Quick! Think of the last D&D campaign you played where no one used a sword! I'm going to guess that, except for a few of you who have been in an all-wizard campaign or a party of greatclub enthusiasts, you all just went "huh?" Because swords are damn-near ubiquitous in campaign worlds, just as they were in real life. There are tons of different kinds of swords, and both D&D and Pathfinder do a fairly good job of representing them. Fairly good, but not good enough. That's why I'm here.
Now, I won't go into how later splatbooks tend to start raiding the thesaurus for new swords to stat up just to fill pages.
Actually, yes, I will go into that...