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Originally Posted by Hellblazer  I have to disagree with this. Any one that has trained with a blade, knows the weak spots. It's not because its a broad sword that it can't be used to slash a throat in a swift pass, to move faster to an other opponent. Even longsword hit on a kidney would leave the opponent bleeding to death slowly. So it's not only assassins and rogues that would know that. The difference in the classes, skills and feats appart, is in the way it will be done. Fighter will go up front unless they need to be silent about it (which would be harder for them as they don't train in that way most of the time. While assassins and rogues will use the shadows and things to hide their approach to attack from the back or in ways that they wouldn't be seen. |
The ways Sneak Attack and Death Attack are described are based on that they have special "one hit, one kill" training while other normal people do not have the same knowledge.
Closest you can come to that is probably weapon masters, in order to increase the critical threat range which is essentially also to hit "critical areas".
The difference lays in that a crit is really only about striking against a "no-brainer" area. Aim whatever weapon you had against your opponents head? If you hit, of course it will hurt a lot. Practicing that is a good idea to get combat over quickly (and an option to lessen the "torture" of your victim).
But to get training in that "four centimeters from the center of his chest, you will find a small gap between his ribs, easily allowing you to slip in and hit vital organs, in order to implement the said one hit, one kill policy"... that's something, per game definitions, reserved for sneaks.
Training in the use of a weapon and training to use it in an assassination "kill directly" fashion are not the same. Combat is of course almost always about killing your opponent as fast as possible anyway and your arguments about learning about how to easier kill some creatures is also very valid. It's just that there are very few exclusive bunch of classes that are specialized in the "super rapid killing"-method.
But it doesn't matter overly much for this particular discussion, as you mentioned the exact point I wanted to get through with:
Even longsword hit on a kidney would leave the opponent bleeding to death slowly.
Which effectively means that hitting someone else with a weapon, regardless of type of weapon, cannot be the sole grounds to define "torture".