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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cap'n Kobold" data-source="post: 7066189" data-attributes="member: 6802951">5e's ethos seems to be to empower the character rather than weapon minutiae. Riposting/counter hitting isn't something solely performed by rapiers, so it would make more sense to make that a feat in the same vein as Defensive Duellist so that someone trained to be able to do this could choose whatever weapon they want. If you make it a weapon property of the rapier, then someone who wants to be able to do this is forced to use a rapier. I believe that this would actually have the opposite effect: Currently players have access to a range of weapons with the occasional minor trade-off of damage.  If every weapon had more specific strengths and weaknesses  it would still give an 'optimal' choice: the weapon with the property that the player wants to use. 5e really isn't granular enough to deal with that sort of detail though. For example: rapiers are pretty ineffective against most armour, yet war picks and daggers were a favourite to use against even the strongest armours. They all do piercing damage.Damage type effectiveness in 5e is limited to things like skeletons, rather than fall down the rabbit hole of chasing after ever-increasing realism. Messing with shields was a function of one specific design of javelin, used in mass combat. It probably doesn't translate well to the very short, individual combat that adventurers tend to engage in.Whips don't have pathetic damage for balance. They have pathetic damage because whips are very bad at killing people compared to other weapons. A character using a whip is probably using it for its unique properties (only finesse, reach weapon for example)  or because they are doing other things (such as swinging from beams) rather than primarily killing people with it. The issue there is that the existence of a feat that allows you to use a whip to catch on to things implies that you can't do that without the feat.In 5e, if you want to use a whip to snag a beam to swing across a pit, you just tell your DM. They will make a ruling, probably giving you a bonus or advantage to your check rather than asking "do you have the feat".</blockquote>

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