Bartheus's page

That wouldn't work at all for people that don't actually gain martial proficiency, erasing dozens of viable concepts as basic as a martial bard.

What could be a viable alternative solution would be to simply make it level dependent like:

Attack trait: blahblahblah. At 4th level and every 4 levels thereafter (8,12,16,20) increase your damage by 1 weapon die. (with probably some language to only make it apply to actual weapons and not spells/innates/etc)

Of course changes like these would require rebalancing which classes get weapon proficiencies and when they get them, changes are also possibly required for other subsystems like feats related to fighting. Still I personally think that if there is a martial bard, then he should have better than normal (= Trained) weapon proficiency, isn't that the point of the different ranks in proficiencies? Otherwise he isn't really martially trained beyond the basics.

If most of the damage bonus would come from the wielder, instead of the weapon, you would not need the "videogamesque" runes which allow moving the magic to another weapon (you want to use). Also, enemy NPC warriors need not be armed with magic weapons to be a credible threat.

I also agree that weapon damage dice should scale according to the proficiency levels. They could also simply make Rogue's Sneak Attack to use a better proficiency than his normal attacks, this would take care of the Sneak Attack bonus. Maybe give two ranks (so rogue goes from Trained to Master, and on higher levels to Legendary) when using Finesse weapons or something like that.

I think Mudfoot's comment about weapon proficiency dictating damage is a good one. If untrained does 1d4, Trained weapon base damage, Expert base damage x 2 and so on, it would go nicely with the proficiency system. Magic weapons could then do cool stuff, not "required to participate" stuff.

Because, why would Spiritual weapon have an exception to a default rule that it was 1 CL check for the casting. I don't see anything special about it as to why they'd want it to be an exception.

It could be because the spell attacks different creatures on different rounds, and not simultaneously like area of effect spells. Having to make a new check would mean that you do not have to remember the original check result on a later combat round in the case that the new target has a different SR value.