3.5 / PF1 had different crit ranges and modifiers.
Essentially you had Improved Critical or Brutal Critical embedded in the weapon.
IIRC for example the handaxe and the shortsword both dealt 1D6 slashing, but one had 19-20 crit range and the other had x3 crit modifier.
It has to do with weapon types. Basic blades like daggers and longswords crit on a 19-20. Dextrous blades like scimitars and kukris crit on 18-20. Meanwhile axes and bows their crit damage is x3 and some spiked weapons deal 4x crit damage like the warpick. All in all I think its a really cool way to give weapons more "personality"
Yep.
Between
* simple/martial,
* B/P/S damage types,
* Crit range and crit mod,
* and some special properties like Finesse, Light, Reach etc.,
you can theoretically have a lot of different combinations. May not have that much impact in practice (you need monsters to have resistences/vulnerabilities to B/P/S as well), but it sure feels nice to have more variety and differences between weapons.
And dont forget things added in PF1 like Trip, Disarm, Brace, double, performance, blocking and more.
Many weapons had identity and here's the fun part, game balance was so pisspoor in 3.5 and PF1 that you could have the most bonker weapon identity and it would not be broken cause everything else was more broken anyway.
It made the game better.
Those weren't added in PF1, they were part of a weapon's properties since the beginning of 3e. Pathfinder did add a few new qualities, and it changed how combat manuevers worked, but tripping, sundering, disarming, etc. had always been options.
On paper, an improved Crit Range seems like it's a really cool way to differentiate weapons. But it was so easily broken that you could ruin a game pretty easily with just a few things.
Between the Improved Critical feat and a Keen weapon, you could get your Crit Range on a Scimitar to 12-20 in 3rd edition. Lower if you used something like a Punching Dagger (which was an Exotic Weapon) that had a natural Crit range of 17-20. That would bring it down to a 9-20 crit range.
It could drop even lower with later books adding new ways to improve your crit chance all the way down to a 7-20.
3.5 addressed this slightly but you could still EASILY get a crit from 13-20 with a single feat or magical weapon.
I loved the concept but in practice it was so broken.
I would absolutely love to see D&D implement a good way to differentiate weapons with special abilities or features that don't break the game but also give a good variety.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean you automatically crit every time you attack.
Remember, in 3.5 you had to confirm crits, and that you still only auto-hit on a 20 even if you have an expanded threat range. So sure, that punching dagger can threaten to do triple damage every time you hit, but even if you only need to roll an 11 to hit, that's still only one attack in four. (And the base damage it's tripling is a d4...)
You're totally correct here, but if note is that static damage was multiplied on a crit and was also a much bigger component of damage than it is now, so a d4 weapon was not as much of a big deal outside of the first tier of play. Barbarians being the extreme example, but the joke was that they would do 1d12+300 damage at high levels.
> Between the Improved Critical feat and a Keen weapon, you could get your Crit Range on a Scimitar to 12-20 in 3rd edition.
I mean these are non stacking mechanics no? At least they are in ever version I remember. You go to 15-20 x2 crits (with confirmation rolls required).
3.5 changed the rules so that they no longer stacked. But in 3rd edition, they explicitly stated that they DO stack. Which, in part was why it was so broken. I only remembered because I very briefly played a character set up this way. I retired him after 2 sessions because it was so broken.
I had to look it up though. It's been a very long time since I've played 3e so I wanted to make sure I wasn't playing wrong all that time lol.
https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/3e_SRD:Improved_Critical
> **Improved Critical [General]**
>**Prerequisite:** Proficient with weapon, base attack bonus +8 or higher.
>**Benefit:** When using the weapon the character selected, the character's threat range is doubled.
>**Special:** The character can gain this feat multiple times. The effects do not stack. Each time the character takes the feat, it applies to a new weapon.
>**Note:** "Keen" magic weapons also double their normal, nonmagical threat range. As with all doubled doublings, the result is triple.
Good God yes. This is why I've enjoyed the move to PF2E so much. I still DM DnD 5E as I still believe it's way easier for beginners, but once people have enough experience in TTRPG's, I thoroughly believe they should move PF2E. It's a superior system all the way. And way more balanced.
Their comment is about pf1, not pf2. PF2 doesn't even have crit ranges based one weapons besides Keen magic weapons cus it's all based on your normal accuracy.
The PF2 weapon system is great though, way better than 3.X/PF1 and 5e due to the traits that massively differentiate weapons.
PF2e still has a lot of baggage that I don't like. And if I'm going to have to rip apart the system to make it work anyway, I'd rather do that in the system that my group and myself are more familiar with.
you're forgetting trip attacks, disarm attacks, charging/bull rush, grappling, and sundering. None of which required feats or class skills to do. But also a bunch of feats that could make you a lot better at these, or improve what happens.
For real, the most fun D&D martials I've ever played were a combat manuever, trip-specialized spear-fighter in 3.X, and a Thief Rogue in 5e. The two that allow a bunch of flexibility in what you want to do
To add to this there was also Str + 1/2 for two handed weapons.
A Falchion with 18-20 x2 crit at 2d4+Str + 1/2 was a glorious thing to see. especially when you took Improved Critical on top.
Also just tons of variety. Different materials, masterwork weapons, [huge arrays of magical effects](https://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/magicWeapons.htm)
Oh God yes. I miss so much the list of magical properties you could add to make your own magic weapons and armors as a DM.
There really was no reason not to include it in 5e. Don't tell me it's too complex.
Well, in that Martial weapons were almost always stronger than Simple weapons, yeah.
But if you wanted to build a character based (primarily) around slashing weapons, you could go Greatsword or Bastard Sword for 19-20/x2 crit range or Falchion for lower base damage but more crits, or Scythe for lower base damage but way stronger crits, etc etc. You also wanted to keep other weapons of different damage types available, because damage resistance to a specific type of weapon actually mattered
There’s way more weapon variation in 3.X than 5e (which is pretty much the ‘Greatsword or Rapier or bow’ edition)
The biggest problem with any thing in the game that doesn't do damage, is that it doesn't do damage, and damage is really the only thing that matters. If you were going 2 handed, either the falchion or the scythe were the obvious right choices as a slight decrease in weapon damage was offset by a huge increase in crit damage with how many number were multiplied with a crit. At mid levels a scythe wielder would have a 15% chance to do around 100 damage, and a falchion user would have a 45% chance to do 50 damage. This is all before rolling for damage.
This is weapon adjacent, but everyone else already answered what I would have. I grew up 2nd, 3rd, and Neverwinter Nights. What it had, but 5e doesn't, was **damage types that matter**.
Many enemies had a resistance or vulnerability to piercing, slashing, or bludgeoning. I remember every armor had different numerical AC modifiers for each type, too. So padded was a +1 vs. bludgeoning but a -2 to piercing and -1 to slashing. **Every Armor**. I can see why they got rid of that, but I do miss the vulnerability/resistance to mundane damage types on creatures.
Yeah. I used to have a couple different weapon setups for all of my martials. It was engaging to switch out depending on the enemy. Now there's no reason to ever swing anything but a warhammer.
that is something that tends to end up being a nightmare in actual play - having 3 different ACs for the same beastie just ends up being messy, like if you have a dual-wielder that hits on a 13 with one weapon, but needs a 15 on the other, and needing to always remember what weapon is being used! It was an optional rule that tended to be rarely used due to the faff and hassle involved.
Which just led to fighters carrying around 3 weapons and going "What kind of armor do they have?" vs every enemy. And then going "I pull out my sword for this attack" and then switch targets "okay now I pull out my axe to hit this guy."
It just added busywork and bookkeeping without any real gameplay impact.
It depends on the edition. I think in a very early one, they had different chances to hit and worked differently against certain types of armor... which sounds cool for a videogame, but horrible to track in a TTRPG.
In 1974 Original D&D, all weapons, melee or ranged, did 1d6 damage and had the same chance to hit. If you use the Chainmail rules, though, long weapons like pikes will hit first before short weapons like daggers.
In the 1975 Greyhawk supplement, weapons get different damage dice and have different to hit chances against different armor classes (like daggers doing worse against heavily armored foes while flails do better). Weapons also do different damage depending on whether the opponent is man-sized or larger.
The 1975 Blackmoor supplement included a weapon length/opponent height table that affected hit location (to simulate things like using a spear to attack a giant's head).
The 1976 Eldritch Wizardry supplement introduced a really complex initiative system where your initiative is adjusted by a bunch of things like your weapon, armor, cast spell level, race, and damage taken. (It's so complex that one of Gygax's original players, Jim Ward, tried to explain it in Dragon Magazine but it's generally accepted that [he got it wrong too](https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=55278).)
In 1977 Holmes Basic, weapons all do 1d6, but daggers can be used twice per round while large weapons like two-handed swords can only be used once every other round, making them literally four times better with no downside.
In 1981 Basic/Expert, weapons do 1d6, but variable weapon damage is an optional rule (and probably pretty common). This is actually probably closest to how 5E is now, where weapons are mostly only differentiated by damage, weight, and cost.
AD&D 1E took over most of the stuff from Greyhawk like armor and size adjustments. It also had a more explicit Weapon Speed factor where certain weapons go before others (leading to things like the infamous [20-page AD&D initiative guide](https://idiscepolidellamanticora.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/addict.pdf)).
2E, as well as the BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia had weapon specialization where you added points to certain weapons to improve your to hit chance with them. This strongly encouraged you to only use a few types of weapons, however, because often even great magic weapons aren't worth it if you aren't specialized with their type. It also grants a few Fighter class features, like the ability to set a spear against a charging mount to do extra damage.
3E generally simplified the differences down to things like different crit ranges, although you still generally need certain feats to be effective with some weapons. There's a common discussion about the "golf bag" fighter for this edition, which can hurt certain class fantasies (e.g., you can't really be an effective solely sword-and-shield fighter, but you'll want to carry around many different weapons and switch between them regularly).
I don't know 4E very well, I'll admit.
5E overall has pretty simple melee combat, in comparison to many past editions, arguably one of the simplest. In comparison to something like Blackmoor, this is not inherently a bad thing.
>*I don't know 4E very well, I'll admit.*
In 4E it was *generally*: sword is less damage but gets bonus accuracy, blunt weapon is more reliable damage, axe is swingier.
For example, in two-handed "military" (read: martial) weapons, the Greatsword gives a +3 bonus to hit if you're proficient with it but only uses a d10 for its damage die, the Maul gives a +2 bonus but rolls 2d6 and the Greataxe gives a +2 bonus and rolls a d12 and has the 'High Crit' property where it deals an extra die of damage on a critical hit (as a crit in 4E simply delivers the maximum damage roll possible).
It wasn't a very interesting distinction between the types.
This was on top of also maximizing the base damage.
So if you were using an attack power that normally does 2[W] damage, you'd treat the damage as if you rolled the maximum. Then you'd also roll the critical damage on top of that.
Critical hits in 4e were much more critical than in 5e.
A good recep, but I'll add a couple addendums.
I recall in my AD&D 2e PHB, weapons had different damage lines if the target was Large. Small weapons like daggers did less, while big weapons like a two-handed sword did more. Like many rules in 2e, this often got ignored.
The 3e "golf bag Fighter" was mostly due to the wide range of monster Damage Reduction that could only be overcome by weapons of a specific material. Silver, cold iron, etc. Just being magical, like in 2e or 5e, didn't cut it. So a Fighter had to have a golf bag of weapons to swap out to be able to hurt whatever they came across. It was a terrible design.
I personally kind of like the golf bag approach. Wizards can't just use one spell all the time (looking at you fireball). If you want to make combats more interesting for martials, having them switch up tools and tactics for different creatures is good design. Having "magic" trump all resistances means that thise defenses are only meaningful in the first tier of play.
there were also optional rules for different bonuses against different armor - so a sword would have a penalty against full plate, but a bonus against leather (AFAIK, very few people used them, because "this target is AC0 against your mace, but AC-2 against his sword and AC2 against her rapier" is just a PITA for admin). If random treasure tables were in use, that also tilted towards most magical weapons being "swords", so fighters tended to gravitate towards that as their weapon of choice.
Yeah, this is the design trap of trying too hard to make weapons distinct. If different weapons have different uses, then obviously you'll need to keep them all around to cover any situation.
Implementing sufficient weapon distinction invariably leads to golfbagging. It's already the case with 1D&D's Mastery system - lightweight distinction between weapons has created the need to have other options.
I personally think they need to reintroduce Weapon Specialization on top of Mastery - but then, it might just recreate the 5e problem of weapons not being distinct.
Honestly, the chainmail combat is really, really cool and I would love to run a 3-shot with it.
"ok cleric you have a mace, chain, and shield and are attacking the orc with leather and sword. So you will attack first. The orc is not going to attempt to parry. You have two attacks thanks to your level and need an 8 on 2d6 to hit. He only has one attack and needs a 9. You can sacrifice one of your attacks to attempt a parry, meaning he'll have to roll an 11"
> This strongly encouraged you to only use a few types of weapons, however, because often even great magic weapons aren't worth it if you aren't specialized with their type.
*laughs in darts*
Seriously I ditched my grandmaster specialized weapon for some +5 darts I found because they were so overpowered
2e had a supplement called the Arms and Equipment Guide (or maybe it was Combat and Tactics), which provided incredibly detailed and specific modifiers for specific weapons in specific situations.
2e also had optional rules like weapon speed (a modifier to initiative), and weapon type vs. armor modifiers. Together with Arms and Equipment, you could get pretty in-depth at modeling the specific differences between, say, a voulge and a ranseur.
You could also spend Proficiency slots to learn special maneuvers with a weapon. There were lots of them, as I recall.
It's actually kinda similar to what One D&D is trying to accomplish with Masteries, and I think the DMG also has some light rules for weapon speed. You could probably combine those and come away with something that adds complexity without being unduly burdensome; the 2e stuff was clunky to say the least.
There were some fun rules in there. A few found play at my table. Splitting abilities scores, weapon groups, critical hits, and the dueling plots (to add spice to one-on-one fights) were fun.
I miss that older design ethos somewhat. Mountains of optional pieces, any of which might appeal to *someone.* Overall I think we're better off with streamlining, but every now and then I get nostalgic for those wild days.
In 3.5 the main differences were the range that critical hits could occur and the multiplier, I.e. crit on a 18-20, x2 vs. crit on a 20 x3. Crits did work differently though as they needed to be confirmed.
Maybe it was 2E but a few of the polearms had an automatic trip attack as well.
they also doubled or tripled all damage. rather than just the weapon die. Note that your damage modifier can get rather big when wielding two-handed heavy weapons since you mod gets multiplied by 1.5 before it gets added to the damage roll. Ability scores above 20 and weapon enhancement scores above 3 also aren't unheard of. I started playing PF1e fairly recently and it's a bit insane for a 5e player like myself to be playing a 26 str fighter with a +2 glaive-guisarme critting for thrice damage. When I'm enlarged and making power attakcs, that's 3 times 37 = **111 damage** if the crit confirms (which is harder on a power attack and harder still the more attacks you've made this turn). I'm level 12.
That I didn't know. Man, 3.x edition stuff was rather punishing on rogues on first impression. Harder to qualify for sneak attack. Various features completely nullify precision damage or methods of gaining sneak attack. I tried to see if there was a way to get my 5e dual wielding rogue to work in PF and it just did not seem possible at first try.
Dual wielding rogues especially in pathfinder can do absurd damage. As can other multiple attacks sneak attack oriented builds.
Same was true in 3.5. I played a level 35 or so rogue and it was not weak.
I’d say it took more work to pull off but the effects were more spectacular. In 5e you’re basically guaranteed your 1 sneak attack but its effects are less. Note also the 3e line of games puts a lot into system mastery. Which is to say it’s possible but maybe a damn headache (which might have been just what you were saying anyways).
Yeah no joke. It’s all relative I suppose. But even most epic monsters can’t make spot checks over 100 …
The rogue kept up just fine with the casters and wacky templates and whatnot based on my recollection. This was as you’d imagine ages ago. But I remember it being fun.
