D&D 5E (2014) Should the game have extensive weapon lists?

[Azurewraith]

Because like all threads longer than 5 pages it has morphed to an argument about warlords and metagaming.

Its sad how true this is.

 

[Eltab]

I'm too lazy to read the whole thread (bad poster that I am), so if I repeat what somebody else said, mentally replace my comment with "+1 to that other guy who got here first"

3e had too many weapons that were not much different from each other. (Ex: dagger - kukri - shortsword)
4e had a multi-dimension chart buried in its weapon descriptions, and I liked that.
5e 'feels' a bit short on weapon variety. It would not hurt at all to produce a 'Conversion Chart' for all those exotic weapons (kukri) and other-cultural names (katana) so the non-enthusiast knows where they fit in.

 

[schnee]

I want more options for martial classes to go along with all the new spells for wizards.

It doesn't have to be weapons. It can be other stuff.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

3e had too many weapons that were not much different from each other. (Ex: dagger - kukri - shortsword)
4e had a multi-dimension chart buried in its weapon descriptions, and I liked that.
5e 'feels' a bit short on weapon variety. It would not hurt at all to produce a 'Conversion Chart' for all those exotic weapons (kukri) and other-cultural names (katana) so the non-enthusiast knows where they fit in.

I actually would not like to see this because I think that it would hurt. Existence of such a table would render them 'official' whereas not where is a degree of wiggle room.

Currently, Kukri and Katana don't have official placements in the table. A player who wants their character to use kukri could use dagger stats, or they could use perhaps handaxe or scimitar stats, fitting with the character design and the way they visualise that character's weapons.
Likewise katana are generally used as a longsword, but they could fit as scimitars for a character whose player wants to have them dual-wielding from the start.
Use shortsword rather than rapier stats for your smallsword and you can dual-wield with a dagger. Want to use a main-gauche alongside your smallsword instead? You could use shortsword stats for that as well.

There are only a few 'official' conversions (nunchaku = club, kama = sickle etc). For anything else, the lack of specificity is an advantage since it allows more flexibility.

I want more options for martial classes to go along with all the new spells for wizards.

It doesn't have to be weapons. It can be other stuff.

Stuff like the feats UA?

 

[Gradine]

You seem to have a fundamental, and understandable, misunderstanding of how 4e works.

Every character in 4e can taunt an enemy into attacking them. The fighter with Come and Get It can do it with a single attack roll, and maybe some fancy rider effect. Powers, especially martial powers but also magic ones, represent things you have trained to do, up in your muscle memory banks, as it were, and are better at than other people.

No, I get it. I actually even forgot that Battlemaster has Goading Attack. I just think it boils down to picking nits when the 5e ability does basically the same thing but not quite the same way as the 4e ability. The 4e martial character became the Battlemaster in 5e. I can empathize that that's not good enough for some people; and I think it would have been alleviated quite a bit had the Battlemaster gotten at least one at-will ability, to set them a little further apart from everyone else (never mind that literally everyone else can trip or push). But I also think that claims like 5e "doesn't care about martial characters" is hyperbolic to the extreme and are demonstrably false.

 

[Gradine]

Your assertion was that everything a 4e martial character could do could be done by a character in a /prior/ edition.

Now who's being pedantic?

Ding! Something anyone can do is not character- nor class-defining. It's not an ability, it's a baseline from which actual abilities are defined.

That's a fair point. It's also why several Battlemaster maneuvers can do things every other character can do, but also better.

That's what options are. If you take them, you can do them, if you don't, you can't. If you don't have them in the first place, you can't do them, either. You can just do what everyone can do.

This conversation has mostly run its course, but I do have a question. Say you're DMing 5e and I, playing a rogue am fighting a goblin in the desert. I say that I scoop up some sand and throw it in the goblin's face. How do you, as the DM, adjudicate that action? I swear I'm not trying to prove a point by asking this; I think that ship has quite frankly sailed. I'm just honestly curious.

Now, in 4e, anyone could improvise, and there were the famed 'pg 42' guidelines for that, and they could be pretty effective (about on par with an encounter power).

Pg 42! I had forgotten about that... now that brings me back...

They are not. To understand the difference consider /how/ a thing is accomplished. In the natural course of things, you can pick up an object and throw it if you're strong enough. That's a natural ability. You can not cause a heavy object to move just by concentrating on it. That's a supernatural ability. If you can pick up and throw an object much heavier than any human being ever could, that's super-human, but not super-natural.

