Long swords get a deserved boost in BWG

The point I’m making is, fundamentally, that there are many factors that go into choosing a weapon, and how effective it is in the usual game-mechanical sense* is only one of those factors. Battlefield use is indeed irrelevant to BW, that was not at all what I was trying to suggest. Instead, I was pointing out that the most effective military weapons are not commonly carried in civilian life, either because (like pikes and laser designators) they are not effective when you’re alone, or (like assault rifles and poleaxes) for more complex reasons involving weight, social acceptability, and tradition.

Maces are actually beautiful weapons, exquisitely balanced** for what they do. It’s almost impossible to use a mace wrong. Pick one up and your hand and arm will automatically do exactly the right thing with it. If anything deserves an automatic balance die, it’s a mace. Swords, on the other hand, require all kinds of knowledge and training to use right.

The trouble with using “frequency of weapon use in duels” as a metric for weapon effectiveness is that dueling weapons weren’t chosen for simple effectiveness. They were chosen for all kinds of reasons: prestige, tradition, advantage. If we go a little later, you see a lot of duels fought with pistols, right? How come you never see duels fought with muskets? They are, after all, more effective.

To lay out my central thesis very simply, then: Sometimes people do not carry the weapon that gives them the best chance of winning a fight. Often, that’s because they would grab a rifle or a poleaxe if they were expecting a brawl/shootout, but they don’t expect big trouble and they need their hands free/don’t want to carry it/don’t want to look like a crazy man/want the prestige of a sword or pistol.

*Roughly, we could define that as “how hard does it hit, and how easy is it to hit with?”
**Note that “a balanced weapon” is not at all the same thing as “a weapon in which the center of gravity is close to the hand.” That’s one way to balance a weapon, to enhance one kind of performance. There are others.

I agree that a mace is very easy to use but it’s balanced for increased power, not in order to move it more easily. Therefor I don’t see it as subject to a balancing die which affects how you move it. Being a simple weapon that anyone can use doesn’t mean that it’s the most dangerous weapon in the hands of a highly skilled fighter either. It’s similar to unarmed combat. An untrained fighter should not be using kicks because those are hard to use well but a skilled martial artist would be worse off if he didn’t use them because he would limit himself. The more options you have, the harder you are to defend against.

As for a duel with a pistol instead of a musket, I wouldn’t say that the musket is necessarily more effective in that particular situation (not necessarily worse either though). As for the sword I wasn’t saying that it being used often was an indication that it was the best, I just said that it has an advantage through being more versatile than the other two mentioned weapons. I certainly agree with you on that weapons are chosen with more than efficiency in mind though, both in history and in my current campaign.