Battle Cleric Options is up

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

There's a difference between "once or twice an encounter based on whatever weapon you're good with" and "always on, but only with specific weapons" which is now possible, but the point is taken.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, it is certainly going outside of the topic to some extent, but I never understood why 4e (or any other system for that matter) insists that some weapons are substantially better than others. I assure you that a guy swinging a mace at your head is just as deadly as a guy swinging a sword given equal skill. The whole concept of some weapons being better than others is dubious. Some may be more effective in certain situations, others may have less tangible benefits, and some may simply exists because although inferior they can be easily or cheaply constructed. I think the whole notion of simple weapons suck and other weapons don't doesn't hold much water. Not only that but the assignment of weapons to the different types is virtually arbitrary. I think the whole concept stinks. Weapon choice really should just be mostly a cosmetic thing, with any tangible benefits being based on some kind of rational analysis of different trade offs (IE two-handed weapons give the wielder some advantages when you have sufficient room to use them and time to prepare, but a short sword is just that much better in close quarters and a dagger can be drawn quickly and concealed easily).

 

[bargle0]

Big swords, big axes, and big spears are naturally more awesome than their smaller siblings. Moreover, they are more awesome than some wooden stick, which is the weapon of peasants and other swordfodder.

I'm sure Hârn has excellent rules for dying horribly by any weapon, but D&D since at least AD&D has been about coolness and not realism in weapons*. I believe that magic swords were elevated above other magic weapons in even older editions.

 

[SabreCat]

A system like Gamma World's would make the differences between weapons cosmetic. It wouldn't get you the detailed situational tradeoffs, though.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Big swords, big axes, and big spears are naturally more awesome than their smaller siblings. Moreover, they are more awesome than some wooden stick, which is the weapon of peasants and other swordfodder.

I'm sure Hârn has excellent rules for dying horribly by any weapon, but D&D since at least AD&D has been about coolness and not realism in weapons*. I believe that magic swords were elevated above other magic weapons in even older editions.

Except this is exactly the problem. Why can't I be an awesome mace wielding badass? Just because AD&D blew it has no bearing on where we are now. Consider all the characters of legend. OK, I want to play a 'Friar Tuck' character, nope, you have to suck in melee combat because hey staves aren't macho. Oh, you DON'T want to suck? OK, here's a feat tax on your butt for trying to be creative... Yeah, that's good.

 

[Klaus]

Except this is exactly the problem. Why can't I be an awesome mace wielding badass? Just because AD&D blew it has no bearing on where we are now. Consider all the characters of legend. OK, I want to play a 'Friar Tuck' character, nope, you have to suck in melee combat because hey staves aren't macho. Oh, you DON'T want to suck? OK, here's a feat tax on your butt for trying to be creative... Yeah, that's good.

Funny you should mention Friar Tuck. I was reminded of him when I saw this article. He wasn't always "wise" (and his tendency to get drunk and eat too much point in the other way), but he was always strong enough to work the land and live in a forest with a bunch of outlaws. I'd really stat him as a Battle Cleric wielding a staff, with his heavy robes counting as hide armor.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Funny you should mention Friar Tuck. I was reminded of him when I saw this article. He wasn't always "wise" (and his tendency to get drunk and eat too much point in the other way), but he was always strong enough to work the land and live in a forest with a bunch of outlaws. I'd really stat him as a Battle Cleric wielding a staff, with his heavy robes counting as hide armor.

Right, and while I can understand the messiness of the Battle Cleric stuff under debate here, I think the fundamental blame has to go to the design of weapon types in 4e as a concept. THIS is where you don't want your mechanics detached from or unrelated to the world that the narrative is happening in, because INEVITABLY you will end up with these arbitrary distinctions that simply shouldn't need to exist. 4e is filled with them unfortunately. I don't care about CaGI nonsense, but this stuff is more fundamental and in the long run causes a lot more system issues. I'm sure it seemed like an innocent and convenient convention when PHB1 was written, but obviously it hasn't turned out so well. Again, were I redesigning the game, I'd simply abolish the whole idea. In fact it isn't clear to me that the 4e devs ever intended things like simple/military/superior to actually HAVE mechanical import beyond being a handy way to specify proficiences. It should have stayed that way.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I assure you that a guy swinging a mace at your head is just as deadly as a guy swinging a sword given equal skill.

