Cold Iron: Forgery and Reality

European folklore often paints fey creatures as allergic to iron. This supports the idea that people with Bronze or Stone age technology, defeated by iron-using peoples, passed into the victors' mythology as faeries and other weird beings. The first and finest expression of this belief in gaming comes from Runequest, where technology is Bronze Age, meteorite iron is rare and near-magical, and elves and trolls can't stand it.

As with so many other issues, Runequest had the elegant solution and D&D ham-fisted it. In a medieval, iron-using society, there's nothing special about the metal itself. Thus the peculiarity, in the AD&D Monster Manual, of seeing iron as the bane of demons and other evil creatures. And the backpedaling, in a couple of entries, to insist that only "cold iron" bans a ghast or harms a quasit.

Adding injury to St. Dunstan's insult.

As I understood this back in the day, "iron" must mean something different from steel. Most likely, the carbon involved in forging weapons in the medieval-Renaissance world somehow disrupted the mojo of iron, so you would have to special-order a mace head of the same stuff as your cauldron or door handle. And, it would be reasonably balancing to say that non-carbon iron couldn't make up a useful blade, because it would be too soft or brittle.

"Cold iron" is near-meaningless, more a poetic epithet than a technical term. Iron can't be extracted from ore without heat, and "cold forging" is a modern industrial term which assumes you can die-stamp a sheet of rolled iron (which passed through heat in the smelting and rolling processes). One obvious way to get iron "cold" is to chip it off a meteorite, but with what tools exactly?

Over the years, the D&D rules got cleaned up to the point where only this "cold iron" can harm some immune monsters, and the 3rd edition SRD lists it as a special material: "This iron, mined deep underground, known for its effectiveness against fey creatures, is forged at a lower temperature to preserve its delicate properties ."

Well, but there's something too game-y balance-y about this solution, full of vague and passive rules-speak. "Stuff that harms the Weird is super expensive because it comes from a Place of Rareness." It makes sense but lacks resonance. The same goes for meteorite iron. I suppose if only dwarves or lost human races had the technology to whittle blades from meteorites that would sound a bit cooler. But ...

Why not have iron (as opposed to steel) just show up the ability of non-carbon-forged tools and household implements to resist the supernatural? After all, the silver that devils and werewolves fear is dirt-common in the D&D world. Silver pieces are crappy coins that make slightly more expensive sling bullets than lead. A party in my campaign once bought a silver teapot, filled it with sand, and swung it as a flail against the equivalent of wights. So why not have desperate halfling housewives fending off a quasit with a skillet? Or adventurers chucking their iron door spikes at ghasts? 

As a bonus, if elves can't stand iron spikes, it throws a little game balance into elven PC's who (at least in AD&D) are far superior to poor old humans.

Easy Rule for Broken Arrows

Among the logistics of adventure gaming that I currently handwave is the depletion of arrows and other missile ammo. In practice it's too tedious, forgettable, and character-sheet-messy to cross off every arrow (and pick them up again).

So, if there is a thing that people are supposed to do, and they don't do it, and you think it adds to the play of the game, it's on you as the rules hacker/designer to make it easy. I think as long as people are buying arrows in lots of 12 or 20 they should pay attention to depletion. But until now I haven't come up with an easy rule that makes some kind of sense.

So happy, sucking up all your ammo.

Here it is:

1. If an arrow or crossbow bolt does damage but does not kill its target, cross it off; in effect it gets stuck in there and broken off by the still-alive creature. Sling bullets are hardier, so do not suffer this fate.
2. If the party flees the scene of a combat without time to rest and pick up missiles, anyone who shot missiles crosses off two if the fight was short, five if the fight was long, and more for epic fights. If a player thinks this is too many, they are free to keep track of their missiles one by one.

If your players are marking down TWELVE ARROWS or TWENTY ARROWS IN QUIVER, they can just cross off letters from those phrases as ammo gets depleted. Same goes for TWENTY BULLETS IN POUCH and TWENTY QUARRELS IN CASE.

The Price of a Hauberk in Gomorrah

It seems almost obscene to extract something gameable out of the brutal and depressing revelations in Roberto Saviano's undercover account of the organized crime economy in his native Naples, Gomorrah. Nonetheless, this paragraph struck me, from the chapter titled Kalashnikov:

To calculate the state of human rights, the analysts consider the price of an AK-47. The less it costs, the more human rights violations there are, an indication that civil rights are gangrening and the state is falling to pieces.

