One of the old goals in my Old Goals document was:
The reason for the great historical variety of weapons is that different designs work better in different contexts and for different purposes. I'd like a game that lets you engage with that dynamic and expands on it with interesting and relatively light mechanics.
This has been tough! The weapons system has gone through many, many revisions. Each revision has resulted in a simpler system. I believe I’ve removed, consolidated, or compressed everything I can while retaining the sort of expressive weapon system I wanted.
First, let’s look at some weapons. Then, each field in the weapon statblock will be explained.
Machete
Tags: hilt, one-handed
Speed: 1->2
To-Hit: +STR
d4 S
A simple tool for cutting down brush.
Black Shotel
Tags: hilt, one-handed
Requirements: 1 AGI
Speed: 1
To-Hit: +AGI
d4 Picking, “Pull” on 6
d4 Severing
Anatomy of a Weapon
Tags
The “tags” are listed right after the name listed. This is where mechanically-significant descriptors are stored.1 Some skills may require weapons with particular tags, like [range: close] or [hilt]. Weapon tags describe how the weapon is handled. There are six main weapon tags, [hilt], [pole], [one-handed], [two-handed], [reach] and [range].
[hilt]: A weapon with a hilt. A “hilt” is a “well-defined” handle or grip which often2 includes some kind of guard to protect the users hand. Swords, knives, and daggers, are [hilt] weapons, as are patas and katars.
[pole]: Pole weapons. Weapons with a long shaft rather than a well defined grip. Pole weapons include spears, axes, hammers, and of course, all polearms.
[one-handed]: A weapon designed to be used with one hand. If you use two hands on a [one-handed] weapon, treat your STR as 2 points higher for the purposes of meeting a STR requirement.
[two-handed]: If you try to wield a [two-handed] weapon with one hand, attack with disadvantage.
[reach]: How many spaces does your weapon reach? If this tag is absent, assume the weapon has [reach: 1]. If a weapon has [range: close], you are treated as if you move briefly into the opponents space to attack them. This is often relevant for particular skills.3
[range]: Used for ranged weapons.
Tags can be combined to accommodate unusual weapons like “hand-and-a-half” a.k.a. “bastard” swords or this thing.
Requirements
Not satisfying the weapon’s requirements causes you to attack with disadvantage.
Speed
The “Speed” of a weapon is the AP cost of an attack with the weapon. If the weapon has multiple costs separated by arrows, you pay the first cost on your first attack with the weapon in a round, the second cost on your second, etc. If you are on the last listed cost, pay that cost again to attack again. Attacking three times in one round with a weapon with the cost “1→2” costs 5 AP.
To-Hit
The score you add to an attack check with this weapon.
Everything Else
Finally, the attacks and attack types are listed separated by commas.4 Choose one listed attack to perform. Some weapons also have special effect text. Flavor text is listed last.
Damage Types
Attacks also have with damage types. There are three major types of damage. They are: B for "Bludgeoning", P for "Piercing", and S for "Slashing".
There are also sub-types like Severing, Slicing, and Picking. Severing damage counts as S, but S does not count as Severing. The damage sub-type will share the first letter of the generic damage type. This has worked so far because there are a lot of conveniently placed words in English.
The most common sub-types of damage are:
Slicing: What a saber does. A long fast drawing cut, often with a curved blade.
Severing: What an axe does. A chopping motion.
Picking: What a warpick does.5 A swinging motion.
Bashing: Reserved for heavy, crushing blows.6
Weapon Effects and Common Conditions
Weapons often have extra effects that trigger “on 6”, “on matching”.7 This means when dice are rolled for an attack check, effects can be activated based on the numbers rolled. Rolling a 6 and a 4 will give you a total of 10 (+ any bonuses) and if you succeed, the 6 might activate some additional effect. This makes gaining advantage even more useful, as it increases your odds of activating effects.
Often, weapons use common effects and inflict common statuses or conditions. These conditions and effects are listed below. Conditions are notated in brackets, common weapon effects are in quotes. All common conditions are listed, not just conditions that weapons inflict.
Effects
“Bypass”: Ignore an amount of damage reduction from armor equal to your To-Hit bonus.
“Pull”: The target can be moved one space in any direction except backwards. Target can spend 1 AP to trigger a STR contest. If they win, they are not moved.8
“Push”: The target is pushed back one space. Target can spend 1 AP to trigger a STR contest. If they win, they are not pushed back.
“Stop”: The action is stopped. If the action that triggered this was movement, the character is stopped outside of the space they were trying to move into.
“Rend”: If armor reduced the damage of this attack note whether the damage type was B, P, or S. Reduce the armor’s damage reduction against that damage type by the To-Hit bonus of this attack.
Conditions
[bleed]: Take 1 damage each turn until [bleed] is removed. [bleed] can be removed by spending 3 AP fashioning and applying a bandage or spending 1 AP applying a prepared bandage
[injury]: The target chooses to either lower their move speed by 1 by taking an injury to a leg, orthey take disadvantage while using one limb. [injury] can be removed by resting while missing no crit health, then flipping a coin and getting heads.9
[poison]: At the beginning of the round, take damage equal to the number of [poison] you have. Remove 1 [poison].
