I don't recall if it was in a plurk I made or in a plurk someone else posted, but I once talked about how, for all their flaws, Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020 understood that weapon choice was important not just mechanically but in terms of characterization.
Both of those games get further credit for mirroring the real world gun collector/shooting enthusiast aspect of buying a $200 weapon and then slamming another $600 worth of customization on top of it, but that's just bonus points.
At the time this was inspired by my reading of Hard Wired Island, which is a fantastic game that really is written as a strong response to the above by defocusing combat as the only solution to fighting, but to be completely frank the way the game very smugly treats guns when they are part and parcel of the genre was obnoxious.
Guns essentially have a flat stat block and three mechanical benefits based on brand with the catch-all being "your super cool gun is real impressive and offers a +1 to social rolls when wanking about guns with other gun nerds" which is just eye-rolling, jack-off motion inducing condescension.
For all my distaste for it... it is honest about why the weapon rules are very flat and minimal for the game, it matches the thematic elements HWI wants to explore, it's an understandable and in some aspects respectable stance to take.
Which puts it leagues ahead of a lot of other more combat heavy games that really do not put thought into weapons and their importance both mechanically and narratively. Admittedly that's a weird way to say it but let me try to explain.
Let's use D&D, because D&D offers a great example what with martial characters being the begotten bastard children of the last 20 years of their game design.
3.5 had by the end of its run something like a 10 page table of mundane weapon choices available for people to pick from or, more accurately, pick through to find the best version of the thing you wanted for your specific build. This wasn't intentional by design but it did at least offer some interesting places for characterization.
If you want a big sword, you didn't want a Bastard Sword or a Greatsword, you wanted a Mercurial Fullblade, which was alchemical or magictech so you had to explain how you had it.
The best shield outside of tower shield specific builds was actually the weighted cape because it meant you could effectively swap between bonus AC and two-handing a weapon but also you had to work a cape into your aesthetic and explain why you knew this weird obscure dueling style.
Spiked chain fighters and double-blade sword weilders and all other manner of weird mechanical optimized niche builds at least suggested something about the character and their backstory or where they were from. Moreover they were choices that mattered at least a little bit for your build and your approach to fights.
4e on the other hand even if you had every single book and magazine for it had a more flat spread, albeit an evocative one, but it did kind of lead to some levels of tiering and logical choices.
this is all genuinely really interesting to me but the more i learn about minmaxed DnD specifically the more i feel that DnD as a game is just noticeably less fun as a storytelling mechanism (as distinct from “combat simulator obstacle course”) the more you actually invest in optimizing character builds
D&D minmaxing honestly feels like a game of mutually assured destruction which is why I hated 3.5 D&D - it was designed with the idea the party was going to push out every single advantage they could (so they'd have to buy more books of course).
But yeah, re: 4e - Why does my character use an Executioner's Axe? Because I want them to use an axe and that's the biggest number-having, most axiest axe I can get. Problem solved. This is also obviously flawed but it's at least less paperwork for everyone involved, and 4e also outright just had hyper module magic weapon rules anyways.
3.5 was finding the specific weapon you wanted in a sea of options largely designed to trick you, 4e was picking the aesthetic of a weapon you wanted and then getting the biggest, glowiest version of it you had permissions for. Both have issues, but at least there's logic to them.
5e is the worst in this regard because it has the tiniest gear list since Basic D&D and they still somehow couldn't stop themselves from making mechanically optimal choices on the list.
5e is literally "please flavor text this to your liking because we won't" about its weapons, by contrast, which both offers great leeway at the table if your DM isn't a shit, but, also
But yeah it rapidly becomes a flowchart mechanically: take a greatsword over a greataxe if you're a two-handed weapon fighter, have a rapier if you're a finesse type, polearm mastery it's a glaive or a halberd they're literally mechanically identical, simple weapon folks want a quarterstaff 90% of the time, bam done.
