The Tavern

I don't know if the topic has been discussed already, but it seems to me, that most species without improved means of unarmed combat tend to have difficult times at the beginning of the game if they're playing a pure magical background and can't find a decent melee weapon straight away, due to their limited manapool. I was wondering whether it would be any fair to give them a quarterstaff at the beginning (just like artificers have) without any starting Fighting/Staves skill to solve this issue. Even flavour-wise this would make a lot of sense to me, since many casters, especially elemental specialists, like to melee with the apropriate magical staff late-game. What are the counter-arguments against this?

Counter-argument: a "quarterstaff" is a ridiculously strong weapon to start with. It is probably the strongest starting weapon currently available.
If you mean the "staff", well, I don't see any real problem giving them that... though it is a quite bad weapon and you're probably going to find something better on D:1 already.
If you run out of mana on your caster early on, and don't have sufficient melee power, you should go ahead and pillerdance or stairdance, or begin whacking doors in people's faces till you regenerate.

Staff: Accuracy rating: +5 Damage rating: 5 Base attack delay: 120%
Whip: Accuracy rating: +2 Damage rating: 6 Base attack delay: 110%
Dagger: Accuracy rating: +6 Damage rating: 4 Base attack delay: 100%
Short sword: Accuracy rating: +4 Damage rating: 6 Base attack delay: 110%

The fact that whips or especially daggers, even branded daggers, have a tendency to appear on D:1 don't really make caster mana pools, especially Naga caster mana pools, any problem, and every other species can just run away.

Don't sweat, people. It's not like you can't find at least 3 quarterstaves between D1 and D3.

Quarterstaffs can be tricky to find, but daggers and short swords are everywhere. I honestly don't think you can get to D:4 without seeing a glowing low level weapon. Crazy Yiuf's chaotistaff also makes a solid emergency weapon too and its likely to be moderately enchanted.

In any case, caster backgrounds already provide far more stuff then non caster backgrounds. Every piece of fighter/gladiator equipment except the legendary buckler can be easily picked up off the floor, but good luck finding mephitic cloud in a book early on. [This could also be taken as a reason to add more to both caster and melee backgrounds, although that would break the early game...]