Combat where a backup weapon is handy to have

[Thaluikhain]

I'm not going to pretend to be an authority on this one but I've heard it mentioned that in WWI the American officers had a strange propensity to carry big fuck-off .45s, much in contrast to the little .32s that the Europeans packed, and that the antecedent was the in-living-memory use of the Army out on the frontier where officers planned for unanticipated hostile situations in which they actually had to blow a motherfucker away, whereas the Europeans officers thought more about them as the point-blank means of executing a subordinate who refused to go over the top before anyone else started getting the same ideas.

There may have been an element of that, the US upgraded to the .45 after finding the .38 less effective then they wanted in the Philippines, IIRC, so it was due to actual combat experience.

OTOH, the British were using the .455 Webley, and later went down to a smaller cartridge because it was more manageable and for a given budget for bullets at the shooting range you got people trained to be more accurate. The Germans used smaller rounds than the US, but while they got rid of their .32 rounds, they kept the 9mm to this day, it being made NATO standard. So, not just for officers there.

[hogarth]

Moving on, I think that the main issue with adding this as a subsystem is that it generates a lot of book keeping.

I think the main problem is that it suffers from a fallacy along the lines of: "if something is interesting when it happens once in a blue moon, then it's 30 times as interesting if it happens 30 times in a blue moon".

Having to fight with some backup weapon, like a D&D wizard losing a spellbook, is something that is only interesting if it happens once or twice in a character's career.

[Mord]

D&D is a bad system for trying to model different weapon profiles. The only thing D&D's AC/damage system ever made sense for was its original context, i.e. battleships lobbing shells at each other. When speaking of warships it makes sense to model a shell that misses and one that fails to penetrate in the same way because the target is an inanimate pile of steel; impacts that strike but fail to penetrate the armor naturally do no structural or systems damage to the target. The separate damage roll is justified by the fact that when a shell does penetrate the armor, the damage it does is wholly dependent on where in the ship it landed; whether you hit the mess or the magazine is totally orthogonal to whether you were able to penetrate in the first place.

Applying that same model to human beings in armor is just obviously not going to work. Blows that strike but fail to penetrate plate armor absolutely can harm the person in the armor, so the equivalency between a miss and a non-penetration is out the window. Furthermore, there is virtually no place on the body you can jam a length of steel into without it becoming an urgent situation for the recipient. Like, I may not need my right arm to live per se, but if you open my brachial artery I am fucked. If you snap my humerus I am maybe less immediately fucked but still probably done with the fight and with my fighting career.

So we've ended up with all these weird back-rationalizations of what these terms actually mean when applied to humanoids in armor swinging bits of metal at each other. Armor Class is used to describe both some notion of evasiveness as well as tankiness, which makes it difficult to model the distinction between a weapon that is especially light and agile, making it easy to aim a strike against an opening, and a weapon that is more cumbersome but has good armor penetration. You can make completely opposite arguments for rapiers having +1 to-hit and picks having +1 to-hit that are both equally valid.

The rationalizations applied to the damage roll are totally different, because HP could be interpreted as the physical bodily damage you sustain when struck with a blow or the exhaustion, pain, and loss of morale you suffer when struck. So you could argue that a pick should be d12 because any injury you sustain from a pick has a high likelihood of penetrating deeply into your body and breaking a lot of your important bones, and you could argue that a pick should only be d8 because it's no scarier or more painful that being struck with a sword but a serrated lash should be d12 because even a glancing blow is exceptionally painful.

Finally, D&D is so stacked against martial arts in general that any notion of the diffences between weapons is totally irrelevant by lv7-ish. For this to make a difference, we would need to be playing in a system where the things a person can do with a bit of sharp metal and some length of wood are in any way comparable to the expected opposition and their non-martial party members.

So your first step in modeling the properties of different weapons is to pick a system where those properties are called out into their own separate game operations instead of being lumped together into one. Modeling armor as damage reduction instead of damage avoidance is one fairly straightforward way to do this, but it's obviously not back-compatible with D&D.

[Thaluikhain]

Hey, remember way back when when there was a giant table and each weapon got bonuses or penalties to hitting each AC? That was a thing that was a thing.

Applying that same model to human beings in armor is just obviously not going to work.

