D&D (2024) Why are weapon masteries limited?

[Charlaquin]

I don’t think that’s right.

It is.

You pick a mastery.

No, you pick a weapon, and you can use that weapon’s mastery property.

 

[ezo]

It's GAMIST...but if you couldn't switch masteries we'd have Ranger Favored Enemy and 3e Weapon specialization. And players demanding DMs drops specific weapons.

Please, get real...

As I said, and you seemed to ignore...

At best, changing a mastery should be once when you level, require downtime to train (or retrain), etc.

So, you found magical greataxe and (whine whine) you have greatsword mastery, then take a week to a month off and train to develop mastery in greataxe. Your mastery in greatsword has laxed as you haven't been keeping up with the necessary practice, so you lose it and develop a new ability. 5E already has rules for downtime activities, this would be easy enough to implement.

But overnight after a long rest? Forget it. Ridiculous and silly and yes, gamist.

"A magic greataxe! But I have great sword mastery. This is useless You're a terrible DM! Why you dropping a weapon that's not for what my build is?! This is terrible. These module sucks this It's adventurous stinks I'm not engaged wah wah wah wah wah."

I'll take long rest weapon Mastery switching over that nonsense again.

"Oh players shouldn't be so entitled."

I do Not want to deal with that nonsense again. It will happen. It always happens. Happened in second edition. Happened in third edition. Sometimes even happen in 4th edition.

"Another +1 Magic bow. Where's the magic hand crossbow?"

I hate Crossbow expert.

LOL man if you dealt with this, kick the player out or just allow them to train after the adventure and switch proficiencies. 5E is silly enough with all simple and martial weapons for martials---like anyone would know how to use every weapon they come across.

This really isn't a problem.

Buy hey, you want to do it after a long rest? Knock yourself out, I still call it what it is... gamist.

 

[cbwjm]

With the exception of rogues, all those classes can already use all weapons. You might as well just allow them all (including rogues) to use all weapons and know all weapon masteries since that is basically the direction you've gone.

So, I guess now you can do all the cool things, but you're even further away from anything that helps define your character's style...

People will still define a character's style with a preferred weapon. I'm in a game with 2 fighters, each have a polearm, it's their character's preferred weapon. My character has a great axe, it's a large part of his appearance. In another game I recall a rogue would dual wield shortswords and my fighter would wield a magical mace (which was an awesome weapon because it had hidden abilities defined by alignment and events in game). We could have used other weapons if needed and did from time to time, but we each had our preferred weapons.

Basically, I doubt that having all the masteries will stop people from defining their character's preferred weapon style.

 

[ezo]

People will still define a character's style with a preferred weapon. I'm in a game with 2 fighters, each have a polearm, it's their character's preferred weapon. My character has a great axe, it's a large part of his appearance. In another game I recall a rogue would dual wield shortswords and my fighter would wield a magical mace (which was an awesome weapon because it had hidden abilities defined by alignment and events in game). We could have used other weapons if needed and did from time to time, but we each had our preferred weapons.

Basically, I doubt that having all the masteries will stop people from defining their character's preferred weapon style.

My response was more to the OP's point. If you can switch out masteries so easily, it is hardly helping define your character's style.

 

[FrogReaver]

It is.

No, you pick a weapon, and you can use that weapon’s mastery property.

Well then. No idea how I’d misread that so badly.

 

[Minigiant]

So, you found magical greataxe and (whine whine) you have greatsword mastery, then take a week to a month off and train to develop mastery in greataxe. Your mastery in greatsword has laxed as you haven't been keeping up with the necessary practice, so you lose it and develop a new ability. 5E already has rules for downtime activities, this would be easy enough to implement.

But overnight after a long rest? Forget it. Ridiculous and silly and yes, gamist.

Not every DM gives a month off for downtime. Time pressure is a heavily used DM tool.

It's gamist but many fans hate simulationist weapon availablity.

LOL man if you dealt with this, kick the player out or just allow them to train after the adventure and switch proficiencies. 5E is silly enough with all simple and martial weapons for martials---like anyone would know how to use every weapon they come across.

This really isn't a problem.

I ran into this problem at most tables I sat at in a 2e or 3e table when weapon specialization was allowed and used.

Whenever the wrong weapon dropped, if the fighter player didn't already have a higher +X weapon.... complaining,

It's the Ranger Favored Enemy for Weapons.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

My response was more to the OP's point. If you can switch out masteries so easily, it is hardly helping define your character's style.

Sure. And I don't think it should define it. I don't think martial characters need to be locked to specific limited weapon combos from the get go. Besides, fighting styles already do it, so you already have a mechanic for defining their style (which I dislike.)

 

[Crimson Longinus]

We let Life clerics take Toll the Dead. We let Abjurers take summoning spells. We tell Warlocks they make a permanent pact with an otherworldly patron like Asmodeous, but then say he doesn't have any special ability to influence, manipulate, or compel you. You just get to sell your soul to the devil and he'll let you keep your soul. We tell players that this is a world with actual, real gods, and then let them get divine powers from ideas. The worlds are supposed to be full to the brim with exotic monsters, but also quaint little villages that somehow never get harassed unless it's a plot point. Everyone knows that dungeons have more powerful magic items, but they just let any group of random knuckleheads venture into them and take whatever they find. The game is full of pretty absurd narratives, and almost all of them are like that because it's a collaborative game first and foremost. Making martials have to play fair because they're more mundane is not remotely fair at all.

