what systems arm the most realistic with weapons and how they would be used in combat and who would use what weapon.
Here come the SoS faggots...
>>44405607
it won't be that bad.
The Riddle of Steel
The Riddle of Steel descendents. Blade of the Iron Throne, Song of Swords, and Band of Bastards. My favorite is Song of Swords and you can find it for free on /tg/. Blade of the Iron Throne is more directly based on Riddle but has some issues and weird aspects, like using a d12 dice pool. Band of Bastards should have a beta release soon, and has some good ideas but I'm not as much a fan of their "build your own weapon" system rather than having statlines for common weapons.
If dice pool systems aren't your jam, RuneQuest 6 is also excellent, and has stuff for magic and general fantasy. GURPS with Low Tech and Martial Arts has a lot of pretty good medieval combat, but I haven't played it myself and only have heard such first hand. You have plenty of options.
>>44405604
Any system that gets super detailed about weapons run into the problems of A: They become more about combat than role-playing, and B: they're still not detailed enough to model everything and you STILL have to improvise a ton of stuff.
Weapon autism is wonderful, but it's more well-suited for computer games where the game keep tracks of all the finicky stats for you.
It's not like you're going to capture the feeling of men at arms fighting with halberds or unhorsing your opponent during a lance tilt by rolling a bunch of extra dice, so it's mainly going to be about whacking it to a ton of weapon trivia. Which is cool, if that's your thing, but you'd probably be happier making a Mount & Blade mod than running a pen and paper game.
>The fact that the Lucerne Hammer and the Pollaxe had different stats are what really made that role-playing session memorable
Said no one ever.
>>44406736
It seems completely possible that the right group would say that, to be honest.
>>44405604
You can't have realistic weapons usage without realistic injury and death, because without those things just get really weird, and realistic injury and death almost never makes for fun role-playing.
>>44406736
>Because this aspect is not the central thing that everyone's enjoyment hinges on, it's shit and there's no reason to include it.
>Details only belong in vidya
Seriously? And actually, yes, sometimes it's nice to be able to exploit different aspects of a weapon that make the weapons feel different. Reach, heft, balance, and injury type are all easy to factor in and can make weapons actually feel like more than numbers on a page. I know it sounds like it should be the opposite, but it isn't. To me, saying "all one-handed weapons are 1d6, two-handed are 1d8, fluff as you want" does nothing as my choices are meaningless. It's just damage dice. It's just numbers.
>>44406786
That's just, like, your opinion, man.
My group tends to prefer the grittier and more "realistic" wound and injury systems. They feel it adds a lot more weight to combat and makes them fear for their character more. As a consequence combat is actually less common, but what's there is way more satisfying and interesting for them. Obviously, many groups would disagree. There is a niche for those kinds of combat system though.
>>44406886
I'm going to ignore your gross misrepresentation of what I said for sake of argument.
When does weapons somehow stop being damage dice?
The only thing that really matters is difference in outcome, and a lot of the time rolling once for the entire fight with an opponent is not going to make much of a difference compared to 10 consecutive rolls and checks. It's still numbers, it's still going to average out, and there's not much in the way of player-skill involved since you're basically choosing between options and rolling dice, and the outcome of the choices made is not going to be affected by who is controlling the character, so in reality, what you end up with, is just moving more of the descriptions onto the combat rules instead of onto the player, and taking up a lot of time with rules.
On top of that, detailed weapons in rpgs tend to focus way too much on damage differences and different dice. Weight, reach and balance are the things that should matter, rather than one slightly different type of sword doing 1 more abstracted damage than another type.
There's basically no rpg that has realistic combat and injury anyway, they just have a fuckton of detail and clunkiness that masqurades as verisimilitude, but in the end it's just as abstract as your D8 example compared to real fighting.
>>44407027
Oh, don't get me wrong, I love gritty combat too, but when was the last time someone opened a door in your game and got killed by a crossbow bolt to the eye, or hit on the head with a hammer and fainted instantly?
