Lots of DMs won't let anything like that fly unfortunately.
I can't see a logical argument they could put forth against doing it.
I can't see a logical argument they could put forth against doing it.
Lots of DMs won't let anything like that fly unfortunately.
I think it's literally banned in PFS.
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I can't see a logical argument they could put forth against doing it.
Lots of DMs won't let anything like that fly unfortunately.
Realism. Swords don't have reach, for example, and a sling does not, in fact, work the same as a bow with no need to make a special sling to apply one's full Strength and a different range.
And so on and so forth. If the GM in question doesn't care about realism, sure go for it. But the fact that many GMs do care about that is what this thread is about to some extent.
1) If you rename weapons using a name that's already in the game it quickly becomes impossible to keep track of what weapons the characters actually have.
2) If a name is just meaningless flavor text, then do you also expect to meet "kobolds" with the stats of dragons?
1) unique names. unique spellings. Easy without any thought. Google the weapon. I challenge you to find a weapon in pathfinder without an alternate name for it on it's wikipedia page.
eg. Shepard's sling instead of just sling2) Yes, you would find that impossible why?
I can't see a logical argument they could put forth against doing it.
Lots of DMs won't let anything like that fly unfortunately.Realism. Swords don't have reach, for example, and a sling does not, in fact, work the same as a bow with no need to make a special sling to apply one's full Strength and a different range.
And so on and so forth. If the GM in question doesn't care about realism, sure go for it. But the fact that many GMs do care about that is what this thread is about to some extent.
But that's not realism, that's rule lawyering. Some swords *are* longer than others, a thrown object should account for your strength.
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I don't have any fundamental objection to re-skinning weapons if everyone is on board, but it still bothers me that said weapon just couldn't have its own nice thing to begin with so the re-skin wouldn't be necessary.
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But that's not realism, that's rule lawyering.
No, it isn't.
Some swords *are* longer than others,
Sure, but none is as long as a longspear. What if someone wanted to use those stats for a sword? Or use them for a dagger for that matter?
a thrown object should account for your strength.
Actually...this was my point. A bow that adds your Strength to damage costs several hundred extra gp. How do you justify that in a sling, which should definitionaly allow it all to start with, just from the perspective of logic?
And that's what we're talking here: Logic. The game rules mean things in-world. A weapon with Reach is longer than one without, for example. start violating that and suspension of disbelief tends to break down more or less completely.
I don't have any fundamental objection to re-skinning weapons if everyone is on board, but it still bothers me that said weapon just couldn't have its own nice thing to begin with so the re-skin wouldn't be necessary.
oh that gives me a great idea. we could make weapon classes weapon templates, like
simple light d4, one handed d6 and two handed d8 crit on 20ranged d2 or one die up per reload time step
(d4 swift, d6 move, d8 standard)
martial light d6, one handed d8 and two handed d10 crit on either 19-20 or 3x
Ranged starts at d6, d8 swift, d10 move, d12 standard
exotic same as simple but crit on 18-20 or 4x
ranged at d4, swift d6, move d8, standard d10 but crits 19-20 or 3x
so like a wizard would use simple, a fighter would use martial, rogue would use exotic and the weapon can be whatever they want it to be. Deal with weapon specials like trip as just an increase to the cost of the weapon and limit to none for simple, one for martial and 2 for exotic.
The actual weapon you're using can be whatever you want. Everyone could use longswords for example but they all use it differently based on their level and style of training.
Edit: I'd probably just make reach an option for two handed. If you want a long weapon make it reach, without adding that to the cost or limit.
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Sling reloads as a move action and can't benefit from Rapid Reload. The best you can do is Ammo Drop for a swift action reload. So you can have at best two shots per round. Ever. No benefit from Rapid Shot once you reach BAB 6. No Manyshot. No Haste benefit. By choosing to specialize in a sling you are objectively worse than someone who just took Weapon Proficiency Longbow and dumped the weapon entirely... I'm not sure if you didn't know this or were lamenting the fact it is the way it is.I personally just don't see why feats that help you use a Longbow better can't be applied to a Sling. Or a Crossbow. Or a Blowdart.
I don't see why that kind of thing needs to be a thing, in general, really.
Lamenting. Very much lamenting.
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I don't really mind that some melee weapons are better than others. I'm fine with maces, hammers, morningstars, flails and whatnot all being unequal, and swords generally being a bit better anyway.
