Heck, properly made maille is enough to stop a katana. Quality leather armor would also provide protection assuming the guy using the sword hadn’t sharpened it to stupid-sharp levels without though about the usability beyond the first person he meets.
[hr]
There was a plasma “sword” in an open source XCOM game that I really liked. It had one charge, and that charge was only ever enough to get off one strike at close range before the fuel was spent. The briefness of the usability being said, it did do an otherworldly amount of damage when used.
There is also another plasma sword I recall in an old snes game called Metal Warriors. It’s basically a short range plasma thrower that the mech nevertheless swung like a sword. When it was swung it was like swinging a fluffy whip. The game somehow managed to pull making the thing look incredibly deadly off though, probably because the designers didn’t go the fancy unrealistic route and actually gave the sword the colours of something incredibly hot. On top of this, I think it gave me the impression that such a weapon was only useable because the mech swinging it around had a butt-load of thermoarmor to protect itself from the heat that it was releasing at arms-length, and would probably be unusable to any human being without protection.
Both these iterations injected a level of creativity and reworked the concept of an energy sword, if you’re going to throw away realism and consistency for thematic purposes, at the very least don’t copy the issue outright with a bit of fluff attached to it and then call it the end of the day. There is a paradox that goes bundled together with the rule of cool, and that is if you just toss in all the things that you think is cool without any thought to the each of those things’ relation to each other, the game might not actually be so cool at the end. Expanding and creating a game isn’t as easy as playing it, and some thought has to go into the process of making the setting consistent and, on some level, believable and cohesive.
