D&D General Weapons should break left and right

[GobHag]

What about managing spell slots? Or ki points?

Here's one from me: I think spell slots suck ass, when I would prefer only specific spells to be limited daily.

 

[Mort]

You make some good points, but you are also leaving out 99% of the wizard's complexity at character creation.

The player of the wizard as part of character creation has to go through 16 cantrips and select which 3 he wants,

Sure but if he doesn't like his choices, replacement is only a long rest away. The wizard isn't stuck here, like the fighter.

then he has to go through 30 1st level spells and select which 6 he wants. And that's only the PHB. Those numbers go way up if the DM is using non-core books.

6 is quite a lot, but more importantly, most DMs, IME, are quite generous in allowing the wizard to gain more spells.

Everything you listed above for the fighter, even when added together, doesn't come close to having to do that.

After character creation the 1st level fighter has to.................hit things. That's almost his choice. Except for every once in a while he has to choose to second wind to heal so that he can................keep hitting things.

The 1st level wizard on the other hand has to prepare 3-5 of his 6 picked 1st level spells, depending on starting intelligence, so he doesn't have all of his spells memorized. Then he has to choose from those 3-5 prepared spells which 2 he is going to use with his spell slots. Or is he going to save a slot and use a cantrip instead. Then has arcane recover to get 1 slot back to cast one of his 3-5 1st level spells.

The 1st wizard blows the 1st level fighter away for complexity.

Except the fighter choices stick more, are harder to change, and can't really be adapted.

The point being, the fighter isn't necessarily "easy." I suppose we can go back and forth on degree, and whether the wizard is "more" complex (and by how much). But my point is that the fighter is deceptively complex and certainly not "simple."

 

[Hussar]

Casting time was the spell level usually, so yes you could more reliably cast magic missile, but cone of cold got a lot more dodgy. Also virtually no monsters had ranged attacks? What about all the goblins, orcs, gnolls, kobolds and the like that could wield missile weapons? What about giants who were pretty skilled at throwing boulders? There were a lot of very common monsters with missile weapons, not to mention human opponents.

I can’t say why it didn’t happen in your game, but in my game, it definitely happened.

By the time you are casting cone of cold, orcs and humanoids are rarely encountered? As in, why would you bother using something like? One fireball, by that level, and anything smaller than an ogre dies instantly. Even Cone of Cold is a casting time of 4. Longbow is speed factor of 8, with shortbow at 7. Giants have an initiative of +6 to +9. An MU is still almost always winning initiative vs pretty much any monster with all but the slowest of spells.

 

[AlViking]

My attempt at levity failed miserably. My point was wouldn't it be funny if our heroes' swords routinely broke in combat. I probably shouldn't have included two swords which actually did break.

I do think it made a point though. The swords broke because it was a narrative turning point. A weapon breaking should have reason and be impactful. Breaking "left and right" is not that, it's not particularly realistic, doesn't improve verisimilitude as far as I'm concerned nor does it sound like it would increase engagement or be enjoyable.

For a lot of people D&D isn't about narrative or an emerging story but when it fails the other points as well I see no value in the suggestion.

 

[Maxperson]

Sure but if he doesn't like his choices, replacement is only a long rest away. The wizard isn't stuck here, like the fighter.

That only adds more complexity.

6 is quite a lot, but more importantly, most DMs, IME, are quite generous in allowing the wizard to gain more spells.

6 out of 30 is a recipe for paralysis for someone who has a hard time making decisions. 80% of the spell list is out of the question, and again that's if it's only the core and not all the official books.

Except the fighter choices stick more, are harder to change, and can't really be adapted.

That reduces complexity.

The point being, the fighter isn't necessarily "easy." I suppose we can go back and forth on degree, and whether the wizard is "more" complex (and by how much). But my point is that the fighter is deceptively complex and certainly not "simple."

The fighter's choices become set in stone and there are ultimately many fewer of them. No one has argued that there are no decisions with the base fighter. Only that it is the "simple" class among the twelve core classes.

 

[Hussar]

A lot of enemies were humanoids with weapons, and they frequently won initiative over wizards casting spells. I played and DM'd during 2e and interruption of spells happened a lot on both sides of the screen.

Again, I have to wonder, how?

