What is Wrong with Equipment in Dungeons and Dragons

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about rpgs is that at least to me what makes an rpg and rpg a lot of it has to do with progression is the idea of you maybe beginning here and then ending there is the idea of leveling up of improving your stats over time maybe the acquisition of ability so you start with a few abilities but then as you progress through the advancement of the game you get more and more abilities that perhaps are more intricate uh or maybe even harder to understand sort of as you progress so that you're learning your character as you go but a big part of it at least for me when you when i play video games or i guess tabletop games a big part of the rpg has always also been the items specifically weapons and armor and has always been one of the weaker parts of the dragons even though to me it's one of the strongest like more important parts of what makes an rpg an rpg in dungeons and dragons when you think about advancing in equipment typically that means magical items but a big problem with magical items is that the player can't quite prepare itself or look forward to a very specific item typically you rely on the dungeon master to basically give you an item you either have to literally tell your master hey i want this item or you have to effectively just wait for the dungeon master to just roll on tables for uh the item to kind of appear and then even then you have to like go on an adventure proceed through the story in order to get that item you can't just simply save your money and have this one item that you know that you can buy and then buy it the only one time i believe where you can do that is really the plate armor for the uh heavy armor users plate armor of course cost 1500 gold pieces and from the very beginning of the game you know that that's a goal that you have you can sort of save up for that item and it feels good i'm not gonna lie whenever i'm a heavy armor user it always feels good to know that i have that item that i can save for and finally get after maybe you know a couple of levels of dungeoneering before i can finally have the money to purchase it but that's it as far as items that is really as far as you can go it is kind of sad that when it comes to weapons there is never any saving that happens there is never any kind of looking forward to a specific mundane weapon that maybe you couldn't get at the beginning that you can get later because you accrued either some amount of experience or practice or money imagine being a rogue a rogue starts with i believe it's like a leather armor at level one that's just what they start with for you to literally finish off your entire equipment itemization this is like your gear for you to be completely done with your armor all you have to do is spend what is it i have it here at 45 gold pieces and then you get the studded leather and that's it you spend 45 gold pieces and you're literally done with armor i mean i guess it could be until the rest of the game or until the dm basically decides to give you a started leather plus one which may literally never happen there are tons of adventures in fifth edition like the actual book modules where there isn't a solid leather plus one in the entirety of the game but would you know what's even sadder sadler sadder than that is that if the dm plays the game as he is supposed to effectively just like rolling on tables or just kind of letting the game happen depending on what the book says it is possible and and quite comedic but maybe in a sad way for the rogue that after he's working so hard in the adventure going through the story going through dungeons and basically just waiting for any kind of improvement on his armor that the game will instead of giving him a started leather plus one that instead he might get a padded armor plus one padded armor plus one is uh it's it's light armor nobody uses it because it's literally useless but it is effectively one ac lower than solid leather but it gives you this advantage on stealth i believe it is trash but it is possible that you can get that plus one and have it literally be worse than studded leather which you can buy for 45 gold pieces like how is that sensical in any way it is so tragic that you can have plate armor that you bought yourself and then finish off a dodge and get splint mail plus one and have that be just simply the same as your plate armor the armor design in dungeons dragons is very weird it makes sense a little bit when you're i guess doing heavy armor because the disparity between the prices of the armor is so great that it gives you something to look forward to something that you can actually strive for it feels good to be honest to like save up for that you know 750 gold pieces or whatever it is to buy your splint and then save 1500 to get your plate it does feel really good because it's something you can work towards something you can save but the other classes don't quite have that especially not light armor which is so sad that they literally just have nothing that they can work towards i at least like the way that meteor armor sort of goes about doing it where i see i have it right here the breastplate and the half plate so the breastplate has one less ac than the half plate does but it doesn't have this advantage on stealth which means it actually allows for the player to make a decision hey should i maybe maybe i don't need stealth maybe my character is not stealthy so hey you know what i'm gonna go for the half plate it'll