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Have you looked at some of the artwork? A few of the weapons depicted appear to weigh upwards of 300 pounds. Apparently steel in Golarion (or stone, judging from the looks of some of the "swords" depicted) contains an antigravity element.
So, if the stats reflect the artwork weapons, rather than historical ones, the listed weights are probably too low!
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Have you looked at some of the artwork? A few of the weapons depicted appear to weigh upwards of 300 pounds. Apparently steel in Golarion (or stone, judging from the looks of some of the "swords" depicted) contains an antigravity element.
So, if the stats reflect the artwork weapons, rather than historical ones, the listed weights are probably too low!
Yeah - the artists likely know nothing about what a real warhammer is like: those are by far the worst offenders.
Warhammer /= giant Sledgehammer
What, you mean this thing is more accurate than THIS one? Say it ain't so!
There are whole layers of absurdity to debating whether a rapier is DEX or STR in real life. DEX-or-STR is a strange abstraction of such colossal properties that it dwarfs things like appropriate item weight.
This is mainly because there's no stat for speed (only 'movement'), which would enable str+speed to combine for a Power stat. People keep mistaking dexterity for speed, which is not what the stat represents at all.
==Aelryinth
There are whole layers of absurdity to debating whether a rapier is DEX or STR in real life. DEX-or-STR is a strange abstraction of such colossal properties that it dwarfs things like appropriate item weight.This is mainly because there's no stat for speed (only 'movement'), which would enable str+speed to combine for a Power stat. People keep mistaking dexterity for speed, which is not what the stat represents at all.
==Aelryinth
The big abstraction is that in this system, a character with 20STR/3DEX and a character with 3STR/20DEX are both more effective at landing attacks than a character with 18STR/18DEX. So being uncoordinated to the point of barely functioning doesn't affect landing a blow 'with strength', and being so weak you can barely lift more than a sword doesn't prevent you from striking very accurately with it 'with dexterity' (and maybe even doing solid damage...).
I'd actually like to see what happened if things otherwise worked the same, but base AC was 11 and attack bonus was STR+DEX.
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There are whole layers of absurdity to debating whether a rapier is DEX or STR in real life. DEX-or-STR is a strange abstraction of such colossal properties that it dwarfs things like appropriate item weight.This is mainly because there's no stat for speed (only 'movement'), which would enable str+speed to combine for a Power stat. People keep mistaking dexterity for speed, which is not what the stat represents at all.
==Aelryinth
The big abstraction is that in this system, a character with 20STR/3DEX and a character with 3STR/20DEX are both more effective at landing attacks than a character with 18STR/18DEX. So being uncoordinated to the point of barely functioning doesn't affect landing a blow 'with strength', and being so weak you can barely lift more than a sword doesn't prevent you from striking very accurately with it 'with dexterity' (and maybe even doing solid damage...).
I'd actually like to see what happened if things otherwise worked the same, but base AC was 11 and attack bonus was STR+DEX.
While I like the vibe - if you did that so that DEX always affected accuracy, it would have to be split into Dexterity & Agility. (I did pretty much that in a homebrew system I'm working on. Accuracy for most melee in it is dice+Dex+Brawn, with finesse style melee weapons being dice+Dex+Agl)
if you did that so that DEX always affected accuracy, it would have to be split into Dexterity & Agility.
...why would you have to split it?
Balance - Dex would be doing too much.if you did that so that DEX always affected accuracy, it would have to be split into Dexterity & Agility....why would you have to split it?
Well it doesn't really do anything for DEX that Weapon Finesse won't already do. The difference is that 1)Weapon Finesse isn't needed, 2)you're punished for dumping strength on a 'dex' character while you're rewarded for taking some, and 3)you can balance a character between strength and dexterity instead of being forced to maximize one or the other to be effective. So a melee character becomes an open scale of choice between strength and dexterity instead of being one of two fixed archetypes.
Rapiers as DEX based weapons, if you're pushing for realism, really comes down to which period/style of rapier, which school of fencing, and what style of combat you're looking at.
Early period rapiers with the more spike-like blade with a thick cross section were absolutely more STR based and could puncture armour with a solid thrust. Later period dueling rapiers were thinner, lighter and much more of a "swish & flick" affair that relied on quickness and placement but were often only really used in a "to the blood" style of organized combat.
Just wanting to reply to this, since it was bugging me. The "early period rapiers" you're referring to are estocs, and they're not rapiers at all. They were mostly English and French longswords with a spike for a blade, and were used to penetrate armor as you said, on the battlefield.
The rapier was absolutely a civilian weapon; a nobleman's weapon to be sure, but definitely not a battlefield weapon. If it was well-made it MIGHT pierce/break chainmail, but they were completely impractical against someone in plate armor.