I finally got around to playing Knights of Amalur: Reckoning and have found a new liking for CHAKRAMs.
Do you even use them with your characters? Or even with a specific build in mind?
I know it would cost a single feat, but I thought they are the perfect weapon for a ranged sneaking attack rogue. Or a power hit from a barbarian before the melee charge.
Where's the sling when you need one? :p
I usually give a couple chakrams to my lvl 1 martial characters, especially if their primary weapon is a reach weapon.
1GP for a 1D8 slashing, 30ft range, thrown weapon that I can melee with as long as I'm wearing gauntlets? Yes, please!!
Why would it cost a feat? Chakram are Martial, meaning most rogues who want it would do the reasonable thing and level dip into Fighter for the bonus feat, weapon profs, and such.
There's not really enough bonus in straight rogue to justify doing so.
I don't like the regular ones. The crystal chakrams have some nice stats, though. Working on the assumption they would be part of the "thrown weapons" group for weapon training like normal chakram, I've had a build idea for a while now that involved a Sohei 6-8 / Fighter that flurries and rapid shots with crystal chakram built for crit-fishing and using Butterfly's Sting to give allies crits on all the enemies.
Of course, they break when used, so you'd need a lot of them and mending spell every night to replenish your stock to not go broke.
They are the only ranged slashing weapons that I know of.
I think they used to be exotic weapons back in 3.5, so I never paid them much mind. As martial weapons they look great, especially for low levels. Unfortunately this makes the starknife look even worse by comparison.
Atarlost - Actually, starknives do piercing damage
Saluzi - The weirdest Indian weapon is probably the urumi:
"Commonly known as a whip sword, this deadly weapon is fashioned from one to four 5-foot-long, razor-sharp blades of flexible steel, almost like a metal cat-o'-nine-tails. The weapon is wielded by whipping the blades at one's opponent. The coiled blade is fine and flexible enough to be worn as a belt, and its wielders often carry the blades wrapped around themselves in this fashion."
Using that weapon in combat sounds kind of impractical, and a razor sharp belt doesn't really sound like much fun either, especially if you're overweight. Meanwhile you'd be in danger of cutting your hand on the chakram. Maybe Indian weapon designers wanted to encourage people to be more peaceful by making weapons which injure their wielders (and possibly make their pants fall down when they try to fight with their belt)
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Sometimes I get the impression Europe was able to dominate the world for a while just because we ditched the weirder weapons :P
In my homebrew campaign chakrams are used by an influential sun-religion because the disk could (if you wanted to) resemble a sun. Does put a new meaning into sunstroke.
I hadn't paid attention to the slashing damage part, that's an interesting tidbit.
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I had not heard of the Urami (or don't remember) but that's not it
this thing was a target shield with a sword coming of the top edge (in the geometric plane of the shield) and some other stuff coming off other places. I think it was something I saw in a Palladium book.
BTW, there's also the hurlbat and the African throwing knife that probably inspired it - a swastika with one leg extended as a handle and everything else sharpened. Big and thrown horizontally. The African one was said to be able to take a leg off (Palladium again).
I had an Inquisitor of Pharasma with dual-wielded chakrams made out of Ring Gates once (gods those were ever expensive. Fun though).
Lots of neat tricks, but to this day I still haven't figured out how to play an inquisitor well. The character suffered often under my lack of proficiency with the class, and eventually died to a Retriever if I remember correctly.
Spikes Deadliest Warrior season 1 & 2 are good resources for character builds (IMO season 3 got to fluffy & lost sight of what the show was intended). I was thinking a rogue for the sneak attack (I also fancy playing straight builds as often as I can), and the swashbuckler rogue gives you a free martial weapon proficiency. Though a ranger dip could be useful, though for this build, I'm not sure favored enemy or favored terrain are useful (again for this build idea).
Doesn't everyone carry an adamantine +1 throwing returning chakram?