I'm sure people have been coming up with ideas for warrior skillsets since... well, since forever. But I have a few ideas, some which are vague and probably near-impossible to ever make a reality, and some which I think would just be neat.

To begin with... A trophy system.
The way I envision this working is you buy a trophy belt (made by either tailors or forgers, although I guess forgers would fit in better). This belt can be worn outside normal clothing, similar to an ordinary belt. However, it can store up to ten ears/scalps/identifying components. While in the same room as someone with a trophy belt, VIEW JOE'S TROPHIES (or along those lines) would show you the trophies he is most proud of. For extra detail, you could VIEW JOE'S TROPHIES 1-10, and see where they came from. I'm not sure how it'd come off, though, since you don't actually have to have killed someone to have their ear.

Second off - flashy duels!.
This is kind of involved, so bear with me. Once someone gets to a certain level in Knighthood, or their chosen specialisation, they can inititiate a duel with someone - similar to psychic combat, in a sense. Probably closer to a debate, though. Anyway, this duel (if accepted) consists of a certain number of rounds (say, 5). Each person selects their action for each round before the duel begins - and then each round is played out. So, for example, if some of the duel actions were (off the top of my head) Flash (which tries to reflect sunlight into the eyes of your opponent), Riposte, Lunge, Feint, etc... So there's a kind of complex Rock Paper Scissor system. So a sample duel could go something like

Duellist 1 inputs his five moves as Flash, Riposte, Lunge, Lunge, Feint.
Duellist 2 inputs his five moves as Lunge, Feint, Riposte, Flash, Feint.
Then the duel begins... round one goes to duellist 2 (since he's lunging, Flash probably wouldn't put him off that much), round two to duellist 2 (the feint catches duellist 1 off guard), round three is a draw (the lunge strikes duellist 2, but he gets off a riposte), round four to duellist 1, and round 5 is a draw.

Take the final score, and Duellist 2 comes out the victor, 2-1. What victory would mean, exactly, I'm not sure. Maybe a loss of ego, maybe nothing at all, maybe it could be used as a show of skill (higher skill levels get more actions to choose from)... Still, you see where I'm coming from.

And finally... different blade types
I know I'll probably pick up a lot of flak for this, but what if very highly skilled forgers could make different blade types? For example, a klangaxe with a serrated edge, or a razor-honed rapier. The upshot of this would be adding a few more afflictions to the warrior archetype. For example, once a warrior gains the skill SERRATION (or whatever it's called), s/he can use serrated weapons, which have a slight chance of getting stuck in their opponent (yes, it's a little gruesome), and then giving an affliction depending on how long the blade is in there and how wounded the area in question is when the seratee pulls the axe out. The tradeoff for this could be something like less damage, less precision, or maybe even losing their hold on the axe (unequipping it, maybe?). On the flip side, a weapon could be sharpened to a razor's edge, increasing the chance of successful slice afflictions... at the cost of speed (even a skilled warrior would want to be careful swinging something that sharp around), and perhaps eventually the weapon would dull (after, say, 50 hits) and have to be resharpened by a skilled forger. The same thing could be implemented for bludgeons, too - spiked clubs, or reinforced heads, or something along that line, to achieve a similar affect.

Let me know what you think - even if it's that I'm wasting my time with these, heh.

For one thing, it's admirable that you took the time to come up with these, let alone putting them down into writing.

As for your suggestions:

trophy belt- as you have said, these "trophies" are easy to come by and don't prove anything. It might be a nice decoration for those who like to travel with their foe's innerds, eyeballs and limbs... but not much beyond that.

The duel system is nice, issue is, why should a knight to knight warfare should be any different?. If someone is more skilled, he should enjoy more versitility and more powerful manuvers at least in my opinion.

lastly, the blade idea... cool one, -very hard- to implement I believe... and I doubt its worth -so much- time. As for the dulling of the blade... don't go there. 50 swings is nothing, and if you end up needing a forger every 10 minutes well... it will become a true annoyance. perhaps some dullness over time... , but only once in a pretty long while or else it will just be more of an annoyance than anything else.


cheers

I really like the duelling idea. That's a nice little touch.

