| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'll keep it simple. Before the remaster Longswords were included in elven weapon familiarity. They are not anymore. Does anyone know why?
EDIT: Also the legacy version says you are trained with the weapons listed. Does "access" mean trained in the remaster? If not then what is even the point of taking the feat? Without the training it's effectively crippled as far as it's function goes.
First part, no idea why. Maybe it was an error that hasn't been corrected yet, maybe they believed 5 weapons + any weapon with the Elven trait would be enough. We'll probably never know, unless a member from the Rules and Lore teams wants to clarify. Which they often will not do.
Second part, the new way "familiarity" works basically makes it so that the list of martial weapons listed use your simple weapon proficiency, instead of making you trained in those weapons. All classes are now at least trained in simple weapons, so you're still basically getting the "training" of those weapons. Same with advanced weapons using your martial weapon proficiency, if your class happens to be trained in martial weapons.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
So the reason for omitting longswords I think is that there isn't an actual reason for Elves to culturally favor heavier weapons because Elven people tend to be dextrous. Elven Weapon familiarity works with a bunch of ranged weapons, and also the rapier, curve blade, and branch spear all of which use dex to hit, and elves tend to be dextrous.
You could say from a game design perspective it's not a good idea to signpost "your people use these weapons" when one weapon on that list is most likely going to be a worse choice than the other ones on the same list.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
"It has worked this way in D&D for a while" is actually a good reason for Paizo to specifically not do things that way, for legal reasons.
Like if the feat was unchanged, there could be an argument that "you are using the exact same set of weapons as D&D without the safe harbor of the OGL" but when Paizo changes to feat for "only finesse and ranged weapons" they have a plausible justification in "these are the weapons it makes sense for a high dex group of people to use."
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
elves have used longswords since at least dnd 3.5. Fairly certain they could be made to use dex in those games. Also helps when making say an Eldritch Knight type character. It's not a big deal. It's not like I play society or anything, just thought it was a weird change.So the reason for omitting longswords I think is that there isn't an actual reason for Elves to culturally favor heavier weapons because Elven people tend to be dextrous. Elven Weapon familiarity works with a bunch of ranged weapons, and also the rapier, curve blade, and branch spear all of which use dex to hit, and elves tend to be dextrous.
You could say from a game design perspective it's not a good idea to signpost "your people use these weapons" when one weapon on that list is most likely going to be a worse choice than the other ones on the same list.
Elves being good with Longswords, Shortswords, and 'non-cross' bows dates back to at least AD&D1.0 in 1978 (though is was a +1 bonus to hit with such weapons prior to D&D3.0), and I presume there was something similar in the older Basic D&D editions.
Retaining the Longsword for this bonus in the Remaster doesn't make any particular 'logical' sense and might leave a lawsuit vulnerability (as PossibleCabbage noted) so it makes perfect sense that it got dropped...