But because Agility is objectively the better stat...
Ah-ha! So the issue might be that Agility is used for a lot of other things, except combat, while strength is not.
You also give up any ability to make ranged attacks
Both archery and throwing weapons scale with strength.
and if str only works on big weapons, you can't use concealed weapons at all
This idea of 'big weapons need strength' just penalizes melee users.
There are more weapons and attacks that would make sense if they are linked to Strength. Fist fighting, wrestling, karate, knucks, clubs, saps are all easy to 'conceal' but could still be linked to Strength...
Combat axes are DV5 as opposed to a Katana's DV4.
Today an agile (but maybe not very strong) elf will deal more damage with a combat axe compared to a strong (but maybe not very agile) troll. The elf would also deal more damage with the combat axe than with a katana.
If the axe is linked to strength instead then it would deal more damage in the hands of the troll than in the hands of the elf, but the elf would still deal more damage than the troll if they both used a katana.
Not sure about you, but I think this feel more 'realistic' than treating the combat axe as a 'pseudo-mono-whip'.
And dual-investing into agility and strength means you may as well use unarmed, which scales on strength anyway...
Not if unarmed have a base DV of 2.
But viability and game balance do matter, and slapping a str requirement onto weapons without fixing why strength is not attractive isn't useful.
But it could be useful if strength was attractive enough on its own, yes?
So what about this suggestion:
Rolling Strength into Body would be a more elegant solution to melee MAD than cutting it out of melee damage, yet I'm the first one here to propose it.
OK, so this change is a little bigger (as it will have an impact on the metatype priority table and list of augmentations etc), but it
does solve the whole issue with the attribute not being as attractive outside of combat when compared to agility ;-)
You could have a focus on Robustness (or whatever the combined Strength/Body attribute would be called) to take a lot of beating
and to deal a lot of damage with a combat axe (big slow troll) or you could have a focus on Agility to be great at sneaking
and deal a lot of damage with a katana (small agile elf).
As primary 'muscle' of the team you would probably put more or less focus on both attributes (no matter if you even have the Close Combat skill or not).
Ya. I like SR6 much more than 5 despite it's many shortcomings.
Also i think the relative uselessness of str and the insane levels of unarmed damage kind of work together. In the sense that, while it stretches my suspension of disbelief, the only reason to buff str past 2 or 3 is unarmed damage.
Agreed.
I guess that, before I go too deep into this discussion :-), I should mention that I am actually fine with the rules as they are and that strength is mostly an attribute you don't have to focus on, unless you go unarmed combat, archery, throwing.
But at the same time I find root causes and fix problems for a living and I like the direction where this discussion is going so I would like to spend some time exploring the topic.