D&D General Weapons should break left and right

[W'rkncacnter]

Sifu, the best action game in the history of action games

 

[Staffan]

What old editions are you playing? Weapon durability isn't a thing in any of editions I know of, and while I don't follow the OSR that closely I'm not aware of it being in most of the mainstream ones there either. You'd lose weapons due to stuff like rust monsters or the rare creatures with weapon destruction effects, but that was very specific to those limited creatures and not a widespread thing

The one place I saw weapon breakage during routine usage in old editions was when using the rules for inferior weapon materials – primarily in Dark Sun, but I think they were nabbed from the Complete Fighter's Handbook. Basically, weapons made out of bone, stone, or wood would have a 1-in-20 chance of breaking if you rolled max damage (in addition to having penalties to attack and damage). You also had the rule about item damage when exposed to things like fireballs and dragon's breath: if you failed a save, you'd have to check to see if each exposed item survived the attack.

 

[Distracted DM]

I do like magic items breaking- in DND they are so common that I made wands have charges like the old days, no attunement, and even better rarely I'll make relatively powerful weapons etc that have a chance of breaking (roll a nat 1 attack, roll a d10 to see what happens with a few results, maybe on a 1 it breaks). It was sort of inspired by my dark sun game where I made the few magic items found "damaged," but I liked the mechanic so I ported it to my regular games (albeit infrequently).

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

A few issues have been pointed out in this thread. Still think this is the kernel of an interesting idea though.

 

[Horwath]

weapon can easily break in combat?

now all martials look like this;

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The one place I saw weapon breakage during routine usage in old editions was when using the rules for inferior weapon materials

It's a plot point in BG1 due to inferior materials. But magic (and a couple of plot) weapons don't break, so martials are not too disadvantaged against casters.

If you are going to have weapons breaking, it's pretty much essential that you also have random spell failure.

 

[CreamCloud0]

i'm sure when you add weapon breakage you'll also add focii, component pouches and holy symbols breaking on a dime too so casters also perpetually loose their only form of attack.

 

[CreamCloud0]

okay, a little more seriously, i like the root idea of OP which is making the weaker and lesser used weapons more viable and desirable but forcing the issue with weapon breakage is not the solution.

i always liked the idea of if you've got martial proficiency and choose to use a simple weapon it gains an additional benefit, increased to-hit, an extra attack or crit expansion, those kinds of things.

 

[James Gasik]

I don't like the idea of equipment breakage, but thinking about it, stuff does break down, especially weapons and armor. D&D adventurers, in particular, are hard on their gear, often taking it into battle with unnatural creatures with great strength and natural defenses.

So this begs the question, if say, breaking on a natural 1 is unviable, when should gear break down? I recently watched a video on YouTube where a guy tested out the scene from Army of Darkness where Ash breaks a sword with a shotgun blast. It didn't snap off as it does in the movie, but the blade did bend and looked pretty sorry afterwards.

So thinking about that, and thinking about someone using Defensive Duelist to parry a Hill Giant's club, there certainly are times when gear should at least be temporarily impaired or damaged. Yet unless a creature has a specific special ability to break things, a DM ruling gear being damaged out of the blue might risk being lynched by their players! So a reasonable rule for extreme circumstances that a DM could point to might not be out of the pale.

I guess it comes down to whether or not the juice is worth the squeeze. The Complete Fighter's Handbook in 2e had a system where armor broke down after being attacked X amount of times, but when I tried using the rules, armor tended to be durable enough that it was never a problem in the field, and just taxed some gold out of the players they weren't using anyways (not to mention the same book had rules for masterwork armor, some of which was even more durable!), so I stopped bothering, much in the same way I stopped closely watching player rations- when I finally engineered a situation where they might run low, the Cleric just devoted a spell slot to feeding the group until they stuffed a Bag of Holding full of imperishable rations, rendering the whole thing moot.

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

I find that rules for ordinary weapons regularly breaking in use produce a stupid-silly game, not a fun one. I also have no problem at all with characters who specialize with a signature, iconic weapon. So in my games this is a bad solution looking to solve a non-problem.

If there's a place for weapons-regularly-breaking-in-combat rules, it's for improvised weapons and weapons known to be especially cheap and shoddy. Not for regular weapons and certainly not for masterwork or magic weapons.