Re: Swords are annoying

On Apr 24, 9:16 pm, Antoine <antoine.from.r...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Does anyone else get annoyed at the proportion of games in which the
best melee weapons are swords?

Sometimes I think axes, spears, halberds, and maces get a raw deal.

A.

Planescape: Torment had only three swords in the entire game (one of
which is linked to a specific character and cannot be removed from his
possession, and the other two of which are hard to get and severely
restricted by alignment), for just this reason. The developers were
tired of swords being everywhere.

Part of the problem, I think, is that people have certain assumptions
about weapons based on the game. They assume that axes are heavy, do
more damage, and miss a lot; that maces are only good for people
limited to them, and so forth. The assumption for swords is that
they're better and are the most likely to be magic weapons; this last
one is the worst bit, because it means that even if you make the
weapons in your game equal, most players will still assume "Oh, the
game is only going to give me good swords in the end, so I better
focus on that."

One mechanic that might be interesting, though, is to define a 'reach'
for weapons--not one that actually lets you hit at a range (which is
awkward and usually feels cludge-like), but one that controls offense-
defense in combat. So, if you try and attack a spearman with a sword,
you might sometimes get "The spearman holds you at bay with his
spear", the assumption being that a weapon with a better reach gives
the wielder a chance of 'fending off' attacks from shorter-range
weapons.

This abstracts out a bit of maneuvering (the player tries to advance,
the spearman threatens with the spear, the player halts their attack
automatically), but it's also a mechanically "clean" and fairly
straightforward way of (slightly) realistically representing what is
really one of the most important aspects of weapons in the real world.

Of course, this would cause problems for daggers unless other rules
were made to support them.

.

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