>knife does 1d4 damage
>sword does 1d8 damage
Besides the obvious changing dice size and number, and excluding obviously magical effects, what are some differences individual weapons of the same weapon type? A few ideas I had are...
>add a mechanic where if your attack is blocked you role a d20
>individual weapons have a HP limit and if the roll is higher than the weapons limit it breaks
a simple one, but
>different weapons have different ranges
additionally;
>different weapons modify the rolls for various defensive and offensive actions. A rapier is better at parrying than a greatsword, for example. A greastsword is better at crushing through a parry due to raw force.
Fascinating concept, I feel it would work with armor as well. How about a mechanic to see how deeply a piercing weapon penetrates a target's flesh, with deep penetration being much more damaging, but also much more difficult to take the weapon out of.
In my homebrew martial arts system, weapons have different damage depending on their size and weight (I have a weight-damage chart). Wooden weapons can be blocked bare-handed, but metal weapons, especially slashing or piercing, can't, and the benefits of having a metal weapon yourself is that you may parry with less risk. Otherwise you're stuck with dodging everytime, or else you'll take fatal wounds.
You can also have weapons with special abilities like disarm, break bones, inflict bleed, crush armor, without them even being magic. Another solution is to make rolls with different stats, for example using strength for a polearm when you know you won't miss.
One stupid idea I kicked around in my head a bit was giving weapons qualities based on how they're used and how they inflict harm, which in turn affect their interactions with enemies in the field.
Thats all pretty vague let me explain
[Slashing] Weapons are any weapon used in a slashing motion (and generally are edged). They can, on a hit, do half damage rounded down to an adjacent target. EX you roll and hit with your longsword, so you roll damage twice. One applies to your initial target, one you halve and apply to an adjacent target of your choice.
[Piercing] weapons can roll to piece armor or damage resistances on targets
[Bludgeon] weapons automatically reduce the damage reduction given by any armor or hardness by 1/2 rounded down
[Reach] increases the range of weapon and modifies the effect of other weapons. A [reach][slashing] weapon can attack up to 2 adjacent targets, a [reach][piercing] can pin an enemy with the weapon, sacrificing your next rounds attack in order to reduce that enemies ability to move and attack OR do damage to an enemy immediately behind your target. [Reach][Bludgeoning] weapons reduce all armor/hardness damage resistances by 3/4th's rounded down.
Saving this in case I can use it for my system. Thanks user
Have a look at Legend (Rule of Cool).
In the homebrew I'm working on, combat is nD6 that you divide between defence and offence depending on what you want to do. Having a weapon in combat gives you +D6 to your pool (unless the weapon is exceptionally shitty or good). Different weapons have bonuses in different types of fights. For example a sword gives a further +D6 against non-armoured opponents and a warhammer gives +D6 against heavily armoured opponents etc.
There are systems that are actually adapted to model reach and stuff. The d20 based systems aren't intended for it.
That sounds alright. You should look up Riddle of Steel. It does a lot of the stuff you're doing (dice pool divided between defense and offense, weapons having different effects against armor, etc).
How do you handle injury and damage? Does a weapon have a damage rating? Are successes over and above the defender's defense successes applied as bonus damage?
In RoS, each weapon's damage rating is based on your character's strength and then modified; if it bypasses the target's armor and toughness, then the character has taken a Wound; a level 5 wound destroys the hit location, which is generally fatal.
In addition, combat tends to be defined by initiative - i.e. who's currently attacking. Scoring a successful hit retains your initiative, so you can keep attacking until the defender succeeds, but fights tend to end with one good hit anyway except with duels to the death.
What this models is reach. A longsword has better reach than a dagger, and the dagger takes penalties attacking or defending against a longsword - in fact the only safe thing to do is evade. But if you score a hit with your dagger, you're obviously "inside the opponent's guard" and can keep pressing the advantage until expelled.
Of course in the system, if you get into a fight against someone with longsword of equal skill, and neither of you are wearing armor, unless you fight smart you probably gonna die like a bitch ass ligga.
I'm of two minds. How rollplay is your campaign?
>it isn't
1d4 for casters, 1d6 for 1h martial, 1d10 for 2h martial, martials choose one of reach/x3 crits/upgrade a die size, spend a feat to choose two, apart from that describe and flavor as desired
>everyone has a quick reference copy of the attack of opportunity rules
piercing/slashing/bludgeoning weapons vs. light (padded/mail) and plate armor types. slashing works as normal and is optimal vs. unarmored, piercing does lower base damage but ignores light armor and is optimal vs. it, bludgeoning deals subdual on a roll that would hit without armor and can only crit against plate but deals an added damage die against it (and is optimal against it because of that and the near-guaranteed subdual damage to plate wearers)
>knife does 1d4 damage
>sword does 1d8 damage
Well, first of all....
>knife does 1d4 PIERCING damage
>sword does 1d8 SLASHING damage
Then you add critical hits.
Then you add different effects for critical hits based on damage type, such as Puncture for piercing, limb cutting for slashing or crippling for crushing.
Then you take what said about different ranges and varying rolls for actions and apply that to ranges. If you have to fight close in with a spear or thrusting weapon its less efficient than when you can properly lunge with it. This also applies to cramped or open conditions.
