The primary difference between choosing a one-handed weapon and a two-handed weapon is you can choose to turn up to two offensive dice into block dice. You can keep all four as offensive dice by using a two-hander, turn one into a block die by using a one-hander and a parrying dagger, or fully invest an entire two into block dice by using a shield. Fundamentally, this means reducing your damage output to increase your survivability.

But, is that trade-off really worth it? Let's do the math using this handy dandy anydice function.


Here's the statistics of the two weapon choices.
The deflection rate is how often the attack will do 0 damage - the shield and armor have done their job.
The average damage is, of course, how much damage the average attack will do.
The standard deviation, if I remember going over statistics in middle school properly, tells us about the average between the average and the extremes.
The maximum damage is the maximum amount of damage that attack can do.
While not perfectly composed, it should get the information across. It's the best I can do without making some sort of infographic.

If we go over the results, we'll quickly see some very important trends.

• One-handed weapons have a higher deflection rate against light armor than two-handed do against heavy armor and a shield. (11.78% deflection rate for two-handers against the best defense, vs 16.20% for one-handers against the worst defense )
• One-handed weapons will deal no damage against another warrior in heavy armor and a shield 80% of the time. (wet noodle fights) But they also deflect over 50% of the time against someone with heavy armor and no shield, like a two-handed sword user.
• Two-handed weapons deal a significant amount of damage very reliably - they hardly ever deflect, even against full tanks. Additionally, their average attack will obliterate any limb they hit against a lightly armored foe.

From this we can tell that:

Sword and shield "lose" vs Sword and shield
Two-handers win vs Sword and shield
Two-handers "win" vs Two-handers

Players who pick sword and shield cripple their entire damage output, all for the benefit of being able to deflect attacks from one of the weakest weapons in the game, which just happens to be what they chose. The bright side is they can probably survive being attacked by ten one-handed weapon users! That's worth being unable to hurt anyone who isn't naked, right? Well, probably not.
Meanwhile, two-handed weapon users are cleaving enemies in half in a single swing. Not only that, but they rarely take damage, since not only do half the one handed attacks directed at them miss, but things around them seem to be dead most of the time.

Okay, I think I've beaten the dead horse into submission at this point. Two-handers are objectively better, since they let you largely ignore the penalties of shields, and deal massive damage to all who oppose you, while still being tanky with your armor. And I, personally, think it is unfair to offer a player a starting option that is objectively worse than another. So then, what do we do about it?

Most of the solutions I can think of involve adding an additional attack die. While the defensive dice are split into two to add diversity, the offensive dice are still all the same. We need to change this if we want to balance the damage of two-handed weapons.

Here's an example of one possible solution.

Right now all of the offensive dice are compared against an opponent's shield, and then compared against armor. What we can do is split them up, so some offensive dice only apply if the weapon gets past the shield. This effectively makes that weapon weak to shields, but armor penetrating. While perhaps not the implementation of choice, this is an example of a treatment two-handed weapons desperately need.

If we went along with this example, we'd split offensive dice into two pools, perhaps called control and power dice. Most weapons would completely transfer into the control category, being light and easy to control. Two-handed weapons would be a different story however - instead of getting 4 control dice, they'd get only 2 control dice, like one-handed weapons. The other 2 would be changed into power die, which only apply if the attack makes it past the shield. Here's how this approach would change the statistics.



As you can see, the deflection rate has spiked over 5 times what it was before. Additionally, the average damage more than halved. The maximum damage is still high, so a two-handed weapon user can still get a lucky shot in, but that possibility is statistically insignificant.

Parrying daggers in this system could still be an inbetween step, adding a power die to a one-handed weapon, but only giving one block die. They could, however, add an additional control die instead of a power die! This might make them a bit powerful, but would make them a counter to shield users, introducing something resembling a rock-paper-scissors balance in the physical weapon combat.

Anyway, this would make two-handed weapons have some kind of pronounced weakness, which they sorely need. It could even be done differently - you could say that the massive momentum behind a two-handed weapon lets it knock shields out of the way, and in fact the best defense is being lightly armored so you can dodge out of the way. That would make two-handed weapons more of a dedicated tankbusting weapon. The important thing is that they shouldn't be powerful across the board, against all armor types.

One-handed weapons might also need some kind of buff overall?