Exactly modeling reality would rarely be fun.
D&D 5E (2024) When a 20' pole has a 10' reach...
- Thread starter Byrd
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Exactly modeling reality would rarely be fun.
MGibster
Legend
AD&D has a dizzying array of polearms including the ranseur, awl pike, glaive, halbert, bec de corbin, spetum, etc., etc. I imagine someone, Gygax maybe, came up with this from historical sources.
I understand plate wasn't so cumbersome that it would prevent a knight from climbing on their horse, doing some acrobatics, or many other physical activities, but wearing armor all the time presents some logistical problems. You need help to put it on and take it off, at some point you're going to want to use the privy, and it's going to be awkward and uncomfortable to wear while drinking at the pub, going to a play, hanging out in court, or going about your day-to-day life.
Armor was designed to allow for wearers to go to the privy. They may have only used it for battle or special occasions but they would still be wearing it for hours at a time.
But like I said, I'll start enforcing a no armor rule in the inn when AC for all non-armor-wearing PCs is adjusted to be more realistic.
I can tell you that folks in my HEMA club need help with their palastrons, which are essentially leather breastplates, so I imagine more involved armor would take even more.
Enforcing the no-armor rule could actually go a long way towards reducing the over-focus on maxing primary stats, at least for Strength. A 20 Str 12 Dex fighter caught without armor is arguably in a much worse place than a 16 Str 16 Dex. (It doesn't solve the Dex-is-king problem, though. Maybe a reason to enforce encumbrance rules?)
It also creates some interesting challenges, both in rollplaying and creative problem solving. What are your backup plans for when your armor, or a key magic item is not available? What happens when you have an audience with the king and have to leave your weapons behind? When you've been trapped and stripped of your gear? What fallback does the spellcaster have in a zone of magical silence? These challenges make the game interesting.
Willie the Duck
Legend
I voted "You're just noticing this now?" -- not because it took over 12 years of D&D 5e to notice this specific instance, but because D&D has been like this for 52+ years.
More broadly, and of disparate thought:
It's always seemed more plausible that the devs do know all this*--they just have different priorities than we might want them to have. IMO, they know, they probably could even design a system which takes this, that, or the other historic facet into direct account. They just don't think that is their priority -- or even that anyone would like it**. Regardless, for the life of me, I don't know what it gets us to believe the devs don't know it.
*incredibly commonly known material commented on routinely in free-to-use online places and shown in Youtube videos that are hard to escape if you have this interest profile that is on a subject matter that they focus on as a career. **even amongst people that focus on historic accuracy in their RPGs/wargames, rarely do two such fans agree on which historic facets are the important ones.
But that's ignorance of the historicity, and you're comment was about use of historic references. Dialing it back to that, I imagine they did use something like that to look up the weight of a typical pike (how we got the 18 lb weight). Why we got that as the weight but a 10-12' weapon, I suspect (conjecture only) it was a left-hand/right-hand communication issue. The person who was tasked with looking up the weight of the typical pike was not the same one as who decided that they were going with a much shorter weapon.
More broadly, and of disparate thought:
- D&D has always tried to have it (at least) two ways when it comes to absolute units of measure. Coins were originally whopping 1/10 lb, encumbrance was not gated by strength score, weapon ranges and/or character speed* would cut in third when going underground -- yet the game tried to have reasonable relative item weights (X is heavier than Y), strength-based encumbrance was quickly added, Weapon reach rules were added**, oil was used in pints per hour, overland travel time not being completely outside realism. Broadly speaking, sometimes accuracy in measure has mattered to the game, sometimes not.*Oh, and if one backstrapolates speed from feet/yards per round to meters/second or miles/hour, have those made sense in any version of the game? **and promptly ignored.
- D&D*--as well as RPGs & wargames in general*--have tended to click into battlemat-thinking whenever necessary. Is the maximum realistic range (or realistic combat range) for a longbow 600'? No, but at 5' per 1" square you can fit that on the two 5' tables you might be playing your game on at your FLGS*. So most weapons have a 5' reach and long ones have 10'. Is that because those weapons are specifically that length? No, it's because they click to 1- and 2- square zone-of-control radii***. *the least and most recent versions specifically. **If you think D&D has issues with this, look at Battletech weapon ranges for futuristic advanced long-range missiles and such. ***one table, if you switch to 1/2" squares or 10' per square, as you might for a long-range battle ****why isn't there a 3- or 4-square ZoC option for pikes? Probably because of how that interacts with the rest of the game rules.
- When D&D doesn't click to battlemats, it often clicks to genre emulation. It tries to capture the genre fantasies people who play it grew up with rather than hyper realism. As an example, archery is given over to the forest-loving elves and (potentially) unmuscled-but-dexterous twigs of characters (same ones who get rapiers). It's not exactly uncommon knowledge that bows (shot or just carried) have issues with woods and that they require as much muscle power as dexterity to use well (particularly against armor), but at the same time -- Errol Flynn*, Katniss Everdeen, etc. I'm not sure what power fantasy a pike is supposed to capture (Maybe 300 without the shields, or maybe just the pointy-weapon equivalent of a halberdier), but I'm unsurprised if the game rules are set out to facilitate that more than accurately reflect realistic pike blocks.
