D&D 5E Natural Weapons, How Much Value Is There To Actually Having Them?

[Ruin Explorer]

There won't always be an improvised club sitting within arm's reach. I'll grant that in many circumstances there will be one nearby, but you may have to spend you first turn disengaging (or taking opportunity attacks) and running over to grab it.

You're really serving to point out how useless natural weapons are here.

Even in an idealized scenario, their use is far fetched and applicable solely to martial-melee-oriented PCs who have been disarmed but must fight. How often does that happen? Once a campaign? Less? How many PCs will it even impact? It won't impact any caster who has any offensive cantrips, for example.

The two most common scenarios where PCs don't have weapons (IME) are when they've either been captured or gone to a city that requires their weapons be left at the gate.

In the former, unless the captors are quite stupid or the PCs exceptionally clever, there may be no way to acquire an improvised weapon in advance.

In the latter, you could acquire an improvised weapon, but the guards would probably give you a hard time if you're walking around with a chair leg shoved through your belt. You could maybe hide it in your backpack, but then it's an action to remove and you've basically wasted your first turn anyway.

Assuming that natural weapons help in this kind of situation is pretty silly, especially as you're asserting non-moron captors.

With captors, no sane captor is going to ignore actually-dangerous claws or horns, are they? They're going to use countermeasures, indeed having natural weapons could leave you in a worse situation than other PCs because you're likely to be either separated, maimed intentionally (though I'd feel a DM was a little unkind to do that in most D&D campaigns, which have a sort of subtext of "fair play"), or have devices fitted to you to disable your natural weapons or just to prevent you from acting at all, which will consequentially disable you more than other PCs.

In a "no weapons" scenario, if your natural weapons are a real threat, you may simply be denied entry to such a place, kept at a distance other PCs are not, forced to wear devices preventing use of the weapons, or a variety of other situations. The odds of a guard who is terrified of you having even a dagger being fine with you having claws you could slit throats with or fangs to rip them out are non-existent. If weapons aren't totally banned - i.e. stuff like knives are allowed, you're probably going to be fine, but any total weapon exclusion zone? Nah.

What I'm saying is that this is beyond a corner-case situation.

The reality is that in 5E D&D, natural weapons that don't have additional abilities/effects associated with them have negligible value to and impact on a campaign.

Where they do have additional abilities, like a 1/rest free attack or move-and-attack they do have some real value, but they are still typically wildly, insanely, overvalued by WotC's D&D team to the point where there has to be some kind of weird rule in place about them, which does not stem from playtesting or game experience, merely being the bugbear of Crawford or whatever.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Only problem is if the game designer is deluded in thinking that they should actually be "costed" like valuable features for the specie's "power budget."

100%.

I don't have a big problem with natural weapons being weak or of limited value at all.

But them clearly, as definitely 100% do, count against the "power budget" for species? Just utterly bizarre inexplicable beyond something weird happening at WotC HQ.

 

[James Gasik]

100%.

I don't have a big problem with natural weapons being weak or of limited value at all.

But them clearly, as definitely 100% do, count against the "power budget" for species? Just utterly bizarre inexplicable beyond something weird happening at WotC HQ.

There's a lot of weirdness in 5e with regards to Unarmed Strikes as well. Again, I really think someone on their design team truly overvalues the ability to always have a credible weapon on hand.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

There's a lot of weirdness in 5e with regards to Unarmed Strikes as well. Again, I really think someone on their design team truly overvalues the ability to always have a credible weapon on hand.

That's a good point too - you can even see that in the playtest with the Brawler archetype for Fighter, where whoever designed it is so mortally terrified of it doing even ok damage (let alone comparable to top-tier Fighter subclasses and setups) that they gave it a bonus action unarmed attack, but then banned it from actually making an attack with it, which is one of most bizarre and pig-headed decisions I've seen in game design for a long while.

 

[cbwjm]

I think natural weapons would be better if they had differences beyond the type of damage. Something like thentabaxi having d4 claws but they count as light finesse weapons or the Minotaur dealing d8 with their horns and knocking a target prone. As is, they're a nice to have is certain situations but not an ability that I really care about.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You're really serving to point out how useless natural weapons are here.

Even in an idealized scenario, their use is far fetched and applicable solely to martial-melee-oriented PCs who have been disarmed but must fight. How often does that happen? Once a campaign? Less? How many PCs will it even impact? It won't impact any caster who has any offensive cantrips, for example.

Assuming that natural weapons help in this kind of situation is pretty silly, especially as you're asserting non-moron captors.

