Magic Weapons Only Increase Damage?

[Vadskye]

As part of a rewrite of the magic item system, I have been searching for a way to make weapons fit more smoothly into the system. One of the thing that bugs me about the current system is the way special abilities don't feel special; they are, in many cases, simply a way to increase damage. I think a flaming sword should feel distinct from an ordinary sword. I also want to decrease the cost of magic weapons. (The reasoning for some of these changes may be more clear once the wealth system is completed) Therefore, weapons in this system would have the following changes:

Magic weapons use the same pricing structure as armor.
A +2 magic weapon grants +2 damage, but no bonus to attack rolls.
Most special abilities do not increase damage. Instead, they would have unique effects. The details of how this would work are still being developed, but intuitively, I would guess that a flaming weapon would have a chance to light struck targets on fire, a shocking weapon might stagger a struck target, and so on.


Would this ruin the feel of magic weapons in your game? Do you see the attack bonus as a crucial part of a +2 longsword?

[NichG]

You're going to run up against the problem that generally speaking when someone thinks 'how do I make my weapon better' the natural extension is 'how do I kill things more efficiently?' combined with the fact that you tend to blow through targets in D&D so that lasting effects on a single target become less interesting the more powerful you get.

One way to get around this is 'its a weapon and also serves some secondary purpose that has nothing to do with it being a weapon'. E.g. how artifacts and intelligent weapons have been handled in previous editions. This is a sword, but it can also teleport the user to the nearest battle 1/day. This is a sword, but it can also heal the user's wounds. That kind of thing.

Another method is to create system elaborations such that items that help you deal with the elaborations are more important than items that simply increase your core concern of damage output. This is where elemental damage types come in, though they don't serve that purpose very well in D&D. On the other hand, a game where every monster took half damage from all but one damage type would definitely give value to a weapon whose only effect was 'you can toggle all of its damage to a second damage type'. Similarly, in a game where DR is very large, a weapon that can ignore DR may be more desirable than one that just does +1 damage (and the same goes for Incorporeality/Ghost Touch).

The point is, all of these things are paired - the weapon is more interesting because the enemies systematically have some defense that it negates. If the enemy defenses are more varied, the weapon becomes less interesting.

A third method is for the weapon's 'special' properties to be tangentially related to its combat use, but not directly. This sword lets me interrogate the souls of those it slays. The wounds dealt by this sword are invisible and do no harm nor can they be immediately healed, until at some later date I choose to activate them, which I can do from anywhere. This provides some incentive to use a weapon that is less good at 'killing things' than some other weapon, because of the longer-term benefits you can obtain.

[Xerlith]

As I am not familiar with your magic system, those are mostly random thoughts:

Quick&dirty way.
You may make the weapons' cost the same, but instead make the following change:

The magic weapons have no stand-alone enhancement bonus. Instead, every special ability (I mean those in SRD) grants ALSO a numerical enhancement bonus equivalent to the ability's value.
The enhancement numerical bonus applies only to damage.
Of course, you can enchant a non-magical masterwork bonus with an ability without requiring a prior +1 enhancement, since it's now nonexistant.

Those enchantments cannot be greater than +5. Any special ability (As those which you have listed, not the SRD-ones) is not subject to this limit (Or may be, if you prefer to keep it lowish-magic).

[Vadskye]

You're going to run up against the problem that generally speaking when someone thinks 'how do I make my weapon better' the natural extension is 'how do I kill things more efficiently?' combined with the fact that you tend to blow through targets in D&D so that lasting effects on a single target become less interesting the more powerful you get.
Very true - and a big part of why the non-damaging special abilities in D&D are virtually ignored, I think. This change is made as part of my complete rewrite, one goal of which is to increase the round length of the average combat. That would hopefully give special abilities more time to shine.


One way to get around this is 'its a weapon and also serves some secondary purpose that has nothing to do with it being a weapon'. E.g. how artifacts and intelligent weapons have been handled in previous editions. This is a sword, but it can also teleport the user to the nearest battle 1/day. This is a sword, but it can also heal the user's wounds. That kind of thing.
Yes - but that feels weird to me. Like you said above, when I get a magic sword, I expect it to make me better at fighting. Though "teleporting the user to the nearest battle" might have some merit, possibly with a tweak; it's still combat related.


Another method is to create system elaborations such that items that help you deal with the elaborations are more important than items that simply increase your core concern of damage output...

