Legacy Weapons Question

[plunoir101]

Ok, so were playing Expedition to the Demonweb Pits and my players got a hold of Spidersilk, a +1 Mithral shirt and a legacy item. Now, I haven't read Weapons of Legacy thouroghly, and I need a quick answer.

How does one go about learning the rituals required to bind the legacy item?
Spidersilk states that the PC has to do something before 5th level, yet the campaign it appears in is 9-12th? How does that work?

 

[GunbladeKnight]

It involves either a knowledge (history) check or research, and can be completed any time after 5th. Once they perform the ritual (knowing or not), it unlocks all the abilities up to their level or level 10, whichever is lower. Then they have to complete the lesser ritual for the 11-16 abilities, and the greater ritual for level 17-20.

 

[frankthedm]

Experiences with Weapons of Legacy

Originally Posted by Jeff Wilder
From what I've been able to tell, the main beef against Weapons of Legacy is that the rules actually expect you to pay meaningful penalties for weapon powers that are far, far beyond what you'd normally get for the same amount of gold.

People would have been fine, for instance, if the penalties for a weapon's combat powers were things like "-2 on Diplomacy checks," because for the vast majority of melee-oriented PCs, "-2 on Diplomacy checks" is meaningless. On the other hand, "-4 HP" or "-1 to all attacks" is a trade-off that isn't a no-brainer.

In other words, weapons of legacy, by the book, were balanced, and that's not what people -- me, included, at first -- expected. As such, using them is mostly a matter of whether the DM and the players want the flavor of a weapon that grows in power with the character.

Can DMs and players work out another way of doing a similar idea, without the inherent balance of meaningful game-mechanical penalties? Of course, and in many games that will be a superior way to do things. But if you want weapons of legacy that are game-mechanically balanced, and already created for you (including rules for making your own), Weapons of Legacy is a fine book.

FWIW, my DM gave a PC a weapon of legacy (a longbow) and vastly nerfed the penalties, and the weapon is far, far more powerful than anything the rest of us have. (Including my cleric's self-crafted hammer, a relic of Moradin.) If the player weren't hopelessly inept at both optimization and tactics, the longbow would be extremely unbalancing. (The player's ineptitude might be why the DM was so lenient, but the DM's another one who doesn't like the legacy penalties, so I dunno.)

Weapons of Legacy opinions?

 

[emoplato]

It works as GunbladeKnight says, however just get rid of the damn thing. I don't know the specific penalties assigned to that one in particular but having it incurs various amounts of attack, health, and saves penalties as you level up with it. I am not sure how exactly the DM will use it or not but it also can be a source of major dispute on who has the bad ass item we picked up.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

I second emoplato's vote. Sell the damn thing.

If you have an artificer in the group, have them shard the weapon for XP so nobody else is tempted to waste their time on it. It's a public service!


I don't think the problem is "zomg it has penalties." Despite the penalties being annoying and making little sense, I can see that they bring the cost down. Would be nice if they, say, gave guidelines on that, so you could make your own that're roughly matched with the ones in the book.

The problem is that the weapons in WoL have so many disparate powers that aren't terribly useful, such that it's better to have a regular weapon and not eat the penalties, than a weapon that (for example) gives you a -1 to all attacks in exchange for being able to cast Feather Fall 1x/day, when you have the weapon in hand. It's potentially useful, but really, if you were going to need that, you'd just have a Feather Token or two tucked in your belt.

The ones in Bo9S are much nicer, generally, and are almost worth it, but I'd rather pay a full price to get extra abilities that I can choose, rather than eat penalties for a reduced cost for some weird ability packages.

Brad

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

While I don't want to take as extreme a position as the above posters, I do agree with them in that a Weapon of Legacy has a lot of penalties for the benefits.

IF someone intends to make the most of using a Weapon of Legacy, it will most likely require for the player to build the character around the weapon.

I played a brief campaign where a prince of a nation that had been destroyed was in the process of creating his own Legacy Weapon, a Greatsword called Kingdom Maker.

He took his father's sword, dipped half the sword into the tar pit within the kingdom, dipped it into the blood of his fallen people, and dipped half the blade into sand from the kingdom.
He then was traveling to avenge the destruction of his people, and forge a new kingdom somewhere else.

We used the rules for making a custom Legacy Weapon, and his build was created around the sword. It made for a fantastic character. But the entire build was around the Legacy Weapon.