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Bit of a weird rant here, but what the hell....

Doing a little preliminary prep work for a Helveczia campaign I want to run, and it got me thinking about bows in D&D and related games. I find that bows, particularly longbows, are wildly over-represented and frequently overpowered in almost every fantasy or historical game I've ever played. Usually the ranged weapon alternatives in a game are bows (long, short, recurve, etc.) versus crossbows, and occasionally black-powder firearms. Relative to a bow, the disadvantages of crossbows and muskets are that they are slower to load, and in the case of a musket possibly less reliable. Games virtually always have rules to model those disadvantages. On the other hand, the relative disadvantages of a proper high-poundage war bow are that it is:

-Tiring to use
-Harder to aim
-Awkward to carry
-Unwieldy in tight spaces

Games almost never have rules for that sort of thing. They usually try to compensate by giving the crossbow or gun slightly more damage or armor penetration, but it's rarely enough to compensate for the longbow having 2-5 times the rate of fire. (The rate of fire gets particularly absurd in some games, with bows sometimes having a higher attack-rate than melee weapons. I'm happy to concede that you can shoot a bow faster than you can shoot a musket, but I don't buy that you can do it faster than you can stab with a dagger.) So you often get a world in which no one uses any ranged weapon other than a longbow, and anyone who is not using one is making an objectively sub-optimal choice. This has always annoyed me. Partially, because if longbows were that objectively superior, nobody would have bothered with other ranged weapons. Mostly, because I think a well-designed game is all about different options having pros and cons, such that you might choose differently for different situations or purposes.

In fantasy/medieval settings, this is a minor breach of verisimilitude, but once you add in firearms, I think it becomes a major problem. If I'm going to run a game in the black powder era, I want my players to have good reasons to use black powder weapons, outside of just the cool factor. To it's credit, Helveczia is already putting in some work on this front. It has unusually generous reload times for black powder guns, with the ability for trained soldiers to reduce the time further, as well as exploding dice for firearm damage. But it got me thinking about possible homebrew rules to counteract the supremacy of the longbow in future games. Possibilities would include:

-Bows are not carried around already strung. Choosing to do so damages your bow.
-If attacked in melee while using a bow, make a saving throw or have it broken.
-Longbows cannot be sheathed, OR while carrying one you cannot also carry a large shield or polearm.
-Longbows cannot be shot from horseback. Short/Composite bows require special training to do so.

Really just spit-balling on it at the moment, but I wondered if this phenomenon bothers anyone else, or if others have placed homebrewed limitations on bows to balance them a bit better.

That's something Conan The Barbarian got right in part - Subotai carried the bow in his off hand, it wasn't over his back. We didn't see him stringing the bow though.

Requiring at least a round to string the bow and get it ready, and have some penalty for keeping it strung too long would make sense.

What's probably hard to model is that the crossbow is easier to use. GURPS could model it by having some weapons as a very easy skill, and others as a very hard skill, and it would make the crossbow much more preferable depending on where you want to put your points, but most systems don't have a provision like that.

There's also the problem of if you start making all the drawbacks of particular weapons realistic, the system starts getting bogged down and either someone doesn't want to play it at all, or they just avoid using those weapons (like how people avoid grappling because the rules are a mess).

Quote from: migo on January 28, 2023, 05:17:00 PM
There's also the problem of if you start making all the drawbacks of particular weapons realistic, the system starts getting bogged down and either someone doesn't want to play it at all, or they just avoid using those weapons (like how people avoid grappling because the rules are a mess).

Funny you should mention grappling, actually. One of the things I'm working on today is critical miss tables. For the melee table, one of the items I'm putting on it is "accidentally get caught up in a grapple with your opponent".  In my experience, that's one of the most common things that happens when a hand-to-hand attack goes wrong.

Here is a short article that I read today about the longbow's rate of fire among other things.

https://neutralhistory.com/longbow-effectiveness-reach-use-and-rate-of-fire/

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 28, 2023, 04:50:18 PM
-Bows are not carried around already strung. Choosing to do so damages your bow.
-If attacked in melee while using a bow, make a saving throw or have it broken.
-Longbows cannot be sheathed, OR while carrying one you cannot also carry a large shield or polearm.
-Longbows cannot be shot from horseback. Short/Composite bows require special training to do so.

For point 3, I would say you can carry both, but can't use either.
For point 4, look at the Japanese longbows that are shot from horses.

To address the relative power of bows the way you want, you really have to build it into the combat system from the beginning.  In particular, you have to leave room at the bottom for edge cases.  It's not something that can be easily tacked onto an existing system built with a different mindset. 

In my case, I wanted bows, crossbows, and slings to be closer to what you are talking about, but not necessarily realistic.  Not even really verisimilitude, but instead a mere nod to realism. But yeah, mainly I wanted the players to make choices, and for the choices to matter.  When I made the combat system, that was part of what was driving these choices:

- By default, it takes a round to draw and nock an arrow or get a sling bullet placed and whirling, 2 rounds to pull a bolt and load a light crossbow, and 3 rounds for the heavy crossbow.
- A character can use one of their weapon proficiency slots to lower that time by 1 round.
- It takes multiple proficiency slots to max out al the abilities of a weapon, and some give more than others.  In particular, there's a proficiency for maces and crossbows that is very nice.
- Not every weapon maxes out the same way or with the same number of proficiency slots.
- Ranged fired weapons get bigger damage dice (relative to similar melee weapons) but it is very hard to get damage bonuses compared to melee or thrown weapons. 
- In most cases, spells also take a 1 round to prepare and another round to cast.
- Damage relative to your ability to take it is skewed a little towards offense.  Shields are beefed up.

There's some other nuances slipped in, but that's the heart of it.  The upshot is that, yeah, a fully trained warbow user is a killer at range.  It takes them more proficiency to get to that than almost any other weapon, though.  And his damage is highly variable. Meanwhile, his equivalent opponent has picked up a cheap heavy crossbow proficiency, some throwing and melee axe options, and specialized in the battle axe.  The opponent takes one shot with the crossbow, drops it, runs forwards, tosses a smaller axe, and then charges with the bigger axe.  It could go either way.  Getting hit with that warbow may hurt.  Getting hit with that axe will hurt.

More to the point, those are the combat specialists in their niches.  Joe Schmoe has picked up a composite bow or a sling or a light crossbow, not fully trained in it, and maybe can't even afford to get the rate of fire down.  His main thing is some kind of spells or sneaking or a less in your face melee role. 

I've had a lot of characters working as a team to keep the archers (and spell casters) out of melee, regretting it severely when they can't, and often switching preemptively to a melee weapon when being charged. You simply cannot hang around in melee combat with a ranged fired weapon and get away with it, unless your luck is running really strong.

Greetings!

I would add the note that the Mongolian Composite Bow was shorter in length and overall encumbrance than a western Longbow, and had a superior rate of fire, and an equal or even superior range than Longbows.

In medieval form, the Mongols pioneered groundbreaking tactics, leadership and organization, as well as training, to create a nearly-invincible war machine. In many ways, the Mongols exemplified the concepts of modern warfare and combined arms--routinely using large units of fast-moving, fast-firing mobile horse archers, backed up by heavily-armoured heavy cavalry using heavy lances, axes, and swords. The Mongol Heavy Cavalry would typically deliver a devastating coup de grace to an enemy army.

Like with the Romans, there are huge reasons why the modern military--especially here in the United States--why our military studies the ancient Romans and the Medieval Mongols. In demonstrating an absolute mastery of warfare, the Mongols and the Romans are at the top in most every regard.

Also interesting--Mongol warriors began riding in the saddle and learning to use bows in the saddle by the age of 5. That's right. 5 Years old. Not 12, or 18, or 20, but 5!

By the time a typical Mongol warrior was 18--he was a highly-skilled rider, scout, and mounted archer--and also highly-trained in using the Mongolian hunting tactics adapted to warfare. The Mongols were well-accustomed to the harsh struggle for survival on the great Steppes, and so therefore, the march to war was absolutely an entirely easy process for the Mongols to make.

Again and again, the Mongols demonstrated mastery in how a relatively small force of Mongol warriors--15,000, 25,000, or 50,000--could as a general rule always be expected to take on foreign enemies that outnumbered them three or four to one--and emerge victorious. The Mongols usually slaughtered all of their foreign enemies--whether they were Chinese, Muslims, Russians, or Western Europeans--like easy sheep led to the slaughter.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

War bows took a lot of training, so one way to cut down on their use is to limit them to people with the right background. Other bows would be more easily used, but wouldn't have the range or power of a war bow. When you look at why firearms replaced war bows and crossbows, a lot of it was how easy it was to train people to use them. So while your PCs might be well-trained longbowmen, perhaps most of their opponents could be trained with firearms. And war bows weren't the tool of the nobility, so noble characters shouldn't be trained in them. For that matter, perhaps they're only available to people of one nationality. After all, only English and Welsh armies seemed to deploy them en masse historically.

If you are adventuring in cramped caverns underground, bows should have severely limited range. To shoot long distances, you have to aim upwards, something that would result in hitting the ceiling in a dungeon.

And as to rate of fire, I wonder whether that melee attack rate is for getting in a decent strike amongst the various feints and parries. I suspect that bows could exceed that rate, though whether you want that in your game is up to you.

Firearms became more widespread than bows because they require a lot less training to be effective at massed fire, and even aimed fire. That's it. Plus they make a big noise which scares the fuck out of people even if you don't hit them.

In the earlier centuries firearms were unreliable and super-expensive. Once the industrial revolution started waking up in its crib in the 17th century on, this changed.

You probably want GURPS.  People always complain about the one round to draw an arrow, one round to draw the bow, one round to aim, one round to fire.  Crossbows are even worse since, while they do more damage, they can still be dodged and after 4 - 6 rounds of prep, you really need to hit something.

AD&D 1 and 2 give bows six times the rate of fire of crossbows while having them do less damage 1d4+1 but are marginally more acurate and better at penetrating armour.  In first edition Daggers actually have two attacks in melee if their weapon speed is twice that of the foe's.  Second edition "cleaned up" combat by which I mean made it worse in every aspect.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on January 28, 2023, 06:21:22 PM
To address the relative power of bows the way you want, you really have to build it into the combat system from the beginning.  In particular, you have to leave room at the bottom for edge cases.  It's not something that can be easily tacked onto an existing system built with a different mindset. 

In my case, I wanted bows, crossbows, and slings to be closer to what you are talking about, but not necessarily realistic.  Not even really verisimilitude, but instead a mere nod to realism. But yeah, mainly I wanted the players to make choices, and for the choices to matter.  When I made the combat system, that was part of what was driving these choices:

- By default, it takes a round to draw and nock an arrow or get a sling bullet placed and whirling, 2 rounds to pull a bolt and load a light crossbow, and 3 rounds for the heavy crossbow.
- A character can use one of their weapon proficiency slots to lower that time by 1 round.
- It takes multiple proficiency slots to max out al the abilities of a weapon, and some give more than others.  In particular, there's a proficiency for maces and crossbows that is very nice.
- Not every weapon maxes out the same way or with the same number of proficiency slots.
- Ranged fired weapons get bigger damage dice (relative to similar melee weapons) but it is very hard to get damage bonuses compared to melee or thrown weapons. 
- In most cases, spells also take a 1 round to prepare and another round to cast.
- Damage relative to your ability to take it is skewed a little towards offense.  Shields are beefed up.

