Talk:Boltcaster (5e Equipment)

High Damage Weapons

The design of high damage dealing weapons in 5e(especially ranged weapons) is almost always problematic as there is no real good way to make them. For example, even if a ranged weapon takes a long time to set up or reload but deals a large amount of damage, the player can set up the weapon before engaging in a fight and once it has been used once for free extra damage, the weapon can be swapped out for another weapon if it has a long reload period. Because of these issues, adding a longer than usual reload or setup period doesn't balance a ranged weapon and you would have to create meta-gaming like properties to prevent the abuse. So in the end, your better off just making a weapon deal regular damage.

Besides that, ~100 gp is the limit for martial ranged weapons' cost and items should have consistent effects and not have different effects in or out of combat(mentioning it has a number of issues, a few being that you may fire a weapon, take damage, or do something before you enter combat and say an item only has an effect during combat so would you or would you not gain its effects? There is also no real distinction between when you are in or out of combat in 5e(there isn't a term for it, rolling initiative doesn't always mean there will be combat as it could be used in other tense situations, ect.) as the effects of items and others things should be the same regardless.)--Blobby383b (talk) 22:48, 9 January 2020 (MST)

I am partially unsure at the moment as to how exactly to implement this, but what if we made it so that reloading and switching to another weapon required the same length of time/check? --Ref3rence (talk) 09:59, 30 April 2020 (MDT)

Ballistae

The boltcaster is moving into realm of ballistae. Sometimes a ballista is even called a 'bolt thrower', For some perspective, here are some ballistae from the wiki and from the DMG.

Light Ballista (5e Equipment)      - 2d8    load, aim, fire,                 handheld
Boltcaster (5e Equipment)          - 3d8    load, load, load, fire           restraint harness
Ballista (5e Equipment)            - 3d10   load, aim, fire,                 siege equipment, page 255 DMG 
Medium Ballista (5e Equipment)     - 3d12+9 load, aim, fire,                 mounted on a stand
Windcutter Ballista (5e Equipment) - 5d10   load, load, aim, aim, cfm, fire, mounted on a stand

I would remove the athletics check and change the sequence to load, load, aim, fire or since the wielder seems to be the stand: brace, load, aim, fire. Arquebus (talk) 17:53, 22 May 2020 (MDT)