so been going over a bunch of different builds and i got to say thrown weapons are bad unless I’m missing something.
all of them are 3-4 damage. periceing 1. but don’t get strength bonus(not melee weapons), have no rate of fire bonus(like guns), no perks to increase damage like gun (gunslinger, rifle man and such), and no mods for them. i mean they’re good for sneak attack cause of surpsessed but will never do enough damage to drop a target in one shot anyways with sand man.
The only thing you missed was that (I assume) thrown weapons can be retrieved and reused. If ammo was very scarce, having a javelin you can throw again and again is valuable. But I don’t think it comes close to balancing out. No perks to increase damage or fire rate, no mods - it’s bad. I’ve seen homebrew for bows using the throwing skill that actually have fire rate and mods, but without them throwing is pretty useless.
You can spend AP to increase their damage like with melee weapons, but with no mods their best used as backup weapons when you run out of ammo. They do have the supressed quality so they are good for stealth attacks and throwing knives have the concealed quality. One of my players are using throwing weapons together with the better criticals perk which so far has been very good, but that perk can be used with any weapon.
Worst is relative. In an RPG not everything is about highest damage all the time. Sometimes you need to be concerned about the cost, availability or other qualities. A thrown weapon is most effective when used on an unaware target. TN reduced by 1 and gaining Vicious on top of Piercing and being able to use AP to up the damage? Add in that Suppressed means you haven’t given up your position and you’re most of the way onto a decent sneak build.
Personally my players are fond of using Aim (for the re-roll) and then a called shot to the leg to make the target prone and then close the distance and slit the throat of the victim in melee. Total of 3 AP (1 additional minor, 2 additional major) but effective.
Given how thrown weapons didn’t even exist in Fallout until FO76, and how utterly garbage they are in that game, I think the rules are doing a pretty good job of emulating them. XD
More seriously, a friend of mine was griping about throwing weapons in another game recently, calling it “archery, but with more steps and a worse turnover.” Unless you’ve got some rules to support characters who want to specialize in thrown weapons (which Fallout 2d20 lacks at the moment), then they’re always going to be niche. There are situations where they’re useful, but they’re few and far between compared to just using a bow or crossbow.
There were thrown spears, knives and even rocks to throw in fallout 1 & 2, but suffice to say if you ever chose them over a gun (or indeed a multitude of guns) in most serious fights you were either going to die very fast or had a very clever plan. One-shot kills with a thrown blade have never been a thing in fallout games because of how the health systems work (Hell, shooting a man in the head with a shotgun sometimes doesn’t do the job!) Take a bandolier of grenades instead if you want damage out of your throwing skill, and hope the enemy don’t get a lucky shot and blow you up with your own stash! Otherwise, just use these weapons for character flavour and style points.
If the enemy is unaware of you then your attack is usually D0 and the weapon gets Vicious. If you have 3AP to spare that brings a throwing knife up to 6CD Piercing Vicious. On most rolls that’s a bad day for folks.
If you plan to stop a charging Deathclaw with a throwing knife then you get what you deserve. If you use it in a smart manner to take advantage of its Qualities and Effects then it’s pretty damn good.
Okay, but Sneak Attacks don’t require that a weapon be Suppressed. You can do that with literally anything for the first Round. And even after that, there are Suppressor Mods for Small Guns. Every other kind of weapon has a big list of Rarity 4+ weapons, Mods, and Perks to improve. Throwing Weapons have three low-Rarity, low-Damage weapons, no Mods, the Heave Ho! Perk and the Mister Sandman Perk.
While you’ve demonstrated that Throwing Weapons aren’t entirely useless, you must admit that Throwing Weapons do not have the rules support of the other weapon types. A Throwing Weapons build is getting screwed by the rulebook. 6CD Piercing Vicious is good, but that’s a Hunting Rifle’s starting Sneak Attack, no AP required. And when the Rifleman build is at level 14 and shooting a Sneak Attack with a Suppressed Scoped .50 Hunting Rifle for 17CD Piercing 2 Vicious, the Throwing Weapons character is still at 6 dice, wondering why they put Skill Points into Throwing Weapons.
This game needs more cool stuff for throwers. Heat-seeking, explosive-tipped spears. Armour-melting laser axes. Teleporting plasma shuriken. Something that doesn’t leave Throwing a dead end.
While those things would be cool in a sci-fi game, they are not true to the license. There’s nothing stopping you from adding those things to your game at all but a licensed product needs to retain fidelity to the license.
The original post was that the throwing weapons are the worst. They definitely aren’t, especially for starting characters who don’t have access to mods to get Suppressed on guns. They have a place but they’re not (nor does it look like they were ever intended to be) a primary means of dispatching high level enemies.
Throwing Weapons are the worst. They are the least useful, least damaging weapons in the game. If you were to rank the weapon types from most useful in defeating enemies to least useful at defeating enemies, Throwing Weapons would be at the bottom. That’s what worst means.
Yes, I am talking about homebrewing higher damage Throwing Weapons, Mods and Perks. Modiphius have a licence and they need to keep Bethesda happy.
That said, Fallout is a sci-fi game. The Chinese Army had invisible ninjas, is it really out of the spirit of the world to say that they produced high-tech Throwing Weapons?
My players want to play a fun, balanced TTRPG, not simulate the weaknesses of Fallout 4. If a player chooses a Throwing Weapons build, I feel it’s my obligation as a GM to support their fun from Level 1 to Level 20. I wish the rules would help me do that. But since they don’t, I will turn to the community of players to assist me in homebrewing. That will include a discussion on which weapons need more support.
The easiest fix would probably be to add the Melee Damage modifier (or perhaps base a similar bonus off AGI) and then allow the combat knife mods to be applied to throwing knives and something similar to tomahawks and javelins.
You could have a Perk similar to Gunslinger as well, which would up the damage.
I homebrewed a Throwing Dagger armbrace for FFG star wars for one player - totally preposterous and probably wouldn’t fit canon… but it would definitely fit in the kiddie’s tv shows like Clone Wars or the Bad Batch.
For Fallout they could build and mod a magnetic repulsor glove, using a gauntlet from a museum, a series of copper coils or wiring insulated up the arm that projects a magnetic charge down the arm, the force which propels a throwing knife or shuriken at greater speeds (also adding Viscous quality for extra damage) extra mods adding a wire, like a tazer, to allow retrieval of a miss… fun over rules people, fun over rules…
You could always introduce a perk along the lines of “Cowboy” from FNV that affects revolvers, knives and hatchets (including when thrown) in the same way that gunslinger or rifleman affect pistols and rifles (there aren’t any lever action rifles in the base game without homebrewing and technically there is only 1 revolver, the .44, but if you did, you could add lever action rifles and a couple more revolvers in too to duplicate the Cowboy perk completely).
