Jonathan Tweet
Adventurer
How does a pre-industrial society hang together with super-powerful individuals and groups wandering the land at will, especially as these people rocket up in personal power in just a few years?
D&D General What are your Pedantic Complaints about D&D?
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Ask a Platypus.
The idea of functioning D&D societies as the default setting is just a 3e trope. IMCs the OD&D Wilderlands or 4e Points of Light/Nerath are more typical - there basically is no functioning society, it's more Fallout than Greyhawk.
I'm not sure if this is a pedantic complaint or a complaint about where the rules need to be read pedantically to work. (Worrying about that distinction, however, seems suitably pedantic.) Without further ado...
Crawford has confirmed in a rules article that the commonly used rules phrase "melee weapon attack" refers to "melee attacks with a weapon" rather than "attacks with melee weapons". Furthermore, he stated that we can know this was the intended meaning due to the lack of a hypen between "melee" and "weapon".
While Crawford is entirely correct regarding the rules for hyphenating compound adjectives, I think it was a frustrating mistake to write the game rule in a way where its meaning depends on the omission of the hyphen. Not only that, but because the rules for hyphenating compound adjectives are often ignored in casual writing (which 5e purports to be), even readers familiar with the hyphenation rules have no way of knowing if the omission of the hyphen was purposeful.
It would have been much clearer to just write "melee attack with a weapon" everywhere in the rules that they wrote "melee weapon attack".
Crawford has confirmed in a rules article that the commonly used rules phrase "melee weapon attack" refers to "melee attacks with a weapon" rather than "attacks with melee weapons". Furthermore, he stated that we can know this was the intended meaning due to the lack of a hypen between "melee" and "weapon".
While Crawford is entirely correct regarding the rules for hyphenating compound adjectives, I think it was a frustrating mistake to write the game rule in a way where its meaning depends on the omission of the hyphen. Not only that, but because the rules for hyphenating compound adjectives are often ignored in casual writing (which 5e purports to be), even readers familiar with the hyphenation rules have no way of knowing if the omission of the hyphen was purposeful.
It would have been much clearer to just write "melee attack with a weapon" everywhere in the rules that they wrote "melee weapon attack".
Read the 80's novels Guardians of the Flame, in those books potions were poured on to a wound or drank.
I'm trying to figure out the circumstances where the difference would matter - or why Crawford got this question in the first place. (Clicking the link gave no context, just the answer).
Is someone wondering whether whacking a monster with their longbow counts as a "melee weapon attack"? I don't even get why this question would come up...
ETA: I know this is the thread for pedantry, and this is pedantry and so it's appropriate. But the fact that Crawford got asked this question just blows my mind - I just have to know why it matters!
MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
Chase rules, really all non-simultaneous actions/movement.
Character A runs away and hides as character B stands and watches.
A horse chase where horse A runs 100 feet away from the other moving horse, then B runs to catch up, etc. (and the weird dino race rules in Tomb of Annhilation).
Character A runs away and hides as character B stands and watches.
A horse chase where horse A runs 100 feet away from the other moving horse, then B runs to catch up, etc. (and the weird dino race rules in Tomb of Annhilation).
Tony Vargas
Legend
There are melee weapons that can be thrown. So there's a very practical distinction between "attack with a melee weapon" or "melee attack with a weapon," as throwing an axe at someone is ranged attack with a melee weapon, but not a melee attack, at all.
Hitting someone with a bowstave is a less common example of the same distinction.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Agreed - it's one of PF's better productions, and largely adaptable to almost any system with a bit of work.
Well, this assumes both players and PCs are looking at things first and foremost in terms of DPR and so forth rather than characterization and flavour...which kinda brings up a peeve of mine, that being players who only view their characters in terms of how much damage they can give out each round.
There's also d5 (easy enough to achieve by either d10/2 or d6 reroll 6s) and multiples thereof; and multiples of d3; so it's not quite as limited as you say.lowkey13 said:
That said, because you're dealing with small whole numbers it's not very granular and thus a whole lot of different weapons get shoehorned into doing d6 or d8 damage. 1e tried to mitigate this a bit by differentiating weapons vs armour type, and 3e kinda waved at differentiating between slash-pierce-bludgeon; but any such system is going to add lots of complication for, really, not all that much return. So in the end we kinda have to live with it.
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