Are there any significant effects of a character swordfighting or fighting with other weapons while wearing fingerless gloves VS wearing no gloves? How about with normal gloves?
The short answer would be, it's not a huge difference, until it is. When you're looking at most melee weapons, gloves will provide a little bit of protection to your hands, sometimes at the cost of a little bit of grip on the weapon itself.
Somewhat obviously, if you have a plate gauntlet that's protecting your hand or fingers, that will provide more protection, same thing if you're wearing chain gloves. In fact, chain gloves can be pretty useful in specific situations to protect your hands against cutting impacts.
However, as I mentioned, you lose a little bit of grip. This isn't a huge difference, but it can start to impact things like your ability to engage in fine manual dexterity with the weapon. For example, if you can quickly reverse a knife with one hand without thinking about it, you might not be able to replicate that feat while wearing a heavy glove. You can think of this as more of an armor familiarity issue, though. If you train, and practice, while wearing gloves, this should be a pretty minimal loss.
Archery is a case when you really want those heavy gloves. The fletching can scrape up an exposed arm, drawing can scrape up your fingers. Having gauntlets, and even bracers to protect your forearms, can dramatically reduce the amount of cuts and scrapes you suffer from your own arrows. You really do not want fingerless gloves while using a bow, and in some cases, you may even get archer's gauntlets that are just finger protection, leaving the hand itself exposed. (This is for the draw hand, not the bow hand.)
Fingerless gloves work best in situations where you'll expect to take hits across the palm or back of the hand, but need your fingers to operate controls. Firearms are a prime example of this, where most shooters would rather have their finger directly on the trigger, and it's much easier to operate things like fire control settings, mag releases, and bolt catches, when you can actually get the tactile feedback from it. (Also, if you have normal to large hands, a lot of guns don't really accommodate the increased bulk of the glove on top of your hand.)
It should probably be mentioned, that I am assuming the gloves in question are heavy leather, or some similar material (there are synthetic work gloves now.) So, if you're thinking about something like a thin fabric glove, that's mostly going to be a cosmetic change. It will probably protect against some minor nicks and scratches, but won't offer much use as armor, while a heavy leather glove will provide a little more protection. Something like chain or plate gauntlets can offer some significant combat protection, and depending on the design, you can even minimize the loss of grip on your weapon. In a modern context, there are even work gloves with rubberized inserts on the palm and fingers to increase grip, though I'm unsure exactly how useful those would be in a combat situation. Fingerless gloves do have practical applications (I used to wear a pair for years at an old job), but they're not uniformly better, just specialized to different tasks.
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