[lonnarin]

Perhaps striking speed could be a factor of not only the size and weight of a weapon, but the relative size, strength and stamina of the character. So that dwarven berzerker with two morningstars is only slightly slower than a weakling character with two shortswords or daggers. A beefed up ogrekin with the strength of 3 humans could swing a greatsword with the ease that a human could swing a short sword, etc.

As for the range of weapons and the like, I always liked the way the Gothic series had "higher lvl" weapons too heavy to weild until you hit a certain threshold str score. So you'd have to go lift weights and slaughter dinosaurs for awhile before you got to use that big doublehanded orc axe.

In a sense, the overall attack damage could not only be a factor of the attacker's skill with the blade, but the weight of the blade too adding to piercing power. Now keeping in mind that D&D's old ruleset that we're used to always had a hit-or-miss policy with little variation in the severity of damage, a more realistic approach would be to have armors soak damage as much as they do avoid it. Of course if the attack rolls are automated, there would have to be some "miss-factor" considering that you can't dodge or avoid damage manually as in Oblivion or Gothic. Perhaps a toss-up then... where lighter armors don't soak as much damage but they can dodge the attack more easily, while fullplated fighters really can't dodge well, though stabbing them with a dagger and an 8 strength is mostly fruitless. Of course that same fullplated fighter is a sitting turtle for magical touch attacks and the like. I'd like to see armor weight factors play a role along these lines, would make for some interesting builds. The sneaky acrobat vs the hulking juggernaught.