Fixing the Weapons Table, Part 9: Ranged Weapons

Welcome back to my ongoing series, Fixing the Weapons Table, wherein I channel my MA in medieval history and my near-compulsive need to tweak with game mechanics toward making the Pathfinder weapons table even better!  Today we'll take a look at ranged weapons: bows, crossbows, and slings.

In previous installments I've touched on throwing knives and hunga mungas, medieval gunpowder weapons including explosive arrows and crossbow bolts, and even the razor-sharp Indian throwing disc known as the chakram.  So what is left to say about ranged weapons?  As it turns out, plenty!  In this installment, we'll talk about bows and crossbows, sling staves, pila, and heavy javelins.  There's also tons of new ammunition types for bows and crossbows, including alchemical creations, plus I'm revising the explosive arrows and crossbow bolts from my previous entry on medieval gunpowder weapons.  So read on!

The following material given in gold text and its accompanying table is available as Open Game Content under the OGL.  Open Game Content is ©2015 Jonah Bomgaars.

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Fixing the Weapons Table, Part 8: Bludgeoning Weapons

Welcome back to my ongoing series, Fixing the Weapons Table, wherein I channel my MA in medieval history and my near-compulsive need to tweak with game mechanics toward making the Pathfinder weapons table even better!  Today we'll be looking at bludgeoning weapons thanks to a reader's request for more options for hammer lovers.

In my very first installment of Fixing the Weapons Table, I talked about heavy maces vs morningstars and gave the heavy mace a +2 to sunder attempts.  In my two posts about polearms, I gave you the bec de corbin and lucerne hammer and the great morningstar and pollaxe.  So what else is there to say on the subject of bludgeoning weapons?  Well, I'll be talking about clubs, mauls, and flails, introducing pick-hammers and multi-headed flails, and letting you punch people in the face with a buckler.  Sound good?  Read on!

The following material given in gold text is available as Open Game Content under the OGL.  Open Game Content is ©2015 Jonah Bomgaars.

Fixing the Weapons Table, Part 7: Daggers and Short Blades

Whew!  I just finished my dissertation and boy am I tired, so this article might be a bit brief, but it's still important.  You probably know my whole Fixing the Weapons Table spiel by now: the weapons table in Pathfinder is broken, I think I know better than the team of professional game designers that wrote it, etc.

Today's article comes from a struggle I've been having with myself (and the weapons table, of course) over the various types of daggers and how best to simulate them in-game.  Specifically, I wanted to incorporate the long, pointy stiletto dagger and the iconic, wavy kris dagger.

The kris modeled here by Jafar                 Aladdin - Disney

In the end I had to move some things around and add some new stuff, and it really fleshed out the dagger and short blade options available to your characters, be they old-man assassins or merely powerful sorcerers disguised as old-man assassins.

The following material given in gold text is available as Open Game Content under the OGL.  Open Game Content is (C)2014 Jonah Bomgaars.

Fixing the Weapons Table, Part 6: Medieval Gunpowder Weapons

Depictions of gunpowder weapons in fantasy RPGs are plagued by a number of issues, not the least of which is a general overestimation of their power and efficacy.  This is because people think, "Guns and gunners replaced swords and knights, therefore guns must be more powerful."  This is a reasonable line of thinking, but it is not correct.  The reasons why guns became the dominant weapon on the battlefield are many - too many to go into here, in fact - but for our purposes, it is important simply to recognize that guns did not become dominant because they did more damage than the other weapons of the period.  Even today, in this wonderful technological world we live in, I would rather be shot in the chest than be struck with a battle axe.

Knights actually co-existed with guns for centuries, and for the most part they could get by with only a few dents in their armour to show for it.  Even in the 17th century, many soldiers wore steel armour which protected them from bullets.

Royal Armouries - Leeds

Although later guns were getting better at penetrating armour, the decline of armour in warfare had less to do with the power of guns and more to do with the weight and expense of the armour itself.  It is only in recent decades that sending soldiers into battle in suits of armour has come back into fashion.

That said, you may be starting to guess that I have some issues with the way Pathfinder deals with gunpowder weapons.

