The Lord of War and weapon diversity
Just a thought

Each weapon has its own set of messages for dodges, you parry, they parry, various types of hits, some of them body part specific, criticals, etc.

Some of these messages you might only see once in the lifetime of a character, or never at all, but they are there. It is a large time investment and likely an unwelcome contribution to game bloat. His stance was more or less that the weapon messaging needed to be overhauled to be more efficient before any new weapons would be added.

Then we tack on some other reasons for being critical of uniquely "crafted" weaponry. Weapon specializations, for one, would require someone to be able to tell what base a weapon was using, at a glance. Otherwise things just get confusing. Further, players themselves would likely have to customize the messages. Spending any amount of time on the game will probably have exposed you to just how creative some of our players here can get when given free license. So, administrative efforts such as those used for review-cloth would have to be used, and in some extreme cases, take up GM time to reign players in.

While more weapon diversity is certainly a welcome idea in and of itself, I would almost prefer that staff oversaw the creation of these, and that they were more of a reward for dedication to the game or exceptional RP. And if you see something really cool, that someone has… go take it from them.

Then once those are made you would have template objects for low and high end versions of each weapon with baked in attack tables and stat weightings and each actual child weapon just has to have messages written which can be builder or fix-it facing without any need to see the backend mechanics.

The big contentious hurdle to a process like that would be that the existing weapons would have to fit into new power slots which would change the power of some of them up and downwards, but I think if you used the most popular weapons as the category prototype (ie. high-end blade = katana attack table) then most players would end up with slightly better weapons in their possession and a lot more variety to choose from overnight.

It would be a gigantic amount of copy-paste to move old weapon messages to new child objects as well but could be done over a really horrible weekend with a sacrificial copywriter who knows how to use the weapon messaging tool that Slither kindly made (it's me!).

We'd end up with weapons being extremely normalized but it would be way simpler to extend and balance while still adding weapons whenever anyone wanted to since there would basically only be six different weapons as far as the code was concerned that just had different cosmetic descriptions and messaging.

Sorry I'm getting way away from the parent topic with all that but I've always thought of the above as an ideal way to get to the point everyone could have cool semi-customized weapons on call for not too too much overhead. If there was confidence that the child objects were all balanced and everyone was on the same page to how they worked, you could probably just (ultra long term) allow full messages customization through IC weapon crafting without worrying that it would be disruptive.