There's plenty of choice in melee weaponry. There are easily twenty melee weapons that have enough going for them.
It's different with ranged weapons. Crossbows suck unless you take a specific archetype. Thrown weapons have a hard time being more than a secondary weapon for melee types who happen to be at range for the moment. To get a sling to work you're forced to take rare feat taxes or an alternate racial trait (that competes with some other very desirable traits). Guns require major investment as well.
Meanwhile, it's almost hard to find a class that can't do something nice with a bow right out of the gate. We have zen archers, rangers and fighters that easily climb the feat trees, inquisitors, magi and clerics adding a neat packet of buffs on their archery, paladins smiting at range and quite a few more. I guess the full arcane casters are a bit lacklustre archers, but that's about it.
So my main beef is: there's just not enough good ranged weapons to choose from. Not every ranged weapon has to be great, but right now bows are the only good choice that doesn't shoehorn you into a specific build, and that's not enough.
I think something that everyone is forgetting is that the title of a weapon is just flavour text. calling your melee weapon Halberd or Long sword does as much to the mechanic as calling your spell Magic Missile or calling your feat Diehard.
If you want to be a sling fighter that is as good as an archer just rename the bow to sling and rename arrow to stones. Now you can visualize your character how you want. Same mechanic, different flavour text.
It really is a shame that D&D/PF never got on board with the HERO Games-style full separation of fluff and mechanics. It is ultimately much more elegant to just call a D6 a D6, and it frees up the players to imagine their characters as they please rather than forcing everyone into cookie-cutter "build" nonsense where a huge number of the PCs end up looking depressingly similar because mechanics and fluff are connected on a deep and nonsensical level like Siamese twins who only share a butt.
It's not like the game is even close to a simulation. If it were, nobody would try to hit someone in full plate with a longsword.
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By the time you can manage it with any consistency, you are probably skilled enough to kill like 6 lightly armed dudes in a fight. I assume when my 3rd level fighter is swinging a longsword at platemail, every strike is this deadly accurate, superhuman technique of captain america level proportions, because there is no living human being, now or ever, as competent in a fight as a third level fighter.
It's not like the game is even close to a simulation. If it were, nobody would try to hit someone in full plate with a longsword.
Killing someone in fullplate with a longsword is entirely possible it's just a question of how you use it.
Several medeival manuals explicitly talk about and illustrate methods and means to dispatch or disable someone in heavy armor with a sword.
In fact here's one such technique.
The trouble with a lot of the simulationist arguments is that they often get the actual facts dead wrong.
A sling could be useful, yeah, but there's a reason the longbow was a more popular weapon for elite troops.
Over time, research has led me to suspect that the assertion that the longbow was the most popular or best weapon for elite troops may simply be a gigantic Anglo myth...
....okay, okay, I won't get into it.
(except to link a post in a different thread)
But I don't, strictly, mind that the sling isn't quite as good - I do mind if the sling is way less good, and on grounds that tend to have nothing to do with realism.
Well, slings have a little problem with their reload time...
I'm not entirely sure what prevents you from doing that. The difference between a sling and a bow is 1d4 vs 1d6 (or 1d8) for a longbow, either of which will be dwarfed by the +305 damage bonus a barbarian routinely adds to his attacks.
My halfling warslinger never has that problem.
Limiting stuff to a certain race for no good reason bothers me too. I don't like that certain sling material is halfling-only for the same reason that I don't like orc-only Dirty Trick archetypes that have no mechanical or flavor reason to be orc-only.
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The trouble with a lot of the simulationist arguments is that they often get the actual facts dead wrong.
If I wanted to simulate simulationism in RPGs, I would use a series of mostly untrained skill checks. ;)
Some people want to have their cake and eat it too all of the time. Some people understand that a sword should do more damage than a knife. Some people understand even more about fighting and that the above knife vs. sword statement should be qualified by a number of factors including distance to enemy, armor and space available.
Pathfinder like D&D before it is "semi-simulationist". Some things are realistic, some are not, and some are just outlandish but it tries to strike a balance.
I personally as a player with a knife throwing rogue don't agree with the idea that if an option is not optimal no one will ever use it.
martials suck anwyays be a wlizard
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There have been a lot of threads complaining about underpowered weapons. With the exception of the first link, I just dug those up with about five minutes of random searching. Hell, I didn't even bother wading through the many firearm threads.