give me more armor i'm fine with that it's a trade-off i love the idea of trade-offs it's sad that heavy armor and light armor don't have trade-offs it is sad that light armor doesn't have anything and is that the medium armor doesn't really have something that you can truly save for a big chunk of the game in order to get because quite frankly like breastplate is only 400 gold pieces it's it's you're gonna get that really quickly the reason why these issues with armor happen in the first place i believe is simply just because there's only one stat that you have to worry about and that is armor class when it really comes down to it the armor with the highest armor class is just going to be better than the rest and that's that's just the fact that there's only one stat that happens when you only have one stat if we had two stats to worry about then there would actually be more back and forth there would be decisions that one had to make that would be an actual philosophy of whether or not my character maybe believes that he should worry about this rather than that like for example if there was something like uh magical armor rather than just normal armor then you have to worry then you would have to worry about the idea of just like hey well maybe i i want to have more of this type of armor than that type of armor that creates decisions decisions are always good in my opinion now weapons are a little bit different because there are actually more than just the one stat for weapons right um every weapons typically have like different uh damage values they all do different types of damages you really don't get access to all types of weapons small characters cannot use heavy weapons right there's a lot of factors that are kind of involved in here but a big problem that i think really exists within the weapon categories are that a lot of weapons are just literally just the same why why is a morning star and a a long sword and what is it a war hammer why are they literally just the same the longsword and the warhammer are literally they have the same stats they have the same abilities both are versatile they they effectively cost this i think they cost the same they literally cost the same yeah so there is there's no difference between them other than the fact that one deals bludgeoning and the other one deals slashing but that and that is a difference but is it really though is there a difference that actually matters no it really doesn't like in my matter against like skeletons it might matter if you're fighting like a flame skull or something where you don't want to use like piercing for example that can happen but that is just so rare like realistically how often does it happen where you find yourself in a situation where you say oh man i i wish i would have chosen the the the morning star instead of the long story like that literally never crosses anyone's mind like that this just happened what's what's particularly tragic too is that the weapons like it's specifically like a none of maybe not a warhammer and a long sword they are used for completely different things i mean just imagine yourself using a hammer versus using a long sword the way that people would go about using those weapons would be entirely different have you guys actually seen what a warhammer does to plate mail if you go and strike at a big chunk of armor and you managed to dent that armor which would happen the dent would actually pierce your skin which would be not just very painful but as you would be moving then with that pier like that armor piercing your skin it would continue to create more and more damage the more you move like that's something that actually happens that's why hammers are so good against heavy armor why not just put that into the game what about making the whip feel like a real whip what if maybe the whip deals more damage if you are at the perfect distance from the target because that's how whips are supposed to be if you strike with a web and you're too close you don't quite get the right slashing impact if you do it too far obviously you literally don't reach but if you're in that precise exact same spot what if you just uh what if you what if you crit on a 9 or an 18 a 19 and a 20 if you happen to be within that precise sweet spot or what if you just simply just do more damage what did the damage die of the weapon actually changes if you are within that distance what if daggers just have a better critical chance what if they always just crit on a 19 and a 20 right when you think about using a weapon like a dagger you typically are always getting the maximum benefit of the dagger if you use something like a long sword for example the the range between the type of things that can happen when you're using a long sword is actually quite great you could either just barely scratch an enemy you could maybe give him a really good slash or you could literally just cut through the bow and just break bone and just sever a bunch of different organs as you just managed to completely slash off the belly of a character the range of possibilities on a long story strike are actually quite huge whereas with a dagger as long as you're stabbing someone you're kind of getting the benefit of the dagger like the benefit is always going to be the same so it makes sense for a dagger to just basically just create all the time or treat a lot more often whereas imagine something like a scythe sides they're so hard to use you're probably always just doing glancing blows with a big just cumbersome size it's probably