The point is, all of these things are paired - the weapon is more interesting because the enemies systematically have some defense that it negates. If the enemy defenses are more varied, the weapon becomes less interesting.
Definitely an interesting approach! The problem that I see is that the core fluff for monsters doesn't really include this kind of defense. Actually, if I were to categorize monsters in terms of the type of natural armor they have (exoskeleton, tough hide, inherent armor...) I might find some divisions that different weapons could overcome. That's a viable option - and I may use something like this to deal with the relatively mundane/simple special abilities like flaming or holy.


A third method is for the weapon's 'special' properties to be tangentially related to its combat use, but not directly. This sword lets me interrogate the souls of those it slays. The wounds dealt by this sword are invisible and do no harm nor can they be immediately healed, until at some later date I choose to activate them, which I can do from anywhere. This provides some incentive to use a weapon that is less good at 'killing things' than some other weapon, because of the longer-term benefits you can obtain.
This is what sounds most interesting and fitting to me. Those are special abilities which are difficult or impossible to duplicate without being tied specifically to a magic weapon. The main challenge is in creating a bunch of new special abilities to be more "interesting". But that's a fun challenge!


The magic weapons have no stand-alone enhancement bonus. Instead, every special ability (I mean those in SRD) grants ALSO a numerical enhancement bonus equivalent to the ability's value.
The enhancement numerical bonus applies only to damage.
Of course, you can enchant a non-magical masterwork bonus with an ability without requiring a prior +1 enhancement, since it's now nonexistant.

Those enchantments cannot be greater than +5. Any special ability (As those which you have listed, not the SRD-ones) is not subject to this limit (Or may be, if you prefer to keep it lowish-magic).
This is also an intriguing concept. However, I think that allowing the idea of a simple "+3 longsword" has too much history behind it for me to totally get rid of weapon enhancement bonuses.

[Grinner]

Or perhaps the enhancement bonus merely enhances the natural properties of the weapon? A special ability would represent a change in the fundamental nature of the object, causing the "enhancement magic" to boost those properties. So a +1 flaming sword would glow as though it had recently been immersed in hot coals, but a +5 flaming sword would be raging inferno.

[Starbuck_II]

Magic weapons use the same pricing structure as armor.
A +2 magic weapon grants +2 damage, but no bonus to attack rolls.
Most special abilities do not increase damage. Instead, they would have unique effects. The details of how this would work are still being developed, but intuitively, I would guess that a flaming weapon would have a chance to light struck targets on fire, a shocking weapon might stagger a struck target, and so on.


Would this ruin the feel of magic weapons in your game? Do you see the attack bonus as a crucial part of a +2 longsword?

No. I think it might work:
Remember Masterwork already provides +1 hit.
This really only nerfs +2 weapons.
How about Elemental weapons add +1 element damage and their side effect? You could just have them add the elemental damage on Crits if you think it makes enhancement bonuses not as good.

But for fire weapons use standard rules.
DC 15 to avoid catching on fire. You could add enhancement bonus of weapon to DC (or double enhancement bonus).
So +1 flaming weapons have DC 16 to avoid catch on fire.

Use same guidelines for Shocking. Shocking staggers.

Cold freezes the target? (Y Dex damage, same DC guidelines: Dex equals zero they are frozen) or just use Daze rules.

Sonic deafens target.
Acid sickens foe.

[ericgrau]

Dunno if this was intentional to discourage damage, but +3 damage per +1 enhancement would be more fair. Except it's +1 damage for the first +1 so maybe it averages out.

One problem with giving enhancements special effects is that there are up to 9 of them and they will quickly get confusing. For that you might want to make them upgradable to +2 to +5 enchantments in ways that encourage mostly "single classing" instead of "multi-classing" the effects. The second problem is that damage dealers deal damage, and special effects don't stack well with damage. You may want to make many of them still deal damage, but in a special way. Like you said fire could ignite the target and deal damage over time. But for shocking I might have lightning jump to nearby targets: either low damage if it's controlled, or higher damage if it's uncontrolled.

I don't think it would ruin the game at all. A lot of people play with +1 weapons with a lot of enchantments anyway.

So the next step, which I'll leave to you and/or others, is to make up weapon progressions. Something like:

Flaming
+1: (describe effect here)
+2:
+3:
+4:
+5:

And now for some rules of thumb to help you along. You're balancing against 1d6 damage, so try to make it about that powerful on average whether it deals damage or what. At least shoot for equal to 3d6 around +3. Maybe barely weaker at +1, and barely stronger at +5. For multiple targets instead of focused fire on a single target, the extra damage is at least half as good per target, if not 3/4 as good. For damage over time, a good rule of thumb is to assume that up to 3 rounds are significant. Hopefully you can make some guesses on the other abilities.

