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The standard means of handling Weapons in the HERO System is
to write up an attack, usually a Hand Killing Attack (HKA),
and add certain specific Limitations to it to model a "Weapon".
While this is internally consistent and plays nicely with the
rest of the rules, I find it cumbersome for Fantasy weapons
as it isn't very good at modeling slight nuances in similar
but distinct Weapons.
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To add a slight benefit or hindrance to a particular Weapon
in the standard system, such as a +1 OCV or -1 OCV, requires
a fairly clumsy Power Construct, and adding more subtle differences
quickly becomes much more trouble that it's worth in my opinion.
As a side effect of this, the standard Weapons tend to lose
a lot of their flavor in my opinion.
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Thus for my own campaigns I am opting to use a modified form
of the "Equal Damage" variant, described on page 177
of the Fantasy HERO genre book. By this method, weapons are
grouped together in general terms and do a set amount of damage
based on the size rather than being based on Power write ups.
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Instead of worrying about exact Power write ups, this system
instead abstracts weapon damage by size and then uses various
Traits in combination to define other behaviors of the Weapons
beyond just doing damage.
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This system is somewhat complex; thus its particulars are organized
into several documents, linked to below.
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CATEGORIES: This document explains the breakdown of
weapons by size and the default effects and assumptions inherent
to each category.
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TRAITS: This document explains each of the special Weapon
Traits used to define the game effects of weapons using this
alternate system.
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WEAPON LIST: This document lists out many different
weapons, described using the categories and traits defined in
the previous two documents. This list is done at a high level;
for a detailed version giving a verbose description see the
Weapon Chart instead.
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WEAPON CHART: This document is the same as the Weapon
List, except that it gives the full verbose version of each
weapon, providing the actual abilities the weapons have rather
than just listing the traits.
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