really hard to use yeah but if a scythe crits could you imagine how that would look like a scythe critic to me just basically implies that you just get your com your arm just chopped off like that's it you get disemboweled it's it's the credit for messiah just feels like it should be way more impactful than for example a crit from a pike why not just make it so that instead of just doubling your die with a scythe you triple it or hell just quadruple it it wouldn't make sense you can make the damage die the normal damage die of the scythe just be kind of lower but just like dramatically increase the critical chance of the weapon that would make the weapon i don't know interesting it would make it unique it would make it special see i i don't like the idea that maybe like the whip is just like oh it's just like a normal weapon except that it has range now that's what a spear does i'm okay with the spear just being a normal weapon with range that's kind of what it does but what if you just make the whip just feel whimsical what if you you can grapple with the whip almost like for free you may have a thing where instead of dealing damage with the whip when you d when you attack maybe you just get a free grapple anything would make it more flavorful now ironically like this was not really the main topic of the video these are just things that i've been thinking about just kind of how would i improve these systems the weapons the armors uh like we just talked about the weapons like it seems to me very simple how one would go about upgrading the systems changing the values for crit changing the values of attacks adding more special properties to the weapons i mean like this is the this is the rpg the rpg is the weapons this is what you're going to be using with your character for the entire game and this has nothing to do with magical items by the way if if you change the way a maze works you can make it for example you can simply have it just deal you can say that bludgeoning damage or mesas in particular deal more damage to heavy armor users or you can make it so that spears in particular maybe uh penetrate like shields or some i don't know like maybe flails like i think is a good example you can make it so that flails just are not affected by shield those special attributes that you add to the mundane versions of the weapons would then carry on to the magical versions of those weapons so your flail of destruction that you took from the demon lord ginogu would already also have those special benefits that you have added to the mundane website so like this has nothing to do with because a lot of people when they say like oh you know like the magical the the items the equipment the game are very basic but that's what magical items are there for not like the idea would be that you would enhance the way the mundane whimpers weapons work so that the entire game then becomes enhanced i think it's worth it fixing armor i i think is a little bit tricky uh the simplest way of doing it in my opinion would be to basically just add an entire different table that would literally just be materials like different materials that you could make the already existing armor of and how it would effectively change that armor so you could have something for example like um instead of just using like like deer leather or cow leather or whatever for studded leather leather you could have say owl bear leather so you would have a table that says like all right well this is what happens when you mix studded leather with owl bear skin and it could i don't know it could be anything but like let's say that it just makes it so that um it's something silly like your your stealth checks are just better or maybe there's your stealth checks are worse but you get resistance to fire and cold something like that right like it doesn't have to be a big deal but as long as there is maybe like five or seven different variations of leather that you could pick from and have all of those variations maybe like obviously would cost a lot more money maybe each of those variations would have their own very specific requirement for for your gold maybe something like a thousand gold pieces but like just having that in the game would one allow for the players to have something to look forward to something that they could save their reasons if your dm doesn't like putting magical items into the game there just isn't a reason to have money that's a that's a big problem especially when players tend to just get magical items through dungeons right a lot of campaigns like i i guess curse astrad campaigns like those that are meant to not have like big magical shops like there isn't a reason to have gold in those adventures and that's why something like this was really good so if you have these seven options each of which cost maybe like a thousand or two thousand gold pieces it would one give players a reason to use their money and something to save and look forward to but also choice choice is so important when you're customizing your character because you want your character to be your character you don't want your rogue with studded leather to just be the same as that other row with studded leather so if you can at least configure character in some way that would be great and if you have the selection of seven different materials that you could make the armor from and those materials each of them could be more esoteric than the last you could have like owl bear you could have a purple worm it doesn't matter you can have all kinds of things i love