Weapons and Variety (a Weekend Workshop solve)

 Yesterday I posted the following prompt to Twitter:

In your friend's game, to do the basic "attack" move, the attacker rolls Xd6 (X depends on weapon size, skill, etc). For each 4+, they choose an effect from a list in their playbook. They complain that weapons feel the same, and small ones are useless. Can you help?

The responses were real good. The most common one by far was a tuning of "well, separate the playbooks by weapon", but they were far from uninteresting, and it was far from the only response. You can see all the responses here.

I've had a day to think about it, so I wanted to write what I would do, and my answer doesn't fit in a thread of any reasonable size. If my thing resembles your answer and I don't explicitly talk about it, I swear I'm not plagiarizing you, we just both thought an idea was good.

First, establish what it means to have your weapon outside of combat. Kazumi's very good answer touches on this. Their argument, which I take here, is that, rather than try the weapons such that they're equally good at hitting things, we should attempt to construct situations where the worse weapons shine. I'll reword that slightly: People pick weapons because they have an idea of what it looks like to use them. Let's let them do so.

If you have a dagger, you want to stab people in the back, right? So let's do that: if you've set up the perfect situation, you can backstab people, no rolls no shenanigans. Similarly, if you pick a shield, you probably find a theme of protection resonant-- so let's say it makes people feel safe around you. I'm picking up PbtA/FitD vibes, so let's say you can roll the Act Under Fire equivalent for them.

If you have a big ol' axe, you're communicating to the table that you want to have a lot of combat scenes, right? So let's say you can't conceal the axe, ever, in any situation-- you leave it at home or you send a signal to everybody at the dinner party or whatever that you like to cause problems on purpose. And so on, and so forth.

There might be multiple options for each weapon, or these might actually be class traits, or it could just be the one thing. I don't know enough about my hypothetical friend's game to have a preference.

Anyway, this is good, but it only half-solves the problem. So far we've let people use weapons in the situations they want to. However, within actual combat, the weapons feel samey. Worse, they feel like strictly better and worse versions of each other entirely.

This may seem fine to you-- after all, the player gets to make a trade-off between combat abilities and other abilities! I have a story in response: Back when I played more Magic, I did a bunch drafts with my then-girlfriend. The variant we did was pretty feast-or-famine, and it led to a lot of matchups that were fun, but lopsided. Despite this, the only time anybody ever conceded mid-match was when we went for the same strategy (storm) but one of us, by sheer luck, did it better. Players like being weaker than their friends or adversaries; very few like being strictly or basically objectively weaker.

Anyway-- we have a dice pool, which is a canvas that allows for a lot of expression. The most obvious way I can think of to proceed is this:

• Different weapons use d4, d6, or d8 dice. Daggers and such are d4s, big dumb swords are d8s, for "that's what they are in D&D" reasons more than anything else.
• We already have a "Choose one for each 4+" picklist, so let's keep that as is. This is generic stuff like "Impress, dismay, or frighten" or "Do 1-harm" or "Defend a position" or whatever.
• Weapons also have another stat called EDGE. Edge is the maximum number of picklist options you can choose by roling 4+. Flavorfully it represents like, potential backstabbery ability. Large-die weapons have Edge around 2 or 3, small-die ones have more.
  
• Finally, each weapon has "combos" that trigger on patterns in the numbers. For example, a d4-based dagger might have an additional effect when you roll triples or when you roll a 1, 2, 3, and 4. An enchanted d8-based mace might have a boring damage-boosting effect if you rolled an 8, and it might start whispering to you if you roll double 1s. Stuff like that.
  
• To actually attack, roll some number of your weapon's dice (derived from your skill and the fictional position and whatnot). For each 4+, choose one option from the picklist, up to a maximum of MAX. Then, check to see if you rolled any combos, and apply those.

The benefits of this system off the top of my head:

• The daggers and whatever feel weaker, but they do feel cool and distinct, and if a player says "I want a dagger that can actually pull its weight in combat", the table has the tools to make that happen.
• The players who have signaled that they want to be better at combat (i.e. the big-die weapons) have more consistent success. It's real easy to roll 4+ on d8s, actually.
  
• But those high-die players are still doing cool things-- it's not like 5e and whatnot where you have a fighter with "Deal d6 damage. Special ability (1/day): Deal 2d6 damage".
  
• Similarly, it's real easy to make a weapon enchanted, or really old, or poorly-made, or if you wanna break out the d10s really big. Furthermore, all those enchantments will feel different, because caring about rolling 1s vs saving dice vs anything else you do with the dice pool feel different in a really tactile way.
  
• Edge lets you kind of give people whatever buffs you want. That's its main function-- your marginal skill increases from "high" to "really high", your weapon becomes more consistent as opposed to end-the-world powerful.
• This system generalizes nicely to non-weapon combat actions. Remember, we kept the picklist of generic combat goodstuff intact, free for the "throw sand at your enemy" move or an improvised "drop down from the chandelier" move to use.
  
• I used a lot of words, but the stat block for a weapon isn't that big? Die size, edge, like two combos, an out-of-combat effect. Boom. If you wanna go really rules-light you could probably ditch the edge and just promise to be very judicious about giving people skill buffs.

There are downsides, too, but I'm kinda sleepy, and also I'd really need to see this played in a broader context of game to verify them. That's the kind of impartial reporting you've come to expect from Natalie Libre Bigstuffedcat.

Anyway, if I have a broader design point to wrap this up, it's that dice pools are real expressive. They let you differentiate things in a way that feels more tactile and fundamental to me than, say, swapping out picklists in a BoB game. They're like a really intimidating synthesizer with a thousand knobs and settings that theoretically can imitate any instrument in existence, and several not in existence. My benediction to you is to turn those knobs more.