Like I always think of the 5e version of the whip, because whips are cool! Whips are evocative! You can make a whole character aesthetic around fighting with one!
What I am getting at is an ideal gear system in a TTRPG does two things: it has some meaningful choices while trying to be balanced around some manner of internal consistent logic, and it tells me something about why the player picked the weapon they did for their character beyond it being the biggest number.
But there's a difference beween suboptimal and punishing the player. I think of the whip thing because I remember
dental care
's character getting one because it was cool and fit Naeva's aesthetic and we rapidly worked out that her doing literally anything else - cantrips, more standard druid weapons, punching a guy - was more effective.
weapons get a chance to shine by having such wildly different functions in terms of what charms and/or martial arts they pair with; you never need to go, “i really want to use war fans but weighted chains are just better in every way” because they’ll end up having straight-up different functions half the time
Yeah I was thinking about using Exalted as a god example because breaking weapons down to light/medium/heavy and tags legitimately lets you have a meaningful weapon choice mechanically while not locking you into all having the same weapons because dice or whatever.
obviously you know as well as i do that exalted has its own separate set of bloat problems but what i’m saying is that i have a new appreciation for the fact that it’s so unashamedly aesthetic-driven
Specifically 3e, 2e Exalted is in the same boat as D&D 3.5 of having optimal choices that determine aesthetics, except they fucked up and 90% of the best weapons were in the core book.
Then that system also needs to make not using a weapon feel good and rewarding in some way. Obviously there's a paradox that having a weapon in a fight is 99% of the time better than not having one but there should be a class or a powerset or skills or something to let the person who wants to be a martial artist contribute meaningfully.
there was literally one advantage to using a whip and it required wrapping it in barbed wire and having the bard use heat metal so it really Wasn't, belatedly.
Re: Unarmed, Originally this was gonna be me talking about how some games model it versus others before I realized I don't actually really feel comfortable talking about martial arts like I know it intimately, and how accurately martial arts are modeled is besides the point!
bit of a clickbait header but this is a really solid bunch of answers from Professional Historians on the topic of "are katana better or worse than anything else" and i'm linking to it so i can provide a followup and not derail mark's actual plurk topic doing so
A short version of this is again 3e Exalted seems to handle it well by making MA a subset and character niche hook of the unarmed rules and powers, rather than the way 2e did it where everything was by default a martial art.
(n.b. this mentions one of the really funny things about soulslikes, to me, which is that fromsoft looked at the game they were making and said "this is a game about european combat. using a katana here is a bad idea" and thus, for actual factual martial history Lore Reasons, all the katana suck to use in it, because You Can't Use Them Properly This Way)
Which meant some... let's say fraught tropes in like making literally everyone in a setting that leads hard on Asian aesthetics into a martial artist, or until we got Throne Shadow for the Sidereals there was a subsect of people who just inherently figured out magical enlightened fighting powers in stressful situations.
(this actually does lead back to mark's point, though, which is that the fromsoft games demonstrate, in doing this, actual thought about the options available to the players and what those choices suggest about the player, and how to mechanically encourage tone through choice. .... up to a point, anyway.)
To bring this full circle: I'm gonna piss blood when that Dark Souls 5e book comes out and the combat is the usual wizard artillery mush that D&D turns into.
this isn't entirely accurate, mostly because in the last D&D game i was in, it's the barehanded Fighter guy in our party who's been the raw damage output guy despite my best efforts as a spellcaster to upstage him
5e also has, as of Tasha's, the Unarmed Fighting style (exclusive to Fighters, but it takes your fighting style to use), but...that will basically drop off after a while since at best you're getting 1d8+STR out of it
Many of these games are woefully underequipped for the concept of "punchmans someone to death" though, with the general assumption that if you want to kill someone, you use a weapon
literally begging needs to stop being weird about katanas
it's a fucking sword, sit down buddy(they’re genuinely elegant-looking swords, i will absolutely give them that.)