Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Drifter Bob" data-source="post: 1675151" data-attributes="member: 17723">Glad to hear it!We don't scientifically model every aspect of combat, we just get as close as we can within the spirit of D&DWith a little tinkering, the basic D&D concept of simple, martial, and exotic weapons is not too far off base.  We tend to look at history for a guide, so the way we look at it, simple weapons are those typically wielded by peasants, burghers, and ordinary civilians; martial by soldiers, mercenaries, knights, and other military specialists; and exotic weapons are basically any weapons which are unique or difficult enough to require special training in their use.  Those military weapons used by elite troops (like the dopplehander or the arbalest) and those civilian weapons which seemed to historically require special training.  For example, renaisance era soldiers who weilded dopplehander swords were in a category called "dopplesoldner" because they recieved double pay due to their extraordinary skill.Frankly, I believe that a rapier, as well as a smallsword or any other principly thrusting sword is also an exotic weapon.  It is not as intuitive as say, a club or even a spear.  Most people who used them recieved training.  An arming sword, by contrast, normally used in conjunction with a shield, is something you can pick up with much less formal training.  I was never formally trained in sword and shield at all (though I had a lot of experience) and I can fence much better that way than with a rapier or smallsword.That is one of the reasons aristocrats liked rapiers so much, few commoners or even soldiers knew how to use them.We take a cue from an optional rule in D20 modern and similar variants presented in some other recent sourcebooks, and break up AC into a defense roll and armor damage reduction.  Your base defense bonus is based on your BAB plus your dex bonus.  Your melee defense bonus also includes the defense value of your weapon.  Thus a staff is effetively a better defensive weapon than a dagger.Actually, the cultures did in fact meet.Generally speaking, what we do is rationally evaluate what we see as the strengths and weaknesses of various fighting styles (mostly as translated into feats) from different eras and cultures, and their items of kit (weapons and armor) and attempt to model them as well as we can within the spirit of D&D, i.e. still in an abstracted manner, but with a little more realistic feel, in terms of their actual merits.This specific issue (knight vs samurai or rapier vs samurai) keeps coming up in this thread so I'll post this link, which I also bumped up.  <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=73933&highlight=samurai" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=73933&highlight=samurai</a>I reccomend reading John Clements article which is linked to page one of the thread and my own comments on page 4.DB</blockquote>

Verification