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Masterwork: A 5e Equipment Mod (Update)
🕑 Added 2019-06-01 16:12:52 +0000 UTCI have always been a little disappointed in the item options I have in 5e. Armor doesn't quite make sense (why can't I have padded armor on under my chain armor?) but it works well enough, though without careful management on the DMs part of how much gold is meted out, players very quickly acquire the best non-magical armor in short order. Weapons aren't much different. There are a few best options for the builds that care about weapons, and those are acquired without much noise.
What I do appreciate about these systems is that I am not swimming in a sea of synonyms for "long sword" trying to pick out the best option based on crit value. In fact, as far as that goes, Fifth Edition *fucking nailed* weapons.
Pathfinder 2e has a really impressive system in place too that makes weapon choice feel more important, but in both systems - as with armor - the best choice for a character is quickly acquired and that's that.
This is part of what I am trying to address in Masterwork. Players can build ideal weapons, but these weapons have substantial costs.
Gold eventually becomes meaningless in these tabletop fantasy games because players quickly have the best equipment - but when there are clear, non-magical items that are baked into the system that players can set for themselves as goals, I think this goes away. In fact, I know it goes away, at least based on how often I generally give out gold (oh god my games rain money)
There's the logical problem of (if we're thinking of Gold as an analog for Dollars) "why is this specific longsword $21,500?" to which I reply, "I found a website that sells katanas for $30,000 because they're made by master crafters." So especially in a fantasy gaming setting where this fine gradation of quality can mean the different between killing a dragon and being the dragon's lunch, yeah, I think the king's personal adventuring squad might have $200,000 worth of weapons between them.
The bones of Masterwork are done. I really like them. People can read it and just make weapons and armor that they'd like to see on their character sheet, and DMs can quickly tabulate the cost.
What I am doing now is making lots of tables of premade weapons so that DMs can populate stores and monsters, and so that players who end up stuck in this system but don't necessarily want to customize their weapons can just pick a weapon from a familiar-looking list.
I'm looking down the barrel of using this system to create a metric fuckton of weapons all at once, so I'll really be putting my hypothesis that this is fun to the test today.
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