WotC: Let's Improve the Weapon List, Shall We?

[Imp]

I do not want weapon simplification or abstraction in this game. Other games, sure, this game, no. Lovingly detailed statistics for pieces of sharp metal is one of the things I like most about it.

Ditched it in Red Box D&D as soon as I read the options, never looked back.

 

[Ahglock]

I hope the crossbow gets some love in 4e. Those things were more powerful than longbows, way easier to use, and the only disadvantage was low rate of fire. There was a reason you had professional mercenary units using them all over Europe. So why, if they're more powerful than the longbow, is their damage so piddly, and they're reduced to the status of "level 1 wizard weapon"? That stinks.

I hope the crossbow gets a lot more powerful in 4e.

Well they should of allowed strength crossbows, and the feat rapid reload effectively feat expenditure wise was saying martial crossbow. So they could of ignored the AOA while reloading part.

 

[Nyaricus]

For what it's worth, many of these HAVE shown up in 3rd...it's just that they were spread out over multiple supplements. I wouldnt mind at all if they put them all in on the PHB to begin with.

My mistake. What I meant to say initially was that the PHB had several rules gaps, and I of course should have mentioned the various supplements which you mentioned. I complete agree that most of these should should up in the PHB though

I'm pretty happy to see a majority backing here for more weapons in the 4e PHB. I fully realize that most of these wouldn't make the cut, but damned if I'm not keeping my fingers crossed

WotC, can we pretty please more sharp, pointy and blunt objects to mutilate foes with? Pleeeeeease??

cheers,
--N

 

[resistor]

Actually, I'm more of a minimalist than that. I want a base damage per class per level, with feats and special stances to adjust for your perfered weapon look....

You might like the stuff in this thread.

 

[Kahuna Burger]

You might like the stuff in this thread.

Not bad, though as far as I got he had held to the "bigger must be better" schtick that would be the first thing to go in my system.

 

[med stud]

I hope the crossbow gets some love in 4e. Those things were more powerful than longbows, way easier to use, and the only disadvantage was low rate of fire. There was a reason you had professional mercenary units using them all over Europe. So why, if they're more powerful than the longbow, is their damage so piddly, and they're reduced to the status of "level 1 wizard weapon"? That stinks.

I hope the crossbow gets a lot more powerful in 4e.

In a way they acknowledged the crossbow in 3.x. Since crossbows are simple you can load a bunch of commoners up with ranged weapons dealing 1d8 damage. Considering that commoners have 95 % of the damage output of the more rare warriors that means that you can have access to large amounts of dangerous troops. There are more to crossbows than that but it's hard to get across in D&D.

 

[Cadfan]

Prediction: Crossbows will automatically fix themselves in 4e.

Crossbows in 3e sucked for PCs because you could only fire one bolt a round without investing feats, and why would you invest feats when you could just buy a longbow?

But in 4e, iterative attacks are gone. That was the only thing that made crossbows crap compared to longbows- longbows had iterative attacks and crossbows didn't.

So, problem solved?

 

[CleverNickName]

Simplify, simplify, simplify

My thoughts on how to fix weapons:

1. Stop trying to emulate physics. I have had more arguments at my table about weapon damage and effects than anything else. Why does a punching dagger have a lower crit range than a pick axe? Well, it's because the force of a pickaxe is more concentrated on the impact site because of the increased moment of intertia granted by the shaft of the weapon and blah blah BLAH. Who cares? Both are piercing weapons, so both should have the same crit range.

2. The stats of the weapon should be determined by its size and damage type. That's all. The name of the weapon can be chosen by the player or DM to fit the campaign, but the stats should remain fixed. A one-handed slashing weapon would be called a short sword, wakisashi, scimitar, khopesh, machete, or axe, depending on the setting. But they are all one-handed slashing weapons, so they all should deal 1d6 damage and crit at 19-20/x2. Every other difference is cosmetic.

This might be over-simplifying things. But I never understood why it had to be complicated in the first place.

 

[Plane Sailing]

2d6 rolls 7 or more 70% of the time.

I think it is 58.3% of the time (I vaguely remember the calculations from 1e days when dragons would breath on 7+ on 2d6 each round, which meant a 58.3% of breathing and a 41.7% chance of biting etc).

The issue of consistency of a multiple-dice weapon vs more chance of extreme results with a single dice weapon is right on though.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Prediction: Crossbows will automatically fix themselves in 4e.

Crossbows in 3e sucked for PCs because you could only fire one bolt a round without investing feats, and why would you invest feats when you could just buy a longbow?

But in 4e, iterative attacks are gone. That was the only thing that made crossbows crap compared to longbows- longbows had iterative attacks and crossbows didn't.

So, problem solved?

There was another problem... longbows allowed str bonus to damage, crossbows didn't.

Which was wacky, because the crossbows should technically have had their str bonus 'baked in' - which is why various mechanisms were needed for re-cocking them.

The 3e designers wanted to eliminate the 'die + bonus' scheme for weapons, but in the process didn't properly consider the effect on weapons which had mechanisms for augmenting strength, like the crossbow.

Cheers