An Alternate Way of Handling Weapons.

[Amechra]

These replace normal weapons - for games where style trumps realism, mostly.

Proficiency: If you are proficient in martial weapons, you're proficient with all of these templates. You gain proficiency in a single weapon template for each of the following:
• Proficiency with simple weapons.
• Proficiency with a specific weapon.

Damage: To save on typing, I'll be using a piece of short-hand. Whenever you see [W], use your class's hit-die.
Example: A Fighter would deal d10 damage with their weapon - a Wizard would use a d6 instead.

Secondary Attacks: Some templates or features let you make secondary attack whenever you take the Attack action. That means that you can immediately take a bonus action to make an attack with the listed damage.

House Rule - Parrying: As long as you are armed, you may defend yourself by actively deflecting attacks. You may calculate your AC using your Strength in place of your Dexterity - you may choose which value you use at the beginning of each of your turns. Using your Dexterity is referred to as evading, while using your Strength is referred to as parrying.

Now, on to the templates!

Blade
This template covers everything from swords to daggers - this is for pointy things that you stick into people.
Attacks With: Strength or Dexterity, Damage: [W] + Strength or Dexterity, Damage Type: Slashing or Piercing
• Whenever you score a critical hit against a creature, roll an additional damage die.
• You have Advantage on the first attack you make against a creature who has attacked you and missed since the end of your last turn.

Flexible
This template covers whips or flails, as well as other weapons that can snake their way around defenses.
Attacks With: Strength or Dexterity, Damage: [W] + Strength or Dexterity, Damage Type: Bludgeoning or Slashing
• You have Advantage on attacks made against creatures trying to evade your attacks.
• You may attack creatures up to 10 feet away. If you do, you have Disadvantage on the attack.

Massive
This template covers huge, weighty weapons like greathammers or waraxes.
Attacks With: Strength, Damage: [W] + Strength, Damage Type: Bludgeoning or Slashing
• You have Advantage on attacks made against creatures trying to parry your attacks.
• Whenever you attack with Disadvantage and miss, you deal damage equal to your Strength modifier if the higher of the two dice would have hit.

Paired
This template covers dual-wielding weapons, and subsumes the normal rules for such.
Attacks With: Strength or Dexterity, Damage: [W] + Strength or Dexterity, Damage Type: Slashing or Piercing
• You have Advantage on attacks made to disarm a creature¹.
• Whenever you successfully parry a creature's melee attack, you may make an opportunity attack against them.

Ranged²
This template covers bows, slings, and other ways to kill people at a distance.
Attacks With: Dexterity, Damage: [W] + Dexterity, Damage Type: Piercing
• You may attack creatures up to 60 ft away without penalties.
• Creatures cannot parry your attacks - resolve your attack against their AC as if they were evading.

Spear³
This template covers spears, pitchforks, and other polearms.
Attacks With: Strength, Damage: [W] + Strength, Damage Type: Slashing or Piercing
• You have disadvantage on attacks made against adjacent creatures, and don't threaten spaces adjacent to you.
• You may attack creatures up to 10 feet away, and may make opportunity attacks out to that range.

Staff
This template covers quarterstaves and other such double weapons.
Attacks With: Strength, Damage: [W] + Strength, Damage Type: Bludgeoning
• Creatures can't use the Help action on attacks made against you.
• You may make a 1d4 secondary attack with your staff.

Shield
This template covers pairing a weapon with a shield. This supersedes the normal rules for shields.
Attacks With: Strength or Dexterity, Damage: [W] + Strength or Dexterity, Damage Type: Slashing or Bludgeoning
• Whenever you parry, melee attacks against you have Disadvantage. You may parry ranged attacks.
• You may use your reaction to give an attack made against an adjacent ally Disadvantage.

Unarmed
This template represents fighting unarmed or with improvised weapons. For most creatures, this isn't a very good idea.
Attacks With: Strength, Damage: 1 + Strength, Damage Type: Bludgeoning
• Whenever you successfully disarm¹ a creature, you may immediately arm yourself with their weapon.
• If you are wielding an improvised weapon, improve the damage to d4 + Strength and change the damage type as appropriate.

