Where's the lance?

[FreeTheSlaves]

I don't own so many supplementary books nor subscribe, so is it out there officially?

Cheers

 

[DNH]

Nope. No lance. You could use a spear, or is there a longspear? Or make something up.

Or you could wait. This month's Dragon has an article on jousting and I would assume/hope the lance will be in there somewhere.

 

[Peraion Graufalke]

There's an Unbroken Lance enchantment for spears in Adventurer's Vault 2. For a regular lance I'd just use a spear.

 

[FreeTheSlaves]

Thanks guys.

I don't think the spear really cuts it as an option. If we're thinking of say the lance used in Ivanhoe or A Knight's Tale, we're looking at a pretty specialized weapon. I may just have to build it from scratch in the houserules forum.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Thanks guys.

I don't think the spear really cuts it as an option. If we're thinking of say the lance used in Ivanhoe or A Knight's Tale, we're looking at a pretty specialized weapon. I may just have to build it from scratch in the houserules forum.

How would it differ from a spear? It is a long stick with a pointy end on it. Beyond that there are a large number of references to actual medieval knights dismounting and using their lances on foot as spears. I don't disagree that you can look at some lances and say "yeah, this was made to use from horseback", but is there some kind of actual weapon property that makes it MECHANICALLY distinct? I can't think of one. Beyond that beware of romantic portrayals of weapons. The jousting lances you generally see depicted in artwork were very specialized equipment developed purely for sport jousting and were neither similar to nor suitable for use in war.

 

[Destil]

You want a spear of some sort: spear feats support charging pretty well at this point.

 

[Unwise]

I once made up lance rules for a player who really wanted to play a jousting knight. A knight's lance is +1 d10 when mounted, +0 d8 when on foot. It can be wielded one handed when mounted. It is +2 to hit when charging and does +3 damage. A 1handed +3 D10+3 weapon when charging is very nice, but the idea is that it gets dropped once melee is joined properly. It is intentionally bad in normal melee. This is not a mongol/practical lance, but a jousting one.

 

[DracoSuave]

Yeah, you're either looking for a weapon that's only good for one very unimportant part of jousting... knocking someone off a horse... that doesn't warrant stats, or you're looking at a field weapon that's just a variant form of longspear... which already has stats.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Right, the other aspect of this is who's going to really use a lance which has utility only during a mounted charge? Even if such a weapon was part of the game it would be a bad deal. You're not going to waste resources on getting an enchanted one, nor on using feats to buff it, etc. The situation simply doesn't come up that much. The character would STILL be better off taking a spear and feats like Spear Expertise and/or Weapon Focus (Spear), etc. Then you'd have a weapon which is quite useful in all situations with an appropriate build, and as a bonus you can use it mounted (though I will observe that in 4e there is no advantage to using a spear mounted over using say a longsword).

I think it would be reasonable if Mounted Combat granted extra damage when charging mounted with a spear, and also say allowed the character to have his mount make an attack as a minor action during a charge. Mounted combat is rather awkward, even with these kinds of minor advantages the character will only benefit once in a while.

 

[FreeTheSlaves]

How would it differ from a spear? It is a long stick with a pointy end on it. Beyond that there are a large number of references to actual medieval knights dismounting and using their lances on foot as spears. I don't disagree that you can look at some lances and say "yeah, this was made to use from horseback", but is there some kind of actual weapon property that makes it MECHANICALLY distinct? I can't think of one. Beyond that beware of romantic portrayals of weapons. The jousting lances you generally see depicted in artwork were very specialized equipment developed purely for sport jousting and were neither similar to nor suitable for use in war.

Erm, going by that rationale we'd have a very short list of weapons, for example all swords can boil down into the one weapon?

The bottom line is that currently there is no incentive to wield a lance (spear) over any other form of weapon when charging from horseback.

I'm not interested in historical accuracy. What I am interested in is the cinematic use of the lance as in the above films. Those are not spears and you couldn't really wield them to full effect unmounted.

The answer lies somewhere in the mounted combat/charge/over-run rules, with the spear as the base weapon, with reach, that can be used 1 handed under special circumstances. The 3E addition of multiplied damage goes against current design and really, doesn't capture the nature of the weapon anyway IMO.

To be honest, I'm not a fan of serving up answers at the expense of feats. Too often that limited resource is used to patch a hole instead of its proper use.

Just to be clear, I'm not interested in a power play, rather a straightforward reason to use the lance for the charge & then switch to melee weapon.

Anyhoo, Dragon or Houserules is where this discussion needs to go.