Good Morning

I've recently been pondering how weapons and armor are each being treated differently in the realm of Legendary Heros.

Armor - The hero/soverign needs to acquire the prerequisite trait prior to donning said armour.

Weapons - The hero/sovereign can wield any weapon and suffer the pros/cons of said weapon, the only con really being initiative penality.

I've seen many on these threads express their concern over this initiative penalty....especially in terms of the Staff for mages.

What if:

To wield a weapon, the hero/sovereign required the corresponding trait prerequisite prior to using the weapon?

All weapons would be split into a 3 tier system. Common. Uncommon. Rare.

The general trait tab would have "Mundane Weapons" preselected as a default trait, granting the hero/sov access to common weapons.

THEN, in all of the specialized classes, specific advancements to Uncommon and Rare of different weapon types can be given out. For example, Mages would receive Uncommon and Rare for the Staff, but not necessarily for a Bow. Likewise a Fighter will probably not get traits for a Staff and instead will receive Uncommon/Rare traits for Axes, Swords, and Clubs.

The overall effect would be that each class would have access to a slightly different weapons set....doing away with the need to place arbitrary initiative penalties to weapons....especially those staffs. Instead those initiative penalties could be applied to heavy weapons or two handed weapons....weapons where it makes sense that a slower speed called for.

Naturally, with the possible addition of at least 3 more traits to choose from for each of the class types, it may be prudent to grant multiple trait points for some level ups.

As a side note, a new trait penalty could be made for the sovereign creation, removing the Mundane Weapons trait from the character build....thus making the early game just that much harder tactically.

Thoughts? Comments?