It's made me rethink the usual scheme by which the party adventures out in the boondocks but then has to travel to the big civilized city to get the best deals, or any deals, on the materials of war: weapons, armor, foot-soldiers, and in a fantasy world, usable items like potions or battle charms.

It was not a good day.

But what if the opposite logic holds true? What if the best ratio of supply to demand is not found in the big city, which has to stay peaceful and organized to attract trade and reap taxes, where the state is strong, and men, arms and magic are regulated - and as a consequence, arms are sold only in black markets at greatly inflated prices? What if instead the deals are to be found on the borders of civilization, where swords and mail are regularly looted from the slain? Stocks in the house of war have to be high, for any day now a warlord could strut by looking to garrison a castle or equip a company. And if magic items are bought and sold, the ones useful in a fight are more likely to command a good price in a place where the line between life and death is as clear as the sea's horizon.

And human rights violations. Of course your adventurers (read; your players) are not the kind who would burn a hut to shake loose a few copper pieces, kill cows for experience points, right? But guess what, other adventurers are. And just as much as you lay waste the orcs, the orcs are equipped to lay waste the village, which means that they too have their hidden source of cheap arms and provisions. Consider: have the adventurers gotten to a point where they turn their nose up at loading a mule with the fallen goblins'crappy hauberks and scimitars? There are those on the other side who do not. You may even meet them someday.

Finally, Saviano devotes a lot of space to the economy and mystique of the Kalashnikov, its ease of use, its democratization of mobilization and massacre. A phenomenon confined to the industrial age? Maybe your medieval or Renaissance world is about to experience a rude awakening as one or another evil warlord figures out a way to stamp out reliable longswords with minimal craft. Or - more frightening still - maybe what is being mass-produced is enchantments on swords. Not straight pluses, that would be convenient to the party as loot, the glass-cannon wielders easily overcome. No, these are equalizer bonuses that give a flat attack roll as if you were 5 Hit Dice, and a flat damage bonus of +3 excluding strength. Effects like that get a little closer to evoking the sheer panic of well-armed, low-numbered adventurers who, like the knights and samurai of old, are going to have to get used to the triumph of the masses over the hero ...

One Page Weapon Vs. Armor Chart

This year being the 35th anniversary of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Player Handbook, I thought it only fitting to remedy some of the realism gaps in mine own 52 Pages ruleset, taking a leaf (no. 38, to be precise!) from the Dean of Dungeons himself - possibly the most beloved page of all in that estimable tome.

After extensive research in musty fechtbueche, after in-depth consultations with American ninjas and dead-serious dudes who will cut you if you call them "reenacters," I decided to ignore everything they told me. D&D was never supposed to simulate the literal medieval era, but rather, a mythopoetic simulacrum-dimension called "Dungeon Game Reality." Hence, D&D is always correct - and thus, inevitably, AD&D just advances the correctness to a near-unbearable level, in a brief golden decade before the "Et tu, Brute?" of 2nd Edition.

Of course, because the attention spans of today's gamers are beset with daily rat-race and squalling offspring - or else, were strangled at birth in a world of point-and-click instant gratification - the chart had to be cut down from its original 57 x 9 to a mere 4 x 4.

Combat now presents a terrain of real strategic choice! Do you drop your enchanted flatchet and choke-up on your retainer's mundane awl-pike, the better to penetrate the crevices of the giant serpent's scales? From the rack of pole arms, do you grab the sword-like glaive-guisarme as the tool wherewith to Julienne that room of giant mushrooms, or trust in the axe-like power of the bardiche to dismember the killer ants foretold in yon scrawled graffito? And at last, the traditional poisson d'Avril shines forth in the arsenal of adventure, delivering a most efficacious slap to unjacketed varlets.

Future Advanced 52 Pages updates include psionic combat, aerial jousting rules, that hardscrabble hero class the Monk, and Boot Hill character conversion guidelines.

Dual Wielding

The munchkin's delight, fighting with a weapon in each hand needs to be balanced against using a shield or a two-handed weapon.

Go go spell checker!

Here's my usual solution.

 It got some attention when I posted the 52 Pages, and commenter Picador noted a few emergent properties of the rule ... namely that attacks with a shield getting a maximum +2 strength bonus to hit can complement using a normal sword, which only gets +1 ... and the potential for awesome comboing with my "feats" for fighters and rogues that let you roll an extra damage die on a max or min roll.

The slight update clarifies that the higher damage roll is checked after adding bonuses like Strength and extra dice. This privileges the rogue's extra damage die feat, which activates on a high roll, over the fighter's, which has more chance of being irrelevant because it boosts the lower roll.