There's some other nuances slipped in, but that's the heart of it.  The upshot is that, yeah, a fully trained warbow user is a killer at range.  It takes them more proficiency to get to that than almost any other weapon, though.  And his damage is highly variable. Meanwhile, his equivalent opponent has picked up a cheap heavy crossbow proficiency, some throwing and melee axe options, and specialized in the battle axe.  The opponent takes one shot with the crossbow, drops it, runs forwards, tosses a smaller axe, and then charges with the bigger axe.  It could go either way.  Getting hit with that warbow may hurt.  Getting hit with that axe will hurt.

More to the point, those are the combat specialists in their niches.  Joe Schmoe has picked up a composite bow or a sling or a light crossbow, not fully trained in it, and maybe can't even afford to get the rate of fire down.  His main thing is some kind of spells or sneaking or a less in your face melee role. 

I've had a lot of characters working as a team to keep the archers (and spell casters) out of melee, regretting it severely when they can't, and often switching preemptively to a melee weapon when being charged. You simply cannot hang around in melee combat with a ranged fired weapon and get away with it, unless your luck is running really strong.

That sounds like an extremely interesting system. The issue, as always, is how to produce the intended player behavior without overdoing the rules load. I wouldn't have thought to use weapon specializations that way. Would love to see how it works in more detail.

Quote from: SHARK on January 28, 2023, 06:31:45 PM

In medieval form, the Mongols pioneered groundbreaking tactics, leadership and organization, as well as training, to create a nearly-invincible war machine. In many ways, the Mongols exemplified the concepts of modern warfare and combined arms--routinely using large units of fast-moving, fast-firing mobile horse archers, backed up by heavily-armoured heavy cavalry using heavy lances, axes, and swords. The Mongol Heavy Cavalry would typically deliver a devastating coup de grace to an enemy army.
SHARK

That's probably the key point. Weapons-nerds (which include a lot of role-players, myself amongst them) tend to overstate the role of specific weapons in the success of historical armies. As is so often the case, the success of the Mongols was probably more down to superior strategy, tactics and logistics, rather than any particular weapons system. The armies of Napoleon and Gustavus Adolphus are probably the best examples of this. Phenomenally successful, despite being equipped almost identically to their opponents. I suspect the same is true of the Romans as well. For all the efficiency of the pilum-gladius-&-scutum system, it's not like big shields, short swords, and spears were unusual in the period. They won because of better discipline, command systems, and unit tactics. 

As for roleplaying games, the Tartar or Mongol-style recurve bow may in some cases have been higher poundage than the average English longbow, but I would guess that on average it probably wasn't. I'd base that on the fact that the longbow was designed for men standing still and firing in volleys, while the Mongol bow was largely a skirmishing weapon. Ironically, that's why it would make more sense for a fantasy adventurer, since the type of combat they get into is more akin to skirmishing. Interestingly, I was watching a video today on the bows used by Powhatan Indians in the 17th century, which suggested they were quite powerful as well.

Quote from: Krazz on January 28, 2023, 06:35:55 PM
War bows took a lot of training, so one way to cut down on their use is to limit them to people with the right background. Other bows would be more easily used, but wouldn't have the range or power of a war bow. When you look at why firearms replaced war bows and crossbows, a lot of it was how easy it was to train people to use them. So while your PCs might be well-trained longbowmen, perhaps most of their opponents could be trained with firearms. And war bows weren't the tool of the nobility, so noble characters shouldn't be trained in them. For that matter, perhaps they're only available to people of one nationality. After all, only English and Welsh armies seemed to deploy them en masse historically.

That might be a rules-light way of dealing with the issue. Part of what got me thinking about this is that the Sorcerer and the Mystic in my Dragon Warriors campaign are both using longbows, frequently racking up higher kill counts with them than my knight or assassin with their melee weapons, and there's nothing in the rules to say they can't.

An obvious solution which slipped my mind earlier is just putting a strength requirement on the use of more powerful bows. That would at least force people to make a stat investment if they want that kind of ranged firepower.

Quote from: Krazz on January 28, 2023, 06:35:55 PM
If you are adventuring in cramped caverns underground, bows should have severely limited range. To shoot long distances, you have to aim upwards, something that would result in hitting the ceiling in a dungeon.

True, but the flip side is that almost all underground encounters happen at such short range that you could probably shoot a bow at a flat trajectory with minimal issue.

Quote from: Krazz on January 28, 2023, 06:35:55 PM
And as to rate of fire, I wonder whether that melee attack rate is for getting in a decent strike amongst the various feints and parries. I suspect that bows could exceed that rate, though whether you want that in your game is up to you.

That's my usual argument for why you only get one melee attack per round. An "attack" represents 6 seconds worth of fencing, rather than one swing of the sword. However, I would argue that the same should apply to bows. If you are shooting at targets moving around in the heat of battle, you still need to take a few seconds to pick your shot, especially if you want any hope of wounding an armored opponent. 

Quote from: David Johansen on January 28, 2023, 08:19:22 PM
You probably want GURPS.  People always complain about the one round to draw an arrow, one round to draw the bow, one round to aim, one round to fire.  Crossbows are even worse since, while they do more damage, they can still be dodged and after 4 - 6 rounds of prep, you really need to hit something.

That seems like overkill  :P

I have considered making it so that knocking and drawing an arrow is a separate action. That way you'd still be able to shoot every round, but you'd have to stand still to do so. 

Another technique I've tried is giving crossbows priority in initiative over other bows, since they are easier to aim, but it doesn't make enough difference.

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 28, 2023, 09:14:56 PM

Quote from: David Johansen on January 28, 2023, 08:19:22 PM
You probably want GURPS.  People always complain about the one round to draw an arrow, one round to draw the bow, one round to aim, one round to fire.  Crossbows are even worse since, while they do more damage, they can still be dodged and after 4 - 6 rounds of prep, you really need to hit something.

That seems like overkill  :P

I have considered making it so that knocking and drawing an arrow is a separate action. That way you'd still be able to shoot every round, but you'd have to stand still to do so.

If you've got Fast Draw (Arrow) and Heroic Archer you can get it down to one shot a round at the cost of having to make two extra rolls per round and not aiming.  GURPS fourth edition did away with the -4 Snap Shot penalty for not aiming but the range modifiers are still pretty high.  I personally think Crossbows would work with the Gunslinger advantage which lets you skip the aim maneuver and still get the weapon's accuracy bonus.  But really, if the other guy just dodges it, that's just wasted points.

Rolemaster Standard System has percentage activity for attacks.  Missile attacks take 40 - 60% activivy where it takes 40% activity to load a bow and 60% activity to load a long bow.  Heavy crossbows are out there at 220% to load but this is Rolemaster and YOU DO NOT WANT TO GET SHOT WITH A HEAVY CROSSBOW!!!  This basically means you can fire a short bow once per round with no penalty but a long bow will be taking a -20.

You make some good points about how bows would actually work in a realistic sense, although mostly that's not what TTRPGs are trying to emulate. Still, from a purely mechanical perspective I'd be curious to see how things would shake out in a combat system that's modeling more of this in detail. I suspect it's one of the reasons that the forefathers of fantasy tended to envision melee-combatants as much more important and effective -- Because in small-scale engagements, they generally are.

One thing to think of, is that most of the early fantasy/games were all dungeon crawlers which would limit the use of a longbow greatly.

The rule in D&D was that ranges were in feet indoors and yards outdoors.

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 28, 2023, 09:00:58 PM

Quote from: Krazz on January 28, 2023, 06:35:55 PM
And as to rate of fire, I wonder whether that melee attack rate is for getting in a decent strike amongst the various feints and parries. I suspect that bows could exceed that rate, though whether you want that in your game is up to you.

That's my usual argument for why you only get one melee attack per round. An "attack" represents 6 seconds worth of fencing, rather than one swing of the sword. However, I would argue that the same should apply to bows. If you are shooting at targets moving around in the heat of battle, you still need to take a few seconds to pick your shot, especially if you want any hope of wounding an armored opponent.

It's also simple enough to abstract rate-of-fire in the same way: bows get one "attack", just like melee weapons, which represents any number of arrows fired. A quiver holds a number of attacks worth of ammunition, rather than a specific number of arrows. (Yes, you are Legolas already firing two, three or four arrows in rapid succession.)

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 28, 2023, 09:00:58 PM

Quote from: Krazz on January 28, 2023, 06:35:55 PM
If you are adventuring in cramped caverns underground, bows should have severely limited range. To shoot long distances, you have to aim upwards, something that would result in hitting the ceiling in a dungeon.

True, but the flip side is that almost all underground encounters happen at such short range that you could probably shoot a bow at a flat trajectory with minimal issue.

Not in any game where  the archer is toast in melee and has even modest cover rules.  You are at short range.  Either you have no one between you and the target or you do.  If you don't, you get one shot, and then you are in melee.  If you do, it's difficult to clean shots.

What I do is part to simulate this and part enforcing the results I want (hah!):  There's an automatic -2 to hit anyone on the front rank of a melee line, with a chance to hit friends if you try it.  There's an automatic -2 to hit anyone on the second rank of a melee line (e.g. spear wielders), but no chance to hit friends.  Or you can take a shot at someone in the enemy back ranks, where you don't get to pick the target.  Instead, the GM just semi-randomly assigns any hit to an appropriate target in whatever general group you were aiming at.

Result:  Players who can find a ledge, a crevice, a dais--anything to get a clear shot--will grab it.  Usually when they do, it makes them a target for enemy ranged attacks.  Moreover, it greatly discourages "focus fire" in a modestly realistic manner.  If the archer wants to cleanly commit to taking down a prime target, often the most effective means is to take one shot at the charging foes and then immediately retreat through the line.  The melee guys like this.  You took out one of the 3 guys about to fall on me, or you hurt something tough that I now get to kill.  And the archer player has to think a little.

Again, I'm hardly the only person to get this result.  There are multiple ways to do it.  But you have to decide how you want all this to work, how much complexity you are willing to tolerate, and then build the game with those goals ruthlessly pursued. 

Some rules I have typically used (in any game) to limit the long-bow

1. Can't be used on horseback, and the rider gets a penalty to ride checks simply for having the bow on his person. The longbow is HUGE
2. Roll a 1 and you break the string. 2-8 rounds to get the bow re-strung
3. Huge penalties to move silently or hide-in-shadows when carrying a longbow.
4. If the thief is hiding-in-shadows and trying to move silently, the short-bow must be on his back and around the shoulder--one round to ready that weapon, and you will likely be seen

The longbow is a big, infantry weapon, used in pitched battles. It's like a pike

The other thing I modify is missile fire rules according to surprise in the DM's guide for AD&D. PC's should NOT be getting missile fire at x3 per segment of surprise--that was a mistake in the book, and I even talked to Gary about this many years ago. If you use a High Elf from the UA, you can get like 12 attacks in one round if you surprise the enemy (if I remember correctly), which breaks the implicit rule that only one action per segment can be taken, and there are only 10 segments in a round (I limit surprise segments to 2).

Longbows are broken in AD&D and 3e+ --you need to nerf them IMHO

It's a game and doing it more accurately would make swords not that cool on a battlefield when there's distance. Our rpg culture, like many, worship swords. We must be careful not to burst that bubble. I can imagine DMs sighing when some archer gets 5 or more shots a round. I can also imagine DMs then doing their damnedest to use terrain to stick archers in situations that make bows worthless.

Longbows can be used on horseback. This is a problem.

Getting bows right is something way outside the D&D sphere. It's on the same level as hit points making sense. It's best to nod and go along with them in any D&D game.

I'm amazed nobody mentioned the first sin against the use of longbows, it requires lots of uper body strenght to do so, those things are fucking hard to draw.

Firing them from horseback? pfft, We know you can if you train, as demonstrated by the Samurai and those Japanese monks.

Firing 2-5 arrows per turn? Pfft, we know it is possible.

