OSSR: Sword and Fist
Chapter Five: Tools of the Trade
Crossbows really should be threatening, but in 3e D&D they are not.
AncientH:
Type Three bloat for splatbooks of this class is
equipment, both in the form of exotic mundane stuff and various magical items. At first glance, this last bit seems a little silly - D&D has had an issue with magic item bloat for years (such as the thousands of items in the
Encyclopedia Magica), but d20 with its Item Creation feats and item creation requirements in the form of fixed costs and particular spells, so while a lot of the individual enchantments may be bullshit, they actually managed to come up with something for magic arms and armor that was the equivalent of
dwarf runes - which is actually good. I might have liked to see the whole magic item system streamlined
more, but the main issue wasn't magic items themselves...it was how they were awarded.
Same-same goes for exotic non-magical weapons, armor, and gear. This is shit that seems a little silly but also "cool" at low levels, but quickly becomes worthless and underperforming at higher levels. Really, wealth-by-level means that you get linear warriors and quadratic wizards playing out
at the equipment level, when a custom magic sword might have at least helped to balance the scales a little in the mid-level crunch.
FrankT:
At twenty seven pages, the fifth and final chapter is the second longest in the book. It also has the most non-original content. As mentioned earlier Andy Collins submitted his entire exotic weapons article that he had published in Dragon Magazine to this book. And I bet that if I looked hard enough, I could find most or all of these castle floorplans in 2nd edition books. Anyway, we start with the extra exotic weapons. I could not tell you how many alterations or adjustments there are to the magazine version and the official book version. But the existence of the Halfling Skiprock, which did not exist until Dragon Magazine #275 gives the show away.
Exotic Weapons are a thing that was supposed to be a big thing in 3rd edition D&D but in practice never lived up to its potential. With few exceptions, Exotic Weapons are
better than their non-exotic counterparts, but to use them you need to have a special ability. So the special ability works out to being a bonus to your attacks in the form of you using a weapon that's better than what you'd otherwise be using. Fine. But the difference between an exotic and a non-exotic weapon is rarely as big as the difference between having a slightly more magical whatever and not. And even if it was the same, you're still usually
finding magical treasure and paying non-replaceable resources to learn to use exotic weapons. This means that Exotic Weapon use is pretty much restricted to NPCs and very low level games. Basically you can spend a feat on Exotic Weapon Proficiency: Bastard Sword, and then you can swing a masterwork bastard sword around, but that isn't actually better than spending zero feats and having a +1 Longsword.
3e needed a system where you could pay a cost to learn how to use a Harpoon but it wasn't a
permanent cost. Like, if there were mid-adventure upgrades and learning a language or a weapon cost one of those. Or if the feat you spent on Exotic Weapon: Mouth Darts was refunded to you when you went up a level. Or
something. The fundamental issue is that the Triple Dagger is simply better than the Dagger and the Bastard Sword is simply better than the Longsword – so there has to be a cost of some kind. But neither one of those weapons is
very much better, so any cost you'd actually feel when you were riding a Pegasus to go have a mid air battle with a Dragon over a volcano is one that is too high. It's a needle to thread, and 3rd edition never figured out how to thread it.
At the time, there was a lot of argument about whether and how the Ward Cestus interacted with Monk Damage and whether you could get stupid huge piles of sneak attack damage with Halfling Skiprocks and shit. I don't remember if any of those arguments were ever satisfactorily won by anyone, but I do know that I don't give a shit.
AncientH:
I've been
dipping into swords a bit in real life, and one thing the Historical European Martial Arts like to harp on is the silliness of how combat in D&D works - specifically, the idea that one style of sword is intrinsically better than another, or that having two weapons means you get to attack twice. The thing about combat in the Real World is that weapons are designed in a certain context, and those contexts determine what weapons are available in a certain time or place. Short of traveling large distances to technologically disparate communities, you don't get, say, one dude with a steel cutlass and another dude with a macuahuitl.
