The weird thing they call a sling!

[Combat Reflexes]

The sling is one weapon that the creators of D&D 3.5 totally messed up.

First of all, the sling is a damn difficult weapon to use. You have to swing it round and round with increasing speed, and let go at the exactly the right time or your shot is wasted. There is no way that anyone could reliably hit someone up to 500 feet away with this thing.

Second - the sling is a simple weapon in D&D. That's not quite right, because almost all other simple weapons have a very simple fighting style: stab someone with the spear, whack someone over the head with the mace, or punch someone with the spiked gauntlet. The sling, however, is much more complex to use and requires a lot more practice than just 'load it and throw it'. In the hands of an unexperienced thrower, aiming the sling is very hard, let alone hitting something. Try it yourself: improvise a sling, find a rock. It takes days of practice to hit the broad side of a barn.

Also, bullets that are thrown with a sling deal 1d4 damage. 1d4, while a simple thrown club (which is much less dense, fast and areodynamic) does 1d6. A wooden stick doing more damage than a high velocity lead bullet - it just doesn't work for me.

My point? Upgrade the sling to a martial weapon, increase the damage to 1d8. Lead spheres hurt.

SO,
what does the playground think about this?

ps. sorry if I ranted a bit. I didn't intend to :smallredface:

©®

[HunterOfJello]

From what I've heard, the original author who worked on the weapons section for the 3e phb explained and apologized at a later date that the sling in the player's handbook is based off of a typical slingshot and not a war sling. He had supposedly never heard of a war sling before and that's why it has the characteristics of a slingshot instead of a war sling.

A War Sling should have higher damage since they're pretty damn dangerous.

~

I've also always been surprised that the Greatclub is on the Martial Weapons list and not the Simple Weapons list. Especially considering that tons of low intelligence monstrous humanoids are seen wielding them on a regular basis.

[Yora]

I usually change them to 1d6 damage and x3 on a critical hit.
While difficult to use, they are very easy and inexpensive to get, which allows even people with no access to military grade equipment to just build one and train in their backyard.
I apply the same logic here as for exotic weapons, which are often really simple and basic weapons, but just very uncommon and therefore few people have any training with them. So I think it's okay to leave them as simple weapons.

[Amphetryon]

The Halfling War-Sling is probably more to your liking.

[Vangor]

To me, simple weapons are not only those with simple fighting styles but weapons which any given character could have used. Using a quarterstaff as more than an unwieldy club requires some training, but quarterstaves are abundant. The weapons are often simple to craft and possess other uses (handaxe, light hammer, and light pick should be simple). Martial weapons, on the other hand, tend to be used specifically for combat and are less available for those not training in direct, armed combat to wield. Exotic weapons are, of course, those least available without specialized training; a dwarven waraxe is identical in use to a battleaxe except most are unlikely to encounter one of such weight and size.

Characters having access to a sling represent the possibility of them as a child having used one. Still need good dexterity or actual training to harm anything, but a character can wield one without minuses to attack.

What you see on the weapons tables are for mechanical purposes besides, not real world mapping of those weapons.

[byaku rai]

I tend to agree with Combat Reflexes' assessment. I mean, a sling isn't the sort of thing that just anyone could pick up and use right away.

On the other hand, it isn't the sort of weapon that you're likely to see as part of a trained military force, either. Not when bows are much more common, easier to use, and quite a bit more effective (tiny lead pellets versus sharp steel on the end of dense wood). Therefore, it's logical to make them more simple weapons as opposed to martial weapons, because that way they might actually get used.

[Yora]

Not in the middle ages at least. In earlier eras, there well professional sling units which had a reputation like english longbow men.

[Mayhem]

A shortbow is very easy to use, dunno why that's not in the simple weapons list. But bows aren't actually that good, the only decent ones historically required an entire lifetime of work to make use them. Also, a sling isn't much harder to learn than a bow.

The sling is a weapon of shepherds, very effective and commoners only get one weapon so it makes sense. Slings actually have a much longer range on them than bows, and sling bullets will break bones without penetrating armour-something arrows cannot do. Lead has a very high mass so they pack a huge amount of punch in a very aerodynamic package. A bullet will work against padded, mail and plate, but bodkin arrows can't penetrate padding and broadhead arrows can't penetrate plate and mail.
The role of arrows on the battle field were to create confusion and disarray(Like modern automatic weapon surpressing fire), and arrows were deadly because of the infection they caused. At long ranges the arrows didn't really cause much damage, it's like being shot by a shotgun at a range of 30 meters is scary but doesn't hurt( yes I've been shot at before, at duck shooting season). Arrows were also useful for signaling like fire arrows.

