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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6648584" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I'd like to expand a bit on my last post, actually (which was written on my phone, so I tried to keep it short...or, at least, short-er!)To a certain extent the "more common" and "more dangerous" problems are interwoven, but both individually contribute.Getting into the thick of fighting is something that D&D characters do on a highly regular basis; I'd even say they do more life-or-death fighting than a typical soldier or guardsman in Antiquity or the Medieval period, admittedly without much expertise on the subject. Similarly, a hunter (someone using a hand axe for its tool benefits) is, I assume, going to try to avoid contact with dangerous predators as much as possible--why engage with a cougar, wolf pack, etc. without a very good reason (e.g. needing to remove competition for scarce resources, or wanting to sell the pelts for profit perhaps)? The less contact you have with "the enemy," the safer you are, so to speak. So even if you assume exploration and combat are equally dangerous, PCs would seem to face life-or-death combat far more often than real-world people did.On the flipside, I don't know of any game that makes a single environmental challenge usually as dangerous as a combat. Combat, in the vast majority of cases, at least theoretically has the potential for a TPK. Enemies are rarely assumed to "take prisoners," and it is often poo-pooed if they do (something about making it "no-risk" so it becomes "boring" is the usual statement). With rounds being 6 seconds long, most combats are resolved in only 30 seconds--quick and brutal, not the long, drawn-out fight scenes from movies. (We just experience them that way because we can't resolve them at the speed a movie or video game can.) On the flipside, a 30-second environmental challenge is rarely going to be lethal; it almost always takes a substantial pile of failures, or an extremely foolhardy/bull-headed approach, to have the environment kill you off. Unless, of course, it's a trap, but single-save-or-die (or even "no save, just die") traps have been frowned upon for years.So environmental challenges tend to be more manageable and controllable than combat ones, and combat challenges happen with substantially greater frequency than environmental challenges IF comparing PC experiences to those of someone from Antiquity or the Medieval period. When coupled with the relatively loosey-goosey attitude about how weapons work for non-fighting purposes, and the general wheeling-and-dealing resolution for environmental challenges as opposed to the precisely-defined methods of resolution for combat (even for TotM)...yeah, it's no wonder, to me at least, that people ignore the super-ultra-versatile-IRL item in favor of the powerful-and-sufficient-in-game item.If you want to change this, you'll probably want to tackle all four of those concerns. Putting that into an advice list would be something like...(1) Make combats less frequent than environmental challenges, and make it explicitly less-frequently-lethal to lose a combat.(2) Give weapons-that-are-tools some kind of mechanical benefit for being used as a tool, and make these benefits both meaningful and desirable.*(3) Make weapons-that-really-aren't-tools actually bad at the things they're supposedly bad at. For example, chopping down a tree with a sword can actually break the sword, or blunt its edge (easily fixed with a whetstone, perhaps, but a -1 to damage until you do).(4) Consider aping at least the concept of the Skill Challenge from 4e: give non-combat situations a more precisely-defined method of resolution, so that having tools to address those situations becomes an important part of play. Make it a richer scenario than "have vs. have-not," just as weapons are almost always a more diverse experience than merely "you have a weapon or you don't."*If you have trouble justifying this to yourself, think of it as "the game has failed to show the real-world utility of this item, therefore the game's representation isn't as good as the real thing." Some ways to do this could be allowing "survival tool" proficiency to apply to hand axes; giving a flat bonus to survival tasks as long as having a hand axe is relevant to completing them; granting advantage on specific kinds of tasks performed using the hand axe; or even allowing someone to have Expertise aka Double Proficiency for a list of tasks that employ the hand axe in a central way.</blockquote>

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