A realism level specific rule does not belong in a general guide book to making RPGs. Some RPGs are designed as almost complete departures from the real world and as such should not sacrifice game design for realism.
Furthermore size did matter in 4e, it determined the number of squares you took on the battlefield, and rendered you resistant or vulnerable to various special attacks such as grab, or giant slaying. There wasn't a huge chart and being large didn't boost your str by some rediculous amount but size did indeed matter. If you're gonna bash 4e bash something it actually got wrong, like multi-classing, or the mathfix feats.
The essential problem is that the small size only really affects heavy weapon users, knifers, and mages are not impeded. So if the bonus given to compensate small creatures (at least those intended for PC use) applies to somethign besides heavy weapon users then that class gets to ignore the penalty and reap the benefit. So for example a +1 on attack rolls makes life really sweet for the mages and rogues, and just sort of compensates the axe man.
One can make the case for this not being a huge issue since fighters can nominally wield light weapons with as much skill and CS die as heavy weapons. HOwever the current set of abilities availiable does mean that a half-ling is limited in that respect.
My suggestion is to say that weapons and such for off-sized characters needs to be modified for them to use, so an ogres great axe deals tons of extra damage because there's a frigging ogre swinging it, and a half-ling needs to carve the thing down to size, and alter the weights, before he can use it. However this is gonna set the realism crowd on a warpath because short people with giant weapons is too freaking anime or some such utter garbage.
The alternative is to provide weapons specifically balanced for small creatures that take advantage of small size to do damage on the scale of the larger weapons and just say that larger creatures cannot use larger versions of these to deal even more damage becasue they don't scale up well.
Yeah how about that? The system doesn't have scaling weapons so far so why not have special weapons for small creatures?
No, we don't need any specific penalties for being small. All that they do is add another needless level of complexity and racial pigeon-holing. 4E had it almost right but then still included those ridiculous weapon restrictions and limitations, but thankfully those were very easily house-ruled away. Even most claims that penalizing small characters in some ways is logical and/or realistic can be rather easily debunked, again for example the weapon restrictions and limitations that we're seeing again here in the Next play-test.
Speaking of things that were badly designed, please check out this thread for my Minotaur fix. What have the critics said, you ask? "If any of my players ask to play a Minotaur, I'm definitely offering this as an alternative to the official version." - EmpactWB "If I ever feel like playing a Minotaur I'll know where to look!" - Undrave "WoTC if you are reading this - please take this guy's advice." - Ferol_Debtor_of_Torm "Really full of win. A minotaur that is actually attractive for more than just melee classes." - Cpt_Micha
Also, check out my recent GENASI variant! If you've ever wished that your Fire Genasi could actually set stuff on fire, your Water Genasi could actually swim, or your Wind Genasi could at least glide, then look no further.
Finally, check out my OPTIONS FOR EVERYONE article, an effort to give unique support to the races that WotC keeps forgetting about. Includes new racial feature options for the Changeling, Deva, Githzerai, Gnoll, Gnome, Goliath, Half-Orc, Kalashtar, Minotaur, Shadar-Kai, Thri-Kreen, Warforged and more!
Even most claims that penalizing small characters in some ways is logical and/or realistic can be rather easily debunked, again for example the weapon restrictions and limitations that we're seeing again here in the Next play-test.
I would be interested in hearing how a 80-lbs. halfling can wield a 25 lbs. Maul. I would prefer having the same rules for creatures of all sizes. If there's a reasonable explanation on why small creatures shouldn't have any restriction on weapon size, please share your arguments! As of now, a halfling with a 2-handed sword twice his size doesn't make sense.
If you manage to convince me that a halfling should be able to wield a 2-handed sword twice his size, you'll also have to convince me that a human or half-orc can't wield an oversized 2-handed sword twice his size.
Actually that's easy. See larger creatures actually have less power compared to their mass. So pound for pound a human can move more than an elephant. Goes the other way too, ants and the like can bench 50 times their wight or some such.
