'sprucing up' the weapons list.

[Cybren]

A while back I attempted overhauling the weapon system to give the weapons more variety (and utility). It wound up being more work than I wanted, and created potential balance problems or weird rules interactions.

As an alternate to that concept, I was thinking of just creating a handful of 'small' weapon properties that can be added to existing weapons to make them feel more unique, but only marginally increase their utility. To that end I was brainstorming some effects:

Defensive: If you use your reaction to gain a bonus to AC, increase that bonus by one.
- Weapons whose size or position allows you a natural defensive posture.
Hooking: +2 to attacks to establish a grapple.
-Weapons with hooks or flexible weapons that may entangle. The bonus doesn't apply to keeping the grapple, only initiating it.
Traumatic: +1 damage vs targets with light or no armor (Or possibly, some wording of 'creatures with AC n before adding ability modifiers)
-impact weapons that cause blunt force trauma
Armor Piercing: +1 damage vs targets with medium or heavy armor (or possibly a similar ac based wording as traumatic)
-Weapons whose shape or size make them good at finding the gaps in armor
Heavy Bow: bow that uses str for attack/damage
-Bows are muscle powered weapons, ultimately. Good archers usually had good upper body strength, so it should be a trope that's possible.

[Thrudd]

If you want to model bows in a more realistic way, their damage range should be based on the strength required to draw them. A bow with no or very low strength requirement might be d6 damage. Bow with minimum 10 str might be d8. Bow with Minimum 12 str is d8 + str bonus, to a max of +2. Maybe there's a hercules or odysseus bow that has a minimum 14 or 16 str and allows up to +4 or +5 str bonus. That would probably be a special one of a kind item. No bow should do more base damage than a heavy crossbow, but a heavy crossbow should require two rounds to load (one full round loading, during which time you have to be immobile using a winch or crannequin, shooting the next round).

Hand crossbows should be reduced to d4, a weapon of that size could not throw a dart with much more force than hand thrown (though it might require less skill/practice to be accurate with it). unless it was magical or constructed of some kind of special advanced material.