Nonproficiency

If a character has never had any training or practice with a weapon, he is nonproficient. He can only guess at the proper way to hold the weapon or attack his opponent. Anything fancier than a simple hack, slash, or bash is beyond his abilities—the character cannot attempt any attack options such as disarming, blocking, or sapping.

In addition to his inability to make special attacks, the character also suffers an attack roll penalty based on his character class. Warriors tend to figure out weapons of any kind relatively quickly and have a small penalty for attacking with weapons they’re not familiar with. Other characters don’t have the warrior’s affinity for weapons and are more severely penalized. These penalties are:

Class	Nonprof.	Familiarity
Warrior	–2	–1
Wizard	–5	–3
Priest	–3	–2
Rogue	–3	–2
Psionicist	–4	–2
Nonclassed
NPCs	–4	–2

Any weapon wielded by a nonproficient character is considered one initiative phase slower than it really is, and missile weapons have their rate of fire halved. An untrained character wielding a long sword has an initiative phase of slow, not average, and an unskilled character wielding a long bow would only fire once per round instead of twice.

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