With captors, no sane captor is going to ignore actually-dangerous claws or horns, are they? They're going to use countermeasures, indeed having natural weapons could leave you in a worse situation than other PCs because you're likely to be either separated, maimed intentionally (though I'd feel a DM was a little unkind to do that in most D&D campaigns, which have a sort of subtext of "fair play"), or have devices fitted to you to disable your natural weapons or just to prevent you from acting at all, which will consequentially disable you more than other PCs.

In a "no weapons" scenario, if your natural weapons are a real threat, you may simply be denied entry to such a place, kept at a distance other PCs are not, forced to wear devices preventing use of the weapons, or a variety of other situations. The odds of a guard who is terrified of you having even a dagger being fine with you having claws you could slit throats with or fangs to rip them out are non-existent. If weapons aren't totally banned - i.e. stuff like knives are allowed, you're probably going to be fine, but any total weapon exclusion zone? Nah.

What I'm saying is that this is beyond a corner-case situation.

The reality is that in 5E D&D, natural weapons that don't have additional abilities/effects associated with them have negligible value to and impact on a campaign.

Where they do have additional abilities, like a 1/rest free attack or move-and-attack they do have some real value, but they are still typically wildly, insanely, overvalued by WotC's D&D team to the point where there has to be some kind of weird rule in place about them, which does not stem from playtesting or game experience, merely being the bugbear of Crawford or whatever.

This is why I don't rely on WotC's design team, and why quite frankly I don't see why so many people do, especially if they don't like what they get from them.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This is why I don't rely on WotC's design team, and why quite frankly I don't see why so many people do, especially if they don't like what they get from them.

To be honest, people rely on them because this is the exception rather than norm.

That's why it sticks out so badly and why so many people here are aware of the issue.

Most of WotC's design is fairly reasonable. It's not perfect and I'll criticise every element of it that's dodgy, but generally, overall, most of what WotC does is better-designed than most 3PPs, outside of adventures. That said, the quality of 3PP products has absolutely shot up over the course of 5E, and some have emerged as potentially pretty reliable - I'd say MCDM, based on what I've seen have a higher average quality of design than WotC.

The other issue is digital integration. Because of the way Beyond works, it's not really trivial to integrate 3PP products, and you can't integrate new classes at all, sadly. Hopefully this will improve because it seems like Beyond wants to get cosy with 3PPs as time goes on. Perhaps because it seems increasingly like WotC will be competing against itself with Beyond vs 3D VTT as different solutions to similar but not indentical problems - this is tealeaf-reading on my part, but to me it looks like Beyond is going to try and aim to be akin a particularly slick and easy-to-use conventional VTT for people who normally play TT RPGs and have an RL group and so on, whereas the 3D VTT looks like may be attempting to target a rather different market of people who don't have groups for whatever reason, which is, to be fair, potentially a huge untapped market. However sometimes things that are untapped are untapped for a reason... Just saying.

Like I'm pretty keen to try MCDM's new psion class (I forget its name), but I know I'll have to work entirely off paper, which I can do but just inconveniences me in a slightly annoying way and potentially inconveniences the DM a bit too.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Maybe we can design some good riders for them? Push-back, bleed, maybe at the high end reduction of max hit points until a long rest?

what are the thoughts on these being natural weapon rider effects?
-Damage over time (takes an action to stop like alchemists fire)
-tripped/blinded/slowed/fear/poisoned/other conditions
-pushed/forced movement
-recover HP equal to damage dealt or hit die+con
-reach/projectile attacks
-expanded critical range
-energy damage types
-nonstandard action iniative (serving as an Extra Attack, can make opportunity attacks that don't burn reaction)
-targeting saving throws instead of AC

 

[Crimson Longinus]

what are the thoughts on these being natural weapon rider effects?
-Damage over time (takes an action to stop like alchemists fire)
-tripped/blinded/slowed/fear/poisoned/other conditions
-pushed/forced movement
-recover HP equal to damage dealt or hit die+con
-reach/projectile attacks
-expanded critical range
-energy damage types
-nonstandard action iniative (serving as an Extra Attack, can make opportunity attacks that don't burn reaction)
-targeting saving throws instead of AC

Most of those make me ask why would it do this, what it is representing?

Natural attacks not being that powerful is fine. In most situations sword is going to be better than claws. If cats had thumbs, they'd use swords too.

 

[Hriston]

No, I mean being given access to a natural weapon as an ability should be valued at half of elven weapon training.

Elf Weapon Training grants at least one and in some cases two improved weapon choices to most non-martial characters. Whereas, natural weapons aren't an improvement over the melee weapon options already offered by every class.