Not work as an accurate simulation, no, but to streamline things for the game, maybe.

Armor Class is used to describe both some notion of evasiveness as well as tankiness, which makes it difficult to model the distinction between a weapon that is especially light and agile, making it easy to aim a strike against an opening, and a weapon that is more cumbersome but has good armor penetration. You can make completely opposite arguments for rapiers having +1 to-hit and picks having +1 to-hit that are both equally valid.

Definitely agree there (your old giant table is not going to work).

I sorta like the way Dragon Warriors did that, you compared Attack vs Defence to see if you hit, then roll above their Armour on the die used for that weapon to damage them. Swords had d8 for armour penetration and did 4 points of damage, morning stars had d6 and did 5, so there wasn't one clearly better. OTOH, only so many dice and number combos you can come up with, so you have maces doing (d6, 4), so you'd never want one, and shortswords doing (d8,3), so maybe you'd want one as an alternative to your morning star until you found a sword.

[Mord]

Hey, remember way back when when there was a giant table and each weapon got bonuses or penalties to hitting each AC? That was a thing that was a thing.

These?

Yeah, I don't think anyone misses Weapon Class. It's a weird epicycle that fixes the problem with super-penetrative weapons also being super-accurate, but introduces the problem that "this table is totally fucking bonkers." Stripping it out is the only sane choice.

[Whipstitch]

There may have been an element of that, the US upgraded to the .45 after finding the .38 less effective then they wanted in the Philippines, IIRC, so it was due to actual combat experience.

The Moro definitely left an impression, although I do wonder whether the switch was genuinely practical or if it was a result of people doing something because they felt something must be done. After all--and this will sound familiar--the Moro Rebellion was one of those conflicts where the US demonstrably had a massive advantage in firepower but their opponent's refusal to surrender made things a horrible slog psychologically even though the Americans were taking very few casualties relative to their opponents.

[Thaluikhain]

Hey, remember way back when when there was a giant table and each weapon got bonuses or penalties to hitting each AC? That was a thing that was a thing.

These?

Yeah, I don't think anyone misses Weapon Class. It's a weird epicycle that fixes the problem with super-penetrative weapons also being super-accurate, but introduces the problem that "this table is totally fucking bonkers." Stripping it out is the only sane choice.

Yeah, those...only seen the one for modifiers against certain AC, not certain types of armour, the latter making a lot more sense.

The Moro definitely left an impression, although I do wonder whether the switch was genuinely practical or if it was a result of people doing something because they felt something must be done. After all--and this will sound familiar--the Moro Rebellion was one of those conflicts where the US demonstrably had a massive advantage in firepower but their opponent's refusal to surrender made things a horrible slog psychologically even though the Americans were taking very few casualties relative to their opponents.

Possibly, but everyone else went to something more powerful than the .38 as well, and the US kept with the .45 as standard for decades, kept it in some uses even after adopting 9mm. So they seemed to have made a reasonable choice there.

[Eikre]

There may have been an element of that, the US upgraded to the .45 after finding the .38 less effective then they wanted in the Philippines, IIRC, so it was due to actual combat experience.

OTOH, the British were using the .455 Webley, and later went down to a smaller cartridge because it was more manageable and for a given budget for bullets at the shooting range you got people trained to be more accurate. The Germans used smaller rounds than the US, but while they got rid of their .32 rounds, they kept the 9mm to this day, it being made NATO standard. So, not just for officers there.

A good post. I believe in what you're illustrating far more than the jingoistic edge in my own story.

[Whipstitch]

Possibly, but everyone else went to something more powerful than the .38 as well, and the US kept with the .45 as standard for decades, kept it in some uses even after adopting 9mm. So they seemed to have made a reasonable choice there.

Yeah, it's obviously something we'll never know, since it's not like a .45 won't kill you.

[OgreBattle]

My theory the .45 was held onto in the US so long...

the Colt Walker was the first service revolver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colt_Walker

One of the requirements for the gun is, it needs to kill a horse in one shot to deal with Spain/Mexicans and injuns on the steppes of America.

It had a tendency to explode due to the big care needed to load the big honkin bullets and powder, but it succeeded at destroying terrorist horses. I think that good memory made American troopers favor big honkin horse killers over smaller man disabler rounds

[JonSetanta]

Intentionally cursed weapons are... extremely difficult to disarm.

