#sword throwing

It’ll get you killed, so that’s one thing you can scratch off your bucket list.

To be fair, people actually did throw their swords in combat. It was enough of a problem that some surviving fencing manuals specifically tell you not to.

There are also surviving manuals that explain how to throw a sword effectively. Combined, I think it’s safe to say your best option is to throw someone else’s sword, not yours.

As to why you’d want to do this at all? The answer is pretty simple: There’s someone you want to stab, but they’re all the way over there, and walking is for peasants.

Any attack that leaves you without a weapon is a bad idea. Throwing a sword, or axe, or knife, is something you should only consider if you have other weapons available to you. A large part of why it’s dueling texts that tell you not to is, that’s a controlled environment where you wouldn’t have additional weapons to fall back on. It’s also, literally, giving your foes an extra weapon. They may not want it, but you’ve created a situation where that weapon can be used against you. So, throwing weapons is not always the worst possible idea, but it’s rarely a good one.

-Starke