A guy who goes by “Confused Jackal Mage” on various d20 boards put together a handy system for determining the stats/handedness/etc. of weapon types in d20. Is your 1d4 one-handed simple weapon too weak? Is your 2d8 two-handed exotic weapon too good? This will tell you.
It’s simple and quite effective, and I thought it deserves more attention, so here it is.
Sean K Reynolds 
We used this (or something like it) for our now-deceased Iron Heroes PBMB games. CJM and I were players and A’Koss and the old mysterious bike in the corner were GMs. I liked it a lot. We got to create custom weapons. My executioner had a pair of short-ranged (10′) skulls with spikes in them attached to chains that, after being fired once, became normal melee weapons.
Ah yes, I miss my hookbrand…
Ah yes, I saw something very like this a while ago. It worked more simply as follows:
A simple weapon has one point, a martial has two, and an exotic weapon has three. One point buys a weapon which is 1d4 if light, 1d6 if one-handed, 1d8 if two-handed, and 1d6/1d6 if double weapon. Increased damage die (1d6, 1d8, 2d6, or 1d8/1d8) is one point, and special abilities (reach, increased threat range) are one point.
Thanks for the info! I might find it useful for my own campaign setting!
This is gorgeous! Thanks a ton, you just saved me a bunch of work balancing some special gremlin and elven weapons!
Thanks!
Wow, Sean, thanks for the plug. Those rules are fairly old now, so I’m a little surprised you’ve never seen them, but I know you don’t hit Monte’s board much where most of my pimping goes on. ^_^
It’s really to y’all’s credit that the weapon rules work as well as they do. Almost all weapons conform to a simple, consistent structure that can be divined with nothing more than a bit of logic. Frex, Iron Heroes’ weapon system is much less consistent. I simply can’t pin down an accurate point breakdown for the polearms, which makes me suspect that there isn’t one. >_<
~Confused Jackal Mage