If I think of weapons in RPGs, my first thought is my favorite character story.
In the early 80s, I played in an AD&D game that was “computer moderated.” That’s what the ads at the gaming store, the old Learning Center in Cielo Vista Mall in El Paso, emphasized. Of course, in 1982, a computer moderated AD&D game meant the DM had programmed all the random tables and character generation on his Vic-20 and Commodore-64.
When I went to my first game, I had three points about my character. He would be named ‘Osric’ due to an article on historical names in Dragon #49. He would be a fighter. He would hate magic weapons.
Yeah, the last one was me trying to be edgy.
Osric was created, and off we went. We were on a mission to retrieve an evil dwarf. We found him by opening a door in the dungeon that was the back of a large theater stage. The evil dwarf was giving a rallying speech to a bunch of orcs.
Everyone was surprised.
The first person to react was our druid, who ran into the room, threw a rope around the dwarf, and ran back out. He didn’t stop at the door but headed straight to the exit.
The rest of us followed to catch up and serve as a rear guard. We’d spiked the door and weren’t too far behind when a side door opened and several orcs charged us.
At some point in a dungeon, I was left holding a magic spear. I loathed magic weapons. Asking the DM, I learned the spear could just about bridge the width of the corridor. I headed to one wall and yelled at the other fighter to hug the other. Then I dropped the spear.
The DM treated it as a grapple, under the old AD&D grappling rules. We knocked them all to the ground, broke the spear, and kept going. Enough orcs to wipe out the rearguard completely immobilized and avoided because Osrice hated magic weapons and figured they get him killed, so he used it as a ram instead of a spear.
That beats a mere +1 magic bonus any day.
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