D&D General Weapon Mastery - Yea or Nay?

[Bladesinger]

My group and I don't care for them for a variety of reasons. I wish they had done something more akin to BG 3's weapon maneuvers personally, although that may have stepped on the Battle Master Fighter somewhat.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I think, every martial should just get the option to use all weapon masteries. Having to switch them in the morning is dumb.
Otherwise they are very fine. Especially the champion rocks.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I'm surprised the Nays are (at the time I'm typing this) winning.

I was already waffling toward OSR, and Weapon Masteries is what finally shut the door on D&D for me.

 

[payn]

Yea, I want more of this kind of thing in 5E. I totally get the nays are coming from though. I just manage to slice through crunchy systems a little easier than the average gamer I guess.

 

[Bacon Bits]

In general they're fine, but they're a bit undercooked.

I have two design complaints:

1. Every single time they eliminate needing to care about weapon proficiencies, they seem to immediately add in a brand new type of weapon proficiency. Like... really, guys? Have we not learned on the sixth or seventh go around that weapon slots are kind of an unpopular design?
2. It is genuinely unbelievable to me that Topple survived without changes. Adding an extra saving throw to every attack is so obnoxious just conceptually that the only time a player took a weapon with Topple (Maul) the DM let the player swap Topple for Graze.

 

[FrogReaver]

I’ve got a love hate relationship with them. Tactically they are fun, but I dislike them being tied to a particular weapon type.

 

[TheSword]

Yay. Finally makes weapons more interesting than how much damage they do. A great addition to the game.

 

[Shiroiken]

Hard for me to say. I just started up my first 5E24 campaign, and nobody played a character with them. We've got a cleric, monk, warlock, and wizard, so I haven't seen them in play yet. Maybe if someone dies, or I might have to wait for my next campaign to find out.

 

[TheSword]

In general they're fine, but they're a bit undercooked.

I have two design complaints:

1. Every single time they eliminate needing to care about weapon proficiencies, they seem to immediately add in a brand new type of weapon proficiency. Like... really, guys? Have we not learned on the sixth or seventh go around that weapon slots are kind of an unpopular design?
2. It is genuinely unbelievable to me that Topple survived without changes. Adding an extra saving throw to every attack is so obnoxious just conceptually that the only time a player took a weapon with Topple (Maul) the DM let the player swap Topple for Graze.

Just for the record it doesn’t add a save to every attack.

• It doesn’t apply to attacks that miss
• It doesn’t apply to attacks that hit creatures that are already prone (possibly because you have multiple attacks)
• It doesn’t apply to attacks that kill their target.
• It doesn’t apply when the wielder doesn’t want it to.

My rough experience is that it only applies to roughly half the attacks that get made with a toppling weapon. Often less.

The balance changes made through weapon masteries also make Prone less powerful than it used to and actually in many cases you might not want to make someone prone (when the rest of the party is making ranged weapon and spell attacks)

 

[SteveC]

My question is: why would you want to play 5.5E and not use them? To me, they are the major new system that's revised, so I'm not sure why you'd even want to use the new rulebooks without it.

I say this as we're just starting an update for our campaign with a different DM and using the 5.0E rules. No one was pushing to update it, so we're continuing using the content we already have on Roll20.