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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4725341" data-attributes="member: 4937">One potential complaint you can raise against 3.X (as compared to 1st edition for example), is that there isn't much room in the system for fine granularity in describing weapons.  On the good side, that means that virtually all historical weapons map to one of the existing weapon classes.  On the bad side, that means that virtually all historical weapons map to an existing weapon class, which means if you want to communicate to a play an immediate, obvious, distinctiveness to a particular weapon type you are largely out of luck.In 1st edition, we could vary weapons by pretty much everything that they vary by in 3rd edition, but additionally we had things like weapons doing more or less damage against large creatures or 'weapon vs. ac' modifiers.  So if you wanted to, you could have an almost infinite variaty of weapons each useful (more or less) in some narrow case.  The same is not true in 3rd edition.In 3rd edition, there are some pretty tight construction rules for weapons, and if we break the rules we end up simply invalidating some other weapon as a choice.  Once we end up listing all the rules, we find that there aren't really many holes in the SRD list of weapons.  We have one and two handed simple bludgeoning weapons with appropriate stats, and one and two handed martial bludgeoning weapons with appropriate stats, and so forth through all possible combinations.If anything, I think that attempts to extend the list of weapons by WotC and others just showed the futility of doing so.  Far and away the most well accepted variaty of those extensions where those that used the general rule, 'If the weapon is an exotic version of a martial weapon, it can use one step larger dice than normal.'  However, I think that quickly gets pretty silly and actually, by the time we've done that, I think we've lost sight of the original goals - recreating a historical weapon and making a weapon feel distinctive to a player.   Even some of the weapons in SRD which are valid weapons under the rules for designing a weapon (more or less) - in particular alot of the double weapons - fail as designs for me when taken from the abstract level of 'we have some game mechanics' to 'imagine what using this weapon is actually like'.  There are a handful of cases, particularly if you are willing to change or bend the rules a bit, and maybe I'll post some later, but generally speaking I think this is not a good use of a DM's time.  Take it from someone who has wasted a considerable amount.</blockquote>

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