Should bows be Exotic Weapons?

[Rel]

Longbows required training from a very early age to use and the training issue was a significant reason many armies preferred to use crossbows or muskets as they became common.

I seem to recall hearing something along the lines of "If you want to train a man to shoot a longbow, first you start with his grandfather..."

I'm not sure that the "longbow" in the PHB is meant to represent the Welsh longbow. Perhaps the Composite Longbow is meant for that role or maybe not. But I could see a place in the game for an Exotic weapon that was a lonbow with 1d10 damage and a longer range.

 

[Li Shenron]

But I could see a place in the game for an Exotic weapon that was a lonbow with 1d10 damage and a longer range.

There actually is the Greatbow, exotic and d10

 

[Cithindril]

Should we apply realism and also require that bows be strung before every fight?

...and Cithindril, the sadistic DM gets an evil grin on his face..

I actually had never thought of this but it makes a great deal of sense! My players will curse your name...

 

[Jeff Wilder]

If swords are martial, then bows CERTAINLY are. Being able to fight effectively with a sword is far more difficult than learning to shoot a bow with reasonable accuracy.

I'm not so sure about this.

Speaking as a former champion archer, I know I wouldn't be equipped to take part in a typical D&D battle. Yet a skilled SCA fighter, armed with real weapons and armor, would probably do okay. (Psychological aspects aside, in both cases.)

I think I would agree that archery as part of a unit -- massed firing against massed targets -- is martial. But archery as part of a skirmish, D&D style? Making bows exotic easily passes my realism test. (And dividing the two aspects of archery strikes me as more trouble than it's worth.)

On the other hand, I really don't see that it's necessary from a game balance standpoint. Archery in D&D is not such a powerful alternative to melee that it needs to become more difficult to do effectively, IMO.

 

[Bagpuss]

No i dont think so. For a bow all you gotta do is knock an arrow on a string and pull.

You do that and you'ld be luckly to hit a barn door. Bows have no sights, and depending on how far you draw them drastically effects their range and flight characteristics. That's where the years of training comes in.

On key advantage of firearms and crossbow is they are consistant, the force applied is always the same and the sighting is considerably easier.

A gun (the D&D guns, not modern ones) require gun powder, loading and packing all that stuff then adding a musket ball then aiming and firing. To be able to fire a D&D gun and repack everything in 6 seconds is quite a feat in my mind,

Actually its impossible with the firearms as they are discribed in D&D. You'll have to rigoursly trained to manage to get of one shot every 20 seconds, 6 or 7 rounds, with a flintlock. And that's using paper & ball cartridges as opposed to a power horn and seperate ball.

where as a bow and crossbow are extremely simple.

It maybe simple to notch an arrow and shoot it, but without training that arrow is going to land in a random location. There is a lot of skill in pulling to the same point and aiming true with a long or short bow, and you certainly arn't going to be firing of 5 or more shots in 3 seconds like some high level character even with decades of experience.

In summary D&D is a game and it doesn't reflect the reality of early firearms or archery. Play it as a game and have fun.

 

[kolvar]

Hmh, about the common bow: The Longbow, the bow, that is as tall as a man, was widely used only in England and Wales and there only because it was a sports-item that the nobility required the peasents to train with (to get access to trained archers - what a great scheme, actually. giving them the freedom to use a weapon, to exploit that freedom for their wars). Others used short-bows or X-bows. Considering the "many" battles won with the bows, it where mainly the English who killed with the bow (Agincourt, i.e. had the english longbowmen on one side and X-bow man on the other).
There is another saying about training bowmen: if you take 10 longbow-men with you on a campaign, you will have 2 afterwards, who know how to use a bow.
Another thing about the X-bow: As far as I know, it was one of the first weapons to be banned from use during wars, becaue any peasant could grab one and kill a noble-man with it.

The funny thing is, that I was thinking about making the longbow an exotic weapon just yesterday, after reading the Palladium RPG, where the longbow is restricted to two classes only.

 

[jesseghfan]

As a halfway decent archer and a halfway decent SCA swordsman, I can tell you my thoughts: it isn't really even close. Shooting archery takes some time and patience. The default D&D bows aren't the 90-100 pound pull, English longbow things- rather, they are made for the average 10-11 strength individual- who could not pull such a beast as the Yeomen used. (Yeoman might have been 11s or so in strength overall, but the forearms, etc., were at least 18s, I'd think)

But give me a typical adult male (not to be sexist- just an example) and a 50 pound pull bow and 20 days of training every day (with a few off for muscle recovery) and he can shoot somewhat and would be somewhat dangerous to his opponent. Heck, give me an average 45 year old woman (was my mom one time, actually) with a 35 pound pull bow and 20 days of training every day (with a few off for muscle recovery) and she could plunk it. Now could she shoot into two combatants fighting toe-to-toe and hit the enemy one without hitting her own some of the time? No, but that's a feat, isn't it? And yep, I'm talking about bare bows here, none of these modern pulleys and aiming devices.