This scheme isn't perfect. It requires a fiddly choice each round whether to bash with the shield, forgoing AC bonus, or not- and when does that get decided? Also, it may not matter that much. I worked out numbers (ignoring the bonus dice for the moment) for damage ...

A d8 weapon does average of 4.5 damage/hit
Fighter with d8 and d6 weapon: average of 5.23 damage
Anyone with d8 and d4 weapon: average of 4.81 damage
Anyone with d8 weapon and shield (d4-1): average of 4.63 damage

So, stacked up to the benefit of using a shield defensively (+2 AC), the off-hand dagger isn't looking so hot, although the d6 weapon gives the fighter a respectable half-point plus of bonus damage, not quite reaching the +1 average damage from using a two-handed weapon (more if you're super-strong) but without the drawbacks of a wide swing. The shield bash is going to be beneficial only rarely, but that factor further argues for the shield, which especially against weak opponents can cut your chance to be hit by a half to a third.

Some ideas to make the dagger more attractive off-hand, especially for the iconic rogue ...


* It gives +1 AC in the off-hand.
* When ambushing/backstabbing with dual weapons (except shield), roll the bonus d6 twice as well and take the higher.
* Rogues can use a dagger for d6 damage.

Anything else?

Broken Arrows

By coincidence, I had been thinking about one of the logistic aspects of the game this week that I seem to blow off in my campaigns - keeping track of ammo. Then Talysman writes about it so I feel I should share my thoughts.

Are most people overestimating how many arrows would be lost in combat, given enough time to recover them afterwards as part of the ten minute post-combat rest? This blog has 50% attrition, Talysman has 33%. It doesn't look like too many arrows would be broken even shooting against armor (here) so the main source of loss would be sticking in the wound and being broken off, being trodden on in combat, or just disappearing into the distance. It may be useful to overestimate these occurrences, though, if only to have ammo supplies play a meaningful part in an adventure.

Also topical for Valentine's Day.

In battlefield combat, of course, there is the factor of not wanting your enemy to easily pull out arrows or use them back against you, that led some historical archers to use arrows with the point intentionally loosened. Most of what adventurers are fighting, though, won't have bows themselves. The option can be given to loosen heads if needed, but it seems more important to explorers to be able to conserve arrow stores.

Here are a couple of ideas:

1. Track ammo supplies using toothpicks stuck in a piece of modeling clay, packing sponge, or styrofoam (personally I hate the sound of squeaking styrofoam so that's right out.) Pull your "arrows" out when you shoot them and turn them in if they break or are abandoned. Indicate special arrows (magic, silver, etc.) using marker on the tip.

2. Arrows, magic or otherwise, break immediately on a natural damage roll of 6; I also have a missile fumble that breaks the arrow. Otherwise, there is no need to have a fiddly "realistic" system or extra dice rolls to model what is ultimately just another aspect of logistics like food, water, and light source consumption. So, breakage and loss are abstracted after the combat; each archer loses 1 out of every 4 arrows shot, rolling d4 to see if there is any loss when a fraction of that is shot. If the party flees the battlefield, of course, losses are total. Magic arrows can be exempted from this due to superior construction, although they may be picked up by intelligent foes.

3. Arrow heads can be loosened to become unusable after any hit (including a hit that would connect with an unarmored target even if it missed due to armor) and 3/4 unrecoverable.

Equipment and Weapon Cards - System-Free

I realized yesterday that it might be more useful if I left off all the One Page prices, weights, and rules assumptions from these cards, so that you can put on them whatever's appropriate in your rules system and campaign.

The weapon kits, of course, can't be system neutral entirely. For example, the "civilian" kit for wizards has a crossbow, the "rogue" kit for thieves has a bow and arrows, choices not supported by AD&D. I also included the mace in the "cleric" kit but some DMs may allow religion-specific weapons. You may want to substitute appropriate weapons (darts, sling) or just say that the weapon is for hirelings or other party members to use.

Hope these are useful!

One Page Equipment, Weapons, Armor

As promised, for those following along at home. Probably the one page of these that's most "detachable" from the system is the equipment page. I find that this distribution of the standard adventurer equipment into six little packages really speeds up preparation for one-shot dungeon crawls. It would be even nicer, I guess, if each equipment package was represented on a separate card...

One-Roll Breakage Rules

It may be a while before I post the Dungeon.ppt you've been awaiting - there's the small matter of my 100,000 word manuscript I have to format and put in the mail by Thursday. It's not for gaming - it's a psychological monograph on moral emotions -  but I did slip the phrase "malevolent and benign" into one of the chapters...

