I had considered picking the mastery instead of the weapon until I realized that both the club and crossbow have push and it didn't make sense that mastering the club would also let you master the crossbow. You could maybe do push (melee) and push (ranged) to open more options and have it still make sense but then you are making it more complicated than it needs to be. They toyed with the idea of giving the fighter the ability to put multiple masteries on a weapon in the UA. Crawford said they backtracked on that because it was causing headaches on the backend and instead opted to give the fighter the ability to apply the push, sap, or slow to any weapon at level 9. Looks like multiple masteries are going to be class/ subclass dependent instead of weapon dependent.
yeah like I said, while I do vastly prefer the idea of learning abilities and applying them to applicable weapons, it is inevitably going to be a more complicated system to manage and they did explicitly say that they wanted to try and keep the system simple and fast. So I get that. But I still do think that having 2 abilities per weapon would be more than twice as good. But yeah at least some class abilities are kind of sorta making up for it. The Fighter getting multiple Abilities on virtually all weapons is nice, and the barbarian gets Mastery like abilities with its Brutal Strike thing, and the Rogue gets something similar, but it doesn't solve the either of the issues I brought up about the system not being very expandable, nor the issue of the design space for those abilities being very limited.
I wished there was more masteries and they just being open to all weapons. A master of a sword can still tople with a sword. Graze with a sword or cleave with a sword. You could have put restriction like needing heavy or light for some masteries like they did in earlier ua but open it up to just pic and choose what you want. Giving the martials a taste of what casters can. Because now like a weapon with slow you can only use once. That means after the first hit you don't have a weapon mastrie any more. Same with sap and nick. But a tople or push or vex can always work . And graze is a mastry that you only use when you fail . Just word stuff like that
I wonder if something like Elden ring would be possible, where you can find weapon arts and weapon spells that you can place on your gear if it is of the right type. Shield bash on a shield, cleave on greatswords, etc. For dnd I picture you can learn these from npcs or manuals or whatever and have some variations to pick from and then special weapons come with their own one or two special abilities for you to use that'd be pretty fun.
Yeah one thing I do wish they would bring back is customizing magic weapons like you could in 3.5/Pathfinder and such. They could greatly simplify the system from those games and still give you a lot of options. And having Weapon Mastery-like abilities on magic weapons, but with less design limitations since you can justify most things by just saying "it's magic!" could be a cool way to expand Martial abilities. Things like my Ground Slam example could work as a weapon Enchantment, and you could totally have simple things like "oh this is a Magic Greatsword that just also has the Cleave ability" or things like that.
@@BlazeMakesGamesthing about magical weapons is the eternal question/dilemma of "casters can also use those". I think that's why devs lean into Weapon Mastery being a class/subclass thing heavily - else it'd be moreso a weapons buff rather than martials buff.
I completely agree that the weapon mastery system doesn't go far enough. It makes the system slightly more tactically rich for martials and slightly more expressive for martials, but in the most minimal way possible. It has the advantage of being simple, but D&D isn't exactly a rules light system regardless. Your first proposal sounds good to me, but I agree that if one of their goals for the system was keeping it simple, your second proposal might be a better choice. It has a big advantage over the system they used, and would dramatically increase the design space. In addition, you could tie that system into the magic weapon system and class features in more interesting ways. DC20's maneuvers and weapon systems are a lot more interesting to me than the weapon mastery system in D&D.
