D&D General Weapon Mastery - Yea or Nay?

[Crimson Longinus]

I kinda get why being able to switch them was added into the rules.

If your fighter selects short sword and longsword but then finds a wondrous magical battleaxe it’s a bit crappy find a big chunk of your skill just doesn’t apply. Or perhaps their preferences change in that character. You should be able to wield different weapons within your proficiency and 5e has fully embraced that.

Yes, but the problem is solved by just giving them all masteries. It is not OP, they will not be able to wield all weapons at one anyway.

 

[Bacon Bits]

In order for the magic energy to be a greatsword, it has to emulate the qualities of a greatsword.

Weight is a quality.

Yeah, the "magic swords don't have to have weight" reasoning that takes us down the same road as "spellcaster magic can freely do anything because it's magic, but martials have to follow physics because realism."

Like, Dex Barbarians can't use Rage damage, and Rogues have to use a weapon with Finesse for Sneak Attack. While I might agree that it's stupid that the only two-handed melee weapon that isn't heavy is the Greatclub and all SEVEN martial weapons are both, I don't think the rule is unfair to Warlocks.

Besides, this is a great reason to maybe actually use Versatile for once!

 

[Bacon Bits]

Yes, but the problem is solved by just giving them all masteries. It is not OP, they will not be able to wield all weapons at one anyway.

No, that would lead to min/maxing masteries during combat. We'd be back at the golf bag of weapons thing.

It would be like letting attack cantrips be based on which implement you have. If firebolt is a wand with a ruby tip, and acid splash is an emerald orb, then any caster is going to carry both. They'll use acid splash when 2 targets are present, and firebolt otherwise.

You're just moving the choice to the start of every combat round, which I don't think makes for a very good play experience. It's also not fitting with the fiction.

 

[TheSword]

Yes, but the problem is solved by just giving them all masteries. It is not OP, they will not be able to wield all weapons at one anyway.

By that logic why not give wizards access to all their spells? They can only cast one per round.

 

[Retros_x]

I voted no because I feel 5e needs less rules bloat, not more.

Spoiler: Rant on why I dislike the change.

I think OSR variants like Shadowdark get combat right. It's fast, brutal and decisive. Weapon masteries, especially ones that add rolls, are moving away from that. We risk turning combat into 3-4 hour chess matches and not the fast-paced action of a fight.

In my experience, most players struggle with real-time decision-making, and the added micro-decisions these masteries bring often compound 5e’s pacing issues. The system isn’t crunchy enough to justify the slowdown, but it's too complex to move through quickly. It ends up in this awkward middle ground, with just enough friction to bog things down, and not enough depth to make it worthwhile.

So we end up spending 2 hours on a minor fight, debating decisions that have no bearing on the outcome, all so we can claim we did more. But if we look at it from a more holistic perspective, we did less per minute because everyone taking twice as long to do anything. Each player only actually contributing every 35 minutes, so we just turned what in other systems would be 10 minutes of intense action, into an exercise in doom scrolling social media.

And we do all of this so we can make, mostly, meaningless choices. That extra damage, or that prone condition, isnt going to change the outcome in 95% of fights. But the resulting decision tree will make everyone of those fights longer. It's the inconsequential rules bloat that 5e is famous for.

But feel free to ignore me, as I've never been a fan of 5e's combat. But I think this is an example of how the 2024 revisions moved the system in the wrong direction. They should have cut the fat, not added more.

I like your point of micro-decisions, but I am not sure it applies here. You don't decide for your mastery on every attack, only once when choosing your weapon.

In general I also prefer more OSR approaches like Shadowdark, but I don't think weapon masteries made 5e combat weaknesses worse. At least in my games I don't sense a real time difference to 2014 5e, especially after the first sessions when we still were get used to the rules. If I would try to trim down 5e combat I had other areas where I would look first before weapon mastery (HP bloat, action system, complex spells/abilities, number of spells/abilites etc.)