When was the last time someone broke his arm and was useless for the rest of the fight, or died of bloodloss because he got stabbed in the arm in the worst possible spot?
Playing games that are grittier or more dangerous than D&D doesn't mean they're realistically dangerous.
I'm sorry to barge into this thread with what might seem to be a hijacking attempt, but I've got a question and this seems relevant.
What reason would a smith have to seek higher and higher temperatures for his forge, to the point where the heat is at a level which could only be found in fantasy (eg "I WANT TO STICK A SUN UNDER THERE")? Is there any precedent in metallurgy for astronomically high temperatures?
>>44406736
>Any system that gets super detailed about weapons run into the problems of A: They become more about combat than role-playing
That is simply not true.
>>44407138
There are RPG's with that level of realism around or the option to do so.
>>44407155
Super high temperatures are for smelting ore, because that produces purer, more homogenous (less pockets or inclusions of junk) metal than bloomery type smelting (where you get a big lump of slag and metal that you need to beat the shit out of)
So super redonculous fantasy temperatures could be for smelting some kind of fantasy metal, like mithril.
It's still a little bit retarded though since anything that needs highter temperatures to smelt than fucking rock does is likely to be a shit material for a weapon, but you can just blame gods or magic I suppose.
>>44407244
That kinda works out for me.
I'm trying to put together my next fantasy RPG antagonist - it'll be a legendary artificer and smith, corrupted by some strange, twisted artifact into the kind of ambitious rush that'll see him cleanly open half the realm into the plane of Inferno, just so he can reach the volcano within the caldera at its centre and find The Hottest Flame.
>>44407204
>That is simply not true.
Oh wow, you sure convinced me there. Jesus, all you have to do is look at the major rpgs to realize that the things the characters end up doing are fairly proportional to how much room they are given in the rules.
If you have fuckhuge combat rules and slim social rules, players end up spending more time on combat, that's just natural. Besides the whole issue of what means you give the characters to influence the world, you also have the issue of one aspect of the game getting figured out pretty fast and another offering heaps of customization or different actions.
Don't get me wrong, that can be really great, but I just don't think that super-combat heavy rpgs are a good investment of time, since they competitive or mechanically deep aspects tend to just be a lot clunkier to handle through dice rolls and turns than in other forms of games.
I'm the kind of person who can spend a whole day modding the files in a game to get more accurate item weights or damage, but the same thing in an rpg, in my opinion, so you are totally free to disagree, just leads to clunky play and a poor time spent vs fun gained payoff.
>>44406786
An uberrealistic system where the players themselves get whacked with a hammer for every injury their characters suffer could be pretty cool actually.
>>44407390
>You get captured by the pirates, time to lube up everyone.
>>44407324
Why can you not have both extremely detailed combat and social rules
>>44407324
But in my experience that is simply not true, its more about the group.
Look at GURPS, three whole chapters are devoted to combat rules and 90% of the equipment chapter is weapons and armour. Yet combat by no means dominates the games people play with the system unless they specifically choose to play a combat heavy campaign.
>>44407438
Of course you can, there are games like that, but how many people play them?
>>44406886
The strength of pen and paper rpgs is that you can do anything you want and that anything can happen. Adding more rules for the details doesn't actually add anything that you couldn't do before, it just removes freedom by specifying exactly what you can do.
You can make a super-duper detailed combat or social system and anyone reading it will probably be able to come up with a scenario that isn't covered in the rules so you still end up having to improvise or do a "counts as" type solution.
The rules are supposed to be there so that you know how to resolve conflict by other means than the DM just deciding what happens or players getting into freeform slap fights, but when you make the rules so detailed that the game becomes about figuring out the rules and breaking them, I think you're missing the point and should play other types of games instead.
>>44407103
I'm sorry, but it sounded like you were arguing that detail, especially weapons detail, was both not the central pillar of enjoyment and therefor not worth including ("said no one ever") and belonging more in vidya anyway ("more well-suited for computer games" and "happier making a mount and blade mod than running a pen and paper game"). My apologies for misrepresenting you.
