Moves and Combos with different weapons

If I'm making - say - an RPG, and there's a sweet move that characters can do with a sword or other weapon, should I animate the mesh to do the move without the weapon in hand, and then parent the weapon to the hand so that the character can do the same move with different weapons?

In this case, how could I make each weapon have those cool trails behind them like in SSX Tricky?

Also, in a game with tons of possible spells or moves or something (like, say, WoW), would it be better to only attach moves to a character mesh as animated sequences when they learn them rather than to have all of them attached to the original character from the start? I imagine it would...

1. yes, it makes sense i think.

2. no idea really. maybe several alphaed copies of the weapon?

3. no, i would think you just have all animations and special animations allowed whenever a "has got move" flag is set.

Mark: for #3, wouldn't it slow down the game/computer drastically if the character had to carry all of those animations that it can't use? Or does the computer not actually load these unless they're needed?

Anyone else?

It would slow the computer during loading, but it would however that more RAM. So I say just load them if you need to.

But you don't think it would be a waste to load moves that the character might never learn?

Maybe you can defer worrying about that until you find out how big of a memory footprint your game will make when it's done.

Or maybe I should stop procrastinating and actually start making the game! ;-)