Why? Why does it bother people that a sling isn't as effective as a longbow? Isn't that kind of realistic? A sling could be useful, yeah, but there's a reason the longbow was a more popular weapon for elite troops.
Why are people annoyed that a crossbow is a less heroic weapon than a composite bow, for that matter? Of course crossbows take too long to load to be a valid "hero's" weapon.
Well, the thing is, Pathfinder has a bit of a contradiction. It's not a big thing—it's not something that ruins the game by any means—but I think it's the reason these arguments keep sprouting up.
Pathfinder, much more than any D&D edition prior to it, makes the characters feel like big, damn heroes. Like many games and stories, it tells us that the important thing is that the players feel badass—and it's not exactly all wrong there. And if there's anything anime has taught us, it's that the more impractical a weapon is, the more badass it is to use. Who needs guns?! I got swordchucks!
Pathfinder starts us down this path, giving us extra feats, extra abilities, and ensuring we always have options. But it doesn't go all the way. It keeps crossbows pretty much nerfed unless you're willing to spend a bunch of feats. Nobody in their right mind uses shuriken when they can just take levels in Zen Archer and get a much better result. And don't get me started on sling staves.
Pathfinder...
My two cents is; if other weapon options had different flavors of support (as in tactics, maneuvers, and special ammo)they would get seen in a better light.
Whats the difference between a Bow and a Crossbow; range, damage, and feat support. Whats the difference between armed melee and unarmed melee? Damage and attack options. Sword and Board/other Sword you got attack, disarm, sunder, ect. Unarmed you can do all that, and grab the guys face and shove it into your knee whilst screaming LUCHA at the top of your lungs.
Lets look at slings, sure they're not the greatest damage wise, but say there was the option of delivering sunder and disarm attempts with it. And/or being able to deliver thrown splash weapons (50ft range tangle-foot bag anyone?
If everything was equal, that would defeat the purpose of options. What the other options need is a different kind of support that lets them be competitive but in a different light
To get a sling to work you're forced to take rare feat taxes or an alternate racial trait (that competes with some other very desirable traits). Guns require major investment as well.
I am assuming that the two feats you are talking about are the ammo drop and the juggle load but what's the trait you are talking about?
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My two cents is; if other weapon options had different flavors of support (as in tactics, maneuvers, and special ammo)they would get seen in a better light.
Whats the difference between a Bow and a Crossbow; range, damage, and feat support. Whats the difference between armed melee and unarmed melee? Damage and attack options. Sword and Board/other Sword you got attack, disarm, sunder, ect. Unarmed you can do all that, and grab the guys face and shove it into your knee whilst screaming LUCHA at the top of your lungs.
Lets look at slings, sure they're not the greatest damage wise, but say there was the option of delivering sunder and disarm attempts with it. And/or being able to deliver thrown splash weapons (50ft range tangle-foot bag anyone?
If everything was equal, that would defeat the purpose of options. What the other options need is a different kind of support that lets them be competitive but in a different light
Have to agree on this. Part of the problem with ranged weapon is that every non-longbow weapon just plays like a weaker, crappier longbow.
Pretty much I agree totally with that. And its not just the ranged weapons.
Three I identified were Dagger, War Razor and Butterfly knife. Each getting progressively worse then the last.
Daggers have a lot of versatility. Sure they don't do the damage of a great sword, but they are easier to hide, lighter, and can be thrown and duel wielded etc. Lots of other utility stuff you could get as well, like cutting ropes, or eating meat.
Then comes war razor, same damage/crit, only slashing, cannot be thrown. Even the thing they are suppose to have "easily concealable" doesn't work. Daggers already had that.
Then Butterfly knife. You need a special feat to actually use it properly (exotic weapon prof.) You've gotta draw it, open it, then you could use it. Sadly it didn't come after ultimet equipment came out, as it should at least get the performance quality. Also cannot be thrown.
ITs nice and cool to have flavor, but that flavor seriously needs to be built into the mechanics of the weapon, feat, class..
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So my main beef is: there's just not enough good ranged weapons to choose from. Not every ranged weapon has to be great, but right now bows are the only good choice that doesn't shoehorn you into a specific build, and that's not enough.
Or a better way of putting it:
You don't (or at least shouldn't) take an optimized build of a specialist archetype just to be good at a weapon. That's what you do when you want to be Amazing at that weapon.
