Why is bigger always better?

[Dausuul]

But then I guess it comes down to what you want out of your game. Fun or reality?

This would be the reality in which wars throughout history were fought by people wielding daggers, was it?

Swords were invented for a reason. In the hands of a skilled wielder, a sword is a better weapon. You can quibble over why that is the case, but if it weren't the case, nobody would ever have gone to the trouble of inventing swords and they would never have seen such widespread use.

 

[jimmifett]

One of the things that has always bothered me about D&D and many other systems I've delved into, is the pervading assumption that bigger weapons do more damage. Reality seems to contradict this assumption.

Rock beats scissors and is easy to throw.
Boulder beats rock, but is less easy to move and tough to set up for use. hurts like hell when it lands on you.
Asteroid beats rock. You don't even really have to aim...

 

[El Mahdi]

When your life is on the line, you're not going to back up to give your opponent with a sword an advantage. Once you're under his guard, assuming you can get there without dying, you're going to stay there and get stabby.

I think you have a misconception about how swords are used. Yes, they most obviously can be used for large slashing or chopping attacks, but they are also effective as a close in weapon. You can choke up (grab the blade) and use it as a short blade (called half-swording), or reverse it and use the hilt or crossguard as a short club. In both hands (one hand on hilt, one hand on blade) it blocks as effectively against a small weapon (like a dagger) as a staff or shield does. There really is no such thing as "inside" the defenses of someone with a sword. You can negate the advantage of reach, but that's it.

 

[El Mahdi]

Swords were invented for a reason. In the hands of a skilled wielder, a sword is a better weapon. You can quibble over why that is the case, but if it weren't the case, nobody would ever have gone to the trouble of inventing swords and they would never have seen such widespread use.

Not True.

If you have to pick one weapon to carry, a sword has the best overall combination of traits - making it the best multi-use weapon. But it's far from the flat-out best weapon period. More specialized weapons were always better than swords at their specialized use.

Right tool for the right job - it's just as true in combat as everywhere else.

 

[GenghisDon]

I think ARMOR is one of the reasons in RL...and in the D&D game.

Armor Class is bypassed largely the same by all weapons...and people in the real world used large 2 handed weapons in the time of the best armor...because things like an ordinary sword were rendered nigh useless (although certain types of daggers were used..attacking the joint areas).

This effect where weapon type doesn't matter on chances to inflict damage was turned into a reason for other weapons inflicting more damage as some kind of compensation I believe.

Interestingly, in OD&D, the weapons all do the same damage: d6. Daggers, however, are noted as being faster, thus gaining 2 attacks per round, while big weapons like a greatsword are slow. Result: Daggers are by far the "best" weapon. Later editions tried to fix this foolishness, in various ways, but mainly by including variable weapon damage.

I saw a post earlier describing multiple attacks in d20 working off a variable modifier rather than -5. I've experimented with that, using diablo weapon speed as the inspiration; very fast weapon (-3) fast weapon(-4), average (-5) slow (-6) very slow (-7). It works, but only in a "realistic" way when armor is divorced from the chance to be hit & does what armor really does; reduce damage. With armor as DR this works quite well. A dagger fighter might get many attacks, but against a plate armored foe most (save criticals or other specials) will inflict no damage, while a slow weapon, like a maul, gets few attacks (or just one), but inflicts considerable damage to armored opponents.

In 4e, one can easily make "monsters" that are deadly with daggers...just use the standard damage for a given "monster's" role & level. For PC's, the rogue class presents the opportunity for a dagger fighter that is effective.

It is a hard thing to make a system with vermisilitude & have it be fast paced & fun at the same time, but good luck with it.

 

[MrMyth]

So to me, at least, D&D is more of an MMA fight than a real fight. Everyone is ducking, dodging, feinting, weaving, attacking, defending... it's very dynamic and interesting, but not very realistic. I would favour an agile person with a small blade who could get into the pocket without significant injury over a greatsword wielder who relied on distance and reach, every day in a real fight.

But then I guess it comes down to what you want out of your game. Fun or reality?

As others have pointed out, I'm not sure that your statements are an accurate reflection of reality. Will a skilled, agile combatant with a knife defeat a strong but clumsy and untrained guy with a large sword? Probably. But that isn't due to knife vs sword, that is due to skilled vs unskilled.

If you have a skilled and agile person with a small blade vs a skilled and strong person with a large blade... I don't think the odds are necessarily in the favor of the knife-wielder. Dismissing the difficulty in getting in close without injury is, well... unrealistic.

Look, earlier in the thread, you offered up a pretty condescending dismissal of "geeks who worship japanese culture". Even so, I can understanding feeling that the fetishization of samurai and katanas is overblown.