You don't leave a bow stringed for long periods, true, but when you're heading into battle you do string it BEFORE since doing it after you can see the enemy means they caould fire upon you while you can't. Also I'm not sure you'd take a full round just to string it, I've seen demonstrations, properly trained warriors could string and fire one shot in one turn I'm sure.

The reason firearms won was (as others have pointed out) you didn't require as much training OR upper body strength. Instead of years of training your soldiers you spend your money in the firearm, costly in the upfront, but anyone can pick up the weapon of a fallen enemy/friend and use it WITHOUT training at close range, it requires a little training to get used to the kick and boom and to reload it fast.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on January 29, 2023, 08:38:55 AM

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 28, 2023, 09:00:58 PM

Quote from: Krazz on January 28, 2023, 06:35:55 PM
If you are adventuring in cramped caverns underground, bows should have severely limited range. To shoot long distances, you have to aim upwards, something that would result in hitting the ceiling in a dungeon.

True, but the flip side is that almost all underground encounters happen at such short range that you could probably shoot a bow at a flat trajectory with minimal issue.

Not in any game where  the archer is toast in melee and has even modest cover rules.  You are at short range.  Either you have no one between you and the target or you do.  If you don't, you get one shot, and then you are in melee.  If you do, it's difficult to clean shots.

What I do is part to simulate this and part enforcing the results I want (hah!):  There's an automatic -2 to hit anyone on the front rank of a melee line, with a chance to hit friends if you try it.  There's an automatic -2 to hit anyone on the second rank of a melee line (e.g. spear wielders), but no chance to hit friends.  Or you can take a shot at someone in the enemy back ranks, where you don't get to pick the target.  Instead, the GM just semi-randomly assigns any hit to an appropriate target in whatever general group you were aiming at.

Result:  Players who can find a ledge, a crevice, a dais--anything to get a clear shot--will grab it.  Usually when they do, it makes them a target for enemy ranged attacks.  Moreover, it greatly discourages "focus fire" in a modestly realistic manner.  If the archer wants to cleanly commit to taking down a prime target, often the most effective means is to take one shot at the charging foes and then immediately retreat through the line.  The melee guys like this.  You took out one of the 3 guys about to fall on me, or you hurt something tough that I now get to kill.  And the archer player has to think a little.

Again, I'm hardly the only person to get this result.  There are multiple ways to do it.  But you have to decide how you want all this to work, how much complexity you are willing to tolerate, and then build the game with those goals ruthlessly pursued.

I was mostly meaning a range where you could shoot the bow at a flat trajectory without any serious ballistic consequences. You're right that flat shooting into a melee would be a big problem. I've mostly been trying to address that by treating intervening combatants as giving cover to enemies on the other side of them.

Sounds interesting. Sounds like you're using something akin to the system in The One Ring, where you have semi-abstracted combat ranks rather than a strict battle gird? I'm in the process of switching my games off of the battle grid, so a rank system could be useful.

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 28, 2023, 04:50:18 PM
Bit of a weird rant here, but what the hell....

Doing a little preliminary prep work for a Helveczia campaign I want to run, and it got me thinking about bows in D&D and related games. I find that bows, particularly longbows, are wildly over-represented and frequently overpowered in almost every fantasy or historical game I've ever played.

[. . .]

Really just spit-balling on it at the moment, but I wondered if this phenomenon bothers anyone else, or if others have placed homebrewed limitations on bows to balance them a bit better.

I've seen this in just about every D&D campaign I've played in, but it's just not a thing when I run 1E.

For what it's worth, I think the real issue is that, fundamentally, the bow really is faster and more capable of penetrating armor than the crossbow. But the crossbow takes a lot less skill to use. All the other gripes notwithstanding, these facts by themselves explain why you see crossbows as more common historically but bows the favored choice for player characters.

Here are the subtleties I see in 1E that effectively "solve" this disconnect.

1) The BtB prices for hiring different types of mercenaries has it substantially more expensive to hire bowman over crossbowmen. If we're playing a game where each side is given X amount of GP to hire their armies, the crossbowmen is the more effective unit. You can hire twice as many of them, offsetting the difference in rate of fire, but if they are forced to melee, you've got twice as many of them than if you went with bowmen. In a broader scope, sure, there's a lot more to it than that, but in the end, if you follow the BtB incentives, there's no reason you wouldn't expect crossbows to be a lot more common than bows among NPCs.

2) As for PCs, the BtB prices for buying starting equipment are such that you generally can't afford to begin with both a good armor and a good bow. If you want good armor, you're going to have to settle for crossbow as your ranged weapon. You invest the weapon proficiency. And once your initial slots are set in, it's going to be a few levels before a new slot opens up. If you want to play a bowman and start with a good bow, you can maybe start with scalemail armor at best if you're lucky. In the long run, PCs do mostly use bows. But for low level characters, it's a pretty even mix of bows and crossbows, maybe even 60/40 favoring crossbows.

QuoteUsually the ranged weapon alternatives in a game are bows (long, short, recurve, etc.) versus crossbows, and occasionally black-powder firearms. Relative to a bow, the disadvantages of crossbows and muskets are that they are slower to load, and in the case of a musket possibly less reliable. Games virtually always have rules to model those disadvantages. On the other hand, the relative disadvantages of a proper high-poundage war bow are that it is:

-Tiring to use
-Harder to aim
-Awkward to carry
-Unwieldy in tight spaces

It's even worse for a heavy crossbow, which really just a smaller scorpion that can be operated by a single individual. And it's also not a given that the crossbow is easier to aim than a bow. Some experts claim the opposite. 1E rules certainly has the rules to differentiate on this point via the weapon vs armor tables.

QuoteGames almost never have rules for that sort of thing. They usually try to compensate by giving the crossbow or gun slightly more damage or armor penetration, but it's rarely enough to compensate for the longbow having 2-5 times the rate of fire. (The rate of fire gets particularly absurd in some games, with bows sometimes having a higher attack-rate than melee weapons. I'm happy to concede that you can shoot a bow faster than you can shoot a musket, but I don't buy that you can do it faster than you can stab with a dagger.) So you often get a world in which no one uses any ranged weapon other than a longbow, and anyone who is not using one is making an objectively sub-optimal choice. This has always annoyed me. Partially, because if longbows were that objectively superior, nobody would have bothered with other ranged weapons. Mostly, because I think a well-designed game is all about different options having pros and cons, such that you might choose differently for different situations or purposes.

Well, the long bow really did have a rate of fire twice that of the (light) crossbow. Yet other ranged weapons were also used. I think it comes down to the difference in skill requirements. Even when the king isn't literally paying his fighting men, the 3 hours a day a serf spends practicing the long bow are 3 hours a day he's not working the fields. It can be obscured, but one way or another, there's a price to be paid for the skill differential, and this will mean there will be many times the crossbow is the preferred ranged weapon.

QuoteBut it got me thinking about possible homebrew rules to counteract the supremacy of the longbow in future games. Possibilities would include:

-Bows are not carried around already strung. Choosing to do so damages your bow.
-If attacked in melee while using a bow, make a saving throw or have it broken.
-Longbows cannot be sheathed, OR while carrying one you cannot also carry a large shield or polearm.
-Longbows cannot be shot from horseback. Short/Composite bows require special training to do so.

I think the 1E rules assumed it was understood that short bows can be used from horseback, and long bows cannot. Likewise, heavy crossbows are not usable from horseback. It's also assumed that gamers would know the difference between the composite and non-composite bows. That bows would need to be strung prior to use, but that a trained archer could string a bow in virtually no time within the 1 minute round, but which is why the surprise rule that gives missiles a higher rate of fire only applies when the weapon is readied.

Quote from: MerrillWeathermay on January 29, 2023, 10:22:35 AM
The other thing I modify is missile fire rules according to surprise in the DM's guide for AD&D. PC's should NOT be getting missile fire at x3 per segment of surprise--that was a mistake in the book, and I even talked to Gary about this many years ago. If you use a High Elf from the UA, you can get like 12 attacks in one round if you surprise the enemy (if I remember correctly), which breaks the implicit rule that only one action per segment can be taken, and there are only 10 segments in a round (I limit surprise segments to 2).

None of this is correct. The mistake isn't in the book. It's in the interpretation. The book says readied missiles during surprise get "three times the normal rate"--and the given rates of fire, of course, are per round. Some people chose to interpret that as per segment. There's a question about it in the Gary Gygax Q&A on DF. Some people take Gary's response as affirmation that this obviously wrong interpretation is correct. But Gary only affirmed it as, insofar, if that's what you decide as DM, so be it. He literally said he felt it was possible, but unlikely, and would require ideal circumstances, including having all those arrows lined up, stuck in the ground for easy grabbing.

Specialization of bows in UA allows for 4 attacks per round (and so if you triple that, you do indeed get 12), but you have to be at least 13th level to get that rate of fire. The level limits on high elfs do not permit them to reach 13th level. The only relevance being a high elf could possibly have is that they can score 4 surprise segments due to the elf surprise ability. For the record, I'm not a fan of weapon specialization or the increased level limits in UA.

If you take the 2/1 rate of fire on bows, multiply it by 3 per the surprise rule, you get 6 shots per round. Presumably 3 in the first half (first 5 segments) and 3 in the second half. Which would mean segments 1, 3, and 5, but the elf surprise will only ever get  you to 4, so at most you get 2 attacks during the surprise round.

The example of combat given in the DMG supports this, where a RoF 1 missile weapon was not given 3 attacks on segment one despite being readied. It was not even allowed an attack on segment 2. Because 1 times 3 is 3, when divided across the round, would presumably go off on segments 1, 4, and 7, but on a 2 segment surprise, the 4th segment never comes into play, so it's just one attack for slings and crossbows.

Did you know San Marino has a crossbow corps?

https://www.federazionebalestrieri.sm/palio-delle-balestre/

Quote from: Jason Coplen on January 29, 2023, 12:23:20 PM
It's a game and doing it more accurately would make swords not that cool on a battlefield when there's distance. Our rpg culture, like many, worship swords. We must be careful not to burst that bubble.

I dunno, for as long as the internet has existed (which is a long time) people have always insisted swords are actually bad, spears or pikes are better and there's some sort of conspiracy that promotes sword (the sword lobby?).

And yet, the Romans conquered most their world with swords. Short swords. Beating great phalanxes who used spears.

The Romans had teamwork, which is far more important than whatever tool you're using. Remember: don't split the party!

Quote from: JeremyR on January 29, 2023, 10:48:48 PM

Quote from: Jason Coplen on January 29, 2023, 12:23:20 PM
It's a game and doing it more accurately would make swords not that cool on a battlefield when there's distance. Our rpg culture, like many, worship swords. We must be careful not to burst that bubble.

I dunno, for as long as the internet has existed (which is a long time) people have always insisted swords are actually bad, spears or pikes are better and there's some sort of conspiracy that promotes sword (the sword lobby?).

And yet, the Romans conquered most their world with swords. Short swords. Beating great phalanxes who used spears.

Well they also had javelins. So they would start with a longer range weapon and then move to a close range weapon. Spear -> Sword -> Unarmed is a pretty common training progression.

  youtube Lars Andersen.  Once you see what a guy can do with a bow, it might make those assumptions change a bit regarding how bows are treated in combat in some RPGs.  I think one issue is we treat how a weapon like that can be handled through the lens of hobbyists and not trained professionals who trained for decades to constantly improve.   Granted Lars uses a 50-55 pound bow for his demos, but that is not so far from a war bow and Lars is probably not even a buck fifty and over 50 years old. 

