Lack of weapon STR requirement or fatigue is unrealistic

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Every wimp with 6 STR can swing a two-handed sword if he likes. Heck, any wuss with 15 DEX could dual-wield a bastard sword and a rapier at almost no penalty, even if his STR is below average.

Come on, in real life, it takes a really strong person to wield a bastard sword in one hand. Let alone dual-wield it with something... let alone with a medium-sized weapon like a rapier.

You could actually dual-wield two bastard swords with a little more of a penalty, but still doable if your STR is 8. Or 6. I've never seen anyone dual-wield two bastard swords but one is already a pain even for strong guys. If you're an 8 STR elven rogue girl dual-wielding two bastard swords, you'll get tired no sooner than your 18 STR half-orc barbarian team-mate wielding an empty bottle. Where's realism in 3E?

 

Because it's a *game*?

As a GM, you can state flatout some rules for wielding the weapons stated. The PHB, MM and DMG are guidelines for the game - the rules can be modified to suit the campaign and/or players.

 

You know what's unrealistic?

Elves making big balls of fire from bat poop.

So let's get rid of magic because it's obviously unrealistic.

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Okay, sarcasm aside, there are a few points to made. One is that the 6 Str wimp is going to have a hard time hitting anyone in the first place or hurting anyone, since he has a -2 to hit and damage. The point with the bastard sword isn't valid either, since you need 13 Str in one hand. You can go look at the feat Exotic Weapon Proficiency.

I'm not sure where you're going with the fatigue point. I'm willing to bet that in the rush of combat (which in D&D probably won't take more than 10 rounds, usually) an average joe can wield a heavy sword without much penalty. It makes sense that he would be tired carrying it all day, but that's why you can sheathe weapons.

Besides, all PC's with less than 8 Str are going to be wizards or sorcerers carrying daggers or quarterstaffs anyway.

 

For bastard sword only or for any exotic weapon? It would make no sense to have a STR 13 requirement for all kinds of Exotic Weapon Proficiency, including kukris, kamas and stuff.

 

I think what chevalier means is that it destroys the versimiltude... IOW, while magic and so on may be "not real", it fits within the game and doesn't break game reality, while he thinks that low-strength people wielding huge weapons without fatigue does break the game reality.

One solution for fatigue, chev, is to take a look at the 2nd edition book "Combat and Tactics", which has a fatigue system for fighting, which is still very compatible with 3.5. Basically, you get a number of fatigue points equal to your HD size. Every round in which you move or attack, you lose a point of fatigue. When you reach 0, you become fatigued (which increases your encumbrance category by one). You then count off two points per round, and when you reach the end of that, you're counted as exhausted (two categories higher; 2e had a "severely" encumbered level which helped this system).

You might, instead, go with a non-lethal damage option for fatigue... maybe every attack or move costs 1 point of non-lethal damage, and spells cost 1 non-lethal per level. If you rested a bit between fights, you're cool... if you don't give yourself a chance to, you're going to get closer and closer to unconsciousness, as your wounds and exhaustion add up.

For the weapon size issue, you could argue that a 6 Strength character may be able to pick up a two-handed sword, and even swing it, but think about how his weaknes affects that... his sword attacks will be easy to block or avoid (-2 to hit), and will cause less damage (-2 to damage) because he needs such a huge wind-up that he's easy to anticipate, and he can't generate much force, to start with.

 

The 13 Str requirement applies only for bastard swords and dwarven waraxes.

 

The only thing unrealistic in the above, Oaz, are the elves. Big balls of fire can be made from bat poop - or guano, if you want to get technical. If you don't like using the material components for spells, don't use them. And yes, it is just that simple.

My point was that chev is making a big to-do about strength requirements for wielding weapons and he doen't have to. If it's PnP, he can make up whatever rules he wants about who can wield what and how. If it's an CRPG, he's stuck with the programmers'/game designers' rules.

 

Um, if you think your character is too weak to carry a big weapon, then don't have your character carry a big weapon. Just because the rules let you do something silly, doesn't mean you have to do it. I never have my characters dual wield unless there is something really small in the off hand like a dagger because I just can't imagine being able to swing a longsword in each hand.

 

Now that I think about it, it seems to me that a major flaw of all editions of DnD is that the combat is *too* streamlined. Aside from lack of fatigue, the big problem for me is the whole concept of Hit Points: non-specific injuries that have no effect on how well characters fight (and that's even if you roll-play hit point loss as a kind of fatigue...) Sure, it makes combat go much faster, but it also means, in PnPs as well as CRPGs, that combat becomes super frequent, and fuundamentally sequential. The DM essentially sets up a series of battles all of relatively the same difficulty (just difficult enough to challenge the characters), in a way that often challenges belief (i.e., why don't those orcs know that this group of adventurers have infiltrated their caves and are taking them out one conveniently small group at a time, and so band together in force to eliminate the threat?).

Plus, Hit Points remove alot of fear from many battle situations once a character has a few levels, as a character can say, "so what if these orcs shoot a few arrows at me, they'll hardly dent my hit point total."

And then there's the XP issue: in the end, every high level character in a DnD universe represents literally thousands of kills. How is this possible. Monsters, evil humans, etc. must be incredibly fertile in the DnD universe to support such predation...

[I hope the following isn't too OT!]

Chev: actually, I wonder if you'd find the Ars Magica RPG system interesting. You can find a free download of the previous edition on the Atlas Games website.

Ars Magica is set in a fantasy medieval europe, thus allowing the use of european history as source material (including assumptions that 1) physics is in actuality Aristotelian, 2) that all sorts of medieval legends of the supernatural have a basis in fact, etc).

