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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 6610871" data-attributes="member: 6787503">First of all, thank you for sharing your weapon training experiences, and thanks to others that have done the same. I really don't have any such experience to draw on and it's very helpful to get an idea of how someone who has training with various forms of weaponry would interpret what it means to be proficient. The word is actually defined on Google as "a high degree of competence or skill; expertise", which, to me, implies more than just a basic level of skill. The word "incompetence" is given as an antonym, but I don't think it would be correct to infer from this that proficiency encompasses everything that is not incompetence, as someone injuring themselves with their own weapon would seem to imply, but rather that it is an opposite extreme of ability. I think this is born out by the mechanics of the game. The 10% bonus that proficiency grants at low levels is not trivial, while at higher levels mere proficiency can grant a bonus as much as 30% above the chance that a non-proficient character has to hit with the same weapon. While it is obviously not the weapon specialization and mastery that various class features and feats give to a character, I think that proficiency does mean that the character has been thoroughly trained in the weapon to the degree to which we might expect a regular soldier, who uses his or her weapon on the battlefield with confidence in his or her own ability, to have been.The other issue that you and a number of others have brought up on this thread is the degree of overlap that exists between similar weapons. While I'm certain that this is the case, I'm not so sure this is what accounts for classes being granted blanket weapon proficiencies. Frequently we see a class that is proficient with one weapon, while not being proficient with the weapons one would think were the most similar. The Rogue, for example, although trained with hand and light crossbows, is not proficient with heavy crossbows. Classes proficient in simple weapons are proficient with the shortbow, but not necessarily with the longbow. Of course, this makes sense because these martial weapons require a greater degree of training than their simpler counterparts, but if overlap were the main design consideration at play here, I would imagine that we might see something more like "proficient with bows", or "proficient with crossbows" as an option, not that I'd want that. I think the true reason has more to do with game balance, and I don't see how limiting characters to choosing a few weapons to be proficient with would upset that.</blockquote>

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