Crafting: More Fundamental Property Changing Enhancements

I like the very cheap, poorly balanced
thr-4 crushing bayonet.

Today, I'm speaking to the more fundamental properties of an object, weapon, or what have you and the ability to customize properties related to same. This is probably the furthest out on a limb that I'll go into testy, homebrew, and unRAW waters (Cooked waters? Boiling waters?) and will require a bit of conjecture. My hope is that if I throw out some numbers here, and they are decent, that is that, but if they aren't, at least the conversation will be started and someone can tell me, "you should nudge that one up, and this one down." So let's get started.

Non-Muscle Powered Weapons

Inverting the formula for adding ST-Based to a melee Innate Attack (Powers, p.103), a weapon that isn't ST-Based has a 0.5 CF. This makes a weapon that has a thr/sw-1 worthless without further customization.

Fine (Parrying)

Extrapolating a bit from the Fine (Balanced) modifier (Martial Arts, p. 216) Being able to parry one better is about 40 percent (37.5% exactly) less good than having a +2 in skill, which includes the +1 for parrying. So... as a matter of fact, the 37.5% actually works nicely in this situation. A small bonus to parry is +5 CF. For example, multiply a knife's price by 6 to get a knife with no parrying penalty.

Extra Damage

Comes up a lot in this post
It's really good though.

Calculate the damage as an innate attack (Damage type) (Melee, Reach x, -y%; ST-Based +100%). Increase the amount of damage done by increasing the innate attack level, the difference in character points is the difference in damage. To improve damage for both thrust and swinging, this is not enough, but doubling the value seems too much, so let's say, multiply CF by 1.5.

For example, a mace (Basic Set - Characters, p. 271) does sw+3 crushing, and has range 1. Using the optional rule for Modifying dice+adds, the +3 is a 1d-1. as an innate attack, and after applying the limitation and enhancements, this comes out to be 6.125 points, or [7] rounded up. If we wanted to convert that to sw+7 damage, That would be Innate Attack (Crushing) 2 (Modifiers again) [18], and the difference in points is 11, so it is a +11 CF, which is a lot of CF, but a Mace is pretty cheap, and that's a pretty awesome weapon. A more realistic and less costly treatment would be using oversized weapons, which I think is explained well in Low Tech Companion 2, but this gives you all the same oomph for none of the extra weight.

Parry Modifiers

Unbalanced can be treated with the Dwarven Modifier in Dungeon Fantasy 1, page 26, but extrapolating backwards and taking the reciprocal of that modifier, and then rounding it to a nice number, to give a weapon an unbalanced parry, that would cost -0.3 CF. To change to a fencing parry, based on the value of Weapon Fencer in Pyramid 3/89, p. 22, simply +1 CF is probably fine, and inversely, taking it away would be -0.5 CF.

Weight and Minimum ST

These two probably require a bit of complicated manhandling to come up with a number, even more so than adding damage. We could extrapolate hard core from p. 21 of Low Tech Companion 2, but that will give us a large variance in possibilities. I think instead I am going to say, +0.1CF for each 100% added to weight, subtracting all the bad things from Heavy Blunt on p.13, and, extrapolating from Faerie quality manuals in Dungeon Fantasy 4, p.13, weight can be supernaturally reduced while retaining all the same performance parameters for a weapon in the same way.

Other Thoughts

I was thinking about the whip I designed in this post using Metatronic Generators and homebrewed techniques. Thinking about using my recent CF system for converting modifiers to Cost Factors, a whip that can ready instantly, using Reduced Time 2, would only cost 5x.

Using Armor-Piercing Weapons, p.12 of Low Tech Companion 2, the above house rule for more damage, and the previous post that converts enhancements and limitations into cost factors, we'd get a CF+20, meaning an 8 lb, 4 yard whip with sw Crushing damage and instant readies would cost $1,680 instead. That seems like a decent price to me.

I feel like these numbers I came up with today are pretty reasonable, but I'm not sure if they are fair or not. They are obviously super cinematic and fantasy level stuff and pretty gamist, so they won't fit your historical reenactment of the American Revolutionary War campaign, but they could be fun for anything that isn't too serious. Wish I could think of something faster for the damage listing... probably just need to run the equation over a gigantic table of values and see if a pattern presents itself maybe?