To match 1d6, any special effects you do get should be minor, especially if they also deal damage. Never underestimate the ability to drop 20 disablers in a full attack basically as free actions. Even a +5 equivalent disabler might activate 4-6 times in a round by itself. A full attack should take off about half of a foe's hp and only half of that is from magic. So at any given level the special effects should have about 1/20 to 1/10 chance per hit of removing the foe from the fight entirely. Or double the odds if it only reduces the foe's effectiveness by 50% or if it only lasts 1-2 rounds instead of 3+, or if it also deals half of a d6 per +1, etc.

[Jormengand]

Just thinking of non-damaging effects that you could add in so people had more options.

How about Draining, which would heal you when you did damage, or Reforming which can suddenly jump back to your hand intact even if damaged. Slowing which reduces movement speed of things you hit. Shifting weapons will randomly teleport enemies. For throwing and ammunition, there's Phaselink which brings you to the target hit, even if it's a wall or whatever, or Dragging, which forces the target towards you.

[AttilaTheGeek]

That sounds like a really cool idea, ericgrau. Something like this:

Flaming +1: +1d6 damage per hit
Flaming +2: As Flaming +1, with 1d6 fire the next two turns. (Stacks with itself)
Flaming +3: As Flaming +2, but deals 2d10 on a crit (and 4d10 on an x3 weapon, and 6d10 on an x4 weapon)
Flaming +4: As Flaming +3, but deals an extra 1d6 on each attack, an extra 1d6 the next two turns, and an extra 1d10 (times crit multiplier -1) on a crit
Flaming +5: As Flaming +4, but the crit explosion is now a 15-foot cone.

would be really cool. I would buy that Flaming +5 enchantment. I increased the d10s on the burst from 1d10 default to 2d10, because I've mathed it out, and Elemental Burst weapons are nowhere near worth a +2.

[Vadskye]

There are a lot of good ideas here. Thank you all very much! I'll get to work on translating these into fully fleshed out mechanics.

[Lord of Shadows]

The wounds dealt by this sword are invisible and do no harm nor can they be immediately healed, until at some later date I choose to activate them, which I can do from anywhere. This provides some incentive to use a weapon that is less good at 'killing things' than some other weapon, because of the longer-term benefits you can obtain.
That is a really cool (and a REALLY sinister) idea!!

Back to the topic at hand...

It seems like there are two basic types at work here, "damage" and "flavor." Players will like more of one or the other. Some are OK with a balance of each. A lot of where this goes will depend on what type of players are going to be using it. The changes also need to be consistent. It sounds interesting, but would certainly put more emphasis on the "flavor" aspect.

Consider the example above from NichG, the weapon would do damage, but in a "flavorful" way. The PC could damage an enemy with this weapon and then hold that damage over their head unless they comply with something (revealing secrets, or whatever). Perhaps not necessarily a good thing to do, but that's a different argument.

The point is, combat under this system could be way more interesting for sword-slingers, and require more actual role-playing than roll-playing...

[Thomar_of_Uointer]

As part of a rewrite of the magic item system, I have been searching for a way to make weapons fit more smoothly into the system. One of the thing that bugs me about the current system is the way special abilities don't feel special; they are, in many cases, simply a way to increase damage. I think a flaming sword should feel distinct from an ordinary sword. I also want to decrease the cost of magic weapons. (The reasoning for some of these changes may be more clear once the wealth system is completed) Therefore, weapons in this system would have the following changes:

Magic weapons use the same pricing structure as armor.
A +2 magic weapon grants +2 damage, but no bonus to attack rolls.
Most special abilities do not increase damage. Instead, they would have unique effects. The details of how this would work are still being developed, but intuitively, I would guess that a flaming weapon would have a chance to light struck targets on fire, a shocking weapon might stagger a struck target, and so on.


Would this ruin the feel of magic weapons in your game? Do you see the attack bonus as a crucial part of a +2 longsword?

Your third point leaves a big hole in any assessment I can make of your changes.

I agree that making weapons more interesting is important. How about this?


Magic weapons cost twice as much.
All magic weapons have special abilities whose enhancement bonus is equal to the weapon's enhancement bonus. For example, all +1 longswords also have a +1 enhancement like flaming, keen, or spell storing.


I know it seems counterintuitive to think that giving all magic weapons a special ability would make abilities more special. However, it also means that there's no such thing as a +3 longsword. It's always a +3 longsword that burns things, or a +3 longsword that slays demons.