If an opponent is unarmored a staff would do just fine offensivly. Give 'em a concussion, shatter their bones, give em the ol' staff-in-groin. It's almost as good as football-in-groin. Unless Accursed Lands has a cup slot, which after hearing all these semi-ads for it i'm almost convinced it would.

As I said before, I've implemented this approach in the past (for a now long-gone mud). Picking something up would put it into one of your hands, from where it could be worn (weapons would also be worn - you'd strap them to one of nine possible location from where they could later be drawn).

The problem is it was very unwieldy to use, so I started tweaking it to make it more usable - the then-redundant "inventory" command was modified to list the content of all containers you were wearing (trouser/jacket pockets, backpack/s, pouch/es, etc), and various other commands were adjusted to access those locations directly (eg you could eat food or drink from flasks without having to get them out of your backpack and pocket each time).

The end result was that I spent a large amount of time and effort developing a system which added unnecessary realism at the expense of gameplay. I realised that at the end of the day, it's easier just to assume that your inventory represents the stuff in your backpack and pockets, and not bother going too much into specifics.

That is indeed the system we use - the inventory command becoming similar to the default 'eq' command.  

There are many workarounds with this - for example selling containers holding many similar items instead of selling each item one by one, a simple 'empty' or 'fill' command to manipulate many items at once.  It can of course get quite frustrating at times, and so it better used in a more rp focused mud, or one that uses many other realistic features.  On the other hand, if this feature was used on a mud where mobs drop many items and the whole premise of the game is too kill as many creatures as possible, then it would be a pointless and infuriating system (I would hate to 'get all from corpse;put all in pack' a couple of times per corpse).  

I do see your point about realism compromising gameplay, but think in some cases it can enhance gameplay (for example every item being useable as a weapon).  Saying that, such a system does take a lot of time and effort and if I were to create my own mud, I doubt I would even consider to implement this for that reason.  

If an opponent is unarmored, any long object would do fine offensively - you'd just have to be more skilled in using it than your opponent is with his weapon.    

Trying to get back on the original topic, types of weapons really would depend on the type of of combat - of the top of my head I can't think of many wars (pre explosives and bullets) that use much more than swords, axes, daggers, pikes, maces in melee combat (unless you have the peasants uprising with their pitch forks and such).