And then you develop an expertise system that allows people that are familiar with a specific weapon group to deepen the effects unique to that weapon group, with the benefits affecting all from that group so they're not literally stuck with one weapon, but a general niche of weaponry that they are familiar with. This could be something like targetting your attacks better with lunging/piercing/precision type weaponry, or if you have something like constricting things like whips or chains the deepending ability to disarm or trip people.
Riddle of Steel is pretty good, though I'd recommend Song of Swords over it, you can find it here on Veeky Forums every now and again and it's more or less still currently being updated, you can even play it's spin off Ballad of the Laser Whales for some decent fun operating too giving you the best of both worlds.
Fantasycraft has a pretty good system for it. It breaks the standard weapons first into a group (edged, blunt, bow, thrown, black powder, siege and unarmed). You get a number of Proficiencies based on your Class (you also gain more as you level) that you can spend on one of the above groups. 1 proficiency lets you avoid untrained penalties for all normal weapons in the group, and 2 is called a Forte, gives you +1 to attacks using any weapon in the group, lets you also use exotic weapons in the group, and lets you take weapon feats.
Within each group, there are classifications of weapons, for example, Edged has Swords, Axes, Fencing Blades, Knives, Greatswords, Polearms, and Spears (I may be missing some).
Each of these types has multiple wraps within it, and each of these types has a 3-deep feat tree that give unique abilities that cause different weapons to actually have different "styles". Sword is full-on damage, Greatsword is area control, Axe focuses on brutal rending hits and damaging objects, knife is sneaky and utility, Fencing blade is focused on controlling your adjacent squares and punishing enemy mistakes, etc.
Within each type, every weapon is unique, they vary in terms of damage, critical range, Armor Piercing, and special qualities. For Instance, in knives, you have the Stilleto with a measly d4 damage, but AP 8 (most armor gives 1-3 DR, unless it's heavy stuff), then you have a main gauche which gives +1 Defence (AC), a Dagger with d6 damage, which can be thrown with no penalty, and a Kukri which has a higher chance of causing critical injuries, along others.
Pic related
Damage should be based on strength, then modified by weapon. Maybe modified by skill as well, depending on how other mechanics work.
I always like armor-as-soak and different weapons going through armor better (a la Dark Heresy). So your stiletto does 1d4 but has pen 4, but your sword just does 1d8. If the dude has 4 armor, you're better off trying to get in and stab through gaps than slicing with a longsword.
I dont know why you would want to, but in general the best thing to do would be to just make the weapon out of buzzwords, that way you can just intuitively assemble a weapon. A few positive examples:
>Offhand: if used in combination with another weapon, increases crit-range but on crit lower-damage weapon is used.
>Reach: Can hit an enemy from further away, in a gridless system, you gain a defense bonus against whoever you attacked.
>Crushing: Does not bypass armor, but negates part of it with each blow.
>Piercing: Bypasses a certain amount of armor
>Swift: Attack bonus if your agility is greater than that of your attacker.
And some negative bonuses:
>Heavy: weapon takes neg to hit against enemies which are as agile or more agile than you.
>Unwieldy: Neg to hit
>Two handed: its two handed, you cant use a shield.
>Exposing: Requires wide swings to use properly, lowers defense.
These are just off the top of my head, but using such a system you could easily build weapons on the fly that were fairly complex, pairing buffs and debuffs. As a rule Id say average weapons have one more buff than debuff, masterwork have two, and legendary weapons have three.
Let players design their own weapon out of a relatively balanced grabbag of effects.
hook? what does a sword that hooks do?
Disarm, trip, etc.
>>add a mechanic where if your attack is blocked you role a d20
>>individual weapons have a HP limit and if the roll is higher than the weapons limit it breaks
So with a weapon that has the highest HP limit of 19, it breaks one time in every twenty swings on average?
I think OP is saying weapons level up with you
We all know the answer to this one.
The fun thing about the Star Wars FFG system (and most likely also with Cortex) are all the secondary abilities a weapon can have, like armor penetration, roll bonuses, or special qualities (homing, blast, bulky, ect). So even if two weapon s had the same damage output, they could be vastly different instruments. And the ability to upgrade and sidegrade weapons is pretty nutty as well.
Have you played Age of Decadence? They did weapons pretty well there. Spears could interrupt people moving in and get a free attack, swords made people bleed, axes reduced their strength, maces destroyed their armor, etc., in addition to the weapons have different modes of attack. Maces, for example, could knockdown but daggers could aim for arteries and thus crit and bypass armor entirely.
This may be of interest. It also has few errors. Should I post the rest?
I like the ideas already in the thread. I propose the idea that combat is divided into different kinds of fighting, such as "grappling", "fencing", "melee(fighting in a large group)", "slaughter(or something, basically attacking an unprepared enemy)" and so on and so fourth.
Different weapons would have different hit dice depending on which style of fighting you were using them for: a knife or dagger would get better hit dice, for example, if it was being used in a surprise attack, or while wrestling/grappling your opponent, but would have worse dice in fencing in the open due to it's short reach.
Unironically this.