Why were all warriors in AD&D 2e (or rogues or priests with your favorite overpowered kit) not just dart throwers?

Player's Option, Combat & Tactics, page 144:

>The samurai's katana may be the single finest sword ever made. It is a slashing weapon with a sharp, chisel-shaped point. The steel was often of exceptional quality, built up with a laborious process of folding and re-folding; some blades had hundreds of folds. This created a sword of tremendous resilience and strength. The hilt accomodates [sic] one or two hands equally well.

Is this the original katana copypasta?

That said, Dragon #232 seems to have a sword even better than the katana. The one-handed Manchu broadsword has speed factor 4 (3 if specialized before any other reductions) and deals 2d4+3 damage against Small or Medium targets. Is that not the ultimate melee weapon against anything Small or Medium?

That is a very lovely ass.

it's average in every sense of the word. Is this the first animu girl you've seen?

>it's average in every sense of the word.

The ass is mean, median, and mode?

>average in every sense of the word.

so that's an ass that is the central ass found when all asses were aggregated?

Why do they look European but dress Aztec?

It's adlet mayer, the strongest man in the world.

>that webm

what an absolute cunt of an MC. How do weebs watch this?

Fetch your box and whisker plots, gentlemen. Rev your linear regression. Warm up your stochastic analysis. We're going to get statistical.

I was interested and started watching it just now. I'm up to episode 8 and in my opinion, Adlet isn't actually annoying. He's a tad dull, and all his weaponry, tricks, and tactics weren't stuff he himself thought up, but he's got guts.

It's well presented, is the thing.

Wait til half the show is a boring "whodunnit?" arc and ignores any and all interesting world they have developed.

The rest of the series is him getting beat up, bullied, and betrayed. He's also got a tragic past, so if you want to enjoy an absolute cunt getting shit on, you might enjoy the series.

Hell, he gets beaten up and imprisoned about ten seconds after that webm ends.

Because the show is an absolute clusterfuck of styles and influences. It also can't really make up its minds to what kind of show it wants to be, but somehow it all works.

And, that's actually how the Japanese think Japanese people look like. They typically depict Europeans with longer noses and they're almost all uniformly blonde, sort of how we imagine asians to all have black hair and small eyes.

The gods of war got bored of playing darts, so said darts don't get all the nutso bonuses.

>Because the show is an absolute clusterfuck of styles and influences.
Isn't that how fantasy should work?

The "interesting world" is anime original so of course it's not explored.
If you read the LN you'll quickly realize the only thing really written about are the mystery plots and the BBEGs

The problem is range. You can only get one volley off before enemies close with you. In addition, you get a whopping -5 at the dart's furthest range, which isn't all that far.
Combine with the heavy weight of darts, and it's not such a great option. I mean it's still better than it should be if you're using the weapon specialization rules (and still ridiculous if you use some of the optional combat and tactics stuff), but it's not a game breaker by any stretch.
It's basically a specialized mage-hunter setup.

>The problem is range. You can only get one volley off before enemies close with you. In addition, you get a whopping -5 at the dart's furthest range, which isn't all that far.

Nope. Pic related. Meleefags on suicidewatch.

You know Skills and Powers has a reputation for being the worst, most broken book ever published for 2e, right?

Considering how broken and unbalanced the system is as a whole, I don't really think it matters much. It's like complaining about a spot of dirt in a mud pit.

2e was great for its time, but a few decades of game design later and it's a rusty antique.

Nothing wrong with a custom cleric being a better everything than everything else!

>Why were all warriors in AD&D 2e (or rogues or priests with your favorite overpowered kit) not just dart throwers?

Because back then it was acceptable for a DM to slap the player's shit and tell them, "fuck you, no." And it would stick. Nowadays that's not allowed.

>Considering how broken and unbalanced the system is as a whole, I don't really think it matters much. It's like complaining about a spot of dirt in a mud pit.

No, it's not. 2e is pretty solid overall. Skills and Powers is incredibly broken. Like stupidly so. The Player's Option series received little to no playtesting at all, and most of the books were terrible. S&P especially was a giant clusterfuck of entirely new mechanics that broke pretty much everything.
2e works, S&P can hardly function it's so bad. It makes 1e Unearthed Arcana look good in comparison. It makes 3e look like a well-designed, well-balanced machine.

>No, it's not. 2e is pretty solid overall
Solid? It has gigantic shifts in power throughout the levels, and some of the combat math is absolutely ridiculous, like they really weren't all that concerned with balance (which they arguably weren't). Add to that a whole bunch of outdated subsystems using finicky rulesets, and you've got a system that holds up only when you focus on the lore and avoid scrutinizing the mechanics.

If it's your preferred system, more power to you, but it really hasn't aged well. I can go ahead and agree that it's solid in some senses and you can definitely use it to run a game, but it's unapologetic-ally unbalanced and is filled with ideas that clash with most tables' more modern playstyles.

How the fuck is one or two darts, throwing knives, shurikens, etc actually meant to kill anyone? Even if guts launches a throwing knife into your eye, it's not going to kill you. Eye removal isn't lethal and you still have your entire skull in the way. You can't get close to the same force out of throwing a dagger as you can from shooting an arrow or a bolt. If you get the jugular, maybe, but fuck, even if the guy in OP can accurately hit that many soldiers with that many darts at once, you'll just have a rather annoyed army surrounding you now, with maybe one or two missing eyes or bleeding profusely.

