The equipping isn't so bad if you think of them like hand wraps or something similar to that. I've got my own mod with unarmed weapons, all of them variations of handwraps with different "studs" (iron, steel, orcish, etc.) that bestow extra damage ability. This allows things like sharpening (of the studs) and the need for equipping the item to make a little more sense.

It is pretty bad ass to be able to flame punch the crap out of people though...so even if thinking of them as hand wraps or fist packs or something doesn't work for you, the payoff is much larger than the amount that this breaks the immersion.

Would it be possible to combine these unarmed weapons with the existing gauntlets in the game by scripting or such? Like, if your hands are empty but you are wearing Steel Gauntlets, a Steel Gauntlets item with zero weight will be added to your weapon category that can be upgraded and enchanted separately from the armor version (so your gauntlets can have both an armor and attack rating and be enchanted twice). Make it invisible so you aren't shown wearing two pairs of gauntlets.

It might be a little tricky having to equip the gauntlets as armor to be able to interact with the weapon version, but I can't really think of a better way to handle it and it would be awfully convenient and realistic to be able to use a good pair of gauntlets for both offensive and defensive purposes. And less silly than equipping brass knuckles or hand wraps over your metal gauntlets.

It could be done easily enough with scripting if the new system is anything like Oblivion.

The issues I see with this is the fact that even when the gauntlets are equipped the player would still have to equip the "weapon" version manually to avoid the frustration of having it automatically swap out your current weapon for your fists. I also think some character types wouldn't use gauntlets, so things like hand wraps, brass knuckles, etc. are still a viable and reasonable way of dealing with this. Especially if you can use both methods without much trouble.

You will probably be able to write a script once the CK is out that automatically equips, say, the last "fist" weapon you'd had equipped when you equip no weapons.

It may be more complicated than that, even. Unarmed attacks don't get killmoves unless you have both hands empty. Subsequently, unarmed weapons don't get kill moves unless they take up both hands. Which means that just unequipping one of your hands won't let you use any unarmed weapon effects. In the end it's probably simpler to just have an unarmed "weapon" that you assign to one of your hotkeys (especially since equipping a weapon is much quicker and easier than unequipping one).

Although I believe it would be possible to write a script that equips your unarmed weapon for you if you are found to not be wielding anything.

@Jupiah: it is possible to make a script that detects if you have any gloves in your inventory and gives you the corresponding unarmed weapon if you don't have it already. Of course, this wouldn't work dynamically with any new gloves modders make.

Considering how much more powerful Papyrus is supposed to be compared to Obliviscript, I'd expect it to be possible to do that without hard-coding things. Base it on the material/gold value/armor rating, perhaps. Worst case scenario, sixy ought to make that available pretty quickly, I expect.

sixy

Oh how I hope Papyrus is awesome.

Your right.

I'd like to apologize to Azureal and everyone else for being rude and seemingly dismissive of this discovery and it's potential as that was certainly not my intent.

Water under the bridge! =)

So messing with this some more, I've messed around with some conditions and decided that since Khajit "slash" with their claws, a hand wrap would do no good for them, so messing with the conditions, I created a Khajit only enchantable unarmed weapon as well as my fist wraps. I'll upload the whole deal tomorrow.

How do you know if the actor is attacking ?!
Great mod anyway