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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gwarok" data-source="post: 7456559" data-attributes="member: 12249">Some things that bothered me and what I've done or proposed, there are more, but here is what I felt like mentioning here today:Things that bug me1) Giant creatures hit really not much harder than medium ones.   Big things should be REALLY scary to fight in close combat for man sized stuff, even if you are the greatest fighter in the land encased in the best armor, a T-Rex is not a laughing matter.   Jaime Lannister in his prime with that Valerian sword would still find some excuse to not slug it out with one of those Frost Giants.  Really just a level of suspension of disbelief I've never been able to make peace with.  2) Magic items that are rated "Very Rare" or thereabouts yet seem vastly inferior to lower quality or lower rated items.  Specifically in this case comparing Staves of Fire or Frost to a Staff of Power, all of which are Very Rare but miles apart in usefulness.   Also, the fact staves seem to just be weapons for specific purpose instead of a general tool to help wizards to their thing.  3 Speaking of magic swords, always bothered me that simply giving a +1 to a sword now made it magical and it can cut ghosts.   Didn't seem like there was any way to give someone a weapon improvement that simply meant it was a sharper, stronger, better made weapon without also giving it super powers.   What is the difference between a sword made by a master smith and one made by a merely competent one?  And no one that can't fling fireballs or make miracles happen can make a decent sword?  I'm pretty sure Hattori Hanzo never cracked a spellbook or studied at Hogwarts.  This also never sat right with me. Solutions:1) I know the damage die goes up one with the size increase, but that doesn't really seem to capture the essence of how much harder big things hit.   So the damage bonus from STR goes up with size as well.  Ogre with a 19 Strength doesn't get the same +4 to damage a human does, it gets +8.   STR 19 on Huge will get you +12.   This will really make players not want to get hit by big things and come up with a better plan for fighting them than yonder orc warlord.   We seem to have no problem with their carrying capacity going up with size, seems to me this isn't much different.   2) So I could just make Staves of Fire Rare instead of Very Rare, and I have.   Now I also have "Greater" Staves of Fire/Frost.   They come with plus +1(Very Rare) or +2(Legendary) varieties.  In addition to what the normal staves do, their bonus applies to when they are used as quarterstaves, and also add 1(2) to the hit, DC, and effective level of any fire for frost spell cast through them or generated by the staff directly.  3) For weapons the +1-3 simply refers to the quality of the weapon.  A non spellcaster can craft them, they just take longer and require more skill and better tools/materials.   Which is why most of the +2 and +3 are made by elves and dwarves, they simply take too long to make for shorter lived races.   Who's got the patience and time to spend 1 year to make a single sword, even a really kickass one?  Elves and dwarves, that's who.  And the occasional human grand master forging his magnum opus.  But how does that help me fight werewolves and devils and ghosts you ask?  It doesn't.   You want to hit them your going to need a Magic Sword, and you'll know it's magic because it's on fire.   Or glowing with the holy radiance of Celestia.   Or made of silver.  Yea, that's right, werewolves are still a thing now at 10th level, even though any sane DM would have given players a +1 something by then, totally making the need for silver weapons of any kind obsolete.  So now you still get to have those resistances mean something past 4th level without running an absurdly magic weapon free campaign world just to shoe horn that sweet little piece of flavor in.  I like the fact you need specific weapons for that, it's cool, it's classic fantasy, and almost totally absent from 5E campaigns.  Ok, that's all for now.  I'm not totally invested in any of these ideas so anyone wanting to yell at me about how stupid and game breaking they are hoping I'll into launch a 10 page diatribe in defense of them is going to be sorely disappointed.  I just think things work better this way, but you do you <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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