A History of SWORDS (and how to fix them)

Chainmail, OD&D, and Magic Swords

One of the classic tropes of D&D, for good or ill, is the magic sword. A sword that is just magically better at doing its job of hurting and killing people. Maybe it has a few other properties like glowing blue in the presence of orcs or evaluating the "alignment" of the person holding it. But at the most basic level, it's a +1 sword. When you make an attack roll, you add an extra +1 to the D20 on top of whatever you would add from your class or ability scores, and you add an extra +1 to your damage roll. However, in OD&D, the latter was not the case and magic weapons only improved your chance to hit.

Unsurprisingly, this is not incredibly impactful. You're increasing your chance to hit by 5% and your damage by about 20%. However, players mostly care about their hit-chance as that's what they get immediate feedback on. Additionally, the damage boost is not as impressive as it might seem once you realize its goal, reducing the enemy's HP to zero. Against an enemy with 1 hit-die (HP rolled randomly), the chance for a single sword-stroke to slay them only increases by ~10% when you add +1 to your damage roll. This conflicts with the supposed idea of magic swords as presented by both Chainmail and OD&D. Each one was supposed to be a rare thing with its own personality and name. That's a level of importance that doesn't seem fitting of such a slight increase in fighting ability. However, this makes more sense when you realize that OD&D was initially supposed to use Chainmail's combat resolution system.

Chainmail combat is a very different beast from the D20 system we're familiar with. The gist of it is that in mass combat, units roll a bunch of D6s, looking for sixes (or fours or fives if they outclassed their opponents in skill or power), to see how many losses they inflict on the enemy. There's also man-to-man combat (for jousting) and fantasy combat (for fighting supernatural beings). The latter encompassed one-on-one fights between powerful humans like wizards and "heroes" (which are basically high-level Fighters). In man-to-man and fantasy combat, one combatant would go first and roll a 2D6 to see if they scored a kill on their opponent. If they were still alive, their opponent would then do the same. A final important point about "fantasy combat" is that only exceptionally powerful beings could participate. If a unit of spear-wielding foot-soldiers attacked a dragon, they would have no effect. Only a magician or a "superhero" could have a chance of killing it.

Magic weapons completely transform this process. First, they allowed lesser units to challenge fantastical ones in man-to-man combat. This is pretty well represented by how certain monsters in D&D are immune or resistant to harm from mundane weaponry. However, the real transformation comes in mass and man-to-man/fantasy combat. In mass combat, a magic sword adds an entire die to the unit's fighting capabilities. Giving King Arthur his Excalibur meant that now you have two King Arthurs fighting alongside you. This kind of force multiplication was otherwise reserved for resolving cavalry units crashing into foot-soldiers. In man-to-man and fantasy combat, magic swords added +1 to your roll. That may not sound like much, but remember, these fights were resolved on 2D6, not a D20. To contrast with the "alternative combat system," as it was called, this is about a +2 or +3 to hit. 

Magical ranged weapons existed too, but they were less impressive. Specifically, they were magic arrows. There were no enchanted bows which rained magic missiles down on the enemy. You just had a limited supply of magic arrows. On the bright side, they automatically hit any normal opponent and allowed troops to engage fantastical beasts in "man-to-man combat" from afar.

From here on out, things get a bit spotty. Inferring what was meant from Chainmail's text is hard, but the following is about reading OD&D and collecting stories of how games used to run. The big change is that OD&D introduced the concept of a +1 sword. That may sound unintuitive, but Chainmail only had "magic swords." In OD&D you have the +1 sword, which is distinct from the +2 and +3 sword. Each "plus" added an extra die to the mass combat rolls. When engaging opponents of 1 HD or lower, Fighters got attacks/dice equal to their level, but with a magic sword, they could still retain their multiple attacks against stronger enemies. If using Chainmail to resolve combat, a Cleric and Fighter armed with a mace and a +2 sword would roll 4D6 to fend off an oncoming horde of ghouls. The Fighter's proficiency with magical swords was important because they were the only ones capable of using them and magic swords outnumbered the magical weapons available to the other classes. Remember how magic bonuses didn't add to damage, only to-hit? This might still seem like a letdown until you realize that each +1 was an extra attack.

