A different take on Ancient Weapons.

[Northern Ranger]

It sounds... interesting. My first thought though was how will you work parrying? Say a person using a dagger is fighting a person wielding an axe. With your system, (unless I'm misreading something, and it wouldn't be the first time), it seems the dagger wielder would have a hell of an advantage. The delay involved in bringing an axe around to parry the faster moving dagger would make the smaller weapon almost impossible to parry. While this actually holds true in real life, it makes for a lot of confusion in game play. The combat system in Palladium is good because its simple. It may not stack up when one looks at logically (and trust me, as a martial artist holding two black belts, I've had my issues with the combat system), but in the end I've always come to the same conclusion. Simplicity is best when dealing with combat. You don't want to have to think about things like swinging delay due to weapon size when you're already having to think about whether or not your weapon is even the right kind to use against that damn Mucker! (Northern Hinterlands!)

That having been said, I don't want to discourage you in your attempt. I'd be interested in hearing how it plays out in game testing. If it works well, I might even try it in mine. Keep us all posted!

[Scrud]

I would recommend a battle range in which the axe amn would have a serius advantge 3or4 ft away and the poor dagger man can't get to him with out losing a limb(an Attack from the axer while the dagger move in unable to block with his small weapon)

[RockJock]

I see it being more realistic, but less usable as a combat system. You now have to deal with range, and combat styles on top of everything else.

[Yisterwald]

Max, you might want to check out Palladium's Weapons and Armor, by Matt Balent. It may be out of print by now, but I'm sure you can get hooked up. It's a thin little volume of supplemental material about, well, weapons and armor. Many, many types of both are represented, from many periods and cultures. Armour gets some more detail in the form of resistance values for 4 different attack types: cutting, chopping, thrusting, and impact.

Weapons are expanded slightly with main attack types (the 4 above), dex values (your speed or delay factors), parry values (a relative scale on which to judge a given weapon's defensive effectiveness), and symmetry values (another relative scale indicating how effective the weapon is when thrown).

It may give you a good jumping off point, and keep you from having to reinvent the wheel.

[kamikazzijoe]

I've never been a fan of delay factors as a way to reflect realism. They make a decent game balance but in the real world power vs speed are just style techniques.

Watch the British royal armory reenact the fighting styles of two handed swords and the blades fly fast and furiously, coming at their opponent with every part of the blade and handle. A better example would be the bow staff. the ones used by the Japanese and Chinese are essentially the same item weapon however one group is slow and hard hitting and the other light and fast.

So with that in mind any weapon should be able to take a delay and get a damage bonus. A dagger trying to pierce armor does take some wind up.

[Eryk Stormbright]

i'm with Northern Ranger, it sounds really interesting. once all the bugs are worked out i'd like to see the chart you come up with.