the idea that you can make decisions on what type of armor you're gonna make for this one character depending on perhaps the adventure so if you're going for example uh if you're playing goes to salt marsh you're doing this whole nautical adventure you know that you're gonna be going underwater maybe you want to go into this you want to build your your leather armor and speak it fast maybe you want to build your studded leather with the hanging leather because maybe it's a hacking leather just makes it so that you can swim faster or maybe it allows you for you to uh always get advantage with your trident attacks who knows it could be you could make it for whatever but the idea is that you could make a decision and that seems really cool to me now that would be the easy way of basically solving that armor problem but i have been thinking and the reason why i made this video is because well i guess two parters one is because there is this crazy homebrew that i've been thinking about that i i wanted to kind of pass by you guys just to see what you guys would think about this but also too i've been thinking about making uh possibly some homebrew content that i could then put on something like uh drive through rpg or i guess it would have to be dm skilled um so i'm just kind of i just want to kind of just do it like a little back and forth with you guys about some of these ideas and what kind of concepts you guys would think would be really cool that i could create for you guys um but but the biggest reason for this video was because i do have this one actually crazy idea that i don't know if i would ever make something out of this but i wanted to test it with my players in an upcoming adventure and it is kind of out there but it would effectively make armor a lot more interesting yet kind of maybe perhaps a little bit more complicated because the thing is dungeon dragons is great for many reasons of course but one of those reasons is because it is simple when you're sort of enhancing the game with all these suggestions that i just offered you always want to make sure that you're not over complicating the game the reason that you're using dragons is so popular the reason why people love it is because it is very simple to understand i have played with a lot of new players like a lot of new players and dude it is so simple to just teach dnd to a new player fifth edition that is that uh it's lovely it's so good people just get so into it so quickly and i have i i i have read the second edition pathfinder and man that i don't know what's going on there that's so it's there's just so much in there and dnd nah simple love it those suggestions that i offered for the weapons and for the armor like those are simple suggestions that would enhance what would add depth into the game without necessarily making the game more complicated and that's why i think those suggestions are great but they're also very they're pretty straightforward i didn't require much for me to come up with those concepts but i thought you know what if i just want more and i kind of do i i want i think armor to be a little bit more complicated maybe complicated is a weird word to say i think there's a negative connotation to it i just want a lot more depth to armor i want another stat for armor i don't want armor to just be about armor class i think that it would be even more interesting if there was at least another stat that you could kind of just you know just kind of work with here and the obvious thing might just be to kind of go back to third edition pathfinder and use something like forms of different magical resistances so for example you could have something like if you have uh plate armor you could have different types of plate armor some of which simply just gives you armor class like ac but then others might give you fire resistance something as simple as just like 10 points of fire resistance this is something that we used to use back in third and path third edition pathfinder where if you were to take for example 20 points of damage and your armor had 10 fire resistance you would simply subtract 10 from the damage you took i think that concept is cool but i wanted to modify it into something that we actually haven't seen before something that we haven't done before at least not to the degree that i would want to do it and that is a literal damage reduction for just normal attacks now there is already a feat in the game that does this i don't remember the names like armor something basically what it does is if you have heavy armor then you can pick the feet and it makes it so that any physical damage that you take you basically get to subtract three points of that damage so if you take five damage you subtract three and then you only take two that's the idea i wanted to incorporate that into armor directly and the way that i went about because i thought about this a long time and i haven't actually practiced it i'm going to real soon that's why i just wanted to kind of bring this up to you guys to see what you guys thought but the idea would be to effectively grab any armors ac and then subtract 10 and have that number that's left being actual straight up damage reduction but that damage reduction would only apply to hits that hit the armor so for example let's say that you have absolutely no armor you're just just guy without a shirt if someone were to attack you for a five to hit that would obviously miss right your unarmored ac is 10 plus your dexterity modifier so if you have a character with 12 dexterity that would