Actually, not as many as you might think from the above paragraphs.  For the most part, the damage these weapons deal seems reasonable on the whole, with a few exceptions.  A lot of the weapons have x4 crits, which seems fine for modelling gunpowder weapons - if they hit you right, they can hit you hard.  Sure there are a lot of things I could nitpick (in what world does a musket do more damage than a rifle?), but I'd rather just scrap the whole thing and start over.  So let's kick off Part 6 of Fixing the Weapons Table.

Fixing the Weapons Table, Part 5: Indian Weapons

The second campaign I ever ran was set in Chattara, a mighty multicultural empire ruled over by a caste of turbaned, woolly rhino-riding dwarves.  I did a lot of research into Indian weapons at the time, to make sure my party could really get the feel of the land they were adventuring through.  For today's post, I'm revisiting these weapons, updating them for Pathfinder and with a more practiced eye for game design.

When D&D books start talking about eastern weaponry, you know they mostly mean Chinese and Japanese stuff.  Pathfinder has been a bit better at this, but I find Indian weapons are still a gap that doesn't get filled in as much as it deserves to be.  That's why I'm Fixing the Weapons Table.  The Indian subcontinent has a rich history of unique and exotic weaponry that deserves a chance in the hands of a PC.  From the thrown chakram to the badass pata to the deadly urumi, here are nine awesome Indian weapons for your D&D game.

The following weapons given in gold text are available as Open Game Content under the OGL.  Open Game Content is (C)2014 Jonah Bomgaars.

Fixing the Weapons Table, Part 4: More Polearms (part 2)

Continuing from last time (before I was interrupted by an amor of rampaging cupids)...

I am on a quest to make polearms more appealing weapon options for adventurers, and just more realistic* in general.  Part of that involves updating and expanding the list of polearms.  Last time I covered the bardiche, bec de corbin, lucerne hammer, bill, fauchard, fauchard-fork, halberd, glaive, glaive-guisarme, guisarme, glaive-glaive-glaive-guisarme-glaive...  This time around we've got some more polearms like the partisan, the pike, the pollaxe, and maybe some that don't start with p.  Read on, dear reader.

*By realistic, I don't mean 100% historically accurate, because that is simply not possible within the d20 combat system.  I am attempting to reconcile what we know about polearms with the assumptions about them that are core to D&D.  This may sometimes mean adhering to polearm categories that are relevant to D&D but not to modern historical scholarship (I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as a glaive-guisarme).

Fixing the Weapons Table, Part 3: Polearms (part 1)

Polearms are just about the most ubiquitous and varied category of weapon to have ever existed.  Heck, spears alone have been in use around the world for hundreds of thousands of years, and are so fundamental that chimpanzees have been observed crafting and using spears for hunting.  But in the Middle Ages and continuing on into the Early-Modern period, there was a proliferation of new varieties of pole-weapons designed for all sorts of uses.  Many of them were very simple to make and to wield, allowing peasant armies to have some recourse against mounted knights.  Many of them were much more complicated and specialized, designed to bust open armour, cut harnesses, or just really mess up a dude's face.

You would be hard pressed to find an army that went to war without polearms, if only just spears; getting into the Late Medieval period most armies would have units of some other specialist polearms - usually halberds.  And yet they hardly turn up in fantasy RPGs these days, whether tabletop of video game.  Many such weapons were included in 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D, and a few of those made the jump to 3.5 and Pathfinder.  My goal here is to round out the list of available polearms and fix those already existing ones which don't seem to have been statted up quite right.

Fixing the Weapons Table, Part 2: Swords, Swords, Swords!

Quick! Think of the last D&D campaign you played where no one used a sword! I'm going to guess that, except for a few of you who have been in an all-wizard campaign or a party of greatclub enthusiasts, you all just went "huh?"  Because swords are damn-near ubiquitous in campaign worlds, just as they were in real life.  There are tons of different kinds of swords, and both D&D and Pathfinder do a fairly good job of representing them.  Fairly good, but not good enough.  That's why I'm here.

Now, I won't go into how later splatbooks tend to start raiding the thesaurus for new swords to stat up just to fill pages.

Actually, yes, I will go into that...

Fixing the Weapons Table, Part 1: Heavy Mace, Kama, and Starknife

I have a bone or two to pick with the selection of weapons available in Pathfinder (and previous editions).  As such, I've been re-working the table of weapons a bit (okay, a lot) in order to make it more balanced, more interesting, more fun, and above all more realistic.

I'll start off today with a few minor problems.