A Simple Weapon Mastery System

Premise

In the OSR Community one thing gets talked about often: How to make Fighters more competitive long term. This is a question that has plagued the D&D community since the early day’s and there have been many proposed solutions that have all been met with varying degree’s of success.

Recently I have been pondering over this questions and while I don’t profess to have the solution, I do have an idea for a little hack that I think adds a another layer to fighters that some might enjoy(some wont. Some will call me a lunatic).

Additionally this system has the added benefit of giving fighters the “fun” that wizards have when they get to roll a fistful of dice for a fireball, while not being instantly unbalancing to the existing game structure.

Weapon Mastery

The premise of this weapon mastery system is simple but can be expanded in a lot of different directions. The basic function is fighters have a certain level of weapon mastery based on their own level. Depending on your needs this can be per weapon, or a universal constant for all weapons.

Each level of weapon mastery gives fighters a Bonus damage die that they roll with each attack. They then take the highest result(s) depending on the weapon.
IE: a 1d8 long sword in the hands of a fighter with 1 level of weapon mastery would be rolled as 2d8, and whichever single die came up the highest would be the final damage die.

In a system with weapons that might have multiple damage dice a 2d4 weapon is rolled as 3d4 with the fighter taking the highest two results for their damage.

By doing this you can easily allow fighters to scale up their average damage, representing their skill in combat, without drastically shifting the maximum potential.

Additionally it becomes an easy secondary quest reward for other classes that have shown some martial focus. The fighter may be at weapon mastery 3 for all weapons, but the thief has sought out a mastery assassin and trained with them. As a reward they have gained weapon mastery 1 for daggers specifically(And by result now subtly shift up the average damage of their backstabs)

Additional Hacks

What I like about this system is that the core premise is blindingly simple, but it opens up to ease of hacking for a lot of different things.

Do you want your fighters to have multiple attacks? Easily enough, they can attack a second creature in a round by choosing to divide their weapon mastery and risk a second attack where they might miss, as oppose to guaranteeing higher damage on the attack that does hit.

Do you want an easy way to handle weapon maneuvers? Give other classes the option of choosing between a maneuver and doing damage, maneuvers being activated on a damage die roll of 3 or higher, while fighters can choose from their damage/weapon mastery dice to take a result for a maneuver and a result for damage. IE a Fighter Declares “as part of this attack, I will disarm them”. They roll 3d8 for their d8 long sword and their level two Weapon Mastery. They come up with a 2, 4 and a 1. They are able to choose to spend the 4 to activate the maneuver and take 2 as their damage, or disregard the maneuver in favor of taking 4 damage.

Maybe Fighters can choose to parry an attack if they spend a weapon mastery die as a reaction to increase their AC for a single attack, but that die then is unavailable to be used for damage on their next turn.

Cleave: You killed your opponent with your highest result, the second highest die in your damage pool carries over to a target within range.

Power attack: Before you roll damage you declare a power attack #, When you roll your damage+mastery dice you are declaring that you will cut a number of the highest results of your rolled dice, in exchange for adding multiple of the lower dice together. IE: Power Attack 1 with weapon mastery 4, You end up rolling 5d8: 6, 3,4,2,1. You cut the 6, and instead add 3+4. You are taking the gamble that having Multiple smaller dice will add up to a higher number then 1 higher die.

Closing thoughts

I don’t know that this is a worthy inclusion to the rules that are passed around. I haven’t had a chance to really play through the idea, but it is an idea that has tickled my brain and I think the idea in general has some potential to be an interesting but easy mechanic to slot into a game.