Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="mneme" data-source="post: 4981288" data-attributes="member: 59248">Not really; OD&D had all weapons do 1d6.In theory, they could have made differences between weapons entirely a matter of class features and feats.  But D&D's history is that weapons are different, and they wanted the widgetness.Similarly (and importantly) the whole point of implements was to make casters more like weapon users mechanically, thus letting the same reward structure and math cover both.  AFAICT, they initially had the idea of implements being "similar but different" -- with more controller secondaries, no inherent damage, and more rider effects.  In the end, this has (IMO, anyway) proved to be a bad decision (a good thing to change for 4.5 <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />; given the accretion of feats and powers, weapons end up with the best of both worlds: more damage, -and- a much greater variation in inherent properties (there are 6 implements; there are over 40 distinct weapons.  Hmm), enchants (most weapon enchants affect -categories- of weapons; most implement enchants affect specific implements.  Thus most weapon enchants are available to all weapon users, with at most a feat, whereas most implement enchants...aren't) -- without a significant difference in how many status effects (etc) are available.In a perfect world, the distinction would be eroded, with the "combo" types being a superior implement type with enchants layered on top, not a specific implement enchantment that precluded other enchantments (songblades do this OK, as there are at least a good variety of types.  Every other combo?  Not so much, and rather than having every implement power have a specific damage die, use the same rules as weapons do; implements have their own keywords and damage dice, so you can go with wands for more accuracy, staves for more defense, or (for instance) orbs for more damage, etc, with the idea that wizards, for example, care more about their implement than other casters being layered on top of this.Now, in fact, without a reboot, we're not going to get there from here; you'd need to rewrite every implement ability and replace the fixed damage with [w] construction.  But it's possible to give implements -more- of the feel and flexibility of weapons, and one hopes they eventually will.</blockquote>

Verification