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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6960829" data-attributes="member: 42582">I had hoped I made it clear I don't think this is primarily a RP issue. It's a mechanical issue. Why should the player, who envisages his/her PC using a scimitar rather than a longsword, suffer a mechanical penalty? How does that make the game better?As I said, the only answer I can think of for insisting on this character's scimitar doing d6 rather than d8 is that we deny that this is all abstraction - that we think that it matters to our sense of the shared fiction of the game that longswords are heavier, more dangerous weapons than scimitars. But now we can legitimately ask, why is the character using the lighter weapon? And we can ask that in character! (Which is  [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]'s point.)In my BW game, the character who choose to carry a shortsword rather than a longsword despite being equally competent with both had an answer - she was an assassin, and wanted to be able to hide her shortsword in her backpack.Maybe the scimitar-wielding STR fighter has a similar answer (though I'm not sure that, at the same weight as a longsword, the scimitar is actually all that much smaller). In which case I'm happy to hear it - though it, as  [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] mooted, the answer is "tradition", one might reasonably push back against this in character.TLDR: if it's really all abstraction, why is the player being penalised in the name of fetishing the weapon chart? if it's not abstraction and actually means something in the fiction, then the character should have some answer in the fiction.</blockquote>

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