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The Unseen Servant forums • Weapons
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Weapons

Posted: Sun Jul 16, 2017 11:39 pm
by sirravd
In the real world, of course, weapons were radically different: maces were better for combat against a highly armored foe, daggers for assassinations and very close quarters, etc. This is tough to replicate in a game; the best attempt I know is a very simple one (heavy weapons treat all enemies as though they have chain AC); Gygax's weapon vs. armor tables are unusable. Anyone know of other solutions to this problem?

Re: Weapons

Posted: Fri Feb 23, 2018 9:44 pm
by Zhym
I'm not sure it's possible to make weapons more realistic and varied without descending into Gygaxian detail. The weapon vs. AC tables may be unusable, but the space required and weapon speed weapon factors can do a lot to making different weapons better in different situations.

Re: Weapons

Posted: Sat Feb 24, 2018 4:25 am
by Rex
The best system I have seen for it is Harnmaster, but it is very different from any D&D system. Combat takes considerably longer and combat is deadly, a single blow can kill or cripple, even the most powerful PC and just surviving the healing process is very difficult (infections are brutal).

Re: Weapons

Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2018 6:08 pm
by Starbeard
Yeah, the most intuitive solutions I've encountered all come from games designed to replicate the blow by blow detail of gladiatorial combat:

Harnmaster with its rules for layered armour and wound types.

GURPS/Man-to-Man with all of its combat bells and whistles (and using the optional, Harn-style descriptive wound system that no one remembers is in the rulebook).

Or just about any good old, straight up wargame for gladiator combat.

Nagora on Dragonsfoot has figured out what I think is the best way to use the AD&D weapon-armour tables. It can be found in his signature here (https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/view ... 9#p1915509). Instead of using class attack matrices, you use a weapon & armour matrix (like in Chainmail), each giving the base to-hit number for normal men; character classes then get a Combat Factor of +x to the attack roll based on their level.

Re: Weapons

Posted: Wed Dec 05, 2018 4:49 pm
by AsenRG
sirravd wrote:In the real world, of course, weapons were radically different: maces were better for combat against a highly armored foe, daggers for assassinations and very close quarters, etc. This is tough to replicate in a game; the best attempt I know is a very simple one (heavy weapons treat all enemies as though they have chain AC); Gygax's weapon vs. armor tables are unusable. Anyone know of other solutions to this problem?
There are multiple solutions, but if you're asking about solutions that can be used in D&D, probably not - especially if you dislike weapon vs armour tables. (Not sure what you dislike about them, BTW. They seem to work well enough in Classic Traveller).
The closest that I know of for D&D is adding a result that happens on rolling a 19 (assuming it's a successful hit), as in Low Fantasy RPG. I don't think that's enough to really make weapons distinct, however.

OTOH, there are, for example, systems that make it a point to track relative distance between the combatants, and changing it can give an advantage to the guy with the shorter or longer weapon. The dagger master is going to slice and dice you, or stab you in the armpits of your armour, once he gest in close quarters...but getting there in the first place might be hard against a competent swordsman.

And yes, most such systems adopt a more blow-by-blow (or close to it) approach to combat than the one present in D&D. (Makes sense - if you want to distinguish the interactions of arms and armours, you're probably after a more detailed approach to combat than the one found in D&D).

Re: Weapons

Posted: Wed Dec 05, 2018 5:40 pm
by dmw71
AsenRG wrote: There are multiple solutions, but if you're asking about solutions that can be used in D&D, probably not - especially if you dislike weapon vs armour tables. (Not sure what you dislike about them, BTW. They seem to work well enough in Classic Traveller).
This may shock a lot of people here, but I recently started to re-read the 1e DMG, and went on a shopping spree during the 'Black Friday' sale on DriveThruRPG to pick up a bunch of the "series" modules (e.g. C, T, L, etc...).

I still really, really like 5e, and will likely not act on this newfound 1e interest, but if I did run a 1e game, the weapons vs armor class table was one of the options I was strongly considering using (even if it meant me, as the DM, checking the table and applying all the modifiers to player-supplied rolls).

This 1e weapons vs armor class is extremely clunky (perhaps that's part of its charm?), and, while I don't recall ever actually using it, I did like how 2e modified it to be weapon type (e.g. slashing, bludgeoning, etc...) vs armor worn (e.g. leather, chain, etc...). It does add some of that flavor, while removing the complexity.

Table 52, from the Purple Worm website:
Weapon Type vs Armor Modifiers.jpg
Weapon Type vs Armor Modifiers.jpg (189.51 KiB) Viewed 7616 times
In the unlikely event I do run an AD&D adventure again at some point, I will almost certainly be using one of these two methods.

Re: Weapons

Posted: Sat Dec 08, 2018 2:07 am
by Inferno
dmw71 wrote:This may shock a lot of people here, but I recently started to re-read the 1e DMG, and went on a shopping spree during the 'Black Friday' sale on DriveThruRPG to pick up a bunch of the "series" modules (e.g. C, T, L, etc...).

I still really, really like 5e, and will likely not act on this newfound 1e interest, but if I did run a 1e game...
:D I knew it was only a matter of time. ;)

Re: Weapons

Posted: Sat Dec 08, 2018 3:02 am
by dmw71
Inferno wrote:
dmw71 wrote:This may shock a lot of people here, but I recently started to re-read the 1e DMG, and went on a shopping spree during the 'Black Friday' sale on DriveThruRPG to pick up a bunch of the "series" modules (e.g. C, T, L, etc...).

I still really, really like 5e, and will likely not act on this newfound 1e interest, but if I did run a 1e game...
:D I knew it was only a matter of time. ;)
Lol. :lol:

I'm definitely a 5e convert. but I guess the nostalgia will always be there.

Re: Weapons

Posted: Sat Dec 08, 2018 2:00 pm
by Inferno
Nothing beats nostalgia. :)

Re: Weapons

Posted: Sun Dec 09, 2018 4:35 pm
by rredmond
Inferno wrote:Nothing beats nostalgia. :)
My argument when people accuse me of liking first edition just because it's nostalgic. :D

Re: Weapons

Posted: Sun Dec 09, 2018 4:54 pm
by Inferno
Such arguments remind me of this New Yorker cartoon:

A wife discovers her husband feverishly typing on the computer in the middle of the night. He says: 'I can't come to bed. Someone on the internet is wrong.'