Now, D&D is set in a quasi-medieval era by default. And when I say "quasi-medieval" I mean everyone's running around with swords and shit, but there are no cannon or other gunpowder weapons outside the dirty back pages of the DMG, and pretty much all the artillery would be familiar to the Romans. But it's still a bit of a hodge-podge where the fine details of what makes one sword different from another are glossed over in favor of categorizing things "longsword," "short sword," "bastard sword," etc. This is not quite how things worked back in the day - and it's not how things
would work in most D&D settings, given access to magic and diverse cultures. But it's what leads to people getting creative and creating fantasy weapons, or exotic real weapons that were of limited utility in their original context and aren't particularly suited to a lot of other contexts.
A boomerang is not necessarily something you arm a regiment with.
So some of these are "real" weapons, in that there are historical examples of items that were loosely akin to things like the mercurial longsword. But they weren't necessarily better except in specific contexts, they had drawbacks, and they weren't always that expensive. Good grief, 600 gp?
This gets especially silly when you hit the "monty haul" problem and take into consideration the number of weapons - and amount of armor - that the average dungeoneer tends to be hauling around. Being decked out with magic weapons is cool, but it's been derided by generations of gamers. Shadowrun tried to solve the problem by making weapon foci a major investment; Earthdawn tried to solve the problem by making magic weapons a major investment
that you could customize; and D&D...uh...largely embraced it, really.
FrankT:
This chapter has a list of magic items. Most of them are shit that shakes out of the item creation math from DMG one way or the other. There are new properties, and those have a surprisingly high usability index. I mean, you're never going to see anyone make a Ki Focus Katana, because those are terrible. I mean, not as terrible as it at first sounds because you're probably thinking that it's a magic weapon that lets you use your ability to treat your unarmed attacks as magic weapons to treat it... as a magic weapon. It
does do that, but the actual point is that you can use your Stunning Fist power through your sword. And that's almost worth considering. But shit like Merciful became standard. Also it gets props for giving out the potion of
false life before the printing of the spell
false life. So it casts a spell that does not, as yet, exist. But it tells you what it does, so it's fine. But we are talking about Magic Items so we should talk about the
Basically, 3e D&D doesn't give out enough magic items. Low level characters don't really care because low level play is kinda based around not having any to begin with and that's fine. And high level characters don't really care because casters can do their own thing without magic items at those levels and non-casters can stand around with their dicks in their hands magic items or no. But in the in-between levels, it's a really fucking big deal. Somewhere around 6th level, you're supposed to upgrade all your equipment from +1 shit to +2 shit, but +2 shit costs
four fucking times what +1 shit does, the wealth by level system simply does not put out that kind of swag. But while the math gives out bad outcomes for characters in the 4th-12th level range, it's also way too elegant and intricate for most of the designers to wrap their heads around. It's based on fucking logs. 3.5 didn't update those equations because Andy Collins couldn't deal with it. And Pathfailure's attempt to rework the magic item wealth progression tables are just a bunch of math fail.
So people needed shit that hit above its weight. Because the weight they were allowed was insufficient when used normally. The end result was that people gravitated to stuff like Merciful Weapons that could be comboed up to do something on the level of a +3 weapon for the cost of a +2 weapon. Because you were going to be using something that cost as much as a +2 weapon
long after +2 weaponry had gone obsolete.
The signs were there.
