OK, so in a sam­ple com­bat the fol­low­ing occurred.

A char­ac­ter wear­ing a metal helm and leather hauberk was attacked and hit by a swung hal­berd in area 5

The d6 result was a one. In the cleav­ing table area ⁵⁄₁ result is “Head (upper)” pretty clearly a strike on the helm.

Met­tal helm = Blunt dam­age so we switch to the blunt attack table.

Now, check­ing swung blunt attack against area ⁵⁄₁ tells us that this is an attack against the shoul­der. Clearly a case where we should use cleav­ing dam­age and the cleav­ing dam­age table.

Now, I see that Head (upper) is an option on the blunt 5 so that is pretty easy to resolve I sup­pose. But it got me look­ing and I see that in some cases there is not a ready answer. Blunt ⁶⁄₆ for exam­ple is face whereas cleav­ing ⁶⁄₆ is chest and nei­ther of these two loca­tions are to be found on the oppo­site table.

Is there a defin­i­tive rul­ing for this or is it just a case of pick­ing a log­i­cal stand in from another chart?

Also, talk­ing of wounds to the face, any­one want to tell me how they resolve nasals or cheek plates on a helm? Or really any armor that may or may not kick in given the gran­u­lar­ity of the hit loca­tions being insuf­fi­cient to the task?

Phew, what a mess , no won­der you are hav­ing trou­ble

Ok, so here’s the prob­lem. Thing is you don’t ever pick another table after you choose your action and com­mit for an attack.

So lets go at it step by step:
For­get the maille, it wont come in play;

Attacker (A) wants to hit Defender (D) with a hal­berd. A hopes to split D’s head apart, so he chooses to hit the Area 5 of his oppo­nent, which has the high­est chance of hit­ting the head;

He selects to swing the hal­berd using the cleav­ing blade of its weapon through the CUT maneu­ver. He com­mits the dice and D com­mits to his defense;

A hal­berd has a swing ATN of 8, a Swing DR of +4, Thrust ATN of +1, a DTN of 7 and a Blunt DR of +2;

Now lets say A man­aged to get past D’s defense (by any amount), so he rolls a fur­ther D6 to deter­mine the attack sublo­ca­tion, which in your case was a 1 (I usu­ally roll sublo­ca­tion as soon as you choose an Area, but what­ever you fancy);

Now, usu­ally a hal­berdier would enjoy the whoop­ing +4DR to a cleav­ing swong attack, but since D has a metal hel­met it wont be such a thing: look­ing over at Table 4:3 “Armor val­ues vs weapon type” (pg. 153) we can see that plate has a N/​A AV ver­sus Cleav­ing. What this means is that you must use your weapon’s BLUNT DR instead of its SWING DR or THRUST DR (if its not a pierc­ing one), not that your attack or your weapon trans­forms into another thing;

Since the dam­age being dealt is blunt, D will use the “AV vs. Blunt” value of his armor (a 4 or 5) as seen in table 4.3.

Thus, the hal­berdier will roll its attack nor­mally, be it a swing or a thrust (those being modes of attack, not of dam­age) but will have to use the BLUNT DR instead of SWING or THRUST DR, in this case using a DR of +2 instead of the +4 should its enemy have a less pow­er­ful hel­met.
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All cleav­ing capa­ble weapons have the BLUNT DR as part of its sta­tis­tics for such cases as when fac­ing though armor that cant be cleaved — in that case the power of the cut will trans­form into blunt power, usu­ally less pow­er­ful than a “ded­i­cated” blunt weapon.
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Tac­ti­cally speak­ing, it might be a slightly supe­rior choice if the hal­berdier chose to use the Back-​Spike of its hal­berd (using the Swung Pierc­ing dam­age tables instead), even if the defense of the metal hel­met is supe­rior against pierc­ing than it is to blunt.

Check it out: By swing­ing the back-​spike down at D’s head, A use the Swing ATN for its attack. Since its pierc­ing (and not cleav­ing), and there’s an AV against Pierce, the dam­age doesnt switch to Blunt. Since it doesn’t switch, it uses its Swing DR of +4. Read­ing the descrip­tion of the Hal­berd we can see that it fur­ther enjoys a +1 Swing DR against armor, so effec­tively he’s at +5DR. Thus a swing cleaving-​turned-​blunt-​attack has a DR of 2 against an AV of ⁴⁄₅ and a swing pierc­ing attack has a DR of 5 against an AV of ⁶⁄₇. A sin­gle wound step that can mean a death.