What I did for 5e was borrow (and modify as needed) the weapon actions for Baldur's Gate. I let any character that is proficient in the weapon use that weapon action once per short rest. Fighters get a Fighter Action use per Fighter level per short rest. They can use it on the weapon actions, or instead spend two Fighter actions, or one Fighter Action and the normal use, to use it on a weapon that is not normally linked to it. Also, at level 5, I have it so Fighters, or any character with the Fighting Initiate feat, to use weapon actions as an extra attack. I will have to look at the new Weapon Masteries to see how I will tweak how I am doing it, but this has really made martial characters, especially fighters, cool.
yeah BG3's weapon systems are also pretty solid though the one thing I think Weapon masteries has over it is that they are unlimited use, so they are modifying virtually every attack, as opposed to being limited by short rests, which I think is better overall because it's more akin to things like Cantrips so it helps out in every round of every fight without needing to worry about who gets to rest when. Though another thing that is possible with either of my alternatives for how I think Weapon Masteries should work, is we could easily combine both ideas. Maybe some abilities are usable constantly with every attack like Push, while others have a Once per Round or Once per Short Rest cooldown to help balance out how strong they are. Hell if you're learning Abilities instead of Mastering weapons, you could even have level pre-reqs behind some of them. so that maybe you can have things like a big whirlwind attack that hits a bunch of people, but you gotta be level 10 to get it. Stuff like that.
there is *some* scaling because over time you can perform more attacks, so especially for the fighter they do in a sense get more powerful. A Fighter wielding the Greatclub could push someone 10 feet at level 1 and by level 20 they could push someone 40 feet. (or 80 with action surge) The problem though is that only the fighter really scales like this. Every other martial class only gets 2 attacks base so they stop scaling in any way that matters for Weapon Mastery at level 5. Sure they might learn one or two new abilities as they level but their turn-by-turn power plateaus really early. If it were me, I'd redesign the martial classes to at least universally get a 3rd attack at level 11 to at least somewhat help with this issue as well as bolster their abilities at mid-to-high levels.
Base fighter can apply more masteries to any weapon at higher levels (also battlemaster maneuvers stack) and a Barbarian subclass can apply two masteries at once on certain weapons (not to mention stack it with their brutal strike maneuvers). There is room to design new masteries and more subclasses that can take advantage of certain masteries.
to be fair, 4e solved the divide by making there not be a divide between classes at all. Every class pretty much felt like it played the same because every class shared the same mechanics. There was no longer a balance issue because there was very little differentiation, so I totally understand why people (including me) didn't like it. Hell 4e was actually the first TTRPG I played and I didn't even like it as a new player at the time with no preconceived notions. There are lots of ways that you *could* solve these issues but that doesn't automatically make them *good* solutions. And I think 4e just went too far in a number of different ways that just turned people off of it, despite how balanced it was. Book of 9 Swords tho I think I've heard about before but I never read it myself, may have to go check that out.
Yeah a lot of the homebrews people do (not this one) are just reinventing the wheel of what was already done in 4th and other d20 systems at the time. People don't give 5e enough credit for how much better it is than 3rd, 3.5, and Pathfinder 1e (same game) for class balance even though it's still not great.
Check out the new in-development ttrpg called DC20, it's got a bunch of martial maneuvers that do a bunch of these kinds of ideas. It's got a weapon trait building system, where you can customize a weapon with 2 properties by default, but by adding downsides you can add even more.
@@BlazeMakesGames The comments here are my first time hearing about it. I'll have to look into it too. Nowadays, I tend to stick to Pathfinder 1e and a bunch of 3pp content for it.
@@BlazeMakesGames i can't believe that people who are moving away from D&D STILL choose to stick to a damn D20 rather than going for a far more intuitive/granular D100 system. I got that D&D doesn't want to ditch it because it's basically their signature dice at this point, but as you have to start over anyway...
I had considered picking the mastery instead of the weapon until I realized that both the club and crossbow have push and it didn't make sense that mastering the club would also let you master the crossbow. You could maybe do push (melee) and push (ranged) to open more options and have it still make sense but then you are making it more complicated than it needs to be.