In my experience, give me a fairly athletically inclined male with 20 days of training sword and shield (with a few days off for muscle and bruise recovery) and you know what you got? Nothing much. These folks are referred to (in my area) as speed bumps. Any fighter with several years of training can kill at will and the newbie will not be able to touch the vet who is really trying.

Gotta remember, sword fighting includes defense, shooting an arrow basically does not.

In reponse to the superb archer wondering how he would do on the battlefield- I bet you would kick tail. Sure, you'd have to learn to watch the whole battlefield (instead of focusing on one target to the exclusion of everything else) and move, move, move, but that shouldn't take too long. Just leave the front row of the enemy alone if it is engaged with your front row. Shoot the enemy archers. Shoot the enemy reinforcements. Above all, shoot those dang nam spearmen and polearmsmen fighting (in relative safety) from the second row.

As to SCA fighters on a real battlefield- yeah, pretty close, but SCA doesn't allow swinging at the lower legs (knees cannot be sufficiently armored to allow it to be done safely in the SCA's full force mass combats). As archaelogical finds have suggested lower legs very much were a viable target, the SCA falls short here. Of course, folks have developed defensive styles that do not take protecting the shins into account. So, pretty close, close as we can, but not quite.

Yet another way of looking at it: During the Hundred Years War, the English peasantry were required by law to practice with the longbow. Everyone shot. The English force in France had _thousands_ of longbowmen. That just doesn't sound like an exotic weapon to me.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

In reponse to the superb archer wondering how he would do on the battlefield- I bet you would kick tail.

You're vastly underestimating the significance of a moving, not to mention dodging target. It is simply not something archers train for. I've never done any bow hunting, but I know guys who do, and they don't bother to loose at targets on the move. (My ex-girlfriend's brother tells one story of the best hunter he knows, who took a buck "on the bound" ... the kicker of the story being that it was an accident.)

Although there are archery competitions with moving targets, these are metronome or pendulum targets, with fixed and calculable rates of movement. So far as I'm aware, there are no sanctioned competitions using irregularly-moving targets. There were definitely none when I was in competition.

There's a reason for that: they'd result in a lot of really embarrassed otherwise superb archers.

Anyway, movement -- of both target and archer -- is the issue, which is why I bifurcated my earlier response between massed archery and skirmish archery. As I said, skirmish archery with self-bows (which is what 99% of D&D archery is, after all) could easily be classified as an exotic proficiency, realistically speaking. Crossbows differ in both areas of movement -- as flat-trajectory weapons, there's no need for constant adjustments of pull and elevation (which are made very difficult for a moving or dodging archer).

So, much as it would gratify my ego to think I'd "kick tail" on a D&D battlefield, I really do know better.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

Yet another way of looking at it: During the Hundred Years War, the English peasantry were required by law to practice with the longbow. Everyone shot. The English force in France had _thousands_ of longbowmen. That just doesn't sound like an exotic weapon to me.

One issue D&D combat has is that it uses two criteria for determining whether a weapon is "exotic." One is whether or not it's just plain better than a similar martial weapon. For example, the Elven thinblade. You cannot tell me that an Elven thinblade differs more from a rapier than a longsword differs from a shortsword ... the thinblade isn't exotic because it takes special training to use, it's exotic because game balance requires it.

The second criterion is whether the weapon is actually so weird that it requires special training. The whip, for instance.

(Some weapons are both. The spiked chain being the premier example.)

In neither case is "commonality" actually at issue, though even the name of the Exotic Weapon Proficiency feat implies otherwise. To illustrate, consider a nation that requires its able-bodied citizens to train with the spiked chain. In D&D terms, wouldn't you still require a native of that land to take Exotic Weapon Proficiency (spiked chain)? Sure you would. (I hope.) So the issue isn't a matter of how common usage of the weapon is. It's entirely conceivable that all those English yeomen would have had Exotic Weapon Proficiency (longbow), just like our hypothetical folks had the spiked chain.

(Also, not to beat a dead horse, but there really is a difference between how the longbow was used historically and how D&D archers use it. The former doesn't merit EWP. The latter easily could.)