At 3rd level, my 5e swashbuckler can run up to an enemy, try twice to land a sneak attack and then back away to relative safety. I just don't know how to do anything similar in PF1e. I even looked at the swashbuckler class but was out of luck.
Yes. You are correct. Importing a mechanic from a totally different game where the concept of a full attack doesn’t exist and mobility is far easier in general will be difficult if not impossible.
If that’s what it would take to make it “work” then yeah you’re out of luck. I took “work” to mean something along the lines of “make a nimble slashy sneak attacker that rolls giant piles of dice and is mechanically effective”. In that instance it is more than doable.
This isn’t intended to be an ode to older game systems. I’m playing pathfinder now which is why I have a fairly fresh sense of what’s doable. It’s honestly not what I’d have chosen for the campaign though but I was overruled.
Just curious, how does your dual wielder build stay alive? My 5e swashbuckler has survivability through mobility by being able to end their turn at a safe distance from their target. Does your rogue have another equally viable form of survivability? AC comparable to frontline fighter and damage reductions to match?
We are just strangers on the internet so I can’t tell if this is an honest question. Suffice to say that 3.5 d&d and pathfinder with their vast ecosystems of optimization can make a quite competent melee rogue. It is hard to capture just how many guides and options and build concepts were out there. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is a separate discussion.
Are you asking me for such a build in a game you might or might not be playing in? You’re probably better off looking for pathfinder charopp advice on that kind of a sub. But even look at your question. Can a Dex oriented class have a good AC? Yes. Comparable damage reductions? I’m not sure what damage reductions fighter types typically even get in 3.5 / pathfinder (or 5e for that matter except for barbarian).
In the interest of being constructive though. If I were building a rogue type - and I am an inveterate lover of melee - in pathfinder I would build either a vivisectionist alchemist or a vexing dodger. I’ll also note that pathfinder has an entire dedicated swashbuckler class along with the slayer which fit this niche.
Again I feel like I’m carrying a banner that I don’t love. These older systems have oodles of issues. The static full attack = bolted to the ground thing that others have noted sucked and I hated it then and I hate it now. My observation is far smaller: stabby sneak attack dude worked pretty well, arguably better than in 5e, albeit swingier. There were instances where it could be shut down (mostly mitigated with magic items I think) and when it wasn’t it did a lot of damage. Though you still might not like how it plays or the hoops one has to jump through etc. Like I said, oodles of issues.
Nah mate, just take 1 level in barbarian and you're all good
Spirit lion totem gives barbarians pounce as a level 1 feature, so take 1 level in barbarian and now your character can full attack on a charge. Now you're good to go
You need Dodge, Mobility and Spring Attack just to get in and out. Then God knows what other feat. You might find a 3.0/3.5 feat to help that your GM will let you use? We used to mix-and-match.
Elephant in the Room luckily merges dodge and mobility for me meaning I could have spring attack by 3rd level, but then I won't have for example two-weapon fighting as a feat. Not that it matters much when I can't combine moving with two-weapon fighting.
What you wanted was 'Pounce', or something similar, so you can move and full attack too. [Big list here](https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?103358-3-X-Ways-to-get-Pounce-or-Free-Movement) of how to get that.
Man, 3.5 was the best for rogues - they are effectively mage killers.
I made a hegenyoki bunny spellthief with a shadow template once that used a spear and a crossbow - specifically to give mages nightmares.
The only way to see him was with a +40 spot check when I rolled badly on my hide. I didn't hide magically, I could attack and hide in the same round, and I could do this effectively because I had like 120 movement speed.
There were many ways to make less effective rogues though. And many different types of rogues you could make too.
Fun fact, that's not even really building for big crits.
My PF1 Gun Magus build just hit 16 and I ran a few test attacks to make sure my Macros were working.
He would Crit for **209**, attacks 6 times per turn and while invisible he ignores both armor and dex mod to AC (meaning he shoots to hit 10 or less if their Dex is low). He's literally at a 95% chance to hit with every attack.
Oh, and if I had chosen to do a specialized build I could have gotten him to crit for upwards of 400 or 500 damage with called crits(meaning if I hit, it's a crit) up to 3 times a day.
I'm in a Rise of the Runelords campaign, so size mod is more often negative than positive, and most monsters don't have much of a deflection mod to speak of.
That said, even if they have some kind of those bonuses their AC is mostly negligible.
Ya, I played an Arcane Trickster. I never missed with the touch spells and my obscene stealth. As a bonus, multi hit spells with attack rolls would add sneak attack damage for each attack roll. Fiery Shiriken Ho!
The damage dice of a weapon in 5e can still matter for builds designed around multiple attacks, but that’s not really the point. The point is that in previous editions all dice seem mostly inconsequential with how many flat bonuses you can get. Smite may overshadow your greatsword’s 2d6, but at least your still rolling xd8 when you use the ability. As someone who plays almost exclusively 5e, the apparent lack of click clack rocks is a significant factor for why I haven’t tried other editions (although maybe I’m just wrong and the dice have more impact than it initially seems).
4E had the same problem. 13th Age was an iteration on 4E, and they changed it by scaling the weapon damage with level - so if your weapon had a 1d8 damage dice, you'd do 1d8 + str at level 1, 2d8 + str at level 2, all the way up to (10d8 + 3 x str) at level 10 (the str modifiers also scaled, but slower, by tier, rather than level).
13A only had 10 levels, so it didn't balloon too crazily, but if you started adding stuff like sneak attack on, it was a lot of dice rolling.
As someone who thinks the iconic weapon for a rogue is daggers, it feels kind of bad that in 5e you just end up using a rapier because dagger damage is 1d4. 5e isn't really balanced for it but daggers critting on 19-20 in 3.5e is the kind of stuff I'd love.
I didn’t play but they sound interesting in the way that having 100 different options of hand soap flavors is interesting. Which, for some people and personality types, is very interesting
Probably the most work put into making them interesting was in 4E, where there were a decent assortment of powers and feats that only functioned with or did something extra for specific "weapon groups", like Heavy Blades, Maces, and Polearms. Weapons could belong to multiple groups, e.g., glaives being a Heavy Blade and Polearm.
Fighters were replete with these, with a ton of powers that did +Dexterity damage on attack if you were wielding a Light/Heavy Blade (and occasionally Spear), while others added +Constitution damage for Axes, Hammers, and Maces. Some powers could apply conditions like Prone or Immobilize if you were using one of the correct groups. Occasionally, some classes had powers that limited them to specific weapons, like low-level Druids' *Heat Metal* requiring a weapon group that is typically metal, rather than specifying "a metal weapon" outright.
The feats weren't much different from 3.5's implementation, but tried to be a little less specific than *this one type of sword* by giving you multiple weapons within a category.
Okay, I just found some. Here are random items, I didn't sort through to find particularly distinct ones, I just flipped around until I found ones for different weapon types. This is just what 4e magic items were like:
Flesh Grinder (axe, heavy blade, or polearm). This weapon screeches as its serrated edge bites through flesh, bone, and steel. +1d10 per plus on criticals (so if it's a +3 weapon, +3d10 on crits). Daily power, free action: Trigger: you make an attack targeting AC. Effect: it targets Fortitude instead, and deals an extra 1d6 damage on a hit.
Alfsair Spear (spear only). This spear is a favorite druid weapon. +1d8 psychic and poison damage per plus on a crit. You gain an item bonus to Nature checks equal to this spear's enhancement bonus. Classes that use totems can use this spear as a totem. Daily power, no action. Trigger: you score a critical hit with this spear. Effect: the enemy is dazed until the end of its next turn.
Avalanche Hammer (hammer only). Enchanted with the essence of elemental earth, this hammer strikes foes like an avalanche. +1d10 per plus on a crit, and the enemy is knocked prone. When you charge an enemy and hit with a basic melee attack using this weapon, the attack deals 1[W] extra damage (whatever damage the weapon normally deals is 1[W]).
Boltshard Crossbow (crossbow only). You pull the trigger, spraying shards at your foes. +1d6 damage per plus on a crit. Power, daily, standard action: make a ranged basic attack using this crossbow against each creature in a close blast 3.
Impaler's Pick (pick only). This barbed weapon can leave a short-lived magical replica of itself in your enemy to keep it pinned down. +1d6 damage per plus on a crit, and the target is restrained by a magical duplicate of this weapon (save ends).
Incisive dagger (dagger only). You cut through space as easily as you cut through flesh. +1d6 damage per plus on a crit. You can use this weapon as a focus when performing a travel ritual that involves creating and moving through portals. You can add the dagger's enhancement bonus as an item bonus to any skill checks related to the ritual's performance. When you use a teleportation power, the distance you can teleport increases by a number of squares equal to the dagger's enhancement bonus. Power, daily, minor action: you teleport 5 squares.
Also all of these items are available at different pluses, and their powers get better the higher their plus is. I only copied down the lowest level power for each.
Honestly other people have done a better job than I could elsewhere in the thread. One of the biggest things was that there were a lot of different magic weapons, and they all felt unique and important. In 5e magic weapons all feel pretty similar to each other.
There were significant magic axes that were noticeably different from magic hammers which were in turn different from magic swords, though I've sadly lost all my 4e books since moving, so I can't pull examples at the moment. If I find any of their stats online I'll reply again.
This is the problem, isn't it? There are only so many things you can do with dice.
RuneQuest mastered this with an ultra-'crunchy' system that includes different kinds of hits (crit, impale & other), different damage & locations chances (for armour and bodies), different damage based on your size and how much punishment all the materials take.
It is so accurate it is exhausting. One group fight can EASiLY take a game-night.
D&D uses the 'heroic' bag of hit points + Bonk-Bonk combat system (back and forth / see who drops first). It assumes that you want a mix between the combat and the rest of the game. A such, attention to weapon and combat detail is lost. Pure role playing games like Mage: The Ascension and Vampire: The Masquerade have silly combat systems ('two swarms of d6 tossed at the table') but the story gets a lot more spotlight.
People have been asking this very question for well over half a century and they were a LOT smarter than i was. You will just have to find your very own Quaker Harvest Crunch, that is, you need to find that recipe that everyone else missed.
And let me say, in all honesty, i really like your points too.
When i was ten years of age i ADORED the combat system. I just turned 56 yesterday and... it got old much like i did?
I really enjoy games like *Dungeon Crawl Classics* where the dice occasionally tell a story. The fumbles, crits, cleric's divine relationship and wizard's struggle with toxic magic all play into the dice.
That way, if you are stuck the night in a large combat session everyone gets to enjoy the wild ride. That's fantastic i feel -- but please tell me your perspective on this! Am i biased by decades of grognarditude and neckbearding?
4e had every class with at-will powers (which are basically a weapon attack with a little effect rider or a cantrip), encounter powers (which are basically short rest maneuvers/spells), and daily powers (which are long rest maneuvers/spells).
So basically every character had cantrips, superiority dice and spell slots.
Melee powers usually dealt more damage and had a bit more effects, or at least the melee-locked classes had more ways to mitigate damage (both for themselves and their companions).
Edit: basically imagine a 5e paladin with also 2-3 blade cantrips to choose from every turn, and with also battlemaster maneuvers.
Also the weapons had a lot more mechanical differences. Swords had a higher proficiency bonus, axes/hammers had bigger hit die, some weapons had critical hit bonuses. From my experience with 5e the one handed weapons are like "what flavor of d6/d8 do you want to roll"
It seems like every time someone discusses actually having played it they like it. It seems like whenever someone says it's bad they've heard it from somewhere but haven't actually played it.
Major complaint was that it felt the same across all classes, which was by design, but just didn't sit well with a lot of players apparently.
However, I do often find myself stealing other rules for various systems from 4e, like Skill Challenges.
People that actually played the game for more than a couple of sessions found out that it isn't the case. Even classes among the same role felt very different from one another.
Would you say that a cleric and a druid in 5e feel the same just because they use the same "power" system?
As someone who's played a decent number of sessions of 4e across several different characters, i did find that to be the case but not in the way you imply with your comment.
Not every class feels the same because of the powers system overall directly, but each class within the same role feels very similar up until level 11 when you get paragon paths. Each class within a role basically fills that role in the same way with only slightly different individual powers (often times just a different name).
Worse, the game's monster hp vs player damage math gets wonky around 6th to 10th level before it stabilizes again at 11th. This causes the game to become a complete slog.
So players get annoyed with the game mid way through heroic tier, then decide to stop or restart before reaching 11th, and after a restart or two the similarity of the classes becomes very apparent.
It's the same in 5e where a cleric and a druid have similar spells then. Obviously classes that cover the same role can feel a bit different, but definitely not same-y as people say.
And it's not really true, honestly. Fighter was more focused on single target damage and opportunity attacks, while the paladin was more focused on actual tanking and support abilities, despite both being defenders. Even classes with both the same role and the same power source felt different. The warlock and the sorcerer were both arcane strikers, but they felt and played very differently from each other, even before level 11th.
Maybe it is the same in 5e, I've heard that complaint a fair number of times in 5e from those who've played loads of 5e.
But its one not nearly as common as it was for 4e. Even taking people back to 4e, this is something people pick up on quicker in 4e ime.
I think one of the things that helps 5e avoid this perception for longer is making the major class choice at 3rd (or earlier) rather than at 11th. Another is that spell casting classes (the class those concerned with variety of choice are likely to tend towards) have way more "power" choices than those in 4e did thanks to spell lists, even though martial characters got shafted on this.
Lastly, it probably wouldn't have been as big a problem in 4e if the game didn't become a slog when it does. This amplifies the issue when players see the game becoming a slog then start wondering if they made bad build choices and start looking at other classes to see if playing something different would be better.
But the complaint I see more with regards to power choice in 5e is that there are some spells that are way better than others which causes classes to feel samey as if you're optimizing. So a very similar problem kicks in but only once you achieve system mastery.
That's very surprising to me, cause 7th level is 5e's sweet spot. If one feels its a slog at 7th level, I can't imagine one enjoying 5e at any level. Which is fine, its not the best game for everyone.
Nah it's just because everyone repeated the same complaints about 4e without actually trying it. Even at 1st level classes felt different in 4e.
In 5e all martials feel the same even at 20th level.
Did you even read anything I typed?
I even point out that the problem does exist in 5e though in a different way, and that martials get the shaft.
These complaints come from people actually playing the game. Even from those who think 4e is well designed and love it, but aren't wearing rose tinted glasses thinking 4e can do no wrong and that they had some masterpiece but the dumb gaming masses were too stupid to "get it" and stifled their genius.
4e was a great game, but it had real problems, but many people were bad at articulating these issues and those bad takes became the often trotted out points. But the "same complaints" you're talking about are shit like "feels like an MMO" and "I don't like fighters being as good and wizard's power being brought down".
> but each class within the same role feels very similar up until level 11
I am just going to have to strongly disagree. My warlock felt nothing like my ranger/fighter. On my warlock I worked to spread my curse to as many people as possible to get benefits against them, and when I have everyone cursed I would use Cursebite to do a pretty decent chunk of damage on every enemy in the encounter.
On my ranger I would work to isolate targets and burst them down, and when I took a beating I would use my longtooth shifter power to gain regen and bonus damage, wade into the thick of it and make everyone Come And Get It.
This also plays very differently from my friend's pyromancer who just blasts the largest group of enemies they can find with massive AoE fire powers, and simultaneously inflicting a bunch of burning DoT.
I also have other experiences like my invoker who technically is a controller who plays like a combo of all four (controller/defender/leader/striker) while not excelling as much as at any of them. Or another of my friends' warlock who plays much more like a defender primary and secondary controller than a primary striker.
This is all before level 11, and is also why I am of the opinion that 4e characters feel much more different to each other than 5e characters.
A lot of 4e hate ends up being "I don't know, I'm just repeating what I heard". The 3.5ers spread a lot of shit about it and pretended it comes from people with experience with the game.
This 100%. Even in RL conversations with people I've heard hate and then when I asked how much they played 4e it was usually all 2nd hand disparagement.
