“ I've never been happy that almost every player picks long sword and greatsword, so I made a special chart to make them more unique. I use this in OSR and Pathfinder. I use 20 only as crit threat(Pathfinder speak),double damage.
dagger +2 to hit, D4 damage
short sword +1 to hit, d6 damage
long sword, threatens critical(see below) on 19-20, D8 damage
battle axe, ignores one Damage resistance( some monsters have resistance to damage in the form of knocks damage off before you do actual damage)(scale at higher L?) D8 damage
Mace, 0ne damage on a miss(Scalable?) D8 damage (Ok , should prob only be vrs Metal armor but not looking for that kind of complexity)
spear D6 damage, d12 damage vrs large creatures
great sword 2d6 damage
military pick d6 damage, x3 damage( triple dice damage) on crit(20)
great axe D10 damage, +3 to confirm crit ( in pathfinder if you roll a 20 you then reroll your attack and if you hit the targets AC, you get a critical multiplier)
quarterstaff(2 handed) D6 damage +1 bonus to AC (to the better)
Etc.”
“ Rain slowly builds, thunder and lightning continue to roll in. Road muddies, horse/wagon getting stuck in the mud. Thunder strikes coinciding with a deep hole a horse just walked in, horse panics, breaks its leg (maybe just sprain?). Horse is decompacitated and the rain just went from pouring to an all out monsoon. Shelter needs to be found, horse needs to be taken care of, covered in mud, add the posibility of items being lost to the confusion with the wind and dealing with spooked animals.”
“ In a long-lost age, a party of adventurers are frozen into stone by the stare of some gorgon-like creature. An unscrupulous rogue, coming across the frozen party several centuries later, decides to haul off two of the statues to decorate his den. Upon his death, an artisan friend of his claims a statue and sells it to a rich merchant, passing it off as his own work. Years later, the merchant gilds the statue in bronze and re-sells it at a much higher price. After passing through the art markets for many decades, the statue ends up in the hallways of a mage academy. Imagine the chaos and confusion when a young mage's spell happens to break the curse of stone, returning the adventurer to life several centuries after his petrification! Is he interrogated by historians? Driven mad by the change of times? Or does he set off on a quest to find and liberate his other frozen party-members?”