merkir,
The two weapons you talk about (IIRC) require a special race and background to play to use the weapons effectively. This may have a big impact on your SW game and the players PC.
Your comment is a common one that I have seen quite a bit of and the solutions to the problem range all over the spectrum. Such as disallowing the weapon to it ok with taking specific skills and background to o'well I guess I will let the player get away with one this time.
You might do a search on the SW archives to see what other people have done in the past as well as open a topic there for some more in depth advice.
MDC
Understood, but when a GM is overseeing 5 players creating their PC's, handling literally a dozen simultaneous issues/questions from players as they go through the process, the last thing you would expect is for the GM to say, "no you can't have that wepon until I check it's balanced". How would the GM even know it's unbalanced? Is the GM expected to look up the stats for every weapon as the player chooses it?
In short, GMs (and Players) should be forgiven for expecting that core rulebook weapons are at least somewhat balanced. Surely we're not expected to assume every rule or item is unbalanced until we personally vet it?
Also fyi, this player came to the character creation session wanting to be a Duranaki (and yes, this is precisely the race he must be to use kynacs) and with a two page detailed background, goals, personality, character portrait - the lot. Pretty sad when the player puts in so many hours of effort only to have the GM say, "no you can't have that weapon".
I'm just fortunate that even the player himself agreed that the weapon is ridiculously unbalanced, and we've house-ruled something more appropriate.
For those that are interested, I kept the range at 150' but increased the penalties. Throwing a "rapier" 150' is quite a feat, but one I wanted to allow for late game "flavour".
Constructively, I hope nothing like this gets into RMU. By all means make fantasy weapons more powerful, but not
this powerful. Please allow GMs to assume that rules and items from the core rulebook are at least somewhat balanced.