You could just change the flavor text in 4e, and re-skin away, but the supposed 'dissociation' between that flavor text (that you had complete effing control over) and the 'mechanics' was an unforgivable flaw. Crazy, I know. Your join date's 2007, unless you wandered off (I wouldn't blame you for that) you'd've seen it.

Even in 4e, that wouldn't've worked, because keywords, including Source, were a mechanical aspect and couldn't just be re-skinned.
It also wasn't necessary, since you just plain had inspiring word. Most classes had enough powers that they didn't need to poach & re-skin eachother's.

5e just doesn't work that way, healing word is an actual spell, you must know it, prep it, and cast it, the rules for spells are designed to make them distinct from everything that's not a spell.
You can pretend it's something else, but you're only fooling yourself.

Basically everything in this quote reads to me like you're showing me two apples and telling me one of them is an orange. Since that is probably the exact same thing you're probably thinking I'm doing, it's pretty obvious we're just going end up talking past each other if we continue down this road. Suffice to say, I completely disagree, but you gotta run with what you believe.

And you're right about the join date; I actually signed up for the forums here because of how excited I was about 4e. And I 4venged with the best of them. I think I bowed out before "dissociated mechanics" became a buzzword, because it was new to me until recently; my point in bringing up the term again is that there are specific, aesthetic-based reasons why people identified so strongly with it in explaining their distaste for 4e. They were people who not only deeply cared about immersion (Fantasy-aesthetic) but also had very specific ideas about what martial characters could or could not do (and also what HPs were supposed to model). The results explain like... at least 70% of the 4e edition war.

And the other reason I bring it up because all of this "caster supremacy" "5e hates martials" "where's my warlord" is basically a rehash of that exact same edition war, only in reverse. 4e and 5e cater towards different aesthetics, different ideas regarding immersion. Different, dare I say it, play styles. Which sucks, because that's not what 5e was originally billed as. WotC obviously thought the Battlemaster was enough to entice the martial 4venger. They were obviously wrong. And that sucks. I get that. And I apologize for exacerbating that; I can empathize with that position, but I was playing devil's advocate, which is kind of a dick-ish thing to do.

But my point is that all of this relates to the aesthetics of play, which are personal and subjective. And so every call that 5e is "broken" and needs to be "fixed" is a wrong now as it was when people were slinging those accusations at 4e a decade ago.

A lot of people, when 3e was the current ed, said they never felt that same need until 3e. The groused that 3e was so terribly, horribly, wrongbadfun 'grid dependent.' They said they never had to do that in 2e. 3e's treatment of the grid was all but lifted from 2e C&T. Plenty of folks used minis the whole time. One DM I gamed with for years in the early 80's brought 40 lbs of lead minis to the game very week.

Fact is, D&D started life as a wargame, you were always meant to play it on a surface, with minis. A lot of us didn't - minis were expensive! - but that's what the rules were designed for from the beginning, and they've never been re-designed to work well without /some/ way of tracking movement, area & positioning.

wrecan, back on the Wizard's board, came up with a set of tricks he called 'SARN-FU' that you could use to run 4e that way. Ironically, that's as close as D&D has ever come to TotM support, some fan-authored variant.
13th Age has been designed to work that way, or with minis, it actually delivers TotM by default, FWIW.
5e is not, it's system isn't much better suited to 'TotM' than 0e or 1e or any other wargame, let alone any other edition of D&D. ;P

The whole 'grid dependent' thing is just an easy dig. It's always been true, it's always been fairly easily ignored, so ignore it selectively and point the finger at the ed you don't like.

I'm aware of the origins and history of D&D. Fact is you could run pretty much every edition pre-4e with TotM combat pretty much seamlessly. It's also a fact that 4e placed a much greater emphasis on tactical positioning than any other edition, which is what made it so hard to run gridlessly. So hard, that it required a fan-made hack (with a name!) to implement. And we can still name the fan who created it. Did we need any of that to run gridless combat pre-4e? Or in 5e?

You can ignore it all you want, but the fact is that 4e required grids for combat in a way no other edition really did. That's not to say other editions couldn't be run with grids, or even that they weren't easier with grids. But 4e codified grids in every inch of its system. To insist that it was no more or less grid dependent than any other edition is simply not true.