Supernatural forces come in 4 flavors: Divine (the church), Infernal, Faerie, and Magic. The game centers around magi, all part of what is called the "Hermetic Order":a set of rules as to how magic is taught and practiced. The magi, along with non-magus servants, soldiers, and companions, group together in covenants dedicated to increasing their knowledge; most advancement in the game comes out of training, studying tomes, and lab work, as opposed to adventuring/slaughtering enemies.

The magic system is especially interesting: one gains skill points in 15 different disciplines, 5 of which are verbs (Perdo, Creo, Rego, Muto, Intellego), and 10 are nouns (Aquam, Ignem, Mentam, etc), with a spell being a combination of the two (i.e., a "fireball" would be a Creo Ignem spell). While particular spells can be invented, learned, and mastered, the system is also incredibly flexible in allowing for spontaneous spells (i.e., if a magus wants to move set of stones into a river as stepping stones to allow him to cross, he might cast a spontaneous Rego Terram spell).

Strangely enough, if one wanted to model the Harry Potter universe in a RPG, Ars Magica would be a very good place to start (including magical education, the great advantages of wizards over muggles, etc).

Finally: to combat. Combat is far less forgiving in Ars Magica. Injuries cause skill decreases, and often (fitting the medieval milieu) lead to permanent injury or death. Exertion causes fatigue, whether in combat or magic, and fatigue also leads to skill penalties. Age is also quite brutally modeled, though magi can prolong their lives by researching longevity potions, etc.

Enough of the quick summary tho. In the end, Ars Magica differs from DnD in that 1) much more time is spent planning what kind of research/training your characters will do in a given season (and even attempts to develop their convent library through writing treatises, trade, etc) as that gives you the bulk of your development; 2) much less time is spent in repetative battles. Combat takes longer to work out, but somehow seems more significant and dangerous, (especially as magical healing is much more difficult to accomplish); and 3) the sourse research you end up doing is actual serious medieval history, like Fernand Braudel, so you're not spending your time learning trivia about Elminster, etc.

[what a long post for something off topic!]

 

I'm a big fan of Ars Magica; I'm currently in two PBeM's for the game, and its definitely worth a look.

However, Bion, not every high level person gets there through thousands of kills; there are other ways to get experience than killing (such as story bonuses), and NPCs in 3e also go up in levels, slowly, just by living their lives.

 

It's weird -- in my 3.5 Players Handbook the Kukri is listed as a Martial weapon, yet in Complete Divine and in this thread, it is referred to as an Exotic weapon. Weird.

Anyhow, as for the bastard sword issue, Oaz had it right -- to wield that puppy one handed you need a Strength score of 13 or more. Same as the Dwarven Waraxe.

As for anyone wielding two weapons with almost no penalty, if anyone with a Strength penalty tries to wield 2 weapons, even with the 2 weapon fighting feat, they're going to take some serious penalties, even at high levels. IMHO, at -2 for the dual wielding plus the -1 minimum for strength penalty, that's a -3 penalty right there, which is nothing to sneeze at. Of course, I believe there's a feat that wipes out even the -2 penalty for two handed fighting, but if someone wants to waste their precious feat slots on feats that really don't complement their abilities, that's their call -- they'll suffer the consequences.

 

And that's another issue: levels! Imagine what an odd world DnD would actually be if that were the case: your young, fit warrior, trained to proficiency in the ultimate weapons of the medieval age, the long sword and bow, afraid to offend the peasantry because that 85 year old crone might be a 10th level peasant with 6 your hit points and two attacks per round with her cane! Age equals experience, I guess...

I like the argument when playing DnD that 1) most people don't level, and it takes extraordinary talent and experience to do so. Thus, most career soldiers remain first level fighters (tho they would still have a distinct combat advantage over commoners, reflecting their training). And 2) while PCs level according to DnD rules, that doesn't mean that NPCs must necessarily have done the same.

Also, isn't there something, well, a bit vampiric about automatically growing in power by killing other sentient beings? What if everyone in the DnD universe realized this, instantly creating hundreds of thousands of would-be mass murderers, realizing that, no, training won't get you diddly-squat, what you need to do is run around slaughtering everyone you see until you become a god... In fact, what if our hypothetical old crone, once she reached a high level of peasantry, took to preying on young, fit warriors to boost her power...

And glad you're enjoying the Ars Magica pbem campaigns. If only I had more time... But do you agree that this rule set takes the emphasis off all combat, all the time?

 

Well, Ars Magica is different because combat is also very deadly, healing takes a long time, and dead is dead... D&D's ease of healing, and 3e's ease of ressurection changes the play dynamic considerably. Also, Ars Magica is about wizards more than warriors, which really changes the nature of combat.

And, in 3e, the old crone who was a 10th level peasant would be a 9 CR creature, and so wouldn't get any experience for offing a 1st level warrior in combat.

I can see, though, the argument that the level system does create logical inconsistencies. It's something that is somewhat addressed. In 2e, it was addressed because your 10th level fighter would need to kill thousands of goblins to achieve 11th level, and the rules even acknowledged that enemies who didn't post a threat weren't worth experience. 3e goes even further, and something beneath a certain CR isn't worth experience at all.

However, D&D isn't a game about chopping down old ladies... its about grand adventures, which doesn't work as well if you're bleeding out from the sword-wound you just took.

 

As a DM you have complete control over your game world. A DM should make a decision on such a rule and hopefully make an educated choice.