They toyed with the idea of giving the fighter the ability to put multiple masteries on a weapon in the UA. Crawford said they backtracked on that because it was causing headaches on the backend and instead opted to give the fighter the ability to apply the push, sap, or slow to any weapon at level 9. Looks like multiple masteries are going to be class/ subclass dependent instead of weapon dependent.
yeah like I said, while I do vastly prefer the idea of learning abilities and applying them to applicable weapons, it is inevitably going to be a more complicated system to manage and they did explicitly say that they wanted to try and keep the system simple and fast. So I get that. But I still do think that having 2 abilities per weapon would be more than twice as good.
But yeah at least some class abilities are kind of sorta making up for it. The Fighter getting multiple Abilities on virtually all weapons is nice, and the barbarian gets Mastery like abilities with its Brutal Strike thing, and the Rogue gets something similar, but it doesn't solve the either of the issues I brought up about the system not being very expandable, nor the issue of the design space for those abilities being very limited.
I wished there was more masteries and they just being open to all weapons. A master of a sword can still tople with a sword. Graze with a sword or cleave with a sword. You could have put restriction like needing heavy or light for some masteries like they did in earlier ua but open it up to just pic and choose what you want. Giving the martials a taste of what casters can.
Because now like a weapon with slow you can only use once. That means after the first hit you don't have a weapon mastrie any more. Same with sap and nick. But a tople or push or vex can always work . And graze is a mastry that you only use when you fail . Just word stuff like that
I wonder if something like Elden ring would be possible, where you can find weapon arts and weapon spells that you can place on your gear if it is of the right type. Shield bash on a shield, cleave on greatswords, etc. For dnd I picture you can learn these from npcs or manuals or whatever and have some variations to pick from
and then special weapons come with their own one or two special abilities for you to use that'd be pretty fun.
Yeah one thing I do wish they would bring back is customizing magic weapons like you could in 3.5/Pathfinder and such. They could greatly simplify the system from those games and still give you a lot of options. And having Weapon Mastery-like abilities on magic weapons, but with less design limitations since you can justify most things by just saying "it's magic!" could be a cool way to expand Martial abilities. Things like my Ground Slam example could work as a weapon Enchantment, and you could totally have simple things like "oh this is a Magic Greatsword that just also has the Cleave ability" or things like that.
@@BlazeMakesGamesthing about magical weapons is the eternal question/dilemma of "casters can also use those". I think that's why devs lean into Weapon Mastery being a class/subclass thing heavily - else it'd be moreso a weapons buff rather than martials buff.
I completely agree that the weapon mastery system doesn't go far enough. It makes the system slightly more tactically rich for martials and slightly more expressive for martials, but in the most minimal way possible. It has the advantage of being simple, but D&D isn't exactly a rules light system regardless. Your first proposal sounds good to me, but I agree that if one of their goals for the system was keeping it simple, your second proposal might be a better choice. It has a big advantage over the system they used, and would dramatically increase the design space. In addition, you could tie that system into the magic weapon system and class features in more interesting ways.
DC20's maneuvers and weapon systems are a lot more interesting to me than the weapon mastery system in D&D.
I totally agree. I hope they implement more Weapon mastery options per weapon to add more diversity and utility options for warriors
What I did for 5e was borrow (and modify as needed) the weapon actions for Baldur's Gate. I let any character that is proficient in the weapon use that weapon action once per short rest. Fighters get a Fighter Action use per Fighter level per short rest. They can use it on the weapon actions, or instead spend two Fighter actions, or one Fighter Action and the normal use, to use it on a weapon that is not normally linked to it. Also, at level 5, I have it so Fighters, or any character with the Fighting Initiate feat, to use weapon actions as an extra attack. I will have to look at the new Weapon Masteries to see how I will tweak how I am doing it, but this has really made martial characters, especially fighters, cool.
yeah BG3's weapon systems are also pretty solid though the one thing I think Weapon masteries has over it is that they are unlimited use, so they are modifying virtually every attack, as opposed to being limited by short rests, which I think is better overall because it's more akin to things like Cantrips so it helps out in every round of every fight without needing to worry about who gets to rest when.
