TBD d20 System (Inspired by Dark Souls)

[Hibou]

Just to clarify, I'm not necessarily saying you should model your combat system on real historical martial arts - super-granular simulationist combat mechanics aren't necessarily the most fun or streamlined in play - just that his points about translating a kind of "general weapon-based martial arts ability" from one weapon set to another are relevant to your thoughts on weapon proficiencies and could potentially be translated into something gameable in a more abstract, less hardcore simulationist sense.

Yeah, I get what you're saying. That being said, there are probably a few of his other videos (dual-wielding comes to mind) where there might be some ideas worth pursuing. Ultimately I want to avoid making the melee combat too complicated while making warrior builds more viable.

[sparkletwist]

I'd just like to chime in that making warrior builds more viable has almost nothing to do with weapons. For example, in Pathfinder, fighters are actually quite good at dealing lots of damage. It's just that, as levels go up, they basically can't do anything else, which is what makes them suffer when there are challenges to be overcome that can't be solved by just full attacking for tons of damage. What will make warrior builds more viable is giving them a lot of skills that can't easily be duplicated by spells, and, as magical spells go up in power, they'll almost certainly need some super-athletics to make sure they can be (literally) on the same playing field.