What does all this mean? It means that the push for higher to-hit and damage bonuses and additional effects (like flaming brands and crit multipliers) in later editions is all a result of a math mixup in early D&D. Magic weapons were supposed to be impressive items. They had names, personalities, and goals. However, this level of detail and importance didn't mesh with their meager impact on combat. So by AD&D 2e, magic swords could add anywhere from a +1 to a +5 to both to-hit and damage. And that was before you got to the list of other effects they might have. A +1 sword feels underwhelming because it is. It was supposed to be a +2.5 sword. 

Fixing the SWORD

How do we fix this in our OSR games? It's not actually that hard. Because OD&D only had to-hit bonuses for magic weapons, we double the magic sword's attack bonus while keeping the damage bonus the same. This brings the effect of a magic weapon's attack bonus up to its original significance while leaving damage alone. A +1 to damage is powerful all on its own. Even for weapons with large damage dice (D10s or D12s) a +1 is roughly a 15% increase in damage, the equivalent of a +3 on a D20 (and about a +5 if you have a D6 or D8 weapon). If you don't plan on including a progression from +1 to +3 weapons, I recommend just doubling both the to-hit and the damage bonuses.

How I Design Around Magic Swords

Will I be using this in my home game? Surprisingly, no. As is inevitable for any DM, I run a homebrew system. It's called Begone, FOE! and I think it's pretty neat. What's even neater is that a +1 sword is just as powerful for a Fighter as it was in OD&D, even when it's only adding +1 to attack and damage rolls. This is because of how Fighters work in the system.

Begone is very different from OD&D, in large part due to not having classes. A "Fighter" is just someone who started with a particular set of gear and more martial prowess than the average person. They could go on to become a powerful sorcerer, only hanging onto those one or two points of BODY they started with in case they need to stab someone. This means we can't make magic swords cool by only letting Fighters use them while also making non-sword magic weapons rare. But that's good, because balancing via treasure distribution and proficiencies is artificial coolness which is bad and not actually cool. 

What we can do is look at Begone's Fighting Arts. For those who didn't read the linked document, a Fighting Art is just a special martial ability, stuff like attacking two enemies at once, boosting your AC, etc. These abilities can be activated for free. The only limit is that you can only use one per turn. So if you have at least one, your best bet is to use it if you plan on attacking that turn. We're only concerned with three specific ones (Windup, Power Attack, and Sure Strike) because they change your attack and damage bonuses. These abilities let you sacrifice your action to attack with double your to-hit and damage bonus next turn, double your damage bonus that turn, or double your to-hit bonus that turn respectively. These basically turn a +1 weapon into a +2 weapon. More accurately, Power Attack and Sure Strike turn +1 weapons into +1.5 weapons because you only get +1 to hit or damage, not both. However, Windup does let you turn a +1 weapon into a +2 weapon, and when you combine it with one of the previous two Fighting Arts on the turn you actually attack, it becomes a +3 weapon. 

In fact, the whole business with Fighting Arts replicates the weapon restrictions we saw in OD&D. Only, rather than Fighters being the only ones capable of making use of these powerful weapons, magic swords become powerful weapons in the hands of Fighters/characters with good BODY scores. Everyone else has to make do with a paltry +1 to hit and damage. I think this is a better way of doing it, because one person's fun doesn't come at the expense of another character's competence.

This means that, in Begone, you can use the standard lineup of +1 swords without having to worry that the "Fighter's" ability to use them more effectively doesn't have an actual impact. A first level Fighter with 2 BODY can pick up a +1 sword and attack at +12 to-hit and +6 to damage if they choke up on their backswing. If you're worried about making the insane numbers of Begone Fighters too nuts (that Fighter could've attacked at +4 to hit and +8 to damage with just a pointy stick), you can lower the bonus of all magic weapons by 1 point. I'd only recommend doing this if you're running modules where magic weapons are more plentiful and those +2 swords (which are now just +1) are actually going to end up in the players' hands. 

As a final note, in the most recent revesion of Begone, Fighters get some automatic damage. If they miss with a melee attack, they still inflict their BODY score in damage against their opponent. Should the magical "plus" of a magic weapon add to this? I would say no. The damage you deal on a "miss" isn't affected by your Fighting Arts. If you used Power Attack and missed, you wouldn't deal twice your BODY score in damage. Likewise, the "pluses" of magic weapons only apply to your attack and damage rolls. But aside from that, the magic weapon is still doing something important when you miss: it makes your "whiff damage" magical, and thus capable of hurting werewolves and similar supernatural beings.