Dual-wielding weapons: Not practical
"dual wielding" as in holding a pistol in each hand and firing both simultaneously is NOT going to be effective (I’m not saying it won’t go in, just that if it does it will be ludicrously ineffective because of pelalties). The rationale for why this is so have been well-outlined already in the thread (http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=1313.15) and I’m not going to get into it. This will probably be represented in a very high rate of accumulation of recoil if you try to do this, most likely paired with an accuracy penalty.
Likewise, wielding and attacking with two melee weapons isn’t going to have any benefit over wielding a single melee weapon in both hands, either you’re going to be able to attack faster and deal more damage with the same weapon, or you’d be able to use a larger, more damaging weapon at the same speed and much more damage per strike. Attacking with one weapon and defending with another has a completely different set of tradeoffs, and might be overall beneficial, especially if one of the items is very good at defending, like a shield.
“holding something in your off-hand” is something I want to support.
If you’re holding something in your off hand and a gun (even a small pistol) in your primary hand, you’ll have a penalty assessed due to lack of stability. Probably based on the weight/volume of the carried item, so e.g. a small flashlight or a small melee weapon might have a minimal penalty, but another pistol is relatively heavy and might cause you problems.
Along with adding support for holding items in the off-hand, we’ll get stricter about tracking how many free hands you have to perform actions, and automatically perform the actions needed E.g. if you want to light a stick of dynamite and throw it while you are wielding a gun, the actual actions performed will be:
'a’ctivate dynamite ->
put up gun, take out dynamite, take out lighter, light dynamite, put up lighter
(you end up holding dynamite (lit) in your primary hand)
't’hrow dynamite ->
throw dynamite, draw gun
You may notice this sort of thing will “waste” some time by performing unnecessary actions sometimes, for example maybe you want to light and throw several sticks of dynamite in a row, in that case you’ll want to holster the gun first to avoid triggering the item swapping stuff.
On the other hand, this buffs pisols relative to rifles or shotguns, as it’s much faster to holster/draw a pistol (especially if you have a holster)
Even for simple stuff, like opening a door, if you have both hands occupied, it will put up an item, open the door, take out the item again.
I want to stress that when this happens (which will be a while, it’s pretty invasive and complicated), we will be VERY careful to not cause disruptions to doing things simply, with the extra actions just costing in-game time. If you’re in a hurry though and need to make every second count, it will be better to think ahead about a sequence of actions and try to minimise this sort of overhead.