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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 861663" data-attributes="member: 8158">Ah, the great longbow/crossbow debate reareth its head again.Truly, there were all kinds of longbows, many types of crossbows, and armor plates of varying thickness and temper. Talking about the Middle Ages is not like talking about the wild west. What we consider the Middle Ages was, after all, a really long frickin' period of time--we're talking a few centuries here--and it encompassed the better part of a whole darn continent. When you hear some fellow arguing insistently that there is one "official" statistic with regards to how fast a crossbow could be loaded or at what range a bolt could penetrate plate armor, it's safe to assume the person you're listening to hasn't lent a great deal of thought to the matter regardless of how many books he's read or websites he's visited.For instance, a crossbow with a low amount of pull is obviously going to require less effort to recock than one with a heavier draw, and there's quite a bit of difference between the lightest crossbow that ever was and the heaviest one. This is a weapon that went through a long evolution, so why would anyone be surprised to find that documents from the time of the War of the Roses provides different information than was scribed during the Hundred Years War? The latter started a century earlier.  For game purposes you have to figure out where you are within the crossbow's evolution. Is it like D&D, where you still have "plain" wood bows existing alongside the patently-superior composites? Are there tempered-steel prods that likewise outshine composites? If you want a crossbow to be more powerful than a bow, then you ought to go with steel. After all, a longbow’s prod has a much broader width than that of a crossbow, so the only thing that could ever endow a crossbow with a better draw is having a prod that’s impossible to pull back by hand. Which begs the question of what reloading devices are available? Can’t decide how fast a crossbow reloads if you don’t have that established. If there are just wooden crossbows, then perhaps marksmen are still reloading by hand or belt claw. If you're up to steel bows, then you're going to need a goot's hoof or, more likely, a crannequin [sic?].This was all likely discussed when 3e went into design, and they ultimately went for the abstracted, highly-unrealistic set of statistics. They threw out STR minimums too, which really would have played a more meaningful part with bows than with melee weapons. Meanwhile, they retained the notions of “mighty” crossbows, which is kind of nonsensical. When you have a +4 mighty light crossbow and a +1 mighty heavy crossbow, why exactly is the former still considered “light” and thus faster to reload than the latter? Light crossbows should not be allowed to be mighty.</blockquote>

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