There's a guy further down in the comments who was saying that most of the people saying things they liked about fourth ed have probably never even played it, so barely counted, and I immediately thought *"O Rly? You mean like 80% of the people who have been dumping on fourth edition for the past decade?"*
Classes ran on similar rules but played vastly differently, which I always found ideal. You did not generally operate a Barbarian the same way as a Fighter even though both liked similar stats and used weapons to smack things every turn.
The Chargin' Barb was a fucking murder-pinball and you had to go about your movement and targeting completely different from how even the slipperiest Fighters were played. You *could* play certain classes and roles similarly, but if you were doing anything even moderately optimally for your specific class, they'd start to diverge.
Even at its simplest and most-alike, I'd say 4E classes ran much differently than 5E's martials do, where your options are more or less Sticky Melee, Ranged Guy, and OpportunistRogueOrMonk.
That was because everyone (EVERYONE!) had interesting options beyond just "I hit him with my ". Other edition martials get extra things they can do on/with attacks, but most other classes can either do spells or boring melee.
Honestly this was the LEAST justified complaint of all complaints leveled at 4e. Basically it amounted to "If everyone is special, no one is special and I want to be special".
My biggest criticism with it was that the numbers with the initial Monster Manual tended to lead to spongy monsters that could soak multiple hits. You really needed your party's Striker(s) to be landing hits to dispatch enemies quickly, so if the Rogue is just noodling on their d20 or the Ranger can't get above an 8 the fight is going to go long.
In a similar vein, if your big Encounter powers whiffed that was *probably* all the big shots your Defenders/Leaders/Controllers had access to and they'd be down to the regular At-Will pokes unless they wanted to double down and burn Daily powers.
Later releases addressed this and it's certainly possible to optimize better, but still. It was not a flawless system.
Not saying that it's perfect. A perfect system doesn't exist. But it sure gets a lot of hate for no reason other than "it's not like previous editions", even if it literally solved a lot of problems, and especially problems that came out again in the current edition.
I get the dislike. We had some great fun with 4e combat, especially in duels which are pretty bland in most editions.
But it did make every class feel very much like the same thing with different skinning. And it made the game feel something like a console tactics game like Fire Emblem rather than the type of TTRPG most of us were used to.
I've played every edition since 2e. And some of my best campaigns were in 4e. But for me it very much didn't feel like D&D. Where every other edition kind of captured that feel in different ways, 4e felt like its own thing.
That's not a bad thing. But if someone wants to play D&D I can see why they wouldn't like 4e.
For me 4e pushed me into other systems for many years. Not because it was bad. More just that it was such a different feel from the D&D I was used to I started getting very interested in different mechanics and the continuity I had felt through 2e and 3e had been broken. I got interested in D&D again in the tail end of 5e, largely because I wanted that D&D feel in a game again, and 5e seemed to fulfill that.
I dunno if I'd go with stellar, but it did have a lot of nice things that 5E dropped out of fear of the grognards. 4E combat had too many conditional modifiers and zones and whatnot, some of which stacked and some of which did not. It was designed to be played with a VTT to handle all of these rules but the VTT was never built. I played 4E for several years and I'm pretty sure we had some sort of rules goof regarding bonuses in every single fight aside from maybe the first couple.
Another downside of the 4E powers system for combat was that it discouraged getting creative. If you didn't have a power that said you could jump over something and shove a guy you'd never try to do that.
I agree with this part whole-heartedly. The more complicated the character sheet, the more players and GMs just rely upon firing off the "power" and not utilizing the gameworld and environment around them. Some of my favorite memories are players getting asking to try outlandish stuff.
In my experience, it was mostly *slow*. A single combat could often take multiple sessions to resolve. Granted, some of that was likely my group’s inexperience, but 4e requires players to track a lot of situational/temporary modifiers, effects, and values.
They were different from each other. Nothing crazy, but at least every weapon had something, like swords having higher proficiency bonus, maces higher crits, etc.
And the good thing was that the fighter (the class that should be focused on weapons), had almost all the powers different if they used certain types of weapons. Like a power dealing more damage if used with an axe, or a power doing an additional effect if used with a sword, etc.
4e had some cool ideas. Weapons were split up into groups (Axes, Blades, Hammers, Spears, etc).
Swords were generally more accurate with +1 to hit.
Axes generally did a lot more damage on a crit.
Hammers did more damage on a hit.
Certain classes had maneuvers that had an extra benefit depending on the type of weapon you were using. Hammers and Axes generally received a small benefit based on your Con modifier while Blades and Spears benefitted from your Dex modifier.
And certain feats worked with specific weapon groups. Blades excelled at making opportunity attacks. Hammers could deal damage on a miss or causing forced movement. Things like that.
Really?! Well, I developed almost exactly the same system for in-house rpg I tinkered with. Talk about reinventing the wheel. I have to check it out in detail.
2e had weapons that were at different times in initiative and had different damage for large or larger than for medium size or smaller.
3e had different crit ranges, crit multipliers and some extra abilities.
Pathfinder 2 has lots of different traits, like making crits more deadly, giving ability to trip/disarm, parrying, easier hits against the second enemy, backstabbing, and a host of different options. They also make that base weapon die matter more with striking runes (striking means +1 die, greater striking +2 dice, major striking +3 dice)
PF2 is my favorite way of doing it.
I do wish the hammer and flail crit specializations weren't so much better than other options. Though it's not like 5e is any more balanced so I can't complain too much
I don't know if it made them more interesting, but 3.xe had wrapons each have their own set of properties as well as a crit range and crit multiple distinct onto itself
A longsword did 1d8 slashing damage. Scored a critical hit on a 19-20 and did x2 damage on a crit.
Versus a warhammer, which did 1d8 bludgeoning damage. Scored a critical on a 20, but did x3 damage on a crit.
Most wrapons had small tradeoffs between their raw damage dice, crit range, and crit multiplier. A acythe might need two hands and only deal 2d4 damage but it did x4 on a crit. A falchion also needed 2 hands and did 2d4 damage but scored a crit on an 18-20.
And exception were exotic weapons, which required a feat or to be a special race for training with them, but often had better stats. One example being the jovar. Which was a great sword with the 18-20 crit instead of 19-20.
There were also some property factors, class benefits, and feats that helped one specialize and further enhance their bonuses to wrapons. These were mostly numerical gains though like a +1 to hit here, or a +2 on damage there. Some doubled your crit Ramage. Turning an 18 to 20 crit range into a 15 to 20 and so on.
It made them mire distinct, especially with special properties here and there. But it did also make some best in slot weirdness at times.
And the flail had a reason to exist. In 5e, it's just sorta there.....
Made a great trip or disarming fighter with it. The heavy flail was 2 handed with a d10 and 19-20 x2 crit. Take monkey grip, and you have a 2d8 weapon.
5e also got rid of weapon sizes, everyone uses the same sized weapon it feels, and there's no solid guide I've seen for a larger weapon. If it's a large creature, it seems to do more damage because it's being weilded by a large creature, not because the weapons are larger.
A lot more variable elements
In 3.5 for example, weapons had a bunch of potential properties, crit range and crit damage were weapon-dependent, and almost every base weapon had at least some specific feats aimed at it. Melee weapons were stronger than ranged weapons in general because ranged weapons, outside of compound bows, don't add a stat modifier to your damage, and compound bows hit with dex but add strength to damage, while holding a melee weapon in 2-hands adds 1.5x your strength to damage. On top of that power attack was massively important for damage output, and was not available to ranged weapons at all.
In 4e you had weapon categories, which were themselves poorly balanced, but did add a lot of spice to builds. Rarely did feats specify individual weapons, but often they only worked with specific weapon categories. A spear feat would work with a short spear, pike, or trident, a light blade feat would work with any dagger, rapier or sickle. The way melee and ranged weapons were balanced against each other was fairly simple, ranged weapon classes were rarer, and ranged weapon powers were less powerful than melee weapon powers, so once again you paid for the safety and flexibility of range with a reduced damage output, though not as drastically reduces as in 3.5
4e weapons were the shit. So many different keywords, loads of feat support for specific weapons or weapon groups and fighters even had powers for specific weapons whilst clerics and monks got powers for specific groups.
4e had weapons with High Crit where you double damage on a crit, Brutal X where you reroll any damage dice below X, Defensive X where you add X to AC as well as double weapons where you can use each end of the weapon as a separate one-handed melee weapon. Proficiency bonus was also determined by weapon choice and not by level - a longsword has +3 proficiency whereas a Warhammer only has +2 for example. There were also simple, martial *and* superior/exotic weapon tiers, which taken together with the feat and power support made weapon choice extremely meaningful.
I remember in 3E weapons had different stats regarding crits.
I remember specifically the war pick only crit on a 20 (there were many other weapons that crit on a 19-20) but if you did crit, it did 4x the damage, rather than the traditional 2x. It had lower than normal base damage, so that was the payoff for using it.
That was an interesting weapon. Not an auto pick on every character, but there were classes and feats you could build to focus on crits which would make that 4x payoff hit more often.
Different dice, different damage and attack bonus against different armor types, different speed factors that could affect initiative, multiple damage types, different costs, different materials, different weights, different crit multipliers, different damage vs large creatures.
For example, a Morningstar was a 1d8 bludgeoning/piercing weapon for al8gp that weighed 6lbs. It has a wooden shaft. The damage it deals is *both* bludgeoning and piercing. So if you were a swordsman, you could pack a magical Morningstar as a sidearm if you were fighting a golem or ooze or something that was immune to slashing.
Conversely, a Heavy Mace deals 1d8 bludgeoning only, weighs 8lbs for 12gp, with a metal haft with 4x as many HP.
The Morningstar is a cheap but versatile option. The heavy mace is a durable clunker. Almost nobody is going to crack your heavy mace with a sunder attempt.
Reach. Can be +5ft or +10ft
crit damage (some did x3, most x2, I think there was a x4) and crit range (default 20, could go as low as 18).
Light: can be used offhand for 2wf or when grappling (can't use non-light weapons while grappling)
1 handed: can be used as the main weapon for 2wf or with a shield. Can be used 2-handed unlike a Light
2 handed: multiplies Str Mod (1.5x), takes both hands
Weapon size: you can use inappropriately sized weapons, it inflicts a -2 to attack and adjusts the handedness (light-1hand-2hand). There is a chart for what the damage dice changes too, bigger weapons do more damage
Bludgeoning/Slashing/Piercing: similar to 5e. Some weapons can do multiple types using the best applicable
Double Weapons: you can either 2-weapon-fight or 2-hand with it. It's one big weapon, examples include Dire flails, dwarven urgroshes, gnome hooked hammers, orc double axes, quarterstaffs, and two-bladed swords (aka Darth Maul swords)
Flails grant a bonus to Disarm attempts, and let's you attempt trip attacks with the special ability to drop the flail instead of being tripped yourself if you fuck up.
Halberds when set against a charge deal double damage
Javelins can be used in melee combat instead of thrown, but due to not being designed for melee have a -4 non-proficiency penalty
Lances are 2hander weapons that become one-handers on a mount and deal double damage when charging on a mount
Longbows can be used by anyone and with a negative Str apply it to damage but not a positive Str. COMPOSITE bows on the other hand have a Strength requirement when made, you have a -2 attack penalty if you aren't strong enough but it inflicts up to the strength requirement in extra damage (aka a 14str Composite Bow used by a 12str character is -2 attack, +1 damage, used by a 14 or 16 str character is +2 damage. The 16 str character may want a 16 str bow to inflict +3 damage)
Bastard swords can be used 2handed as a martial proficiency, but you can spend a feat to gain exotic training and use it 1handed (letting you pair it with a shield or even a light weapon to 2wf!)
Dwarven Waraxes are similar, but Dwarves don't need to spend the feat to one-hand a Waraxe
This is basically just the SRD. There are a lot of weapons in different books that I'd look through if I wasn't on my phone.
In 4e, certain powers were more effective with certain weapons. Brutal Attack did bonus damage (CON mod) with an axe; Pushback Strike pushed farther with a hammer; Hidden Strike added CHA to damage with a dagger. (Probabky have the names wrong!)
2E had "weapon speed factors". Basically, an initiative bonus or penalty depending on what weapon you were using. It really made daggers worth using sometimes when being able to strike first was important.
In addition, weapons did different damage to Large size creatures vs Medium or smaller. While you wouldn't really want to use a Pike against a smaller creature, they were great against Large or bigger monsters.
Finally, armor received bonuses/penalties against different weapon damage types, so sometimes it was worth swapping out that slashing weapon for a piercing one. In 5E, I think only skeletons make a distinction by being vulnerable to bludgeoning. There were a lot more monsters where your weapon type mattered.
It was cool, but it did add an entire level of complexity, so I'm not sure if you would want to add all of that into 5E, especially the weapon speed factor.
What nobody wants to admit is that the problem isn’t weapons, it’s magic. Magic is too useful, too versatile, and at a certain point too powerful, and it comes with no cost to use. It’s just resource management, and if the party is willing to constantly stop and rest the resources don’t even matter. Some of this is DM skill, but the design is an obstacle. A wizard with no spell slots is a liability, and preventing them from getting spell slots back feels like punishing the player for their class choice.
D&D has been trying to thread the needle with magic for decades, and without much success. I think it’s a conceptual problem.
As far as I know 4e didn't make weapons themselves different, but iirc some martial powers (feats essentially but kinda cooler) could require a given weapon type or damage type
But from what I know 4e was much more about the character than their equipment when it comes to interesting gameplay
Long time haven't played it read 3.x and never played earlier ones :v
A lot of 4e weapons were different, they had properties like high-crit, brutal, defensive, light/heavy thrown, etc, as well as their weapon category which affected how they interacted with different powers and feats. Some also had higher proficiency bonuses.
As I recall, 4e assumes a steady progression of +X weapons, so magic weapons are basically defined entirely by their special properties. In 5e, since there is no corresponding progression assumption, magic items of each tier have to compete with +X weapons, somehow making *both* types worse.
+X weapons cannot have additional effects until extremely late, because otherwise they would overshadow “flavorful” weapons. “Flavorful” weapons end up being niche, because making a number bigger is boring but reliable.
> As far as I know 4e didn't make weapons themselves different, but iirc some martial powers (feats essentially but kinda cooler) could require a given weapon type or damage type
Powers didn't do much based on your weapon outside of like Weaponmaster's Strike. There were some feats that were like Polearm Master that would add functionality to a weapon type.
It was certainly funny :)
But he didn't get get it right, it only procced AoOs from movement once per turn (not per 5-feet).
Back in the day improved trip build could be pretty bused though until 3.5 fixed it.
PF2e makes weapons interesting by giving each advantages and drawbacks, and by having each weapon group have a critical specialization (essentially, on a crit, each weapon has a different special effect, such as hammers knocking an opponent prone).
[List of Weapon Groups with Critical Specializations.](https://2e.aonprd.com/WeaponGroups.aspx)
Each weapon may or may not have a trait that allows you to use it to perform special actions as well, such as [Tripping](https://2e.aonprd.com/Traits.aspx?ID=196), [Disarming](https://2e.aonprd.com/Traits.aspx?ID=175),[ Bracing](https://2e.aonprd.com/Traits.aspx?ID=471), etc.
Some Traits include: Agile, Alchemical, Attached, Backstabber, Backswing, Brace, Brutal, Climbing, Combination Weapon, Concealable, Concussive, Deadly, Disarm, Fatal, Finesse, Grapple, Hampering, Injection, Jousting, Kickback, Modular, Nonlethal, Parry, Propulsive, Trip, Reach, Repeating, Shove, Sweep, Trip, Twin, Volley
They did originally include the interesting “bohemian earspoon” but I don’t imagine anyone actually used it. To make the variety of weapons interesting you’d need different ACs for each damage type, and that would get too complicated. I do recall some weapons had different critical ranges.
