Goblin Squad Member
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In TT, most exotic weapons aren't worth the feat for proficiency. They are good if you can get proficient from a trait or class feature, but not if you have to actually spend the feat. That said, I like shuriken, whips (especially with whip mastery feats supporting it), nine-section whips, and the Urumi.
The Dwarven Dorn-Dergar is also really cool, if you take the additional Dwarven feats supporting it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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PFO is per the pathfinder rules only, so no. RAW, the only thing is has going for it is that it is a two handed weapon that can be used with weapon finesse and has the trip and disarm properties to give bonuses to those maneuvers. It has no reach, no double weapon feat support, and the same crappy damage and crit profile.
Personally, I always thought it was cheesy anyway.
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Goblin Squad Member
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PFO is per the pathfinder rules only, so no. RAW, the only thing is has going for it is that it is a two handed weapon that can be used with weapon finesse and has the trip and disarm properties to give bonuses to those maneuvers. It has no reach, no double weapon feat support, and the same crappy damage and crit profile.
Personally, I always thought it was cheesy anyway.
PFO is not per Pathfinder rules, it CAN'T be, due to Open Gaming License restrictions. If PFO adhered strongly to TT rules we'd have classes, feats, spell slots, and experience points dolled out for defeating challenges in one way or another.
If PFO can ditch classes for "archetypes" and everything else, it can make Spiked Chains a viable and flavorful option again.
I once made a tribe of Hobgoblins whose shtick was trained Ankhegs with chain-mail barding ridden by spiked-chain fighters.
It was awesome.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The 3.5 D&D spiked chain was a good weapon but got nerfed for a few reasons:
1) Players that wanted to play D&D as a version of historical medieval combat with realistic medieval weapons really really REALLY hated it
2) Whilst not OP in itself (using even a fraction of its abilities well needed huge feat trees) it was usually played INCORRECTLY which made it overpowered.
3) With low level fighters, enlarge person plus spiked chain WAS an overpowered combination.
It is a shame it was actually a good weapon concept but got abused.
They should look like the HUGE weapons we've all come to know and love from WoW... If they don't look like WoW's weapons, I won't be playing.
I also want big shoulder-pads too.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Nets. Nets can be cast and use as entangle or laid out as traps or laid to support vegetation cover over "tiger traps' w or w/o spikes.
They can provide interesting way to control flanks or at least slow actions around flanks.
Nets have reach when prepared against approaching attackers. Or cast, hit pull tight, and 5' step behind line.
Lol, I'm not sure black puddings count as a "weapon".
Vorpal Spork +10
Gunstock club.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Simple Firearms. Let's leave the more complex versions to players to develop and create.
Repeating Crossbows.
No Katana's from day one. Doesn't match the setting in that particular spot. But if through trial and error and questing, a player learned to make a curved blade of metal folded, folded and folded again ... They'd be millionaires overnight.
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Goblin Squad Member
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No Katana's from day one. Doesn't match the setting in that particular spot. But if through trial and error and questing, a player learned to make a curved blade of metal folded, folded and folded again ... They'd be millionaires overnight.
Folding steel was a necessary method for the Japanese because they had a much smaller supply of iron ore than Europe, and the ore was often a lot more impure. Folding the steel gets the impurities out, but folding high purity steel is pointless and provides no benefit.
European metal smiths made stronger swords than the Japanese by focusing on mixing in the right amounts of carbon in low oxygen furnaces, which gave them few imperfections, like Japanese steel, but also a more precise alloy than the Japanese could manage.
The katana specifically was actually designed as a less lethal sidearm for the samurai of the Edo period when the military was trying to tone down the arms of the obsolete samurai. The larger No-dachi were much more important in their time.
The idea of the katana remains very fantasized in the minds of many people, but all the science boils down to is that the Japanese just did what they did because of the limited resources in their region.
Ironically Japan uses a huge amount of steel today and it's a crux of their economy, but it's pretty much all imported.
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Goblin Squad Member
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No Katana's from day one. Doesn't match the setting in that particular spot. But if through trial and error and questing, a player learned to make a curved blade of metal folded, folded and folded again ... They'd be millionaires overnight.
Unfortunately, one of the daily deals from the Kickstarter was a katana.
The larger No-dachi were much more important in their time.
My favourite polearm of which I hope gets a run at some point.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Folding steel was a necessary method for the Japanese because they had a much smaller supply of iron ore than Europe, and the ore was often a lot more impure. Folding the steel gets the impurities out, but folding high purity steel is pointless and provides no benefit.
European metal smiths made stronger swords than the Japanese by focusing on mixing in the right amounts of carbon in low oxygen furnaces, which gave them few imperfections, like Japanese steel, but also a more precise alloy than the Japanese could manage.
The only thing that "high purity steel" could be is iron. High quality steel is iron with a precise amount of impurities, mostly carbon, but nickel, cobalt, zinc and other exotic metals in very small amounts create steels with very different material, magnetic, and chemical properties, and heat-treatment and cold-working can alter the material and magnetic properties significantly more.
Hot-folding two different steels together creates a layered structure such that cracks require more energy to propagate through the layers, and it allow for a harder layer to microfracture but remain bonded to a more elastic layer, so that at the micro-level the blade consists of hard, sharp bits on an elastic, tougher layer (which is itself bonded to another hard layer).
I don't know about the actual Japanese or European history of metalworking, and the facts of metallurgy haven't changed, but attempts to duplicate or explain the results of historical accounts of metalworking have often failed. I suspect that is mostly because the recorded accounts of metalworking were intentionally inaccurate or incomplete.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The only thing that "high purity steel" could be is iron.
Steel is by definition an alloy. "high purity" means nothing other than iron and carbon.
Though there may still be mysteries surrounding the exact construction of swords from those times, samples of steel and finished swords from the time do exist and the great myth of folded steel does not, when scrutinized, hold up to the best European steels.
Layers don't "propagate [force] through the layers" very effectively when those layers are heated up and hammered together. Yes, there is a visible grain that appears in the finished product, but one could hardly call it layers as each "layer" is melted/hammered into the adjacent layer.
The only layers in Japanese swords that mattered were the layers of different steel alloys (different mixtures of iron and carbon) which was achieved in Japan by coating different parts of the blade with different kinds of clay to get different degrees of stiffness/flexibility. But of course the Europeans also layered their steel, but not just with different iron carbon ratios - some of their layers had other elements mixed in as well (eg tungsten and vanadium).
There's just a lot of hype out there about Japanese swords.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Layers don't "propagate [force] through the layers" very effectively when those layers are heated up and hammered together. Yes, there is a visible grain that appears in the finished product, but one could hardly call it layers as each "layer" is melted/hammered into the adjacent layer.
I meant it in the crystalline structure sense; and I meant "crack propagation is arrested" in that sense; the harder layers are also more brittle, but share tough electron bonds with a more elastic region; the net result is that an impact that would shatter a pure hardened alloy blade instead shatters thousands of layers a few microns deep each, leaving them still firmly in place by the more elastic layers between them.
Layered steel is still used to make blades which are less likely to break and require much less sharpening; they keep an edge almost as well as a hardened blade, but can deform much more both elastically and inelastically before breaking.