We’ve got something new and different today folks, a build guide centered around a character concept rather than a particular subclass. Oversized Weapons are typically hard to use, both literally imposing Disadvantage and figuratively not having access to them in game for various reasons. In this article we break down some of the math related to using larger weapons and then provide an example build using a Rune Knight Fighter and Genie Warlock multiclass for getting good use out of these weapons.
This is newer territory for us so if you’d like to see more conceptual and multiclassed builds outside of the Subclass Handbooks, let us know. Your feedback always helps us in improving the content that we create.
That was a really fun read. I’d definitely be keen to see more articles like this!
Seems great, love the idea of seeing more posts like this. Keep it up!
I really enjoyed this read, especially the math breakdowns. I do wonder though if a dm wouldn’t just say that having 2 disadvantages and 1 advantage is still a disadvantage, coming RAI instead of RAW.
Overall though, I’d love to see more articles like this one, you’ve got a great site here and always check out your opinions to help sort through my ideas when making a new character.
Keep up the good work!
WotC has been really explicit that multiple instances of Advantage/Disadvantage negating each other was intentional. It can lead to some edge cases like this where you just say “Well, I can’t do any worse”, but the designers opted for simplicity in the vast majority of cases over protection from very occasional edge cases.
There will almost certainly be more articles like this, so I’m glad to hear that you’re enjoying them! We have another subclass coming in the next few days which has a similar math breakdown in the example build.
I missed somewhere in the disclaimer that this concept doesn’t follow written game mechanics. Oversized weapons are something for monsters and not intended or available for players unless it’s homebrew. Enlarge & Rune Knight already have damage increases baked in to simulate the weapon growing in size or however one might want to RP the mechanic. I’ve already seen two players bring up this idea, but I’m disappointed RPGBot put this article out as it’s otherwise a great source for people to use a guide when building characters. This is the kind of stuff I remember having to shoot down when a player brought something they found off of d&d wiki not realizing they were in the homebrew section of the site.
We had a lengthy debate about the rules here within the team. Where we landed was that this was allowed by a strict RAW reading of the rules, but WotC likely doesn’t realize that the rule is in the text.
Enlarge/Reduce has a specific effect for what happens when it increases the size of a weapon, which overrides the default rule for how weapons of increased size work (specific beats general). Rune Knight similarly has a feature which we believe was intended to provide a damage boost in place of the typical effects for oversized weapons, but the wording of the feature doesn’t make that especially clear.
Regardless, the capability is neat but honestly not very good. You have to go to great lengths for very slightly better damage output. There’s also the obvious question of where you put these incredibly large weapons. A large hand crossbow is plausible to some degree, but anything else gets silly immediately. A bag of holding only has a 2-foot diameter opening, so even that isn’t a solution because the vast majority of large or larger weapons simply won’t fit into the bag. The DM is well within their rights to ask “okay, where do you put your surfboard-sized weapon?”.
I specifically put the math in to show that it’s not that good unless you really build for it, and then it becomes okay but not amazing. The article is not from the direction that big chonky weapons are optimal gameplay, but that big chonky weapons are fun and this is an optimal way to use this option.
But more importantly, this is how these weapons work RAW, so it would be homebrew for weapons to not work this way. If you don’t want your players to have large weapons, don’t put large weapons in your world for the players to find.