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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="urLordy" data-source="post: 6211069" data-attributes="member: 6747028">If you have 12 heroes of various skills and calibre against an undeclared enemy, only the fighter hero with the heavy weapon is guaranteed/predestined to inflict some measure of loss to the enemy. Regardless of the relative qualities of the attackers and defender, the one and only variable for fictional positioning is binary: the absence or presence of heavy weapon expertise. The rule is blind to fictional positioning such as the qualities of the target creature or the exclusively direct correlation between a heavy weapon and that particular fictional outcome.Now let's pretend the theoretical rule was: If you use a heavy weapon, once per encounter you may roll to attack against the target's touch AC. The idea is that the fighter may summon the strength to bring that weapon crunch through any hide or armour. Two outcomes are the same regardless of the fictional positioning: that the fighter can only summon sufficient strength to do so only once per combat, and that the fighter can do so regardless of whether it's leather or platemail or dragonscale or adamantium shield. OTOH, the outcome does respect the fictional positioning that a heavy weapon can only damage a creature if it physically contacts the creature's body as abstracted by the attack roll. (Again, this is just a theoretical rule for illustration purposes.)Back to the always damage on a miss, the only way that the rule's outcome can respect the fictional positioning is to pre-declare that in any combat that occurs during that fighter's "onscreen" battles, the heavy weapon always physically contact every enemy or always depletes the enemy's stamina, and that the heavy weapon fighter will never encounter an enemy that cannot be physically contacted or have its stamina depleted so, and there will be no other heroes in the story not wielding a heavy weapon who can guarantee to inflict the same. The entire fiction in the minds of all the players must therefore be controlled/limited in order to protect the fictional integrity of the rule, and all that is caused by one little rule in one subset of one class. I could imagine something mythical like a fighter born with the destiny that "When thou wieldeth a greatsword, thou shalt never fail to harm thine enemy" and that this manifest destiny shall come to be true by the power of the gods, but it would be tiresome to imagine this every time a player chooses the heavy weapon fighting style for their PC.</blockquote>

Verification