Jester David
Hero
That lots of counts name their sword? So it's regal?
(Or something. I may be misremembering.
)
D&D 5E Renaming +1, +2, +3
- Thread starter Achan hiArusa
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(Or something. I may be misremembering.
)
And enough imagination and/or world-building detail to come up with a name that makes sense on the fly.
Jester David
Hero
It's the sword Ealladrint, an ancient elven name whose meaning only a scholar would know*
*aka give me 15 minutes to brainstorm.
"Pointy End Goes In Orc"
Jester David
Hero
Player: "Wha... elves seriously have a word that means 'pointy end goes in orcs'?!"
DM: "They have five words that means 'point end goes in orcs'. Elves really don't like orcs."
Player: "... Fair enough. Ealladrint. E-L-L-A?"
Evenglare
Adventurer
Ok, so there's one of two things happening here. both terrible. Option 1, You create a weapon via random generation using the naming convention OP talks about, giving +1s a particular material etc, then you basically have to refer to another chart, such as the one you linked me, and I have to randomly generate all of that mess to get a name. I don't want to have to randomly generate a weapon and then have to do it for the name, it's double the work when you could easily just give the weapon a name, which brings us back my original post about how tedious it would be to come up with a name specific to each individual weapon. The act of naming weapons either manually or specially is way more hassle than it's worth when you have a perfectly good name from the +1s > darkwood (or whatever). Secondly, you are going to respond with something along the lines of just use the "name generator" instead of giving the items special materials to plusses. This means you are basically doing the generation without mapping the +s to materials. Completely a waste of effort in that situation, OR you can use your chat to map names to the plusses which is essentially what OP proposed in the opening post. Redundant is redundant.
Every weapon can be unique. It doesn't matter whether it was one of ten thousand star metal blades forged during the Goblin Wars of the Third Imperium or if it gained its magic due to a lucky crit on an ogre by a farm boy defending his mom with dad's rusty old blade. As far as the player and character is concerned, a sense of history and uniqueness improves the qualitative value of the item. What random charts do rather than predetermined "types" is add breadth to the world. It is a pretty boring world if every +1 sword is made of ElementX.
DMZ2112
Chaotic Looseleaf
No, no, you're doing it wrong. If you use shears instead of a sword you get three blocks of wool instead of one and you can reshear the sheep later.
If you're taking dungeon mastery advice from the Hound it's going to take more than this thread to save you.
I think that in most cases that would be unusual, and in the few cases where it does occur it would surprise me if the name sticks. Swords are named for deeds, or if not for deeds than for the vanity of their wielders. Either way, the swordsmith probably doesn't get a say, even if he wants one.
The smith who forged Orcrist might have called it that, and its wielder might have called it that, but no one /else/ called it that until it had killed a /lot/ of goblins.
You don't need to generate treasure non-randomly to use unique weapon names. It's purely a question of the rarity of magic weapons, and whether rare or not, random generation is still an option. If you've got a campaign setting with mass-produced magic weapons, then yeah, a lot of them are not going to have stories, are not going to have been wielded by anyone remarkable, and are going to be identified by plus (or material, in your system).
But my questions for you are these -- if they're truly that common, why aren't your PCs already armed with them? Why has someone bothered to hoard them? Why hasn't your world's weaponsmithing industry been driven under by used sword salesmen, with their Pomade of Holding, tacky Cravats of Charisma, and cheap Tweed Tunics of Transacting?
If weapons are rare enough that people bother to name them, then you can assume that virtually anything you randomly generate was named at one time or another. But there's no onus on the dungeon master to come up with a name on the fly -- magic items don't identify themselves. The dungeon master has the length and breadth of the window between discovery and Identify being cast to think up a suitable name.
Glamdring and Orcrist didn't have their names etched on the blades, to the best of my knowledge. Gandalf knew of them by reputation. You can doubt that, but certainly the Goblin King identified both weapons without ever getting close enough to read the runes on the hilt.
TL;DR: The question of whether magic weapons in your game should be individually named or not is a function of their rarity and your group's playstyle, and absolutely not a function of the use of a random treasure generation system.
I could be mistaken (and it's not really important to your larger/actual point) but, I do believe the names of those particular swords are, indeed, etched in runes somewhere on the swords. I don't recall if it was "on the blades" or not. But I am pretty sure they were labeled with elvish [made by the high elves in/of Gondolin, I believe] runes/lettering.
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