D&D General Weapons should break left and right

[Micah Sweet]

After many hours of having played Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I would not inflict weapon breakage on my players unless we were doing something like Dark Sun.

That game just needed better item repair mechanics.

 

[AlViking]

I would imagine magical weapons would be at least tougher to break. This isn't a serious examination of the question.

Depends on the DM. If magic weapons don't break then the rule is pointless once the characters affected get magic weapons.

 

[Micah Sweet]

all i have to say about this is
Jury Rigging + Blade of the West + 9 Iron + 9 Iron + 9 Iron + 9 Iron + 9 Iro

I don't understand this.

 

[AlViking]

I assume that you missed this response of mine before you made this statement?

Accusing people of "getting worked up" about a topic is dismissive of them expressing their opinion and is not constructive in any way.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I have a favorite weapon in Quake, it's the rocket launcher. I also like how Quake as a game is set up, that I'm not going to always have access to the rocket launcher or might want to keep in my back pocket for a quick escape, so I'd better also learn how to use all the other weapons.

Is that bad? Is that the game telling me that my fun is bad and wrong and stupid? Or is it the game making me consider my moves, and manage my ammo and positioning?

Sifu, the best action game in the history of action games, has weapons breaking all the time and it's aggressively fun. Granted, unlike BotW your best weapon in Sifu is your bare fists, but I can certainly see a less kung fu game having a mediocre unbreakable fallback option.


Is it, really? Because the way I see it, most of the time, people pretty quickly realize what weapon + perk combination is the best one, and never reach for anything else. And something is always going to be the best.


I think caster vs martial disparity is overstated, but I'm totally on board with screwing the mages over too. Hate their guts.

Vancian casting where you have to assign specific spells to slots when preparing spells is very similar to what I'm proposing for weapons breaking -- you are often forced to just deal with the hand dealt to you. "Yeah I fireball would be really nice here, but I only have Fly prepared".

I miss true Vancian casting sometimes. The current version feels quite soft-serve to me.

 

[Mecheon]

Why wouldn't you be able to use katanas competently? Unless by that you mean with extra bonuses from feats and class features over other weapons?

Its a hypothetical were you've got some sort of dedicated build and instead of having something that supports that, you get things that are useless to you. You can replace the katana in the example (i'd been playing limbus company, y'see. bamboo hatted kim has hands) with any other weapon. But, yeah, through sheer randomness you can't play your character the way you built them. That's what weapon breakage does.

Perhaps you're trying for a polearm build but oops, its Gibberling territory so all that's available are their shortswords due to their inexplicable shortswords in earlier editions. Or a bow build but you've stumbled into Crossbow Town

If you want players to look at those widely available other weapons to use, there needs to be an incentive to do so, otherwise its an incentive to isntead just, not build characters around those ideas.

Also, well, in the fantasy D&D emulates, people tend to stick with one weapon and don't tend to, y'know, smash them to pieces every fight and keep picking up new ones.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That sounds horrible.
What's next; force spellcasters to use a spell focus to cast any spell, including cantrips. Make it so each casting of a spell risks breaking the spell focus. Bonus points if each spell focus it tied to a single spell school.

There is definitely something there. Cool suggestion!

 

[TiQuinn]

Do you also have casters constantly scrounging for spell components? Make that monk risk bruising their knuckles or that cleric's god demanding proper sacrifices or obeisance in order to receive spells? Not a game I would be interested in but the issue is only one type of character having to pay extra to do what their character is supposed to do.

Generally a game that is themed around survival like that also has rules for making spellcasting less certain. Most games I’ve seen make spellcasters weaker in general, or make spell loss or disruption relatively easy. Shadowdark has you lose spells if they fail, with chance of catastrophic effect on a 1. 1e and 2e…you had to not lose the spell due to an attack first, and heaven help your wizard if you were in melee. Basically, there was some mitigating disadvantage that spellcasters had.

That’s why I’m not a fan of house rules for stuff like this. I much prefer it when it’s part of the whole of the system, and serves to fit the themes of the game. Forbidden Lands, for instance, is all about survival and attrition - the rules are about constantly managing the resources you have. In 5e, this would be a square peg in a round hole.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Just noting that 5+ level, even just a break on a 1 means a fighter will be breaking a weapon every 3-4 fights on average. So on a typical adventuring day, a fighter would expect to lose 1-2 weapons to breakage.

See, at my table we don't have nearly that many fights per day.

 

[AlViking]

A fighter would likely look something like the following if the rule was used