Quote from: JeremyR on January 29, 2023, 10:48:48 PM

Quote from: Jason Coplen on January 29, 2023, 12:23:20 PM
It's a game and doing it more accurately would make swords not that cool on a battlefield when there's distance. Our rpg culture, like many, worship swords. We must be careful not to burst that bubble.

I dunno, for as long as the internet has existed (which is a long time) people have always insisted swords are actually bad, spears or pikes are better and there's some sort of conspiracy that promotes sword (the sword lobby?).

And yet, the Romans conquered most their world with swords. Short swords. Beating great phalanxes who used spears.

Well once you get to the High and Late Medieval periods, swords are almost useless against full plate armor.  That's when knights dropped using shields and started using poleaxes/polearms or heavy mace against their opponents.

As to the Romans, the pilum they used against opponents shield walls were made to stick through the shield and then bend, thus bringing the opponents shields down due to the weight added to it.

Their Testudo formation (turtle) was also very effective against spears to where they would march in it up to the opponents and strike at gladius range.

One thing that you can do to bring down the longbow a bit is to bring the prices of arrows to a more realistic level.

In the High Middle Ages (1340s), a non-painted longbow (white bow) cost around 12 pence, but a sheaf of arrows (24 arrows) cost around 14 pence for steeled arrows and 12 pence for non-steeled arrows.

To translate to gaming terms:

In BFRPG a longbow costs 60gp, so a sheaf of arrows would cost 70gp for steeled and 60gp for non-steeled.
In B/X (Rules Cyclopedia) a longbow costs 40gp, so a sheaf of arrows would cost around 47gp for steeled and 40gp for non-steeled.

Hackmaster handles this rather well.

The Player's book warns players not to carry their bow around unstrung, though it leaves the reason why up to the GM. Stringing your bow requires so much time (fifteen seconds) that by the time you're ready to use it, the fight has already gone into melee and now you run the risk of hitting a friendly. Thusly, people being ambushed almost never use mechanical ranged weapons to defend themselves. Also the bow string can snap if you fumble, not only necessitating you to restring the bow, but requiring you to have a spare bowstring in the first place.

Longbows are described as being so large that you probably need to carry them in both hands when not in use. The way combat works, being armed with a ranged weapon puts you at a terrible disadvantage if someone initiates melee with you (it's all but assured you will be struck).

Quote from: oggsmash on January 30, 2023, 05:39:51 AM
  youtube Lars Andersen.  Once you see what a guy can do with a bow, it might make those assumptions change a bit regarding how bows are treated in combat in some RPGs.  I think one issue is we treat how a weapon like that can be handled through the lens of hobbyists and not trained professionals who trained for decades to constantly improve.   Granted Lars uses a 50-55 pound bow for his demos, but that is not so far from a war bow and Lars is probably not even a buck fifty and over 50 years old.

Is one guy that hyper trains.  I don't have any issue with a gaming style where the PCs are superheros bouncing around like bad movie elves on speed.  In fact, if I'm going to edge into that, I'm as likely to go all the way in.  Sometimes.  Other times I enjoy something a little more grounded.  The training needed to do what Andersen does--even for a professional at the time--is not consistent with that.  As for age, he didn't start doing this when he was 50.  There's lots of people who do all kinds of physical activities from youth into their 50's or later, where age, guile, and experience go a long way towards making up for declining peak physical condition.

Quote from: JeremyR on January 29, 2023, 10:48:48 PM

Quote from: Jason Coplen on January 29, 2023, 12:23:20 PM
It's a game and doing it more accurately would make swords not that cool on a battlefield when there's distance. Our rpg culture, like many, worship swords. We must be careful not to burst that bubble.

I dunno, for as long as the internet has existed (which is a long time) people have always insisted swords are actually bad, spears or pikes are better and there's some sort of conspiracy that promotes sword (the sword lobby?).

And yet, the Romans conquered most their world with swords. Short swords. Beating great phalanxes who used spears.

True. It's....I misphrased. Spears are a better weapon by far, but our pop culture is all into swords. Many new players buy into this (see the bazillion fights online about katanas for an example). Not to sound unfair to D&D, but why are most magic weapons swords? Yes, staves and daggers and axes are seen, but most are swords.

Quote from: Jason Coplen on January 30, 2023, 10:40:28 AM

Quote from: JeremyR on January 29, 2023, 10:48:48 PM

Quote from: Jason Coplen on January 29, 2023, 12:23:20 PM
It's a game and doing it more accurately would make swords not that cool on a battlefield when there's distance. Our rpg culture, like many, worship swords. We must be careful not to burst that bubble.

I dunno, for as long as the internet has existed (which is a long time) people have always insisted swords are actually bad, spears or pikes are better and there's some sort of conspiracy that promotes sword (the sword lobby?).

And yet, the Romans conquered most their world with swords. Short swords. Beating great phalanxes who used spears.

True. It's....I misphrased. Spears are a better weapon by far, but our pop culture is all into swords. Many new players buy into this (see the bazillion fights online about katanas for an example). Not to sound unfair to D&D, but why are most magic weapons swords? Yes, staves and daggers and axes are seen, but most are swords.

I think a lot of it is not realizing that armor changes the equation and the fascination of duels by samurai.

Versus non-armored opponents, the sword may be better than the spear assuming you can get past the point of it.

If you watch some of the current armored fighting league stuff, then most of what you see are two handed weapons (axes, maces, polearms, swords).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3QQwohEY48

Quote from: LordBP on January 30, 2023, 10:49:57 AM

Quote from: Jason Coplen on January 30, 2023, 10:40:28 AM

Quote from: JeremyR on January 29, 2023, 10:48:48 PM

Quote from: Jason Coplen on January 29, 2023, 12:23:20 PM
It's a game and doing it more accurately would make swords not that cool on a battlefield when there's distance. Our rpg culture, like many, worship swords. We must be careful not to burst that bubble.

I dunno, for as long as the internet has existed (which is a long time) people have always insisted swords are actually bad, spears or pikes are better and there's some sort of conspiracy that promotes sword (the sword lobby?).

And yet, the Romans conquered most their world with swords. Short swords. Beating great phalanxes who used spears.

True. It's....I misphrased. Spears are a better weapon by far, but our pop culture is all into swords. Many new players buy into this (see the bazillion fights online about katanas for an example). Not to sound unfair to D&D, but why are most magic weapons swords? Yes, staves and daggers and axes are seen, but most are swords.

I think a lot of it is not realizing that armor changes the equation and the fascination of duels by samurai.

Versus non-armored opponents, the sword may be better than the spear assuming you can get past the point of it.

If you watch some of the current armored fighting league stuff, then most of what you see are two handed weapons (axes, maces, polearms, swords).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3QQwohEY48

Mass combat in armor videos!? Why did I never hear of this? Wow!

Quote from: Jason Coplen on January 30, 2023, 10:40:28 AM

Quote from: JeremyR on January 29, 2023, 10:48:48 PM

Quote from: Jason Coplen on January 29, 2023, 12:23:20 PM
It's a game and doing it more accurately would make swords not that cool on a battlefield when there's distance. Our rpg culture, like many, worship swords. We must be careful not to burst that bubble.

I dunno, for as long as the internet has existed (which is a long time) people have always insisted swords are actually bad, spears or pikes are better and there's some sort of conspiracy that promotes sword (the sword lobby?).

And yet, the Romans conquered most their world with swords. Short swords. Beating great phalanxes who used spears.

True. It's....I misphrased. Spears are a better weapon by far, but our pop culture is all into swords. Many new players buy into this (see the bazillion fights online about katanas for an example). Not to sound unfair to D&D, but why are most magic weapons swords? Yes, staves and daggers and axes are seen, but most are swords.

Spears are better weapons of war. Swords are much easier to carry around all day and are "good enough" for self-defense in most situations outside of war. Similarly, even knights didn't go around in their full plate all day long. That was armor for war. Gambesons, Brigandines or Mail would be much more common among those who had to actually wear armor all day long.

Basically, swords are the equivalent of modern day pistols/sidearms while spears and polearms are the equivalent of the M-16, AK-47 and similar battle rifles. Similarly, brigs/mail is more like the protective vests wore day to day by police while full plate is the equivalent of full SWAT tactical gear.

If you really wanted to make things more realistic for a lot of this stuff, the real issue is in the handling of encumbrance and fatigue as relates to traveling adventurers. The decision of what items are really worth carrying around relative to the advantage they impart is something most games sorely lack and lead things like a traveling fighter walking around in full plate with a longbow, polearm, sword, shield, backpack w. bedroll and who knows what else all day long because Strength is all that really matters for carrying capacity in the system.

Is a spear better than a sword in many situations? Probably. Is it enough of an advantage to give up one your free hands to carry it around at all times? Very situational. A similar evaluation can be made about longbows vs. a lighter and more transportable ranged weapon (ex. a hunting bow would be something of sufficient value for a traveling adventurer to carry vs. a longbow which is overkill for game).

In terms of realism, a wandering adventurer defaulting to some type of light-to-medium armor with a sword (or similar weapon that can be fully stowed and quickly drawn), mid-sized shield (to make up for lack of full armor coverage), a hunting bow and pack for most situations and assessing meaningful penalties to carrying excessively bulky items on their person (ex. wearing heavy armor doesn't so much slow someone down as it causes them to fatigue more quickly, carrying a longbow or spear means you can't perform actions requiring two hands without putting it down) would do more to curb many of the issues about various weapons and their use by soldiers and adventurers.

ETA: one of the more interesting aspects of a more bulk-based encumbrance system that I've witnessed was the use of quick release backpacks as most warriors gained significant advantage by dropping the excess bulk before entering a fight (and created a fairly meaningful loss condition if they were then forced to retreat).

If you really want to simulate the English longbow, and the English longbowman, I would make Longbowman a class, and a class only available to commoners at that. And you are not allowed to multi-class for the first X levels.

Only longbowmen can use the longbow. Because historically, you had to raise up a generation of longbowmen, you didn't just train adults in it. (The same is probably true of Mongol archers.) You wind up with physiological adaptations that archaeologists can detect, even on a skeleton.

Having bows break automatically in melee is dumb. I have seen children's practice bows break in the hands of a strong adult, but hunting bows and longbows are an entirely different matter. Bows are strong, and the more powerful they are, the tougher they are. If they break, it should be at the same rate as other weapons like swords and staves.

But with all that said, frankly, don't bury your game under minutiae. A certain amount of historical inaccuracy is perfectly acceptable in a game. It is OK to consider bows and crossbows to be strung at all times. Just like black powder guns are considered to be loaded and primed at all times. Because ultimately, the goal is to have that moment of "I waste him with my crossbow!"

Quote from: Lurkndog on January 30, 2023, 11:28:35 AM
If you really want to simulate the English longbow, and the English longbowman, I would make Longbowman a class, and a class only available to commoners at that. And you are not allowed to multi-class for the first X levels.

Only longbowmen can use the longbow. Because historically, you had to raise up a generation of longbowmen, you didn't just train adults in it. (The same is probably true of Mongol archers.) You wind up with physiological adaptations that archaeologists can detect, even on a skeleton.

Interestingly, that's exactly the route Palladium Fantasy took. The Longbowman OCC was the only class that had proficiency in the longbow. No other class could even take it. I don't have the books in front of me, but I think it also had a minimum Strength prerequisite to be able to take it.

Also, with regard to black powder replacing bows and arrows and crossbows, what really happened is that black powder cannons and mortars appeared on the scene in the middle ages, and made all other siege engines instantly obsolete, along with a number of defensive fortifications. Cannon and mortars were just that much better.

And from there, black powder slowly worked its way down to the individual soldier, having established utter dominance in the field of artillery. There wasn't a question of "if" it was better, they'd seen the cannons.

