While playing in my solo OSE game I decided I was going to make some changes to the weapons in the game, which is compatible with both OSE and B/X. The core rules have all weapons doing a d6 damage, which I think works well but it's more fun to get to roll the different polyhedral dice. I think that's one of the places D&D originally introduced power creep with polearms doing a d10, and then trying to find ways to inflate character hit points to compensate ever since.
It never made much sense to me that a spear would do d6 damage but add a small hook and suddenly it was doing d10 damage. Similarly swords should be back at the d6 baseline unless being used in two hands, and spears should be much closer to polearms.
I removed the 'slow' quality from weapons. That was added to help balance out the high damage they gave certain weapons, which now isn't necessary with the maximum damage reduced to d8. In it's place I'm adding a 'reach' quality which gives the initiative to someone with a longer weapon.
Finally, I made some adjustments to what kind of weapons halflings and goblins can wield. This makes more sense thematically as well as reducing the damage output of a common low level monster which helps with the problem of 1st-level character survivability without inflating all the numbers like we see in later editions. I think biggest change here is a 3 foot character can't use bows the way larger characters can. They can still use slings, which I like for the David and Goliath quality it encourages. I might let a PC discover a custom made "Tiny Bow" which uses the same stats as a sling, but I don't think a character who is 3 feet tall could use a 4-6 foot tall bow and get enough draw length to fire arrows at the same range for the same amounts of damage as other PCs.
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