Greatswords are one of the most well loved weapons in classic fantasy roll playing for a variety of reasons, especially when you are playing as a Barbarian or the like.
Why would they, seemingly intentionally, make the Greatsword a functionally inferior weapon to the Bastard Sword?
When you weird the BaSw two handed, it has the exact same damage as the GrSw. The GrSw has only one advantage against the BaSw, that being that it is versatile and can do slashing or piercing damage. This will usually never come up unless you happen to come across something that is specifically weak to piercing damage (I don't even know how many of those that there are in the bestiary, other than not many). You could literally go through a whole campaign and never benefit from that.
Meanwhile the Bastard Sword can also be used 1 handed, exactly like a Longsword. This is extremely useful even for a character desiring to use two-handed weapons. It allows for grappling, picking up things more easily, and a bunch of other stuff. And if you need sheer DPS, again, the the BaSw can be used exactly as a GrSw as well.
I don't mind certain weapons being straight up better than others. Nothing can ever be perfectly balanced without being boring and homoginized, but one martial weapon should never make another martial weapon completely obsolete. Especially one as iconic and popular as the Greatsword.
The Greatsword needs something. Something just a little extra to give you a reason to use it. It doesn't even have to make it as good as the Bastard Sword. It just needs something substantial that the BaSw doesn't have so that there is a reason to use it. Piercing damage is not substantial.
Personally I'd pick the forceful trait. It's a relatively minor damage buff that only works on multiple attacks, but it still makes the Greatsword potentially hit harder, and it goes along with the idea of building momentum while swinging a Greatsword around.
tl;dr version. Greatswords are awesome and need something cool to make them not just a Bastard Sword that you can't weild one-handed.
For the record, all this applies to Longsword too. It also needs something to give you a reason to use one if you want. Maybe Parry for a Longsword?
Why not just have the bastard sword be a d10 when being two handed?
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Why not just have the bastard sword be a d10 when being two handed?
They've stated that if they did that, they'd have to also downgrade it to 1d6 while one-handed, and that really doesn't make sense. I'm not sure why they can't do one without the other, but apparently it's the way they're handling things. I suggested a new Awkward trait for the bastard sword, kind of a reverse agile. While one handed second attack penalty is -6 while third and later is -12. I'd also agree with giving the Greatsword another trait like Forceful or deadly.
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I suppose they assumed that the Bastard Sword needed to be balanced with itself by making the damage die go up two stages so that it justifies choosing to use it either one or two handed. All other one or two-handed weapons have the property. In other editions, going up one damage die was fine, since using the weapon 2-handed without having another tool in the off-hand was as simple as choosing to do so.
Now if you want to grapple someone with the off hand, you need to use an action to let go of the sword, then use another action to grapple. So two damage die seems reasonable to me.
Like I said, I think the damage of all weapons involved is fine. I just think that both the Longsword and the Greatsword need something else to justify ever wanting to use either of them over a Bastard Sword.
I think Forceful for the Greatsword and Parry for the Longsword work just fine.
Hmm part of me feels like them limiting the dice to max d12 is hindering them over all. I feel it woulnd't be that hard to describe the effect of a +1 die for 2d6 also being 2d6. so +3 2d6 weapon would be 8d6. Now that might be to much damage but conceptually I don't think that is to hard to grasp.
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Because the greatsword is unquestionably the best weapon in the game. 2d6 is always better than 1d12. Greatsword cries on 19-20 as well. There's not a weapon that's even close, as far as two handed weapons go.
1) None of that applies to Second Edition.
2) You're responding to a 6 year old conversation.