Wait. What the fuck? The actual example was that a player should be able to mandate that they get a katana and not an ax or even some other kind of sword. That was the example.DSMatticus wrote:No. Fuck your strawman and the straw horse it rode in on. If you want to pretend Wolverine doesn't mean "claws shoot out of his knuckles and he fucks people up with them" because he's touched a variety of other weaponry throughout his lifetime as a comic book character, you are not being reasonable. At all.Frank wrote:A weapon fetishist character is a character who uses one weapon exclusively.
That's beyond "character has a class feature where they have awesome natural weapons". That's way beyond "character uses a wide variety of weaponry available in a modern setting". That's a character who refuses to use a weapon because it's the wrong flavor of medieval one handed slashing weapons and even because it's the wrong flavor of medieval one handed slashing weapons that happen to be swords.
That is the "archetype" that people are advocating support for. A character who does not find weapons that are even slightly different from the current weapons.
Uh... this is D&D. Your primary weapon is going to be dropped forever because you find another weapon with a bigger plus. That is a given. People are going to drop their ancestral +1 Ancestral Flaming sword because a +2 Ice weapon dropped. They are going to do that. That part is not even up for discussion. The thing that Fuchs and company are arguing is that the player should be allowed to mandate that the +2 ice weapon happens to be specifically a Gladius because the +1 Flaming ancestral weapon happened to be a Gladius. Lago and I are arguing against that.DSM wrote:you and Lago have been saying that people should be dropping their primary weapon forever because something with a bigger plus randomly dropped, not that they should have a golf bag of other weapons. You've been saying outright that people should abandon forever the use of their ancestral +1 sword because a +2 dire flail dropped, or else be labelled as weapon fetishists.
That mandating that the +2 Ice weapon is specifically a gladius comes with several huge problems for the game. Most notably:
- It strains believability for the monsters to only drop Gladius upgrades when you need weapon upgrades. That is one of the things that makes 4e so shitty. You wade through skull demons with burning scythes and orcish warriors with tear drinking axes, but the only time a weapon you can use drops it happens to be exactly the weapon you were already using with bigger numbers? What the fuck?
- When item drops have a 1:1 correspondence with players, as they necessarily do when all your weapon upgrades are exactly upgrades of your current weapon and all of the next player's weapon upgrades are new versions of his weapon, then the items are seen (correctly in my opinion) as being gifts directly from the MC to a particular player. This means that when they aren't perfectly equal in value and/or utility and/or time of arrival (as they necessarily will not be) those differences will be seen as the conscious favoritism of one player over another by the MC.
- By creating the assumption that the player will get an upgraded version of their current weapon, you've transformed a potential reward into a potential punishment. When the player does find their +2 Ice Gladius, rather than being happy that they got a gladius and don't have to change their figure, they are now disappointed because their new gladius is ice instead of fire. You've set the expectations to be equal to the most the DM could possibly give you, which means that you can't ever exceed those expectations and are doomed to fall short of expectations constantly.
-Username17