Picking up a weapon on the fly

[Hans Hellinger]

Wanted to start a thread here about a comment by Lenny / Zarlor on the Beta thread. Lenny mentioned that it was ‘almost impossible’ to pick up a weapon on the fly in CM so I wanted to get into that.

When I did the example of play rules, this came up numerous times.

The main protagonist characters in particular lost a lot of their weapons and had to use new ones. One guy made a spear by tying his roundel dagger to a stick, and that was used by a second guy. Another person had to pick up a saber and use it, and a third person used someone else’s crossbow.

It did take me a minute to figure out the stats but it wasn’t very difficult.

The way I make the character sheets now I put in the BAB, MP, and basic melee (BAB+Str bonus) and Missile weapon / Defense (BAB+Dex bonus) stats up above, and then the weapon stats roughly in the middle.

To add a new melee weapon you picked up on the fly, you just look up the Reach Attack, Speed Attack, and Defense bonus of the weapon. You then add your melee bonus from up above on the character sheet for both of the attack bonuses, and those are your new stats for the weapon. Defense is the weapons defense + your missile / defense bonus (i.e. BAB+Dex bonus). The only exception is you have Weapon Finesse and a Finesse weapon, in which case you use the Missile / Defense bonus for everything.

So if you have the CM book, there are convenient tables for this on page 51.

As an example, one of the main characters Anton Bauz, had given another guy his longsword and had to fight with a spear.

His longsword stats were Reach +11, Speed +8, Defense 10.

He had Weapon Finesse and the False Edge cut MF so his Speed got an additional +2 for +10 and he was allowed to use his Missile bonus for his longsword.

His BAB is +3, To Hit (Melee) +5, and To Hit (Missile) / Defense +6

I opened the core rules to page 52 and looked up a spear in two hands (second to last entry).
Spear Reach bonus is +7, Speed is +1, Defense is +3

Spear is not a ‘finesse’ weapon nor does it qualify for the False Edge Cut MF so it’s pretty basic – just add To Hit Melee to the Attack bonus and Defense to the defense modifier, which works out to:

Spear Reach +12 (+7 for the spear, +5 Melee bonus), Speed + 6 (+1 for the spear, +5 Melee bonus), and Defense +9 (Spear +3, +6 Defense bonus)

So it wasn’t too hard to sort out.

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