Anyway, the weapon that caused the most head explosions and willful misreadings of the rules was of course the Bow of True Arrows. It was an unlimited use Spell Trigger item of
true strike that was also a +1 Bow and it cost... 4000 gp. What it actually does is to allow you to spend a standard action to get +20 to-hit on your next attack with the bow and ignore concealment miss chances. But since it costs a standard action to activate, you only get one true shot off every other round. Also, you only can use it if you
true strike on your spell list or can fake it with UMD – meaning that either way you are presumably high enough level to not care much about a +1 bow. If you're doing horse archer shit, it will let you take down a lot of enemies that you otherwise would not be able to. And that's kinda neat. Naturally, hope springs eternal and the internet was once filled with tales of internet woe about how some dumb jackass somewhere convinced their DM to let them use it as a free action despite not having the prerequisite spell list to activate it at all and then they got +20 to-hit on
every attack. The thing which is really striking about these stories is that while that's fucking intense at level 3 and a severe game changer at level five, at 10th level you actually have to do some min/maxing in other areas to have a character output reasonable damage whether you get +20 to-hit or not. You can just
hit on everything but a natty 1 on every attack at the higher levels and if you don't have some sort of damage app you're still going to suck. A +1 bow does a base d8+1 damage, you'd fucking better have more cheese in your stockings because Fire Giants have 142 hit points.
AncientH:
The practicalities don't end with magic weapons. One of the
good things that D&D decided on was that different types of bonuses stacked, which meant that you could get the same equivalent benefit from several small bonuses as one big bonus. Given the cost of One Big Bonus, this actually worked out well...for a while. So for example,
Amulet of Mighty Fists (+1) is 6,000 gp, while
Amulet of Mighty Fists (+2) is 24,000 gp. In an MMO, those prices work because you can just grind and sell enough vendor trash to upgrade. On the tabletop, that's...not an option.
It also neglects what 18,000 gp
is, in real terms. The total value of all the land surveyed in the Domesday Book is
£73,000 per annum. Which means that an
amulet of mighty fists (+2) roughly costs the equivalent of a third of the annual output of medieval England. When you keep in mind that prices for magic items in this book go into the
hundreds of thousands and the
millions, you get to understand that D&D had really lost all sense of perspective of the medieval economy - by at least three orders of magnitude.
That sounds like it should only be an issue for simulationists, but it becomes a real problem with keeping players interested and maintaining game balance. If your monsters aren't dropping enough magic items to fund a scholarship at Hogwarts, your PCs are fighting behind the power curve against the monsters they're coming up against. If you are, then the PCs are carrying on their person more wealth than the GDP of most countries.
FrankT:
Chariots!
People have tried to make Chariots work in D&D a lot of times. There was a rant about this shit back in the already mentioned Dragon Kings. There were chariots back in Chain Mail. Chariots are a real thing that were really used through much of history. And the turn system of D&D and its emphasis on close quarter fighting really leave little place for the fucking things. Chariots are like the helicopter gunship of the ancient world, and just as helicopter gunships rarely make any sense to include in Shadowrun, there are few instances when a chariot would serve any purpose in a D&D game.
These chariot rules honestly aren't bad. You could imagine a sufficiently large D&D engagement having some chariots running around trying to set up multi-sideswipe action. And if the game was in general less fiddly with initiative and able to handle bigger engagements without grinding to a halt, that could be a thing that happened. As is, I have never used these chariot rules or seen them used. But that has more to do with the game's assumed encounter sizes than anything. I would say these are almost as good as 3rd edition charioteering rules could be.
I'm really not.
AncientH:
I ranted a little about chariots before. I'm not sure how much I have left. The main problem with a lot of war-weapons is that they are designed for war - not typical combat. There's a reason people in the middle ages were usually legally restricted from going around armed to the teeth in town, and even the guys that were allowed to carry swords stuck with something that they could easily manage without giving themselves a hernia. Nobody in the middle ages was trying to negotiate a zweihander when they had to leave the tavern for a moment to take a piss, anymore than they were wearing full plate armor on a warm spring day because they were taking a stroll outside.
And of course, what you
did get was people abusing the rules all to hell and gone. If a burgher wasn't allowed to carry a sword but they could carry a knife, they would start carrying the biggest fucking knife they could get away with - just for the look of the thing, like anything else. Mallninjas existed back in the medieval period too.
Well, not quite.
