Right, so, I'm going to keep this short and sweet:
Over the years I've collected a LOT of 3rd party and backwards compatible products ( one of the reason I love pathfinder so much)and it's given me an overwhelming amount of equipment, feats and spells to sort through. As part of my attempts to consolidate all this disparate crunch, I've noticed a lot of things that don't really make any sense:
A regular crossbow is a simple weapon, but attach a mechanism that saves you time and effort reloading, and suddenly it takes a jump to exotic?
A person can specialize in short blades all their life, knives, kukuris etc, but all of a sudden they're about as well off as a commoner the moment they pick up a swordbreaker dagger.
The sheer number of weapons that are only considered 'exotic' because they come from a non-european culture, rather than any needing any special training.
As such, here's my system. You divide the weapons up into various families, much akin to the fighter's weapon groups, though with a little more specificity: Sword, pole, short blade, etc, as well as families that have to do with cultural influence. Dwarves get a dwarven weapon weapon family people from a meso-american setting get one with obsidian weapons and so on.
The family itself is divided into levels of simple, martial and exotic, with your access determined by your class's proficiency, With martial proficiency ( not just the class ability, but the feat too) opening up all those weapons in the martial level of that family. Exotic weapons are chosen on a one for one basis, as par normal, but out of those families you are skilled with ( unless it's really off the wall).
A player gains access to a number of weapon groups based off of 1+ con modifier, representing the amount of time and effort they have put into training, as well as muscle memory etc.
Most feats that apply to a weapon now apply to all weapons in that weapon group ( so if you take weapon focus axe, you get bonuses on everything from greataxes to throwing axes) though others ( like greater weapon specialization) can only affect one. Much like the bastard sword, or dwarven war axe, If you are using an exotic weapon, you only take the penalties for it if you are using what sets it apart form the base weapon of the group. the aforementioned swordbreaker dagger could still be used as a dagger, but without it's nifty sunder ability.
So that's my budding system as it stands, feel free to let me know what you think, or any advise or suggestions you may have. The main reason I wanted to post this was to see if anyone had any ideas for weapon groups I might have missed, and just how finely I should be dividing them.
Thanks much!
We tried that in our group, too. But we tied the number of weapon groups to the BA and added a so-simple-everyone-can-use-it-group (like clubs). The Fighter got one additional group to make him stand out a little.
We dropped the whole proficiency system soon after, though.
My PCs still mostly carry simple or martial weapons, exotics only if it fits their background or they find it as treasure.
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The core problem here is technological advancement. D&D and PF have weapons from several technological eras crammed together into one system. It would make sense for the high-tech weapons to be just plain better; better metallurgy, balancing, advanced shape design and so forth.
Plate armors should also have gentler dexterity limitations because they're actually body-fitted rather than just a curtain of heavy stuff pulling you down like chain armor.
But game balance. Having some weapons be just plain better than others would be bad for game balance.
The core problem here is technological advancement. D&D and PF have weapons from several technological eras crammed together into one system. It would make sense for the high-tech weapons to be just plain better; better metallurgy, balancing, advanced shape design and so forth.
Plate armors should also have gentler dexterity limitations because they're actually body-fitted rather than just a curtain of heavy stuff pulling you down like chain armor.
But game balance. Having some weapons be just plain better than others would be bad for game balance.
Totally reasonable, and and I'd say it was up to the gm to decide exactly how they wanted to set it. I'm currently thinking of having crossbows and two handed firearms in the same weapon tree , with hand crossbows and one handed firearms being in the other. Whether or not guns were in the setting would of course change how that would work.