Weapons Proposal: Rope Dart, Kusari-gama

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I’d like to see these weapons added to the game. They should be easy to craft, and be a little different from the normal wooden spear/nail board/javelin early-game weaponry.

The rope dart, or Sheng Biao is simply a metal blade attached to a rope. It’s intended to be swung around and around to stab targets, entangle them, or thrown and retrieved by pulling on the rope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_dart

Crafting:
1x Rope (6ft)
1x Blade or Crossbow Bolt or Spike or Bee Sting or Wasp Sting

Primary Skill: Piercing Weapons
Difficulty 2

Stats:
Volume 2, Weight 5, Pierce 20, Moves 101, Tohit bonus +3
+Grab + Sweep Attack +Feint

The Kusari-Gama is a brutal-looking Japanese weapon, a sickle attached to a chain with a weight at the end. The chain end is intended to be thrown at a target to distract or entangle, so that the user can attack with the sickle more easily. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kusari_gama

Crafting:
1x Steel Chain
1x Lump of Steel
1x Blade

Welder(?)

Primary Skill: Slashing Weapons
Secondary Skill: Mechanics
Difficulty 4

Stats:
Volume 5, Weight 9, Bash 15, Cut 9, Moves 101, Tohit bonus +3
+Grab +Sweep attack +Feint +Weak block

Both of these could be added to mansion/pawn shop loot as well as museum-piece weapons. The special ability of these would be that a character should be able to retrieve these when thrown if still within a certain distance, representing pulling on the rope/chain. How this could be implemented, I do not know. I’m not a code monkey, after all. A throwing weapon that you can always retrieve would be undeniably useful, however.

2

Always wanted to see the sickle and weight ingame.
Kusari-gama should have a higher cut rating and a slightly lower bash rating though I think.

12 bash, 16 cut, moves 80~90, as the sickle would be a lightweight weapon and very easy to attack with.

1x Steel chain,
4x chunk of steel, OR 2x lump of steel (need some for the sickle handle)
1x blade OR 1x steak knife OR 1x combat knife. (As it is, blades are only found in lawnmowers and pretty hard to come by.)
50x duct tape OR 1 fur pelt (again for the handle grip.)

Tools… If it’s not using the blacksmithing system I’d suggest hammer + welder.
Swap mechanics with fabrication as well, but aside from that, everything else looks great, well done.

[edit] hang on, I forgot about +Grab. It gives a free attack right? so moves 101 should be just about fine to reflect the attack speed, my bad.

3

Whenever I make things, I usually err on the side of not powerful enough. I used the Steel Chain item as a guide.

Also, pretty sure you can dissassemble a knife into a Blade, or construct them out of 2 lumps of steel if I remember correctly.

4

The main thing that gives me pause with these is that they are in reality incredibly difficult to use.
With a club/sword/axe/knife/etc you pretty much pick it up and can use it right off the bat. Sure you might not be good with it, but bashing/stabbing/cutting is a fairly straightforward affair.
The dart, and similar things is a completely different beast, the effectiveness is going to be approximately 0 without weeks, if not months of training. The kusari-gama is somewhat in between as the sickle portion is straightforward, but to use any of the chain techniques you need to really know what you’re doing, otherwise it’s just a sickle with a chain dragging around behind you.

I’m not against including it at all, but it needs to handle this weirdness. On the other hand this should be sorted out by the upcoming melee rewrite anyway.

5

the dart and rope usage would throw me I admit-- something like a cross between a sling and a flail or morningstar… swing it really fast and then let go-- hoping it would fly in a direction to hit an enemy. That’d certainly be hard without a lot of training or practice.

sickle n’chain is pretty simple by comparison-- swing chain, throw weight. The weight would actually make it easier to control as you’d have a better grasp of the momentum and you’d be able to do it at reasonably slow speeds as you’re not really aiming for fatal damage with it (although you could certainly clock someone a good one.) Wrap weight and chain around enemy limb or weapon. then drag them in and finish off the immobilized prey with the sickle. Might take a while to get it right, but it’s certainly intuitive.

6

So I’d say a minimum skill requirement for weapons would be nice. So you’d need melee 5 to use a rope dart.
Possibly a minimum skill definable for certain special attacks, so that you can use the Kusari-Gama from the get-go, but only as a sickle. You’d need melee 5 before you get any special attacks using the weighted rope.
Roughly analogous to the minimum skill needed for certain crafting recipes.

7

Yea, something like that sounds reasonable.