His darts are covered in poison that causes extreme pain.

He isn't actually good at fighting at all, so he fights dirty.

poison, he says so in the webm.

In other media then. Ninja throws one throwing star, enemy dead. Fighter throws one knife, enemy dead. Historically they were only used as distractions, or to harass the enemy when you can't do anything else, shurikens in particular were used to confuse the enemy into thinking there were multiple attackers. Why are they depicted as one hit KOs?

Because, historically, people weren't superhuman.

Historical accuracy isn't a priority for most people, they care more about rule of cool.

Because conservation of detail.

On the other hand, D&D darts are more like lawn darts, which were taken off the market when they were linked to a pattern of deaths, including a few victims whose skulls were pierced.
Only instead of being super light like lawn darts, these foot-long darts, called plumbata, had a lead weight built into them to really DRIVE into your target's flesh and bone.
Soldiers during the Byzantine era regarded them as the best throwing weapons known at the time. They were usually used by light cavalry, who would rush up alongside a line of enemy pikemen and hurl these suckers, in order to kill or wound enough to break up the enemy formation.

If they were so good, then why did armies stop using them?

Guns and pikes.

They weren't on par with a bow or crossbow, they were just the best of the throwing weapons. Especially from horseback, since the added height lets it get more speed on the way down.

Did any DMs even allow dart fighters in 2e?

I've played as a dart fighter.

All the other players were like "Hur, dur, you only deal d3 damage with each attack, you are so weak new guy!" But I was killing goblins left and right.

Depending on what optional rules you allow (and how you interpret certain ambiguous rules) dart fighters can be anything from a little mediocre to ridiculously overpowered.
(Protip: If a player comes to you and wants to use anything at all from Skills and Powers, just say no.)

One answer people seem to have ignored up to now is that getting magical darts is fairly rare, and barring strength-increasing items there aren't many things that support them, so you never have much more going for you than you do at the start of the game.

Sure, dart fighters are decent early on, but by level 5-6 a lot of magic items and spells can render them a lot less impressive, and by level 10~ or so dart fighters are almost always trailing behind.

The only way to really exploit them at higher levels (where the damage is far from spectacular, even with splats), is to have a pretty monstrous strength and dex, so you can regularly hit first and interrupt spellcasting. They can also deplete stoneskin pretty well, but that's a pretty edge-case sorta thing.

It's one of those things that's impressive on paper, or if you're running a game where you don't intend to go beyond level 4-5, but most times they're outmatched by a lot of other builds.

A very good ASSessment, user.

Thing is, in 2e, fighters are damage-dealing monsters. They're easily the strongest offensive class. Sure, wizards can bust out the occasional spike, especially of the AoE variety, as well as the save-or-die stuff. But for a long fight, or *especially* a long dungeon where wizards can't re-memorize (seriously, it's 10 minutes per spell *level*, 90 minutes to memorize a single meteor swarm, even if they get a chance to rest) fighters leave everyone else far, far behind.

It gets even more ridiculous once they start getting buffs and support from clerics/druids/potions/whatever.

So can a dart fighter do more damage than a fighter specced in other ways? Some, yeah. Sometimes. But not so much that you'd really notice, especially if you're using normal character gen. The chances of getting 18 strength, let alone good exceptional strength, is pretty low. Once you get to the point of having potions of giant strength to burn, or you get those gauntlets of ogre power, the non-dart fighter is gonna have a sweet-ass magic sword, so the higher base damage and possible special effects are going to start overtaking the greater number of chances to apply bonus strength damage.

Because we'd say "that's lame. Please don't," and they'd say "ok."

>I'm sick of this "masterwork dart" bullshit yadda yadda copypasta...

>Gets his fucking arms destroyed when he's hit by the big guy, literally broken
>Nah its ok
>Flips big man onto his back
>KO

Anime.

Not to mention Moustache Fucker catching all the darts thrown his way.

>>Flips big man onto his back
>>KO

What is Judo?

Yeah, looks like that would really hurt.
If only soldiers would wear armor or padding to stop that from doing any damage...... ow wait, they do.

>What is Judo
A sport? Where they meet certain conditions in very quick successions of time to gain points and win? If you want to talk about throwing people with the intent to incapacitate and hurt, that's Combat Sambo, which I highly doubt is what fast anime man knows/does.

At what speed did he throw the darts to be able to knock down those scrubs?

I honestly fail to see how it being a sport makes it any less effective as a means of martial arts.

It's like saying that wrestlers aren't actually tough because all the shit they do is "fake."

Judo IS fairly useless as a martial arts, at least when comparing it with other grappling sports like BJJ

A knife is fairly useless in a situation where you're fighting someone at range.

Grappling is fairly useless in a situation where you're up against multiple opponents.

Tripping is shit when you're up against something with four legs.

etc. etc.

The beauty of combat is that anything and everything can be effective. Granted, Judo might not be the best thing for every situation but as with everything else, it's a tool that helps you to end combat as quickly as possible.

>it's a tool that helps you to end combat as quickly as possible.
worse than other similar tools