And the most important part: Players in our group seem to really enjoy weapon masteries.

 

[Horwath]

sure we can roll for stats, just so long as everyone has to use the same set of resulting stats.

this is only rolling method that I like,

now we are in the game where we rolled stats.

My sorcerer is doing fine;

10,16,14,13,14,20

fellow rogue is even a little better;

12,20,14,14,16,14

however, the cleric got shafted:

15,13,16,10,16,10

barbarian is also doing great:

20,16,16,12,14,12


no matter how you slice it, cleric is worse in almost anything that is not casting cleric spells.

for next game, I'll suggest a default array for all, no starting ASI's or from feats ASI's just two feats at a time instead of +1 and a feat.

arrays:

super hero fantasy
20,18,16,14,12,12

hero fanstasy:
18,16,14,14,12,10

gritty:
16,16,14,12,10,8

 

[Horwath]

By that logic why not give wizards access to all their spells? They can only cast one per round.

I do not think that it would change much in combat.

there would be an increase in utility(rituals).

in combat everyone casts same 2 or 3 spells of a given level.
druids and clerics can prepare any spell and yes maybe one spell is changed every long rest. maybe.

 

[CreamCloud0]

By that logic why not give wizards access to all their spells? They can only cast one per round.

because there is a far FAR greater number and range of things that spells cover than just damage+minor effect, the sorcerer would know 22! spells at first level this way, 14 of which are a range of support, utility and other non-damaging effects, there are 8 masteries in total, eight, it looks like fullcasters surpass that number of masteries in existence with their spells known at level five going from 7 to 9, where baseline fighters get to know a grand total of...3 masteries, bump that to 6 (but we prepicked the three new ones you're getting already) at level 9.

it'd probably be a balanced equivalency to suggest that casters just knew all their cantrips.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Ever since I heard about it, I have to admit I'm intrigued by the concept of an ability draft, and I may try it the next time I have the opportunity.

just because i know i'm never going to use one for a real game i wouldn't mind having a mock run through on here, just for fun.

edit: i hadn't looked at that link and thought you were referencing el-remmen's stat draft that gets mentioned in that thread, snarf's still seems interesting but remmen's was the one i was thinking of.

 

[billd91]

This is odd to me, because when I offer players point buy vs 3d6, they pick point buy almost every time. So I have this theory that players pick 4d6, over point buy, because it lends itself to higher stats, and the randomness of rolling is just a red herring.

Well, let's unpack this a little. 3d6 vs point buy and 4d6 vs point buy are pretty different comparisons. Both point buy and 4d6 are methods that will tend to insulate a PC from very low stats. And with 4d6 being the long-preferred convention (since 1e days), offering up 3d6 is going to seem relatively punitive to most D&D players. So it's no surprise that people want to avoid the 3d6 if offered an alternative, even if they tend to prefer a random method.

The desire for random results, while leavened by methods to make the lower results less likely, may not simply indicate a just a desire for higher stats since it may also indicate a desire for those stats to be independently derived. That's something random stats can do that point buy cannot because with point buy, any points going into one stat value will suppress the values of the other stats. You can't buff without nerfing, and that's an optimization process a lot of people don't necessarily like. Including me. I don't like it AS A DM because I'm not too keen on my players inhabiting that mindset with such a small (but important) set of values.
Point buy has its place in character generation - in games where points buy virtually everything the character can do like Champions/Hero, GURPS, and Mutants and Masterminds. But just between the 6 stats of D&D? I think it does more harm to the play experience than good.

So now I offer point buy, 3d6 or free pick. That way it's clear what each person is actually after. And, not surprisingly, 3d6 is almost never the pick. This aligns with my theory, but the sample size of a few dozen players isn't exactly ironclad.

Of course people will take free pick over 3d6. That's pretty much a no-brainer because 1) you get exactly what you want, 2) you only get low results if you want them, and 3) all of the stats values are independently derived from each other.