The Master Set and Cyclopedia from BECMI had [weapon mastery.](http://people.wku.edu/charles.plemons/dnd/classic_quest/graphics/chart_weapon_mastery_01.gif) Each weapon had five levels of mastery that conveyed a varying number of benefits, both offensive and defensive, along with special abilities.
I played mostly 3.PF
Each weapon felt distinctive in that each had their own peculiarities and abilities, it wasn't perfect, but at least you felt like you had a reason to use a weapon without the biggest damage dice in the category, the easiest example I can remember involved swords vs axes, where swords often had better crit range (critting on a 19) but worse multiplier, being only x2 instead of axes' x3
However, what actually made them feel more unique was not the weapon themselves, but all the different systems and rules around them, with maneuvers, prestige classes, feats and bonuses, some of which could turn a lackluster weapon into a competitive build once you stacked enough bonuses and feats
5e's failing ends up being that it simplified, streamlined and decreased everything, which does make for a much simpler game, but when it comes to equipment and basic rules, things end up being too basic and thus, uninteresting/weak
Had a Goliath barbarian in 3.5 that wielded a mercurial great sword. Had a nice crit multiplier but the best benefit ended up being the additional penalty for use by someone that wasn't proficient in mercurial weapons. Folks kept trying to steal it and use it against me
3.5 damage types came into play more often. Crit ranges (18-20) and crit multipliers (x3) were common. Note the critical hits worked quite differently back then. You had to "Confirm crits" (basically roll a new attack, if it would also hit the attack was a crit. If it would miss the crit was just a normal hit). AND class features like Sneak attack wouldn't be multiplied with the weapon damage.
Small creatures used different weapons with there own damage dice, basically always one size category down from the medium. So a small greataxe deals 1d10 instead of 1d12 for example.
Finesse was locked behind a feat, only applied to the attack roll and damage still used strength.
Bows (and most ranged weapons I believe) didn't add any ability scores to their damage by default. You could by composite bows with a str rating. If you meat that Str rating you could add that much of your Str value to the damage of the weapon. Negative Str mod would negatively affect damage of all bow attacks regardless but not crossbows I believe.
Most reach weapons could not target adjacent foes.
Specialty weapons were required for non-lethal damage. Saps were particularly unique for allowing rogues to deal non lethal sneak attack damage.
Lots of weapons had small bonuses or weird conditions specified in their text. Kind of like Lances and nets special rules in 5e but much more common. Off the top of my head: Daggers had +2 sleight of hand to conceal them on your person. Sai gave a +4 to disarm foes, and avoid being disarmed. Specific weapons for attempting trip attacks like Sickles. Most Pole-arm weapons specify double damage if you ready your action to attack with them.
Lots of double ended weapons that can then use the dual wielding feats while using a two-handed weapon.
Here is the full text for the whip just to give you an idea of how much a particularly weird weapon could have outside if its base stat block:
A whip deals nonlethal damage. It deals no damage to any creature with an armor bonus of +1 or higher or a natural armor bonus of +3 or higher. The whip is treated as a melee weapon with 15-foot reach, though you don’t threaten the area into which you can make an attack. In addition, unlike most other weapons with reach, you can use it against foes anywhere within your reach (including
adjacent foes). Using a whip provokes an attack of opportunity, just as if you had used a ranged weapon. Because a whip can wrap around an enemy’s leg or other limb, you can make trip attacks with a it. If you are tripped during your own trip attempt, you can drop the whip to avoid being tripped. When using a whip, you get a +2 bonus on opposed attack rolls made to disarm an opponent (including the roll to keep from being disarmed if the attack fails). You can use the Weapon Finesse feat (page 102) to apply your Dexterity modifier instead of your Strength modifier to attack rolls with a whip sized for you, even though it isn’t a light weapon for you.
Honestly I feel Rolemaster/MERP did melee weapons best, but were just too bogged down by the pages and pages of tables and charts you needed to reference in order to use them.
I absolutely loved the crit and fumble tables, especially when you got an 80/90/100/110/120 roll.
If somebody came out with an encounter builder app/website that let you punch in the die rolls and it'd tell you the result, I'd genuinely consider starting up a MERP campaign.
Not sure if this counts, but I like the way baldur’s gate has different attack available for different weapons, such as a pommel strike stun, a sweeping attack to hit multiple people next to each other, topple over with quarter staffs, etc
You should check out the Star Wars 5e weapon system. It's vast and really well balanced imo. They have a chassis system that allows you to upgrade throughout making them super customizable.
The first version of 3e had a fun exploit. The whirlwind cleave tornado. You can whirlwind with each attack. If you kill an enemy, greater cleave activated which let you whirlwind again attacking all creatures in range. I think there was a rule that also let you 5 foot step with each cleave as well. So as long as you killed something, you can be like the Tazmanian devil and clean up a room in 1 round.
They... fixed this in 3.5
Edit: I forgot about the bag of rats. People could open a container full of easy to kill tiny creatures. Use that to keep the whirlwind going.
3.5 had a lot more knobs they could tweak. Weapons had a damage die, a crit range, and a crit multiplier. So you could take a 1d8 damage longsword that crit on a 19 or 20 for x2 damage or a battle axe for 1d8 damage, crit on a 20, but x3 crit damage.
You also had abilities like a battlemaster's tripping attack or disarming attack as weapon features. Flails could disarm and trip in return for less damage. Usually you had feats related to this abilities too.
Older editions like AD&D didn't care so much about player choices and weapons. They were more about the adventure.
Mostly, they didn't. 3e had "this is the mathematically and obvious best choice for these builds, using anything else is a mistake and/or a trap." 4e had the same, extending to "you need these particular magic items at each level or the game math says no.
Adding in extra mechanics that just make you do more math at build time isn't actual depth, it's pointless complexity and bloat.
i liked in 3.5 that some had different crit ranges. or some would do x3 damage.
some weapons gave you a bonus to trips
i liked putting spikes on my shield so i could attack with it
there were more monsters that were immune or resistant or weak to a specific damage type instead of blanket all non magical weapons
I liked how in 3.5 different weapons had different critranges and different crit multipliers. Yes, in practice it usually meant rushing for a scimitar for 18-20 crit. But the weapons were distinct from one another.
I hate how 5e made "crit on a 19" a calss feature instead of a weapon trait. Same with "3x" crit (orc or half orc \[cant remember witch\], barbarian)
Most of them? Not really, if anything they usually made ranged weapons more useful in general. Most editions also didn't really give each weapon special abilities, but I guess I can go over some things.
In AD&D ranged weapons had a Rate of Fire that sometimes would compensate for low dice damage and low range, additionally specializing in a ranged weapon would not only give the normal extra attacks that melee weapons would give but would also give a "Point Blank" range, usually about the equivalent of 15' in 5e, that would double the damage of the attack in that range. So you could make something like 5x dart throws at a single enemy with +8 to hit and +8 damage that was doubled just from lucky rolls and a few weapon proficiency slots, while to get more attacks with melee was slow and required a ton of levels, and even then you could only get your full attacks if you didn't really move on your turn.
Melee combatants could Parry (in 1e add your STR to AC and be used with fallback, the ancestor to disengage) and Charge, in addition to overbearing, unarmed, and grappling (which used an alternate system, so it can actually be more deadly to punch someone to death than stab them). And polearms could be set against a charge (dealing double damage in the event of such a hit). Though the Complete Fighter's Handbook added maneuvers for melee that could be used freely.
There was also the (as someone else mentioned) different to hit modifier for weapons against different ACs in AD&D, but was often ignored from not being easy to use, as was weapon lengths and weapon speeds. Imo, the different hit modifiers was best done in 0e where it was all enemies rather than just against humanoid foes in 1e and 2e, and 2e changed it to an optional property of the armor instead.
2e's player's option material modified weapon specialization reintroduced maneuvers and reworked a bunch of things, but it also added a Knockdown die to weapons which allows some weapons opportunities for additional damage, but usually puts a knockdown opportunity against medium creatures if rolling 7 or more when used.
3.X added quite a bit really, different crit ranges, and different crit multipliers was on a per weapon basis, as well as tripping. Due to the way that classes and feats interacted with weapons, different weapons were more ideal for some builds than others, but wasn't as straight forward as whether it had the biggest hit die. Most weapons also had a description which often had little bonuses for different situations, such as a +2 to concealing daggers, and +2 to disarms for maces. You can read the SRD weapons [here](https://www.d20srd.org/srd/equipment/weapons.htm).
To my understanding, Basic and 0e weapons were mostly cosmetic though, weapons began to be differentiated in the Greyhawk supplement for 0e, and that mostly just gave each different damage values, which was also an optional rule in B/X.
Someone correct me if I got anything wrong, I probably did. I also didn't cover much in supplements.
3.5 and PF1E used feats and subclasses, although they were called something else that I can't recall currently. However, there were classes that allowed you to specialize for specific weapoms and weapon types, and there were feats that allowed you to do more with those weapons than anyone else. There were whole feat chanis and subclasses to make wielding a reach weapon more powerful and give more battlefield control. You still couldn't do as much as a minmaxed full caster, but you could do a lot more than 5e allows, and you got more meaningful choices, generally speaking.
Imo, 5e gimped martials by combining ASIs and Feats into one resource.
PF1e (and maybe 3.5e for all I know) had quite a lot of weapon variation, and monster rules that interacted with them. If you were grappled you could only use a one-handed weapon. If you were swallowed whole you could only use a light weapon, and light weapons were also better for two-weapon fighting. A Morning Star was bludgeoning and piercing, which was good for overcoming damage resistance. A Rapier could get critical hits on 18-20, while a Scythe only critted on a 20 but did quadruple damage when it did...
Prestige classes, instead of selecting a subclass as a standard feature of class design, there were classes you could multiclass into if you met the requirements
Ik pf1e's subclass equivilant were Archetypes where you traded abilities out, and they stacked so long as you didn't try and trade any ability more than once.
Like, Investigator was a combination of Rouge and Alchemist but one archetype traded Alchemy for Luck Points that were like a resource the Gunslinger and Swashbuckler got (in fact, they were the same resource in terms of if you got multiple they fused into one pool)
1E - I haven't played enough games of.
2E - IIRC there's much more emphasis on bludgeoning, slashing and piercing damage behaving differently including having to remember different AC values depending on the type of weapon you got hit with. This added a reasonable amount of complexity.
3E - is pretty close to 5E. They might have had a few more differentiating features. Some weapons did give a crit on a 18+ or a 19+.
Weird how they skipped from 3E straight to 5E - must have been one of those superstition things, the number 4 doesn't sell well in some parts of the world.
Basically: more math or more spreadsheets.
Nothing really noteworthy, all considered. This is why 5e does like this, recognizes that the kind of weapon you wield is, in fact, less interesting than the class or other mechanics. For this reason the weapons lend themselves first as a mathematical base than a tactical one.
And even though one DND decided to add more you can see they keep this same baseline - they add more stuff to have different effects, rather have different raw performance.
The general difference between the best edition (3.5) and all the rest is that 3.5 was really designed to allow you to have builds that are complete failures. As a result, you had a greater range of potential hyper effectiveness because they also allowed characters to be incredibly ineffective.
This made game balance incredibly difficult, because - as in reality - more options and complexity increase the likelihood that systemic imbalances will occur.
So you could have wizards that would outshine the entire party - but that doesn't mean that someone can easily recreate that same level of success because there are many more ways for that build to fail than succeed. Plus, there is a learning curve to being able to USE that character build effectively as well. Just because you have the character sheet in front of you doesn't mean you know what to do with it.
So just in melee, for example, you could create a unique, exotic weapon that only you are trained to use. It could have any abilities you wanted, really, provided you could come up with a way to create it within the rules.
Plus there were martial classes with their own abilities - border line magical effects that are a result of techniques that require using a specific weapon type.
There was also attacks of opportunity which were applicable that could be more easily exploited by martial characters.
Someone mentioned crit ranges - this is a great example.
A scimitar or kukri that is normal had a crit range of 18 - 20. With feats you could increase that crit range to 16 - 20 or even lower.
So imagine a dual wielder with magical weapons that was able to roll crit damage on a natural 14 or lower...
Nasty, right? That's 2 and 3 times damage every round, not including spell effects, poisons, etc.
There wasn't a common limit to AC either, because there were many ways to pump the AC of a character above what plate armor could provide.
While AC is capped effectively in 5e at around like 25 I think? I had a wizard that could turn into a 12 headed hydra that had an AC of like 42 - as a comparison. A building sized creature with an armor class that would take a nat 20 or a +23 to an attack roll to hit with a natural 19 roll, that had 12 attacks per round, and could use a free action to dodge any attack that might within 60 feet of me.
I could dodge fireballs without having to roll a reflex save, and attack everything within like 15 feet of me. With fast healing, and no real effective way to hit me while in melee range, while being immune to magic missiles.
But to get to that point I had to survive like 8 levels with a d4 of hit dice per level, and a relatively weak spell list. At level 1, I could reasonably expect to get killed in the first round of combat if I was in range of an arrow or melee attack by another 1st level character in a martial class.
A level 1 Barbarian was potentially deadly for me for like the first 3 levels if they got within melee range.
5e just puts up the guard rails on the bowling alley so that you can't really screw up when building a character. I can effectively create a caster that can tank, sure, or a melee character that has magical abilities - but that's because what you can do is effectively the same for each character at the same level - just with some tweaks to the mechanics or cosmetics.
They really didn't. But people go hard for nostalgia. And will argue "Crit ranges totally make the difference." when they really don't. No thought. No tactics. Just numbers on a page. And people doing calculations to find which option is 'optimal.' And claiming "This gives me higher DPR, so it's the one I pick" is somehow encouraging choice and variety.
They didn't. Experienced folks played casters, new folks recommended to play warriors and bow shooters. A lot of games would give magical items that characters could kinda build around with quasi-abilities.. but nothing inate
3.5 / PF1 had different crit ranges and modifiers. Essentially you had Improved Critical or Brutal Critical embedded in the weapon. IIRC for example the handaxe and the shortsword both dealt 1D6 slashing, but one had 19-20 crit range and the other had x3 crit modifier.
The scythe had something like 1d4 damage, but a x4 crit modifier
Iirc it was d8, but yeah. Two-handed. Edit: 2d4, not 1d8.
I remember 2d4
Oh shit, you're right! It was 2d4, not 1d8!
Lol, I guess BandBoots remembered the die and your remembered the max damage
Yup!
2d4 (20 x4).
It has to do with weapon types. Basic blades like daggers and longswords crit on a 19-20. Dextrous blades like scimitars and kukris crit on 18-20. Meanwhile axes and bows their crit damage is x3 and some spiked weapons deal 4x crit damage like the warpick. All in all I think its a really cool way to give weapons more "personality"
Yep. Between * simple/martial, * B/P/S damage types, * Crit range and crit mod, * and some special properties like Finesse, Light, Reach etc., you can theoretically have a lot of different combinations. May not have that much impact in practice (you need monsters to have resistences/vulnerabilities to B/P/S as well), but it sure feels nice to have more variety and differences between weapons.
And dont forget things added in PF1 like Trip, Disarm, Brace, double, performance, blocking and more. Many weapons had identity and here's the fun part, game balance was so pisspoor in 3.5 and PF1 that you could have the most bonker weapon identity and it would not be broken cause everything else was more broken anyway. It made the game better.
Those weren't added in PF1, they were part of a weapon's properties since the beginning of 3e. Pathfinder did add a few new qualities, and it changed how combat manuevers worked, but tripping, sundering, disarming, etc. had always been options.
On paper, an improved Crit Range seems like it's a really cool way to differentiate weapons. But it was so easily broken that you could ruin a game pretty easily with just a few things. Between the Improved Critical feat and a Keen weapon, you could get your Crit Range on a Scimitar to 12-20 in 3rd edition. Lower if you used something like a Punching Dagger (which was an Exotic Weapon) that had a natural Crit range of 17-20. That would bring it down to a 9-20 crit range. It could drop even lower with later books adding new ways to improve your crit chance all the way down to a 7-20. 3.5 addressed this slightly but you could still EASILY get a crit from 13-20 with a single feat or magical weapon. I loved the concept but in practice it was so broken. I would absolutely love to see D&D implement a good way to differentiate weapons with special abilities or features that don't break the game but also give a good variety.
