D&D General Weapons should break left and right

[Paul Farquhar]

Sure, but if you're choosing a class that focuses heavily on combat, shouldn't managing your combat resources be part of playing that class? I think so.

Soldiers are trained to keep their gear well maintained. It becomes as automatic a routine as breathing. Now, you might think it would be fun to track breathing “it’s been 5 minutes since you said you take a breath, you fall unconscious.” But that’s not my idea of fun.

There is a computer game about putting one foot in front of another if you like that sort of thing: Behold, the most intimidating demo I’ve had in 12 years of covering video games: playing "literal walking simulator" Baby Steps in front of Getting Over It mastermind Bennett Foddy

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

Wounds should also get infected whenever a weapon cuts you but we rightly handwaved that away as being boring for play. D&D has never been about realism, it's about verisimilitude. It's not about truth, but truthiness.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

Wounds should also get infected whenever a weapon cuts you but we rightly handwaved that away as being boring for play.

And healing should never heal you fully but often leave lasting damage even when the wound is fully healed. In fact, without full surgery avialable, there should be much more amputated limbs or people bleeding out.

 

[Maxperson]

managing my gear HP is as fun as filling out tax returns for the dragon hoard we pillaged last week.

Orphanages. When you get back to civilization you donate to orphanages and half the churches in town. That way you rack up some divine favor hit points, while at the same time giving enough away to charity that you don't have to worry about the taxes.

 

[Maxperson]

The formula for how many weapons you can have on hand is [X * H] + X where X is the average number of weapons a person can carry and H is the number of henches and hirelings you can afford to bring into the field.

The trailing "+ X" is, of course, the weapons you're actually carrying yourself.

Don't forget h. That lower case h is the horse that will also have weapons on it and can carry at least 4 more X.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

Don't forget h. That lower case h is the horse that will also have weapons on it and can carry at least 4 more X.

So now every hero comes packaged with a horse, a mule and a porter, not to mention an entire chart full of weapons.

 

[Maxperson]

So now every hero comes packaged with a horse, a mule and a porter, not to mention an entire chart full of weapons.

That's sort of the end result of extremely common weapon breakage.

 

[loverdrive]

Have you thought that a design that incentivises you to hoard reasources and then punishes you for it is fundamentally bad game design? Any design where mechanics push players towards one kind of behavior, only for that behavior to make them lose is fundamentally broken game.

It makes you consider when to spend (or not to spend) resources. Making mistakes will lead to bad outcomes. Nothing fundamentally bad or broken about that. That's how games work -- they give you opportunities to screw up and then the whole process of play is avoiding screwing up.

Hoarding (and thus wasting) resources is an understandable mistake, but that's what it is: a mistake.

Similarly, in real-time strategy games, many novice players gravitate towards building big bases, then building big epic units (or big epic armies) -- and they inevitably lose to someone who is actually playing the game.

And to be honest, if you want gritty realism in your fantasy RPG, you shouldn't play D&D, for a very simple reason:

I don't know what part of anything that I said in OP or any other posts in this thread made you think about "gritty realism". Does this look like gritty realism to you? And for the love of all the ugliest cannibal gods, do you seriously think that I could not know about WFRP, a big role-playing game tied to one of the biggest fantasy worlds out there?

Spoiler: Rant

The most annoying part of voicing any opinion contrary to the "common wisdom" of RPG community is instant assumption that I must be an idiot who doesn't know anything and somehow never got exposed to the "common wisdom", and not, you know, a rational person who thought about design and came to the conclusion that commonly parroted common wisdom isn't universally applicable.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think there are better ways to do it than making combat with weapons fundamentally worse if not useless.

Have you thought that a design that incentivises you to hoard reasources and then punishes you for it is fundamentally bad game design? Any design where mechanics push players towards one kind of behavior, only for that behavior to make them lose is fundamentally broken game.

And to be honest, if you want gritty realism in your fantasy RPG, you shouldn't play D&D, for a very simple reason:
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Everything you may want from D&D turned into gritty and realistic, deadly game, WFRP has done first and done better.

I do love WFRP, but generally I have a much easier time getting folks to play a modified 5e.

And I agree that weapon use shouldn't be excessively nerfed, but I don't agree with the OP as regards the frequency of weapon breakage, just the concept of it.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't know if it was you or someone else that voiced the idea that "just adding more weapon options" is a better solution -- and it isn't. Creating new weapons and perks for those weapons only adds choices during character creation -- which, while nice, will inevitably succumb to RPG equivalent of netdecking. It's also, frankly, boring. Meaningful choices should happen during the game, not before it.

I don't agree with that. It would be foolish to just make a single choice during character creation and then suffer the consequences for the rest of the campaign as you encounter a bunch of things other weapons would be better suited to defeating.

The point is that monsters and NPCs that are encountered will be using various weapons, armor and perhaps fighting styles that make swords better or worse, maces better or worse, flails better or worse, and so on, to use against them.

If all you've done is pick longsword at the beginning, you will be screwed when facing all of those things for which longswords are weak or even neutral.

The better choice is to carry a variety of weapons so that when you face those skeletons, you put away the weak sword and pull out the strong mace.