Its not a world building issue. You can pretend all you want that maces are better against armor, but when the rules do not support that then they are in the end not.
D&D 5E A matter of weapons
Its not a world building issue. You can pretend all you want that maces are better against armor, but when the rules do not support that then they are in the end not.
I agree that weapons need to be more than what they are, I was wanting to calm the discussion down as both sides had points. Unfortunately anything to do with martial has to be simple and not take up space. Book space and involved mechanics and separation of effect is for magic. Apparently weapons don't cause bleeding, stun or daze and Weapon Vs armour is too fidgety to tackle......but if you want to alter reality go party. If we are talking about lack of choice one could be forgiven for thinking that there is only Studded Leather and Plate Armour in 5e. I think that ultimately they over simplified the martial parts of the game.
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Satyrn
First Post
*points back at the last edition*
Thing is, no matter how many rules you add, as long as they are absolute and don't vary depending on the enemy there will always be a best weapon people will take when they have figured the math out. And if different weapons are better against different enemies it will not result in people taking exotic weapons and hope it was the correct one like what some posters here want, but will carry several weapons with them to use the appropriate one.
That is realistic, but when 3E did it people complained because they do not want to see fighters carry around a "golf bag of weapons" and instead wanted them to have a singular weapon they use all the time and thus had to be effective all the time.
Cap'n Kobold
Hero
IMO it is realistic that people don't choose to use the dagger in open combat for preference. In the real world daggers were never a primary military weapon. They were used as a backup and while wrestling by warriors and in more civilian situations as a weapon of concealment or stealth - or simply because it was the only weapon you were carrying.
Hmm. I saw in the first bout, several double hits before the dual-wielder actually managed to score uncontested points against the single-sword wielder. In the second bout, against someone who knew how to use the reach of the sword, the dual-dagger wielder got quite thoroughly beaten.
Now imagine that the longsword wielders were not restricted as to striking areas, were allowed to use the weight of their weapons, and were fighting an opponent that wasn't willing to "throw themselves into into him as they were dying".
You'll actually notice that in most cases where the dual-dagger wielder got hits in, they were delivered effectively at grapple distances. And that is where daggers saw most of their use as weapons of war.
Not many people's character concepts for warrior types involve fighting with a dagger as a main weapon because its not something as easy to picture as a historical-warrior-based concept. I think that there are plenty of reasons other than metagaming not to play that concept.
As has been pointed out before, D&D just doesn't model combat at the level of detail required to reflect the pressures that shaped actual weapons and armour choice.
I once tested out the Legend RPG. It was a percentile based system, and ... well, not the best out there by far, and it's handling of magic was something I never quite grasped and that my players didn't like.
However, it's weapons were amazing. The notion that upon attacking, each weapon had a sort of action that it could do; hits could do some things, and critical hits could do more. It really added a lot of flare and fun to the melee battles. Suddenly, "trash" enemies were a threat because a single good hit from anything was a hit that the player would feel; one player was one-shot after a guy ran up, an maximized his damage on a crit, impaling the player with a longsword.
Ive often pondered how to get the best of both words into things...
However, it's weapons were amazing. The notion that upon attacking, each weapon had a sort of action that it could do; hits could do some things, and critical hits could do more. It really added a lot of flare and fun to the melee battles. Suddenly, "trash" enemies were a threat because a single good hit from anything was a hit that the player would feel; one player was one-shot after a guy ran up, an maximized his damage on a crit, impaling the player with a longsword.
Ive often pondered how to get the best of both words into things...
Alright, the conversation has moved well past this at this point, but I just need to say that that isn't really sound. You shouldn't pay any attention to what was used the most over the course of human history, you should pay attention to what was best at the time. Today, the most-used weapon is the firearm, because it is the most effective thing we have available at what it does, and firearms would understandably be near the top of the hypothetical weapon chart for our world (below the scarier things we use for altering the landscape as much as killing).
It got touched upon, officially, to some degree in 1e with the Barbarian having initial weapons based upon culture (and unofficially in Dragon). In 2e, most if not all of the kits in the Complete Fighter's Handbook had the kit influencing starting weapons for characters (I think some of the HR series of books may have touched on it as well, but I can't say for certain). There were also some great Dragon magazine articles during 2e as well. As for 3e, I can't recall if it was touched upon officially in any supplements or Dragons Magazine, but there was a great third party supplement, From Stone to Steel.
I agree that it does not get used enough in world building, but some us DMs do take culture and environment into consideration when assigning starting weapons and weapon availability in our world.
You can still have thematically built PCs so long as they have mechanical support to do so. Daggermaster was one of the premier damage options for a long time in 4e due to its excellent crit potential. I feel like that sort of differentiation is better than simply saying “all weapons deal d6 damage” because in my experience people stop caring about what weapon they have, and just opportunistically take whatever is available, magic or otherwise.
Now, there’s certainly a healthy middle ground, as I grew tired of people with huge feat chains around a weapon type they’d never part from, but going from super specific to overly bland isn’t a great swap to me.
Most of those points are invalid, though. While such factors might exist, they are rarely touched on in campaign settings, and even when they are, typically do not apply to PCs for a variety of reasons. This ultimately brings the discussion back to rote combat effectiveness.
As several others have brought up, not all weapons are equal and even with all the above factors, weapon usage was always about the break point between production ability and effectiveness. That’s why the Romans didn’t deploy legions of bullwhip users or knife fighters, because it’s unambiguously a worse option than other weapons.
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