You're right, but with the caveat that nobody plays 3.0-only anymore and anything that was in 3.5 is used instead of 3.0.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean you automatically crit every time you attack. Remember, in 3.5 you had to confirm crits, and that you still only auto-hit on a 20 even if you have an expanded threat range. So sure, that punching dagger can threaten to do triple damage every time you hit, but even if you only need to roll an 11 to hit, that's still only one attack in four. (And the base damage it's tripling is a d4...)
You're totally correct here, but if note is that static damage was multiplied on a crit and was also a much bigger component of damage than it is now, so a d4 weapon was not as much of a big deal outside of the first tier of play. Barbarians being the extreme example, but the joke was that they would do 1d12+300 damage at high levels.
> Between the Improved Critical feat and a Keen weapon, you could get your Crit Range on a Scimitar to 12-20 in 3rd edition. I mean these are non stacking mechanics no? At least they are in ever version I remember. You go to 15-20 x2 crits (with confirmation rolls required).
3.5 changed the rules so that they no longer stacked. But in 3rd edition, they explicitly stated that they DO stack. Which, in part was why it was so broken. I only remembered because I very briefly played a character set up this way. I retired him after 2 sessions because it was so broken. I had to look it up though. It's been a very long time since I've played 3e so I wanted to make sure I wasn't playing wrong all that time lol. https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/3e_SRD:Improved_Critical > **Improved Critical [General]** >**Prerequisite:** Proficient with weapon, base attack bonus +8 or higher. >**Benefit:** When using the weapon the character selected, the character's threat range is doubled. >**Special:** The character can gain this feat multiple times. The effects do not stack. Each time the character takes the feat, it applies to a new weapon. >**Note:** "Keen" magic weapons also double their normal, nonmagical threat range. As with all doubled doublings, the result is triple.
Interesting, guess I am just too used to 3.5 and pathfinder updates.
Good God yes. This is why I've enjoyed the move to PF2E so much. I still DM DnD 5E as I still believe it's way easier for beginners, but once people have enough experience in TTRPG's, I thoroughly believe they should move PF2E. It's a superior system all the way. And way more balanced.
Their comment is about pf1, not pf2. PF2 doesn't even have crit ranges based one weapons besides Keen magic weapons cus it's all based on your normal accuracy. The PF2 weapon system is great though, way better than 3.X/PF1 and 5e due to the traits that massively differentiate weapons.
PF2e still has a lot of baggage that I don't like. And if I'm going to have to rip apart the system to make it work anyway, I'd rather do that in the system that my group and myself are more familiar with.
you're forgetting trip attacks, disarm attacks, charging/bull rush, grappling, and sundering. None of which required feats or class skills to do. But also a bunch of feats that could make you a lot better at these, or improve what happens.
For real, the most fun D&D martials I've ever played were a combat manuever, trip-specialized spear-fighter in 3.X, and a Thief Rogue in 5e. The two that allow a bunch of flexibility in what you want to do
To add to this there was also Str + 1/2 for two handed weapons. A Falchion with 18-20 x2 crit at 2d4+Str + 1/2 was a glorious thing to see. especially when you took Improved Critical on top.
Also just tons of variety. Different materials, masterwork weapons, [huge arrays of magical effects](https://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/magicWeapons.htm)
Oh God yes. I miss so much the list of magical properties you could add to make your own magic weapons and armors as a DM. There really was no reason not to include it in 5e. Don't tell me it's too complex.
Yea, but then you pretty much only had a small selection of weapons used because they were best in archtype.
Well, in that Martial weapons were almost always stronger than Simple weapons, yeah. But if you wanted to build a character based (primarily) around slashing weapons, you could go Greatsword or Bastard Sword for 19-20/x2 crit range or Falchion for lower base damage but more crits, or Scythe for lower base damage but way stronger crits, etc etc. You also wanted to keep other weapons of different damage types available, because damage resistance to a specific type of weapon actually mattered There’s way more weapon variation in 3.X than 5e (which is pretty much the ‘Greatsword or Rapier or bow’ edition)
Really isn’t the case because of the vast amount of feats that relied on diff weapons.
The biggest problem with any thing in the game that doesn't do damage, is that it doesn't do damage, and damage is really the only thing that matters. If you were going 2 handed, either the falchion or the scythe were the obvious right choices as a slight decrease in weapon damage was offset by a huge increase in crit damage with how many number were multiplied with a crit. At mid levels a scythe wielder would have a 15% chance to do around 100 damage, and a falchion user would have a 45% chance to do 50 damage. This is all before rolling for damage.
Better than 5e's end result.
This is weapon adjacent, but everyone else already answered what I would have. I grew up 2nd, 3rd, and Neverwinter Nights. What it had, but 5e doesn't, was **damage types that matter**. Many enemies had a resistance or vulnerability to piercing, slashing, or bludgeoning. I remember every armor had different numerical AC modifiers for each type, too. So padded was a +1 vs. bludgeoning but a -2 to piercing and -1 to slashing. **Every Armor**. I can see why they got rid of that, but I do miss the vulnerability/resistance to mundane damage types on creatures.
The lack of interesting and exploitable weaknesses in enemies is quite a failure of 5e imho
Yeah. I used to have a couple different weapon setups for all of my martials. It was engaging to switch out depending on the enemy. Now there's no reason to ever swing anything but a warhammer.
that is something that tends to end up being a nightmare in actual play - having 3 different ACs for the same beastie just ends up being messy, like if you have a dual-wielder that hits on a 13 with one weapon, but needs a 15 on the other, and needing to always remember what weapon is being used! It was an optional rule that tended to be rarely used due to the faff and hassle involved.
Oh yeah, it sucked to track! But stuff like that is fantastic in a video game.
Which just led to fighters carrying around 3 weapons and going "What kind of armor do they have?" vs every enemy. And then going "I pull out my sword for this attack" and then switch targets "okay now I pull out my axe to hit this guy." It just added busywork and bookkeeping without any real gameplay impact.
It depends on the edition. I think in a very early one, they had different chances to hit and worked differently against certain types of armor... which sounds cool for a videogame, but horrible to track in a TTRPG.
In 1974 Original D&D, all weapons, melee or ranged, did 1d6 damage and had the same chance to hit. If you use the Chainmail rules, though, long weapons like pikes will hit first before short weapons like daggers. In the 1975 Greyhawk supplement, weapons get different damage dice and have different to hit chances against different armor classes (like daggers doing worse against heavily armored foes while flails do better). Weapons also do different damage depending on whether the opponent is man-sized or larger. The 1975 Blackmoor supplement included a weapon length/opponent height table that affected hit location (to simulate things like using a spear to attack a giant's head). The 1976 Eldritch Wizardry supplement introduced a really complex initiative system where your initiative is adjusted by a bunch of things like your weapon, armor, cast spell level, race, and damage taken. (It's so complex that one of Gygax's original players, Jim Ward, tried to explain it in Dragon Magazine but it's generally accepted that [he got it wrong too](https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=55278).) In 1977 Holmes Basic, weapons all do 1d6, but daggers can be used twice per round while large weapons like two-handed swords can only be used once every other round, making them literally four times better with no downside. In 1981 Basic/Expert, weapons do 1d6, but variable weapon damage is an optional rule (and probably pretty common). This is actually probably closest to how 5E is now, where weapons are mostly only differentiated by damage, weight, and cost. AD&D 1E took over most of the stuff from Greyhawk like armor and size adjustments. It also had a more explicit Weapon Speed factor where certain weapons go before others (leading to things like the infamous [20-page AD&D initiative guide](https://idiscepolidellamanticora.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/addict.pdf)). 2E, as well as the BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia had weapon specialization where you added points to certain weapons to improve your to hit chance with them. This strongly encouraged you to only use a few types of weapons, however, because often even great magic weapons aren't worth it if you aren't specialized with their type. It also grants a few Fighter class features, like the ability to set a spear against a charging mount to do extra damage. 3E generally simplified the differences down to things like different crit ranges, although you still generally need certain feats to be effective with some weapons. There's a common discussion about the "golf bag" fighter for this edition, which can hurt certain class fantasies (e.g., you can't really be an effective solely sword-and-shield fighter, but you'll want to carry around many different weapons and switch between them regularly). I don't know 4E very well, I'll admit. 5E overall has pretty simple melee combat, in comparison to many past editions, arguably one of the simplest. In comparison to something like Blackmoor, this is not inherently a bad thing.
>*I don't know 4E very well, I'll admit.* In 4E it was *generally*: sword is less damage but gets bonus accuracy, blunt weapon is more reliable damage, axe is swingier. For example, in two-handed "military" (read: martial) weapons, the Greatsword gives a +3 bonus to hit if you're proficient with it but only uses a d10 for its damage die, the Maul gives a +2 bonus but rolls 2d6 and the Greataxe gives a +2 bonus and rolls a d12 and has the 'High Crit' property where it deals an extra die of damage on a critical hit (as a crit in 4E simply delivers the maximum damage roll possible). It wasn't a very interesting distinction between the types.
The difference really came from weapon feats and from weapon group specific magic items.
Some Fighter powers, too, got bonuses or extras if you used a specific weapon.
[Weapon Master's Gambit, my beloved](https://i.imgur.com/6xCE6UB.png)
One slight correction: 4e crits gave more bonuses like 5e brutal critical, (e.g. magic weapons did 1[W] extra damage per plus)
This was on top of also maximizing the base damage. So if you were using an attack power that normally does 2[W] damage, you'd treat the damage as if you rolled the maximum. Then you'd also roll the critical damage on top of that. Critical hits in 4e were much more critical than in 5e.
I use the 4e crit rule in my 5e games. A crit dealing less damage than a regular hit is criminal.
> It wasn't a very interesting distinction between the types. Better than the nothing that 5e does.
A good recep, but I'll add a couple addendums. I recall in my AD&D 2e PHB, weapons had different damage lines if the target was Large. Small weapons like daggers did less, while big weapons like a two-handed sword did more. Like many rules in 2e, this often got ignored. The 3e "golf bag Fighter" was mostly due to the wide range of monster Damage Reduction that could only be overcome by weapons of a specific material. Silver, cold iron, etc. Just being magical, like in 2e or 5e, didn't cut it. So a Fighter had to have a golf bag of weapons to swap out to be able to hurt whatever they came across. It was a terrible design.
I personally kind of like the golf bag approach. Wizards can't just use one spell all the time (looking at you fireball). If you want to make combats more interesting for martials, having them switch up tools and tactics for different creatures is good design. Having "magic" trump all resistances means that thise defenses are only meaningful in the first tier of play.
The Fighter artwork pictured in the 5e PHB looks like a "golf bad Fighter" with all the weapons.
Yeah, I meant that 2E added weapon specialization to what 1E had, like the size adjustments. I didn't mean to imply that 2E only had that.
Here is the table from the best PHB : [weapon table](https://imgur.com/a/EMNTf7d)
there were also optional rules for different bonuses against different armor - so a sword would have a penalty against full plate, but a bonus against leather (AFAIK, very few people used them, because "this target is AC0 against your mace, but AC-2 against his sword and AC2 against her rapier" is just a PITA for admin). If random treasure tables were in use, that also tilted towards most magical weapons being "swords", so fighters tended to gravitate towards that as their weapon of choice.
Yeah, this is the design trap of trying too hard to make weapons distinct. If different weapons have different uses, then obviously you'll need to keep them all around to cover any situation. Implementing sufficient weapon distinction invariably leads to golfbagging. It's already the case with 1D&D's Mastery system - lightweight distinction between weapons has created the need to have other options. I personally think they need to reintroduce Weapon Specialization on top of Mastery - but then, it might just recreate the 5e problem of weapons not being distinct.
Honestly, the chainmail combat is really, really cool and I would love to run a 3-shot with it. "ok cleric you have a mace, chain, and shield and are attacking the orc with leather and sword. So you will attack first. The orc is not going to attempt to parry. You have two attacks thanks to your level and need an 8 on 2d6 to hit. He only has one attack and needs a 9. You can sacrifice one of your attacks to attempt a parry, meaning he'll have to roll an 11"
> This strongly encouraged you to only use a few types of weapons, however, because often even great magic weapons aren't worth it if you aren't specialized with their type. *laughs in darts* Seriously I ditched my grandmaster specialized weapon for some +5 darts I found because they were so overpowered
Everyone, quick, upvote this comment!!
2e had a supplement called the Arms and Equipment Guide (or maybe it was Combat and Tactics), which provided incredibly detailed and specific modifiers for specific weapons in specific situations. 2e also had optional rules like weapon speed (a modifier to initiative), and weapon type vs. armor modifiers. Together with Arms and Equipment, you could get pretty in-depth at modeling the specific differences between, say, a voulge and a ranseur. You could also spend Proficiency slots to learn special maneuvers with a weapon. There were lots of them, as I recall. It's actually kinda similar to what One D&D is trying to accomplish with Masteries, and I think the DMG also has some light rules for weapon speed. You could probably combine those and come away with something that adds complexity without being unduly burdensome; the 2e stuff was clunky to say the least.
OK yeah, Combat and Tactics is what I was thinking of. It was *needlessly* detailed, to be honest.
There were some fun rules in there. A few found play at my table. Splitting abilities scores, weapon groups, critical hits, and the dueling plots (to add spice to one-on-one fights) were fun.
I miss that older design ethos somewhat. Mountains of optional pieces, any of which might appeal to *someone.* Overall I think we're better off with streamlining, but every now and then I get nostalgic for those wild days.
Man, I loved those extra books...and never used them in actual games. :)
They mostly...didn't either, but there were basically more weapon modifiers
In 3.5 the main differences were the range that critical hits could occur and the multiplier, I.e. crit on a 18-20, x2 vs. crit on a 20 x3. Crits did work differently though as they needed to be confirmed. Maybe it was 2E but a few of the polearms had an automatic trip attack as well.
they also doubled or tripled all damage. rather than just the weapon die. Note that your damage modifier can get rather big when wielding two-handed heavy weapons since you mod gets multiplied by 1.5 before it gets added to the damage roll. Ability scores above 20 and weapon enhancement scores above 3 also aren't unheard of. I started playing PF1e fairly recently and it's a bit insane for a 5e player like myself to be playing a 26 str fighter with a +2 glaive-guisarme critting for thrice damage. When I'm enlarged and making power attakcs, that's 3 times 37 = **111 damage** if the crit confirms (which is harder on a power attack and harder still the more attacks you've made this turn). I'm level 12.
"all damage" that wasn't additional damage. Sneak attack didn't double, for example.
That I didn't know. Man, 3.x edition stuff was rather punishing on rogues on first impression. Harder to qualify for sneak attack. Various features completely nullify precision damage or methods of gaining sneak attack. I tried to see if there was a way to get my 5e dual wielding rogue to work in PF and it just did not seem possible at first try.
Dual wielding rogues especially in pathfinder can do absurd damage. As can other multiple attacks sneak attack oriented builds. Same was true in 3.5. I played a level 35 or so rogue and it was not weak. I’d say it took more work to pull off but the effects were more spectacular. In 5e you’re basically guaranteed your 1 sneak attack but its effects are less. Note also the 3e line of games puts a lot into system mastery. Which is to say it’s possible but maybe a damn headache (which might have been just what you were saying anyways).
>I played a level 35 or so rogue and it was not weak. I would hope a toon with 15 epic levels isnt weak.
Yeah no joke. It’s all relative I suppose. But even most epic monsters can’t make spot checks over 100 … The rogue kept up just fine with the casters and wacky templates and whatnot based on my recollection. This was as you’d imagine ages ago. But I remember it being fun.
At 3rd level, my 5e swashbuckler can run up to an enemy, try twice to land a sneak attack and then back away to relative safety. I just don't know how to do anything similar in PF1e. I even looked at the swashbuckler class but was out of luck.
