>
>Or you could do what fourth edition ARS MAGICA did and make broader
>fighting techniques like "Weapon with Shield", "Single Weapon" or
>"Longshaft Weapon" the norm, or even use something like "Blunt Weapons",
>"Cutting Weapons" and "Thrusting Weapons". There are *many* possible
>solutions to the Close Combat problem.
There are three problems with this stance. 1) you still have the problem of the master swordsman pickingup a new weapon and being at base skill, which is unrealistic, and also a genre breaker for some types of story. Skill at combat does transfer a fair bit - not entirely, but largely. Often you get kludgy responses, like 'improvised weapons' as a weapons category.
2) its really hard to make a set of weapons that doesn't lead to strange counterintuitive consequences. In Ars Magica, for example, all those traditional staff wielding magi are also pretty good with a greatsword.
3) the wacky little categories pretty much disappear. Why learn to use a flail, if its a separate category and "single weapon" is so much more useful.
In contrast, the fighting styles solution of HW seems to be a good compromise - you want to use a weapon style that you have practiced with, definitely, but the consequences of not doing so are reasonable.
Cheers David
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