In the meantime, a solution to something that's been bugging me a while...

What do you do when you roll a critical hit and weapons clash in combat? Or a fumble says to test for weapon breakage? Or one of your players is trying to hack a door with an axe?

Do you:
1: Pause the game, haul out the 1st Edition DMG and consult the item saving throw table?
2: Pause the game, haul out the 3rd Edition or Pathfinder book and use the even more complicated material damage system?
3: Remember 3-5-7-9-11?

When a swung weapon (not a spear, arrow etc.) might damage an item, and the weapon is made of material harder or as hard as the item, roll damage for the attacking weapon. I'm assuming you're using standard variable damage where a dagger is d4, longsword d8 and so on. Does it break the defending item?

If it's 3 or greater, a fragile item like a wand or a flask breaks.
If it's 5 or greater, a wooden haft, club or other thin wooden item breaks.
If it's 7 or greater, a shield or other solid wooden item breaks.
If it's 9 or greater, a sword, dagger blade, iron haft or other thin metal item breaks.
If it's 11 or greater, a metal shield or other solid metal item breaks.

Magical items defending against breakage have +1 to this number for every +1 of magic bonus.

A non-weapon surface that an object hits (say, in a fumble), if it's as hard as or harder than the weapon's weakest material, does:

1d4 damage if wood, 1d6 if reinforced wood, 1d8 if stone, 1d10 if metal - in ascending order of hardness.

In such a fumble, an edged weapon that doesn't break or take any damage is still blunted and has -1 to hit until sharpened.

Hacking at a solid item like a door proceeds the same way, except no hit roll is needed. An axe or pick is the ideal tool; anything else that can be swung is -1 damage for this purpose. Each hacker gets one damage roll per round, and the minimum damage roll to score a "breakage" is 7 (solid wood).

An object will take 2 "breaks" to fully break through a 1' square area that is 1 inch thick. So, to take a typical door off its hinges will require 4 breaks, more if thicker; to open a locked chest will require 2 breaks. If in this process a natural 1 for damage is rolled, the weapon takes damage instead, as in a fumble (see above).

So - hack away!

Stop. Hammer Time.

Everyone's favorite short-breathed hackmaster, the Hog Slicer Guy, is back with a warhammer demonstration that tempts me to put the armor penetration rules for axe/mace/hammer back into my game. (They were a little too arcane to remember when rubber hit the road.)

Combat House Rules now up

Look ye rightwards and behold the Rule of the Assayers, Chapter the First.

One thing I have no illusions about: I did this writeup because I wasn't 100% satisfied with any of the clone rule sets and I doubt anyone will be 100% satisfied with my approach. That's just the way of cranky old-schoolers with a quarter century of ideas and expectations under our belts. Least I can do, though, is put my cards on the table about my goals (see Foreword) without claiming to be the One True Way. I hope you can salvage a few ideas from this or at least be inspired to bash out your own. Comments and brickbats are always welcome!

These rules will largely be in effect for my GenCon private game and any other games I run in the near future.

Incidentally, if anyone can offer better hosting than Mediafire (upload doesn't work any more for me) or RapidShare (annoying), I'd be mucho obligado.

UPDATE: Now in Google Docs with some minor fixes.

Longbows

So, my rules set is going to include bows.  Back to the weapons board.

Be it resolved that no D&D rule set really gets the English longbow right.

There's no magic trick to bows, short, long, composite or cross. Each mechanical advance is just a better way to store up arm strength and release it. The strength comes out as damage, penetration and - especially when arched into the air - range. Crossbows build up strength over time through slower loading.

Two arrows per round, even a six second round, is a really good deal but probably reflects the shooter not having to worry about defense. The tradeoff is having to worry about range minuses.

Range minuses "to hit" for any bow start at 20 feet and are -2 for every whole or part of 50 feet (the bow's range unit) thereafter.

Normal bows are 2 arrows per round, 1d6.

You can have a bow custom built for your strength at three times the price. It'll have +20 feet to its range unit per strength "plus". You get one point of your Strength "to hit" bonus for every three or more points of armor on the target (not counting shield) and +1 damage maximum. So if you're entitled to a +2 "to hit" from a 16 Strength, you get no bonus to hit vs. someone with leather armor or a shield; +1 vs. someone in chain; +2 vs. someone in plate.

That's your English longbow - a whole company of specially exercised Strength 13+ archers with matching bows. You can't just pick one up in the thaler store.

