Armor, Weapons, Gear - What level of detail?

[kitsune9]

What level of detail would you like to see regarding armor, weapons, and other gear?

It depends upon what core rules will be. If it's really simplistic where weapons don't differentiate between damage types (bludgeoning, slashing, piercing, etc.), then I think descriptions and mechanics should be very simple. Otherwise, I'm all for including weapons and armors that provide a choice of mechanics for players to build their characters. In the RPGA, I wanted to have a fighter who could trip so I chose the flail because it granted a bonus to trip attacks. Otherwise, it was just a weapon that does 1d8 x2 damage. However, I can defer that a lot more detail can be devoted in the optional modules.

 

[CM]

Some kind of mix of 3e and 4e weapons and armor is fine with me. Avoid giving some weapons increased chances to crit though--I don't want to go back to the days of rapier-wielders critting 30% of the time.

One thing I would like to see however is a great reduction in the number of exotic (3e) and superior (4e) weapons. A weapon should fall under this category only if it is truly unique and requires special training. Things like spiked chains or xen'drik boomerangs, sure. A punch dagger, kukri, mordenkrad or slightly-longer-than-longsword, no. Those types of weapons should be covered under martial/military weapon proficiencies (dagger, dagger, warhammer, longsword, respectively).

Now on the other hand I'm all for unique "expertise" feats for certain categories of weapons to give them extra properties to represent your advanced training. Perhaps taking offhand-weapon expertise lets you treat any light blade in your offhand as a light shield, or heavy weapon expertise lets you re-roll results of 1 or 2 on the d12 damage die of 2-handed weapons because of your ability to leverage your weapon's great weight.

This frees up the DM quite a bit in rewarding magic weapon treasure and reduces the need for retraining of weapon-specific feats.