D&D 5E Why so few magic polearms in the DMG?

[Paul Farquhar]

Here are a couple of magic polearms from IWD, converted to 5e by me just now:

Spear of White Ash +2, does an extra 1d6 points of piercing damage on a critical hit.

Spear of Kerish (requires atunement) +2, wielder has Fire resistance.

Diseased Halberd +1. On a roll of natural 20 the target is afflicted with a random disease.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[jasper]

The better idea, of course, is to not provide pole-arm users with magic items.

I mean, it's clear that they are already trying to compensate for ... um .... something. You shouldn't reward that type of behavior.

even better. NO ARMS FOR PCS WHO WANT TO USE POLEARMS. Well the wizard could graft 10 foot poles to their arm sockets. insert evil dm laugh.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Ruin Explorer]

or it is a non devious attempt to prove you don't need magic weapons to kill the bad guys off.

Sadly I don't think so. The vast majority of "missing" magic items are the utility kind, and 5E has plenty of powerful weapons, just mostly only available as swords, even if in 3E and 4E and even 2E that wasn't the case.

 

[Umbran]

No arms is a good idea.

You'd need to be sure to have an agreement with your players. An Arms Control Treaty, if you will...

 

[jasper]

Sadly I don't think so. The vast majority of "missing" magic items are the utility kind, and 5E has plenty of powerful weapons, just mostly only available as swords, even if in 3E and 4E and even 2E that wasn't the case.

And back in the early 80s, I swapped out magic sword +x to magical polearm +x. On the fly because Bolo Bob was running around with a halberd. Do we really need a magical polearm entry? Halberd, Sharpness see sword of Sharpness. Please refresh my memory on the "Utility Kind" magic items.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And back in the early 80s, I swapped out magic sword +x to magical polearm +x. On the fly because Bolo Bob was running around with a halberd. Do we really need a magical polearm entry? Halberd, Sharpness see sword of Sharpness. Please refresh my memory on the "Utility Kind" magic items.

No, I'm not the one complaining about that.

I'm saying 5E has a paucity of magic items in general. That a lot of items are weirdly and unnecessarily sword-specific is an odd quirk I'm commenting on. It's like why go to the length off adding something in, then only saying it comes in swords? Weird.

 

[Minigiant]

5E has an appalling lack of magic items generally. In no other edition did I have to constantly write up fairly basic magic items that weren't officially supported. It's in desperate need of a straight-up official magic item book.

I feel like this is a devious attempt to get us to buy adventures as they often have details for quite a few magic items, but I'm just not down with that.

Again the main culpit is that most polearms got popularity after the classical era. Most D&D "named generic" weapons are based on ones from mythology and polearms weren't much used then.

The Ancient Greeks, Romans, Celts, Egyptians, Nubians, Sumerians, Chinese, etc didn't use polearms besides spears much.

If you convert the Greek hero and God weapons to generic forms, you'll get a bunch of spears, javelins, pikes, and tridents.

Best best is to convert Three Kingdoms China weapons. They used a few polearms.

A DM gave me a Halberd of Nonpursuing once.

 

[David Howery]

I made the mistake of putting an intelligent polearm in that could cast cure spells.

My bad.

I once ran an adventure where all the NPC enemy fighters carried those weird polearms from UA that no one ever uses.... fauchard forks, glaives, etc. I gave the BBEG a powerful magic/intelligent Glaive Guisarme. The PCs ended up selling it.

Lack of polearms is a typical D&Dism even though the real medieval foot soldier carried almost always polearms due to their familiarity with them as field implements and their ability to discount cavalry and penetrate their armor.

Even when they had swords, it was typically a secondary weapon while the spear was a primary weapon.

All true, but... the PCs aren't soldiers in an army, and don't have several thousand buddies backing them up with polearms out on an open battlefield. Swords have a real advantage for a dungeon crawling small group of PCs... you can sheath them, which frees up your hands but still keeps the sword handy. Polearms are a bit unwieldy for such people. That said, back in my DM days, I generally made axes and spears more common for enemy NPCs than swords...