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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steampunkette" data-source="post: 9472227" data-attributes="member: 6796468">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: 2Graze: 2Nick: 4Push: 4Sap: 6Slow: 6Topple: 5Vex: 7In 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.</blockquote>

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