Sure, but it is still the size of a dagger, and has about the same penetrating force as a dagger. It just has reach. But when has a spear done as much maximum damage as a dagger in D&D, or a spear done as much damage as a two-handed sword? Never, which is dumb.
While reach is a huge benefit, I'm also under the impression that the spear will also have more force behind it than the dagger. And, again, I think the damage die difference comes back to "would you rather be nicked by a spear, or a two-handed sword?" This falls apart some when you're wearing armor or have a monstrously thick hide, obviously (it's why my RPG uses damage reduction, and things like spears have better armor penetration than things like two-handed swords).
Bringing back the lance's ability to do double damage from the back of a horse during a charge would be a good start. Heck, bringing back the lance at all would be a good idea.
I didn't know it was gone! Interesting.
4e weapon qualities show a way to do weapons that is a fairly elegant compromise with simplicity and weapon design. It is just a shame that they kept differing weapon damage values.
If you classify weapons based on what they do, and give that class of weapons qualities which give them differing damage in different situations, I believe it is completely workable and simple.
That's certainly one way to do it. It's not my preference (I prefer to differentiate them quite substantially, but I like fiddly!), but I could see it. Didn't weapons in D&D used to do 1d6?
The Romans scorned the Gauls and their use of a long slashing sword, believing it was only good for superficial glancing injuries. They put their faith in a short thrusting sword and a shield, and their record in battle against the Gauls speaks for itself. You wouldn't know it from D&D though, because a short sword always does less damage than a longsword or two-handed sword. If you were using D&D stats, the Romans would lose to the Gauls every time.
Well, I'm not familiar with this. I'm curious about opposing tactics, armor, numbers, and the like. Again, I'd rather this be resolved via damage reduction/armor penetration, but I don't think that's a popular stance at all.
A two-handed sword has its uses. If you don't need a shield because you are wearing plate armour, it increases the reach and power of your longsword substantially. Good against calvary, good at cutting through swaths of pike formations. But there is a reason that he generally lost to men wielding an estoc or rapier.
Do you have a link or something to the longsword vs rapier claim here? This is foreign to me. I didn't think there was ever really a historical match between armies of longsword vs rapier (or even really duels).
The large two-handed sword is slower, has a large arc, and is difficult to recover from a missed blow. When a man overcommits with his large weapon, a man pretty much has his pick of where to stick his blade, as large portions of his body will be exposed by the errant swing. So a rapier doing half the damage of a two-handed sword in that situation is baloney.
I really don't want to get into a debate about fighting techniques here, so I'm going to hold back from replying to this paragraph.
Or how about the fact that nobody ever uses a dagger to backstab anyone? Really, assassinations are the reason a stiletto was created, but nobody ever uses them because they do less damage than a short sword or rapier (or pay the feat tax to backstab with an even larger weapon).
I thought the stiletto was developed and used to finish off heavily armored opponents (getting through the eye slit, etc.), and that they were first carried by knights?
Daggers are pretty famous in fantasy for backstabs, though. I think that can be explained easily enough by how easy they are to conceal compared to a rapier.
This can all be laid at the feet of differing damage for weapons, because the D&D community can't be convinced that weapons were designed for tactical advantage in specific situations, not because one weapon is superior to another.
True. While weapons were developed for different situations, you've proven your point: you won't convince me that they were all equally damaging or deadly.
There are ways in which weapons do more damage than other weapons, but they aren't absolute things. A club doesn't have as much mass as a mace, nor metal ridges or spikes designed to bend or pierce armour. But against an unarmoured opponent, a club does the job just as well. (This is why armour should be damage reduction instead of AC but that's a debate for another day).
Back to damage reduction/armor penetration! Seriously, it helps a lot with what I want in the game. Does that mean it should be in the game? No. Maybe (
maybe) as part of a module, but I don't know if there's enough demand for that. Again, though, I'm all for differentiating weapons (my RPG does it through a variety of ways: damage die, armor penetration, critical range, critical multiplier, grade, range increment, reach, type, and 3 features [from a list of 30]; like I said, I like fiddly). As always, play what you like