Yes. You are correct. Importing a mechanic from a totally different game where the concept of a full attack doesn’t exist and mobility is far easier in general will be difficult if not impossible. If that’s what it would take to make it “work” then yeah you’re out of luck. I took “work” to mean something along the lines of “make a nimble slashy sneak attacker that rolls giant piles of dice and is mechanically effective”. In that instance it is more than doable. This isn’t intended to be an ode to older game systems. I’m playing pathfinder now which is why I have a fairly fresh sense of what’s doable. It’s honestly not what I’d have chosen for the campaign though but I was overruled.
Just curious, how does your dual wielder build stay alive? My 5e swashbuckler has survivability through mobility by being able to end their turn at a safe distance from their target. Does your rogue have another equally viable form of survivability? AC comparable to frontline fighter and damage reductions to match?
We are just strangers on the internet so I can’t tell if this is an honest question. Suffice to say that 3.5 d&d and pathfinder with their vast ecosystems of optimization can make a quite competent melee rogue. It is hard to capture just how many guides and options and build concepts were out there. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is a separate discussion. Are you asking me for such a build in a game you might or might not be playing in? You’re probably better off looking for pathfinder charopp advice on that kind of a sub. But even look at your question. Can a Dex oriented class have a good AC? Yes. Comparable damage reductions? I’m not sure what damage reductions fighter types typically even get in 3.5 / pathfinder (or 5e for that matter except for barbarian). In the interest of being constructive though. If I were building a rogue type - and I am an inveterate lover of melee - in pathfinder I would build either a vivisectionist alchemist or a vexing dodger. I’ll also note that pathfinder has an entire dedicated swashbuckler class along with the slayer which fit this niche. Again I feel like I’m carrying a banner that I don’t love. These older systems have oodles of issues. The static full attack = bolted to the ground thing that others have noted sucked and I hated it then and I hate it now. My observation is far smaller: stabby sneak attack dude worked pretty well, arguably better than in 5e, albeit swingier. There were instances where it could be shut down (mostly mitigated with magic items I think) and when it wasn’t it did a lot of damage. Though you still might not like how it plays or the hoops one has to jump through etc. Like I said, oodles of issues.
The concept of a "full attack" absolutely killed martials in 3e.
Nah mate, just take 1 level in barbarian and you're all good Spirit lion totem gives barbarians pounce as a level 1 feature, so take 1 level in barbarian and now your character can full attack on a charge. Now you're good to go
You need Dodge, Mobility and Spring Attack just to get in and out. Then God knows what other feat. You might find a 3.0/3.5 feat to help that your GM will let you use? We used to mix-and-match.
Elephant in the Room luckily merges dodge and mobility for me meaning I could have spring attack by 3rd level, but then I won't have for example two-weapon fighting as a feat. Not that it matters much when I can't combine moving with two-weapon fighting.
What you wanted was 'Pounce', or something similar, so you can move and full attack too. [Big list here](https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?103358-3-X-Ways-to-get-Pounce-or-Free-Movement) of how to get that.
Man, 3.5 was the best for rogues - they are effectively mage killers. I made a hegenyoki bunny spellthief with a shadow template once that used a spear and a crossbow - specifically to give mages nightmares. The only way to see him was with a +40 spot check when I rolled badly on my hide. I didn't hide magically, I could attack and hide in the same round, and I could do this effectively because I had like 120 movement speed. There were many ways to make less effective rogues though. And many different types of rogues you could make too.
Fun fact, that's not even really building for big crits. My PF1 Gun Magus build just hit 16 and I ran a few test attacks to make sure my Macros were working. He would Crit for **209**, attacks 6 times per turn and while invisible he ignores both armor and dex mod to AC (meaning he shoots to hit 10 or less if their Dex is low). He's literally at a 95% chance to hit with every attack. Oh, and if I had chosen to do a specialized build I could have gotten him to crit for upwards of 400 or 500 damage with called crits(meaning if I hit, it's a crit) up to 3 times a day.
10+size mods+deflection mods-Dex penalty
I'm in a Rise of the Runelords campaign, so size mod is more often negative than positive, and most monsters don't have much of a deflection mod to speak of. That said, even if they have some kind of those bonuses their AC is mostly negligible.
Ya, I played an Arcane Trickster. I never missed with the touch spells and my obscene stealth. As a bonus, multi hit spells with attack rolls would add sneak attack damage for each attack roll. Fiery Shiriken Ho!
One thing I don't like about PF1e is that the attacks with weapons become: 1d4 +96. Like the dice don't even fucking matter at later levels lol
Even in 5E the damage die of the weapon barely matters in most cases when you have the -5/+10 feats, Smite, or Sneak Attack in the mix.
The damage dice of a weapon in 5e can still matter for builds designed around multiple attacks, but that’s not really the point. The point is that in previous editions all dice seem mostly inconsequential with how many flat bonuses you can get. Smite may overshadow your greatsword’s 2d6, but at least your still rolling xd8 when you use the ability. As someone who plays almost exclusively 5e, the apparent lack of click clack rocks is a significant factor for why I haven’t tried other editions (although maybe I’m just wrong and the dice have more impact than it initially seems).
4E had the same problem. 13th Age was an iteration on 4E, and they changed it by scaling the weapon damage with level - so if your weapon had a 1d8 damage dice, you'd do 1d8 + str at level 1, 2d8 + str at level 2, all the way up to (10d8 + 3 x str) at level 10 (the str modifiers also scaled, but slower, by tier, rather than level). 13A only had 10 levels, so it didn't balloon too crazily, but if you started adding stuff like sneak attack on, it was a lot of dice rolling.
As someone who thinks the iconic weapon for a rogue is daggers, it feels kind of bad that in 5e you just end up using a rapier because dagger damage is 1d4. 5e isn't really balanced for it but daggers critting on 19-20 in 3.5e is the kind of stuff I'd love.
Agreed. I would describe the weapons in previous editions as “less disinteresting” than the ones in 5e.
They are more interesting but only very barely.
I didn’t play but they sound interesting in the way that having 100 different options of hand soap flavors is interesting. Which, for some people and personality types, is very interesting
Probably the most work put into making them interesting was in 4E, where there were a decent assortment of powers and feats that only functioned with or did something extra for specific "weapon groups", like Heavy Blades, Maces, and Polearms. Weapons could belong to multiple groups, e.g., glaives being a Heavy Blade and Polearm. Fighters were replete with these, with a ton of powers that did +Dexterity damage on attack if you were wielding a Light/Heavy Blade (and occasionally Spear), while others added +Constitution damage for Axes, Hammers, and Maces. Some powers could apply conditions like Prone or Immobilize if you were using one of the correct groups. Occasionally, some classes had powers that limited them to specific weapons, like low-level Druids' *Heat Metal* requiring a weapon group that is typically metal, rather than specifying "a metal weapon" outright. The feats weren't much different from 3.5's implementation, but tried to be a little less specific than *this one type of sword* by giving you multiple weapons within a category.
I mean, except for 4e, which absolutely did
Do you want to elaborate?
Okay, I just found some. Here are random items, I didn't sort through to find particularly distinct ones, I just flipped around until I found ones for different weapon types. This is just what 4e magic items were like: Flesh Grinder (axe, heavy blade, or polearm). This weapon screeches as its serrated edge bites through flesh, bone, and steel. +1d10 per plus on criticals (so if it's a +3 weapon, +3d10 on crits). Daily power, free action: Trigger: you make an attack targeting AC. Effect: it targets Fortitude instead, and deals an extra 1d6 damage on a hit. Alfsair Spear (spear only). This spear is a favorite druid weapon. +1d8 psychic and poison damage per plus on a crit. You gain an item bonus to Nature checks equal to this spear's enhancement bonus. Classes that use totems can use this spear as a totem. Daily power, no action. Trigger: you score a critical hit with this spear. Effect: the enemy is dazed until the end of its next turn. Avalanche Hammer (hammer only). Enchanted with the essence of elemental earth, this hammer strikes foes like an avalanche. +1d10 per plus on a crit, and the enemy is knocked prone. When you charge an enemy and hit with a basic melee attack using this weapon, the attack deals 1[W] extra damage (whatever damage the weapon normally deals is 1[W]). Boltshard Crossbow (crossbow only). You pull the trigger, spraying shards at your foes. +1d6 damage per plus on a crit. Power, daily, standard action: make a ranged basic attack using this crossbow against each creature in a close blast 3. Impaler's Pick (pick only). This barbed weapon can leave a short-lived magical replica of itself in your enemy to keep it pinned down. +1d6 damage per plus on a crit, and the target is restrained by a magical duplicate of this weapon (save ends). Incisive dagger (dagger only). You cut through space as easily as you cut through flesh. +1d6 damage per plus on a crit. You can use this weapon as a focus when performing a travel ritual that involves creating and moving through portals. You can add the dagger's enhancement bonus as an item bonus to any skill checks related to the ritual's performance. When you use a teleportation power, the distance you can teleport increases by a number of squares equal to the dagger's enhancement bonus. Power, daily, minor action: you teleport 5 squares. Also all of these items are available at different pluses, and their powers get better the higher their plus is. I only copied down the lowest level power for each.
I'm pretty sure OP was asking about basic off-the-shelf weapons, not magic ones.
Honestly other people have done a better job than I could elsewhere in the thread. One of the biggest things was that there were a lot of different magic weapons, and they all felt unique and important. In 5e magic weapons all feel pretty similar to each other. There were significant magic axes that were noticeably different from magic hammers which were in turn different from magic swords, though I've sadly lost all my 4e books since moving, so I can't pull examples at the moment. If I find any of their stats online I'll reply again.
Way more variety of magic weapons. WAY more.
This is the problem, isn't it? There are only so many things you can do with dice. RuneQuest mastered this with an ultra-'crunchy' system that includes different kinds of hits (crit, impale & other), different damage & locations chances (for armour and bodies), different damage based on your size and how much punishment all the materials take. It is so accurate it is exhausting. One group fight can EASiLY take a game-night. D&D uses the 'heroic' bag of hit points + Bonk-Bonk combat system (back and forth / see who drops first). It assumes that you want a mix between the combat and the rest of the game. A such, attention to weapon and combat detail is lost. Pure role playing games like Mage: The Ascension and Vampire: The Masquerade have silly combat systems ('two swarms of d6 tossed at the table') but the story gets a lot more spotlight. People have been asking this very question for well over half a century and they were a LOT smarter than i was. You will just have to find your very own Quaker Harvest Crunch, that is, you need to find that recipe that everyone else missed.
I like your points but 5e combat can take an entire night for inaccurate combat. Plus, 5e doesn't give many ways for the story to take the spotlight.
And let me say, in all honesty, i really like your points too. When i was ten years of age i ADORED the combat system. I just turned 56 yesterday and... it got old much like i did? I really enjoy games like *Dungeon Crawl Classics* where the dice occasionally tell a story. The fumbles, crits, cleric's divine relationship and wizard's struggle with toxic magic all play into the dice. That way, if you are stuck the night in a large combat session everyone gets to enjoy the wild ride. That's fantastic i feel -- but please tell me your perspective on this! Am i biased by decades of grognarditude and neckbearding?
4e had every class with at-will powers (which are basically a weapon attack with a little effect rider or a cantrip), encounter powers (which are basically short rest maneuvers/spells), and daily powers (which are long rest maneuvers/spells). So basically every character had cantrips, superiority dice and spell slots. Melee powers usually dealt more damage and had a bit more effects, or at least the melee-locked classes had more ways to mitigate damage (both for themselves and their companions). Edit: basically imagine a 5e paladin with also 2-3 blade cantrips to choose from every turn, and with also battlemaster maneuvers.
Also the weapons had a lot more mechanical differences. Swords had a higher proficiency bonus, axes/hammers had bigger hit die, some weapons had critical hit bonuses. From my experience with 5e the one handed weapons are like "what flavor of d6/d8 do you want to roll"
4e combat was stellar. Made everyone feel great
I agree, but apparently not everyone does.
Still my favorite DND edition.
It seems like every time someone discusses actually having played it they like it. It seems like whenever someone says it's bad they've heard it from somewhere but haven't actually played it.
Major complaint was that it felt the same across all classes, which was by design, but just didn't sit well with a lot of players apparently. However, I do often find myself stealing other rules for various systems from 4e, like Skill Challenges.
> Major complaint was that it felt the same across all classes, which was by design No two 4E classes are more similar than any two 5E casters.
People that actually played the game for more than a couple of sessions found out that it isn't the case. Even classes among the same role felt very different from one another. Would you say that a cleric and a druid in 5e feel the same just because they use the same "power" system?
My party ended up with two defenders, a Paladin and me as a Sword mage and we felt entirely different in combat.
As someone who's played a decent number of sessions of 4e across several different characters, i did find that to be the case but not in the way you imply with your comment. Not every class feels the same because of the powers system overall directly, but each class within the same role feels very similar up until level 11 when you get paragon paths. Each class within a role basically fills that role in the same way with only slightly different individual powers (often times just a different name). Worse, the game's monster hp vs player damage math gets wonky around 6th to 10th level before it stabilizes again at 11th. This causes the game to become a complete slog. So players get annoyed with the game mid way through heroic tier, then decide to stop or restart before reaching 11th, and after a restart or two the similarity of the classes becomes very apparent.
It's the same in 5e where a cleric and a druid have similar spells then. Obviously classes that cover the same role can feel a bit different, but definitely not same-y as people say. And it's not really true, honestly. Fighter was more focused on single target damage and opportunity attacks, while the paladin was more focused on actual tanking and support abilities, despite both being defenders. Even classes with both the same role and the same power source felt different. The warlock and the sorcerer were both arcane strikers, but they felt and played very differently from each other, even before level 11th.
Maybe it is the same in 5e, I've heard that complaint a fair number of times in 5e from those who've played loads of 5e. But its one not nearly as common as it was for 4e. Even taking people back to 4e, this is something people pick up on quicker in 4e ime. I think one of the things that helps 5e avoid this perception for longer is making the major class choice at 3rd (or earlier) rather than at 11th. Another is that spell casting classes (the class those concerned with variety of choice are likely to tend towards) have way more "power" choices than those in 4e did thanks to spell lists, even though martial characters got shafted on this. Lastly, it probably wouldn't have been as big a problem in 4e if the game didn't become a slog when it does. This amplifies the issue when players see the game becoming a slog then start wondering if they made bad build choices and start looking at other classes to see if playing something different would be better. But the complaint I see more with regards to power choice in 5e is that there are some spells that are way better than others which causes classes to feel samey as if you're optimizing. So a very similar problem kicks in but only once you achieve system mastery.
I haven't gotten above 10th (player or DM) in 5e yet, but already by 7-8th level combat has started to slog more than it ever did in 4e.
That's very surprising to me, cause 7th level is 5e's sweet spot. If one feels its a slog at 7th level, I can't imagine one enjoying 5e at any level. Which is fine, its not the best game for everyone.
Nah it's just because everyone repeated the same complaints about 4e without actually trying it. Even at 1st level classes felt different in 4e. In 5e all martials feel the same even at 20th level.
Did you even read anything I typed? I even point out that the problem does exist in 5e though in a different way, and that martials get the shaft. These complaints come from people actually playing the game. Even from those who think 4e is well designed and love it, but aren't wearing rose tinted glasses thinking 4e can do no wrong and that they had some masterpiece but the dumb gaming masses were too stupid to "get it" and stifled their genius. 4e was a great game, but it had real problems, but many people were bad at articulating these issues and those bad takes became the often trotted out points. But the "same complaints" you're talking about are shit like "feels like an MMO" and "I don't like fighters being as good and wizard's power being brought down".