>detailed weapons in rpgs tend to focus way too much on damage differences and different dice
>Weight, reach and balance are the things that should matter, rather than one slightly different type of sword doing 1 more abstracted damage than another type.
>There's basically no rpg that has realistic combat and injury anyway, they just have a fuckton of detail and clunkiness that masqurades as verisimilitude, but in the end it's just as abstract as your D8 example compared to real fighting.
It sounds like you're talking about D&D, the "eighteen different types of polearms with no actual difference" system that does all those crappy things. There are plenty of fun realistic systems out there that don't just add new names to damage dice and call it a day. Prime example of that is GURPS; weight, reach, and balance are all key aspects of melee weapons and very different from the typical 2d4 vs. 1d8 vs 1d6+2 bullshit. In fact, most of the time the change in damage is minimal; ±2 within the same weapon type (knife, one-handed axe/mace, staff, etc.) is about the most I've seen.
Just because D&D doesn't do something doesn't mean no system out there can possibly do it. There's a lot of D&D doesn't/cannot do.
>>44407577
How does "you can't have a rule for everything" factor into a discussion on the detail of weapons? Having detailed weapon stats ≠ drowning your players in rules for everything under the sun.
>>44405604
>what systems arm the most realistic with weapons and how they would be used in combat and who would use what weapon.
Sword Path glory
http://www.kallini.com/SPG.pdf
That phoenix command rpg is a dumbed down version of another rpg called spectrum small arms (but is more realistic with all splats combined) made to sell, that is a dumbed down version of rhand morningstar mission made to sell more and bring audience to their more realistic rpgs that is a dumbed down version of sword path glory.
The guy works for nasa, and also works with ballistic.
The guy made a book for sword path glory called advanced sword path glory that he then he stopped to sell because his rival ballistic companies (he sell stuff to cops) reverse engineered his stuff and used on their programs
>>44406786
>You can't have realistic weapons usage without realistic injury and death
Just reduce "damage" by X
>>44406773
>referring to poleaxe v lucerne hammer
I wouldn't knock them having different stat blocks, but I'm having trouble justifying giving those weapons different stats (for a homebrew). Same weight, balance, and reach. Both are anti-armor oriented. How would I make them truly different weapons.
Or more generally, I'm stating weapons for a homebrew with the categories being: spear, sword, and axe/hammer/mace. Is it fair to group those last three?
>>44408153
Nothing you wrote makes sense.
Let me throw in a more specific question.
Are there any systems that make crossbows a decent alternative to self bows, rather than a second class option? How do they achieve this?
>>44412099
I liked how crossbows worked in GURPS; how decent an alternative they are is up for debate, but at least they're no out and out objectively worse than self bows.
In GURPS, both bows and crossbows have a rated ST which determines their damage and range; they're built to be used by someone with a certain level of strength. While you're kind of fucked if you want to use a bow with higher rated ST than your own, that's the default assumption with crossbows; through positioning, leverage, and devices like the windlass crank or goat's foot, a character can cock a crossbow of much higher ST than their own. There is, of course, the tradeoff that it takes more time to do so, but unlike D&D that's not a deal breaker. Combat in GURPS is regularly going to have fighters of all types have "dead" turns where they do something other than move or attack; even the crossbowman's counterpart, the traditional self-bow archer, is going to be firing off only a shot every three round without special training. Yeah reload time will get prohibitively long if you want to fire a crossbow with 16 times the ST of your character, but what the fuck do you expect, that's basically a ballista at that point. It's also worth noting that the significantly higher rated ST for heavier crossbows translates into an actual boost in damage, unlike D&D where the difference in damage is trivial or nonexistent.
tl;dr when comparing bows and crossbows, the gap between the two in GURPS is much smaller than the gap between the two in most editions of D&D; GURPS crossbows get relatively higher damage and don't suffer nearly as much in terms of a slow rate of fire.