Quote from: Jason Coplen on January 30, 2023, 10:40:28 AM

Quote from: JeremyR on January 29, 2023, 10:48:48 PM

Quote from: Jason Coplen on January 29, 2023, 12:23:20 PM
It's a game and doing it more accurately would make swords not that cool on a battlefield when there's distance. Our rpg culture, like many, worship swords. We must be careful not to burst that bubble.

I dunno, for as long as the internet has existed (which is a long time) people have always insisted swords are actually bad, spears or pikes are better and there's some sort of conspiracy that promotes sword (the sword lobby?).

And yet, the Romans conquered most their world with swords. Short swords. Beating great phalanxes who used spears.

True. It's....I misphrased. Spears are a better weapon by far, but our pop culture is all into swords. Many new players buy into this (see the bazillion fights online about katanas for an example). Not to sound unfair to D&D, but why are most magic weapons swords? Yes, staves and daggers and axes are seen, but most are swords.

Ahh, this again.

Swords vs polearms is almost always a slanted conversation for two very important reasons.

• When you use a pole-arm, you can't use a shield.
• When you use a pole-arm, you can't use a shield.

Now, I realize that's technically only one reason, but it's such an important reason I thought it was worth mentioning twice. And to be fair this is a slight exaggeration; some lighter spears can be used one-handed. I don't think that's a fair comparison because a one-handed spear lacks the leverage and power to be anywhere near as dangerous against a sword as a two-handed spear is.

By and large, if you're going into combat against archers (especially longbow archers), a two-handed pole arm is probably not the best choice, even though they work very well in melees against swords. This is also why actual Men at Arms would carry every weapon they thought was reasonable into the battlefield. Spear, shield, sword, dagger, mace, it's probably all going with you and once you get into melee, you pick the ones you actually think you'll need and likely drop the rest or leave them with your squire/ on your horse, with the supply caravan, etc. And the sword was far more used in self-defense than pole arms.

The sword is the iconic weapon because in Europe the Catholic Church liked the cruciform sword for symbolic reasons. However it's not like it was unused on the battlefield. As with many things, it's a heck of a lot more complicated than the simple Spear > Sword because of triangle advantage.

Completely agree with OP - ranged weapons and thrown weapons are not really comparable to melee.

I'd bet someone with a dagger beats someone with a bow nine times out of ten, even if they start 100 feet apart (provided they received the same amount of training and similar physiques, of course).

In most D&D games, the dagger is a weak 1d4 weapon, while bows to 1d6 or even more.

Bows only work in specific circumstances, e.g., scores of bowmen against a marching army, or shoot and run tactics. These are NOT the types of combat you see in dungeons (bows would be terrible in dungeons BTW).

But... rule of cool. People want Legolas in their D&D games.

Quote from: Fheredin on January 30, 2023, 12:08:19 PM
The sword is the iconic weapon because in Europe the Catholic Church liked the cruciform sword for symbolic reasons. However it's not like it was unused on the battlefield. As with many things, it's a heck of a lot more complicated than the simple Spear > Sword because of triangle advantage.

If it were merely because of its cruciform shape we wouldn't have seen non-cruciform versions arise. The actual reason for the sword's iconic status is for the same reason the handgun (pistol or revolver) is an iconic weapon today; it was easy to wear around as a sidearm (in a scabbard at your side it didn't interfere with normal activities) and quick to draw if needed.

It was also relatively expensive due to the level of craftsmanship required and needing many times more metal to construct than a spear or axe head (and before the advent of the blast furnace steel was far more expensive than it became). Thus, owning a sword was an indication of your wealth and standing in society.

One of the stories about the Messer-style blade is that, as the cost of manufacturing blades dropped, the nobility passed laws outlawing swords for non-nobility (so wearing a sword remained a status symbol). The Messer was as long as a sword, but because it had a full tang handle instead of a hidden tang hilt it was legally a knife and not a sword and thus could be carried by anyone.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on January 30, 2023, 12:25:54 PM
Completely agree with OP - ranged weapons and thrown weapons are not really comparable to melee.

I'd bet someone with a dagger beats someone with a bow nine times out of ten, even if they start 100 feet apart (provided they received the same amount of training and similar physiques, of course).

In most D&D games, the dagger is a weak 1d4 weapon, while bows to 1d6 or even more.

Bows only work in specific circumstances, e.g., scores of bowmen against a marching army, or shoot and run tactics. These are NOT the types of combat you see in dungeons (bows would be terrible in dungeons BTW).

But... rule of cool. People want Legolas in their D&D games.

Curious as to your reasoning here...  My RL skill with a bow is on the lower end of the intermediate range and I'm pretty sure I could get in at least one hit in this situation.  And in RL one hit is all it takes to end the fight if it's in the right spot.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on January 30, 2023, 12:25:54 PM
Bows only work in specific circumstances, e.g., scores of bowmen against a marching army, or shoot and run tactics. These are NOT the types of combat you see in dungeons (bows would be terrible in dungeons BTW).

For what it's worth, this is generally my experience in game. You've got twists, turns, and even in a straight corridor, limits due to vision. The ranges involved are so short, I don't even need to give any thought as to whether or not the ceiling is high enough for the trajectory of the missile. At best, other than surprise, you've got one shot before the enemy can close the distance.

QuoteBut... rule of cool. People want Legolas in their D&D games.

I usually find this lies at the heart of the matter of the vast majority of RPG rules gripes. Different people have different opinions on what the outcome should be or what is reasonable. But when it comes to certain things, and I think this topic may be a candidate, you frequently find contrary wants even within the same gamer. You can't solve the problem until this conflict is unpacked and you get some clarity.

Probably most often it comes down to, "*I* want to be Legolas in a world of dirt farmers."

QuoteCompletely agree with OP - ranged weapons and thrown weapons are not really comparable to melee.

I'd bet someone with a dagger beats someone with a bow nine times out of ten, even if they start 100 feet apart (provided they received the same amount of training and similar physiques, of course).

In most D&D games, the dagger is a weak 1d4 weapon, while bows to 1d6 or even more.

I quoted your post out of order because to address this point, it's important to recognize the conflict I just mentioned. Because one of the things I think is really cool about 1E is that if you play BtB, and if you approach it with a min-max mindset, the "optimal" weapons do vary depending on what you're doing.

If you're talking about large scale battles, where most fighting men are 0th level, where one-hit-kills are most common, he who goes first has a massive advantage. It doesn't matter that a two-hander does d10 while a bow only d6. Even though you can close 100 feet within a single round, the bow has a decent chance of killing before you even get into melee. Even in the case of spears, when weapon length determines first strike during charging, hasty closing into melee, and when the "mass of pikes" rule is in effect, overall the spear is going to be mightier than the sword.

However, once you start to accumulate enough hit points that it takes multiple hits to kill, turn order starts to matter less, and luck and first strike are overtaken by long-term expected averages. And that's when higher damage becomes king.

So at higher levels of play, where PCs are more heroic in scale, the optimal weapons more or less resemble what you tend to see in the heroes of myth and legend, while at low levels, where PCs are more realistic, optimal weapons tend to more or less resemble what you'd expect from a realistic/historical setting. The genre shifts with level of play. But more importantly, it opens the field for you to get to be Legolas in a world of dirt farmers. It's one way of resolving the above conflict. And I really think this is what the plurality of gamers see as their ideal.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on January 30, 2023, 12:25:54 PM
Bows only work in specific circumstances, e.g., scores of bowmen against a marching army, or shoot and run tactics. These are NOT the types of combat you see in dungeons (bows would be terrible in dungeons BTW).

Historically, dungeon crawls don't exist, and conflict is typically out in the open, maybe in a field, or maybe in a forest.

And practically, a standard dungeon with corridors ten feet wide and ten feet tall is spacious enough to use bows and spears in. It might not be ideal, but if I saw five guys with spears marching side by side down a corridor at me, I'd leave immediately.

An actual cave, though? No, I wouldn't even take a spear or a bow into a cave. Too narrow, you might not even be able to get a spear through some twisty places.

Edit: Hell, I probably couldn't get myself through some of the places I went caving as a much younger man.

The funniest part of this thread is that Monte Cook was responsible for beating archery with the nerfbat in 3E D&D.

I thought ranged weapons were handled pretty well in AD&D 2e.  With bows having strength penalties, but only bonuses if specially constructed, a team of longbowmen would generally have a bit longer range but do less damage than an equivalent team of crossbowmen, which I thought was a reasonable take on things.  I'm not sure whether AD&D did it or not, but I know by 3.0 you would want to use shortbows if you were on a horse, making sure that they were actually the superior option for all of that game and Pathfinder 1 (the fact that almost everyone use composite longbows instead is because the horseback riding rules were woefully underutilized by most players, despite being extraordinarily powerful anywhere they were allowed). 

In all of these versions, however, the player character generally had the option of turning the shortbow or longbow into a real weapon that scaled.  Be it a fundamental rate of fire on the bow, a special ability of the fighter class, or some feat, in all cases you could get a bunch of arrows out in a round, and the arrows had at least a bonus to hit from dexterity and a bonus to damage from strength.  In 4th and beyond, you basically get your Dexterity bonus to hit and damage, making them function extremely similar to melee weapons, with a bunch of mild restrictions you can usually get around.

The fact that a player can invest crap into this- starting from attributes- is probably the issue.  When it comes to ranged weapons, you want a system that gives reasonably equal prominence to:
1- A longbow shot by a superior man
2- A shortbow shot by a superior man riding a superior horse
3- A crossbow shot by a dextrous man
4- Early firearms shot by someone trained with their idiosyncrasies

Meanwhile, weapons like:
1- A science fiction blaster rifle
2- A modern selective fire battle rifle
3- A modern semiautomatic rifle
4- A modern submachine gun
Should all be a superior version of (4)- "Early firearms shot by someone trained"- and be superior enough that the other options should fall by the wayside.

Similarly, weapons like:
1- Sling
2- Blowgun
3- Atlatl (assuming your system understands this as a ranged weapon and not an enhancement to a thrown weapon, either is a valid model)

Should generally be inferior to the first list in some fashion.

I really think that the issue comes down to the rate of attack.  Systems seem to understand that a single telling sword blow is scored more often as fighting men gain experience, but are unwilling to extend this level of abstract to ranged weapons, wherein each arrow can be tracked, each muzzle load costing a precise quantity of per-round activity.  This distinction, plus the D&D-ism of the "weapon damage die", is what has yielded the situation OP is complaining about.

Quote from: Venka on February 01, 2023, 05:05:49 PM
...
Similarly, weapons like:
1- Sling
2- Blowgun
3- Atlatl (assuming your system understands this as a ranged weapon and not an enhancement to a thrown weapon, either is a valid model)

You are mostly in the ballpark, but not on slings.  Slings suffer the same thing that longbows do, only earlier and without the fan appeal.  Slings in capable hands are quite a good weapon, better than many bows.  The trouble is that getting capable with a sling, like the longbow, takes constant practice from someone that starts relatively young. 

When you've got a lot of shepherds in the area that grew up driving off predators with a sling from a young age, you've got a well-trained core of skirmishers ready made.  When you don't, it's a whole lot easier to train some archers using some moderate pull, shorter bows. 

Like the longbow, if a system can reflect the real abilities of the weapon, and offset that with increased training to get there, a sling ought to be rather scary to opponents, as soon as capability is demonstrated.

Knowing that enemies who can, will attack the PCs from outside melee range with bows and arrows; any party of PCs would be well advised to have at least a couple of bows among the adventuring party.

It seems that if bows need real strength to use, then strength penalties should apply.
Apply the strength penalty rules for bows (from whatever edition that you prefer), but double or triple the penalties added for longbows.

