Low Tech vs Basic Weapon Stats

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by kracht

...
For its subject matter, LT is one of 4e books that I looked forward to most enthusiastically, and it is a great book, but I cannot help thinking that in some ways there was room for improvement.

But FAR too many RPGs screw things up with frequent ret-cons and changes from one supplement to another. Even when it's for greater accuracy and logic, changes rather than additions promote rules lawyering, MTG style player wealth equals character power, general confusion, and lack of clarity.
Sadly, all things considered, some times, it's best to just leave a mistake alone.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by kracht

Yeah, it was not universally adopted. But by and large, I am under the impression that GodBeastX is right, and sometimes you have strange "duplicates". The obvious example is the bastard sword, which the authors admit is not historical, side by side with the longsword. Another strange thing is that insistence of having both blunt pointed and thrusting broadswords, when the vast majority of weapons of that kind seems to have had a decent point and have been cut-and-thrust weapons (the exceptions that I am aware of are very early Iron Age examples).

Eh... there are many Indian khaṇḍas with very wide tips and a point no sharper than 45*, and it is up to the GM to assign the proper set of stats to a weapon in their game world. While it would be nice to rebuild the GURPS melee weapon rules based on historical and experimental research, and replace the Broadsword and Greataxe in the Basic Set with something which is more common in the real world, what we have today is not bad, and really improving them would require more time and effort than anyone is willing to put in. Real experts on "all swords, daggers, and fighting knives in world history" from a practical and story-telling point of view are thin on the ground and tend to have other commitments ...

One of the problems with LT is that they had to boil down a lot of earlier Pyramid articles with no footnotes and short bibliographies into something even shorter.