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I'd have to say that, to me at least, the reason some players want a sling to be as good as a sling or a crossbow as good as a bow, is because they had a concept involving those weapons and, like most other players, they want to contribute meaningfully and have their awesome moments of awesomeness using said concept.
Now, I'm not saying that all weapons should be amazing or even equal, just that the above is what I've perceived is all. I will say though, that there are things I do believe should be better than they are, namely poisons and thrown weapons (but thrown weapons seems to be getting a bit more oomph) and that I do hope they'll get support in the future, but it's not enough for me to rant... unless I thought it'd get me said support in the future. Which it likely won't.
Just my opinion though.
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Example of Archery rate of fire
Being neutral on the whole "sling vs. bow" subject, I decided to look up some stuff.
It seems that, during the Bronze Age, the difference between bows and slings was nonexistent. One vs the other came down to: bows are easier to handle on chariots; slings deal more damage; bows have a much-lower learning curve than slings; arrows have to be created, while sling bullets can be improvise; sling bullets are much heavier and bulkier if you're going ammunition-to-ammunition. There were pros and cons for either.
However, bows won out over time once Composite and especially Recurve bows came into being. "Composite" in D&D means both Composite AND Recurve.
I will, however, point out that the "sling rate of fire" link says that slingers fired around 7 shots a minute, though possibly more; compare the girl in the video who fires 5 shots in 6 SECONDS - the same as a lv16 character with Rapid Shot (6 seconds being the general time for 1 round) - and with a fairly decent level of accuracy. English Longbowmen are said (with evidence) to have fired 8 WELL AIMED shots per minute; I can't find evidence to say that slingers firing at 7 per minute were well-aimed or just thrown.
From what I've seen I can agree that slings ARE slower than bows; however, I don't think that they're SO slow that they should realistically be "one per round at max" considering that Crossbows and even Early One-Handed firearms can be loaded as a Free Action under the right conditions.
Considering that throw stars/knives/shuriken can all be used as full-round weapons via Quick Draw, I think slings kinda get the short end of the stick, and should be upgraded to allow for rapid-fire - if only for the coolness factor. If you sink Quick Draw and Rapid Reload into your character you should be able to retrieve a bullet as a Free Action (QD) and load as a Free Action (RR).
Sorry to double-post
There is another major factor:
Slings dealt bludgeoning damage - they could break the skin and cause concussive damage (even break bones), but rarely actually penetrated any decent depth.
Arrows bury themselves, and can at least break through armor; slings, by their nature, can't pierce armor nearly as often, though anyone who's ever received gunfire or paintball fire will tell you that while armor stops penetration, it doesn't stop the PAIN of the impact.
I agree with slings doing less dice-damage, but getting the strength bonus to damage naturally, while arrows have a wider range of potential damage via higher dice damage (and Composite bows adding strength the same way recurve and composite bows do in real life via weight), as that better simulates how the weapons actually work.
I've had this happen in a game before. A coplayer wanted to build a pirate-type character, and we were building it semi-together because we both agreed that pirates are cool, and we eventually settled on a 2 weapon fighting pistol/cutlass fighting style. We also decided that he'd have 10 strength and 20 dex (pretty sure he was a tengu, I don't remember anymore though. We built him as a Swashbuckler), for the extra pistol ability and acrobatics stuff. I wanted to give him Weapon Finesse so that he wouldn't suck with the cutlass, but then I realized that it wouldn't apply to a cutlass. We talked to our GM and he decided that we could think of it like a cutlass as long as we kept the rapier's stats, because cutlasses are just so much more pirate-y than rapiers are.
This is also a very minor example compared to bow vs. sling, because the only difference in the end was a single feat's eligibility, compared to feat taxes and trash for damage.
My halfling warslinger never has that problem.Well, slings have a little problem with their reload time...
I'm not entirely sure what prevents you from doing that. The difference between a sling and a bow is 1d4 vs 1d6 (or 1d8) for a longbow, either of which will be dwarfed by the +305 damage bonus a barbarian routinely adds to his attacks.
Though, funny enough, he does if he wants to use a sling staff. ;D
So then what's the purpose of this one? Are you here for any reason other than to insult large sections of the player base while retaining plausible deniability?
No, I'm just here to piss you, Atarlost, off. Not anyone else—just you. You in particular. And I have succeeded. I will now fly away on my unicorn chariot to tell Luna on the moon what I have learned about friendship. I'm going now. I shan't be back. Goodbye!
