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So I've seen people complaining about weapon balance, and why would you choose a lower damage one over higher. One of the other things I have noticed is from first level, classes get bonuses to their attacks.


Why not solve these two with something akin to the 4e proficiency bonus.

Here's the idea...

Instead of giving classes an inherent +2/+3 etc to hit at first level, remove this from class entirely. Instead, put it upon the weapons, so something like a shortsword or longsword has a +3, where as something inherently slower like the broadsword/bastard sword, give it a +2. This way, there are more than two statistics for each weapon... damage and type.

Even more interesting, you could do a similar thing with implements, wands, rods and staves each giving their own proficiency bonus. Maybe the staff only gives a +1 but also gives a +1 to AC. Maybe the wand is on +3 and the rod canbe a +2 with some other bonus or ability.

This would give some more flavour to the implements that the arcane casters use.

Similar things could be done with holy symbols as well, I assume. Having never played a divine class in any edition, I don't actually know if they have varying types of implements, etc.


What do you think?

Something a little amiss or does it sound a bit right? 

Oct 2, 2012 -- 5:11AM, kadim wrote:

I'm intrigued. The issue would be in the book keeping.

Are you suggesting that each weapon have its own progression of mods that scales with level, or are you suggesting each weapon gets a flat bonus?

Or could each class have a different set of bonuses depending on the weapon they use?

Each class having different bonuses would be absolutely attrocious to keep track of (I think, anyway). What I was suggesting about the classes is something more like a class that is not proficient with the weapon/implement, simply doesnt get the bonus. 

Also, I was thinking a flat bonus - then the classes could do any scaling with level that needs to be done - if they want the different classes to scale at different rates (which doesnt make sense to me, considering Bounded Accuracy, but could work if it is only little)

Items scaling with character level could definitely be interesting... But that just makes me think of magic enhancement bonuses, which they really didnt want.

The class bonus is an awful way of fixing the math. 

Keep in mind that we don't need attack bonuses for any actual purpose in relation to the monsters.  If we want the desired PC hit rate to be higher, we can just drop monster AC across the board since the monsters aren't finalized yet.  (Saving throws are a bit more difficult to adjust on the monster side, so the DC calculation is another discussion)

That said, if we do want to have yet another bonus for the purposes of number porn, as one poster described it, then putting it on a fake weapon proficiency rather than a fake class proficiency is a better way to do it, in my opinion.