But doing so while simultaneously fetishizing knife-fighting and agility as the end-all and be-all of combat? And trying to repeatedly claim that only your viewpoint represents reality? That sort of hypocrisy is just going to distract from any decent points that can actually arise in this discussion.

Look, earlier in the thread, Wik pointed out quite a few inaccurate statements and inconsistencies in your initial claims. Your response was to appeal to your own medical knowledge and experience, but you didn't actually address any of his points.

If your goal is to ask, "How can we make the utility of daggers in combat more accurately represented in D&D or other RPGs?", then I recommend actually addressing some of the concerns and comments folks have made about your claims.

If your goal instead is simply to ask, "How can we make daggers the most super-awesome weapon in the game, just as they are in real life?"... well then, continue to ask away, but I don't think you'll be finding any useful suggestions from anyone else in this thread.

 

[Stormonu]

Its partly because of the way that D&D handles weapons that I made some changes to how combat works in my own system.

I made it so all (man-sized) weapons dealt 1 wound (about equivalant to 1d6 in D&D terms). I then gave weapons two properties - a quality of how easy it was to hit with the weapon, and how likely the weapon was to score noticable damage.

A dagger was rated with an attack factor of +4, reflecting the fact its relatively quick to swing and recover. But its damage rating is +1, meaning it can be difficult to score a telling blow. You'd essentially be making two rolls, one to connect, a second to score damage.

A 2-handed sword, on the other hand, sits at a +1 to attacks, but at +4 to damage. Thus, while its a bit harder to connect, its a lot more likely that the blow will be solid enough to injure.

I had actually devised this when I first heard that 4E was going to give weapons a bonus on the attacks. 4E did it by weapon class (blades have +3, most others have +2), but they didn't further quantify it by weapon size (giving daggers, say, +4, letting the longsword stay at +3 and having the greatsword at +2). I think this would have been a nod to what's being talked about here; big weapons being a little slower/harder to hit with, but hurting more when they do connect (on average, the skilled knifefighter vs. unskilled swordman is more about the inequalities of the combatants skills, not the weapons capabilities).

 

[JRRNeiklot]

One thing that seems to pop up in everyone's comments is reach. That's certainly a big factor in fighting. It's a shame it can't be represented easily in systems. D&D of course suffers from being miniatures based and the assumption of a 5' cube of MINE not YOURS.

So to me, at least, D&D is more of an MMA fight than a real fight. Everyone is ducking, dodging, feinting, weaving, attacking, defending... it's very dynamic and interesting, but not very realistic. I would favour an agile person with a small blade who could get into the pocket without significant injury over a greatsword wielder who relied on distance and reach, every day in a real fight.

If I had to choose between fighting the world's greatest knife fighter, he having a knife, and I having a baseball bat or Fighting a one legged moron, he having the bat and I the knife, I'd choose the bat every time, unless I was locked in a closet with him.

 

[Dausuul]

Not True.

If you have to pick one weapon to carry, a sword has the best overall combination of traits - making it the best multi-use weapon. But it's far from the flat-out best weapon period. More specialized weapons were always better than swords at their specialized use.

Right tool for the right job - it's just as true in combat as everywhere else.

I said swords were better than daggers, not swords were better than all other weapons. Still, point taken--daggers would have vanished too if they didn't have their uses.

That said, swords popped up all over the world as soon as metallurgy was advanced enough to make them. Various combinations of spear, bow, and sword were the weapons of choice for most armies from antiquity to the Industrial Revolution. Daggers have never, to my knowledge, been anything but a sidearm. That should tell you something.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I think the real point of the rising damages of larger weapons is to just give players more choice and to give those choices meaning.

All blades could be 1d6-- dagger, shortsword, longsword, bastardsword, greatsword. If you did that... the choice of weapon for a player would just be a matter of fluff. "I envision my character wielding a big blade!" and thus he does. But at some point... we moved away from that idea and began giving weapons different properties so that each weapon was "unique" and gave us a mechanical reason to wield it in addition to a fluff one.

I understand the reasoning here, and I could easily believe that it is the rationale which has informed D&D since the days of Supplement 1, Greyhawk.

However, I think it doesn't do what the designers think it does.

Because if all weapons do the same damage, it gives the PCs *completed* freedom of choice! They can choose any weapon and describe how they use it effectively. But in a codified, bigger does more damage system, the range of _effective choices_ is much smaller! This is because such systems always result in some choices being simply mathematically better than others.

I would argue that this makes sense if you have an RPG where hit points represent physical damage that can be taken (like RuneQuest, with hit points per location); however, in an abstract HP game like D&D adding mechanical detail into the damage delivery mechanism doesn't necessarily make complete sense when dealing with an abstract HP mechanism. IMO two abstracts work better together!

Cheers