I would like to start by saying that I agree with you about how confusing that is, I have experienced it myself at my own table.
DDB has to list things the way they appear in the books because that’s their contract with the game’s publisher, WotC. WotC did the grammatically correct thing, and wrote it as “Crossbow, Hand.” The use of parentheses is technically used for something like ”Arrows (20)” because reasons I don’t remember anymore.
The “best practices” way would probably have been to list it as Crossbow, Hand and then separate different items in the list with semicolons instead of comas, but semicolons mean things within the programming so that’s probably why they don’t do that.
Sorry, my mother was an English Major, so learning this stuff was basically hard-baked into my childhood.
A rogue has following weapon proficiencies in sheet "Crossbow, Hand, Longsword, Rapier, Shortsword, Simple Weapons".
Which had me confused for a while. :) And even once I figured out Hand refers to the crossbow type, it still trips me up.
The clear way to format such in a list would probably be something like "Crossbow (Hand)".
I would like to start by saying that I agree with you about how confusing that is, I have experienced it myself at my own table.
DDB has to list things the way they appear in the books because that’s their contract with the game’s publisher, WotC. WotC did the grammatically correct thing, and wrote it as “Crossbow, Hand.” The use of parentheses is technically used for something like ”Arrows (20)” because reasons I don’t remember anymore.
The “best practices” way would probably have been to list it as Crossbow, Hand and then separate different items in the list with semicolons instead of comas, but semicolons mean things within the programming so that’s probably why they don’t do that.
Sorry, my mother was an English Major, so learning this stuff was basically hard-baked into my childhood.
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