Some extra stuff to account for these altered rules:

New Feat - Exotic Weapon
Requires: Proficiency in two or more Weapon Templates.
You have access to a more-or-less unique weapon. Pick two weapon templates you are proficient in - the weapon has all the benefits of both templates, and uses your choice of their damage types, attack stats, and damage.

Alternate Fighting Styles
Blade Mastery: As long as you are using a Blade weapon, you deal an additional weapon damage die whenever you attack with Advantage and would hit with the lower die.
Flexible Mastery As long as you are using a Flexible weapon, you may grapple creatures out to 10 ft away with disadvantage. If you do, you can't make further attacks with your weapon unless it is also Paired.
Massive Mastery: As long as you are using a Massive weapon, you may immediately use a bonus action to Shove any creature you hit with an attack.
Paired Mastery: As long as you are using a Paired weapon, you may make a secondary attack that deals [W] damage.
Ranged Mastery: As long as you are using a Ranged weapon, you may ignore half cover when making attacks, and may ignore three-quarters cover by attacking with Disadvantage.
Shield Mastery: As long as you are using a Shield weapon, attacks against adjacent allies have Disadvantage.
Staff Mastery: As long as you are using a Staff weapon, [...]
Spear Mastery: As long as you are using a Spear weapon, you may make attacks against adjacent creatures without disadvantage.

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I don't have time at the moment to go through and cover all the feats that need to be tweaked. As it stands:
• I need a benefit for Staff Mastery.
• Unarmed is written the way it is to make Jackie Chan Monks easier to pull off.
• Shield weapons are kinda strong, yes... but you're shutting yourself off from stuff like Spear's pseudo-sentinel (you'll get them coming and going) or the damage potential of Blade or Massive.
• Exotic Weapons are, however, intended to be really strong. So go ahead - give your Barbarian the Massive Blade they always deserved.
• Balance is definitely wonky at the moment. This has literally no testing.
• Credit where credit is due - I stole the basic idea for this from Legends of the Wulin and was inspired by Grod_The_Giant's thread here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?590361-More-Interesting-Weapons-for-5e).

¹ I'm away from my books at the moment, but it's in the alternate combat rules in the DMG. Basically, you can choose to have the creature drop their weapon instead of dealing damage - you get Advantage on the attack for having a bigger weapon and Disadvantage for having a smaller one.
² Yeah, the range is kinda short. My reasoning here is that 60ft covers most of a traditional D&D battlefield, and if you really need to reenact the battle of Agincourt, you'll need to fiddle with the rules a bit anyway, so...
³ The intent here is that you threaten people out to 10ft away, and just 10ft away. If this seems kinda terrible, bear in mind that this means that anyone trying to close with you provokes an opportunity attack...

[Moxxmix]

I like the idea. It keeps things fairly simple while still adding a bit of granularity. Allowing everyone to access every weapon, but limiting the weapon damage to match the class, makes things a lot more flexible.

Various things:

1) You're missing a Club template (clubs, saps, maces, chuí, escrima, etc).

2) The Paired template needs to allow for bludgeoning damage as well.

3) There is no Thrown template, though I'm also not sure it's needed. Might be able to treat them as improvised weapon attacks.

4) I, personally, would rework how proficiencies are granted. This assumes you want the Weapon Master feat to be useful, and that it is modified to grant new templates. I'd do something like: grant everyone the Unarmed template; then grant a choice of a number of weapon templates corresponding to the class's hit die. d6 = 2, d8 = 3, d10 = 4, d12 = 5. That roughly corresponds to the number of templates I'd expect any particular class to pick up for general use. Might grant Fighter a bonus template.

5) The Spear template is problematic. It essentially demands that the user constantly step away from the opponent that will invariably close with him, which means both fighters will be hit by both normal and opportunity attacks every round. Further, the more opponents you face, the worse it gets. This runs counter to the purpose of the polearm, which is intended to keep those with shorter weapons from being able to close effectively.

