A while back I made a post about combining Weapon Master and Trained by a Master into a single advantage. After thinking about it for a while, I think I might have changed my mind about it. I not sure the two traits are really meant to coexist in the same campaign, despite what Dungeon Fantasy tries to do.

Dungeon Fantasy character creation rules are all about replicating a lot of D&D’s conventions in GURPS. And one of the D&D-isms it tries to replicate is that a combat centric character can be either strong or fast, but not both.

D&D Combat Conventions

In recent editions of D&D, that happens because characters have a very limited number of points to distribute at creation, and every class is meant to have only 1 or 2 attributes that are important to its abilities. Physical combatants end up having either STR or DEX as their main attribute, and the rules are usually set up so that the other member of the pair can be safely dumped.

STR-based combatants use the heaviest armor and weapons they can get. The vast majority are melee specialists. Some buy a single thrown weapon at creation and then promptly forget about it. All of these options are designed to make Dexterity not matter to them.

DEX-based combatants are the opposite: they wear light or no armor, and are evenly split between archers and melee skirmishers who rely on “finesse weapons” that use DEX instead of STR. Therefore Strength doesn’t matter to them.

Every physical combatant1 in the last three editions of D&D is going to lean heavily towards one of these archetypes. A few classes incentivise players to try and be a bit of both, but for most of them that’s going to lead to a weaker character.

What about GURPS?

Dungeon Fantasy gives you templates to emulate the classes from recent D&D, so it ends up bringing this particular trope wholesale into GURPS. You have your Strong Delvers, and your Fast Delvers2. But we run into some issues because GURPS is much less abstract than D&D.

Both in real life and in GURPS, combatants want to be both strong and fast. You need speed and precision to hit, and you need to put some force behind your blows for them to be effective. Sure, an individual character might have ST or DX that’s a bit higher than the other, but they’ll never be 10+ points apart like they are in their D&D equivalents.

Still, DF tries, and Weapon Master is a significant component of this attempt. It’s a mandatory trait for Swashbucklers, and an optional one for the other fast delvers. It more or less takes the place of D&D’s Weapon Finesse, since it allows these characters to do improved melee damage without investing many points into ST.

But it’s also an optional Knight trait. And it’s quite easy to take a starting Knight and give them ST 18, Weapon Master (Dueling Halberd), and a starting weapon skill of 20. Such a character literally combines the best of both worlds. They can do all the same fancy tricks as the ST 11 Swashbuckler, and their strikes to a massive amount of damage when they land, due to the higher base number of damage dice and the per-die damage bonus.

As a player, this damage bonus seems so good to me that I’d feel bad about “leaving it on the table” and not taking Weapon Master. As a GM, I worry that any enemy that can withstand a hit from the Knight will be impervious to attacks from the other PCs.

What to do about it?

The first option is of course to do nothing. This is admitedly a very niche concern and you might be okay with it in your game. But if you are having Weapon Master Problems at your table you might try one of these other possible solutions.

Solution 1: Flat Damage Bonus

A “minimally invasive” solution is to change the damage bonus from +1 or +2 per die to a flat +1 or +2. All advantage costs remain the same, as do all templates.

This means that the skinny swashbuckler who rolls a single die for damage still gets the same bonus. Meanwhile Mister Halberd with his three dice of swing damage gets a much smaller relative benefit.

Solution 2: No More Weapon Master!

Weapon Master no longer exists and Trained By a Master comes in categories similar to the removed advantage:

  • 20 points makes you trained in One Weapon. This gives you improved parries, improved Rapid Strikes, and access to the same limited set of Chi Skills as Weapon Master did. No damage bonus, though!

  • 25 points gives you the same benefits for Two Related Weapons or all weapons covered by One Skill.

  • 30 points works as printed, giving you the full set of Trained By a Master benefits for all muscle-powered weapons and unarmed attacks.

“All knives” counts as a single weapon for these purposes, like in the books. So do “all unarmed attacks”.

Everyone who had Weapon Master as an optional advantage gets the corresponding version of Trained by a Master instead, and has the option to upgrade to the full version.

This is a more drastic and slightly more complicated solution. No one gets a damage bonus any more, but no one overpays for the full Weapon Master package either.

  1. And then you have spellcasters, who choose to be slow and weak so they can be good at magic. ↩

  2. And Smart Delvers, for which see Footnote 1. ↩