*Blasts off in friendship cannon*
By the way, the stuff about slings is actually quite interesting, and definitely food for thought. Personally, I'm guessing slings are simple weapons due to a combination of "designers who get them confused with slingshots" and a more logical "commoners are more likely to own and use slings than bows". After all, slings are way cheaper, training or no. People still use them to protect herds of goats and sheep in some places.
Everyone should be able to take off their sock and have an effective weapon when combined with a rock. :D
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Everyone should be able to take off their sock and have an effective weapon when combined with a rock. :D
Half-brick, if you're a Pratchett fan.
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Everyone should be able to take off their sock and have an effective weapon when combined with a rock. :DHalf-brick, if you're a Pratchett fan.
If you're truly a Pratchett fan it's more effective against awful abominations from beyond reality than the most powerful magic which is all but useless against them.
Unicorns don't fly...
They do when M.A. Larson's involved.
Hold on to something...
I hate that a dagger only does d4 damage. I think it should be just as deadly as a greatsword.
Or at least, I think it should have the potential to be in the right hands.
In other words, I want to see damage based on skill and technique rather than weapon selection. There are countless threads across hundreds of boards lamenting the fact that the best damage is done with this or that particular weapon, to heck with your character concept! Dare I bring up sword-and-board fighters from 3.X.
This is a major "problem area" unless you just accept it like the vast majority of us do. It's just the way D&D is built, better or worse. The other side of the coin is hit points, and we all know what an abstraction that is.
My beef has always been with arrows. As little as 1d6 damage (some 1d4). Really? I just shot 10 arrows at the baddie. All hit, and he's still coming? He's got 10 arrows sticking out of him, and he's still attacking three times this round. What the...!?
Then come the excuses: well, he still has xx hit points; well, not all of the hits were "hits"; and the rest of the abstraction of the hit point system. Problem is, I've spent ammunition to do that 10d6 damage. Melee characters don't spend anything to do the same amount of damage.
The combat abstraction falls apart for ranged weapons that use ammunition in my opinion. "Welcome to the D&D World."
Maybe get a composite bow? You've gotta be strong to be an effective archer. That's one of the reasons crossbows got popular. :P
Hold on to something...
I hate that a dagger only does d4 damage. I think it should be just as deadly as a greatsword.
Or at least, I think it should have the potential to be in the right hands.
There is an app for that.
Rather, the Knife Master Rogue. He gets d8's when using the dagger with his sneak attack.
Of course then that also falls back to the problem with rogues, what with their pretty bad talents and the like.
This is also the problem that with a greatsword, all you really need to be effective is really high str and power attack. Maybe weapon focus, furious focus doesn't hurt either.
With a dagger, you're looking at possibly having feats that later on will help you dish out damage with that dagger.. Twf for example. Of course it has its issues of giving you a -2 to hit then you need three feats. Your dex is so high, you'll need weapon finesse to compensate for the loss of AB due to low str. Then if there was any dagger focused feats, you know you're also going to need weapon focus dagger. Possibly combat expertise as well.. The list goes on and on and on of what you're going to need for daggers.
Its kinda like martials vs casters. As a caster you're already leagues ahead of the martials, and they have to use all their feats to catch up. Sadly they get feat ladened with all the pre-reqs and taxes and such..
Cause you see with me, the Iconic knife guy duel wields knives. He slits throats, and attacks weak points of his enemy. They always got knives..
Like the latest hobbit movie, there is this one dwarf that they spend like ten minutes taking all the knives from, and even after getting him to the prison, they're still pull knives off of him. Its somewhat possible to do this.. but it has one small issue.. You cannot quickdraw hidden knives. Even with Hidden Weapons + Quick draw.
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I am assuming that the two feats you are talking about are the ammo drop and the juggle load but what's the trait you are talking about?To get a sling to work you're forced to take rare feat taxes or an alternate racial trait (that competes with some other very desirable traits). Guns require major investment as well.
The Warslinger halfling alternate racial trait.
It competes with the alternate trait that gives you 30ft movement; I consider that a hefty sacrifice just to get the sling going.
Greatsword and Dagger actually a good example of well balanced options.
Greatswords have higher damage and can be used 2-handed. Daggers can be used with Weapon Finesse and TWF. They are also easier to hide and can be used as thrown weapons.