Which is a long way to say, that D&D designers never quite seemed to understand that a lot of the equipment fighter-types were using was designed for actual combat, as opposed to looking cool. And that's understandable. J. R. R. Tolkien did not give six shits about whether or not Strider was allowed to carry a big fucking sword openly in the village of Bree, or what the normal weight allowance was of a trooper in the army of the Dwarfs of the Iron Hills. Orcs used scimitars because they were vaguely foreign and menacing, like the Turks, Arabs, Berbers, Bedouins, Indians, and pretty much every other fucking country that Britain had a pissing match with, while the white dudes ran around with long straight swords or little leaf-shaped blades, like the English and Celts used to use. Even Robert E. Howard wasn't clear on all the finer points of swords and swordplay, and I can say that
having done the research.
But this drift away into fantasy and mechanics is part of the reason the combat system looks the way it does, and why it is broken as it is.
FrankT:
Sword and Fist wrote:A fighter's home is his castle, where he gazes out at an army arrayed below him, secure behind arrow slits, crenellations, and thick walls of stone.
This is the vision that this book laid out for us of a high level Fighter. A fortress at his command and an army to enforce his will. There are some issues with that all being useless against demons that were immune to non-magic weapons and had
teleport without error at will, but you could certainly imagine challenge sets such that having armies and fortresses would matter. But the rules just aren't there. Even if Fighters actually
got an army big enough to solve challenges you'd need an army to solve, the mass battle rules in 3rd edition simply didn't exist. It wasn't that they were bad or gave dumb results, they were simply absent.
And similarly for owning real estate. You could do it, but the rules for actually owning land and
doing something with it weren't there. Problematic.
So when Sword and Fist spent the last 17 pages of the book providing floorplans and building costs for various fantasy castles, that was... a step in the right direction. It wasn't a whole Stronghold Builder's Guidebook, but that was another book that came out later and that was fine. The costs and build times are straight ass pulls because there's no real system to all this, but as an interim step it's fine. Laying down targets like this is necessary for shit like the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook to be a thing you could make, and having something like that is a prerequisite for making the conquest and kingdom management minigame be a thing. Which is what needed to happen for the Fighters they envisioned to actually have a thing to do in the double digit levels. So Sword and Fist took solid and reasonable steps towards making the high level Fighter be a thing. It wasn't complete, but it
could have been completed by later books. It is factually true that it never was, but I can't reasonably blame Jason Carl for that.
The big tripping point is pretty much the same problem as magic items – the horrible restrictiveness of wealth by level. The idea that a Bailey Castle costs half a million gold pieces isn't unreasonable. But that's more gold than the entire equipment suite of a 15th level character. There's no level that you'd be able to afford a motte-and-bailey, because the game requires too much of your wealth to be dumped on the bonus treadmill. Once you've worked out how much real estate costs and then looked at the wealth by level system,
something has to go. Specifically, the idea that fighters had to spend gold pieces to upgrade their swords once they passed name level was simply untenable if you had a vision of fighters owning land and paying soldiers. And that's why K and I started talking about the Wish Economy and shit, because there's literally no way to thread this needle.
AncientH:
I think none of the problems in this book are reflective of the problems with the book itself, as much as underlying problems with the d20 system and its expectations. That said, later books certainly grabbed on to the parts of the books that caught interest and expanded on them beyond all reason.
Complete Warrior is, in all ways except heft and glossy art, a worse product than
Sword & Fist in part because it came later
and should have known better. Instead of addressing any of the real flaws in D&D, the designers decided to "feed the beast" and ladle out more feats, more prestige classes, and more exotic weapons and magic items...without ever addressing any of the much more fundamental problems with fighters.
So in a straight game where the dice fall where they may, Fighters and Monks took a beating. Even if they got all the feats and made it to the prestige classes that the books told them to, they still weren't really capable of holding their own against level-appropriate threats. To do that, you had to think outside the box and realize that what the books told you you wanted to do was wrong.
FrankT:
And that's the book.
AncientH:
You're welcome.