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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6924115" data-attributes="member: 6775031">The fact that a regular vorpal sword is useless against creatures that are immune to slashing damage is not a meaningful difference, since (as far as I can tell) there is nothing that is immune to slashing damage from a magical sword. Plenty of stuff is immune to slashing damage from non-magical swords, but nothing is immune to the damage from a vorpal sword, that I know of. Note also that a vorpal sword does not have a base damage of 1d8; a vorpal sword can be any type of sword that deals slashing damage, and the base damage of a huge longsword is 3d8.The fact that a regular vorpal sword can take the head off of any chump, but not anyone cool, is not a meaningful difference from the function of a balor's sword which can also not take the head off of anyone cool. The rules simply don't bother to declare an exception for what happens when a balor critically hits a chump, because there's no reason why they would be fighting in the first place, and in those rare situations where it might come up the outcome is functionally similar to simply dealing an extra 27 damage beyond normal critical damage.Even if a Balor's sword isn't technically a Vorpal Sword - which is a fair argument, though a bit nitpicky - it still operates as though it was a Vorpal Sword for the purposes of this discussion. Its actual in-game functionality has at least as much in common with a Vorpal Sword as it did in AD&D, where it was explicitly vorpal (adjective, not noun) and also detected evil/good and exploded if anyone else touched it. It doesn't have +3 to hit or damage in 5E, but it probably didn't have +5 to hit or damage in AD&D either. It is a sword which is vorpal, even if it's not the item which is named Vorpal Sword.</blockquote>

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