Mercurial Weapons -- good idea or bad idea?

[NoOneofConsequence]

I don't disallow them because of game balance but for realism. Magic in the game is fantastic, it's suppose to be. It represents an unrealistic event in a plausable manner.

But a sword is a real thing. They have existed for thousands of years. And in all that time no one has invented a hollow sword full of a toxic metal. There is a reason for this, it wouldn't work.

Actually, it would be more accurate historically to say that the reason no one developed mercurial weapons is that the technology required to do so didn't exist until after swords had long ceased to be effective weapons (due to the rise of firearms).

Swords are light. I don't care if WotC says the weights for weapons represent the mass/bulk as well. They are far, far too heavy. This gives most gamers the idea that swords were/are these huge slabs of metal. A real swords does not have one gram of weight it doesn't need. Which makes them thin and fairly dynamic items. They need to have a certain amount of flex.

On this we agree. The weights listed for a lot of 3e weapons are fundamentally ridiculous.

Lots of supplments have odd, fantastical and exotic weapons. I disallow any that violate the ability to exist in reality. If you are looking for a big sword that hits like a tank, use an axe or a maul. Heck use a military pick.

Mercurial weapons are something that could only have been designed by someone that has little knowledge of real world weapons. No insult intented. Most people know next to zero about real world weapons. They are just silly.

I know a fair bit about real world medieval weapons. I would imagine that many of the people at WotC also know a fair bit. The gaming industry in general is full of people who are medievalists, go in for historical reconstruction or martial arts. You sound more than a bit silly denouncing your opposite viewpoint as simple ignorance. Basically, our suspension of disbelief kicks in before yours.

I mean, let's not kid ourselves, 3e has one of the less "realistic" combat systems out there. Realism is not what the designers were aiming for.

 

[NoOneofConsequence]

I like 'em and will allow them in campaigns that I DM. They are rare, but not extremely rare.

<Casts Resist Elements(Fire) on himself>

Besides, I find the spiked chain way more cheesy and unbalancing than the merc. greatsword.

Cheesy and unbalancing? Maybe.

Based on weapons which actually exist? Definitely.

The picture of the spiked chain from PHB has exaggerated proportions, but later pictures (like the design of the snakestrike duellist from Chainmail) essentially represent the spiked chain as just like a Chinese nine-section-whip or the japanese kyoketsu-shoge.

 

[La Bete]

pre-errata: bleagh, bleagh, bleagh.

post errata: nah. use a greatsword if you really wanna moosh things.

 

[Baron Von StarBlade]

I don't know I think all you guys who ban them are missing out. Think of the shocked look on the players faces when you Sunder their Mecurial Longsword, then force them to make a fort save or be poisoned with Mercury!
I think they are cheesy but all they do is make a slight adjustment on the damage/crit ratio at the expense of a feat. In the grand scheme of things they aren't too broken.

 

[Azure Trance]

I don't see a prob with either version of the Merc Greatsword. It takes a feat and IMO if you want to spend a feat on it go ahead.

Huge Golden MercGreatswords unerrated and being used Keen and with Improved Crit by a minotaur are what gets kinda mean. 4d8 18-20/x4

When you say golden, you mean making it a 'heavy weapon' like from Magic Of Faerun, right? Is that possible, as you need a feat to use a Heavy Weapon and a feat to use a Mercurial Weapon. Would you then need two feats to wield it, such as:

Exotic WP Heavy Great Sword
Exotic WP Mercurial Great Sword

 

[Creeperman]

Third (assuming you find a way around one and two), the idea is fine for a baseball bat or an executioner's sword (which is what Terminus Est was), where you have to worry about one forceful hit and then nothing else. For a weapon that you're going to want to pull back into a defensive stance so that you can parry the blades coming at you, it's suicide - your swings are going to overextend you every time, leaving you wide open to be clobbered by any halfway competent opponent.

J

Well, part of that would be the EWP training to learn how to choke back on the swing to prevent overextending like that. Another part is the fighting style that would have to be employed. I run a fighter/weapon master that uses one of these things, and I envision his style to be one of constant motion, with swinging slap-parries rather then a set hard-block of an incoming weapon. The longer the blade stays in motion, the less momentum he needs to fight to bring it back up to speed. It also meshes well with Whirlwind Attack.

As for balance, what's so wrong with a 2d6, 20/x4 crit weapon? It's only when a crit strikes home that the weapon really shines through. Otherwise, it's just a slightly heavier greatsword.

 

[drnuncheon]

When you say golden, you mean making it a 'heavy weapon' like from Magic Of Faerun, right? Is that possible, as you need a feat to use a Heavy Weapon and a feat to use a Mercurial Weapon. Would you then need two feats to wield it, such as:

Exotic WP Heavy Great Sword
Exotic WP Mercurial Great Sword

I would say you could get away with EWP: Heavy Mercurial Greatsword...just don't ever expect to find a magic one in a treasure trove...

J

 

[Azure Trance]

I would say you could get away with EWP: Heavy Mercurial Greatsword...just don't ever expect to find a magic one in a treasure trove...

J

Ah. Thanks, just the munchy in me wondering.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

I don't disallow them because of game balance but for realism. Magic in the game is fantastic, it's suppose to be. It represents an unrealistic event in a plausable manner.

But a sword is a real thing. They have existed for thousands of years. And in all that time no one has invented a hollow sword full of a toxic metal. There is a reason for this, it wouldn't work. Let's put the issue of a shifting point of balance aside. You are swinging a narrow tube of toxic liquid.

There is another logical leap here, that I think a lot of folk forget - in a world where magic exists, there will have been thousands of years of metallurgical and weaponsmithing discoveries that took that additional factor into account. It would be another element to deal with, like heat. Magic would help in the creation of alloys and the discovery of ways to strengthen and modify designs. At least, that's how I see it. The real world has also never produced human-like giants or flying creatures that bulk the same as a dragon, both because of basic principles of physics.

I'm not trying to cop out here, and say "well, it's magic." I'm just trying to point out that there would be a number of profound ways in which a world infused with magic would differ from ours. A sword like the one being discussed, produced as the end result of millennia of experimentation with forces that don't exist in the real world, doesn't seem an unreasonable thing to me.

Think about this - ancient castles never took flying attackers into account. Armorsmiths never took into account attackers so large as to be able to grasp the wearer of the armor in a hand or paw. If these things had to have been dealt with in the real world, how different would these things now look? How many innovations would have been made to them that would look nonsensical to us in our non-magical world?

Look, I do understand that some dislike this particular concept. That's cool. It's just that this particular item leapt out at me as being an interesting touch that could lend a bit of wonder and exoticness to a campaign world. I have something like two or three pages of background material about how the mercurial swords came to be in my campaign world. Anything that sparks ideas like that, especially such a small thing, can't be all bad.

 

[Gunslinger]

I really don't see how that is unbalancing. It's essentially exactly the same as the regular greatsword. Instead of 2d6 it does 1d12, which means that rather than having a 16/36 of rolling 6-8, you have a 1/12 chance of rolling all numbers between 1 and 12. And the only difference between 19-20/x2 and x4 is that one crits twice as often for half damage. Personally, I would rather take the 2d6 damage and crit more often, because most of the time x4 damage is overkill in the campaigns I have played in, where we do many fights with weaker opponents, and x2 is usually enough to drop or badly hurt most enemies. I would far prefer using a weapon I already have profiency with rather than wasting a feat to use a weapon that has more random damage and crits less often.