Light crossbows are 1 bolt per round, 1d6+1, range unit 70 feet, +1 to hit a target with 3 or more points of armor. Heavy crossbows are 1 bolt per 2 rounds, 1d6+2, range unit 100 feet, +1 to hit a target per 3 points of armor. They're bows with Strength bonuses built in.

I like it when magic-users can have crossbows (shout out to Basic!) They're suitably technical and weaselly weapons.

Wrapping up Weapons

So ... I just don't have it in me to blog about the odds and ends of weapons remaining. Shields, staffs, small arms. Flails. Whips. Sigh.

But ... I am going to put it all into a pdf. Here's the first page.

This system presents a set of house rules for pre-gunpowder combat with any pre-1984 d20-based adventure game. They add variety to weapon choice and interesting situations to combat, without bogging down in table lookups or extra dice rolls.

There are four sheets to the guide. One sheet is the Player’s Aid. It is suitable for new players, who shouldn’t be overwhelmed by the level of description. More experienced players should intuitively grasp what is meant by each of the weapon effects. They can always ask the referee for details or check out the advanced sheets.

The other three sheets are mainly for the game master. They’ll replace the pages on weapons in your game rules, and add to your array of rulings on combat situations.

Your group might like these rules if:

*     They like improvising small-group military tactics in a variety of situations, without worrying about who is in which five foot square.

*     Your fighters enjoy walking around with a harness full of weapons, and figuring out which is the right one for any job.

They might not like them if:

*    They want the rules to regulate really dramatic, spectacular, heroic feats. (You can still improvise rulings for those, though.)

*     They want ultra-realistic, blow-by-blow, reenacter-approved fighting rules.

*     They want combat to be ultra-light and schematic, so they can get on with role-playing or exploring.

Spears are Special

Spears win the "most common weapon with the most special rules in gaming" prize. They can impale you and get stuck (Runequest); have some kind of an initiative or reach advantage due to their length (just about everyone); can be set against a charge for an insane amount of damage, which is only fair because a charge itself does an insane amount of damage (AD&D); can be used from the second rank (OD&D). I'm probably missing a couple more.

Starting with the spear, there's definitely a difference between the long and short spear. The short spear doesn't have reach but can be thrown. The long spear does have reach but needs two hands; balance that and the lesser damage of the spear, against the possibility of a tight formation (3' frontage) and whatever reach gives you. Simple enough.

Impaling is part of critical hits, which my system isn't doing.

Charging is one of those things really more relevant to mounted combat. You would only get a substantial bonus on the attack when moving very fast and seated with the lance couched. As for setting spears against a charge - again, only really deadly against mounted charges, and with more a deterrent effect than anything else. In a skirmish, a horseman or other charging creature who could see you holding the spear could usually veer off in time. Still a useful rule to have.

Three rules for the two-handed long spear, 7' or longer:

Long: You strike first against one opponent with a shorter weapon on the first round he moves into melee with you, if you're facing him.
Deep: You can attack from behind a friendly character, without the first strike bonus.
Set: If you are wielding a long spear, and you are involved in a charge at greater than 12" movement rate, you strike first and the spear has +2 to hit and 1d6 extra damage. This is true whether you are charging or being charged. If two spears clash in a charge, both strike simultaneously; this is one place where the "back and forth of combat" model doesn't apply.

One other thing to keep in mind for any pole weapon. Although it can be used in a narrow frontage, to turn and still use it will require room equal to its length, either to the side or overhead. This makes it a risky choice in a dungeon setting.

Weapon Control Means Using Two Hands

Swords, axes, and maces all come in two-handed versions that mean more power, longer weapon, longer swing and ultimately more damage. More damage can come as bigger dice, damage bonuses, roll twice keep high, or my current favorite, multipliers for strength damage bonuses (as in 3rd ed.).

If you allow +2 and +3 bonuses at very high ability scores, even a 1 1/2 x multiplier can double the damage a weapon puts out. That's a real advantage for high strength characters, and having lucky 18 STR high rollers running around doing twice the damage of a mere mortal on every hit might get in the way of the character-lightness of the game.

A tamer alternative might be to allow a flat higher rate of damage and say the +2 and +3 bonuses can only be fully obtained using a fully swung two-handed weapon. But by the same token so are the -2 and -3 penalties. (It makes sense, too, to say that small weapons, dagger for sure, and maybe others, have no strength bonus or penalty whatsoever.)

Two-handed weapons need some love because they are going to suffer from a no-shield drawback, plus the other drawback my formation-conscious house rules require: they need a wide swing frontage to use, 7 feet of space at least.

