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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8224688" data-attributes="member: 6988941">I have been on a Tod's Workshop videos kick recently and they are a bit misleading on this point because he A) makes almost exclusively steel crossbows, which are designed for use with spanning devices, and B) really likes his goats foot lever because it is an elegant device that appeals to him and makes crossbow loading pretty painless. But lighter crossbows (up to about 150 pound draw-weight) could be handspanned. That's what the stirrup at the front is about, putting your foot through and pulling up, either by hand or with spanning belt. Steel bow crossbows are very inefficient and make up for this by having much higher draw-weights than their wood and composite predecessors, necessitating more involved spanning methods.The crossbow issue with D&D is people tend to imagine all the crossbows are hand-spanned. Perfectly reasonable with the handcrossbow, whose anemic 30 foot non-disadvantaged range fairly indicates that it is a small device with a pretty light draw-weight. Reasonable enough to handwave with the light crossbow, though it probably should involve a movement penalty because realistically it would involve, standing (or sitting) still, putting it to the ground and sticking a foot through the stirrup. But anything that can remotely be called a "heavy crossbow" should require some sort of more involved spanning device. More importantly to gameplay, no feat in crossbow expertise should let someone get off more than one heavy crossbow shot in a round, because just getting it down to a 6 second reload and aim time is an extraordinary feat. Unless by "heavy crossbow" we just mean "heavy for a handspanned crossbow" in which case the damage should be reduced, and a bunch of seriously beastly crossbows with awkward loading requirements should be added.</blockquote>

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