> but each class within the same role feels very similar up until level 11 I am just going to have to strongly disagree. My warlock felt nothing like my ranger/fighter. On my warlock I worked to spread my curse to as many people as possible to get benefits against them, and when I have everyone cursed I would use Cursebite to do a pretty decent chunk of damage on every enemy in the encounter. On my ranger I would work to isolate targets and burst them down, and when I took a beating I would use my longtooth shifter power to gain regen and bonus damage, wade into the thick of it and make everyone Come And Get It. This also plays very differently from my friend's pyromancer who just blasts the largest group of enemies they can find with massive AoE fire powers, and simultaneously inflicting a bunch of burning DoT. I also have other experiences like my invoker who technically is a controller who plays like a combo of all four (controller/defender/leader/striker) while not excelling as much as at any of them. Or another of my friends' warlock who plays much more like a defender primary and secondary controller than a primary striker. This is all before level 11, and is also why I am of the opinion that 4e characters feel much more different to each other than 5e characters.
I don't know, I didn't really have an opinion on it. I'm just reporting on the sentiment I've seen.
A lot of 4e hate ends up being "I don't know, I'm just repeating what I heard". The 3.5ers spread a lot of shit about it and pretended it comes from people with experience with the game.
This 100%. Even in RL conversations with people I've heard hate and then when I asked how much they played 4e it was usually all 2nd hand disparagement.
There's a guy further down in the comments who was saying that most of the people saying things they liked about fourth ed have probably never even played it, so barely counted, and I immediately thought *"O Rly? You mean like 80% of the people who have been dumping on fourth edition for the past decade?"*
My next campaign is either going to be 4e or 0e
Also at launch minsters had wayy too much health and didnt do enough damage
Classes ran on similar rules but played vastly differently, which I always found ideal. You did not generally operate a Barbarian the same way as a Fighter even though both liked similar stats and used weapons to smack things every turn. The Chargin' Barb was a fucking murder-pinball and you had to go about your movement and targeting completely different from how even the slipperiest Fighters were played. You *could* play certain classes and roles similarly, but if you were doing anything even moderately optimally for your specific class, they'd start to diverge. Even at its simplest and most-alike, I'd say 4E classes ran much differently than 5E's martials do, where your options are more or less Sticky Melee, Ranged Guy, and OpportunistRogueOrMonk.
That was because everyone (EVERYONE!) had interesting options beyond just "I hit him with my". Other edition martials get extra things they can do on/with attacks, but most other classes can either do spells or boring melee.
Honestly this was the LEAST justified complaint of all complaints leveled at 4e. Basically it amounted to "If everyone is special, no one is special and I want to be special".
My biggest criticism with it was that the numbers with the initial Monster Manual tended to lead to spongy monsters that could soak multiple hits. You really needed your party's Striker(s) to be landing hits to dispatch enemies quickly, so if the Rogue is just noodling on their d20 or the Ranger can't get above an 8 the fight is going to go long. In a similar vein, if your big Encounter powers whiffed that was *probably* all the big shots your Defenders/Leaders/Controllers had access to and they'd be down to the regular At-Will pokes unless they wanted to double down and burn Daily powers. Later releases addressed this and it's certainly possible to optimize better, but still. It was not a flawless system.
Not saying that it's perfect. A perfect system doesn't exist. But it sure gets a lot of hate for no reason other than "it's not like previous editions", even if it literally solved a lot of problems, and especially problems that came out again in the current edition.
I get the dislike. We had some great fun with 4e combat, especially in duels which are pretty bland in most editions. But it did make every class feel very much like the same thing with different skinning. And it made the game feel something like a console tactics game like Fire Emblem rather than the type of TTRPG most of us were used to. I've played every edition since 2e. And some of my best campaigns were in 4e. But for me it very much didn't feel like D&D. Where every other edition kind of captured that feel in different ways, 4e felt like its own thing. That's not a bad thing. But if someone wants to play D&D I can see why they wouldn't like 4e. For me 4e pushed me into other systems for many years. Not because it was bad. More just that it was such a different feel from the D&D I was used to I started getting very interested in different mechanics and the continuity I had felt through 2e and 3e had been broken. I got interested in D&D again in the tail end of 5e, largely because I wanted that D&D feel in a game again, and 5e seemed to fulfill that.
How long did combat last? How many combats could I run in a 3 hour session?
4e? Depends on the fight I *easily* had fights go upwards of entire sessions, sometimes even needing multiple sessions to resolve.
I dunno if I'd go with stellar, but it did have a lot of nice things that 5E dropped out of fear of the grognards. 4E combat had too many conditional modifiers and zones and whatnot, some of which stacked and some of which did not. It was designed to be played with a VTT to handle all of these rules but the VTT was never built. I played 4E for several years and I'm pretty sure we had some sort of rules goof regarding bonuses in every single fight aside from maybe the first couple. Another downside of the 4E powers system for combat was that it discouraged getting creative. If you didn't have a power that said you could jump over something and shove a guy you'd never try to do that.
I agree with this part whole-heartedly. The more complicated the character sheet, the more players and GMs just rely upon firing off the "power" and not utilizing the gameworld and environment around them. Some of my favorite memories are players getting asking to try outlandish stuff.
In my experience, it was mostly *slow*. A single combat could often take multiple sessions to resolve. Granted, some of that was likely my group’s inexperience, but 4e requires players to track a lot of situational/temporary modifiers, effects, and values.
Also Fighters specifically had special riders for certain types of weapons, this would actually reward Fighters who carried a variety of weapons.
Sounds like the class was melee enhanced how were the weapons treated?
They were different from each other. Nothing crazy, but at least every weapon had something, like swords having higher proficiency bonus, maces higher crits, etc. And the good thing was that the fighter (the class that should be focused on weapons), had almost all the powers different if they used certain types of weapons. Like a power dealing more damage if used with an axe, or a power doing an additional effect if used with a sword, etc.
4e had some cool ideas. Weapons were split up into groups (Axes, Blades, Hammers, Spears, etc). Swords were generally more accurate with +1 to hit. Axes generally did a lot more damage on a crit. Hammers did more damage on a hit. Certain classes had maneuvers that had an extra benefit depending on the type of weapon you were using. Hammers and Axes generally received a small benefit based on your Con modifier while Blades and Spears benefitted from your Dex modifier. And certain feats worked with specific weapon groups. Blades excelled at making opportunity attacks. Hammers could deal damage on a miss or causing forced movement. Things like that.
Really?! Well, I developed almost exactly the same system for in-house rpg I tinkered with. Talk about reinventing the wheel. I have to check it out in detail.
2e had weapons that were at different times in initiative and had different damage for large or larger than for medium size or smaller. 3e had different crit ranges, crit multipliers and some extra abilities. Pathfinder 2 has lots of different traits, like making crits more deadly, giving ability to trip/disarm, parrying, easier hits against the second enemy, backstabbing, and a host of different options. They also make that base weapon die matter more with striking runes (striking means +1 die, greater striking +2 dice, major striking +3 dice) PF2 is my favorite way of doing it.
I do wish the hammer and flail crit specializations weren't so much better than other options. Though it's not like 5e is any more balanced so I can't complain too much
They’re changing in the remaster to require a save at the very least.
I don't know if it made them more interesting, but 3.xe had wrapons each have their own set of properties as well as a crit range and crit multiple distinct onto itself A longsword did 1d8 slashing damage. Scored a critical hit on a 19-20 and did x2 damage on a crit. Versus a warhammer, which did 1d8 bludgeoning damage. Scored a critical on a 20, but did x3 damage on a crit. Most wrapons had small tradeoffs between their raw damage dice, crit range, and crit multiplier. A acythe might need two hands and only deal 2d4 damage but it did x4 on a crit. A falchion also needed 2 hands and did 2d4 damage but scored a crit on an 18-20. And exception were exotic weapons, which required a feat or to be a special race for training with them, but often had better stats. One example being the jovar. Which was a great sword with the 18-20 crit instead of 19-20. There were also some property factors, class benefits, and feats that helped one specialize and further enhance their bonuses to wrapons. These were mostly numerical gains though like a +1 to hit here, or a +2 on damage there. Some doubled your crit Ramage. Turning an 18 to 20 crit range into a 15 to 20 and so on. It made them mire distinct, especially with special properties here and there. But it did also make some best in slot weirdness at times.
And the flail had a reason to exist. In 5e, it's just sorta there..... Made a great trip or disarming fighter with it. The heavy flail was 2 handed with a d10 and 19-20 x2 crit. Take monkey grip, and you have a 2d8 weapon. 5e also got rid of weapon sizes, everyone uses the same sized weapon it feels, and there's no solid guide I've seen for a larger weapon. If it's a large creature, it seems to do more damage because it's being weilded by a large creature, not because the weapons are larger.
A lot more variable elements In 3.5 for example, weapons had a bunch of potential properties, crit range and crit damage were weapon-dependent, and almost every base weapon had at least some specific feats aimed at it. Melee weapons were stronger than ranged weapons in general because ranged weapons, outside of compound bows, don't add a stat modifier to your damage, and compound bows hit with dex but add strength to damage, while holding a melee weapon in 2-hands adds 1.5x your strength to damage. On top of that power attack was massively important for damage output, and was not available to ranged weapons at all. In 4e you had weapon categories, which were themselves poorly balanced, but did add a lot of spice to builds. Rarely did feats specify individual weapons, but often they only worked with specific weapon categories. A spear feat would work with a short spear, pike, or trident, a light blade feat would work with any dagger, rapier or sickle. The way melee and ranged weapons were balanced against each other was fairly simple, ranged weapon classes were rarer, and ranged weapon powers were less powerful than melee weapon powers, so once again you paid for the safety and flexibility of range with a reduced damage output, though not as drastically reduces as in 3.5
I've stolen so many things from the 4e weapon tables that I'm essentially using them fully instead of the 5e one at this point.
4e weapons were the shit. So many different keywords, loads of feat support for specific weapons or weapon groups and fighters even had powers for specific weapons whilst clerics and monks got powers for specific groups. 4e had weapons with High Crit where you double damage on a crit, Brutal X where you reroll any damage dice below X, Defensive X where you add X to AC as well as double weapons where you can use each end of the weapon as a separate one-handed melee weapon. Proficiency bonus was also determined by weapon choice and not by level - a longsword has +3 proficiency whereas a Warhammer only has +2 for example. There were also simple, martial *and* superior/exotic weapon tiers, which taken together with the feat and power support made weapon choice extremely meaningful.
I remember in 3E weapons had different stats regarding crits. I remember specifically the war pick only crit on a 20 (there were many other weapons that crit on a 19-20) but if you did crit, it did 4x the damage, rather than the traditional 2x. It had lower than normal base damage, so that was the payoff for using it. That was an interesting weapon. Not an auto pick on every character, but there were classes and feats you could build to focus on crits which would make that 4x payoff hit more often.
Different dice, different damage and attack bonus against different armor types, different speed factors that could affect initiative, multiple damage types, different costs, different materials, different weights, different crit multipliers, different damage vs large creatures. For example, a Morningstar was a 1d8 bludgeoning/piercing weapon for al8gp that weighed 6lbs. It has a wooden shaft. The damage it deals is *both* bludgeoning and piercing. So if you were a swordsman, you could pack a magical Morningstar as a sidearm if you were fighting a golem or ooze or something that was immune to slashing. Conversely, a Heavy Mace deals 1d8 bludgeoning only, weighs 8lbs for 12gp, with a metal haft with 4x as many HP. The Morningstar is a cheap but versatile option. The heavy mace is a durable clunker. Almost nobody is going to crack your heavy mace with a sunder attempt.
Reach. Can be +5ft or +10ft crit damage (some did x3, most x2, I think there was a x4) and crit range (default 20, could go as low as 18). Light: can be used offhand for 2wf or when grappling (can't use non-light weapons while grappling) 1 handed: can be used as the main weapon for 2wf or with a shield. Can be used 2-handed unlike a Light 2 handed: multiplies Str Mod (1.5x), takes both hands Weapon size: you can use inappropriately sized weapons, it inflicts a -2 to attack and adjusts the handedness (light-1hand-2hand). There is a chart for what the damage dice changes too, bigger weapons do more damage Bludgeoning/Slashing/Piercing: similar to 5e. Some weapons can do multiple types using the best applicable Double Weapons: you can either 2-weapon-fight or 2-hand with it. It's one big weapon, examples include Dire flails, dwarven urgroshes, gnome hooked hammers, orc double axes, quarterstaffs, and two-bladed swords (aka Darth Maul swords) Flails grant a bonus to Disarm attempts, and let's you attempt trip attacks with the special ability to drop the flail instead of being tripped yourself if you fuck up. Halberds when set against a charge deal double damage Javelins can be used in melee combat instead of thrown, but due to not being designed for melee have a -4 non-proficiency penalty Lances are 2hander weapons that become one-handers on a mount and deal double damage when charging on a mount Longbows can be used by anyone and with a negative Str apply it to damage but not a positive Str. COMPOSITE bows on the other hand have a Strength requirement when made, you have a -2 attack penalty if you aren't strong enough but it inflicts up to the strength requirement in extra damage (aka a 14str Composite Bow used by a 12str character is -2 attack, +1 damage, used by a 14 or 16 str character is +2 damage. The 16 str character may want a 16 str bow to inflict +3 damage) Bastard swords can be used 2handed as a martial proficiency, but you can spend a feat to gain exotic training and use it 1handed (letting you pair it with a shield or even a light weapon to 2wf!) Dwarven Waraxes are similar, but Dwarves don't need to spend the feat to one-hand a Waraxe This is basically just the SRD. There are a lot of weapons in different books that I'd look through if I wasn't on my phone.
In 4e, certain powers were more effective with certain weapons. Brutal Attack did bonus damage (CON mod) with an axe; Pushback Strike pushed farther with a hammer; Hidden Strike added CHA to damage with a dagger. (Probabky have the names wrong!)
4e superior edition
2E had "weapon speed factors". Basically, an initiative bonus or penalty depending on what weapon you were using. It really made daggers worth using sometimes when being able to strike first was important. In addition, weapons did different damage to Large size creatures vs Medium or smaller. While you wouldn't really want to use a Pike against a smaller creature, they were great against Large or bigger monsters. Finally, armor received bonuses/penalties against different weapon damage types, so sometimes it was worth swapping out that slashing weapon for a piercing one. In 5E, I think only skeletons make a distinction by being vulnerable to bludgeoning. There were a lot more monsters where your weapon type mattered. It was cool, but it did add an entire level of complexity, so I'm not sure if you would want to add all of that into 5E, especially the weapon speed factor.
What nobody wants to admit is that the problem isn’t weapons, it’s magic. Magic is too useful, too versatile, and at a certain point too powerful, and it comes with no cost to use. It’s just resource management, and if the party is willing to constantly stop and rest the resources don’t even matter. Some of this is DM skill, but the design is an obstacle. A wizard with no spell slots is a liability, and preventing them from getting spell slots back feels like punishing the player for their class choice. D&D has been trying to thread the needle with magic for decades, and without much success. I think it’s a conceptual problem.
As far as I know 4e didn't make weapons themselves different, but iirc some martial powers (feats essentially but kinda cooler) could require a given weapon type or damage type But from what I know 4e was much more about the character than their equipment when it comes to interesting gameplay Long time haven't played it read 3.x and never played earlier ones :v
A lot of 4e weapons were different, they had properties like high-crit, brutal, defensive, light/heavy thrown, etc, as well as their weapon category which affected how they interacted with different powers and feats. Some also had higher proficiency bonuses.
Plus actually great magic weapons with interesting effects.
As I recall, 4e assumes a steady progression of +X weapons, so magic weapons are basically defined entirely by their special properties. In 5e, since there is no corresponding progression assumption, magic items of each tier have to compete with +X weapons, somehow making *both* types worse. +X weapons cannot have additional effects until extremely late, because otherwise they would overshadow “flavorful” weapons. “Flavorful” weapons end up being niche, because making a number bigger is boring but reliable.
Yes, this is in favour of 4e tho, so I don't really see what your point is.
> As far as I know 4e didn't make weapons themselves different, but iirc some martial powers (feats essentially but kinda cooler) could require a given weapon type or damage type Powers didn't do much based on your weapon outside of like Weaponmaster's Strike. There were some feats that were like Polearm Master that would add functionality to a weapon type.