Combine with the basic sword, axe and mace principles and we get this:

All two-handed weapons:

• cannot be used with a shield; 
• apply the full +/-2 and +/-3 strength modifiers to damage , while normal sized weapons have a maximum damage modifier of +/-1 (to hit modifiers are the same); 
• take up 7' of swing frontage, so only fit in a 10' corridor with someone else who is using a 3' weapon (spear, dagger, shortsword, longsword used as a shortsword).

Two-handed swords do 1d10 damage, and are versatile; so strike two-handed as a longsword with 5' frontage and as a shortsword with 3' (but not as a dagger in close combat). Thrusting with a two-handed sword was a legitimate technique. Extra damage bonuses only apply to the full 7' frontage though.

Two-handed axes do 1d10 damage, and punch through armor in the same manner as one-handed; +1 to hit for every 3 points of physical armor on the target.

Two handed maces and hammers do a base 1d8+1 damage, and have the same armor-class to hit bonuses as the one-handed variety; if a flanged mace or a hammer, the same as an axe; if a spiked mace, +1 damage vs. opponents with 2 points of armor or fewer.

Sword and Axe: The Mythic

The mythic aspects of the sword and axe flow in part from their function. The rest is history and religion.

The sword is the weapon of killing, dedicated to nothing else. It is purity, oaths, knighthood, kingship. It is the blade of fine cutting, interpreted in the Tarot pack and Buddhism as intellect and discernment. Blind Justice wields it. It is an angelic weapon, by association with the flaming sword placed east of Eden to guard the Tree of Life.

It is magic to Iron Age cultures - because sword technology seemed magic in the Iron Age. Perhaps this is why magic swords are cooler, more prevalent, more interesting in D&D than any other kind of weapon. It is a ritual weapon of the magician and the priest. (Ritual, I emphasize.)

It is male, direct, patriarchal. It is shaped like the Cross. It is holy - at least until Michael Moorcock turned the idea on its head. Its use in execution is reserved for the nobility, in Europe and Japan alike.

A priest of the sword gains the right to carry this edged weapon but at a terrible price. He cannot heal; his curative spells become open, bleeding wounds, cast through the metal of the sword and deepening its strikes.

The axe is the weapon of the people, the earth, the Minoan mother-religion, the labyrinth, the bull-cult. It is moon, blood, wildness. The double-bitted axe is seldom seen on the battlefield, ceremonial, double-facing, double-speaking. It is female power.It is the armament of the Minotaur.

Single-bitted, the axe is a barbarian armament; it is thunder, force narrowly concentrated.

It is the tool used by the state to decapitate commoners. Bound in reeds, it is the Roman fasces - the power of the state bound by the will of the many. It is the tool used by the priest to sacrifice cattle. Dominion over the impure.

A priestess of the axe seeks out the deep places of the earth, but reserves her holy weapon for the object of her quest, the dark sacrifice. Healing and wounding are all the same to her. She may not summon light, but knows a charm for seeing in the dark.

Sword and Axe: Social Naturalism

The following couple of posts on social and military naturalism are a compression of recurring observations from writers on the history and recreation of pre-gunpowder warfare. I'll give a few of my key references at the end.

Axes were cheaper. There is less metal in an axehead than in a longsword. Don't think of the ridiculously inflated weapons wielded in computer or miniatures games; battle axe blades were narrower than that, playing to their main strength of delivering compressed force, as we shall see. More importantly, a longsword blade that is resilient and not liable to break has to be forged according to arts that must have seemed almost magical, with repeated layering and folding of the blade by a master smith. An axe head just has to be hammered out of a block of metal and sharpened; you can even make an axe out of stone.

Axes were more common, too, in the social sense of the word. In Iron Age societies and other places and times where metal was rare, swords required so much expense and craft that they became prerogatives of the ruling class. Looked at another way, a sword has no use except in war and dueling, while most other weapons including the axe have a civilian use, either as tools or in hunting. So, an axe is a good investment for a yeoman soldier in peace and wartime, while a sword marks you out as a professional warrior. Even when swordcrafting became more widespread and almost industrialized, as happened eventually in Europe and Japan, aristocracies promoted their association with the sword, to the point of legislating it out of the hands of commoners.

If we stop here - roughly at the point of OD&D, where axes are equivalent to swords in damage but cost less - social and material reasons favor the cheaper axe over the more expensive sword. A campaign, though, may want to give the sword some of its social meaning back to compensate. So, wearing the more expensive sword may be a claim to aristocratic status, which adventurers can buy or loot their way to. For example, axe-wielding barbarians and woodcutters may not be welcome in a certain tavern or town, while sword-wearing folk are presumed to be gentility and allowed to pass.

