On 22Jun2020 0616, James Catchpole - jlcatchpole at googlemail.com (via
tml list) wrote:

Btw, I also agree entirely about the weapon skills - that always seemed
a bit weird to me. You can have a character who is a crack shot with a
pistol but is barely competent with a revolver?! Or one who is a trained
sniper with a rifle, but struggles with a carbine... I'm not sure what
the idea here was, maybe they wanted to make players pick favourite
weapons and stick with them?

I imagine it was exactly that. The original weapons are fairly broad,
especially the melee ones, so I think they wanted 'the swordsman' to be
different from 'the cutlass swinging marine'. In their source material a
great many characters had a signature weapon type, but often not a
singular weapon (for example, Dumarest uses a knife, but he goes through
a lot of them in his adventures). It also means that specialisation vs a
broader range of weapon skills is a trade-off, with good and bad points
for both options.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>