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[BECMI] Weapon Mastery revamp

by Andrew Theisen

I've been toying with ideas for revamping the weapon mastery system for a while, with an eye towards making it a little more streamlined and reducing the overall bonuses to attack, while still keeping the general concept of characters gaining benefits from "specializing" with particular weapons and allowing the additional "oomph!" to melee characters to keep them competitive with spellcasters in terms of combat at higher levels.

The main things I am considering are the following:

1) Reduce attack bonuses, as noted above. This has long been a houserule, whereby we halve the bonuses given (so +! at skilled to +4 at grandmaster)
2) Have the (modified) attack bonuses apply to all special effects for that weapon; ex. If the weapon currently has an effect like "disarm (save +1)" the bonus/penalty to the effect would be equivalent to the bonus of the skill mastery (but see below for special effects)
3) Eliminate the Primary/Secondary categories and just keep the primary numbers. It removes some nuance, but makes things more straightforward when determining bonuses, scaling damage, etc.
3) Either eliminate the AC bonuses from higher mastery levels, or simply make them full-round AC bonuses (as opposed to +X vs. X #attacks per round). Doing the latter makes them a little less fiddly ("how many attacks were made against me this round?") while keeping some additional benefits, but it might make it much harder to challenge PCs if their enemies can never score a hit.
4) This is the big one: change most of the Special Effects into Combat Actions instead. Some of these Combat Actions might be limited by weapon traits (ie, a sword couldn't be used to Hook an opponent), but would otherwise be usable by any character class for which that action is available. Some Special Effects would remain as such (ex. Double Damage of the dagger).

I'm going to try and draft up an outline of what the new table would look like and hopefully post it soon, but any feedback in the meanwhile would be welcome.