Weapon ideas ...
Posted: 13 Dec 2008, 04:23
I've noticed several threads on naming things so I wanted to start a thread discussing the naming of weapons. Here's my idea: I think naming a weapon "Iron Sword" or "Short Knife" are descriptive of what they are but lame. I would like to see a system where certain types of weapons have a real name (ex: Katana, Excalibur, Ragnarok - we won't use these names because some are trademarked but they are examples) that tell you what type of weapon it is, but that type can made from all sorts of materials.
Let's take Katana as a very primitive example ... A Katana is a long thin-bladed Japanese sword. So if your player made a long sword because he had a lot of metal ores, he could make a Katana. Because of it's length a Katana would be generally good killing fatter/larger monster because you can penetrate deeper. But because it's thin, it wouldn't be very effective against armored enemies. Now that's just the dynamics of the blade. What the blade is made of can determine other factors. What if a type of metal was harder than another? If you made a Katana of a hard metal, while it wouldn't be effective against an armored foe, it wouldn't break as easy. What if a type of metal resisted corrosion by acid? If a monster is classified as having acidic blood/guts, this metal would hold up better than any other type of metal. What if another type of metal resisted rusting? If a weapon of this material was taken into a rainforest, the snow country, a moist cave, etc. the weapon wouldn't rust (eventually breaking). What if a metal resisted/channeled specific elemental forces? If you were a fire mage you would want your weapon to be made of a metal that channeled fire. If you were going up against an electric eel-type monster you would want a weapon that resisted electricity.
So these are all examples of the line of thought that I wanted to discuss in this thread. I think this should maybe be stickied and when we come up with a good name for something, I'll add it to a list at the bottom of this post. I think we should come up with only a few types of weapons and rely on the what it's made from drive variation (ex: A weapon for clubbing would have 3 main types - a solid rod, a rod with a ball on top, and a rod with a spiky ball on top).
Here's the list:
[WEAPON NAMES]
[METAL NAMES]
Let's take Katana as a very primitive example ... A Katana is a long thin-bladed Japanese sword. So if your player made a long sword because he had a lot of metal ores, he could make a Katana. Because of it's length a Katana would be generally good killing fatter/larger monster because you can penetrate deeper. But because it's thin, it wouldn't be very effective against armored enemies. Now that's just the dynamics of the blade. What the blade is made of can determine other factors. What if a type of metal was harder than another? If you made a Katana of a hard metal, while it wouldn't be effective against an armored foe, it wouldn't break as easy. What if a type of metal resisted corrosion by acid? If a monster is classified as having acidic blood/guts, this metal would hold up better than any other type of metal. What if another type of metal resisted rusting? If a weapon of this material was taken into a rainforest, the snow country, a moist cave, etc. the weapon wouldn't rust (eventually breaking). What if a metal resisted/channeled specific elemental forces? If you were a fire mage you would want your weapon to be made of a metal that channeled fire. If you were going up against an electric eel-type monster you would want a weapon that resisted electricity.
So these are all examples of the line of thought that I wanted to discuss in this thread. I think this should maybe be stickied and when we come up with a good name for something, I'll add it to a list at the bottom of this post. I think we should come up with only a few types of weapons and rely on the what it's made from drive variation (ex: A weapon for clubbing would have 3 main types - a solid rod, a rod with a ball on top, and a rod with a spiky ball on top).
Here's the list:
[WEAPON NAMES]
[METAL NAMES]