Also I think you'd be hard pressed to find vikings capable of using a 25 pound maul as a practical weapon, as a tool for destroying stuff sure, but for fighting people not so much.
So a gnome could potentially wield a greatsword only slightly smaller and lighter than a human's, and an ogre's great sword is only a bit longer than a human's excepting the modifications for a bigger grip. The reason a gnome wouldn't wield a greatsword is more because it'd be hard to walk around with one at their height.
Anyway, what if we compromise and let the shorties use different weapons? like maybe the tangat doesn't have a version set up for medium sized wielders.
I think that there should be some effect from being small, but I don't think extra rules considerations are the way to go. Rather, I think size should simply be its own effect -- space, height and reach can all be important factors in the heat of battle, or on any landscape of adventure. They just don't have to be factors that make the character completely unappealing as a concept.
I don't use emoticons, and I'm also pretty pleasant. So if I say something that's rude or insulting, it's probably a joke.
I would be interested in hearing how a 80-lbs. halfling can wield a 25 lbs. Maul. I would prefer having the same rules for creatures of all sizes. If there's a reasonable explanation on why small creatures shouldn't have any restriction on weapon size, please share your arguments! As of now, a halfling with a 2-handed sword twice his size doesn't make sense.
If you manage to convince me that a halfling should be able to wield a 2-handed sword twice his size, you'll also have to convince me that a human or half-orc can't wield an oversized 2-handed sword twice his size.
I'm glad you asked! To explain, we need to go over a couple of basic premises first:
1) Smaller creatures aren't inherently more stupid than medium creatures, so they're perfectly capable of creating their own weapons perfectly sized for themselves rather than needing to rely on larger creatures to make weapons that they then need to adapt to. In other words, a Human can make themselves a longsword appropriately proportionately sized for a Human, and a Halfling can make themselves a longsword smaller than that of the Human's that is appropriately proportionately sized for a Halfling.
Now, the immediate response to this is typically "Well, sure, but then a Halfling's Longsword is the exact same thing as a Human's Shortsword", but that's not the case. Even two weapons of similar size and weight need to be balanced differently if they're going to be used in two completely different ways by two creatures so different in size, and the hilt sizes at least will differ greatly. Furthermore, if we go with the premise that any small-size weapon can be adequately modeled by a step-down version of the medium-size weapon, we run into the issue that many medium-size weapon don't have any step-down version. For example, there is no step down for a Dagger or a Shortbow or a Scythe.
So, following this logic so far, what we must end up with it something like what 3.5 had, where Halflings can and do make their own smaller versions of every weapon that Humans can and do make. Perfectly reasonable.
B) Now, let's go somewhere completely unrelated and talk about attack bonuses and damage bonuses in general. If you saw a feature that said "Due to your superior accuracy and precision, you get a +2 bonus to X", would you have any idea whether that X was attack or damage? No, you wouldn't. It is a simple matter of fact that the vast majority of instances of such a bonus can be reasonably represented either way. These have even sometimes changed from edition to edition, for example like how Weapon Focus created an attack bonus in 3E but a damage bonus in 4E. Another example from 4E is two races, the Dragonborn and the Gnoll, that have thematically practically identical features (they fight more furiously when bloodied) but the former's is modeled with an attack bonus and the latter's with a damage bonus for mechanical variety.
The great thing about a system as flexible as D&D is supposed to be in that a concept can often be mechanically translated in multiple ways, and the fact that many attack or damage bonuses can often be modeled just fine the other way is a testament to that.
If anything is going to cause a hangup for anybody as I continue to explain, this is going to be it.
#) Stepping back to concerns of size, let's look at the inherent mechanics for size, completely independent of race, present in different editions of D&D. The most detailed and "realistic" was probably 3.5, where there were many, many mechanical implications of being small size that we didn't see afterward in 4E and that we don't see yet in Next. For example, small characters in 3.5 got a size bonus to AC. Logically, this makes some sense, as it is more difficult to hit something that's smaller because you have a smaller target to aim for.
