Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2721435" data-attributes="member: 5171">I'd agree with that, I think, with the possible addition of "Size + Proficiency Required" determining the damage ceiling. 3.0 D&D was pretty good at this:Tiny: 1d4Small: 1d6 Simple, 1d6 and bonus if Martial (19-20 or 20/x3 or bonus on Disarms/Trips)Medium: 1d8 Simple, 1d8 and bonus if Martial, 1d10 and crit-bonus if ExoticLarge: Sketchier, but generally 1d10 Simple, 1d12 or 2d6 and bonus if MartialAnd within those, you've got weapons that go down in damage to go up with special abilities, like pole-arms that do less damage than greatswords but have reach and/or trip bonuses or set-against-charge bonuses. Or the D&D 3.5 elegance of the Simple One-Handed weapons, that do either 1d8, or do 1d6 but can be thrown.That's a good point. I guess, for me, the tonfa is sort of in there as a deal-breaker on d20 Modern weapon sizes. I don't know that "amount of volume displaced in water" or "length from end to end" really work for determining weapon sizes, because that means that a pistol butt (small) is the same size as a cleaver, and I have real difficulty buying that. It seems that they must be talking about "heft" when they talk about weapon sizes -- the sizes are already different from Object sizes (which is a pain when trying to determine the size of, say, a gun lying on the ground -- it's certainly not a Small Object, the size of a coyote or a halfling, but the "weapon size" versus "object size" distinction is a tough one for many people to make), and those weapon sizes are there primarily to tell you whether 1) It takes one hand or two to use it and 2) Whether it's a light weapon for dual-wielding and Streetfighting purposes.I agree that a restaurant meat cleaver (ie, a big one, not a little dinky one for home use) can be as big as a shortsword. No argument there at all. But while that meat cleaver might displace about the same amount of water as a shortsword, I'd argue that the big meat cleaver, with its weight mostly in the blade while a shortsword has its weight mostly near the grip to allow for fast movement and stabbing, is going to be a lot more of a heave-and-chop weapon. For me, that means one of two things:1) The weapon, while physically small, is hefty enough that it doesn't make sense to let a player finesse it. It weighs as much as two other 2-pound weapons (tonfa and baton, both of which are classified as Medium), so it ought to be a medium weapon as well. To inflict D&D 3.5 logic on it, I can't imagine finessing a massive kitchen cleaver, but I can imagine somebody using both hands to chop harder -- which means that the cleaver I'm imagining works better as a one-handed non-light weapon -- or, in d20 Modern terms, Medium. For a big-as-a-shortsword-but-weighted-near-the-end kitchen cleaver, this is the option I'd take.2) We say that the cleaver is indeed a light weapon, light enough to finesse or use easily as an off-hand weapon, but heavy enough that it ought to do more damage than a knife. In D&D 3.5 terms, its closest relative would be the handaxe (and if you look at the small axes in hardware stores and not the absurd D&D art, handaxes aren't much larger than good-sized kitchen cleavers), which does 1d6, 20/x3 -- which would likely get turned into 1d6, 19-20/x2 in d20 Modern because x3 crit multipliers were avoided like the plague in the core book (excepting Advanced Martial Arts, if I recall correctly). So this cleaver is about equal to a  handaxe... which means that while it should be easy to use the cleaver to chop vegetation, it should require the Archaic Weapon Proficiency feat to use it properly in combat. In fact, it's a bit of a mystery already, given that it's the only slashing weapon currently in the Simple Weapon list -- bludgeoning weapons are evidently easy enough to hit people with, and stabbing is in a straight line, but the cleaver is apparently the only slashing weapon on the Simple list. And it has better damage output on crits than the Kama, which is a Small Exotic Slashing weapon that also does 1d6 damage and also weighs 2 pounds. I'll save my "save the kama" argument for another thread, but this still seems to point to the cleaver being out of whack. If it was kept as a small weapon doing that kind of damage, it really should be Archaic -- the kind of thing that a player with Archaic Weapons Proficiency could find in the middle of a kitchen fight, pick up, and be happy that his character's feat has come in handy, letting him use a nice weapon without the -4 penalty for it being oddly balanced in a way that takes training to use properly.Hah and ew, in roughly that order. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification