Thursday, April 28, 2011

More Thoughts on Variable Weapon Damage via Holmes & Cook

After some good discussion after my post yesterday on variable damage via Holmes and Cook, I've done some more thinking. There a couple ways my table can be improved:
  • There needs to be a distinction between daggers/knives and throwing daggers/knives. The first are Small Weapons and the latter are Thrown Weapons.
  • Some weapons can exist in two different categories depending on how they are used or who uses them. For example, Bastard Swords can be used as Heavy Weapons when wielded two handed and Standard Weapons wielded with one hand. Another example would be racial weapons like the Gnome Hook. Normally, this would be a Penetrating Weapon. In the hands of a Gnome, however, it can also be used as a Small Weapon.
  • There probably needs to be another category of weapons — Reach Weapons. They deal d8 damage and will automatically win initiative in the first round against any other type of weapon (vs. other Reach Weapons they function as Standard Weapons). On subsequent rounds, however, they automatically lose initiative.
  • There also needs to be another type of missile weapon: small thrown weapons like darts. These do 1d4 damage and up to two can be thrown per round.
  • Finally, if the prospect of automatically losing initiative is enough of a deterrent for players to avoid the use of Heavy Weapons in play testing, I might suggest taking a -4 on initiative instead.
Any thoughts?

2 comments:

The Bane said...

Now this is shaping up to be something I can dig! Glad to see you are continuing on with the development of this.


Best,
TB

James Maliszewski said...

This is a really terrific series of posts. Please, continue!