So if anything slings are underpowered in d&d, historically peasant slinger armies decimated military archer armies. The greeks even eventually incorporated them into their armies in place of their archers. Sure even an expert slinger has a chance of failure while an expert archer pretty much does not, but not every weapon is perfect.

I also agree with vangor, anyone can get a sling they're as common as clubs.

I'd also like to point out archery is an extremely expensive past time, arrows aren't cheap and don't last forever. Bows don't last either, they're all different and it's very hard to pick up someone else's bow. Slings- well they're all basically the same, make them out of scraps, practise bullets can be made from stones, and lead bullets can be recast or hammered back into shape.

[John Campbell]

I figure the basic logic behind the sling being a simple weapon goes something like:

Commoners use slings.
Commoners only get a simple weapon proficiency.
Therefore, slings must be simple weapons.

Despite it being the only thing on the simple weapon list that I can't use competently.

I have my doubts that this was actually the logic they were using, but it's what I use to justify it to myself.

This doesn't explain why the scythe - which should only ever be used by commoners who can't get anything else and don't even have an opportunity to turn it into a glaive - is a martial weapon, of course.

[Mayhem]

Heh, that's true John, the list is weird.

Also in my above post I sound like a douche, sorry about that.

[Firechanter]

I agree fully, a Sling is not a Simple Weapon, and it is pretty damn dangerous.

Martial, 1d8, x3 sounds quite good to me. You might even argue making it Exotic - it's only simple to make but very difficult to master - but then you need to give it some real good stats to make it worthwhile. All in all, Martial will do.

Actually, Conan D20 got at least part of that right. It's a Simple weapon there (but they screwed that up several times in that game, making Crossbows Martial for example), but its damage is pretty decent (d8 x3) and you get to add your Str bonus.

[byaku rai]

@Mayhem: I see your point. It's sort of a difficult weapon to categorize, i guess.

[Blackjackg]

While difficult to use, they are very easy and inexpensive to get, which allows even people with no access to military grade equipment to just build one and train in their backyard.


This. You really can't overlook this part. The average shepherd in the hills of [Medieval Europe] has probably never seen a greatsword, but he may well have spent hours every day practicing with a sling out of sheer boredom. My understanding is that simple weapons are so categorized not specifically because they're easier to use, but because they're "peasant weapons" that most everyone of any culture may have used.

The crossbow, of course, is the exception to that rule. It's there because it's relatively easy compared to traditional bows.

[Veyr]

This. You really can't overlook this part. The average shepherd in the hills of [Medieval Europe] has probably never seen a greatsword, but he may well have spent hours every day practicing with a sling out of sheer boredom. My understanding is that simple weapons are so categorized not specifically because they're easier to use, but because they're "peasant weapons" that most everyone of any culture may have used.

The crossbow, of course, is the exception to that rule. It's there because it's relatively easy compared to traditional bows.
You missed the scythe, which is sort of the opposite exception:

This doesn't explain why the scythe - which should only ever be used by commoners who can't get anything else and don't even have an opportunity to turn it into a glaive - is a martial weapon, of course.

Anyway, in terms of weapons that WotC got atrociously wrong, I'd also point out the Whip. Whips don't (usually) cause real injuries, just hideously painful lacerations, so the nonlethal damage is about right, and it often won't cut through even just thick cloth, so the bit about being unusable on armored opponents is probably about right. And, of course, they're ridiculously difficult to use, so Exotic is probably justified. All-in-all, they're just not very effective weapons (which 3.5 did get right), more showy than practical.

However, the one advantage a whip has in combat is that it's constantly moving and almost impossible to follow (the human optical system fails terribly at following rapidly-spinning objects; see helicopter blades or hubcaps of a fast-moving car), and has very long reach, which means getting near you is going to involve more than a few very-painful lashes. A whip-user basically depends on his opponent's inability to overcome that pain, of course, since the whip cannot physically stop someone from charging right through. Thus, realistically, the only advantage that whips have is that they can attack very suddenly and without much warning, from considerable reach; that is, they're very good at Attacks of Opportunity.

Which 3.5 whips cannot make on account of not threatening.

[sambo.]

imho: the 'correct' use of a sling is to load it with boulders that have been resized via Shrink Item spells.

fire the 'pebble' at the enemy and yell the command word to un-shrink said pebble into a boulder.