They are both similarly effective but in different ways. That's nice balance and good game design in general. Ina perfect world, every choice would be like that.
The problem is stuff like crossbows. That are not just inferior to bows, they are so vastly inferior to the point where they're completely pointless... The only reason to ever use a crossbow is if you can't use a bow. Even Exotic crossbows are far less effective than bows, despite the fact that exotic weapons should theoretically be superior to martial weapons.r
No matter how much you optimize a crossbow, it'll always be a mediocre character at best (Possible exception is the Bolt Ace archetype). Most likely, it'll be garbage. That's neither realistic nor balanced, it's just bad game design.
The infamous "water balloons" quote conveniently ignores the fact that crossbows are not an absurd concept created for fantasy games. They were actual weapons, used in actual wars, by actual warriors, for a long, long time.
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I'm fine with daggers doing less damage than greatswords. If you don't like greatswords there's various polearms, falchions, the no-dachi, two-handed falcata, sansetsukon, bastard sword, earthbreaker, heavy flail, elven curve blade, double sword and more - all of which are decent choices.
If you don't want a bow, your options are something like this:
- thrown weapons but never have real long range. Probably need to spend a feat on Quickdraw.
- slings pretty much require Halfling and 20ft speed as well as a Str penalty, kind of reducing the coolness of strength to damage. Otherwise, no full attack for you.
- crossbows require 1-2 feats to get a full attack going, and since they can't add Strength to damage at all they'll quickly start lagging behind in damage anyway. The Bolt Ace may improve this a bit, but that gets you into a required class.
- guns work, but come with a required class or archetype. And you're still at least a feat behind bows.
We need more different ranged weapons that just work well. There's only one good choice, and that's sad.
The general category differences between light, one handed, and two handed weapons are pretty balanced, I agree. Light for two-weapon fighting and for finesse but lower damage from dice size and lack of 1.5 strength, two handed has the most raw power but is the most restrictive about how it can be used, and one handed is the most versatile.
Even then there are plenty of discrepancies within the actual categories among weapons just like the crossbow/sling/bow issue, especially in the simple/martial/exotic divide, but within as well. There are plenty of weapons that are just worse versions of the "standard" weapons everyone uses for melee. Anyway, I can see some basis for the martial/simple divide, even if at times it goes much too far (sling), but the martial/exotic divide?
I personally don't understand the design decision, which I've heard was a deliberate choice, to make weapons locked behind a feat (Exotic Weapon Proficiency) not better in someway than options pretty much everyone gets by default. I can almost see a justification from a roleplay perspective ("You must spend years studying the ancient ways of our people to master the exquisite art of the quad-wielded stingray chucks!"), but if the weapon in question is so bad mechanically I wonder why anyone would actually sit down and do it.
Start violating that and suspension of disbelief tends to break down more or less completely.
A... WIZARD... DID... IT!
I can't see a logical argument they could put forth against doing it.
Lots of DMs won't let anything like that fly unfortunately.
Neither can I, especially since even Paizo has been known to do it. Look up the Marsh Giant. They wield flails that have been reskinned into gaffs.
I think it's literally banned in PFS.
I would very much like to see that rule, since I've gotten away with doing exactly this sort of thing in PFS several times--and have seen others do it as well. It is a game of imagination after all, so I'd hope such things are to be expected, even in PFS.
By the time you can manage it with any consistency, you are probably skilled enough to kill like 6 lightly armed dudes in a fight. I assume when my 3rd level fighter is swinging a longsword at platemail, every strike is this deadly accurate, superhuman technique of captain america level proportions, because there is no living human being, now or ever, as competent in a fight as a third level fighter.
It's not like the game is even close to a simulation. If it were, nobody would try to hit someone in full plate with a longsword.
Killing someone in fullplate with a longsword is entirely possible it's just a question of how you use it.
Several medeival manuals explicitly talk about and illustrate methods and means to dispatch or disable someone in heavy armor with a sword.
In fact here's one such technique.
The trouble with a lot of the simulationist arguments is that they often get the actual facts dead wrong.
Yes, yes, of course...it was easy to pierce heavy armor with a longsword; all you had to do was grab the blade, get really close, hope your target wasn't moving much or fighting back, and then, easy-peasy, ram it through the joints in his armor. That's why the military pick was never invented!
Whether or not something is possible and whether or not a possible thing is accurately represented in D&D-style combat are two completely separate questions.