iron spikes, pitons, climber's kit

[Harvengure]

Greetings all,

I'm currently on what will be a free netbook. Basically the Ultimate Equipment book for 5E. In that, I am going through the current 5E books and tweaking things here and there to this end. Some of those things are the iron spikes, the pitons, and the climbers kit.

Now while trying to avoid bogging the system down with more mechanics as has been the issue with past systems, I am also trying to make things more usable in mechanical ways beyond off of a DM's head and flavor. So with this all said here is my idea for these items specifically. Or ideas, rather.

One option is to get rid of pitons altogether and go with just iron spikes with some tweaking. More people are going to know what an iron spike is rather than a piton anyway. Give the iron spike the weapon stats of a dagger or a dart and have them give a prof bonus when clinging to a surface to resist falling or being knocked off from said surface.

The other option is keep both and make a distinction, treat the piton like a dart and the spike like a dagger. Have them give prof to resist falling/being knocked off while the climber's kit would either give you prof or advantage to both climbing and not falling. Thoughts?

 

[Weathercock]

The thing about pitons and spikes is that neither is balanced to be used like a weapon as a dagger would be. They're shorter, far more clumsy, and not fit to be weapons at all. If you have a player in a situation where they'd be used as a weapon, they'd fit as little beyond a 1d4 improvised weapon, and that's being extremely generous.

 

[Harvengure]

The thing about pitons is modern pitons don't really look like what would be comparable to a similar time period for a D&D setting. Also, in both scenarios your...issue...is resolved. One treats it as a dart, the other simply makes it interchangeable with the iron spike which does double-duty as a piton anyway; as it has in previous editions of D&D when not -also- being used to spike doors. This said, it has also been used as a weapon in previous editions, specifically the hammer and piton feat. Third, pitons are -hardly- uniform which actually puts a hole in your argument as to length as and usability as a weapon. Some are quite long and quite sharp...being, effectively, an iron spike. So while I thank you for the input, I can neither agree with you for deem it at all constructive. Again though, thank you.

 

[Weathercock]

Except that this is 5th edition, not previous editions. And 5th edition already has a feat that covers all of what you're looking for in Tavern Brawler. And since pitons and spikes are hardly designed to be functional weapons in the first place, they fall under the umbrella of improvised weapons and the Tavern Brawler feat perfectly, without the need for a bunch of extra, specialized rules. If you want to have a character that uses pitons that are specially designed to also function as a specific weapon type for some reason that causes them to require functions beyond that of an improvised weapon, talk to your DM. But as far as 99/100 of the general cases are concerned, there are already rules that cover exactly what you're looking for, and they work quite well.

 

[Harvengure]

So moving on to constructive criticism now, anyone capable of reading the entire post have any thoughts?