Double Weapons?

[Kalthariam]

Hi!

So I made a new character recently to RP with some folks, decided I wanted to play a barbarian, and wanted to do something I hadn't done before, and made them a double weapon user.

However when i started looking into weapons I'd have access to I will admit I was a little disheartened and perplexed?

Seems the only dual weapons outside of Masterly Damask are... a little narrow in focus?

There's one Weapon that Requires Shaman, druid, or Ranger levels. I suppose Barbarian's just aren't in the club for this one. Okay.
There's one weapon that's Half-Elf only. Well that's Frustrating, I'm a gnoll so that won't work.

Oh there's three other dual weapons I wonder what they ar-

Oh.. It's just the same weapon.. three times.. for some reason?

Blood Axe
Blood Sword
Blood Mace.

All racially locked to Orcs / Half-Orcs only.

So... that's that then?

Like, why do Orcs/Half Orcs need three different variants of the same weapon? Why couldn't some of these double weapons be something different?

If your not a Ranger/Shaman/Druid, a Half-Elf, or a Orc apparently there's just no a double weapon for you. (And again, for some reason Half-orcs and Orcs (And orogs probably) get just.. three different versions of the exact same weapon.

I dunno I find this to be rather frustrating. I don't really want to gake shaman druid or rangers levels on my barbarian :\

And I mean.. Yeah sure, I can get a Masterly Damask Double Weapon, but the Sheer valley of strength between these weapons (especially the racially locked ones, less so just the class locked one) is kinda silly.

[RedGiant]

Agree +++

I think top-tier weapons in general could use a thematic review.

There are a ton of odd choices in the pile...hand axes of happiness...push daggers of horticulture...etc.

Many others are hyper-specific in their requirements, practically requiring a UMD class in your build.

Would love to see more generally usable top-tier weapons. I don't think building back-ward from a weapon to a character concept should be required.

To the point of the OP, having all double weapons being race-locked to half-orc is particularly hard.

As is having all Katars being limited to assassin or good (when it is a monk weapon).

Etc.

[Security_Blanket]

The best option may be to just bump damask weapons up to be more on par with the fancy, higher requirement +4 weapons.

[Kenji]

Wild Take:
Make majority tiny/small weapons 18-20 x2 or 20 x3 with base damage from 1d2 (18-20x2) to 1d6 (20x3)
Make Medium and large weapons 19-20 x2 or 20 x3 with base damage from 1d8 (medium) to 1d12 (large)

Simple gets one damage type: slashing, bludgeoning, or piercing
Martial gets two damage types: slashing/piercing or bludgeoning/piercing
Exotic gets two damage types and slightly increased damage dice

Remove Two-Handed weapon groups and crunch it all down to:
Edged, Concussion, Polearm, Missile, and Thrown

Remove any multi-focus weapons and make them singular focus only.

Let the disarm meta begin

[Kalthariam]

I mean.

I'm not against this idea, I guess? Not sure if it's good or not.

Just.. frustrated with how super specific Double Weapons are

[Kenji]

I mean.

I'm not against this idea, I guess? Not sure if it's good or not.

Just.. frustrated with how super specific Double Weapons are

It is all a part of the great plan. The ineffable plan.

[AstralUniverse]

Wild Take:
Make majority tiny/small weapons 18-20 x2 or 20 x3 with base damage from 1d2 (18-20x2) to 1d6 (20x3)
Make Medium and large weapons 19-20 x2 or 20 x3 with base damage from 1d8 (medium) to 1d12 (large)

Simple gets one damage type: slashing, bludgeoning, or piercing
Martial gets two damage types: slashing/piercing or bludgeoning/piercing
Exotic gets two damage types and slightly increased damage dice

Remove Two-Handed weapon groups and crunch it all down to:
Edged, Concussion, Polearm, Missile, and Thrown

Remove any multi-focus weapons and make them singular focus only.

