I was thinking about weapons today, specifically NWN and D&D weapons. I understand the need to simplify things in a pen-and-paper setting, and I understand that NWN was built on that concept, but computers can handle a lot of the details for us. As NWN goes, there really is no difference between a dagger and a greatsword or even a whip except for the damage range of each one. That's missing a lot of cool potential.
Instead of giving different weapons vastly different damage ranges, it would be nice to have weapons of similar quality have similar damage ranges plus bonuses based on the particular weapon, or maintain the large difference in ranges and only apply special bonuses to the 'smaller' weapons (since the extra damage would be the bonus for the 'bigger' weapons).
So, for the second option, imagine a short sword, a light mace, and a greatsword, each of the typical quality that may be found among the militia in Averageton. The greatsword is a big weapon with a lot of damage possible, and that's what you get. Just to give it some numbers, let's give it a range of 6-12 damage. The short sword and mace have less mass so they do less damage, let's say 3-6 for the mace and 2-7 for the sword. That makes the mace (and possibly its family of weapons) give more consistent damage than the sword, while the sword may have some lows and some highs that make it a little more unpredictable. The mace also has a chance to cause stunning blows, a big ding on the head now and then, at some small percentage chance - 10% maybe, on the high side. The short sword has a chance to parry attacks at the same rate. So the bonuses are occasional automatic parries for the short sword, occasional stunning hits for the light mace, and extra damage for the greatsword (only double the others in this example, but constant rather than only a 10% chance - probably not great balance here, but I'm only explaining the idea).
These would be bonuses on top of the skills the character has already learned - skills like those
here. Maybe any character can learn the Parry skill (or Defense Stance or Stone Wall or whatever it would be called) and use it with most weapons, but the short sword would allow an extra chance to parry, and would even do so outside that skill's use. The same with the mace and the Stunning Blow skill (or Skull Smash or Beaner).
Obviously, some skills shouldn't function with some weapons. You can't parry with a whip, y'know? And maybe certain skills only work with one weapon, or one weapon family, like Set with spear and pike weapons.
Also, and I'm adding this for completeness, since it's hard to imagine this hasn't already been worked into the package yet, the best 'Magic Weapon' spells/prayers/skills for certain weapons should come from the god whose combat consideration is high enough to warrant such a blessing. So, for example, the best axe blessing should come from Vorax. No Lucindite should be able to make an axe more dangerous than a priest of Vorax can, heh. On the other hand, Prunilla isn't really much for fighting, so maybe she doesn't have a sickle blessing of the same quality as Vorax's axe blessing. Still, some weeds can be pretty tough, so who knows, hehe.
I hope this isn't too jumbled. I guess the basic idea is to have weapons be more than a damage number. Let's make the weapon type matter a little more.