How many arrows can an expert archer fire in a round?

[Nellisir]

All I know is that I wouldn't want to be shooting at the guy when he's shooting back.

 

[Garthanos]

My point was that a game with that many attacks per round doesn't sound like a great idea to me, whatever method of attack it is. Lots of watching someone roll dice for 20 minutes.

Rather than attacks per round, that sort of thing is best abstracted a little to use area of attack rules, I think.

Certainly makes Barrage Attacks seem pretty plausible.

I think sports archery has affected what people think is possible and plausible way too much. Certain Legendary Figures are described as being able to make a dozen or so shots before the first arrow hit the ground.

The mechanics used to represent that kind of thing might be pretty variable.

Hey I know damage on a miss

 

[Garthanos]

He's also not in anything resembling a combat situation - a quiet room with a completely flat floor, and where the targets, crucially, don't shoot back.

He has other videos showing him firing accurately in mid fall from approximately horseback height. I have no doubt real combat unless the enemy were heavily armored it would work real well.

 

[Ace]

D&D gets bows basically correct erring a bit on the heroic side. In the older editions with 10 second rounds, they were basically spot on.

A few facts.

The minimum draw weight for a combat bow is about 50 lbs since the arrows need to hit with enough force to reach vital organs through clothes.

D&D calls this a short bow.

This bow will not easily penetrate jack armor (this is comparable to leather in D&D but made of layered textiles) or shields in real life.

D&D doesn't cover penetration except as an abstraction, you roll to hit and if you do, you get an unarmored spot. As Mike "Old Geezer" Monard put it "Abstraction is a font of realism" This gives pretty good results actually at low levels.

A long bow (basic) is around 75 lbs draw weight. This is the bow D&D gives 1d8 damage too. It will penetrate jack armor (probably) close up with broadheads and sometimes mail with bodkins but not plate. This is a hunting bow and in reality about as much bow as a woman can draw. In D&D this is of course not the case

War Bows such as found on the Mary Rose shipwreck came in draw weights up to 200 LBS!

For heavy bows a rough estimate would be in 3x terms +1 Damage via strength per extra 25 lbs draw weight. A 175 LB Bow would be about Strength 20 which is about the strongest bows we commonly find.

Most of the archers would not have had Strength 20 though and instead a "class ability" or feat allowing them to increase draw weight through practice. This practice left them with distorted upper body strength that we can see in the skeletal remains even now

Those bows had a lot of range and killing power , often penetrated mail at close range and the very heaviest can occasionally penetrate plate at close range with bodkin points. D&D might have hardened (possible IRL but we have no evidence for them) or other super metal or magic bodkins those would get a nasty bonus +x to hit is actually not a bad way to go.

Now as to the cool videos these techniques are neat, its unlikely they could be used with killing weight bows except very close against unarmored targets and even than they might not stop them.

They are basically using the bow like a Cho-Ko-Nu the real life repeating crossbow.Its fired very fast but very weak bolts and the Chinese relied on poisoned arrows or mass firepower for killing.

In reality an archer could manage about 2 or 3 arrows a round from a light bow and 1 per 5 seconds for a war bow. The D&D abstraction is fine here, being a bit generous.

The higher levels of course are mythic (real life is probably Epic 6ish) and as such its all out the window.

If you wanted to use this in 3x games, you'd have a feat (arrows storm) and a special bow that does 1d3 with half the range of a short bow and is -4 vs targets with any armor or natural armor bonus. You could allow an extra 2 attack so that a say 6th level archer with rapid shot which is comparable to this guys skill level could manage 5 shots a round.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Whatever, it's cool.

Mechanically, I'd say there's diminishing returns in extra attack rolls, but there's no reason fighters shouldn't be constantly slashing, archers shouldn't be constantly peppering the area, etc. The attack roll represents if one of your attempted hits actually gets through, not every attack you make, so I'm cool with 12 arrows per round represented with 1 attack roll just as I'm cool with 20 sword blows per round represented with 1 attack roll. Variable damage, in part, describes how many of those attacks land.

But it's cool, and it's something I should be able to imagine my D&D archer doing! And making multiple attack rolls has some utility (area effects, twin strikes, etc.) that might work for this.

 

[RangerWickett]

If a single attack represents a volley of shots or a flurry of sword strokes . . . how would you model a slow-to-reload weapon like a crossbow?

In the real world, crossbows were just much easier to use. In game, an archer who fills a guy with three arrows does 1d8 damage round after round. Would a crossbowman, who probably needs a round or two to reload his weapon, need to do 2d8 or 3d8 per shot? That seems unrealistic, though, from a physics standpoint.

Thoughts?

 

[marroon69]

I think this only works if the archer and target is standing still, there in no one else in the way, they are not having there life threatened and all the bad guys wear white with red circles at the center. Otherwise I am thinking they would be much slower....maybe not even one per round. Firing into a melee combat would give any archer pause (well unless he does not care for either opponent lol).

 

[Klaus]

Of course, the real advantage of crossbows, compared to bows, is the penetration (+5 to hit against opponents in heavy armor) and ease of use. The video mentioned the archer took 3 years to get to this point. A crossbow is point-and-shoot (and hand over to a shieldbearer to reload, while you shoot the spare crossbow).

 

[Blackbrrd]

Really cool video. I wouldn't have thought the things done there were possible without the video. I wonder how many takes they did to make the videos. Especially when he shot three targets thrown in the air before they landed.

Note worthy: armor piercing arrows pierces chain mail at close range from a 30-35lbs bow not fully pulled back. That was just the chain though. You would wear padding beneath, so the above posters note about 50lbs draw sounds likely.

I do think that the biggest problem with this type of archery is a nice big shield. Shooting arrows rapidly on instinct seems likely to just end up in the shield. And you run out of arrows in 5 seconds.
[MENTION=63]RangerWickett[/MENTION] the crossbow was as [MENTION=607]Klaus[/MENTION] mentions much better at piercing armor, and/or usable in noob hands. A 120-200 lbs bow isn't something you just pick up and use...

 

[Nellisir]

The video mentioned the archer took 3 years to get to this point. A crossbow is point-and-shoot (and hand over to a shieldbearer to reload, while you shoot the spare crossbow).

Yeah. That said, this guy took 3 years to get good. I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to people who had to grow up doing this as their livelihood.