d&d 5e drawing weapons

5e has thirteen damage types: acid, bludgeoning, cold, fire, force, lightning, necrotic, piercing, poison, psychic, radiant, slashing, and thunder.

One could argue we don't need damage types at all - a monster that is susceptible to fire will obviously take more damage form a 5d6 fireball, so "5d6 fire damage" fireball is redundant.

The distinction is useful if you have a magic mace that deals, say, additional 1d6 fire damage, or a spell like meteor swarm, which deals bludgeoning AND fire damage. In this cases, a susceptible creature would take double damage form the fire, but NOT from the bludgeoning damage.

But even in these cases, I think I would ok with a less "realistic" and more "cinematic" version: the (fire-susceptible) scarecrow would be easily destroyed by a flaming sword, etc., despite the fact that a flaming sword would do a terrible job at destroying a scarecrow in real life.

In any case, I would like to keep damage types if only to make things clear and avoid questions such as "does the meteor swarm causes double damage to this monster?".

However, there are three damage types that bother me:

Bludgeoning. Blunt force attacks—hammers, falling, constriction, and the like—deal bludgeoning damage.

Force. Force is pure magical energy focused into a damaging form. Most effects that deal force damage are spells, including magic missile and spiritual weapon.

Thunder. A concussive burst of sound, such as the effect of the Thunderwave spell, deals thunder damage.

These three are so similar in my mind that they could all be described as "bludgeoning". I assume most people picture the impact of a magic missile to be akin to an invisible rock. Likewise, the impact of a "spiritual mace" would be the similar to a regular mace (even if stronger).

And "thunder" damage is specially weird. It deals "concussive" damage - like a mace, but more diffuse I'd guess - but this damage is caused by a burst of sound. Maybe the distinction would make sense in real life, but in 5e thunder damage doesn't hurt your eardrums, and even a grenade does not cause thunder damage. In addition, people might find the thunder/lighting separation confusing (here is one example). "Sonic" damage might be a better choice.

As for monsters... there are not many monsters that are susceptible or resistant to bludgeoning or force. Some creatures are resistant to thunder damage, but most of these are ALSO resistant to bludgeoning for non-magical weapons. There are some flavorful choices - storm giants being immune to thunder and lighting, for example - but also weird distinctions, like skeletons being especially susceptible to maces but not thunderwave, "spiritual maces" or grenades.

Other than that, damage types don't really DO anything. There is no difference in criticals, types of armor (unless magical), and so on. You are not on fire after receiving too much fire damage, and you're not even poisoned if you take poison damage.

In short, if you NEED to use damage types, you could probably fold thunder and force into bludgeoning, making the game simpler and losing very little in the process.

Alternatively, you could USE damage types to do things (for example, making bludgeoning better against heavy armor), but that would make the game more complex.

The "middle ground" of "we have many damage types, but they rarely DO anything" seems like a bad choice for me.

UPDATE (10/10/2019): I released a book (5e Manual of Arms: Weapons) that, among other things, tries to differentiate between bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage - see below!

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