Both can kill me, sure. But the guy swinging the mace at my head and using heavy crushing impact simply isn't as fast as the guy with the scimitar trying to lop off my arm. And the guy trying to thrust at me with the mace gets beaten by the guy trying to thrust at me with a longsword.

It gets more complex. From my experience of reenacting, sword and shield beats spear three times in four. But three spearmen beat four swordsmen nine times in ten assuming anchored flanks. The reach just allows a massive amount of focus fire.

And then it gets simpler again. Spear vs Staff. Same length, same weight. Effectively the same balance. The spear wins by virtue of being able to do everything the staff can and having a much more effective stab (and slash for that matter). Covering argument. The spear can do everything the staff can and it can do many of the core attacks much much better than the staff.

Also scimitar vs dagger. Scimitar wins almost every time. As a weapon it's faster (seriously - you don't have to move very far to get the edge to move in a wide arc). It's got a longer reach so it hits first. And it does much more damage per hit.

Spear vs Staff. Scimitar vs Dagger. There's a huge difference in play here. The reason is that neither staff nor dagger were ever designed to be primary weapons. The dagger is a sharpened belt knife. The staff is a straight piece of wood. The club is a log off the ground. It loses to a sharpened bit of metal the same length and weight (although the weight of the sword should be lower).

That said, with the arguable exception of the greatbow (125lb draw longbow only used by specialists), the superior weapons are all just wrong. If weapons were really that much better it's what everyone would be trained on.

Not only that but the assignment of weapons to the different types is virtually arbitrary.

Oh no it isn't. Although some are misassigned. Simple weapons are the dagger (a tool or something primarily meant to be concealable), the scythe (a tool), the staff (a tool as much as anything), the greatclub (a tool). The exceptions are the mace and the morningstar - and there are western european historical reasons for this to do with the cleric (which is not a good reason but not arbitrary). Martial weapons are weapons designed as weapons. And superior weapons are either extreme niche weapons (the garrote, the shuriken), weapons that require serious specialist training to use at all (the 125lb draw great bow), silly and kewl weapons (the fullblade, the double sword and double axe), or in the case of the Urgrosh a misidentified martial weapon (call it a poll-axe with a butt spike and you're done).

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Apparently I can't give Neonchameleon xp yet, but I was severely beaten to the punch.

There's a reason peasants and nobility have different weapons and armor.

Try doing significant harm to a guy in plate armor with a club, dagger, or staff before his sword rips you a new one. We read books where a guy with a quarterstaff is godly, but in real life a trained guy with metal weapons and armor will punk him every time. Possibly barring lightning storms.

You can find ways the simple/martial/superior distinctions in D&D are flawed, but some weapons really are just better than others IRL. We can debate whether that's something we actually want to model in game, but it is a distinction that exists.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Both can kill me, sure. But the guy swinging the mace at my head and using heavy crushing impact simply isn't as fast as the guy with the scimitar trying to lop off my arm. And the guy trying to thrust at me with the mace gets beaten by the guy trying to thrust at me with a longsword.

It gets more complex. From my experience of reenacting, sword and shield beats spear three times in four. But three spearmen beat four swordsmen nine times in ten assuming anchored flanks. The reach just allows a massive amount of focus fire.

And then it gets simpler again. Spear vs Staff. Same length, same weight. Effectively the same balance. The spear wins by virtue of being able to do everything the staff can and having a much more effective stab (and slash for that matter). Covering argument. The spear can do everything the staff can and it can do many of the core attacks much much better than the staff.

