D&D General Weapons should break left and right

[loverdrive]

N.B.: This has nothing to do with realism. Real life weapons are pretty damn durable (who would've thought, things designed to parry impacts with nasty sharp weapons can withstand impacts of nasty sharp weapons!). Stop fighting your Hokusai's twenty four views of car dealership inflatable strawmen.

This is about switching up gameplay to create varied situation. Whether it's by weapons breakage or buffed "disarm" move is mostly immaterial — the main thing is to make people play each encounter differently.

N.B. see message #308:

I think there are "genres" to complexity.

The kind of complexity that we often imagine when talking about, well, complexity is the book-keepy annoying kind of one. Many people don't like it — I'm among them.

If anything, my proposal can be a simplification — now, "I don't want to read the rules, give me a simple class" kind of people can skip on reading or thinking about different weapon types. "Uhhhh is a longsword better than a shortsword? What should I pick? What? Feats? Girlie I'm just here to smack people with a stick, give me something simple!" (pretty much a verbatim thing I've said myself) is excised entirely: you only read one weapon at a time. You don't have a million options, you only have one, maybe two.

You inflict a critical hit so strong your sword itself snaps from the impact! You grab another weapon and it's.... [roll on a weapon table] a spear! GM hands you a piece of paper that says:

Spear
Damage: 1d6 Piercing

Immediately after you take the Attack action and attack with this weapon, you can use a Bonus Action to make a melee attack with the opposite end of the weapon. The weapon deals Bludgeoning damage, and the weapon's damage die for this attack is a d4.

And stay back!: While you're holding a spear, you can take a Reaction to make one melee attack against a creature that enters the reach you have with that weapon.

And you get to do something new without being overloaded with complexity. You get to protect people for a while, then deliver another crit (and break your spear), roll, say, a pile of daggers (and, idk, get to do a lot of attacks? one attack, one attack from Nick property, bonus action attack for two-weapon fighting? Something like that?)

So a "smack people with a stick" player gets to play around with different (yet still simple) playstyles without delving deep into the rules and reading different feats and whatnot.

What it says on the tin.

The thing about weapon never (or rarely) breaking is that specialization builds become busted strong. Great Weapon Master is such a great perk because realistically it's always guaranteed to be online - the same person is picking the weapon and the feat. The main choice was made on character creation.

But what if players were forced to constantly use whatever they have lying around? Taking weapons from the enemy? What if their weapons broke a couple times per encounter? Now, GWM becomes a much more situational perk: yeah, it's busted strong when you wrench a greatsword from draugr's hands! (and also not waste it on bad targets). Not super useful otherwise.

It's also really cool and cinematic and whatnot.

The way I see it: in Grimwild there's a resource pool system. Basically, for anything consumable, the diceroll is dual purpose, both determining success and resource depletion. Within D&D, you can have, say, a 4d8 longsword, which when rolling for damage with, you take one d8 from this pool. If you roll less than 4, welp, it goes away. Otherwise it stays. When the whole pool dwindles, your sword breaks and you now need another weapon.

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From David Sirlin, Solvability:

The term donkeyspace, coined by Frank Lantz, describes the space of suboptimal plays. As described in the previous section, a good player should intentionally enter donkeyspace (in other words: play in an exploitable way) in order to exploit opponents who are also playing in donkeyspace. If both players are good, they each might dance through different regions of donkeyspace, jockeying for advantages.

It's important to have some perspective here. You might be thinking that everyone is going to play optimally so there's no dance through donkeyspace in high level play. That's laughable if you think about actual competitive games though. First, even at a high level, it's very common for players to play far from optimal. Second, it's highly unlikely that any—much less ALL—opponents will be playing optimally or even close to it. In a good competitive game, it's incredibly difficult to know what optimal play even is. There can be rules of thumb, but to know exactly the right probabilities in which to play a mixed strategy of exactly the right moves in a specific game state that could have thousands of variables? Even in a popular, well-understood game like Poker, optimal play is not known perfectly and in practice players stray from it considerably.

In game design, there's this concept of "donkey space", where you are playing like a donkey (as in, unoptimally) for whatever reason, whether it's for roleplaying, or because better options just aren't available, or to exploit an opponent who is expecting "optimal" play, or because you are a literal donkey. Broadly speaking, the more of the game is happening in this donkey space, the better -- that means the game isn't solved.

In this case, the situation is a little different: the suboptimal play is enforced externally, but I think the larger concept still applies.

 

[zarionofarabel]

Simple enough in D&D, just have weapons always break on a fumble/crit fail. Like, every, single, time. Fumble? Weapon breaks. Also house rule in some armor damage rules so armor is also something that needs to be replaced on the regular.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

I enjoyed Forbidden Lands rules for that. If I recall, every weapon has a base quality. And as you build your pools, whenever some fails happen (not getting one success + having an equipment die be on a 1) your item loses quality.

I've been wanting to make something similar for D&Desque games.

 

[Eubani]

What it says on the tin.