I'm not down on grids and minis; I've DMed 3.5 with and without minis and I think I preferred it with. But they're also an investment, which takes time and money, and they're related to only a single core aesthetic (Sensory Pleasure), and if that's an aesthetic somebody doesn't care about, they're probably going to both a) prefer TotM combat and b) have something to say about 4e's reliance on grids and minis.

The edition wars (for both 4e and 5e) are all based in personal aesthetics.

Sad.

5e is a good edition. Great. The best edition. It has the best rules, really good, solid rules. The greatest.

There's a thread about whether the game really needs saves. That'd be a good place.

I'm pretty sure that was all triggered by that Angry DM article where he was talking about how most rolls represent actions but saving throws are weird because they're passive (he's wrong about his premises here, but that's another thing altogether). What other old nits are there to pick? Martial dailies? My immersion!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

No, I get it. I actually even forgot that Battlemaster has Goading Attack. I just think it boils down to picking nits when the 5e ability does basically the same thing but not quite the same way as the 4e ability. The 4e martial character became the Battlemaster in 5e. I can empathize that that's not good enough for some people; and I think it would have been alleviated quite a bit had the Battlemaster gotten at least one at-will ability, to set them a little further apart from everyone else (never mind that literally everyone else can trip or push). But I also think that claims like 5e "doesn't care about martial characters" is hyperbolic to the extreme and are demonstrably false.

The battlemaster doesn't really do the same things, though(some of the same things, sure), and more importantly, the BM can't spend most of its time doing the sorts of things a 4e martial character could do. Especially the warlord, but just in general, the BM is 90% 5e fighter, 10% whatever the subclass gives, and the fighter base class is completely different. And, imo, very boring, but that is another discussion.

 

[hejtmane]

Me personally I like different weapons etc but if you look through out real history our names do not always represent what our idea of a weapon is may not match what history called them or they had 30 different variations of the weapon and varied depending on the eras and some where created to combat another enemies weapon.

Anyways my issue with 5e is it half assed the system it tried to make it simple but then had feats that allowed some weapons and not other and the reason given make you scratched your head and say wtf. 5e tries to simplify the weapons but at the same time have some exception it is kind of weird; I get a longsword is a martial weapon but a whip which is weird because it would be more likely used by a none trained person because it was used more as a tool or punishment then anything. That is my issue with 5e they tried too have it both ways and did a terrible job. Anyways that was my biggest gripe is they have these half done measures instead of picking one or the other method they tried to do a little of both and in my opinion dropped the ball.

Now with all that said I still enjoy 5e a lot I just wish they would had picked something that made more sense on either end of the spectrum

 

[steeldragons]

I find the game is perfectly playable and suitably flavorful options with a grand total of <drumroll>

20.

You need 20 weapons to provide sufficient difference and meaningful choices.

4 -what 5e classifies as "simple"- my homebrew World of Orea starter game system uses: Club/cudgel, Dagger/knife (can be thrown), Sling, Staff
4 blunt damage weapons: Mace, Hammer (can be thrown), Morningstar, War (two-handed) Hammer
4 bladed weapons: Short Sword, Hand Axe (can be thrown), Scimitar, Longsword
4 missile weapons: Hand Crossbow, Short bow, Long bow, [light] Crossbow
4 assorted miscellany/fill in the gaps: Battle (two-handed) Axe, Two-handed Sword, Spear, Halberd (two-handed)

Fighters, Rangers, Barbarians, Druids, Wizards, Clerics, Thieves, everyone has some of what they need. Certainly enough to get rolling. Then if you want to introduce different/additional weapons in play, a few at a time, you still don't end up with a massive number.

Using 5e's "Versatile" weapons trait to allow single or double handed use to a couple (longsword, scimitar, spear, staff) works without alteration.

 

[redrick]

Personally, I wouldn't mind a slightly longer list for flavor, but without much variation in the mechanics between them. I'm not interested in having 15 different mechanical swords to choose from, but I don't mind having a few more pages on descriptions of different kinds of weapons to help provide some more specific character detail. I feel like 5e split the difference in the wrong way — super broad weapon descriptions, but with some pointless mechanical distinctions. (2d6 greatsword vs 1d12 Greataxe, for instance). And the weapons that they did bother to split out, like short swords and scimitars, feel pretty arbitrary.