Tim wrote:
> Bronze is not as durable as iron. Bronze swords were almost always short
thrusting swords, bronze is incapable of supporting the weight of a longsword
and can't take the sheering stress of a chopping action well. And iron sword
will bend, not break. Romans reported iron-age Celts straightening their bent
iron swords in battle.

Yes, I'm not at all convinced that Moh'd Hardness Scale is particularly
useful in this context.


Perhaps there should be a special rule for materials inferior to "iron"...

I had hoped to be able to use just a simple Durability penalty, which is
added to all the other Durability modifiers such as the weapon's size,
to arrive at a final mundane Durability (which can then be subject to a
magical Durability modifier), but perhaps I'll have to do it in a more
complex way.

Like for Medium sized swords, such as shortswords, bronze gives no
Durability penalty and silver gives -1. For Large weapons, such as
broadswords, bronze gives -1 and silver gives -2, and for Very Large
weapons, such as two-handed swords, bronze gives -2 and silver gives -4.

For Small (daggers) and Tiny (small knives) sized weapons, the penalties
are the same as for Medium, so basically there's an added penalty for
using bronze or silver to make a broadsword or a two-handed sword.

Not yet sure exactly how I'll be handling weapons where most of the
weapon is wood, such as axes, polearms, arrows and javelins.


(Quest FRP v2.0/2.1 also had a phosphor-treated bronze which was
comparable to "steel" in terms of durability (and damage bonus). This
was originally introduced, I believe, as a way to get around the
impossibility of using Mage spells while wearing armour made of a
ferrous material. I've heard elsewhere that the process to make such
bronze is well past the rennaisance, so it isn't something that will be
doable in my Ärth setting at all.)

> Pattern-welded swords should have a higher durability than iron. People
wouldn't go through the trouble of pattern-welding if it didn't offer a
significant benefit over plain iron.

Addressed in another post (which hasn't made it through moderation yet,
as far as I can see).

--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org