1) A com­bat­ant is at a sub opti­mal range with respect to her oppo­nent. The rules state that “This penalty holds until the shorter weapon makes a dam­ag­ing strike”. My ques­tion hinges on the word dam­ag­ing. Am I to under­stand that a suf­fi­ciency of armor and brawn will cause a suc­cess­ful blow to not only fail to do dam­age but also cause the suc­cess­ful attacker to remain at her oppo­nents opti­mal range?

2) Is there a mechanic for grab­bing an oppo­nents weapon? Surely the hafts of spears and pole arms were sub­ject to this in the chaos of bat­tle. And in fic­tion at least many a strug­gle has hinged on two com­bat­ants strug­gling to win con­trol of a sin­gle weapon. Not to men­tion the count­less depic­tions of heroes grasp­ing the blades of swords in a act of sin­gu­lar will before dra­mat­i­cally ris­ing from their seem­ingly inevitable doom to strike down their attacker.

I’ll give it a try.

1) It’s a bit vague, indeed. But my under­stand­ing is that a suc­cess­ful blow can also be one that doesn’t deal dam­age. So ins this case the fighter with the shorter weapon is at his opti­mal range — if his suc­cess­ful blow deals dam­age or not.

2) There is no such rule AFAIK. You use the Grap­pling maneu­ver for unarmed defences against weapons. But there is no option pre­sented to dis­arm the oppo­nent. You can house­rule it. Maybe, if the wrestler achieves a Hold on the weapon (which shouldn’t be too easy) you can ask for an opposed wrestling-​check. The win­ner takes the weapon.

1) I would prob­a­bly agree with Aghori here, I would say range switches sim­ply when you land a blow. How­ever, one might also argue that range should switch when the impact rat­ing exceeds the AV alone, but not nec­es­sar­ily BN/​2.

2) You could make grap­pling work, sure, but I’d say the Bind & Strike manoeu­vre is what you’re look­ing for. I’d use ATN 6 (same as a buck­ler) for such.