be a plus one to dexterity you would have 11 ac a five would miss you what that would mean is that you effectively dodged the attack it's not like you tanked the attack it's not like you blocked the attack you dodged it it didn't hit you but now let's say that we give that character plate armor and the shield so now he has 20 ac if i were to hit him for a 15 to hit no let's say let's say that i hit him for a five to hit that would still miss it's not like the armor did anything to stop that attack you would have dodged that attack even if you didn't have the armor so it just it just missed you you just dodged it it was really easy to dodge but then if the enemy hits you for a 15 to hit you would block it it wouldn't hit you but the reason why it didn't hit you is because of the armor if you didn't have the armor that would have hit you hence the idea is that it hit your armor so in those circumstances where the attack hits your armor your armor damage reduction would basically start actually working now because you have plate armor and a shield that would mean that your ac is 20 you will subtract 10 10 would be your leftover damage reduction so if the attack would have been let's say that it is a dragon and just claws you um and it rolls damage is 12 points of damage you will subtract 10 from the 12 and you would take basically the two residual damage this form of damage reduction would work with virtually anything that gives you ac so if you for example are a wizard and you uh let's say that the dragon the same very same dragon right would go and hit you for a 15 to hit and uh you know your mage armor is active you have 16 ac it will miss you or it'll hit your mage armor that is you might want to just cast shield anyways to get your ac all the way up to 21 so that your damage reduction would be 11 and then presumably you would basically effectively reduce more damage than you otherwise would have with just your mage armor this would apply um well again really anything that would effectively give you ac the only uh sort of exception that would apply with this particular concept would be uh ac that you get through dexterity effectively anything that would apply for a person without armors if you're a rogue for example and you have your studded leather and you have a plus 5 to your dexterity i believe your ac would be 17. if the dragon hits you for a 15 to hit it was it would miss you it wouldn't hit the armor because even if you didn't have the armor you would have dodged it basically so classes that naturally tend to have less armor because they they are more dexterity based um they would still be generally fine unless the attack does hit the armor at which point you know they're probably gonna have less damage reduction than a full-blown tank with full heavy armor and a shield which of course makes a lot of sense now this would create a few things uh of course everyone can already tell that this is effectively a buff to damage or a nerve to serve ability that people are going to be taking damage that they otherwise would not be taking which means well people are going to be losing more health than they normally would um if you kind of like see the math and understand it it seems to me and again i haven't tested it but it seems very clear to me that there's not going to be too much of a difference in the early stages of the game uh typically if you have like starting armor typically you're not going to be taking a lot of bleeding damage that's gonna bleed over from your damage reduction typically monsters deal four or five maybe six at most points of damage on a strike and typically you're gonna have enough ac to be able to cover those attacks just with your damage reduction so generally speaking not much is going to change in the early game unless you're fighting like a bog bear at level one or level two like those those bug bears they can deal like 14 points of damage which is insane you shouldn't be fighting a bog bear early game anyways because they can already just one shot you the way they are so like they're obviously like outliers when you think about this but what i like about the system is that when you do take some of that bleed off damage um it does make the damage even if you do end up just taking more damage roll the damage just feels less like all or nothing it's not gonna be like you either take zero or take ten damage instead it's just gonna be you take one damage here two damage there then maybe you take the four but then you take another one it feels a lot more smooth which i definitely like but the big reason one of the biggest reasons actually why i thought about this concept was because one of the things that infuriated me the most i guess is two things one is um when you have there are monsters later on in the in the game that have just one or two attacks and these attacks are meant to be like really hard-hitting at single attacks that might deal 30 to 35 points of damage but if you basically manage to dodge that attack that monster is useless for the rest of the round there are a fair amount of monsters that are alike that always felt very weird to have an enormous purple worm just come down into one of the players and have that player just like oh like i'm just gonna i'll just just block it with my shield and then just block it this titanic purple enormity colossal monster just comes down with it literally could just take your character like its mouth is like three times the size of your character or something like he could just grab but it just misses you just