Something has always bugged me a little about Rolemaster's weapon skills. I.e. the characters tend to be locked in to one weapon choice, especially if you have a fairly high-power (or in my case, insane-power) party. This is a bit of a downer, considering one of the fun spoils in sci-fi is Nicking People's Cool Guns. It does fall down a bit when you realise you can't actually use them very well.
(We're currently playing, by the way, what amounts to basically RM2/RMC/SM2 characters with RMFRP/SM:P combat rules and tables.) Currently, I fudge the weapon costs a bit, so that the penultimate weapon cost becomes the cost for all weapon catergories but the final one (instead of the final one for everyhting after category 5, a bit like RM VI's (RM VII's?) unified skill system did), giving everyone more options, and implementing a similar skill system that basically gives you half skill ranks for similar weapons in a category.
But it's still not that helpful, as half skill ranks is not all that high the level we play at, and may as well be useless.
What I would like to do is compact the weapon skills a bit more, so the PCs will get more flexibility for their DP.
I bought RMC Combat Companion specifically to have a look at weapons styles and to see if that would help. It might - a bit - but at the cost of pumping everyone's DP costs up, not that helpful (even after the disturbing task of trying to revise the characters!) especially for the characters with mid-to-high DP costs.
Does anyone have any suggestions about how I might tackle the situation?
I'm not so bothered about fixing melee weapons (I'm happy to accept they require a lot more effort to use different types), but especially with modern (plus!) weapons. Which are in theory 'easier' to adapt to. As a lay...er...Lich - and correct me if I'm wrong - I would hazard a guess there's much less difference between an AK-47 and a SA-80 than between, say a gladius and a longsword. Whether an AK-47 bears much resemblence to a Stormtrooper-One Blaster rifle is anybody's guess, though I would postulate that since they're used much the same way (there's not so much shooting 'styles' as their are weapon styles, no?) that they'd be perhaps more similar than I've been giving them credit for (i.e 2H projectile vrs 2H energy).
With this thought in mind (and perhaps a liberal dash of dramatic lisense even if it's totally off-mark!), a few thoughts occur.
1) Compact the weapon catergories themselves a bit more, from the current 1HE, 1HC, bows, thrown, 2H, polearm, 1H Proj, 2H Proj, Support Proj, 1H energy, 2H energy, Sup energy to something smaller (well, not the melee weapons) say, (1H modern, 2H modern, Support modern).
2) Take a leaf out of RM FRP and make the PCs develop weapon skills by catergory instead of by weapon for non-primative weapons (and by narrow categories for primative).
3) Similar to the above, but instead create weapons styles whose style focus is much broader than melee/primative (say, semi-auto pistols, auto pistols, auto rifles, possibly seperating by energy and projectile as groups etc)
Does anyone have any other (better!) ideas, suggestions or comments?