PleasingFungus wrote:there's room to make brand differentiation meaningful, but you'd need to find a good way of communicating it to players. the current brand generation system is a set of tiny incremental patches to a set of very arbitrary ad-hoc decisions one man made 15 years ago. any serious approach to brand generation would probably be best suited to discard the current numbers entirely & start from scratch
That's alright, but I don't think this has to be communicated to the player very explicitly. (I mean, it probably should, but if it's just some appendix in the manual, say, that'd suffice.)
As to brand distribution as a vehicle for weapon type diffentiation: we tried to take this into account when redoing ranged weapons, as you can still see. Perhaps a first step towards redoing melee brands would be assessment of ranged brands. Altogether I completely agree that allowing all brands on all weapon types is not a good idea -- even worse that status quo, I'd say. Also, in my opinion, this is one of those aspects of the game which could clearly be improved upon, but it's not crucial. In other words: good concepts are welcome