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[Agamon]

It's easy to house rule, but mocking people's valid reasons for doing so is antagonizing.

I'm not mocking at all. I'm explaining why it's not a big deal for me and apparently a lot of other people. And I understand that some people enjoy a well balanced game, but this isn't a tough thing to change, as you agree. And I'm not the one posting that a rule should be one way and not the other. I'm just saying it's fine as it is. I also would have been fine if everything was 1d12. The fact is, it is the way it is.

 

[Zaukrie]

The fact the Porsche and Corolla both exist at all should indicate that some people want different experiences, and that it is actually preferable to have some weapons be better than others, imo.

 

[Thaumaturge]

If reliable is valuable in real life for things like cars and buses and train schedules, then you can imagine how important it is for weaponry that will keep you alive. This is no different.

I dislike gambling. I am risk averse when I can look at probabilities and judge outcomes. I'll likely never have a character wield a greataxe in 5e, unless there's something we're not seeing.

But I have a friend who buys lottery tickets, with the full knowledge it's a losing proposition. He also prefers to roll his stats (I prefer point buy), roll hit dice (average +1, thanks), and generally engages in high-risk high-reward behaviors in D&D (I plan my actions carefully). It's not difficult to imagine him preferring the greataxe to the greatsword as a weapon.

And this applies to real life, too. People in real life play Russian roulette, for heaven's sake. It's not unbelievable that some fighters, with certain personalities, would gravitate to a more "all or nothing" style weapon and others would gravitate toward a "slow and steady wins the race" weapon.

Thaumaturge.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

1d12 is the better game design choice.

No, it's not. It's just what you believe is the better game design choice, without even taking a moment to think about what are the actual design goals of the game you're criticizing. But everybody seems to know a lot about game design nowadays, so I'll agree with your suggestion and move away from this thread myself.

 

[Tormyr]

"Move along." Condescending much? Why don't you just leave the discussion if you find it so petty.

If you want to do 2d6 + mod damage for the reliability, then you should dual wield short swords or handaxes. There is NO reason to make greatswords mathematically identical to two short sword attacks in terms of damage, this is chasing the same design space with completely different weapons.

All great weapons should do 2d6, or 1d12. If you want reliable, dual wield instead. The rules already support that.

When a fighter has 3,4 attacks, rolling up to 6d6 or 8d6 every round is going to get very tiresome for everyone at the table. That's at-will fireball amounts of dice rolling. And that's just damage.

It's going to bog the game down for no good reason. 1d12 is the better game design choice. 2d6 is the dual wielder's thing.

Sure dual wielding is more reliable at doing some damage, but there are going to be a lot of turns that you do only 1d6 damage because only one of your attacks hit.

I personally am happy that they have given different damage rolls to different weapons. Dual wielders get 2dX but can attack separate targets. The greatsword has a longer edge and a point, allowing more options for reliably doing damage (2d6) such as slashing, poking or dragging across the target, while the greataxe has a more concentrated edge which makes it harder to land the full force of the damage on the target even when you hit it, but if you hit it solidly, watch out (1d12).

These different options make sense story wise, and story seems to come up trumps in this version (which is fine by me). I have a half-gnoll paladin who plays up his dog half and so keeps a supply of bolas because they have balls on the end, even though they only do 1 damage and he keeps missing. Story is fun. The weapon damage rolls fit the story and make sense from a story point of view.

I think the designers put more thought into this than some give them credit.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

When a fighter has 3,4 attacks, rolling up to 6d6 or 8d6 every round is going to get very tiresome for everyone at the table. That's at-will fireball amounts of dice rolling. And that's just damage.

It's going to bog the game down for no good reason. 1d12 is the better game design choice. 2d6 is the dual wielder's thing.

Um, really? It seemed fine in previous editions, like, I don't see any real, genuine time-difference between rolling 2d6 vs 1d12, nor 8d6 vs 4d12. I mean, if we want to get hyper-detailed, the brain instantly adds 2d6, it's not a conscious thing, and d6s stop better and cleaner than d12s, which often roll off surfaces because they're much... roll-y-er, so really, that is not a convincing point to anyone who has run D&D for years, I suspect.

