Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest 7034872" data-source="post: 8770931">There are some posters on here who know a lot about fencing and swordplay, for all of which I'm grateful.In the end, I'm inclined to agree with [USER=6801299]Horwath[/USER] and others that the rapier isn't the real problem: the way weapons in general work in 5e is the problem. When I say, "problem," I expressly don't mean, "thing I dislike." I mean, "thing that prevents the game from working as intended." We had a lot of these same weapons back in AD&D, but they worked very differently, IIRC (long time ago, though, so maybe I don't RC).My memory of AD&D is that weapon use was much more restrictive, with the Fighter the only class that could use pretty much all weapons. They also had much sharper, more limiting trade-offs between weight, damage-dealing, number of attacks per round, etc. This made one's weapon choices much trickier, where I had to spend some real time figuring out which weapon(s) to use. Almost none of our options were ever genuinely interchangeable or replaceable by some other option that just flat out surpassed the others.Today, it seems, weapon choice is almost reducing down to a matter of flavor, not a matter of affecting what happens in combat. Almost as soon as I got back into the game in 2018, I noticed a lot of options were mechanically redundant, yielding weapon choices that were more flavor than mechanics. Weapons tables that become ~50% flavor are not tables I will like, and I really don't think the designers intended this. Forget verisimilitude: I'm not worried about that. I just want to return to a set of tables in which each option compels a balancing act between various in-combat desiderata.</blockquote>

Verification