Feel free to correct me on any of these points, because this predates my participation in the game.
Johnny instituted a weapons freeze a while back (old thread) because each weapon requires 3 different strings for every action. One for first person, second person, and third person. Add in parries and dodges and such, and it's a cluster.
There are a few weapons in the game with broken strings. You've probably seen them. The weapon will show up as "Combat Engine" or "UNDEF" in the verb.
But that aside... I'd like to workshop a bit and see what peoples' solutions for the weapon issue is, assuming that a streamlined system opens the path to more weapon variety.
Personally, I do not think I would mind too much if the weapons referred to a parent object based on their weapon type OR damage type, which would dictate their action messaging. There might be some anchor points on the object that allowed for a bit of creativity to be defined on the child object to make messaging slightly more unique.
For example. All sharp edged weapons would have the same 'slash' verb at the lower skill level. "Player1 slashes Player2 viciously with their katana." for example.
We could cut out the need for unique dodge/parry/miss messaging by either describing the action itself as an attempt and appending the result to the end of the line, or simply referring to a generic message depending on the type of failure.
Aside from addressing the underlying issue, I'd also like to know how everyone feels about potentially watering down the weapon messaging if the result is more weapon variety itself.
I would honestly prefer more weapon variety over messaging. Personally, after reading through the action verbs the first time, they completely lost their luster. Especially pistol/sword verbs. Those are just annoyingly spammy now.