Stringing/unstringing bows and crossbows should have a table like donning or doffing armour.

For every day that you leave a bow/crossbow strung, there might be a -1 penalty to attacks with that bow, and these penalties are permanent beyond X days. Every threshold at X days with the weapon still strung makes that many penalties permanent in an escalating fashion, i.e. first threshold might be 5 days, next one 3, next is 1. If the number of penalties exceeds the weapon's [hardness rating?] then the bow is rendered useless even as a child's toy.

Quote from: ClusterFluster on February 06, 2023, 11:01:05 AM
It seems that if bows need real strength to use, then strength penalties should apply.
Apply the strength penalty rules for bows (from whatever edition that you prefer), but double or triple the penalties added for longbows.

Stringing/unstringing bows and crossbows should have a table like donning or doffing armour.

For every day that you leave a bow/crossbow strung, there might be a -1 penalty to attacks with that bow, and these penalties are permanent beyond X days. Every threshold at X days with the weapon still strung makes that many penalties permanent in an escalating fashion, i.e. first threshold might be 5 days, next one 3, next is 1. If the number of penalties exceeds the weapon's [hardness rating?] then the bow is rendered useless even as a child's toy.

Maybe, maybe not.  That gets into the granularity of what you are doing.  Are you also going to have rules for caring for armor?  Shields breaking?  Cleaning and repairing weapons?  How about practice time?  In reality, people lose their edge pretty darn fast with weapon skills if they don't practice constantly.  Sure, they are better than most people, who are untrained, even when rusty, but they aren't anywhere near peak. 

Fact is, there are a lot of reasons why historically certain weapons were favored, and many of these don't translate well into games without introducing details that may seem overly fiddly to many people.

Strength penalties or minimums have been used in a lot of systems with various weapons.  The problem you run into there is how Strength scales.  Because a bigger 10-year old or even you average 12-year old can learn to use just about any weapon well, if they start training with it.  Or in other words, you don't use a heavier pound longbow because you are strong.  You are strong (in the particular way needed for a longbow) because you used a lighter bow constantly and then worked up to the current poundage.  This isn't true of every weapon (e.g. rapier), and it's not true for many stamina issues, where you need other training to supplement the weapon training, but again, we are getting into fiddly territory.  If you average adult in D&D has a 10 Str, or even a little lower, they can still, with training, learn almost any weapon available.  So it makes Str penalties and minimums kind of moot, or not realistic, or both.

What he said ^^^

"Your hear shuffling sounds from around the corner."

"I string my bow."

"A cute little puppy walks around the corner."

"I unstring my bow."

That would get old fast. It can just be assumed that you string your bow when preparing for combat. Just like you hone your sword blade after combat, and oil your crossbow cogs or whatever.

Roll init. If you lose it's because you were too slow stringing your bow. There's your reason.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on February 06, 2023, 11:48:50 AM
Maybe, maybe not.  That gets into the granularity of what you are doing.  Are you also going to have rules for caring for armor?  Shields breaking?  Cleaning and repairing weapons?  How about practice time?  In reality, people lose their edge pretty darn fast with weapon skills if they don't practice constantly.  Sure, they are better than most people, who are untrained, even when rusty, but they aren't anywhere near peak. 

Fact is, there are a lot of reasons why historically certain weapons were favored, and many of these don't translate well into games without introducing details that may seem overly fiddly to many people.

Strength penalties or minimums have been used in a lot of systems with various weapons.  The problem you run into there is how Strength scales.  Because a bigger 10-year old or even you average 12-year old can learn to use just about any weapon well, if they start training with it.  Or in other words, you don't use a heavier pound longbow because you are strong.  You are strong (in the particular way needed for a longbow) because you used a lighter bow constantly and then worked up to the current poundage.  This isn't true of every weapon (e.g. rapier), and it's not true for many stamina issues, where you need other training to supplement the weapon training, but again, we are getting into fiddly territory.  If you average adult in D&D has a 10 Str, or even a little lower, they can still, with training, learn almost any weapon available.  So it makes Str penalties and minimums kind of moot, or not realistic, or both.

You can get strong enough through training without incrementing your strength score at all... well put, that makes sense.

And yeah, you do have a point about the fiddly nature of the kind of rules I'm proposing, and I can't say I was excited about posting them. Maybe it would be easier to record 3 fumbles with that weapon before its damage is halved, and if you don't repair it before 3 more fumbles, it breaks in your hands. Magic and wondrous items being different, of course--

Edit:
--but that's tangential to the real problem with bows in combat in general, which I didn't address...

Somewhat related to my first concession here:
I've mentioned to my player group that the AD&D exceptional strength scores should have just been a bonus XP modifier (for any attribute used by a relevant class), and then we could dispose with the guaranteed attribute increases over level ups that creates such a scaling nightmare for monster design. Taking a feat could give you the +2 you want, if you want to play with any feats at all, but that at most.

Quote from: rytrasmi on February 06, 2023, 12:06:46 PM
...

Roll init. If you lose it's because you were too slow stringing your bow. There's your reason.

That's way more elegant, thanks.

Bonus XP modifiers are a very lumpy reward system.  If the party is nearing a big XP payoff, it's entirely possible for the guy with the XP bonus to not get a single session with +1 level over the other guys.

And that's the other part of the problem- the XP bonus tends to be measured as respect to the rest of the party.  Now, you could easily be using a system that delivers challenges based on the total XP given to the party, or simply has a set of challenges that ramp up over time.  In those cases, bonus XP is a great reward.  But if the PCs have any input about what encounters they have and what missions they take, and most especially if the GM is building encounters based on the player party, it's no kind of bonus at all.

Oldest school D&D had a mild bonus if it was above a certain amount, and the pre-AD&D modifiers were less impressive than the -5 to +5 that was introduced with 3.X.  The other benefit of exceptional strength in AD&D 1e was that it was the only nod to realism regarding the physical inferiority of female strength as opposed to male, as while there was no penalty for a lady warrior, she could never have above some strength (was it 18/51?), so if you happened to roll so splendidly on character creation, well, play a dude, bro!

Basically, the odds are great you can just delete the damned exceptional strength table completely from whichever version of AD&D you are running.  I guess if you are using the Skills and Powers "2.5" version, which allows players to buy their way up that chart, then you might not want to, but those characters are really min-maxxy and I doubt you're running that stuff.

I agree with everyone that says bows are useful in actual war... Nothing much to add there.

Quote from: Mishihari on January 30, 2023, 01:10:44 PM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on January 30, 2023, 12:25:54 PM
Completely agree with OP - ranged weapons and thrown weapons are not really comparable to melee.

I'd bet someone with a dagger beats someone with a bow nine times out of ten, even if they start 100 feet apart (provided they received the same amount of training and similar physiques, of course).

In most D&D games, the dagger is a weak 1d4 weapon, while bows to 1d6 or even more.

Bows only work in specific circumstances, e.g., scores of bowmen against a marching army, or shoot and run tactics. These are NOT the types of combat you see in dungeons (bows would be terrible in dungeons BTW).

But... rule of cool. People want Legolas in their D&D games.

Curious as to your reasoning here...  My RL skill with a bow is on the lower end of the intermediate range and I'm pretty sure I could get in at least one hit in this situation.  And in RL one hit is all it takes to end the fight if it's in the right spot.

I have (equally) limited experience with bow and dagger. I can say it is extremely easy to hit a human-shape punching bag with a dagger in the throat. A bow is nothing like this in my experience.

Of course, if you're a experienced bowman - as someone mentioned, "starting with the grandfather" - it might be a different story.

Not to mention I do not believe 1 hit = 1 kill to be true for bows; I think daggers are at least as deadly and I bet I can stab three or more times for every arrow.

Even police training IIRC teaches daggers are incredibly dangerous against GUNS if you are, say, 10 feet apart, due to taking a fraction of a second to draw and shoot. Bows take much longer.

Quote from: Lunamancer on January 30, 2023, 01:56:12 PM
If you're talking about large scale battles, where most fighting men are 0th level, where one-hit-kills are most common, he who goes first has a massive advantage. It doesn't matter that a two-hander does d10 while a bow only d6. Even though you can close 100 feet within a single round, the bow has a decent chance of killing before you even get into melee. Even in the case of spears, when weapon length determines first strike during charging, hasty closing into melee, and when the "mass of pikes" rule is in effect, overall the spear is going to be mightier than the sword.

I'm not, I'm talking about D&D games how I usually se them played - a party of about half a dozen people against monsters in a dungeon or wilderness, usually encountered in a small distance.

Also, I believe spears to be a completely different conversation.

But yeah, good point.

Quote from: Lurkndog on January 30, 2023, 02:46:52 PM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on January 30, 2023, 12:25:54 PM
Bows only work in specific circumstances, e.g., scores of bowmen against a marching army, or shoot and run tactics. These are NOT the types of combat you see in dungeons (bows would be terrible in dungeons BTW).

Historically, dungeon crawls don't exist, and conflict is typically out in the open, maybe in a field, or maybe in a forest.

And practically, a standard dungeon with corridors ten feet wide and ten feet tall is spacious enough to use bows and spears in. It might not be ideal, but if I saw five guys with spears marching side by side down a corridor at me, I'd leave immediately.

An actual cave, though? No, I wouldn't even take a spear or a bow into a cave. Too narrow, you might not even be able to get a spear through some twisty places.

Edit: Hell, I probably couldn't get myself through some of the places I went caving as a much younger man.

Yup, agreed, but D&D does dungeons crawls.

Also, longbows in Moldvay can reach up to 100 feet with no penalty. I d'ont see this working in a long corridor and, even in the open, I doubt it would be hard to dodge a missile if you can spot the single archer shooting a single target 100 feet away.

Spears are a different thing IMO. A short spear might work better than a swung weapons in cave...

Quote from: Venka on February 06, 2023, 12:56:58 PM
Bonus XP modifiers are a very lumpy reward system.  If the party is nearing a big XP payoff, it's entirely possible for the guy with the XP bonus to not get a single session with +1 level over the other guys.

... The other benefit of exceptional strength in AD&D 1e was that it was the only nod to realism regarding the physical inferiority of female strength as opposed to male, as while there was no penalty for a lady warrior, she could never have above some strength (was it 18/51?), so if you happened to roll so splendidly on character creation, well, play a dude, bro!

Basically, the odds are great you can just delete the damned exceptional strength table completely from whichever version of AD&D you are running. ...

I felt that I could have that character become a new campaign NPC, say after getting 3 levels higher than the party average, but in trying to formulate the rest of that rationalization, I get why it'd be easier to just delete that table after all: too much complexity and not enough depth. The attribute caps should be just good enough without those tables. I might stubbornly reread them on the off chance they are truly salvageable...

Quote from: Eric Diaz on February 06, 2023, 03:12:29 PM

Quote from: Lurkndog on January 30, 2023, 02:46:52 PM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on January 30, 2023, 12:25:54 PM
Bows only work in specific circumstances, e.g., scores of bowmen against a marching army, or shoot and run tactics. These are NOT the types of combat you see in dungeons (bows would be terrible in dungeons BTW).

Historically, dungeon crawls don't exist, and conflict is typically out in the open, maybe in a field, or maybe in a forest.

And practically, a standard dungeon with corridors ten feet wide and ten feet tall is spacious enough to use bows and spears in. It might not be ideal, but if I saw five guys with spears marching side by side down a corridor at me, I'd leave immediately.

An actual cave, though? No, I wouldn't even take a spear or a bow into a cave. Too narrow, you might not even be able to get a spear through some twisty places.

Edit: Hell, I probably couldn't get myself through some of the places I went caving as a much younger man.

Yup, agreed, but D&D does dungeons crawls.

