Weapons you wished you'd see sometimes.

[Dykstrav]

Historically, this weapon came to the fore when people abandoned armor made useless by firearms. No sense in lugging around a scrapyard of steel when a 2 pound weapon (a pistol) can make you see your innards...

The rapier would have been useless against a heavily armored opponent.

And THAT is the problem with mixing up everything.

I agree wholeheartedly with this. There are very few rapiers in my games, mostly carried by elven wizards who may realistically expect to fight other unarmored folks. I made a ruling similar to the whip, where a rapier just can't hurt anyone with an armor bonus of +3 or higher. This lets it stand a chance of hurting folks wearing the low-bonus armors (such as leather and hide) but largely stripping out the higher-bonus metal armors.

That being said, my favorite weapon for druids is the longspear (I'll even take a feat to be proficient with it). With a wolf animal companion, an enemy can't effectively close with you: you get two attacks without it being able to attack your druid at all. Keep a cure spell prepped and you can tap the wolf if it starts to get hurt. Very useful tactic, it's always worked out well in the games I've played.

 

[sckeener]

I usually use whatever the holy weapon of my god is...which brings me to my complaint about clerics and their gods. I find it very annoying when the god's holy weapon is something my cleric is going to have to take a feat to use proficiently! There should be exception for their god's holy weapons.

 

[sniffles]

I've mostly seen the same weapons Nightdawn mentions. I think players typically don't want to have to take Exotic Weapon Proficiency or Martial Weapon Proficiency just to use something different. You get too few feats as it is.

Now if I expand on Nightdawn's question beyond the other types of weapons available in various supplementary books: I just saw the wuxia movie Seven Swords the other night, and it would be pretty entertaining to see some of the crazy weapons in that movie show up in a D&D game.

Flying guillotine - if you think spiked chains are bad you should see one of these!

 

[sjmiller]

Let’s see, weapons I wished I would see used in D&D:
Weapons that don’t weigh two to three times as much as they should; polearms that allow you to do trip attacks or subdual attacks on the opponent adjacent to you; weapons that don’t predominantly originate from Europe or Japan; weapons designed to circumvent popular types of armor; and “fantastical” weapons that don’t look silly.

Oh, wait. I see, you want to know about ones that already exist in the game! That gets trickier. Let me think about it.

 

[BullMarkOne]

Flying guillotine - if you think spiked chains are bad you should see one of these!

Yeah, but you're toast as soon as a one armed boxer shows up.

More on topic, I'm starting to become more of a fan of "mundane" weapons. In fairly recent play by voice chat game I had a fighter/rogue who was concentrating on the good ol' humble club. After that I was running an Elements of Magic Mage who spent almost as much time prodding things with his long spear as he did casting offensive spells. My current PC is a heavy mace wielding barbarian (admittedly his weapon choice was slightly influenced by the acquisition of a +3 large blunt instrument). My other option for this campaign was a Human Vow of Poverty Fighter built around using a quarterstaff as a double weapon. Unfortunately the dm vetoed VoP.. so my featmonkey has yet to see actual use.

As for weapons (other than those used by my characters) I'd like to see more of, I'll put in a vote for spiked shields, glaives and tridents.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Let's see ...

For my most recent characters:

• Jonath "One-Eye' Seaward, Rogue and Pirate: Rapier and Buckler; Composite Darkwood Longbow; 4 different flavor Daggers (Cold Iron, MW, Alchemical Silver, Regular); Light Mace
• Sir Palomar the Mirrored, Paladin and Knight: Heavy Mace, Heavy Lance, Longsword, Light Crossbow (with many flavors of bolts), Heavy Mithral Shield, Heavy Warhorse
• Adrastus Demophon, Artificer and Explorer: Darkwood Heavy Trident* and Light Mithral Shield, Darkwood Light Crossbow with Fixed Bayonet, Various Flavors of Dagger (Cold Iron, Alchemical Silver, Regular), Ridiculous number of Wands

For the pregens I made for a one-off short campaign:

• Warforged Unit 2514 "Wall": Longsword, Javelins, Slam
• Warforged Unit 2565 "Hammer": Mithril Warhammer (Throwing, Returning), Slam
• Warforged Unit 3127 "Spike": 2x Spiked Gauntlets, Armor Spikes (Shocking Burst), Slam
• Warforged Unit 2525 "Chains": Spiked Chain, Handaxes, Slam
• Warforged Unit 8111 "Patch": Longbow, Greatspear, Club, Slam
• Warforged Unit 254 "Bo": Composite Longbow, Shortsword, Slam
• Warforged Unit 6719 "Slink": Armbow, Shortsword, Slam
• Graecus Korran, Human Wizard: Quarterstaff, Heavy Crossbow (No Slam )

 

[Ruined]

The fighter in my current Planescape game has purposely gone for the not-so-common choices like the falchion and bolas, so I'm pretty pleased with that.

Looks like I'm the odd one out, but I would enjoy for one of my players to go for the Spiked Chain option. Realism be damned, it just looks like fun.

 

[Bad Paper]

My cleric uses a longspear; also carries a club for those times when things get ugly. My barbarian uses a greataxe; also carries a light mace for grapples.

My 1st ed weapon of choice was the halberd.

Also, I hate the spiked chain with a passion, though I lurved DMing that cornugon.

 

[werk]

Halberd! It's mechanically strong, and it's off the beaten path.

But no. Everyone's gotta get a spiked chain.

-- N

Don't forget that halbards, for some reason, are not reach weapons.



I see pretty much everything in the games I run and play in with the exception of weapons that I don't really want to see, like dire flails or dwarven urgrosh. I've only seen a spiked chain used once...

 

[seans23]

My cleric uses a quarterstaff. His ranged weapon is... umm.... a wand of searing light.
In that same campaign, the fighter alternates between a longsword, battle axe, and kukri; the ranger uses a greatsword when not using her bow.