Homebrew - Weapon Breakdown
Weapons are an important aspect for many cultures, creeds, warriors, and more. Weapons, swords, clubs, and others can bring out strong emotions in people, like a knight wielding a sword is gallant, but if they wield a greataxe, they are probably evil. How many times do we have to dodge the katana-fans talking about the virtues of their favorite sword over every other sword thanks to a bunch of myths? Though, I could talk about why I prefer viking blades… maybe a different day.
We are going over how weapons work, and how you can make your own to best fit your world! Weapons can be an important way to show off culture, give weird loot to your party that isn’t magic items and paintings of yourself, and give reasons why someone would stop picking the same weapon over and over.
For those that don’t care about the nitty-gritty:
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Boring Weapons
Weapons are special, especially in a combat-oriented game like Dungeons & Dragons. Often, you just see players take the same weapon over and over. Their go-to weapon is largely the same because it doesn’t make much sense to change it up. You want the bigger weapon damage die that you are proficient in and will let you get all your fun abilities with your class. A rogue may be imagined with a dagger, but how often are they sticking to that and not picking up shortswords or a rapier?
My complaint is more that the weapon list is rather plain and unexciting, and it breaks its own rules for no reason. Looking at the handaxe and the light hammer, they are the same thing but the light hammer is a lower die. Why? Well, there’s probably a variety of non-mechanical reasons, like maybe someone has a vendetta against light hammers. Who knows.
We even have useless weapons like the blowgun because… well… Let me know.
Of course, no list is complete without also talking about the whip and the net… and that’s all I’ll say on those.
The Internal Workings of a Weapon
Weapons are fairly simple once you strip them down to their components. There are three important categories to know before you go about creating your weapon: Ranged, Martial Melee, and Simple Melee.
Ranged weapons begin with a d4 die.
Simple melee weapons begin with a d6 die.
Martial melee weapons begin with a d8 die.
These damage die are then increased and decreased in power depending on what properties are given to a weapon. For each positive property, it decreases the die size, like from a d6 to a d4. For each negative property, it increases the die size, like from a d6 to a d8.
Of course, as mentioned earlier, some weapons break that but they are the exception that proves the rule. A handaxe, which is a simple melee weapon (starts at d6) has the light property and the thrown property. The light property is a positive property that should decrease the value of the die from a d6 to a d4, but it doesn’t. If you look at the light hammer, it is a d4, which follows the rule that one positive property decreases the die size by one. Of course, they both also have the thrown property, but that is neither a positive or negative property and so has no effect on the damage die.
Let Me Show You Its Properties
Most weapons have one or two properties to help make them special and help determine their abilities. A greatsword is only great because it is heavy and two-handed, otherwise, it’d be a d8 greatsword… which isn’t really that great.
There are only two Positive properties that will decrease the size of a weapon’s damage die, those are: Light and Reach.
For Negative properties, there are only three: Heavy, Loading, and Two-Handed.
The other properties for weapons are largely superficial, even something as powerful as finesse. Technically, it does nothing to a weapon’s damage die and so you could slap it on to a greatsword and it wouldn’t change the die size, though that does go against the feel of what a finesse weapon is as it doesn’t show up on any bludgeoning or heavy weapons.
So keep in mind while you could add in more and more features to a single weapon that on paper doesn’t increase its power, it would create a strong weapon compared to what else exists.
Now that we have a better idea on what makes weapons work, we can see that most weapons in the Player’s Handbook follow the rules of being balanced, but not all of them. Since its fairly easy to figure out how weapons are made, if we wanted to fix something in the book, like the Whip, (which is 1d4 slashing, Finesse and Reach), you could break it down into its components:
Martial Melee: starts at a d8 damage die
Positive Properties: Reach
Other Properties: Finesse
Following the rules, the whip would start with a d8 and, thanks to its one positive property, would decrease in size to a d6. The other property, Finesse, doesn’t negatively or positively affect it, and so the weapon stays at a d6.
All of a sudden, the whip is now useful, especially for anyone wanting to recreate Indiana Jones.
Custom Weapons
Now that we’ve gone over the basics of making a weapon, we can now start looking at making our own. I provide a few of the weapons I’ve made in the past as well as new weapon properties to make the weapons exciting! From additional damage on a critical hit to knocking creatures prone to a few other things. These are just a few examples to help make custom weapons, and I’d love to hear about your weapons that you’ve made.
There is not really a guide on how to make your very own weapons and their unique traits. You can add in positive and negative properties, but what is in the Player’s Handbook is quite limited. To that end, I’ve also made a few new properties to show off what could be seen as balanced compared to other weapons.
Some of these properties simply give your weapon the ability to knock a creature prone, which one can already do as a special attack but maybe you aren’t good at Strength (Athletics) which is what is required to use. Instead, you can just hit the creature with a weapon and knock them over without dealing damage. This has the potential to act similar to the Battlemaster Fighter maneuvers, but they get to deal damage when they knock a creature prone, so they still come out ahead in this situation.
Cleaning Up
So now we’ve broken down weapons, which allows us to have a better understanding of the weapons in 5th edition. Now that we understand weapons, we can better create weapons that are balanced with the game. Unfortunately, since there are only a handful of properties, it does mean that we must create new properties, which can be tricky without hitting and bumping into other class features. If you have some favorite properties, I’d love to hear about them below!
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