Of course, this is only part of that story. If the AC bonus were the only thing that they got, then two Halfling would have a harder time hitting one another than two Humans do, and that just makes no sense. Therefore, small size creatures also got a bonus to attack rolls due to the advantage granted by their perspective. The entire size chart followed suit. Medium was the default "zero" size, and every size smaller got an identical bonus to AC and attack, and every size larger got an identical penalty to AC and attack. If we wanted to most realistically model the effects of size differences, this would be a perfectly internally consistent way to do so.
Now, let's combine all of the above premises, and the true implications of my proposal become clear. Small creatures do create their own smaller versions of the same weapon that medium size creatures create. However, while these weapons may be smaller, small creatures also have a perspective advantage over larger creatures. Where in the past this perspective advantage has been modeled as a bonus on attack rolls, we can instead now model it as a bonus on damage rolls. If the weapons of a small creature do less damage because they're small but then do more damage due to perspective difference, then these things cancel each other out, and we end up with small-size weapons that are physically smaller than their medium-size counterparts but that, when wielded by a small-size character, still do the exact same die damage as their medium-size counterparts. In other words, despite the fact that we are dealing with differently sized weapons (NOT a Halfling with a two-handed sword twice his size), they can still reasonably be modeled as mechanically identical in terms of everything but their weight, removing a layer of complexity and pigeon-holing from the game.
For maximum realism, add in rules for what penalties are taken when wielding a weapon normally sized for another creature, for example a Human taking a -2 penalty to attack for attempting to wield a Halfling's Greatsword as a Longsword or a Halfling taking a -2 penalty to attack for attempting to weld a Human's Shortbow as a Longbow.
If you've been following closely, then you may be saying to yourself that, following this logic, larger creatures, despite wielding larger weapons, would also be dealing the exact same damage with those weapons that medium creatures would with their versions of them. That is also correct. Should larger creatures do more damage than medium creatures? Probably. Must that damage be as a result of weapon damage dice? No, they don't need to be. The vastly superior strength of such larger creatures should give their damage rolls enough of a static modifier to model this increased damage despite rolling only normal damage dice.
tl;dr, Weapon mechanics across size categories can be made more identical by also taking into account the size of a weapon's intended wielder and not just taking into account the size of a weapon itself.
Speaking of things that were badly designed, please check out this thread for my Minotaur fix. What have the critics said, you ask? "If any of my players ask to play a Minotaur, I'm definitely offering this as an alternative to the official version." - EmpactWB "If I ever feel like playing a Minotaur I'll know where to look!" - Undrave "WoTC if you are reading this - please take this guy's advice." - Ferol_Debtor_of_Torm "Really full of win. A minotaur that is actually attractive for more than just melee classes." - Cpt_Micha
Also, check out my recent GENASI variant! If you've ever wished that your Fire Genasi could actually set stuff on fire, your Water Genasi could actually swim, or your Wind Genasi could at least glide, then look no further.
Finally, check out my OPTIONS FOR EVERYONE article, an effort to give unique support to the races that WotC keeps forgetting about. Includes new racial feature options for the Changeling, Deva, Githzerai, Gnoll, Gnome, Goliath, Half-Orc, Kalashtar, Minotaur, Shadar-Kai, Thri-Kreen, Warforged and more!
Actually that's easy. See larger creatures actually have less power compared to their mass. So pound for pound a human can move more than an elephant. Goes the other way too, ants and the like can bench 50 times their wight or some such.
And neither are humanoids, I'm having a hard time finding this convincing! On the other hand, my 8 year old nephew is also a humanoid. This would be a better comparison point.
Also I think you'd be hard pressed to find vikings capable of using a 25 pound maul as a practical weapon, as a tool for destroying stuff sure, but for fighting people not so much.
And the conclusion is? Mauls shouldn't appear on the weapon list?
Anyway, what if we compromise and let the shorties use different weapons? like maybe the tangat doesn't have a version set up for medium sized wielders.
I'll go with whatever the game designers come up with on this one to be honest. This seriously isn't a deal breaker for me, not even close. I do prefer my RPGs less codified/abstract and more 'realistic'.