block it with your shield like you're not dodging you're clearly not dodging you're blocking it with your like heavy armor you imagine this like bulky character just tanking he just always felt really weird so it would make a lot more sense if maybe it does hit you you do manage to block it with your shield with your armor and then the value of your armor suddenly starts mattering oh like i actually want to get my my armor plus one i want to have a shield like these things start gathering more and more value because when that purple worm comes down and like hits your armor for 30 points of damage having 12 damage resistance like that actually starts looking pretty good instead of taking 30 damage you take 15. and 15 damage is really not a lot of damage when you're considering that you're probably fighting the purple worm at like level 10 you know you're gonna have like 70 points of hp 15 feels actually pretty good like i would rather have my players be always taking a little bit of bleeding damage instead of just taking none or just taking a bunch so anything that takes us sort of closer to that in my opinion tends to be a little bit better the other thing too is you know a lot of players and this is not necessarily something like too bad because you you guys at the end can work around this but um there are many classes in the game that can kind of just break the game with the amount of armor class that they can get so we're talking something like um the force cleric i think is a great example where the force cleric can i think they just get it automatic plus one to their ac as long as they're wearing heavy armor uh they might be able to like bless their armor as well to get like another like i think they can just enchant their weapons to get a plus one on top of that um so and they can of course wear heavy armor so these guys can just get like 22 ac without a problem uh if everyone knows about the eldritch knights they can wear shields heavy armor and then they can cast a shield spell really any class that can cast a shield spell that can also get access to uh heavy armors i'm sure that you guys have felt the pressure of those characters and how difficult it can be sometimes to challenge them with physical damage you can of course just throw spells on them there's tons of ways lots of tons of things that you can do in order to challenge them but it is kind of sad that as a dm i have failed that pressure of like oh man like i rolled on the table for magic items it rolled for a plate armor plus two but i just don't wanna give them the plate armor plus two because i know what's gonna happen i know what's gonna happen i'm gonna go out and i'm gonna send them my monster and they're all just gonna miss the monsters are just not gonna be able to hit the characters it's sad because i wanna feel good about my players increasing their ac like of course that's again we go back to what it means to play in an rpg i wanna feel good about my players improving their armor but realistically the balance of the game is not really that well designed for players to just keep on upgrading their armor it just isn't i think that is a shame but i think with this new system it could actually be a really good thing i want my players to get a plate armor plus two it feels really good i will hit armor and i might still deal a little bit more damage to them but like they'll feel good about the fact that they can reduce more damage i will feel good because i can use my monsters that only have the one attack that deals a lot of singular damage and i don't have to feel bad about giving them those items now of course again system untested i haven't actually tried it out i might try it on my next adventure and i'll let you guys know how it actually practically works but uh i want to do what you guys think about this the whole video was just a rambling mess just to get to this part i actually i'm really curious about what you guys think because itemization is so important and i think it is a shame that we basically just gonna push it towards oh but that's what magic items do magic items are supposed to solve that i want these things to be part of the basic package of the game these things should have been part of the player's handbook people from the beginning when they are creating their character they should be able to look forward to all the different types of weapons and what they can do oh dude no i built my character to be very eccentric so of course i'm gonna go for the whip not just because in the flavor of the mind the whip feels kind of eccentric but because the actual play style itself is eccentric oh no i wanna be i don't know warhammer user because i want to be able to maybe i've wrote in my backstory that like i want to be i've always tried to like destroy i don't know like you can find whatever reason for things but like if every weapon was unique and felt truly different from the other i think that would be a lot better if we all had choices for what type of armor we could wear instead of just like oh well i'm a heavy armor user so i go for the plate armor or i am a rogue so i have no choices that's a shame there should be options let me know what you guys think this is i don't do these videos very often but uh i guess if you guys like them i might do them more let me know what you guys think and thank you for watching

Channel: MrRhexx

Views: 209,708

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Id: mh-snHybt9U

Length: 33min 25sec (2005 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021