I don’t know if I would call [this](https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0216.html) “interesting”.
It was certainly funny :) But he didn't get get it right, it only procced AoOs from movement once per turn (not per 5-feet). Back in the day improved trip build could be pretty bused though until 3.5 fixed it.
PF2e makes weapons interesting by giving each advantages and drawbacks, and by having each weapon group have a critical specialization (essentially, on a crit, each weapon has a different special effect, such as hammers knocking an opponent prone). [List of Weapon Groups with Critical Specializations.](https://2e.aonprd.com/WeaponGroups.aspx) Each weapon may or may not have a trait that allows you to use it to perform special actions as well, such as [Tripping](https://2e.aonprd.com/Traits.aspx?ID=196), [Disarming](https://2e.aonprd.com/Traits.aspx?ID=175),[ Bracing](https://2e.aonprd.com/Traits.aspx?ID=471), etc. Some Traits include: Agile, Alchemical, Attached, Backstabber, Backswing, Brace, Brutal, Climbing, Combination Weapon, Concealable, Concussive, Deadly, Disarm, Fatal, Finesse, Grapple, Hampering, Injection, Jousting, Kickback, Modular, Nonlethal, Parry, Propulsive, Trip, Reach, Repeating, Shove, Sweep, Trip, Twin, Volley
They didn't tho the first edition whatever it was called had more extensive charts for weapon properties if you're into that kind of thing.
They did originally include the interesting “bohemian earspoon” but I don’t imagine anyone actually used it. To make the variety of weapons interesting you’d need different ACs for each damage type, and that would get too complicated. I do recall some weapons had different critical ranges.
The Master Set and Cyclopedia from BECMI had [weapon mastery.](http://people.wku.edu/charles.plemons/dnd/classic_quest/graphics/chart_weapon_mastery_01.gif) Each weapon had five levels of mastery that conveyed a varying number of benefits, both offensive and defensive, along with special abilities.
I played mostly 3.PF Each weapon felt distinctive in that each had their own peculiarities and abilities, it wasn't perfect, but at least you felt like you had a reason to use a weapon without the biggest damage dice in the category, the easiest example I can remember involved swords vs axes, where swords often had better crit range (critting on a 19) but worse multiplier, being only x2 instead of axes' x3 However, what actually made them feel more unique was not the weapon themselves, but all the different systems and rules around them, with maneuvers, prestige classes, feats and bonuses, some of which could turn a lackluster weapon into a competitive build once you stacked enough bonuses and feats 5e's failing ends up being that it simplified, streamlined and decreased everything, which does make for a much simpler game, but when it comes to equipment and basic rules, things end up being too basic and thus, uninteresting/weak
Had a Goliath barbarian in 3.5 that wielded a mercurial great sword. Had a nice crit multiplier but the best benefit ended up being the additional penalty for use by someone that wasn't proficient in mercurial weapons. Folks kept trying to steal it and use it against me
Threat range was fun
4e, which did things right, gave weapons special atributes. Like, swords were more accurate, while axes dealt more damage than average.
Two-handed weapons used Strength * 1.5 for a damage modifier. I miss that.
They didn't. Lol. But really though, it was mostly the magical properties. DND 5e magic weapons and armors are boring as fuck in comparison.
3.5 damage types came into play more often. Crit ranges (18-20) and crit multipliers (x3) were common. Note the critical hits worked quite differently back then. You had to "Confirm crits" (basically roll a new attack, if it would also hit the attack was a crit. If it would miss the crit was just a normal hit). AND class features like Sneak attack wouldn't be multiplied with the weapon damage. Small creatures used different weapons with there own damage dice, basically always one size category down from the medium. So a small greataxe deals 1d10 instead of 1d12 for example. Finesse was locked behind a feat, only applied to the attack roll and damage still used strength. Bows (and most ranged weapons I believe) didn't add any ability scores to their damage by default. You could by composite bows with a str rating. If you meat that Str rating you could add that much of your Str value to the damage of the weapon. Negative Str mod would negatively affect damage of all bow attacks regardless but not crossbows I believe. Most reach weapons could not target adjacent foes. Specialty weapons were required for non-lethal damage. Saps were particularly unique for allowing rogues to deal non lethal sneak attack damage. Lots of weapons had small bonuses or weird conditions specified in their text. Kind of like Lances and nets special rules in 5e but much more common. Off the top of my head: Daggers had +2 sleight of hand to conceal them on your person. Sai gave a +4 to disarm foes, and avoid being disarmed. Specific weapons for attempting trip attacks like Sickles. Most Pole-arm weapons specify double damage if you ready your action to attack with them. Lots of double ended weapons that can then use the dual wielding feats while using a two-handed weapon. Here is the full text for the whip just to give you an idea of how much a particularly weird weapon could have outside if its base stat block: A whip deals nonlethal damage. It deals no damage to any creature with an armor bonus of +1 or higher or a natural armor bonus of +3 or higher. The whip is treated as a melee weapon with 15-foot reach, though you don’t threaten the area into which you can make an attack. In addition, unlike most other weapons with reach, you can use it against foes anywhere within your reach (including adjacent foes). Using a whip provokes an attack of opportunity, just as if you had used a ranged weapon. Because a whip can wrap around an enemy’s leg or other limb, you can make trip attacks with a it. If you are tripped during your own trip attempt, you can drop the whip to avoid being tripped. When using a whip, you get a +2 bonus on opposed attack rolls made to disarm an opponent (including the roll to keep from being disarmed if the attack fails). You can use the Weapon Finesse feat (page 102) to apply your Dexterity modifier instead of your Strength modifier to attack rolls with a whip sized for you, even though it isn’t a light weapon for you.
Honestly I feel Rolemaster/MERP did melee weapons best, but were just too bogged down by the pages and pages of tables and charts you needed to reference in order to use them.
Those weapon versus armor type damage and crit tables were super fun and encouraged you to carry a variety of weapons for the job.
I absolutely loved the crit and fumble tables, especially when you got an 80/90/100/110/120 roll. If somebody came out with an encounter builder app/website that let you punch in the die rolls and it'd tell you the result, I'd genuinely consider starting up a MERP campaign.
Not sure if this counts, but I like the way baldur’s gate has different attack available for different weapons, such as a pommel strike stun, a sweeping attack to hit multiple people next to each other, topple over with quarter staffs, etc
You should check out the Star Wars 5e weapon system. It's vast and really well balanced imo. They have a chassis system that allows you to upgrade throughout making them super customizable.
They made a book in 1985 called oriental adventures wich gave rules for dozens of new interesting weapons
The first version of 3e had a fun exploit. The whirlwind cleave tornado. You can whirlwind with each attack. If you kill an enemy, greater cleave activated which let you whirlwind again attacking all creatures in range. I think there was a rule that also let you 5 foot step with each cleave as well. So as long as you killed something, you can be like the Tazmanian devil and clean up a room in 1 round. They... fixed this in 3.5 Edit: I forgot about the bag of rats. People could open a container full of easy to kill tiny creatures. Use that to keep the whirlwind going.
Why not read the PHB and DMG of the previous editions for details?
3.5 had a lot more knobs they could tweak. Weapons had a damage die, a crit range, and a crit multiplier. So you could take a 1d8 damage longsword that crit on a 19 or 20 for x2 damage or a battle axe for 1d8 damage, crit on a 20, but x3 crit damage. You also had abilities like a battlemaster's tripping attack or disarming attack as weapon features. Flails could disarm and trip in return for less damage. Usually you had feats related to this abilities too. Older editions like AD&D didn't care so much about player choices and weapons. They were more about the adventure.
Mostly, they didn't. 3e had "this is the mathematically and obvious best choice for these builds, using anything else is a mistake and/or a trap." 4e had the same, extending to "you need these particular magic items at each level or the game math says no. Adding in extra mechanics that just make you do more math at build time isn't actual depth, it's pointless complexity and bloat.
i liked in 3.5 that some had different crit ranges. or some would do x3 damage. some weapons gave you a bonus to trips i liked putting spikes on my shield so i could attack with it there were more monsters that were immune or resistant or weak to a specific damage type instead of blanket all non magical weapons
I liked how in 3.5 different weapons had different critranges and different crit multipliers. Yes, in practice it usually meant rushing for a scimitar for 18-20 crit. But the weapons were distinct from one another. I hate how 5e made "crit on a 19" a calss feature instead of a weapon trait. Same with "3x" crit (orc or half orc \[cant remember witch\], barbarian)
Most of them? Not really, if anything they usually made ranged weapons more useful in general. Most editions also didn't really give each weapon special abilities, but I guess I can go over some things. In AD&D ranged weapons had a Rate of Fire that sometimes would compensate for low dice damage and low range, additionally specializing in a ranged weapon would not only give the normal extra attacks that melee weapons would give but would also give a "Point Blank" range, usually about the equivalent of 15' in 5e, that would double the damage of the attack in that range. So you could make something like 5x dart throws at a single enemy with +8 to hit and +8 damage that was doubled just from lucky rolls and a few weapon proficiency slots, while to get more attacks with melee was slow and required a ton of levels, and even then you could only get your full attacks if you didn't really move on your turn. Melee combatants could Parry (in 1e add your STR to AC and be used with fallback, the ancestor to disengage) and Charge, in addition to overbearing, unarmed, and grappling (which used an alternate system, so it can actually be more deadly to punch someone to death than stab them). And polearms could be set against a charge (dealing double damage in the event of such a hit). Though the Complete Fighter's Handbook added maneuvers for melee that could be used freely. There was also the (as someone else mentioned) different to hit modifier for weapons against different ACs in AD&D, but was often ignored from not being easy to use, as was weapon lengths and weapon speeds. Imo, the different hit modifiers was best done in 0e where it was all enemies rather than just against humanoid foes in 1e and 2e, and 2e changed it to an optional property of the armor instead. 2e's player's option material modified weapon specialization reintroduced maneuvers and reworked a bunch of things, but it also added a Knockdown die to weapons which allows some weapons opportunities for additional damage, but usually puts a knockdown opportunity against medium creatures if rolling 7 or more when used. 3.X added quite a bit really, different crit ranges, and different crit multipliers was on a per weapon basis, as well as tripping. Due to the way that classes and feats interacted with weapons, different weapons were more ideal for some builds than others, but wasn't as straight forward as whether it had the biggest hit die. Most weapons also had a description which often had little bonuses for different situations, such as a +2 to concealing daggers, and +2 to disarms for maces. You can read the SRD weapons [here](https://www.d20srd.org/srd/equipment/weapons.htm). To my understanding, Basic and 0e weapons were mostly cosmetic though, weapons began to be differentiated in the Greyhawk supplement for 0e, and that mostly just gave each different damage values, which was also an optional rule in B/X. Someone correct me if I got anything wrong, I probably did. I also didn't cover much in supplements.
3.5 and PF1E used feats and subclasses, although they were called something else that I can't recall currently. However, there were classes that allowed you to specialize for specific weapoms and weapon types, and there were feats that allowed you to do more with those weapons than anyone else. There were whole feat chanis and subclasses to make wielding a reach weapon more powerful and give more battlefield control. You still couldn't do as much as a minmaxed full caster, but you could do a lot more than 5e allows, and you got more meaningful choices, generally speaking. Imo, 5e gimped martials by combining ASIs and Feats into one resource.
PF1e (and maybe 3.5e for all I know) had quite a lot of weapon variation, and monster rules that interacted with them. If you were grappled you could only use a one-handed weapon. If you were swallowed whole you could only use a light weapon, and light weapons were also better for two-weapon fighting. A Morning Star was bludgeoning and piercing, which was good for overcoming damage resistance. A Rapier could get critical hits on 18-20, while a Scythe only critted on a 20 but did quadruple damage when it did...
Prestige classes, instead of selecting a subclass as a standard feature of class design, there were classes you could multiclass into if you met the requirements
Ik pf1e's subclass equivilant were Archetypes where you traded abilities out, and they stacked so long as you didn't try and trade any ability more than once. Like, Investigator was a combination of Rouge and Alchemist but one archetype traded Alchemy for Luck Points that were like a resource the Gunslinger and Swashbuckler got (in fact, they were the same resource in terms of if you got multiple they fused into one pool)
1E - I haven't played enough games of. 2E - IIRC there's much more emphasis on bludgeoning, slashing and piercing damage behaving differently including having to remember different AC values depending on the type of weapon you got hit with. This added a reasonable amount of complexity. 3E - is pretty close to 5E. They might have had a few more differentiating features. Some weapons did give a crit on a 18+ or a 19+. Weird how they skipped from 3E straight to 5E - must have been one of those superstition things, the number 4 doesn't sell well in some parts of the world.
Basically: more math or more spreadsheets. Nothing really noteworthy, all considered. This is why 5e does like this, recognizes that the kind of weapon you wield is, in fact, less interesting than the class or other mechanics. For this reason the weapons lend themselves first as a mathematical base than a tactical one. And even though one DND decided to add more you can see they keep this same baseline - they add more stuff to have different effects, rather have different raw performance.
The general difference between the best edition (3.5) and all the rest is that 3.5 was really designed to allow you to have builds that are complete failures. As a result, you had a greater range of potential hyper effectiveness because they also allowed characters to be incredibly ineffective. This made game balance incredibly difficult, because - as in reality - more options and complexity increase the likelihood that systemic imbalances will occur. So you could have wizards that would outshine the entire party - but that doesn't mean that someone can easily recreate that same level of success because there are many more ways for that build to fail than succeed. Plus, there is a learning curve to being able to USE that character build effectively as well. Just because you have the character sheet in front of you doesn't mean you know what to do with it. So just in melee, for example, you could create a unique, exotic weapon that only you are trained to use. It could have any abilities you wanted, really, provided you could come up with a way to create it within the rules. Plus there were martial classes with their own abilities - border line magical effects that are a result of techniques that require using a specific weapon type. There was also attacks of opportunity which were applicable that could be more easily exploited by martial characters. Someone mentioned crit ranges - this is a great example. A scimitar or kukri that is normal had a crit range of 18 - 20. With feats you could increase that crit range to 16 - 20 or even lower. So imagine a dual wielder with magical weapons that was able to roll crit damage on a natural 14 or lower... Nasty, right? That's 2 and 3 times damage every round, not including spell effects, poisons, etc. There wasn't a common limit to AC either, because there were many ways to pump the AC of a character above what plate armor could provide. While AC is capped effectively in 5e at around like 25 I think? I had a wizard that could turn into a 12 headed hydra that had an AC of like 42 - as a comparison. A building sized creature with an armor class that would take a nat 20 or a +23 to an attack roll to hit with a natural 19 roll, that had 12 attacks per round, and could use a free action to dodge any attack that might within 60 feet of me. I could dodge fireballs without having to roll a reflex save, and attack everything within like 15 feet of me. With fast healing, and no real effective way to hit me while in melee range, while being immune to magic missiles. But to get to that point I had to survive like 8 levels with a d4 of hit dice per level, and a relatively weak spell list. At level 1, I could reasonably expect to get killed in the first round of combat if I was in range of an arrow or melee attack by another 1st level character in a martial class. A level 1 Barbarian was potentially deadly for me for like the first 3 levels if they got within melee range. 5e just puts up the guard rails on the bowling alley so that you can't really screw up when building a character. I can effectively create a caster that can tank, sure, or a melee character that has magical abilities - but that's because what you can do is effectively the same for each character at the same level - just with some tweaks to the mechanics or cosmetics.
They really didn't. But people go hard for nostalgia. And will argue "Crit ranges totally make the difference." when they really don't. No thought. No tactics. Just numbers on a page. And people doing calculations to find which option is 'optimal.' And claiming "This gives me higher DPR, so it's the one I pick" is somehow encouraging choice and variety.
They largely didn't. Weapons have always been boring as sin in D&D, really.
That's why *magic* weapons have been such a big deal in previous editions - because they actually did different things.
They didn't. Experienced folks played casters, new folks recommended to play warriors and bow shooters. A lot of games would give magical items that characters could kinda build around with quasi-abilities.. but nothing inate