Weapons as special effects

[Quickleaf]

Great work! And thanks!

My first thought is: Inigo Montoya is chasing the six fingered man downstairs. The six-fingered man has his sword in hand, but when Inigo appears through the door, the six fingered man hurls a knife at him.
In this system, there appears to be no difference in throwing a one-handed sword (either in terms of damage or range) or tossing a dagger. In other words, the six-fingered man could just as well thrown his sword at Inigo. This doesn't explain why all those movies have people throwing daggers and handaxes. Ideas?

 

[SSquirrel]

Great work! And thanks!

My first thought is: Inigo Montoya is chasing the six fingered man downstairs. The six-fingered man has his sword in hand, but when Inigo appears through the door, the six fingered man hurls a knife at him.
In this system, there appears to be no difference in throwing a one-handed sword (either in terms of damage or range) or tossing a dagger. In other words, the six-fingered man could just as well thrown his sword at Inigo. This doesn't explain why all those movies have people throwing daggers and handaxes. Ideas?

It isn't nearly as stylish or easy to throw a 1 handed sword. I would still say that you would gain minuses to throw non-throwing weapons like you do in the PHB anyway, unless you take the feat to allow it with no penalty heh.

Hagen

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

He's more skilled at melee fighting, so he wanted to keep the bigger weapon in his hand. In DnD, it'd work out because your main weapon in probably mw/magical, and you wouldn't want to throw it.

 

[Mouseferatu]

This is really a very cool system. I might even go so far as to say brilliant, with just a little bit of polishing.

Honestly, though, I'd remove the requirement that you be a figther to take the upper-level feats. Sure, rangers, paladins, and barbarians have their own schtick. The fighter also has his own schtick: Extra feats. Give the paladin et al. the option of being better fighters; they'll pay for it by not being able to take other feats. That's the one unbalanced part of this, IMO; you've elevated the fighter much farther above the other warrior classes than the core rules suggest.

Other than that, though, I think this might just work.

 

[woodelf]

OK, i've done a bit of polishing, as Mouseferatu (and i, for that matter) wanted. It's divorced a bit more from specific classes, with all the class stuff (1) shoved into the last section and (2) being AU-centric, 'cause that's the core rulebook i use for my D&D games. It should be attached as a PDF.

So, all y'all let me know what you think. We've been using roughly this in our game for a few weeks, and so far the only complaint is from the faen greenbond who effectively lost a die step on her attacks (due to having no combat proficiency). And i don't think she'd mind, if we'd been using these rules from day 1, and she could've built her character to accomodate. [For that matter, i'm certainly gonna allow her to rebuild her character if she wants to--she's missed the last couple sessions, and a couple other things are in flux about the rules.]

The next step in evolution is to see about rolling armor/defense in in a way that parallels weapons/offense. That's proving to be more than a might bit trickier, in large part because it's less obvious what the fundamental currencies are (like damage, threat range, and crit mult are for weapons), and how to cleanly trade off between them.

 

[Zoatebix]

Yay - I get the first view! The layout looks gorgeous, but I'm too sick to read it thoroughly. I did notice one thing, though: are the damage steps supposed to scale up so quickly? I thought they were supposed to match the size-change rules from the 3.5 Monster Manual.

Anyways, I'll post back here later with more comments.

 

[woodelf]

Yay - I get the first view! The layout looks gorgeous, but I'm too sick to read it thoroughly. I did notice one thing, though: are the damage steps supposed to scale up so quickly? I thought they were supposed to match the size-change rules from the 3.5 Monster Manual.

Anyways, I'll post back here later with more comments.

They scale at the same rate, roughly, as the original proposal by Dan McS. I changed a few of the steps to "smooth out" the progression, IMHO, and to keep the minimum from scaling quite so fast (so, frex, i have 8d12 at the same step that he had 16d6). Oh, and i added 2 more steps on the top of the scale, to accomodate larger PCs (giants can potentially get to size Huge) and warmains (speaking of which--i just realized that i probably should've redefined one of the warmain's abilities in terms of a step increase--hmmm, i'll have to take a look at that).

 

[woodelf]

Oh, two other notes i should've included:

1: the layout is from my players' handout for my home campaign, using Al Qadim as the setting, and AU as the rules, so it's meant to be evocative of both of those layouts in about equal measure.
2: the weapon styles are, at this point, just a descriptive hook. They could, however, have a mechanical value, too, such as tying into feats, or even breaking down proficiency a bit further, more in line with weapon groups.

and an error: Weapon Proficiency, Exotic, shouldn't be in the list of removed feats, because that's still how you get access to many of the templated weapons.

 

[Anabstercorian]

It's excellent, but the incapacitating ability is much too potent! Damage-per-blow goes up in to the 30's and 40's easily, and no one can make that save. Death would be inevitable next round after a Coup De Grace. The demoralizing ability is almost as bad, not to mention it changes the definition of subdual damage completely...

 

[woodelf]

It's excellent, but the incapacitating ability is much too potent! Damage-per-blow goes up in to the 30's and 40's easily, and no one can make that save. Death would be inevitable next round after a Coup De Grace. The demoralizing ability is almost as bad, not to mention it changes the definition of subdual damage completely...

I'd been wondering about changing all of the qualities with saves to be 'standard" DCs: 10 + ability mod + char level, or something along those lines. The flaw in incapacitating just highlights why. Dan McS: any particular reason you used save DCs based on damage, instead of the standard formula?

Yeah, now that i think about it, demoralizing is too powerful, since it basically doubles your damage. Hmmm... i like it conceptually, does D20 System have anything like "morale damage" built in? I suppose i could just fudge something with a save and a -1 on future rolls for some length of time.

edit: doh! i, of course, meant DC = 10 + ability mod + 1/2 char level. And, really maybe replace 1/2 char level with 1/2 BAB--unconventional, yes, but really reflects what it "should" be, in this context, i think.