So, narratively it doesn't make much sense, but as a game mechanic it's basically fine. Mechanically it's no different than attunement or cleric-like spell preparation, and that's about as restrictive as it's meant to be. You're picking your option for today, and it means you can't have a golf bag of weapons where you just use the most optimal mastery ability every round. The point is so that you can't easily push on round 1, topple on round 2, slow on round 3, etc. Maybe if you're a high level Fighter you can do that, but that's its own opportunity cost.

With 2 weapons, most classes will feel pressured to pick 1 melee and 1 ranged weapon simply out of utility. You pick what you plan on using. Then, if your DM award the party with a magic weapon, you'll be able to take that item. You won't have a blank for a class feature because you took battleaxe but the module says longsword and your DM thinks the game is supposed to screw you out of the feature because it never says you can change your choice. Nah. Features are supposed to work the whole game even if you find a different weapon, or if you picked a maul but now you're doing an underwater adventure.

"Some other things are silly, so it is fine if everything is silly." Yeah, this is not going to work for me. If anything, this is a call to perhaps desillify some of those other things too. Though most of them are far easier to overlook, pertaining to magic, which is not real, thus there being greater freedom to define how it works. Masteries represent mundane specialisations in a trained capability, something that we as players are familiar with from the real life. And it is blatantly jarring that this is not even remotely how such things work.

As for balance issues, I doubt there would be any with masteries just always working. Martials overpowering casters just doesn't seem like a reasonable concern, especially as by RAW switching masteries is absurdly easy to begin with.
Always-on masteries would just make things less annoying in some rare edge cases, and make the rules much more sensible.

 

[Bacon Bits]

"Some other things are silly, so it is fine if everything is silly." Yeah, this is not going to work for me. If anything, this is a call to perhaps desillify some of those other things too. Though most of them are far easier to overlook, pertaining to magic, which is not real, thus there being greater freedom to define how it works. Masteries represent mundane specialisations in a trained capability, something that we as players are familiar with from the real life. And it is blatantly jarring that this is not even remotely how such things work.

As for balance issues, I doubt there would be any with masteries just always working. Martials overpowering casters just doesn't seem like a reasonable concern, especially as by RAW switching masteries is absurdly easy to begin with.
Always-on masteries would just make things less annoying in some rare edge cases, and make the rules much more sensible.

I should have been more clear. I don't think it's a power level problem to have access to all masteries. I think it's narratively much, much worse. It's called golf bagging and juggling because it's even more unrealistic than switching masteries overnight. I think the limit exists because the alternative prompts a play pattern that drives a truck through verisimilitude. And, yes, you could make a character that specifically has a narrative justification. But if masteries are good, then now you need to do that with every character.

Meanwhile, the ability to switch... I just don't think it's going to come up in practice. In most games, you'll pick your kit at level 1 and stick to it. Your DM will dispense items that fit what fighting style, mastery, and feats you picked because they're not a jerk and they're not oblivious. So to me the swap rule is entirely there just because bad DMs exist and the rules need to account for that.

 

[Steampunkette]

Weapon Masteries are limited to create both the illusion of a meaningful choice and an artificial barrier between Fighters and other martial characters to present them as 'more martial'.

... that's it. That's the whole thing.

In the average game you're gonna use 2 maybe 3 weapons at a time. One ranged weapon and one melee weapon, two melee weapons, or one specialized melee weapon and one throwing weapon.

Whether that's a Barbarian with a greataxe and throwing axes, a dwarf with a warhammer and crossbow, a ranger with a pair of shortswords and a longbow, or a fancy fencer with a rapier and off-hand dagger.

(Yes, Dwarf is it's own category for theme, even though it's not a class!)

In the event you pick up a magic item that isn't part of your standard kit, you have to give up part of your standard kit. Your father's really fancy rapier he was murdered after making that you've been using to hunt down his killer slips into a bag of holding for the rest of the campaign. And now you've gotta learn how to use this elven longsword because the total bonus is better and it's finessable for reasons.

That's how it's been for a while, but now Weapon Mastery makes it suck to swap for the better bonus EVEN HARDER 'til you take a long rest to swap out mastery. See? CHOICE! Do you want the extra +1 to hit and +1d6 fire damage or do you want Vex?

After a long rest you'll start Sapping instead with that +1 and +1d6. But in the maybe 2 encounters BEFORE you take that long rest you get to choooooose!

It's so mind-numbingly boring to me. Every weapon has -one- property so you'll pick the one with the better overall bonus for your character (Probably Cleave or Vex if you're damage focused, Sap if you're tankier, Nick if you're dual-wielding or a rogue in need of more sneak attack fishing).

MARGINALLY more interesting would've been allowing you to choose specific properties of weapons and use them with any weapon that had that property, then give weapons multiple properties and let you choose which of the properties you had mastery of you'd use on a given turn. Like giving Halberd both Cleave and Topple and making you pick which one to apply on a turn.

But yeah... there's very little to it, mechanically,

Cleave: 2
Graze: 2
Nick: 4
Push: 4
Sap: 6
Slow: 6
Topple: 5
Vex: 7

In case you wanted to know the variety of options for each mastery.

I dunno. Maybe it's a good way to separate out "Finesse Wielder who Duels" and "Dual Wielding Finesse Wielder"... but in play it's just going to further pigeonhole specific weapons to specific wielders.