One of the original releases of Ultima III (the one that was ported over to the NES as Ultima Exodus) had a little bug in it: the game’s combat engine did not actually at any point make reference to the variable that tracked the strength of the weapon used to make the attack.

It might seem ludicrous to think that the designer and his friends playtesters could have possibly missed this, but it actually is pretty easy to figure out how it happened: say you’ve got a Wizard with a Dagger, a Thief with a Short Sword, and a Fighter with a Long Sword… and if the Wizard is the worst at fighting among the three, the Fighter the best, and the Thief is somewhere in between, then you’ll see the one with the Long Sword doing the most damage, the one with the Short Sword doing the second most damage, and the one with the Dagger doing the least damage.

By the time you’ve got the gold and experience to get better weapons… or you’ve found them… your Fighter has leveled up and gained in Strength, so by the time you give the Fighter the really good sword, reality seems to match your expectations.

Is this really that bizarre an idea, though?

Realistically, the damage done by an attack is less the function of the weapon used and more a function of each combatant’s ability… skill, strength, ingenuity, whatever. Is a knife less of a deadly weapon than a broadsword?

I mean, I have a broadsword up on my wall at home and I have knives in my kitchen. If kids got into my apartment and started messing around unsupervised, I’d be a lot more worried about the knives, which are sharp and designed to pierce and rend flesh with minimal effort, than the broadsword, which is more of a lever for multiplying force and focusing it across a narrow edge.

If I were a knight in heavy armor using my own lever to keep foes past arm’s length, I’d be worried about the broadsword, sure, but my point is that the broadsword is not inherently more deadly than knives.

Yet since time immemorial (or since all but the very, very oldest iteration of D&D, which is to say the same thing), roleplaying games have created a heirarchy of weapons according to the damage they do. This is a purely game mechanical thing, the sort of “mechanic disassociated from reality” that 4E is supposed to have foisted upon an unsuspecting gaming public. It was so that you could say the Magic-User only had d4 weapons and the Thief got some d6 ones and the Cleric could go up to d8 and the Fighting Man could have d10 and it would balance things out (yes, that’s probably a slight simplification of the old weapon lists, but only slight)… or in a computer game like Ultima, so that you an incentive to keep killing monsters to get more gold so that you could do more damage to kill more monsters.

Now, in 4E, the weapons still have different base damages, but they still cover about the same range: from roughly 1d4 up to some that do 1d12, with an awful lot of 1d8s. If you have a big two-handed weapon that does 1d12 damage, you’ll do more with a basic melee attack than someone with a 1d4 dagger.

How much more? The math is easy: three times as much.

Except that you’re both adding your attribute bonus to your damage. In original flavor D&D, attribute bonuses topped off at +3, and if you weren’t fudging your die rolls , there was less than half of one percent of a chance that you’d have that much on your Strength. You had about a 20% chance of having a +1 on your Strength, though, so let’s be charitable and say our two example characters are doing 1d4+1 and 1d12+1.

Okay… still only a little less than three times as much damage.

If these hypothetical characters find magical weapons that give them a whopping +3 on their damage, we have 1d4+4 and 1d12+4… no the gap has closed a little bit so that Dagger-User is doing half as much damage as Greataxe-User.

Let’s compare this to 4E. Attribute bonuses are easier to come by, and you’re likely to have anywhere between +3 (if you make a very well-rounded character) to +5 (if you make a narrowly focused character) on the attribute you use for most of your attacks… which isn’t necessarily going to be Strength, as they’ve tied each class’s attacks to the things that make them good at doing what they do. So let’s say a Rogue making Dexterity attacks with a dagger and a Fighter using a big two-handed weapon, and let’s say they both have +4 on those respective attributes.

Rogue is doing 1d4+4. Fighter is doing 1d12+4. Right off the bat, the fact that they are equally skilled at what they do has eaten a good chunk of the “lead” that the Fighter gets for using the giant lever. Each time they both advance their fighting skill (as measured by an increase in the attribute bonus), the lead shrinks.

And of course, the Rogue’s got the ability to inflict extra damage… Sneak Attack adds +2d6 to a skillfully executed attack, Sly Flourish adds Charisma modifier (+2 or +3, probably, possibly +4) to that attack. These bonuses are additive, not multiplicative. If the Rogue could get them with a weapon doing the base damage of the greatsword, they wouldn’t increase. This extra damage is all “from skill” rather than “from weapon”.

Now sure, if you’ve got a repeated strike ability or an attack that does a multiple of the weapon’s damage on a single target, then the difference between a greatsword and a dagger gets multiplied, but those attacks remain exceptions rather than rules because they are limited use.

But even then, the designers have done the math so that other characters are going to have equivalent impact on a combat to a character doing “7W” damage on a daily attack with a d12 weapon. That’s game balance. And is it so unrealistic that a person with a skillfully wielded dagger kills orcs just as dead as one with a giant rage-powered axe? World War II was ended with a pair of atom bombs. World War I was started with a pistol.

For all that, a pistol is not an atom bomb. A dagger is not a greataxe. Different weapons have different uses. 4E recognizes this by making some small trade-offs in the stats, and then by making different attack powers work better (or only) with certain weapons. The weapon’s nature influences how it’s used in combat instead of dictating how well used it will be.

Of course, this makes weapons less a matter of getting the one with the most dice and more a matter of finding the one that suits your character, which is how I feel it should be.

So what’s the point of this post? It’s part my usual D&D 4E analysis/apologia and part preamble to design philosophy for A Wilder World. I’m looking at building a system where the primary concern behind a weapon is how it suits your character. I’m sort of bouncing between a very minimalist system where specific types of weapons are only a little more important than other visual details like hair or eye color and one that deals more with qualities than numbers. I’m more inclined towards the latter than the former, but I’m keeping the former in mind as a model of simplicity and playability that the final version should approach, even though it obviously won’t equal.