If social class is used to distinguish players in the game, having to use more expensive things, like swords, may be a drawback of the greater resources available to upper-class characters. At the same time, upstarts wearing swords may draw the respect or fear of common folk, but the wrath of those who feel more properly entitled by birth to do so, and may even fall afoul of the law. All these options are suitable for a campaign that wants to keep its combat simple but its social world fairly rich. As long as the advantages and drawbacks are communicated to players beforehand, that's perfectly OK.

Real commitment to super-simple combat would stop here. But I also want differences between weapons to count in combat, even if expressed in only a couple of features. So, more next time.

Balance is More than Just One in Each Hand

Putting what I've said recently a different way:

The goal of balance in an imaginative game with player-customized elements (someday soon I'll think of an elegant phrase for this) is to have players feel free to choose roughly the same range of options that exist in the shared vision of the game's setting.

The shared vision most usually comes from the fictional sources of gaming, or by now from gaming itself, the way it has incorporated and recycled its source material into DungeonWorld Standard. But it can also come from reality or from myth. Indeed, in writing my latest gaming work (the former Bag of Tricks that is quickly coming to cover a whole lot more than tricks), I switch back and forth between naturalistic and mythic perspectives. In doing this I hope to shake loose some of the fixed ideas of the adventure-game, and shake free a few ideas. So let's do that here.

Take the longsword versus battleaxe choice. Both are part of fictional fantasy archetypes. Dwarves, minotaurs and barbarians, for one, wouldn't be the same without their axes. Knights, rogues and just about everyone else live and die by flashing swords. You don't want people to feel dumb about taking an axe or a sword into a fantasy hackfest. That's the status quo of gaming, and it's easy to rest on that.

Now, both sword and axe were used historically, as well. But this might not mean that adventuring parties in your gritty, naturalistic world should freely sport axes and swords as they very well please...

Next post I'll examine the historical record. In the meantime - what was up with these guys? Which one was the min-maxer and which one was the scrub?



Indeed, there is no such thing as halfway crooks.

Weapons Again: Rules from Rulings

I'm not entirely happy with the weapon rules I presented a while back. I want to step back and think in terms of the process I described last month, why and how rules are built up from rulings.

The main thing in deciding to write a ruling into a rule is fairness. Because weapons are important in combat and are taken into the adventure, this makes it particularly important to establish their relevant characteristics as rules.

First, the players need to know any rulings that will reliably be applied to the weapons they buy and use, in order to have a fair choice among them. If a character buys a two-handed sword, and the referee judges later on that it's useless in a five foot corridor - and the dungeon area is made up of such corridors - that's not fair. A fighter would have known that, and might have decided to take a back-up weapon like a spear or shortsword for tight situations.

Fairness also applies to the referee. Once they've caught the impromptu ruling bug, players can be very proactive in pointing out situations where they feel they should get an advantage because of the weapon they're using. They may be more reluctant to point out their disadvantages, or the advantages of an opponent. Having clear rules about these situations makes it easier for the referee to put fair limitations on the players. You don't have to wait for the chance to turn the ad hoc rulings that enabled their own anti-monster tactics back against them.

So weapons are important - but how much should they be distinguished from each other? I'm very aware  that simulationism can be a never-ending rabbit hole. Early D&D editions recommend themselves by their simplicity of combat resolution, their lightness of rules and stats. I don't want to throw that away. Hence my pledge to involve no extra dice rolls, and no looking up things beyond what can be easily written on a character card.

I've realized, though, that I do want to hold on to the article of faith that different size weapons do different damage. The argument that combat is so abstract that any weapon is an equal threat doesn't really hold water. If a dagger does as much average damage as a two-handed sword because it strikes more quickly, then the d20 combat system could have modeled that in pluses to hit, or (as in the roguelike game Angband and its variants) multiple attacks. I feel well supported in this by the expectations of generations of players and my own intuitive idea of what D&D is about.

Another judgment to take to a proposed rule: does it promote player skill and strategy, while not bogging combat down in minutiae of placement and timing? I think the kind of things I find important in weapons fit this bill. They are mostly about how the weapon interacts with a given situation, ensuring that players find it to their advantage to equip their fighting characters with more than just one weapon, and use these intelligently.

To end this post for now, I offer a set of ruling principles I use in my games, which in coming posts I'll expand into a set of weapon rules.