Though another thing that is possible with either of my alternatives for how I think Weapon Masteries should work, is we could easily combine both ideas. Maybe some abilities are usable constantly with every attack like Push, while others have a Once per Round or Once per Short Rest cooldown to help balance out how strong they are.
Hell if you're learning Abilities instead of Mastering weapons, you could even have level pre-reqs behind some of them. so that maybe you can have things like a big whirlwind attack that hits a bunch of people, but you gotta be level 10 to get it. Stuff like that.
The problem with these masteries is also no depth. At level one you get all the effects of mastery, levels 2-20 they change barely at all.
there is *some* scaling because over time you can perform more attacks, so especially for the fighter they do in a sense get more powerful. A Fighter wielding the Greatclub could push someone 10 feet at level 1 and by level 20 they could push someone 40 feet. (or 80 with action surge)
The problem though is that only the fighter really scales like this. Every other martial class only gets 2 attacks base so they stop scaling in any way that matters for Weapon Mastery at level 5. Sure they might learn one or two new abilities as they level but their turn-by-turn power plateaus really early. If it were me, I'd redesign the martial classes to at least universally get a 3rd attack at level 11 to at least somewhat help with this issue as well as bolster their abilities at mid-to-high levels.
Base fighter can apply more masteries to any weapon at higher levels (also battlemaster maneuvers stack) and a Barbarian subclass can apply two masteries at once on certain weapons (not to mention stack it with their brutal strike maneuvers). There is room to design new masteries and more subclasses that can take advantage of certain masteries.
The Book of 9 Swords, back in 3.5 solved the Martial Caster divide.
D&D 4e, solved Martial Caster divide.
The fan base solved rejected both.
to be fair, 4e solved the divide by making there not be a divide between classes at all. Every class pretty much felt like it played the same because every class shared the same mechanics. There was no longer a balance issue because there was very little differentiation, so I totally understand why people (including me) didn't like it. Hell 4e was actually the first TTRPG I played and I didn't even like it as a new player at the time with no preconceived notions.
There are lots of ways that you *could* solve these issues but that doesn't automatically make them *good* solutions. And I think 4e just went too far in a number of different ways that just turned people off of it, despite how balanced it was.
Book of 9 Swords tho I think I've heard about before but I never read it myself, may have to go check that out.
Yeah a lot of the homebrews people do (not this one) are just reinventing the wheel of what was already done in 4th and other d20 systems at the time. People don't give 5e enough credit for how much better it is than 3rd, 3.5, and Pathfinder 1e (same game) for class balance even though it's still not great.
@@BlazeMakesGames why should each class have serpate mechanics?
Brother I’m STEALING this for my game let’s fuckin go
Check out the new in-development ttrpg called DC20, it's got a bunch of martial maneuvers that do a bunch of these kinds of ideas. It's got a weapon trait building system, where you can customize a weapon with 2 properties by default, but by adding downsides you can add even more.
I have been hearing more and more about this DC20 thing, I might have to take a peek at it at some point and maybe make a video on it
It's commendable some people are trying to keep D&D alive
Yeah, I'm sure it will take so much effort to keep the most popular ttrpg alive...
I jumped the D&D ship in 4e. I just can't go back to Wizards of the Coast.
honestly fair, I really do need to check out this DC20 thing I keep hearing about
@@BlazeMakesGames The comments here are my first time hearing about it. I'll have to look into it too. Nowadays, I tend to stick to Pathfinder 1e and a bunch of 3pp content for it.
@@BlazeMakesGames i can't believe that people who are moving away from D&D STILL choose to stick to a damn D20 rather than going for a far more intuitive/granular D100 system.
I got that D&D doesn't want to ditch it because it's basically their signature dice at this point, but as you have to start over anyway...
Say what you want about 5th edition, at least it isn't BuffFinder.
@@TucoBenedicto Eh, I can't get into 5e. Seems like a lot of people like it though, so that's cool.