Also scimitar vs dagger. Scimitar wins almost every time. As a weapon it's faster (seriously - you don't have to move very far to get the edge to move in a wide arc). It's got a longer reach so it hits first. And it does much more damage per hit.

Spear vs Staff. Scimitar vs Dagger. There's a huge difference in play here. The reason is that neither staff nor dagger were ever designed to be primary weapons. The dagger is a sharpened belt knife. The staff is a straight piece of wood. The club is a log off the ground. It loses to a sharpened bit of metal the same length and weight (although the weight of the sword should be lower).

That said, with the arguable exception of the greatbow (125lb draw longbow only used by specialists), the superior weapons are all just wrong. If weapons were really that much better it's what everyone would be trained on.

Yes, I spent many years in the SCA beating on people with rattan weapons too... Sorry, I disagree with much of this. There are certain general conclusions you can draw. Reach is quite important. Swords, in general, are better defensive weapons than most anything else, with shorter and longer versions having various advantages (reach, utility in tight quarters, etc). Maces and similar weapons provide a somewhat superior offense (go ahead, block the blow from my 3.5 pound headed war mace with your sword, good luck). Shields are however quite a bit more useful defensively than any sword, and really are far more critical than all but the very heaviest armor. In general in basic one-on-one melee someone equipped with a shield and a one-handed weapon will beat out almost any other permutation overall. This is why a sword/spear/mace/club plus shield and a helmet was the most ubiquitous type of style in most periods.

Staves are actually QUITE effective, and you cannot achieve the same balance with a spear, which requires a reasonable amount of mass in the head. Not that spears were particularly ineffective, quite the contrary, but they weren't any more effective one-on-one than staves (and this can be verified by a quite extensive contemporary literature). In fact a skilled staff user was considered to be at a significant advantage over your average 'longsword' (a nonhistorical term, D&D's weapons are actually rather nonsensical).

Personally I've never played with axes, picks, or flails. I suspect in some forms axes were quite deadly, picks were really a late medieval specialist weapon, and I'm skeptical of flails in general, though no doubt they COULD be dangerous.

In any case, in the hands of skilled users the differences between weapons are mostly situational and I will say it again, there's little to no justification for making some of the significantly less effective than others. Daggers and shortswords in general wouldn't be a first choice of weapon and suffer reach disadvantages, but in a tight situation will actually be superior to longer weapons.

Oh no it isn't. Although some are misassigned. Simple weapons are the dagger (a tool or something primarily meant to be concealable), the scythe (a tool), the staff (a tool as much as anything), the greatclub (a tool). The exceptions are the mace and the morningstar - and there are western european historical reasons for this to do with the cleric (which is not a good reason but not arbitrary). Martial weapons are weapons designed as weapons. And superior weapons are either extreme niche weapons (the garrote, the shuriken), weapons that require serious specialist training to use at all (the 125lb draw great bow), silly and kewl weapons (the fullblade, the double sword and double axe), or in the case of the Urgrosh a misidentified martial weapon (call it a poll-axe with a butt spike and you're done).

Well, since all pole weapons had butt-spikes I never understood why the urgrosh was justifiable either. Daggers are actually a weapon type which is highly specialized and skilled dagger fighters are exceedingly deadly close combat opponents. Things like scythes and simple clubs, sure they aren't primary weapons, but why should they be 'simple'? Same with the staff, staff fighting being historically a high art at least on a par with swordsmanship. I think we agree on other weapons.

Anyway, the point was that the whole 'simple weapon' thing was totally gamist and arbitrary. It is ludicrous to believe that staff is magically something that most characters would be able to master when it was a weapon used by some of the most highly trained martial artists in history (as an example).

I think plenty of the superior weapons just don't need to exist even if they COULD. Why do we need a 'great bow', there is already a longbow, which is absolutely historically a high draw self bow. If it needs to do d12 damage, then it should do d12 damage (why rangers need this I have no idea).

In any case, 4e (and D&D in general) has such utterly ahistorical and inaccurate weapons to start with it rapidly gets difficult to even talk about which one should do what.