to absurdism) can handle.

That is why this one asked to steer away from applying what we find realistic in modern times, when precious few of us have held a real sword or worn real armour, much less been in a real fight.

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