The MU nearly always has 30-50% speed advantage on any weapon. Longswords are +5 speed. Most weapons are even higher. Any medium or larger creature starts at a +3 initiative and then climbs. And that's not taking into account that a PC MU gets Dex bonus to initiative. A +1 Dex bonus to initiative is not exactly hard to have. Meaning that any 1st level spell casts at speed 0.

Look, I'm not denying people's experience, but, I have to wonder how in the heck it was happening. You rolled initiative every round. I've got +0-+2 on my initiative and you have +5-+10 (depending on what spell and what weapons are being used). Sure, I'm going to lose from time to time, but, "a lot"? How?

 

[TiQuinn]

By the time you are casting cone of cold, orcs and humanoids are rarely encountered? As in, why would you bother using something like? One fireball, by that level, and anything smaller than an ogre dies instantly. Even Cone of Cold is a casting time of 4. Longbow is speed factor of 8, with shortbow at 7. Giants have an initiative of +6 to +9. An MU is still almost always winning initiative vs pretty much any monster with all but the slowest of spells.

I don’t know what to say - we were encountering various goblinoid monsters throughout campaigns, even if they were minions. Eventually that’d become stuff like Drow, or Sahuagin, Duergar, and the like.

Cone of Cold was a fifth level spell so casting time was 5, but regardless, it’s not like you were always winning initiative. You declared at the start of the round if you were casting, so it’s not like you could know for sure that you were safe in advance.

 

[Hussar]

A separate tangent on realism (realism isn't the goal by any means, but I'm a nerd, what can I do?)

While, sure, weapons don't get destroyed often, they quite commonly "go offline". If your opponent parries your sword with the rim of their (probably center-grip) shield, it's very likely going to split it and get stuck (and your opponent is probably counting on it); if your opponent gets past the point of your spear, it might be a better idea to drop it and reach for a dagger; archer switching for a side arm is obvious. Armored fighting often devolves into grappling, where the weapon is used more for hooking limbs than striking:

View attachment 418368

View attachment 418367

Currently, you almost never need to switch weapons, and it's practically impossible to disable opponent's weapon (or have it happen to yourself), whether momentarily or for a while.

Everything else aside, swordfighting is cooler when it's not just swordfighting and involves other weapons (or swords themselves in other purposes, say, to clobber the bastard with your cross guard like a pick).

Also, fun fact: in some treatises, "quarterstaff" is not a weapon, it's a grip -- you hold it in the last quarter of its length. When you change grip and hold it closer to the middle, it becomes a half staff. Weapons, in general, are quite versatile and can be used in many different ways for different purposes. A longsword held in both hands is a different weapon from a longsword held in Halbschwert (half-sword) guard, the latter being closer to a short spear with how it's being used!

Forcefully changing player's guard/stance (and thus make their weapon change statblock) can be another way to achieve the proposed effect.

The problem with all of this is that D&D combat is nowhere near that granular. In a system where you resolve all your actions over the course of six seconds with a single die roll, and an entirely abstract HP system, none of that is possible in D&D. I mean that second picture is someone delivering a killing blow which you absolutely cannot do in D&D until something has lost all it's HP.

Or put it another way, that second picture isn't a maneuver. It's the narration of someone killing an opponent.

 

[Hussar]

On average (though admittedly I've never tracked the numbers closely) I'd say there's on average about one PC-side spell interrupted per combat in my game, including all caster types. Which is significant, in that having a spell interrupted can trigger a wild magic surge...

Again, I'm utterly baffled as to how? Oh, wait, you aren't playing 2e D&D are you? You're using the 1e initiative rules IIRC. That makes it somewhat easier, true. But, even then, so long as the MU stays out of melee, no one can engage him because you cannot leave melee without everyone on the side getting a free shot. Which typically means instant death to any NPC.

I just can't see how it would be even remotely possible to interrupt a spell every session, let alone every combat.

 

[loverdrive]

People aren't search engines who know exactly where any particular stat block is in the book, particularly if its not a weapon they're going to care about.

To even compound it further if you're in an online tabletop, you suddenly need to constantly being doing adjustments to what your preferred macros are constantly rather than just quickly making one. No other class needs to do that, why should it suddenly be thrust upon the fighter?

Do you need to know by heart every card in a boardgame to play it?

Like, sure, it's better if you have an encyclopedic knowledge of the game, but when you just roll on a table and get handed a new weapon you can learn one thing at a time as you are playing.

I've handed out magic items in the middle of a fight and had no problems with it whatsoever.