Also, longbows in Moldvay can reach up to 100 feet with no penalty. I d'ont see this working in a long corridor and, even in the open, I doubt it would be hard to dodge a missile if you can spot the single archer shooting a single target 100 feet away.

Spears are a different thing IMO. A short spear might work better than a swung weapons in cave...

You would have about half a second to dodge a longbow at 100 feet and it's a pretty flat trajectory for that 100 feet, so might work in a 10x10 corridor. 

Quote from: LordBP on February 06, 2023, 05:26:47 PM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on February 06, 2023, 03:12:29 PM

Quote from: Lurkndog on January 30, 2023, 02:46:52 PM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on January 30, 2023, 12:25:54 PM
Bows only work in specific circumstances, e.g., scores of bowmen against a marching army, or shoot and run tactics. These are NOT the types of combat you see in dungeons (bows would be terrible in dungeons BTW).

Historically, dungeon crawls don't exist, and conflict is typically out in the open, maybe in a field, or maybe in a forest.

And practically, a standard dungeon with corridors ten feet wide and ten feet tall is spacious enough to use bows and spears in. It might not be ideal, but if I saw five guys with spears marching side by side down a corridor at me, I'd leave immediately.

An actual cave, though? No, I wouldn't even take a spear or a bow into a cave. Too narrow, you might not even be able to get a spear through some twisty places.

Edit: Hell, I probably couldn't get myself through some of the places I went caving as a much younger man.

Yup, agreed, but D&D does dungeons crawls.

Also, longbows in Moldvay can reach up to 100 feet with no penalty. I d'ont see this working in a long corridor and, even in the open, I doubt it would be hard to dodge a missile if you can spot the single archer shooting a single target 100 feet away.

Spears are a different thing IMO. A short spear might work better than a swung weapons in cave...

You would have about half a second to dodge a longbow at 100 feet and it's a pretty flat trajectory for that 100 feet, so might work in a 10x10 corridor.

Good luck even seeing the arrow until it's about five feet away.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on February 06, 2023, 02:58:28 PM
Not to mention I do not believe 1 hit = 1 kill to be true for bows; I think daggers are at least as deadly and I bet I can stab three or more times for every arrow.

Even police training IIRC teaches daggers are incredibly dangerous against GUNS if you are, say, 10 feet apart, due to taking a fraction of a second to draw and shoot. Bows take much longer.

Well, modern games model this by having some downside to shooting a bow if you are threatened in melee.  Perhaps you have a -2 to hit, or a -4 to hit.  Or perhaps the enemy gets a free swing at you, or you roll twice and take the worst.  These same games normally have some way around that though, above and beyond simply not being in melee in the first place.

It's certainly true that versus a hit point dummy you'd do much better with a dagger or a sword than a bow or a gun.  I'd say you'd probably outdamage a battle rifle with just a long knife in that case.  This is, in some real case, the issue of the game having to model a lot more- a combatant is much more than a sack of meat points, after all, and if someone is trying to stab you to death you will be able to slow them down (or sometimes even turn the tide) by interacting with the melee weapon, even unarmed.  While there are certainly cases of people catching arrows here and there, generally the ability to interact with a projectile is lower.

This is why D&D games model a combat round as a series of melee attacks.  If you get to roll three attack dice, it's not because you only swung three times, it's because you had a chance at three telling blows.  If you wanted to extend this to arrows, your only change would be to have the player roll a d4 every shot and find out how many total arrows were expended for that shot.

From a perspective of a game that isn't necessarily about a weapon die, but does still have the idea of hit points, work out:
If your game allows players to move around and hold absolute positions, figure out how much damage a token that is able to close to melee can do in a round, and figure out how much damage a token that holds at range and shoots arrows should do in a round.  If the play of the game frequently allows tokens to close distances with greater propensity than opening gaps, then these values should be close; if the game frequently allows tokens to stay at long distances, then these values should be disparate, with a greater share of damage granted to the melee attacker
If your game has much more abstract location, longer rounds, and likely predeclared actions, then again try to figure out how many rounds force a melee-specialist to engage at range before he closes to melee, and how in-control of these values would be a member of a historic scouting party in a military, or an optimized adventuring team, and try to come up with numbers around these.

D&D's method isn't particularly realistic, but it's easy enough to nerf it if it feels unbalanced.  In many cases, you can simply remove some of the buffs, depending on the version you run.

Quote from: LordBP on February 06, 2023, 05:26:47 PM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on February 06, 2023, 03:12:29 PM

Quote from: Lurkndog on January 30, 2023, 02:46:52 PM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on January 30, 2023, 12:25:54 PM
Bows only work in specific circumstances, e.g., scores of bowmen against a marching army, or shoot and run tactics. These are NOT the types of combat you see in dungeons (bows would be terrible in dungeons BTW).

Historically, dungeon crawls don't exist, and conflict is typically out in the open, maybe in a field, or maybe in a forest.

And practically, a standard dungeon with corridors ten feet wide and ten feet tall is spacious enough to use bows and spears in. It might not be ideal, but if I saw five guys with spears marching side by side down a corridor at me, I'd leave immediately.

An actual cave, though? No, I wouldn't even take a spear or a bow into a cave. Too narrow, you might not even be able to get a spear through some twisty places.

Edit: Hell, I probably couldn't get myself through some of the places I went caving as a much younger man.

Yup, agreed, but D&D does dungeons crawls.

Also, longbows in Moldvay can reach up to 100 feet with no penalty. I d'ont see this working in a long corridor and, even in the open, I doubt it would be hard to dodge a missile if you can spot the single archer shooting a single target 100 feet away.

Spears are a different thing IMO. A short spear might work better than a swung weapons in cave...

You would have about half a second to dodge a longbow at 100 feet and it's a pretty flat trajectory for that 100 feet, so might work in a 10x10 corridor.

Half a second? I reckon the "taking the arrow, drawing the bow process, release, travel 100 feet" process would take a lot longer than that, allowing me more than enough time to take cover if not dodge. Especially if I had a shield.

Of course, if the attackers is hidden I'm probably dead against a dagger OR bow... although I would prefer a bow, since if he misses I'll have some time to react. Also, how many times can one stab in a second?

Anyway, that shouldn't be hard to test by someone like shadiversity or lindybeige.

My experience with bows and daggers, as I've said, is limited, although I do think daggers are MUCH easier to hit in my experience.

Quote from: ClusterFluster on February 06, 2023, 04:25:43 PM
I felt that I could have that character become a new campaign NPC, say after getting 3 levels higher than the party average

Maybe your tables are quite different than mine, but a PC becoming an NPC is usually not something the PC desires, especially if they get there by doing really well.  A PC that gains extra experience because he's very dexterity focused, while picking a simple class like thief, with a favorable XP table, and then is expert at gathering gold that the party would otherwise miss, could definitely be three levels ahead, depending on the version, especially if the party chooses weightier classes.  This seems like it would punish a PC who has done everything correctly, instead of rewarding them, as extra XP is meant to do (and rarely does) and as extra stats actually do (but get all wonky).

too much complexity and not enough depth
Back when I played AD&D avidly, I knew all the strengths from 10 to 21 and their relevant +hit and +damage modifiers.  My players normally only knew the ones that mattered to them.  It wasn't particularly complex, though it was, in retrospect, rather dumb.  At the time, I had faith that these numbers were tested well and tuned appropriately for what they should be capable of in the real world and also how difficult they are to achieve in the game.

Nowadays, I don't think the table is too complex, I think it's generally too powerful.  An 18/00 fighter has a statistical advantage on landing blows that is very substantial, and the extra damage on strike also scales too high.  Obviously, such a fighter is meant to be a rare treat for a player, as they will be generated very rarely, but that alone creates a problem should such a powerful man fall in combat; the player knows he will likely not get to play such a beast again in that game (or any game with the character generation rules mostly as written).

Quote from: Venka on February 06, 2023, 07:48:02 PM

Quote from: ClusterFluster on February 06, 2023, 04:25:43 PM
I felt that I could have that character become a new campaign NPC, say after getting 3 levels higher than the party average

Maybe your tables are quite different than mine, but a PC becoming an NPC is usually not something the PC desires, especially if they get there by doing really well.  A PC that gains extra experience because he's very dexterity focused, while picking a simple class like thief, with a favorable XP table, and then is expert at gathering gold that the party would otherwise miss, could definitely be three levels ahead, depending on the version, especially if the party chooses weightier classes.  This seems like it would punish a PC who has done everything correctly, instead of rewarding them, as extra XP is meant to do (and rarely does) and as extra stats actually do (but get all wonky).

too much complexity and not enough depth
Back when I played AD&D avidly, I knew all the strengths from 10 to 21 and their relevant +hit and +damage modifiers.  My players normally only knew the ones that mattered to them.  It wasn't particularly complex, though it was, in retrospect, rather dumb.  At the time, I had faith that these numbers were tested well and tuned appropriately for what they should be capable of in the real world and also how difficult they are to achieve in the game.

Nowadays, I don't think the table is too complex, I think it's generally too powerful.  An 18/00 fighter has a statistical advantage on landing blows that is very substantial, and the extra damage on strike also scales too high.  Obviously, such a fighter is meant to be a rare treat for a player, as they will be generated very rarely, but that alone creates a problem should such a powerful man fall in combat; the player knows he will likely not get to play such a beast again in that game (or any game with the character generation rules mostly as written).

And he will tell the tales of the exploits of his Fighter for years to come, to everyone that will listen (and some that wouldn't), more than once.

You make it seem like it's a bad thing when it's not.

"Realism."

Don't make me backstab some of you with a ballista. :)

Quote from: Venka on February 06, 2023, 07:48:02 PM

Quote from: ClusterFluster on February 06, 2023, 04:25:43 PM
I felt that I could have that character become a new campaign NPC, say after getting 3 levels higher than the party average

... but a PC becoming an NPC is usually not something the PC desires, especially if they get there by doing really well. ... This seems like it would punish a PC who has done everything correctly, instead of rewarding them, as extra XP is meant to do (and rarely does) and as extra stats actually do (but get all wonky).

too much complexity and not enough depth
...
Nowadays, I don't think the table is too complex, I think it's generally too powerful.  An 18/00 fighter has a statistical advantage on landing blows that is very substantial, and the extra damage on strike also scales too high.  Obviously, such a fighter is meant to be a rare treat for a player, as they will be generated very rarely, but that alone creates a problem should such a powerful man fall in combat; the player knows he will likely not get to play such a beast again in that game (or any game with the character generation rules mostly as written).

Yeah, I can see why that might make the game a bit frustrating, I was grasping at straws to salvage the raw data of the table for a different purpose, the bonus XP idea came from the option to retire a character at tenth level, as presented in the World of Dungeons handout.

If it really makes things too complicated, I'm willing to just set it aside.

Quote
Maybe your tables are quite different than mine,--

No tables, I don't even run any games at all right now. Just from reading the old rules and any perspectives online largely from my perspective as a player. And I'm not enticed by calculative spreadsheets just yet, given that I have had no useful instruction for math or probability to apply to that end. Most of my ideas just extrapolate from common sense reflecting on my own experience combined with many other concise summaries and persuasions. I think I might spot something about a solution for the bows issue if I read this thread in full and keep up with it, but that might take a while.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on February 06, 2023, 07:42:51 PM

Quote from: LordBP on February 06, 2023, 05:26:47 PM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on February 06, 2023, 03:12:29 PM

Quote from: Lurkndog on January 30, 2023, 02:46:52 PM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on January 30, 2023, 12:25:54 PM
Bows only work in specific circumstances, e.g., scores of bowmen against a marching army, or shoot and run tactics. These are NOT the types of combat you see in dungeons (bows would be terrible in dungeons BTW).

