D&D General The rapier in D&D

[jmartkdr2]

it was never decided it was a weapon for fighting dragons, it was decided as a weapon for 'humans' to fight each other and then they just extended those damage values to cover fighting every other creature they could think of without considering if anything ought to be altered in the process.

Clearly what the people want is a giant chart with different damage values for each weapon against each kind of monster!

(Even Rolemaster only had like, three categories of target)

 

[Steampunkette]

If and when I ever take the time to write down all my thoughts into an actual 5e revamp the list of changes will be significant...

And the all-importance of Dex will be high among them.

Like. First among them is DRASTICALLY narrowing the difference between armor values and then adding attribute in medium and heavy armor. Specifically: Constitution and Strength, respectively.

Light armor as 11-12 + Dex. Medium armor as 12-13 + Con. Heavy armor as 13-14 + Str.

It's a start, at least.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I think this is a non sequitur, in that that's not what AIViking stated. There some significant ground between "our ancestors have been killing everything in their path with stone-age weapon" and "Stone age hunters did not go toe to toe with massive predators."

Few if any groups ever hunted* large predators. Just in general it is not an efficient way of acquiring food (both based on risk and regularity of coming across them). However, people have successfully defended themselves from lions/tigers/bears all the way back to the sharpened-rock era (with middling success rates, to be sure, and plenty success stories falling into the 'the spear was not the deciding factor, any putting up of a fight would have worked in making the creature look for easier/safer prey). *for food. Nobles hunting dangerous beasts for sport certainly predates the colonial era.

Likewise, pre-historic people did go after boars and elephants/mammoths and other pretty dangerous non-predators in a hunting capacity, and not just by driving them off cliffs. Even Neanderthals seem to have done so, and there's indication that they couldn't/didn't throw their spears.

There’s still some peoples in Africa who hunt huge game (elephants, giraffes) as a rite of passage and proof of skill. The hard part is chasing the target for a few days after you wound it so it doesn’t even get a chance to heal. Poisons are sometimes used.

Even these people don’t consider this an efficient way to acquire meat; there’s just too much. But the hides are extremely valuable and the cred for taking down an elephant is real.

 

[Mannahnin]

Sure, why not? Why, what sword do you normally use to fight dragons in your day-to-day life?

Seriously though, a rapier was added so that people could live out their 3 Musketeers/Inigo Montoya/Zorro (maybe Puss in Boots? now also Lara Raith?) fantasies. ... Just like every other fantasy trope out there. We also have wizards in the thick of battle without armor because tropes (and balance). Also people wearing plate armor while climbing into unexplained treasure-filled deadly holes in the ground.

Beyond that, it should be mentioned that other swords weren't built for fighting dragons either. Fantasy has always been this bizarre amalgam of 'what if magic and dragons actually existed in old-timey days, but it was still recognizably old-timey days instead of what it would actually have looked like if magic and dragons existed.' That's going to inherently have some dissonance. Frankly speaking, rapiers are not high on the list of the dissonant parts.

Bringing a spear to a fight against a dragon is useless. You're not getting through it's hide before the haft breaks and/or you are swiped into oblivion.

Same thing with the lucerne hammer. "Evade!" doesn't work against a hand the size of a human torso with fingers as long as your arm tipped with claws as long as your hand coming to you at roughly the speed, and impact force, of a midsize SUV.

Fighting a dragon, for real, would be impossible with any melee weapon. And almost all ranged weapons would be equally ineffective.

My point was not about historical accuracy of people encountering T-Rexes, it's that if you want a "dragon" that works according to real world physics you have to strip away a lot of what makes a dragon a dragon. First thing that goes is the breath weapon and flying. Then you ask if the fore-limbs really do anything essential, scale to an appropriate size and suddenly you have a predator that looks a lot like a T-Rex. Convergent evolution created the same basic structure many times over millions and millions of years because it was effective.

Of course you could go the other way and create something like a giant pterosaur like Quetzalcoatlus that had a cobra's venom spit. But you're never going to have anything that looks like a D&D dragon.

Right. If we're going to dismiss weapon effectiveness based on physical realities of mass and strength, we similarly should be accounting for how those same physical realities alter and limit the large monsters.

There's also some tendency for everyone to have invisible implicit assumptions/premises buried in their opinions, and I feel like some of us are talking past each other based on having somewhat different assumptions we're working with. .

Not just the flying, but the sheer scale of dragons as pictured in modern D&D (as Steampunkette, for example, is referencing) is probably an unreasonable thing to assume.

Folks have talked about how "fantasy" describes dragons and fighting them a few times in the thread, but that isn't always monolithic. Many older folkloric depictions of dragons have them as substantially smaller than the dragons we're accustomed to in D&D. Some dragons are also smaller than others even in D&D.

In Gene Wolfe's The Knight heroic humans battle giants, but the giants are a bit more plausible in scale and shape than we typically see D&D giants, and are much slower in reflexes and turning ability. And humans mostly employ spears and penetrating ranged weapons, only the most heroic or foolhardy getting into melee with them (though able to have some success there using weapons which can get deep penetration and/or using tactics like hamstringing).

Checking the 1977 Monster Manual I see that the chromatic dragons range from 24' in length for a white dragon to 48' for a red. An adult has 5hp/HD, with as low as 5HD for a small adult white dragon and as minimum of 9HD for a small adult red. So we're looking at as low as 25 or 45 HP for those for an adult. Those are still huge, of course, and as SP aptly pointed out, a hippo is enormously, terrifyingly more powerful than a human, at a "mere" 10-16 ft in length. Though dragons are at least somewhat serpentine, with long tails and necks which add to the length, and if we are assuming flight we could also reasonably assume a lighter build is part of that. A dragon 30' or even 50' in total length might be considerably less massive than a 15' hippo.

And in addition to the size, fantasy isn't always monolithic in how mythic or heroically it treats dragons and dragonslaying. In Barbara Hambly's 1985 Dragonsbane, our protagonist hero is a bookish local lord who's earned that eponym by cornering a smallish local dragon in a cave and killing it with a poisoned spear/harpoon. Inflicting a telling wound and getting TFO, as I recall.

This is all to say that while the basic premise of a much smaller animal fighting and killing a much larger animal has multiple basic ways for it to be doubtful and implausible, there are also ways of addressing and adjusting the fiction to make it MORE plausible, if we so choose.

 

[SkidAce]

I say bring back the 3rd edition double headed flail.

Flind bars.

 

[Reynard]

Flind bars.

Those places are rough. I wouldn't go without a gnoll buddy.

 

[SkidAce]

As a former 11H, I recommend a TOW missile mounted on a Bradley.

Crew served 50 cal maybe?

 

[Reynard]

Crew served 50 cal maybe?

Sure, if you want to take your time.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It is. If you want a true reality simulator, I would think a world with dragons would invent their own new weapons appropriate to the task

Right, but including something that allows emulating the quintessential fantasy story in a fantasy game is hardly out of bounds for the game. This is a critique of the argument that something being 'too modern' is reason to exclude something from the game.

It can be reason enough, if the GM and players agree on that choice.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Clearly what the people want is a giant chart with different damage values for each weapon against each kind of monster!

(Even Rolemaster only had like, three categories of target)

Two or three categories is granular enough. Anything beyond that is fodder for individual statblocks