- What D&D is has never looked very much like the real medieval times, but it still tries to make them fit (because that's what people want). Sure, battlefield weapons that would only work in formation. But also weapons you would never use on dragons or 20' humanoids (if their bodies could somehow support their weight). Similarly, open-air castles (with maybe some extra ballistae on top of the towers) despite a plethora of flying monsters. People don't really want to play characters living in closed-top castles and wielding whatever we decide you realistically fight dragons with because someone else calls foul on the realism. Similarly, people want to play characters using pikes and polearms (and wear plate armor in dark, wet holes in the ground) even though it doesn't fit some realism threshold.
- There are/were absolutely 10' "pikes." Same as straight scimitars and one-handed claymores and all sorts of things our retro-active modern (and English-language focused) nomenclature wants everything that ever bore a name to fit into a single conceptual box. The term pike has been used for spears of many sizes. You might be familiar with the shorter (8-12') spear being called a pike when it was used on a boat (as a 'boarding pike') -- perhaps the last in-combat version of the pike (boarding pikes lasting well into the 19th century. That being said, that's undoubtedly not what they were referencing with this.
- Sometimes the real language is boring (or overly complex, or just no consensus). Corollary to the above. In all likelihood, what the devs imagine being used by PCs is what in previous editions was called a "longspear." A. long. spear. I can understand why it didn't exactly take the game by storm. I think they chose the more evocative "pike" well-aware that it wasn't a perfect fit. There's certainly precedence. 3e had the two-handed end of the kukri-scimitar spectrum be a "falchion." Probably in no small part because most medieval names for two-handed curved swords were either not unique to them ('scimitar,' just one you would use two handed), were confusing ('kriegsmesser' which means 'war knife*'), or similar. *knife because of the handle, a technicality that affected legality.
This mildly frustrates me. Not so much you saying it, but because the same sentiment comes up a lot with the kids I work with when discussing nerd properties, and take it to a much greater extreme (often leaning towards 'they don't even know this stuff' moreso than 'they didn't use the historic sources'). It's very easy to convince ourselves that we are a special clade of fans, a cut above the rest, and certainly above the so-and-so current folks in charge ruined our favorite IP by making Buffy be Jodie Whittaker's and emperor Palpatine's daughter in direct violation of the Prime Directive*. Certainly I've seen it with D&D since I first went online in the late 80s. Every month like clockwork Usenet had a new user who thought they were the first person to know weapon & armor trivia** and/or had X years combat-hobby*** experience and they were going to explain it to everyone else there. Moreso, clearly those devs at TSR couldn't know this if they continued to include studded leather and one-handed longswords in 2nd edition and what kinda rubes did that make them? *or something like that, I kinda zone out on the details sometime. **usually that studded leather was ahistoric, 'longsword' generally was a reference to large hand-and-a-half+ swords, and katanas weren't all that and a bag of chips. ***fencing, martial arts, SCA, HEMA, buhurt
It's always seemed more plausible that the devs do know all this*--they just have different priorities than we might want them to have. IMO, they know, they probably could even design a system which takes this, that, or the other historic facet into direct account. They just don't think that is their priority -- or even that anyone would like it**. Regardless, for the life of me, I don't know what it gets us to believe the devs don't know it.
*incredibly commonly known material commented on routinely in free-to-use online places and shown in Youtube videos that are hard to escape if you have this interest profile that is on a subject matter that they focus on as a career. **even amongst people that focus on historic accuracy in their RPGs/wargames, rarely do two such fans agree on which historic facets are the important ones.
But that's ignorance of the historicity, and you're comment was about use of historic references. Dialing it back to that, I imagine they did use something like that to look up the weight of a typical pike (how we got the 18 lb weight). Why we got that as the weight but a 10-12' weapon, I suspect (conjecture only) it was a left-hand/right-hand communication issue. The person who was tasked with looking up the weight of the typical pike was not the same one as who decided that they were going with a much shorter weapon.
uh oh, you are entering grognard territory here, i read on multiple occasions on this forum that this is an absolute nono zone:
YOU NERF THE FIGHTER why? why did you do it? My poor Sir Cutalot III. will perish in that ambush on the local pub at midnight whereas the Dex goon played by my buddy did almost get no disadvantage. I demand DEX and STR to be interchangeable at will once each short rest for the sake of equality!
Nah just joking, imagine the wizard lost his spellbook somehow or the cleric forgot his holy symbol what an uproar that would cause
But back to serious, want an example: Here it goes. I argue in one of the darksun threads that being oldschool i would ban monks and barbarians because of unarmored defense. Ah no that would be no problem at all, because no one would start a campaign with the PCs owning nothing than a loincloth these days. Of course the fighter would come with (bone) chainmail and a two handed (bone) greatsword or (bone) rapier (yuck what ???? bone greatsword bone rapier??? did i really just write that?)
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Coat of plates, misinterpreted. i tend to rename studded leather to Brigandine, and leather armor does not exist at all there is padded armor for that. There have been breast plates made of hardened oil cooked leather, very thick, surely not the prefered equipment of your nimble rogue or ranger. Several layers of linen protect against cuts and stabs and especially blunt attacks much better than the outfit of a metalhead
Of course. But can we keep it at least somehow believable? Every bodies theater of mind works differently, and i am sure those who relate to some IRL education on materials, historic, physics and mechanics will have a harder time than those not caring at all on whether there are or not - WoW caricatures of 6 feet swords running around with halflings or gnomes attached to their handles -present within the game.
Willie the Duck
Legend
How does a 10' longspear being called a pike (but still weighing 18 lbs) do this?
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