Historically, dungeon crawls don't exist, and conflict is typically out in the open, maybe in a field, or maybe in a forest.

And practically, a standard dungeon with corridors ten feet wide and ten feet tall is spacious enough to use bows and spears in. It might not be ideal, but if I saw five guys with spears marching side by side down a corridor at me, I'd leave immediately.

An actual cave, though? No, I wouldn't even take a spear or a bow into a cave. Too narrow, you might not even be able to get a spear through some twisty places.

Edit: Hell, I probably couldn't get myself through some of the places I went caving as a much younger man.

Yup, agreed, but D&D does dungeons crawls.

Also, longbows in Moldvay can reach up to 100 feet with no penalty. I d'ont see this working in a long corridor and, even in the open, I doubt it would be hard to dodge a missile if you can spot the single archer shooting a single target 100 feet away.

Spears are a different thing IMO. A short spear might work better than a swung weapons in cave...

You would have about half a second to dodge a longbow at 100 feet and it's a pretty flat trajectory for that 100 feet, so might work in a 10x10 corridor.

Half a second? I reckon the "taking the arrow, drawing the bow process, release, travel 100 feet" process would take a lot longer than that, allowing me more than enough time to take cover if not dodge. Especially if I had a shield.

Of course, if the attackers is hidden I'm probably dead against a dagger OR bow... although I would prefer a bow, since if he misses I'll have some time to react. Also, how many times can one stab in a second?

Anyway, that shouldn't be hard to test by someone like shadiversity or lindybeige.

My experience with bows and daggers, as I've said, is limited, although I do think daggers are MUCH easier to hit in my experience.

Half a second is the flight time which you would have to dodge.  The time to draw, aim, fire, and flight time of the arrow would be more around 1-1.5 seconds.

I believe it was standard for longbowmen to shoot between 20-24 arrows per minute for short periods of time, so around 3 seconds per shot.


If you want videos of legit longbows being used, then Tod's Workshop is probably the best channel as he has quite a few videos on it against different types of armor.

https://www.youtube.com/c/TodsWorkshop1/videos

Matt Easton is also pretty good about different weapons and teams up with Tod on some things.

https://www.youtube.com/c/scholagladiatoria/videos



The thing with stabbing with a dagger is that once you get it in the body, you don't stab again.  You twist and turn the dagger to get the most internal damage you can especially if the opponent is armored as you may not be able to get another stab in past the armor.

Quote from: LordBP on February 07, 2023, 07:05:20 AM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on February 06, 2023, 07:42:51 PM

Quote from: LordBP on February 06, 2023, 05:26:47 PM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on February 06, 2023, 03:12:29 PM

Quote from: Lurkndog on January 30, 2023, 02:46:52 PM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on January 30, 2023, 12:25:54 PM
Bows only work in specific circumstances, e.g., scores of bowmen against a marching army, or shoot and run tactics. These are NOT the types of combat you see in dungeons (bows would be terrible in dungeons BTW).

Historically, dungeon crawls don't exist, and conflict is typically out in the open, maybe in a field, or maybe in a forest.

And practically, a standard dungeon with corridors ten feet wide and ten feet tall is spacious enough to use bows and spears in. It might not be ideal, but if I saw five guys with spears marching side by side down a corridor at me, I'd leave immediately.

An actual cave, though? No, I wouldn't even take a spear or a bow into a cave. Too narrow, you might not even be able to get a spear through some twisty places.

Edit: Hell, I probably couldn't get myself through some of the places I went caving as a much younger man.

Yup, agreed, but D&D does dungeons crawls.

Also, longbows in Moldvay can reach up to 100 feet with no penalty. I d'ont see this working in a long corridor and, even in the open, I doubt it would be hard to dodge a missile if you can spot the single archer shooting a single target 100 feet away.

Spears are a different thing IMO. A short spear might work better than a swung weapons in cave...

You would have about half a second to dodge a longbow at 100 feet and it's a pretty flat trajectory for that 100 feet, so might work in a 10x10 corridor.

Half a second? I reckon the "taking the arrow, drawing the bow process, release, travel 100 feet" process would take a lot longer than that, allowing me more than enough time to take cover if not dodge. Especially if I had a shield.

Of course, if the attackers is hidden I'm probably dead against a dagger OR bow... although I would prefer a bow, since if he misses I'll have some time to react. Also, how many times can one stab in a second?

Anyway, that shouldn't be hard to test by someone like shadiversity or lindybeige.

My experience with bows and daggers, as I've said, is limited, although I do think daggers are MUCH easier to hit in my experience.

Half a second is the flight time which you would have to dodge.  The time to draw, aim, fire, and flight time of the arrow would be more around 1-1.5 seconds.

I believe it was standard for longbowmen to shoot between 20-24 arrows per minute for short periods of time, so around 3 seconds per shot.


If you want videos of legit longbows being used, then Tod's Workshop is probably the best channel as he has quite a few videos on it against different types of armor.

https://www.youtube.com/c/TodsWorkshop1/videos

Matt Easton is also pretty good about different weapons and teams up with Tod on some things.

https://www.youtube.com/c/scholagladiatoria/videos



The thing with stabbing with a dagger is that once you get it in the body, you don't stab again.  You twist and turn the dagger to get the most internal damage you can especially if the opponent is armored as you may not be able to get another stab in past the armor.

Yes, good point. I wasn't even considering armor; I also think it is easier to find a weak spot with a dagger (say, armpits) than a bow. With no armor, however, you could stab a lot in 3 seconds...

These videos are very cool, thanks! One guy hits an arrow in the dummy's "eye" thought the helmet! This is impressive and not something you can do without training IMO - again, unlike a dagger, especially if you opponent is pinned to the ground.

But there are so many circumstances that I don't think we can see a result only using theory. A fake dagger (or short sword etc.) versus blunt arrows shouldn't be impossible to do on YT. The reason why it hasn't been done, maybe, it is because, again, bows are not usually for duels, like in D&D, so this use wouldn't be "historically relevant".

(another video I wanted to make is getting a 4 lb. quarterstaff and trying to fight one handed as 5e suggests... but I'm pretty sure I'd destroy my wrists!)

It is still a good idea for a channel, that I leave here since I wasn't able to start my own!  ;D

Other than that, anyone can do their own experience - try shooting a bow at a target that is say, 30 feet away to see how hard it is. Now imagine a moving target that has 3 second to see what you're doing between shots. I've tried and remain convinced that bows require much more training to become deadly.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on February 01, 2023, 06:44:47 PM
Slings in capable hands are quite a good weapon, better than many bows.  The trouble is that getting capable with a sling, like the longbow, takes constant practice from someone that starts relatively young. 

When you've got a lot of shepherds in the area that grew up driving off predators with a sling from a young age, you've got a well-trained core of skirmishers ready made.  When you don't, it's a whole lot easier to train some archers using some moderate pull, shorter bows. 

Like the longbow, if a system can reflect the real abilities of the weapon, and offset that with increased training to get there, a sling ought to be rather scary to opponents, as soon as capability is demonstrated.

Spot on! I have trained with both a bow and a sling, and this matches my personal experience. I found the sling terribly difficult to achieve even basic proficiency with compared to the bow. Once I did though, wow. Those stones hit with explosive power.

(Ultimately I stuck with the sling over the bow for my "prepping", since it has the advantage of being easily improvised in minutes, with a practically limitless supply of ammunition readily available).

Quote from: Eric Diaz on February 07, 2023, 08:08:39 AM

Quote from: LordBP on February 07, 2023, 07:05:20 AM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on February 06, 2023, 07:42:51 PM

Quote from: LordBP on February 06, 2023, 05:26:47 PM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on February 06, 2023, 03:12:29 PM

Quote from: Lurkndog on January 30, 2023, 02:46:52 PM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on January 30, 2023, 12:25:54 PM
Bows only work in specific circumstances, e.g., scores of bowmen against a marching army, or shoot and run tactics. These are NOT the types of combat you see in dungeons (bows would be terrible in dungeons BTW).

Historically, dungeon crawls don't exist, and conflict is typically out in the open, maybe in a field, or maybe in a forest.

And practically, a standard dungeon with corridors ten feet wide and ten feet tall is spacious enough to use bows and spears in. It might not be ideal, but if I saw five guys with spears marching side by side down a corridor at me, I'd leave immediately.

An actual cave, though? No, I wouldn't even take a spear or a bow into a cave. Too narrow, you might not even be able to get a spear through some twisty places.

Edit: Hell, I probably couldn't get myself through some of the places I went caving as a much younger man.

Yup, agreed, but D&D does dungeons crawls.

Also, longbows in Moldvay can reach up to 100 feet with no penalty. I d'ont see this working in a long corridor and, even in the open, I doubt it would be hard to dodge a missile if you can spot the single archer shooting a single target 100 feet away.

Spears are a different thing IMO. A short spear might work better than a swung weapons in cave...

You would have about half a second to dodge a longbow at 100 feet and it's a pretty flat trajectory for that 100 feet, so might work in a 10x10 corridor.

Half a second? I reckon the "taking the arrow, drawing the bow process, release, travel 100 feet" process would take a lot longer than that, allowing me more than enough time to take cover if not dodge. Especially if I had a shield.

Of course, if the attackers is hidden I'm probably dead against a dagger OR bow... although I would prefer a bow, since if he misses I'll have some time to react. Also, how many times can one stab in a second?

Anyway, that shouldn't be hard to test by someone like shadiversity or lindybeige.

My experience with bows and daggers, as I've said, is limited, although I do think daggers are MUCH easier to hit in my experience.

Half a second is the flight time which you would have to dodge.  The time to draw, aim, fire, and flight time of the arrow would be more around 1-1.5 seconds.

I believe it was standard for longbowmen to shoot between 20-24 arrows per minute for short periods of time, so around 3 seconds per shot.


If you want videos of legit longbows being used, then Tod's Workshop is probably the best channel as he has quite a few videos on it against different types of armor.

https://www.youtube.com/c/TodsWorkshop1/videos

Matt Easton is also pretty good about different weapons and teams up with Tod on some things.

https://www.youtube.com/c/scholagladiatoria/videos



The thing with stabbing with a dagger is that once you get it in the body, you don't stab again.  You twist and turn the dagger to get the most internal damage you can especially if the opponent is armored as you may not be able to get another stab in past the armor.

Yes, good point. I wasn't even considering armor; I also think it is easier to find a weak spot with a dagger (say, armpits) than a bow. With no armor, however, you could stab a lot in 3 seconds...

These videos are very cool, thanks! One guy hits an arrow in the dummy's "eye" thought the helmet! This is impressive and not something you can do without training IMO - again, unlike a dagger, especially if you opponent is pinned to the ground.

But there are so many circumstances that I don't think we can see a result only using theory. A fake dagger (or short sword etc.) versus blunt arrows shouldn't be impossible to do on YT. The reason why it hasn't been done, maybe, it is because, again, bows are not usually for duels, like in D&D, so this use wouldn't be "historically relevant".

(another video I wanted to make is getting a 4 lb. quarterstaff and trying to fight one handed as 5e suggests... but I'm pretty sure I'd destroy my wrists!)

It is still a good idea for a channel, that I leave here since I wasn't able to start my own!  ;D

Other than that, anyone can do their own experience - try shooting a bow at a target that is say, 30 feet away to see how hard it is. Now imagine a moving target that has 3 second to see what you're doing between shots. I've tried and remain convinced that bows require much more training to become deadly.

If you want to see what a very good archer can do with a modern bow, then the below channel has a lot of crazy stuff on it.  Think he has some stuff on older archery also.

https://www.youtube.com/@larsandersen23/videos