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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7180228" data-attributes="member: 4937">Before I answer that question, I want to point out something I consider very important.  The assertion was made that drawing a sword from one's back would work out fine because the world also contained firebreathing dragonmen.  Whether the rules make a distinction between daggers and greatswords for the purposes of readying a weapon is irrelevant to the original claim, and your response is a complete tangent.   It could be that the rules make a great distinction, or that they make no distinction but whether they do or not has nothing at all to do with the presence or absence of firebreathing dragonmen, nor - and this is less obvious but equally important - does it have anything to do with how readable a greatsword is if it is currently strapped on ones back.The rules make no distinction between readying a weapon on the basis of size in most situations, though the wieldiness of 'light weapons' does make a difference in some few situations.  But, and here we must read the minds of the designer a little bit, I think we can reasonably speculate that though this is something the player character's care about very much indeed, it's not a level of detail that the players themselves will normally care about.  To this end, proper stowage of gear falls into the category of things like maintenance of weapons and gear and relieving oneself in the field and dressing wounds between battles where it is assumed that the PC's, being expert in this sort of thing, will have done the correct thing even if the player themselves doesn't know how to expediently stow a greatsword so that it can be readily wielded but also doesn't greatly hamper movement.   However they are doing it normally, the weapon is readiable in the space of time necessary to arm oneself in the heat of battle without giving away openings to the enemy.  PC's are just cool like that.But the critical thing to understand is that this is a role playing game and not a board game, and as such it doesn't matter too much what the rules care about.  There are plenty of things that are in the game that aren't in the rules.  In fact, in general, there are more things in the game that aren't stated in the rules, than are in the rules.  If a PC expressly stows the weapon away in a particular manner, and if an expert would recognize that manner as being unweildly, then the stowage of that weapon is actually unwieldy and the PC in question may require more than a normal amount of time to retrieve the weapon.   For example, if - fearing thievery - the PC explicitly takes extra steps to make the weapon difficult for a thief to remove, then it's quite reasonable that those same steps force the PC to take extra time to ready the weapon.   And this happens, not because the rules care about such things, but because in the fiction being created by the players, the exact fictional positioning of the sword mattered.   And presumably, the way adventures with greatsword stow their weapons is not the way that is called out as unwieldy, but is a more efficient and practical manner.And we still haven't explained what the presence of firebreathing dragonmen has to do with the wieldiness of weaponry, because the two are completely unrelated except that if you are really living in a world with firebreathing dragonmen, you probably care very deeply about stowing weapons in as practical of manner as possible.If I had to guess, what the person was trying to say is he doesn't care about the fictional positioning of weapons.  But he's rather ineptly linking his lack of concern for these details to firebreathing dragonmen.   What's actually going on here deep down is how you think about a game and how you prepare to play a role-playing game is more important than the rules of the role-playing game in determining how the play at the table will actually work.   The poster I wheedled made the erroneous assumption that how you are to think about a game is something for which there was only one right way of doing things, for example that since this is fantasy, it was wrong to think hard about fictional positioning or realism or logic because in his mind firebreathing dragonmen are illogical.   Firebreathing dragons aren't illogical if they are a conceit of the setting, but assuming that fantasy means no adherence to realism outside of its conceits is illogical. But in any event that's not the rules either; that's in his default approach to a particular game.  It is very much wrong to assume your approach is the only right one and other people's approach is necessarily the wrong one.</blockquote>

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