One design goal of 5e, due to bounded accuracy, is to allow for low level creatures to continue to be a threat into mid and even high level play. They do this by increasing the quantity of the creatures. So taking out an orc in one blow will be valuable at all levels of play, and not just for low level play.

Interestingly (I feel!), the value of one-shotting an orc declines as the number of orcs increases, in terms of damage-negation (esp. as your AC goes up and the threat of the orc goes down). So valuable, sure, but equally valuable? (which you didn't say it was, just thinking about this) Not so much.

 

[The Human Target]

I had hopes for a simple "create your own" system. Light weapons, 1d6; medium weapons, 1d8; heavy weapons, 2d6. Add Slashing, Piercing, Bludgeoning as desired. Pay the cost of the different qualities. Describe it the way you want. So my heavy slashing and piercing weapon is a poleaxe and yours is a zweihander, but their effect, cost and weight are the same. Do something similar with armour.

Instead we got this fake precision. And will no doubt get more in various sets, as more sets come out with the ultra-special-super-weapon of the latest fancy supplement. It's just all so predictable, and wrong-headed, and utterly inaccurate, and sure to be argued about anyway as people want their favourite weapon to be different and special.

I would be fine with that, but its probably too "not D&D" for a lot of people.

 

[Agamon]

I dislike gambling. I am risk averse when I can look at probabilities and judge outcomes. I'll likely never have a character wield a greataxe in 5e, unless there's something we're not seeing.

See, I'm the same way. I'm a poker player, and when I play, I'm not gambling. I take the money from the gamblers.

But D&D isn't about the gamble to me. It's about cool PC concepts and the story that comes from interacting with the GM's ideas. A slight difference like this doesn't bug me at all. If the difference was 1d10 and 1d12, that's tough to ignore (even though it's still not that significant), but this isn't that.

 

[Mistwell]

Interestingly (I feel!), the value of one-shotting an orc declines as the number of orcs increases, in terms of damage-negation (esp. as your AC goes up and the threat of the orc goes down). So valuable, sure, but equally valuable? (which you didn't say it was, just thinking about this) Not so much.

For me, I am not concerned. We're talking about a small difference here - mostly meaningless anyway. From my perspective, we (as in people who use this message board) will debate something all the time - but we've gotten to the point where most of our debates are over tiny differences that in reality don't matter to the game much.

 

[DDNFan]

Funny how people are comparing a greataxe to playing russian roulette, a game where you are literally risking suicide to win money. Gambling and other unwise high risk behavior is stupid, picking your weapon should involve your intelligence. I don't want to have to assume every time I play a great axe wielding character that they are reckless or unstable in any way.

Dwarves never seemed particularly like the gambling types, so it's beyond me why their gods would favor an inferior, less reliable weapon. I don't want my greataxe wielding paladin to have his weapon be considered, with good reason, to be a gamble over a maul. As a player, I don't want to have my weapon choice to dictate my character vision where reliability is concerned. A paladin might be very cautious, and think twice about the idea of a greataxe since it's not only inferior, but a gamble too. Killing enemies steadily and reliably seems very appropriate to me for such a character, and that will make them gravitate away from the greataxe.

That's two strikes against them.

If you want to allow gambling fighting styles, make one, but don't force it on people.

The main thing that will make this debate moot, is whether Great Weapon Master is now Brutal and allows rerolls of 1s or even to take advantage on damage rolls. But I doubt it will be the latter, since that will indeed worsen the problem with so many d6s rolled, and be a real bothersome experience at the game table.

Another possible houserule would be a "High crit" property, so at least axes can beat greatswords on max damage once in a while.

The fourth edition's weapon table was much better than this. There, axes were harder to aim (+2 proficiency bonus vs +3), but had higher damage potential. Even that was inferior because +1 to hit is almost always better than +1 to average damage, but at least we got something.

Playing russian roulette vs not playing russian roulette, is not "balanced".

Doing stupid things or picking inferior mechanical choices doesn't make you a better roleplayer, one would think that this community would have Oberoni stickied at the top of the forum by now.