Reposted from the old forum.
Melee attacks with daggers can use either a heroes melee trait, or their ranged trait. ie. Ranged heroes can use daggers (of whatever treasure level) as adeptly as they can bows.
Makes a degree of thematic sense, based on the large proportion of ranged heroes wielding daggers in their pictures, and gives a much needed boost to both ranged heroes , and also to daggers. Consider and accept/reject at your leisure .
Now, this sparked off quite a heated debate last time as to whether it was a, realistic and b, remotely useful. I couldn't care less whether it's realistic. As to whether it's useful, my reasoning:
-I generally like my house rules to be simple and not to affect things much. This doesn't. That's a good thing.
- Ranged weapons are the slowest to convert surges to damage. Especially in RtL. At copper level the two surges=1 damage is frustrating to a hero with multiple ranged trait upgrades. With 4 black dice, the knuckle dagger looks better than the copper bow at close range.
-There's better odds of getting a useful treasure. A silver dagger is always better than a copper ranged weapon.
- Some monsters have enough armour to ignore most ranged weapons. At least with a dagger you can get a bleed.... (doesn't help this house-rule, but another reason a ranged hero might want to carry one)
-Feats.... There are a lot of ranged heroes with one fighting skill. If you pick sweep or follow through.... a dagger might be worth that 25 gold.