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<blockquote data-quote="Kobold Stew" data-source="post: 6618156" data-attributes="member: 23484">There's other deadweight on the weapons chart (Halberd and especially Trident, I'm looking at you), but I'm not sure I agree with you on the great axe. First off, we're not looking to this for complete realism: there just isn't enough granularity to make this meaningful; and we acknowledge there's a lot that's artificial about D&amp;D combat. The table has to have a plausibility, but not verisimilitude. Spear and dagger show us that. But there is always more than one reasonable choice for a lost every character design.Second, you are assuming every player wants your experience of play. When you imply greatswords are objectively better, you're calculating maximum average damage per round. That's fine, but it's not the only measure of these things. A greataxe, for example will do maximum damage three times more often than the greatsword, and for some players, that's what they want to experience -- that exhilaration of doing the max. (The fact that &quot;1s&quot; occur too matters less, since you get to add your strength bonus anyways -- you're always going to be doing at least 4 points of damage (say), so the trough is less apparent. That's not the way you play? Fine! But it's completely fair. So people just like to roll the d12&nbsp; (as was realized when they designed the Order of the Stick board game).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Kobold Stew, post: 6618156, member: 23484"] There's other deadweight on the weapons chart (Halberd and especially Trident, I'm looking at you), but I'm not sure I agree with you on the great axe. First off, we're not looking to this for complete realism: there just isn't enough granularity to make this meaningful; and we acknowledge there's a lot that's artificial about D&D combat. The table has to have a plausibility, but not verisimilitude. Spear and dagger show us that. But there is always more than one reasonable choice for a lost every character design. Second, you are assuming every player wants your experience of play. When you imply greatswords are objectively better, you're calculating maximum average damage per round. That's fine, but it's not the only measure of these things. A greataxe, for example will do maximum damage three times more often than the greatsword, and for some players, that's what they want to experience -- that exhilaration of doing the max. (The fact that "1s" occur too matters less, since you get to add your strength bonus anyways -- you're always going to be doing at least 4 points of damage (say), so the trough is less apparent. That's not the way you play? Fine! But it's completely fair. So people just like to roll the d12 (as was realized when they designed the Order of the Stick board game). [/QUOTE]

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