Quote from: Charon's Little Helper;952988I will say - that's not as big of an issue at standard adventurer levels rather than low % battlefield shots.  I know that Mongols were recorded as going into battle with hundreds of arrows each, and they often shot themselves dry.  But does anyone really want a system where you roll for hundreds of arrows a day?  *snore*

So rolling lots of arrow to hits = bad. But rolling lots of melee hits = good?

Are players getting stupider with each generation?

Quote from: Charon's Little Helper;952988I will say - that's not as big of an issue at standard adventurer levels rather than low % battlefield shots.  I know that Mongols were recorded as going into battle with hundreds of arrows each, and they often shot themselves dry.  But does anyone really want a system where you roll for hundreds of arrows a day?  *snore*

Do you have a source for this? Googling brings numbers of 50, 60, and 75, all of which seem far more feasible than "hundreds".

(Arrows may be lightweight, but they're bulky; the mass-produced ones we might treat a bit casually, but when my family shoots handmade arrows modeled after late-medieval finds they're *really* careful with storage and carrying. You don't want to crush the feathers or snap the shafts. After watching my family with them I have a hard time envisioning even a dedicated adventurer carrying more than two or three dozen.)

Quote from: Naburimannu;953036Do you have a source for this? Googling brings numbers of 50, 60, and 75, all of which seem far more feasible than "hundreds".

That's what you carry on your main horse:). You have spare horses, just like you have spare bows and spare quivers.

Guess what the spare horses carry when you jump from one to the next to give the first one some rest;)?

Quote from: Christopher Brady;952989But...  They ARE 'I win' buttons.  Where the hell do you think we got the idea to use gunpowder to propel a small lead ball at near supersonic to supersonic speeds?  Ranged combat is superiour to melee combat for multiple reasons, the least of which is giving the soldier a better chance of survival, against a lesser skilled foe.  There is a reason ranged combat is king in the modern world.

Actually gunpowder weapons started out as a better siege weapons and the guns as miniature versions of the big cannons. However you are correct that the general idea that ranged weapons are a good thing to have was due to the use of bows and crossbows. Plus what they knew about training with crossbows proved helpful when they developed first gunpowder formations like pike and shot.

Quote from: AsenRG;953043That's what you carry on your main horse:). You have spare horses, just like you have spare bows and spare quivers.

Guess what the spare horses carry when you jump from one to the next to give the first one some rest;)?

Yeah most players don't realize that for long distance travel you would be leading a small string of remounts and alternate among them each day. Of course you can put a SMALL load on the remount like extra quivers of arrows.

The person who gets up on a single horse and just rides was pretty much limited to within a half day's ride of wherever the horse and person lived.

Quote from: Naburimannu;953036After watching my family with them I have a hard time envisioning even a dedicated adventurer carrying more than two or three dozen.

On foot maybe (though I do believe that the Mongols had 60 per quiver and often carried one on their back) but horses' whole job is to carry stuff.  Heck - they often went into battle with multiple bows in addition to some melee weaponry.  Obviously they couldn't do so on foot.

Firstly, dump the idea of 'realism' with bows. But here's how you can make this work in an traditional OSR game:

1) Using bows at a range any further than short indoors or in a place with a ceiling lower than three times the height of the attacker impossible.

2) Remove reload times. That's right, you heard me: no reload times. Speed factor as-is is fine.

3) Allow attackers to fire as many arrows as they like, with a -5 to each shot after the first. Once they generate a result lower than a modified '1', they must stop shooting.

4) Attackers can't use bows when engaged with a foe, full stop.

These rules worked for my group over many years when we played D&D.

Quote from: Xanther;952916Fourth, ammo; bows use arrows, and these arrows are subject to damage if not protected.  

Furthermore, try carrying more than ~30 arrows at once.

The Egyptians were masters of the Shortbow, and Javelin, and this made them the most powerful army on earth for a time. This is how their battles were fought;

The Egyptian Chariots would roll up toward the front line of battle, and then the archers would shoot into charging infantry at point blanks range. The chariot driver would do a 180 and roll away with the horses easily outrunning any charging infantry and the archer would just continue shooting the whole time. Once they had outrun the charge, they would do another 180 and return again to the line of battle. They inflicted a lot of casualties this way while taking much less casualties themselves, becuase they were exposed to ranged fire for only limited amounts of time, but they were able to strike at their foes with both precision and speed.

Course once everyone figured out what the Egyptians were up to, they changed their rules of engagement and refused to engage the Egyptian army in open fields or open terrain, preferring to fight battles in terrain that was unfavorable for chariot mounted archers and lancers.

Fortunately for the Egyptians, there is lots of open terrain in deserts.

I've played archers in many systems, and the fun is being the fantasy sniper. 4e Ranger was a favorite.

The Wasp clan bushi in L5R is insane. Deeply overpowered archer, and that overkill kinda negates some of the fun.

Quote from: Spinachcat;953184I've played archers in many systems, and the fun is being the fantasy sniper. 4e Ranger was a favorite.

The Wasp clan bushi in L5R is insane. Deeply overpowered archer, and that overkill kinda negates some of the fun.

Do you have a fun memory from a 4E campaign?

Archery has lasted from the Stone Age up to, the present day. Why? Because it is useful and very good for killing things.

Steppe Nomads, especially the Mongols, used archery in a devastating way. English longbowmen used archery in mass combat. Archery can be found in all the inhabited continents, and is used for hubting and warfare.

Sure, in combat, archery can be boring, you take an arrow, you aim, fire, roll to hit and do damage. Spice it up by adding modifiers for movement, terrain and conditions. Some archers might have specialised techniques, such as drawing three arrows at a time to improve rate of fire, or firing two arrows together at a single target.

It appears... right now that the niche for bows is as a backup weapon for when mages run out of mana, from what I can tell pre-playtesting. If it's fun, cool. If it needs some more jazz, there's been a lot of good suggestions on the thread.

Archery, like any other martial arts, incorporates some odd metaphysics, breath control, increased sense of timing and spacial distances, etc.

Make bows a force multiplier for some flavors of magic. The "properly prepared and enchanted bow" is a devastating weapon in the hands of a mage. Spell effects suddenly manifest at the point the bolt/arrow hits something instead of touch/a-few-yards. Some arrows may be enchanted to to aid specific flavors of magic (Elemental-Fire Arrows adding to Fireball Damage at Longbow Range, Water -Arrows like from Theif to put out fires or throw water enchantments further then they could otherwise, arrows enchanted to find the specific person/animal who's hair was whipped into to feathers, etc). Make it a FORCE multiplier.


<--- Played an Elf Archer Adept up to mid-Circles in Earthdawn 1st edition.

In the games I've played and preferred, archery seems about as interesting as other types of combat, which has been plenty interesting to me, and I tend to be just as (or more) interested in combat as magic and other stuff. Again, usually because the focus of the game tends to be about the combat situations, and provides a lot to work with other than character sheets and a list of foes. With detailed maps and terrain in play, the layout of the place where everyone moves and faces and so on determines which targets are available and how difficult they are to hit from each attacker's position. So an archer has to decide where to move to be able to clear shot at whom, and to avoid getting hit by which foes - even more than front-line fighters, a smart archer should take into account the entire battle layout and situation when deciding where to move and what shots to take.

Archers are a bit more capable in short-range fighting in TFT compared to GURPS because of the differences in the movement rules and the time scale. In TFT, an archer can generally attack about as often as a hand-weapon fighter, and if he has friends who can keep foes away from him, may get off several shots per fight. In GURPS, even the fastest archer is about half as fast at attacking as a swordsman.