I would add this additional condition: If you hit an opponent with an opportunity attack while they were moving from your threat range to within 5' of you, the opponent's movement is halted, and he may not move closer to you this turn.

It's a sort of Sentinel-light. It doesn't reduce the opponent's movement to 0, and they can still move around or away from you (and having used your opportunity attack, you can't make another at that point), but prevents him from closing to close melee range. That balances the fact that if he does get close to you, you have disadvantage to attack him, and subject yourself to an opportunity attack to get back to the 10' range. It also has no effect if you were using your reach in a backline position, since the opponent couldn't attempt to close to 5' range with you anyway. On the other hand, you can only stop one opponent this way, since it uses your reaction; a second one can slip past your guard.

6) This entire ruleset runs into problems when trying to figure out how to reconcile multiclassing with weapon damage. What's the weapon damage for a sorcadin (d6 sorcerer vs d10 paladin), or any other multiclass setup? Take the highest die? Is that valid with a 1-level dip? If I have a level 10 sorcerer who takes 1 level in fighter or paladin, does that automatically raise the damage die from d6 to d10? Some balance of levels? Your first class only?

7) I like the parry concept, and using Str for AC instead of Dex. However it starts running into issues that were specifically designed against. For example, the barbarian's abilities are specifically limited to Str-only because allowing it to work with Dex weapons led to things getting overpowered, building on the God Stat. If you allow defense to be based off of Str, you end up with the same problem, except that you can use much higher-damage weapons at the same time.

I don't know if this is solveable, though I'm also not sure of the degree to which this is a real problem. It requires a more detailed review that's impacted by all of these changes.

8) The first benefit under the Ranged template seems pointless. Ranged weapons attack at range; that's why they are what they are. You're not providing a benefit (and actually limiting them compared to listed values).

9) Not sure the Ranged Mastery fighting style's benefit with respect to 3/4 cover actually means anything. +5 AC compared to taking disadvantage on the roll... it's mostly a wash.

10) Idea for Staff Mastery: As long as you are using a Staff weapon, you may use your secondary attack with the weapon to knock an opponent prone, rather than do damage.

[Bruniik]

I love this alternate approach to martial combat. Really like the idea of parrying as it gives strength some more love which I feel it needs.

Using the hit die as your damage is interesting as generally the more melee focused the higher the die. Which is used for multiclassing?

Overall as currently written I think it's a tad bloated. Maybe move some of the bullet points from templates into fighting styles or feats?

I like he general feel of all of this though.

[Amechra]

Alright, going over things (sorry, it's been... a bit.)

A General Note
Moxxmix, a couple of your comments seem to skip over the fact that this completely overwrites the whole weapon system as it stands. Which is why A) Ranged specifies that you can hit things at a certain range and B) why parrying exists (to cover for the fact that Strength doesn't get sole ownership of high damage weapons). That being said, those comments were pretty helpful.

Multiclassing
To be honest, I've only just started playing in a game where multiclassing is even allowed, so I wasn't thinking about this. My gut feeling is that you should just use the higher die - sure, it makes Barbarian dips stronger, but I'm overly fond of the Barbarian archetype, so that's fine with me :D.

Parrying Barbarians Are Kinda OP
Looking over what I have written up, Barbarians with Shields are actually hilariously overpowered. They just Reckless Attack + parry all the time, giving them Advantage on all attacks for basically no drawback. I'll... have to reconsider that.

Proficiencies
Part of me thinks that giving everyone proficiency in all of the weapon templates wouldn't be terrible (the one exception being maybe kinda the Monk). The weapon-using classes would still have their niche, since their weapons straight-up deal more damage than, say, a Wizard's. That being said, I probably should give Warlocks something to boost their Blade Pact as part of this... let them use d10s, maybe?

Missing Templates (Clubs, Thrown, Others?)
I'll have to think about those - Clubs can be covered by Massive as a stopgap, I guess?

