Weapons: Dwarven and ‡

[Johnny Angel]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I'd nitpick the description here. The "‡" notation's actual effect is that the weapon becomes unready. That does prevent parrying with it before your next turn. But it also prevents parrying or attacking after your next turn, until you take a Ready maneuver to get it back in position.

Thanks for the clarification. I think I did know that, but the knowledge got lost somewhere in my head as I was trying to shuffle everything together. The game I'm currently running is my first attempt at meshing a lot of different rules sources together.

Originally Posted by Stripe

What we've got here is a failure to communicate.

Weapons that become Unready after use (‡) are NOT inherently Unbalanced.

Unbalanced weapons have a Parry of U.

End of story.

That I am aware, there is no canonical way to be rid of the ‡ except through the Graceful Weapon or Quick Draw enchantment in Magic, p. 63.

This is one thing that seriously confused me in 2004 switching from Third Edition to Fourth, and it's still confusing people today.

I was under the impression that you could be rid of the ‡ by have 1.5 times the strength needed to use the weapon. For example, the Warhammer has 12‡ for ST. I believe a user with ST 18 could attack without it becoming unready. (Side note: If you have 3 times the ST needed, you can wield a ‡ weapon in one hand. So, a ST 36 character could use a Warhammer in one hand.)

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Oh, I'd missed this before...U parry does not mean that the weapon becomes unready after an attack. I suspect you were just using 'unready' loosely, but it's got a kind of specific meaning and misusing it in this context can be confusing.

Poor wording/reading on my part... I was using the word loosely, but I was also not aware that I was confusing two different u-words.

Originally Posted by Bruno

I vote for finding another word for Unbalanced for some future edition. Especially since we now have Cheap (Balance) and Fine (Balanced) cluttering up the situation.

Best choices would be words that don't start with "Un", for maximum distinction from ‡-weapons.

In my case, I didn't read carefully enough when looking over the rules. Still, I think it would help to find a way to further distinguish some of the terms which sound similar.
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Ok, so let's see if I have everything right now. I'm going to switch over to the Warhammer for my example.

By default, the warhammer is a weapon which has a parry of "U" and has "‡" as part of its statistics. This means you cannot attack and parry with it on the same turn. It also means the weapon becomes unready after attacking with it.

A Dwarven Warhammer would no longer have a parry of "U." As such, you could attack after parrying with it. However, you could not parry after attacking with it because the weapon would become unready after attacking with it.

Someone with a ST of 18 could attack using a warhammer without it becoming unready. However, a regular (non-Dwarven) warhammer would still be unbalanced; as such even the ST 18 user could not attack and parry with it on the same turn.

Someone with a ST of 18 and using a Dwarven Warhammer could parry and attack with the Dwarven Warhammer on the same turn because it would no longer be unbalanced. They could also attack without the weapon becoming unready.