Revamping melee weapons:

1. Slashing (swords, axes) and blunt weapons (maces, flails) deal about the same base damage.
2. Swords’ main advantage is that they have a high chance of inflicting bleeding. Blunt weapons have a very low bleed chance but armor reduces their damage a lot less.
3. Bleeding steadily decreases the HP of the bleeding creature. It’s debated whether this should remove a few HP per turn (which would require increasing the HP of everything by a factor of 10 or so) or whether there should be a random chance (around 10%) of losing 1 HP on a given turn. (Possibly an algorithm that makes a monster lose 1 HP on one turn in every 10 - but the exact turn of HP loss isn’t predictable. For instance, if hash(monster id + (turns / 10)) % 10 == turns % 10, lose HP due to bleeding on this turn.)
4. Certain monsters are immune to bleeding, notably undead, golems, elementals, and others that don’t have vitals of any sort. These tend to be better killed with blunt weapons.
5. Bleeding can be fixed (or at least stanched) with bandages. Cloth items can be torn up to make bandages.