Ranged and Spears
I kinda have to go back to the drawing board on these - Spears could be simplified to just giving them a boost on opportunity attacks. Though with Ranged, I am going to keep "you can attack people at range" as a benefit, since none of the other templates can do that (I'll probably bump it up to 120ft or something.)

Masteries
Now that you mention it, Ranged Mastery really doesn't do much vs. 3/4ths cover (unless you grab advantage from somewhere).

"Overall as currently written I think it's a tad bloated"
You wound me, Bruniik! But you're probably right - the templates really could stand to be streamlined in general. I still like weapons having two features each (since that makes distinguishing between them easier). Well, more time at the drawing board!

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Things I'm considering
• Replace the rampant use of Advantage with good old "reroll 1s and 2s once". That would help the whole "Shield Barbarian" issue.
• Revise Ranged, Spears, and Shields - as it stands, Spears are fiddly and Shields are leaning towards being too good. And Ranged fits clumsily into this whole system in the first place, so hrn.
• Actually going through and revising class features like the Pact of the Blade and Martial Arts. Should've done that the first time, honestly.
• More templates? Maybe? Daggers fit oddly with Blades and smaller clubs don't have a home.
• I need to stress-test parrying.

[Amechra]

Alright, going over things (sorry, it's been... a bit.)

A General Note
Moxxmix, a couple of your comments seem to skip over the fact that this completely overwrites the whole weapon system as it stands. Which is why A) Ranged specifies that you can hit things at a certain range and B) why parrying exists (to cover for the fact that Strength doesn't get sole ownership of high damage weapons). That being said, those comments were pretty helpful.

Multiclassing
To be honest, I've only just started playing in a game where multiclassing is even allowed, so I wasn't thinking about this. My gut feeling is that you should just use the higher die - sure, it makes Barbarian dips stronger, but I'm overly fond of the Barbarian archetype, so that's fine with me :D.

Parrying Barbarians Are Kinda OP
Looking over what I have written up, Barbarians with Shields are actually hilariously overpowered. They just Reckless Attack + parry all the time, giving them Advantage on all attacks for basically no drawback. I'll... have to reconsider that.

Proficiencies
Part of me thinks that giving everyone proficiency in all of the weapon templates wouldn't be terrible (the one exception being maybe kinda the Monk). The weapon-using classes would still have their niche, since their weapons straight-up deal more damage than, say, a Wizard's. That being said, I probably should give Warlocks something to boost their Blade Pact as part of this... let them use d10s, maybe?

Missing Templates (Clubs, Thrown, Others?)
I'll have to think about those - Clubs can be covered by Massive as a stopgap, I guess?

Ranged and Spears
I kinda have to go back to the drawing board on these - Spears could be simplified to just giving them a boost on opportunity attacks. Though with Ranged, I am going to keep "you can attack people at range" as a benefit, since none of the other templates can do that (I'll probably bump it up to 120ft or something.)

Masteries
Now that you mention it, Ranged Mastery really doesn't do much vs. 3/4ths cover (unless you grab advantage from somewhere).

"Overall as currently written I think it's a tad bloated"
You wound me, Bruniik! But you're probably right - the templates really could stand to be streamlined in general. I still like weapons having two features each (since that makes distinguishing between them easier). Well, more time at the drawing board!

---

Things I'm considering
• Replace the rampant use of Advantage with good old "reroll 1s and 2s once". That would help the whole "Shield Barbarian" issue.
• Revise Ranged, Spears, and Shields - as it stands, Spears are fiddly and Shields are leaning towards being too good. And Ranged fits clumsily into this whole system in the first place, so hrn.
• Actually going through and revising class features like the Pact of the Blade and Martial Arts. Should've done that the first time, honestly.
• More templates? Maybe? Daggers fit oddly with Blades and smaller clubs don't have a home.
• I need to stress-test parrying.

EDIT: An idea for Shields would be that, rather than them being a template, they're just a type of armor that you can only use with Paired weapons. Or something.