#RPGaDAY2021 Day 4: Weapon

 So many RPGs are geared towards action and adventure scenarios where weapons are likely to make an appearance. Because of this, there are often a variety of rules involving their use. Just what are these rules trying to accomplish? I thought I'd use today's #RPGaDay2021 prompt to discuss this a bit.

Going back to the beginning of the RPG hobby with 1974's good ol' "White Box" Dungeons and Dragons, characters were, in a sense, expanded, more detailed versions of war game units. Rather than a character being able to take 1 hit, or 2 hits, etc., they were granted Hit Dice (1d6), accumulating them over levels. Then, instead of successful attacks dealing "1 hit", they dealt 1d6 "Hit Points" of damage (yes, every weapon dealt 1d6 in the earliest edition). While a d6 was used to determine Hit Points for each class in the original D&D, Fighting Men, Clerics and Magic Users gained them at different rates, to reflect their varying ability to survive dangerous situations.

Were these good rules?

It all comes down to what role you want weapons to play in a game and its design. Even more broadly, it comes down to what role you want physical conflict to play in your game. Here are a few approaches to weapons that come to mind:

1. Weapons are basically set dressing - This desire can be reached for a few reasons. One is that... imagine Conan, or a movie like Hard Boiled. Are we interested in how Conan performs with a sword vs. a battle axe? Is Inspector "Tequila" Yuen's ability to shoot folks in the face and take them out meaningfully altered by the fact he is wielding a Beretta 92F vs. a Taurus PT92CS vs. a Steyr GB vs. a Heckler & Koch P7M13? Some might argue that the weapons make for decent in-character talk possibly, but that ultimately the character is the weapon, and it is their ability more than their tools that matter. Another reason weapons may be treated as set dressing is that the RPG does not want to focus on weapons or combat, it is primarily about other kinds of endeavor. Even in games where violence occurs, sometimes the weightiest factor was that someone chose violence, and to go into detailing the weapons involved is a triviality in comparison.
2. Weapons are detailed to some extent to reflect how they would work in real life, or reflect the fictional reality - I feel like this is the default, traditional assumption made by many RPGs. This comes out of a "In a game of make-believe, what rules could fairly and reasonably reflect the physics of what would happen?" impulse. At the extreme end of this, you get people who are basically gun/sword nuts who are interested in this particular subject almost as a hobby of its own. At the mild end you get people who just want a shotgun, pistol and rifle to be different in a way broadly consistent with our intuitions. Ideally, I think it is hoped that these rules also lead to weapons being chosen for similarly realistic reasons possibly involving real life tactics. There are RPGs that do this decently. I do believe a lot of people seeing weapon rules and detail in this way still end up in pretty unrealistic places quite often, however. A lot of this has to deal with how injury to characters occurs, how powerful characters are permitted to become while still clinging to the idea that they are human and so on. A dagger can kill anyone with a single strike, but many games make nods towards realism without addressing why it might take 15 successful attacks with a dagger to kill someone. They often then appeal to other goals, which is fine, but... it would be helpful to be explicit about it. To be more generous, some RPGs may just be satisfied with nodding towards realism with the idea of "A longsword could cut a person more than a dagger, so I'll have it do 1d8 & the dagger do 1d4 damage", and glossing over the details of how that abstraction fails, the weapon then being lightly differentiated set dressing, in a way.
3. Weapons are differentiated to support tactical variety in combat - Yesterday I discussed tactics in RPGs. I discussed how there is the open "Tactical Infinity" of make-believe roleplaying, and how also RPGs can contain sub-systems that function as games in themselves, with rules defined maneuvers and equipment and effects that can be skillfully manipulated to win conflicts or achieve goals. One approach to weapons in RPGs is to strive to give weapons interesting abilities and trade-offs to support or complicate different tactics employed by players playing the game. Maybe you like using a net or bola with a back-up spear, and your friend wields a big-ass hammer, and you have this tactic of trying to lock down an opponent while your friend delivers the hurt, or maybe you have a number of maneuvers and abilities that make you good at ranged attacks and you struggle to use the environment to keep distance between you and your opponents. With a goal like this, the primary idea here is to make weapons interesting in the "game of combat" part of the RPG, more than to be realistic, strictly speaking.
4. Weapons are accessories, tools or costuming used as part of creating an iconic character - When I'm playing an action based RPG, a lot of times I want my character to be imaginable as a cool action figure, or a character a comic book could be based on. In this approach to weapons, they are one of the tools you can use to create an iconic character. In fiction, Prince Corwyn's Glaive in the movie Krull, or Lion-O's Sword of Omens (and really all of the Thundercats' weapons), and of course even the characters in the '80s Dungeons & Dragons cartoon are in part iconic due to their weapons or tools. These weapons are so iconic, they are part of your conception of the character, much like the Flash runs really fast and has lightning streaks going on, Iron Man has an armored suit that flies and shoots repulsor beams, Thor has his hammer, Elric wields Stormbringer. Personally, when RPGs contain "magic items", they usually don't feel very magic to me unless they become an iconic part of a character or story. In this approach, a weapon is part of the character in a sense, a portion of their identity.

Reading back over this, it does read like I have a possibly negative view of the "realism" approach, but I honestly can appreciate each of these approaches to handling weapons when done well. Each approach can be done in ways I find satisfying or less-than. I do think that intentionally considering what you are hoping to accomplish with how weapons are handled in a game can only help improve how they or handled, or aid you in choosing a game that best supports an approach you would appreciate. It's all about what we want and how to get there!

Until next time!