Disadvantages of Attack (hindering the free use of a weapon) give a -2 on a d20 chance to hit, and in opposed initiative, the disadvantaged person strikes after anyone else who is not at a disadvantage.

Great Disadvantages of Attack are also -2 to hit, but the attack happens only on the second round after engaging (at the normal initiative for that round), and every other round thereafter.

Advantages of Attack give +2 to hit and first strike. There aren't really any tactical situations that can give a Great Advantage of Attack as opposed to hindering the opponent in some way, though.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Defense in general combat are strictly applied to armor class, and are +/-2 for normal and +/-4 for Great dis/advantages - which way is which depends on how AC numbers run in your game.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Force apply to the momentum behind a weapon, and translate to +2 or -2 damage.

Weapons: Traits, not Systems

I'm a stone's throw away from ending the Text to Tabletop series with some discussion of player vs. character identification. But now the last couple of posts on JB's B/X Blackrazor blog have had my design thumbs twitching.

JB's gripe is the general lack of attention to balance among different melee weapons in D&D from the moment they were mechanically distinguished from each other, really right up until 3rd Edition. The focus is the battle axe as opposed to the longsword, a clearly unbalanced choice rules-wise in both B/X and AD&D. He eventually solves the problem by calling on the abstract nature of combat, proposing a system of damage by character class, modified only by the most general characteristics of weapons. I think this is fine, but I'm going to propose another way out.

One point of frustration that comes through in the posts is the clunkiness of systems that try to balance out weapons with a host of non-damage characteristics like speed factor, bonuses vs. specific AC, room needed to swing ... Why instead can't each weapon have a special trait or two, and maybe a special drawback, without every single weapon having to be rated on that trait?

A rough brainstorm, aided by borrowings and scrapings from old-school posts too numerous to recall, gives me this:

Weapon	Average Damage	Good Things	Bad Things
Dagger	-2	Quick Draw, Throwable, Close, Narrow	Short
Shortsword	-1	Quick Draw, Narrow	Short, Expensive
Longsword	+0	Quick Draw	Expensive
Two-handed sword	+1	+1 to hit Armor	Wide, Expensive, Two-Handed
Mace/War Hammer	+0	+2 to hit Armor	Wide, Unwieldy
Battle Axe	+0	+1 to hit Armor	Wide
Two-Handed Mace/Hammer/Axe	+1	+2 to hit Armor	Wide, Unwieldy, Two-Handed
Hand Axe/Hammer	-1	Throwable, Narrow	Short
Staff	-1	Improves AC by 1 against facing opponent	Two-Handed, Unwieldy
Short Spear	-1	Throwable, Narrow	Unwieldy
Long Spear	-1	Long, Narrow	Unwieldy, Two-Handed
Pole Arm	+0	Long	Unwieldy, Two-Handed

Armor Bonuses: Apply only to chain armor or better, or the monster AC equivalent, assuming this comes from armor/hide and not dexterity or magic bonuses
Close: Weapon has no penalty when used in grappling range; other weapons have -2 to hit and strike last
Expensive: Reflected in equipment tables
Long: Weapon strikes first against non-Long weapons (and unarmed monsters) unless in grappling range
Narrow: Weapon has no penalty in very tight quarters (3' passages or characters fighting 3 to a 10' passage); other weapons have -2 to hit and strike last
Quick Draw: Weapon can be readied and used in the same round, striking last; other weapons require a full round to ready.
Short: Weapon cannot attack a facing opponent wielding a Long weapon unless in grappling range
Throwable, Two-Handed: Self-explanatory
Unwieldy: Weapon cannot be used in grappling range
Wide: Weapon has -2 to hit and strikes last with even 5' frontage (needs 7' free to swing properly) and cannot be used with only 3'

Average Damage: For example, with a d8 monster hit die basis, minuses refer to d6 and d4, and plus damage requires a d10.

(Closing to grappling range against an aware, facing opponent requires a full round without attacking, and without being hit by that opponent. Striking first and last overrides initiative determination, but opponents that strike at the same time by those rules still use initiative.)

These traits are easy to remember (for example, Unwieldy weapons are all blunt and pole weapons). They can even be implemented by the referee without the players knowing they exist, on a common-sense basis.

Another way to distinguish weapons is to note their different effectiveness against different materials and monsters. Blades are good for cutting ropes, cloth, and sheet-like monsters. Hammers and maces are good for smashing breakable things like jars and skeletons. Axes are all-around adventuring tools, good for hacking wood as well as limbs. Spears will puncture puffballs but harm little else.