Old school weapons are terrible (armor too!)

This is a rant... as you noticed from the title.

I complained about 5e weapons, fixed them, and even wrote a couple of books on the subject. Now that I'm playing OS and OSR games, I must say they are equal or worse than 5e when it comes to weapons.

Let's get "unrealistic" out of the way, since "realism" is really hard to get and to measure. Weapons are too heavy, armor is too cheap, everything is too expensive (and that might be a good idea), but let's leave that aside. I'll not even dwell on the fact that plate armor costs the same as 12 garlic because I believe this is a typo (that nonetheless gets repeated in OSR clones).

The problem is that many weapons are useless or redundant (e.g., the short sword is identical to the mace in every aspect, except it is more expensive and cannot be used by cleric, while the spear is just better and cheaper; the battleaxe is slightly cheaper than the sword but it is slow, two-handed, a terrible weapon in comparison... and it's lighter, which is baffling). This is from B/X, BTW.

I think the problem has a lot to do with the evolution of D&D. I explained it here (and now I notice I'm repeating myself a bit. You know what, you can read THAT post and skip the next four paragraphs if you prefer).

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In chainmail, all weapons dealt 1d6 damage, but you had a weapon versus armor table to differentiate weapons and make some weapons different better in some circumstances. also, when you're dealing with troops, price might be important (when you need 2000 gp to get to level 2, price is definitely not important).

Then you have Holmes, which showcases all the problems in a glaring manner. All weapons deal 1d6, but some of the biggest, heaviest, most expensive ones are also slower, for example, making them not only entirely pointless but also detrimental to characters that do not want to use a dagger.

B/X has an optional rule to allow some weapons to deal more damage, so it fixes some issues: expensive, heavy weapons are more effective.

AD&D uses different damage dice too, but tries to keep other traits to make weapons diverse, including  speed, space, and a weapon versus AC table with glaring arithmetical errors that not even Gygax used. AD&D 2e has a better, somewhat simpler table, IMO.

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3e and 4e are not my favorite editions, but their weapons work a lot better than old-school D&D. Even 5e with all its flaws is better than any of the TSR editions in that aspect.

And I'm not even saying that you need much complexity. On the contrary. It is obvious to me that removing the "slow" aspect from Holmes or B/X would improve the game. You might use 1d6 for all I care - this is just an abstraction, period.

So, I'm done complaining. Should we try to fix it?

It shouldn't be hard. First, let's make slow weapons only gives you -1 initiative. This is a rule I added to my (free) OSR Minimalist document. Add a "fast" tag for some weapons and voilà: even someone with a dagger can occasionally have an advantage over a mace. With a couple of words and a single digit (slow 2, fast 1) you add another dimension to the system - and I bet I don't even need to explain you what slow 2 means!

[Notice that this is not perfect, either, as longer weapons should have an advantage at least on the first round. Unless you're backstabbing, as it should be - in fact, adding speed bonus to back-stab would be great, as it gives thieves a reason to use daggers. There is an entire post to be written about how weapon speed and initiative do not work together for precisely this reason, but we'll leave that for another time]

As you can see, we could go either way: easy or complex.

This is from Dark Fantasy Basic (OH means off-hand, etc. - see below):

There is a lot more to it, but basically heavier/expensive weapons deal more damage. That might be enough. The rest adds fiddly bits that I enjoy but increase complexity a bit. I'll paste the entire page below so you can judge for yourself.

Of course, you could go even deeper, with an usable weapon versus armor table and various special effects for each weapon. This might even justify a Manual of Weapons for OSR games. Of course, it would be shorter (probably including weapons and armor) and simpler than my 5e manuals. What do you think?

For now, I'll be using The Basic Fantasy Equipment Emporium for my B/X-like games. It is free and awesome (it even corrects the price of garlic, lol), which makes me reconsider if it is worth writing another book on the subject. But I might try. A "fixed" version of 5e has simple weapon tags that could work for OSR games. We will see.

Click to enlarge.