ToME WikiLordEstraven: Playing ToME, something strikes me as wrong about the game's various weapons, and I think I know what it is... The stats you see on various weapons just don't strike me as realistic.
Take, for example, the broadsword vs. the rapier. I haven't seen a rapier in the game for a while, but IIRC they're 1d7, and the broadsword is of course 2d5. But something strikes me as wrong here...
Okay... broadsword: clearly a slicing weapon. If you get hit with a broadsword, you'll probably be injured pretty badly; however, the force is distributed over a relatively large area when the sword hits you, which means that armor is effective in warding off attacks.
Rapier: a stabbing weapon for the most part; many rapiers don't have an edge to speak of. I've never used a sword in real life, but I'm guessing the narrow profile would make it much more effective at penetrating light armor such as chainmail and ring mail. However, I also wouldn't be surprised if a stab that didn't reach a vital organ would be much less less dangerous than such a hit with a broadsword, at least in the short run.
What I'm thinking is that maybe a weapon's physical properties should be reflected not only in damage, but in armor penetration capability, effectiveness during critical hits, and the various other things that it does to your foes (i.e. stunning, cuts, bleeding). This would probably take some reworking of the way ToME currently handles weapons, but it could IMO make the game rather more interesting.
NeilStevens: I've already completely rewritten the weapon list for ToME 3.
But not that we're not going to go overboard in terms of differing kinds of weapon damage, and make the game miserable for specialists.
KhymChanur: A little bit of what you're proposing is being handled in ToME 3 via the damage types slashing, crushing, and piercing. Different weapons have the damage they do distribute among these three types in different ways, so a bastard sword is entirely a slashing weapon, a mace is entirely a crushing weapon, and so on. And monsters can have different levels of resisence to these damage types, so a skeleton can be reistant to slashing and piercing but vulnerable to crushing.
You might also be interested in the Differentiated Weaponmastery Effects idea.
NeilStevens: I differentiated the weapons as follows:
Polearms do a mix of all three damage types. They're heavy, though, the lower-level ones being must-2h, and the higher level ones being could-2h.
Axes do more damage than polearms, are virtually all must-2h, but are limited to slash damage.
Hafteds are like axes, only doing mostly crushing damage (a couple do piercing, too, though).
Swords are a mix of one-handed, could-2h, and must-2h, (higher level ones being 2-handed) with the lighter ones doing a mix of slashing and piercing, but the heavy ones doing more damage entirely of a slash type.
Knives are what used to be the low end of the sword range. All but one are one-handed, and they do mostly piercing damage.
In order to make the heavy weapons more beneficial, I'm going to tone down the availability and range of to-damage bonuses. Slays shall rise again.
RavenRed: In my original re-write (which Neil re-wrote) the weapons damages were a little more mixed up between slash/pierce/crush. This was primarily designed to simulate the effects of weapon weight. Personally, I'd keep it mixed rather than making most weapons a single damage type. For me it's the difference between a slice and a chop. Try cutting tomatoes with a slightly blunt knife to get the differentiated idea... it does both slash and crush damage, both of which do damage to the tomato. It has small slash resistance, and almost no crush resistance whatsoever, and it can sometimes be the crush damage that "kills" the tomato. 
Like the idea about making slays more important than +'s. This privileges warriors skill rather than "a good find". How will you manage slays? Additional damage types (e.g. Crush={2,2} SLAYDRAG={4,5}) or the way they're handled now?
KhymChanur: Huh, additional damage types for slays is an interesting idea, but I think the plan was to do it like now, multiplying the base damage. However, there doesn't seem to be any code in CVS dealing with slays or brands, so I'm not sure.
NeilStevens: According to what DG told me, the way bonus damage (either magical plusses or slays) will work, is that the extra damage will be split proprtionately between the damage types already assigned to the weapon. So let's say I attack with a CRUSH={1,4} PIERCE={1,4} weapon with +5 to-damage and an x3 slay in effect.
I swing, and the damage dice rolls gives 2 points of crush damage, and 3 points of pierce damage. x3 modifies that to 6 points of crush damage and 9 points of pierce damage. +5 produces 5 x 2 / 5 = 2 points of bonus crush damage, and 5 x 3 / 5 = 3 points of bonus pierce damage. All that gives a total of 8 + 12 = 20 points for the hit.
I swing again, and the damage dice rolls give 2 points of crush damage and 1 point of pierce damage. x3 modifies that to 6 points of crush damage and 3 points of pierce damage. +5 produces 5 x 2 / 3 = 3 1/3 points of bonus crush damage, and 5 x 1 / 3 = 1 2/3 points of bonus pierce damage. Add it up and round, and you get 9 + 5 = 14 points for the hit.
KhymChanur: Ah, okay. I assume that for brands, the resists will be applied to the multiplier, and then the multiplier applied to the damage? So that a x3 fire brand against a creature with 66% fire resist will end up with a x1 multiplier?
Also, will brand damage multipliers also apply only to crush, pierce, and slash damages? If a weapon had CRUSH={1,3} ACID={1,3}, and had a Lightning brand, it would be pretty weird for the Lightning brand to multply the Acid damage.
NeilStevens: Resistance would apply to the full amount of damage, the total at the end. So take my two examples. If those attacks were made against a monster with 50% crush resistance, they'd actually do 4 + 12 and 5 + 5 points of damage. Against a monsters with 50% pierce resistance, they'd do 8 + 6 and 9 + 3 points of damage.
And as far as I'm concerned, the brand would apply to all the damage types the weapon had, even lightning on acid. Of course, in a case like that, either lightning or acid resistance would cut into the damage from those dice, so a base type of elemental damage would actually be less useful to the player than a multi-branded weapon with a basic damage type.
KhymChanur: So for a multi-branded weapon, the engine would compute the ammount of damage the monster would receive for each brand to determine which brand to use? Since it's supposed to use the most damaging brand/slay available? And I assume that "no brand" would implcitly show up in the comparison, so a Firey Bastard Sword would act like it had no brand against a monster with 100% fire resistence, rather than doing 0 damage?
As for brands affecting elemental base damage: okay, but it seems really weird for a Fire brand to multiply Cold damage...
NeilStevens: Right on the brand analysis. Supposedly brands are magical symbol engraved in the business end of the weapon, they're not a literal forming of the weapon out of the given element. So brands can add, but they can't subtract.
As for elemental base damage versus brands, it's up to the module author to write the ego and artifact list appropriately if he wishes to avoid that, heh.
Since we have no base weapons with elemental damage dice in ToME (I'm not counting mage staves since they aren't going to have brands available via egos or artifacts), it won't be a problem for us. I imagine we'll have some artifacts with some oddball damage dice types, so we'll just make sure not to put any thematicly weird slays and brands on it.