The thing about weapon never (or rarely) breaking is that specialization builds become busted strong. Great Weapon Master is such a great perk because realistically it's always guaranteed to be online - the same person is picking the weapon and the feat. The main choice was made on character creation.

But what if players were forced to constantly use whatever they have lying around? Taking weapons from the enemy? What if their weapons broke a couple times per encounter? Now, GWM becomes a much more situational perk: yeah, it's busted strong when you wrench a greatsword from draugr's hands! (and also not waste it on bad targets). Not super useful otherwise.

It's also really cool and cinematic and whatnot.
View attachment 418085

The way I see it: in Grimwild there's a resource pool system. Basically, for anything consumable, the diceroll is dual purpose, both determining success and resource depletion. Within D&D, you can have, say, a 4d8 longsword, which when rolling for damage with, you take one d8 from this pool. If you roll less than 4, welp, it goes away. Otherwise it stays. When the whole pool dwindles, your sword breaks and you now need another weapon.

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From David Sirlin, Solvability:


In game design, there's this concept of "donkey space", where you are playing like a donkey (as in, unoptimally) for whatever reason, whether it's for roleplaying, or because better options just aren't available, or to exploit an opponent who is expecting "optimal" play, or because you are a literal donkey. Broadly speaking, the more of the game is happening in this donkey space, the better -- that means the game isn't solved.

In this case, the situation is a little different: the suboptimal play is enforced externally, but I think the larger concept still applies.

Are you a card carrying member of the Spellcasters Supremacy Society? There is already a wide enough gap between casters and martials without reducing their one glimmer of hope.

 

[schneeland]

And as you build your pools, whenever some fails happen (not getting one success + having an equipment die be on a 1) your item loses quality.

Small correction: while the equipment degradation happens on a 1 on the gear dice, this is irrespective of the overall success, and comes into play only when the player pushed the roll (for those that haven't played a Year Zero game: pushing usually means re-rolling those dice that are neither a success nor have a negative effect tied to them, e.g. a 1 Forbidden Lands).
I also like it in Forbidden Lands, but I'm not sure how well it fit modern D&D. I could imagine it in an OSR game, though.

 

[Lidgar]

Are you a card carrying member of the Spellcasters Supremacy Society? There is already a wide enough gap between casters and martials without reducing their one glimmer of hope.

You could have a mechanic where spell casters lose an extra spell slot when they roll a 1 on a spell attack or the enemy rolls a 20 on save.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

Small correction: while the equipment degradation happens on a 1 on the gear dice, this is irrespective of the overall success, and comes into play only when the player pushed the roll (for those that haven't played a Year Zero game: pushing usually means re-rolling those dice that are neither a success nor have a negative effect tied to them, e.g. a 1 Forbidden Lands).
I also like it in Forbidden Lands, but I'm not sure how well it fit modern D&D. I could imagine it in an OSR game, though.

That's right! Thank you for the correction.

I think it would mesh well. Your weapons and armor have a quality. It could be as simple as having a crit fail reduce the quality, or receiving a critical hit for an armor. When it's at 0 quality it's broken. It can be repaired. You might find equipement that's already damaged in dungeons.

But I think I'd like for it to be more frequent.

 

[Koloth]

Another way the GWM can lose a weapon is some variation of disarm. In 3.5, I had a monk who had spent the feats for disarm and had great fun taking the opposition's powerful weapons away from them.

 

[Deset Gled]

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild could have been one of the best video games of all time. But the constantly breaking weapon system was so amazingly terrible. I have literally considered jailbreaking a Switch just to replay the game with a hack that turns it off.

Such systems with constantly breaking weapons are the exact opposite of fun, and that's for TTRPGs as well. It guarantees you can never enjoy a favorite weapon, because using it destroys it. It becomes a resource management nightmare, with melee-types carrying around golf bags full of weapons to replace ones that break. It makes post-battle cleanup an endlessly tedious task of checking the details, quality, and status of every weapon of every enemy to determine what gets kept and what gets dropped. Narratively, it works against any story based around a weapon that has any kind of significance, from legendary weapons to family heirlooms, and everything in between. And weapon specialization of any kind is nerfed, as the fighter is now punished any time he fights enemies who don't drop his preferred weapon when killed.

The idea of using adding a "death spiral" mechanic on top of it, where your weapon is less functional as it wears down, is just adding insult to injury. At that point, I would actively hunt down a cursed weapon that I can't get rid of just to avoid dealing with the punishments imposed by the gaming system. Or, y'know, find another game that actually lets warriors use melee weapons.

Furthermore, "donkeyspace" is just inventing jargon for the sake of inventing jargon. It does nothing to aid in communication and can only serve to gatekeep.

TL;DR: No to everything.

 

[BookTenTiger]

I say turn it from a punishment into a reward.

When a character rolls a 1 on a Weapon Attack or Spell Attack, they can choose to break their weapon or spell focus and reroll. If they hit, it counts as a critical hit.