The trophy belt really would just be an extra piece of decoration. Unless you had the might to back up your claims, that is...

The duelling system I thought might be just a fun thing to do. Maybe if there was a reward for winning, like a duelling rankings system, or city/guild/clan sponsored duelling events with a prize of some sort... Hm. I had originally thought it might have a... form system, if that makes sense. As in, as your skill increased, you'd get more set actions - like Boar, Snake, Mountain... Maybe a little more elegant in terms of description. Each action is weak to other actions, neutral to yet more actions, and strong against certain actions. I know, it sounds a lot like the debating system, but as an Orclach Ur'Guard, I have 8 Charisma. Thus, debating is a little difficult, so I thought it'd be fun to have a warrior equivalent. Especially a warrior equivalent that looked cool.

As for the blades... Yeah, I kind of thought when I first started off that it'd be the vaguest, most difficult to implement, and in terms of work-usefuleness, probably the worst.

Trophy belts (WHICH SHOULD BE MADE BY TAILORS, NOT FORGERS, DAMMIT, BECAUSE TAILORS ALREADY MAKE BELTS, DON'T BE SILLY) are a good idea, really, even if a bit gruesome. Sure the trophies are easy to come by, but some would show a little bit of status (Murphy's ear, Amaru's scalp, Kalo's tongue).

Duels shouldn't be specialized combat; I say two warriors with the same specialization should be able to start a duel. Duels would be limited, honourable combat; defenses would all be stripped, using any non-knighthood skill would get you kicked out of the duel, and similarly, using any affliction (Besides wounding, hacking off limbs, and the such) would get you kicked off. The duel could have different victory conditions (First wound, first deep wound, half health, death, yielding, first hacked off body part...) and curing and healing would be forbidden. It would be just two warriors, without any outside artifices, duking it out with weapons.

Different blade types would be nice. Spiked maces would cause more piercing damage but be slower, serrated swords would cause more bleeding but be slower and less accurate, and so on. A way of getting the type of weapon you want, slightly customised to your own bias, would be cool.

All those ideas are intresting and nice... but I am gonna just hope they fix us before adding things like that in.

Heh, the only reason I thought forgers is because forgers make scabbards. Which, in reality, tend not to have much to do with a forge. Well, most scabbards don't. Some. A few. One or two. Eh. You know what I mean. Certainly, the problem is verifying the trophies on the belt. Who knows, it could even start a market for these things (which is a little disturbing, if you think about it). I suppose in the end, as Narses said, it'd just be a new type of decoration.

I guess I thought the duelling thing would be less about actual combat and more about a display of combat-related skills. If it was based on first strike, first blood, etc... Well, up until a certain level of combat/knighthood, it's simply too easy to hit someone. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of having a swing/parry thing involving more than just good reflexes. Not allowing curing would be a brilliant way to compare pure warrior skill, although some specific skills wouldn't work - ones that inhibit movement, for example. I guess in the end, though, it comes down to either an RPS system, or a modification of the current sparring system without curing. I can't really think of middle ground, which is kind of the ideal I had in mind, unless we go back to the forms idea. Which would really unbalance the knighthood skillset, in terms of abilities. I guess the whole idea might be just too unwieldy.

The... prompting, I guess, for the blade types idea was the debate that's going on about the balance between one- and two-handed weapons skills. So I thought it'd be nice to have different ways to afflict that *everyone* in knighthood would get, not just a specific weapon type. So if there was a variety of different blade types that could be added to a weapon, we'd get both broader affliction abilities, *and* the option to specialise even further - if you see what I mean. If possible, it'd be great to have some mental afflictions, rather than just purely physical ones. Maybe a spiked or serrated weapon could be brandished to cause fear. Something along those lines. Or maybe you could have hollowbladed (there's a niche in the blade for holding poisons) 2-handed weapons that can afflict with two venoms at once, but suffer a harsh reduction in stats across the board. I guess there are a lot of problems with this concept - the two that come to mind are the difficulties involved in balancing it, both within and outside of the Knighthood skillset, and actually implementing it, since it'd involve drastic changes to both knighthood and forging.