Let the disarm meta begin

Where do I sign

[RedGiant]

Wild Take:
Make majority tiny/small weapons 18-20 x2 or 20 x3 with base damage from 1d2 (18-20x2) to 1d6 (20x3)
Make Medium and large weapons 19-20 x2 or 20 x3 with base damage from 1d8 (medium) to 1d12 (large)

Simple gets one damage type: slashing, bludgeoning, or piercing
Martial gets two damage types: slashing/piercing or bludgeoning/piercing
Exotic gets two damage types and slightly increased damage dice

Remove Two-Handed weapon groups and crunch it all down to:
Edged, Concussion, Polearm, Missile, and Thrown

Remove any multi-focus weapons and make them singular focus only.

Let the disarm meta begin

I am generally in favor minor tweaks without taking anything away, if that can be helped. I actually do love racial craftables and hyper-specific lore items. While Security_Blanket's suggestion isn't awful, I think an easy solution would be to just add a few more generally useful recipes.

Here the Bastard Sword is a good template. We started with an Orog-only blade for a long while. Then added a Barbarian -only blade for another long while. Finally, we got the Callidyrr Blade, which anyone can us. It may not be quite as good as the others, but it is definitely a top-tier craftable. This, in-turn, means you can now have a bastard-sword wielding concept that doesn't require an orog, a barbarian, or 30+ UMD.

[Naghast]

Wild Take:
Make majority tiny/small weapons 18-20 x2 or 20 x3 with base damage from 1d2 (18-20x2) to 1d6 (20x3)
Make Medium and large weapons 19-20 x2 or 20 x3 with base damage from 1d8 (medium) to 1d12 (large)

Simple gets one damage type: slashing, bludgeoning, or piercing
Martial gets two damage types: slashing/piercing or bludgeoning/piercing
Exotic gets two damage types and slightly increased damage dice

Remove Two-Handed weapon groups and crunch it all down to:
Edged, Concussion, Polearm, Missile, and Thrown

Remove any multi-focus weapons and make them singular focus only.

Let the disarm meta begin

That's neat.
I'd suggest thrusting instead of polearm. Edged and concussion seem to categorise main damage types so, uh, yea.

I'd personally prefer to keep WF groups since it makes combo of shortsword+dagger (or long+short swords) for 2wf easier to pull off but you do you.

As to address the initial topic, i do find it annoying that you can sometimes just screw yourself over by not checking if your race gets a good weapon in desired category.
I'd personally love if we had generic +4 weapons, with no umd requirements, craftable for each category. By that i mean:

+4 enhancement
Keen
Runic

THE END
Minus a few exceptions where a weapon category already has an amazing +4 weapon with no umd requirements (there are a few such categories).

[AlonelyBard]

Personally, I'd prefer it if we didn't allow the power creep of everyone having +4 weapons without a proper scaling subsidy. Ranger/Spellsword/BG/Harbinger and so on, all have good ways of giving themselves +4-5 weapons, which take at least some cost. In this case, casting stat tax and reduction of multiclass options.
If you multiclass as ranger, you better hope you only lose 3 levels, otherwise you're killing your casting and dropping to +4
I love the aesthetics of double weapons, but for a long time they've been ignored from classes. It's hard to warrant a specific weapon that completely bars shield use from the character unless you have a good way of handling the AC loss. Parry doesn't apply to Double Weapons obviously, so the -5 effective AC is rough. Ranger makes up some of this, and back in the day, Wakizashi was also used for some builds to supplant that shield AC.
Most of the time, the benefit to double weapons is the increase in damage die over two light weapons, and in tabletop you could forgo the TWF/ITWF attacks and attack with a double weapon like it was a 2h weapon. Weapon damage dice are almost irrelevant on Arelith and NWN as a whole though, due to the STR modifiers we can commonly hit. The difference of a 3d6 damage weapon and a 2d6 damage weapon don't matter much when you're already doing an extra 24 damage from STR mod.
I think that if we want double weapons to be more usable, we should be able to give them some slightly more transparent benefit over just, "you only need to cast bladethirst once", allowing parry on some double weapons, allowing Invisible Blade to use the few finesse double weapons we have, or just boosting the damage of mdam double weapons by 1 would give a ready benefit over just dual wielding.