[prone]: Character is knocked to the ground and [vulnerable] (so attacks against them have disadvantage). Getting up costs 1 AP.
[stop]: The action is stopped. If the action that triggered this was movement, the character is stopped outside of the space they were trying to move into.
[stun]: When the character receives AP, discard it and remove this condition.
[vulnerable]: If a character is knocked down, distracted, being attacked from opposing directions, or otherwise in a disadvantageous position, checks made against the character have advantage.
Combat Maneuvers
These effects are inflicted in addition to damage on a successful attack, they allow you to build a strategy around a certain fighting style or weapon type. These effects and conditions are not meant to encapsulate everything you can do! For everything else:
On a successful attack, describe the maneuver you are attempting to perform. The target can either let you do it or take the damage of the attack as usual.10
Use this to disarm, knock people out, etc. You can also use this to do what would normally be done by “Push” or some other effect, you just won’t get damage on top of the maneuver.
Things other than weapons can have tags, as things other than weapons might need to list short mechanical descriptors. Weapons could have additional tags not mentioned here for the purposes of a homebrew mechanic or some rare special property, but for a weapon to work well with skills and effects only the six main tags listed in this section need to be considered.
The strict definition of a “hilt” includes a guard, but this use of “hilt” does not. A dagger without a guard still counts as a “hilt” weapon in this typology. “hilt” is seperate “vaguely sword-like objects” from “vaguely stick-like objects”.
This means the defender can use any skills that require an enemy to move into their threatened space. The defender can also use skills that require them to out-reach the attacker. The attacker can use any close-quarters or distance-closing skill that might give them an advantage while they are in the opponents space and the opponent has a longer weapon.
Every “entity” in the game, including NPCs, skills, and weapons, is stored in a big .json file which I use to generate documentation, printable cards, etc. The weapons I’m posting here had to be adjusted a bit to look even okay on Substack.
For reference this weapon:
"jaw_blade": {
"name": "Jaw Blade",
"tags": ["one-handed", "hilt"],
"requirements": ["1 STR"],
"speed": "1->2",
"to_hit": "+STR",
"attacks": ["2 [B] + 1 [Picking]"],
"flavor_text": "The lower portion of an enormous bovine jawbone. The jaw has been chopped down, functioning as something between a sword and a club. The \"blade\" is composed of the jagged teeth of the jawbone. The handle is wrapped in leather.",
"encumbrance": "1/3",
"meta_tags": ["weapon", "dogman"]
}Looks like this:
When printed as a card. Cards put brackets on damage types, I’ll change that ~soon. Notation is always a pain. You can also see encumbrance in the bottom right corner, but I will probably revise that system too eventually! Maybe I’ll just quietly forget about it. Encumbrance is a low priority anyway. You can see the “meta_tags” in the json. These are hidden when the entity is displayed, these are used to filter for all weapons, all basic (non-spoiler) entities, etc.
Not to be confused with Pickling which is what a warpickle does.
Some more unused damage types include:
Striking: Incoherent.
Stabbing: Please don’t create anything with this damage type.
Poking: Too silly.
Bonking: Only available to clowns.
This damage type is kind of an odd duck. All of the other damage types are bound to a particular motion or style of attack, but Bashing is just very emphatic B. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there are not multiple distinct “styles” with which you can inflict B damage, similar to how there are multiple ways of inflicting S damage. However, I still think B players should have some options for expression. Bashing is reserved for slow, high-commitment attacks. It’s meant to separate attacks that come from a one-handed mace from the massive, crushing swings of a greatclub. This allows for the creation of very powerful moves or skills that require Bashing and can inflict significant negative conditions to enemies without every stick picked up from the ground being able to do the same thing many times per turn.
Bashing can be used for just about any any giant weapons to express the sheer kinetic force of the weapon. If the Dragon Slayer was added to this game it would probably have an attack with both Bashing and Severing, with “Rend”. It would have a very high STR requirement.
This replaces the old terminology of “half-crit'“ “matching” and “full-crit”, as described in this post. Why have jargon if you can just have a description?
Initially I thought it would be better to have a concept of “half-crit” so that some other effect could say “when using [hilt] weapons, treat 5s as half-crits”. Of course, that makes it sounds like 5s replace 6s and the only way to clarify they don’t is to call out 6s specifically, at which point the terminology has not helped at all! So, be explicit. I also wanted to avoid the potential confusion that a player might believe “6” referred to damage, but this sort of effect is used very often and it literally never refers to the damage! So, a '“half-crit” is just “on 6” and other skills can just specify that the next lowest roll also activates an effect, or some similar roll-based-condition.
I decided against pricing in the target’s strength, as it’s assumed that with a successful (likely Picking based attack!) you are able to surprise the target or the target reflexively moves with the pulling action as to do otherwise would be painful.
Occasionally an [injury] effect will specify some effect besides this default effect and/or some recovery type method besides the default one.