The pike & half-pike

[TyGuy]

I just went down a rabbit hole brought on by rolling for treasure and generating a +3 pike.
It's such a weird weapon in 5e and with a bit of research I now realize it's doing a poor job of verisimilitude, RAW. In the past I've also wanted a "big spear" option that the pike never really fit, flavor wise. And tonight I've come to find out there's a weapon called the half-pike.

So my table now has half-pike as a martial weapon option. It's functionally the same as the glaive/halberd just with piercing damage instead of slashing.
But the pike, I'm tweaking this guy to make it more inline with reality. I gave it the special property along with the lance and net. It now adds 10 feet to your reach when you Attack with it, and it cannot be used to attack a creature that is 5 feet or less from you.

I foresee the pike continue to get passed over with such a change, but I now have the satisfaction of it functioning more like the real world weapon.

[JNAProductions]

I just went down a rabbit hole brought on by rolling for treasure and generating a +3 pike.
It's such a weird weapon in 5e and with a bit of research I now realize it's doing a poor job of verisimilitude, RAW. In the past I've also wanted a "big spear" option that the pike never really fit, flavor wise. And tonight I've come to find out there's a weapon called the half-pike.

So my table now has half-pike as a martial weapon option. It's functionally the same as the glaive/halberd just with piercing damage instead of slashing.
But the pike, I'm tweaking this guy to make it more inline with reality. I gave it the special property along with the lance and net. It now adds 10 feet to your reach when you Attack with it, and it cannot be used to attack a creature that is 5 feet or less from you.

I foresee the pike continue to get passed over with such a change, but I now have the satisfaction of it functioning more like the real world weapon.

Seems reasonable to me. Unlikely to see PC use, but could be useful for weaker mooks, since they can have the numbers to form a literal wall of bodies (with 5' weapons and shields-I'd go with spears, for flavor) then have pikefolk behind them.

[tokek]

The naming of weapons in DND is pretty weird but then to be honest the naming of weapons IRL is pretty all over the place too. Especially polearms.

What we typically think of as a pike is a weapon for massed combats in formations, its sort of terrible in skirmishes. We used to have a few around in reenactment but honestly the limit for a useful thrusting polearm in a skirmish or single combat is probably around 3m, beyond that they are just too unwieldy and too easy to counter. Even a good fighter with a true 4m+ long pike was far too easy to beat in solo combat or when working in groups of 3 or 4.

A pike block is a whole different matter, getting in there with a shorter melee weapon is very hard and takes skill and determination. Far easier to back off and let the archers deal with it.

What we call a pike in DND is more like a 7-9' spear with a heavy head - a very effective two-handed weapon in skilled hands which can definitely hit targets outside normal reach. Too heavy to be effectively thrown. Historically a whole bunch of primarily thrusting pole weapons would fall in this category, some of which themselves had different names in different places or time periods. So I don't feel terrible about calling it a pike in DND because generally they never had unified agreed names anyway.

So if you want to clean up the name to your own satisfaction then by all means do so. There are a bunch of very similar weapons (half-pike, spontoon etc) and the names were not used consistently in the historical record so have fun with this.

[Chronos]

I'd say that the biggest problem is that the historical pike was of most use against a charging horse, and 5th edition doesn't really have "charging" as a well-defined thing any more.

[loki_ragnarock]

I just went down a rabbit hole brought on by rolling for treasure and generating a +3 pike.
It's such a weird weapon in 5e and with a bit of research I now realize it's doing a poor job of verisimilitude, RAW. In the past I've also wanted a "big spear" option that the pike never really fit, flavor wise. And tonight I've come to find out there's a weapon called the half-pike.

So my table now has half-pike as a martial weapon option. It's functionally the same as the glaive/halberd just with piercing damage instead of slashing.
But the pike, I'm tweaking this guy to make it more inline with reality. I gave it the special property along with the lance and net. It now adds 10 feet to your reach when you Attack with it, and it cannot be used to attack a creature that is 5 feet or less from you.

I foresee the pike continue to get passed over with such a change, but I now have the satisfaction of it functioning more like the real world weapon.

... weirdly, or perhaps intentionally, this rule tweak for pikes makes it significantly easier to generate an opportunity attack with them.

Frankly, that seems fitting.

[Brookshw]

In 2e there was a weapon called a longspear, better damage and reach than a spear, not as much as a pike, reminds me of a half Pike. Your homebrew sounds good to me.

[Sparky McDibben]

I think your homebrew works, especially for mooks with the Sentinel feat.

There's all kinds of cool stuff you can do with polearms in a D&D world, frankly. The goblin empire in my setting has flat-tipped lances etched with spell scrolls. So their lances do only 1 + STR piercing damage, but can activate a 1-3 level spell targeted at the point of impact.

Popular options include burning hands, thunderwave, and fear.

[Segev]

Wouldn't a half-pike just be a mermaid?

[Sparky McDibben]

Wouldn't a half-pike just be a mermaid?

OK, so I know this is a joke, but now I'm thinking about various merfolk tribes whose behavior is colored by the type of fish they (half) are. So the Pike clan are a bunch of freshwater merfolk who are known for their ravenous appetites, vicious tempers, and wicked bite attacks.

[Segev]

OK, so I know this is a joke, but now I'm thinking about various merfolk tribes whose behavior is colored by the type of fish they (half) are. So the Pike clan are a bunch of freshwater merfolk who are known for their ravenous appetites, vicious tempers, and wicked bite attacks.

Piranha merfolk are aquatic kobolds with pack tactics.

Tuna merfolk are historically enslaved by dolphin merfolk, but nowadays you can find tribes of dolphin-free tuna.

Anglerfish mermaids are powerful women whose husbands are tiny little mermen that hover around them and basically are meek accessories to their wives' lives.

Betafish mermen are hyper-aggressive loners always out to impress the ladies and eager for a fight with any other "alpha males" they meet.

Guppy merfolk have enormous families.

Clownfish merfolk are shy but hardy and keep extremely dangerous pets that they tend to forget are dangerous because they aren't...to the clownfish merfolk.