[MA/HT] Innocuous Improvised Weapons

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

The good thing about an actual baton for a car weapon is that there are lots of excuses to have a 12-15" wooden (ok, select coppiced ash carefully dried) stick in your car. "Oh, I use that to prop the lid of our garage freezer open, I must have dumped it in the car after the last grocery run."

Indeed.

I think that some light wrenches or a light tire irons might also be SHORT BATON or BATON, rather than the KNOBBED CLUB or SMALL MACE that heavier examples would be.

I'd be inclined to make even shorter balanced bludgeons than the SHORT BATON sw-2 cr and thr cr, analogous to the LARGE KNIFE vs. LONG KNIFE relationship. Lower than thr cr would be worse than a fist-load, so that's a lower bound, but without at least some length and leverage, I figure sw-1 cr is too generous.

There is a certain point at which an object makes a limited enough weapon so that most people would accept it as something used for improvised self-defense and not taken along as a deliberately planned weapon. I'm basically looking for something on that spectrum, i.e. less effective than a real baton or tire iron, but also something that even a moderately competent defense attorney could argue that a person had on them for perfectly reasonable reasons and most cops would be inclined to agree on that.

A flashlight that does sw cr or better and is stout enough to be used for repeated blows might indeed be viewed as a flashlight carried with intent to use it as a weapon. But at some point, flashlights are small enough so that they are not regarded as 'weapons' as much as 'flashlight someone happened to use to hit someone with'. I don't know if that line starts at sw-1 cr or sw-2 cr, but it has got to be around there somewhere.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

A mallet would be a good choice for the knobbed club as a car weapon, again "I was fencing my yard and it fell out of the bin when I was unloading supplies, I had been meaning to put it away for days."

Yeah, I see this character as wanting to have at least one KNOBBED CLUB in the car, just in case. Well, probably several in the tool kit in the trunk, but at least one should be up front in the car.

Also, this kind of thought experiment is useful for characters in modern campaigns in general. I estimate that every one of my characters, a good bit of PCs in campaigns where I am the GM and not a few NPCs have had to think about good innocuous objects to turn to the purpose of improvised weapons.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

In the old country and the new country, weapon carriage laws are all about intent. If you want to wait outside a bar with a heavy object, you can't tell the police officer that "its not a weapon officer, just a baseball bat."

Just so.

But at a certain point, it becomes much more difficult to argue that a given object in that situation was clearly being carried as a weapon. That correlates pretty well with its utility as a weapon, of course, which is why I'm looking at the less effective, lighter and smaller bludgeons, not the obvious good 'improvised' weapons that are actually just decent weapons, like baseball bat, tire iron, heavy wrench, etc.