[Blade]

I think there's a big difference between fiction, realism and historicism.

In fiction, heroes wield swords and cut people in half with them (or stun them if it's aimed at kids). I think you can compare this with movies where heroes wield akimbo guns. This isn't realistic, but that's what people expect to have in fiction and probably what they expect to play.

If you look at the historical perspective, it's more complicated. First of all, you need to select a time and a place. Then you'll get something that doesn't necessarily looks cool and that might even feel wrong, but it will be realistic given the setting.

Change anything in the setting, like the existence of magic, the relationship between two kingdoms, the quality or quantity of iron, or any other detail and the historical approach might not be realistic anymore. It doesn't make sense to have heavily-armored cavalry if any army can easily field groups of mages who can cast spells that ignore armor.

And finally, there's also the difference between the PCs and the rest of the world. If your PC spend their time having one-on-one fights in dungeons, they won't necessarily use what the infantry uses on the battlefield. The use case is difference, the constraints are different...

[Username17]

The question isn't so much "fiction versus non-fiction" or whatever, because a role playing game will always be fiction. The issue is one of storytelling technique.

Characters like Conan, Robin Hood, and Beowulf spend a lot of time switching between a lot of different weapons and armor, because in those stories kitting out for conflicts is an important part of the storytelling technique. Other characters in other fictional contexts obviously don't do that. Most notably, many characters from Hanuman to Captain America are in fact defined by the tools they use. Archaeologists can recognize what hero is being depicted in some cases by what they are shown holding.

In a storytelling framework in which the characters are expected to use multiple different weapons in different scenes, they might be also presented using different weapons in the same scene, provided that the parameters of that scene had evolved in some way. In a storytelling framework where the characters use pretty much the same weapons in every scene, then an evolving scene would expect to have them use the same weapons across it.

-Username17

[JigokuBosatsu]

I was trying to think of good examples of the backup weapon thing that aren't just being prepared for different armor types, and I keep coming back to one of my fave scenes from Saberhagen's "Swords" series, where a guy goes three rounds against magic sword Shieldbreaker (normally an instakill against armed opponents) by dropping weapons each time the sword sunders them. Not sure if this is just a goofy edge case or something you might want to model in a combat system (along with the lance>mace>dagger or rifle>pistol>boot knife).

[Mord]

Yeah, those...only seen the one for modifiers against certain AC, not certain types of armour, the latter making a lot more sense.

The first one is from Chainmail; the second one, which made it into OD&D, is its direct descendant. Back in Chainmail days, your Armor Class wasn't meaningfully numeric. Your Weapon Class number didn't directly interact with the target's Armor Class; rather it was compared with your opponent's Weapon Class number to determine initiative & number of attacks.

You can see how the evolution of Armor Class into a quantitative measure of the target's overall "protection" rendered a clunky mechanic into total fucking gibberish.

(along with the lance>mace>dagger or rifle>pistol>boot knife).

Surprised no one brought this up yet in this thread. Fire Emblem weapon triangle is classic.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Oh, sorry, I meant those as linear arrows, not a rochambeau. First weapon, backup, extreme backup.

[Judging__Eagle]

The question isn't so much "fiction versus non-fiction" or whatever, because a role playing game will always be fiction. The issue is one of storytelling technique.

Characters like Conan, Robin Hood, and Beowulf spend a lot of time switching between a lot of different weapons and armor, because in those stories kitting out for conflicts is an important part of the storytelling technique. Other characters in other fictional contexts obviously don't do that. Most notably, many characters from Hanuman to Captain America are in fact defined by the tools they use. Archaeologists can recognize what hero is being depicted in some cases by what they are shown holding.

In a storytelling framework in which the characters are expected to use multiple different weapons in different scenes, they might be also presented using different weapons in the same scene, provided that the parameters of that scene had evolved in some way. In a storytelling framework where the characters use pretty much the same weapons in every scene, then an evolving scene would expect to have them use the same weapons across it.

-Username17

This makes me realize that level 1-5; and very marginally levels 5-10, should have PCs having golfbags of weapons.

However level 6+ characters are going to be defined by their Adamantine Distance Returing Shield, or their Hammer of Lightingbolts; and I think that's fine.