Any­way, thats how we do it. There’s always the pos­si­bil­ity Michael posts here and say I over­looked some­thing silly obvi­ous. Blade has a learn­ing curve, i’ll give you that.

Thank you for your thourogh reply Anarak but I’m afraid you’ve missed my point. My fault per­haps for using the word Hauberk in asso­ci­a­tion with leather armor. I do under­stand the rules with regard to edged weapons and metal armor. I think if you re read my post with the under­stand­ing that hit loca­tion in con­junc­tion with the neces­sity of chang­ing dam­age type and thus dam­age table, has me shift­ing from metal to non metal armor, and then back again, ad infini­tum, you will see what I am talk­ing about.

OK, after re-​reading the book I’ve deleted my pre­vi­ous com­ment and i’ll meet you halfway.

Thing is I think we’re both right and wrong.

The most impor­tant thing in what I think you got wrong remains that you shouldn’t RE-​PICK an area or sub-​location after you com­mit dice into an attack.

Now here’s the tricky part: There’s not a clear text in the book (that I can find) that explains thor­oughly how to deal with this sit­u­a­tion. The only thing I can find is this at pg.152and this at pg.153
The tricky part is that the excerpt from p.153 tells to use Blunt DR — some­thing cov­ered by the BLUNT DR stat, but doesn’t specif­i­cally tells to use the blunt tables.

I can see three pos­si­ble solu­tions for this:

1) Use the Blunt DR mod­i­fier for the dam­age but still use the cleav­ing dam­age table. Which in hind­sight doesn’t seem to be the best solu­tion since its dam­age table takes into account the capa­bil­ity of cut­ting (hence it causes more bleed­ing than blunt causes more shock).

2) See in advance that you will deal blunt dam­age and use the Blunt dam­age tables, which has the neg­a­tive down­side of hav­ing the pos­si­bil­ity rolling a sub-​location unpro­tected by metal (and thus actu­ally deal­ing cleav­ing dam­age) which seems like a silly rever­sion of things.

3) Use the cleav­ing dam­age table, deter­mine sub-​location, detect if the AV cov­ers cleav­ing or if it turns into blunt. If blunt, refer to the SAME sub-​location in the blunt dam­age tables. This seems to be a far bet­ter option IMO.

So, in your hal­berdier case:
He’s using the axe-​blade of his weapon in a ver­ti­cal swing. Thus its a Swing mode of attack with a cleav­ing dam­age. Use the cleav­ing dam­age table Area 5, roll sub d6, rolls a 1 (Head-​Upper). Sees his oppo­nent has a metal hel­met pro­tect­ing upper head. Blunt dam­age, use Blunt DR and look for the Head(Upper) in the blunt swing areas. Doesn’t mat­ter if you take the Head(Upper) from the area 4, area 5 or any other area, all sub-​locations names have the same stats under the same dam­age cat­e­gory.

There might be the odd case, such as the Chest cross-​cut cleave or swung-​pierce that has no true par­al­lel in blunt. In this case i’d say use com­mon sense and pick the next best thing which in this case would be … ribcage? or chest.

What seems like the least likely option is for dam­age tables to be switched dur­ing an attack, firstly because there’s not a slight men­tion of this hap­pen­ing in the book and sec­ondly because of weird things such as your para­dox. If it doesn’t make sense it’s prob­a­bly wrong.

Any­hoo, that’s the limit of my blade-​fu, hope­fully some­one more insight­ful will chip-​in, or bet­ter yet Michael will give a chime.

Right. Option 3 is essen­tially what I am doing and it seems the only log­i­cal path for­ward. It seems a lit­tle silly to me that the hit loca­tion tables for cleav­ing don’t map exactly to those of blunt. Par­tic­u­larly in those cases where it is not just a mat­ter of a dif­fer­ent loca­tion on the D6 but a mat­ter of a par­tic­u­lar loca­tion being present on one table and absent on another.

Hon­estly I feel the best solu­tion might have been to have a sin­gle table for both that sim­ply listed the dif­fer­ent dam­ages results side by side though I rec­og­nize that this might have been a chal­lenge from a lay­out perspective.