The Grim-n-Gritty Rules
- Thread starter Nebuchadnezzar
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Bob Aberton
First Post
Oo! Archery...my third favorite hobby
Yeah, in DnD terms, an English longbow would be a Mighty Composite longbow. The typical longbow of that era would require about 80 pounds of pull on the string.
To put that in perspective, those composite bows you see nowadays area about 10-35 pounds of pull.
English longbowmen would be about six feet tall (The bows themselves were six feet tall), and really strong.
Just my 2 cents
Yeah, in DnD terms, an English longbow would be a Mighty Composite longbow. The typical longbow of that era would require about 80 pounds of pull on the string.
To put that in perspective, those composite bows you see nowadays area about 10-35 pounds of pull.
English longbowmen would be about six feet tall (The bows themselves were six feet tall), and really strong.
Just my 2 cents
The Mighty Composite Longbow stats do seem most appropriate -- but what then is a generic Longbow? An English longbow most certainly was not a composite bow. It was a "self" bow, made from wood, not a composite bow made from wood, horn, sinew, and glue.
I've read 75 to 100 pounds, with much stronger bows in use to -- up to 150-pound pull. Certainly "mighty".
The modern contraptions with pulleys and whatnot are compound bows. Like a good recurved composite bow (better, in fact), they provide more total energy for the same peak pull, since they don't go from roughly zero resistance at the start of the pull to very high resistance at the end of the pull.
And evidently their constant archery practice was enough to warp their skeletons enough to make them obvious to forensic researchers.
Anyway, a good archer isn't a tiny wisp of an elf. A good archer is a big manly man.
To keep this on topic, under the Grim-n-Gritty system, an English longbowman (Str 14) would do 1d8+2 damage with his "mighty" longbow, with an additional two points of Piercing from his "bodkin" arrowheads. A typical hit wouldn't quite pierce full plate (DR 8, minus two for Piercing), but a good hit could do four points of damage, and a crit could do much more.
jasper
Rotten DM
Yuan-Ti said:
arrgggh.
First minor correction. Henry V was at Agincourt.
plate armor did NOT make you unable to move once knock on you backside. Grant if you trip and fell off and landed badly you may have been stunned just like the opposing team dogpile you in tackle football. But plate armour allow you to stand up walk around, do hand stands (since was strapped and balance on the body). I would allow the max dex bonus penalty as a game factor but a knight could vault into his saddle in full plate.
the scenes in the movies are just fiction, no hoist knights to horses for joust, no needing 30 people to help you up etc.
Frostmarrow
First Post
Why not just drop the hp down to Con and make it possible to get new hps in exchange for conditions? Say you have 2 hp left and are about to get smacked over the head with an axe. Then you decide that some new hps would be a good idea and announce that you now is 'clobbered' or even 'shaken' from now on for an additional 2 or 5 hps. That's pretty gritty.
Someone [Austin, be he didn't originally come up with it] mentioned in the House Rules Forum that he had armor turn the amount it protects from into subdual damage. So if you hit a chainmail guy and dealt 7 damage, 2 would be considered real damage and the rest subdual. Since this leads to people falling unconscious before dropping to -10 hp the characters could just as well die at 0. He kept people bleeding even though they had 'real' hp left. That's pretty grim.
If you couple those two and add Defense Rating (Defense equals Base Ref Save+10) instead of Armor Class you have a brand new system. Yay!
It still doesn't work with ranged weapons but the standard rules don't either, do they?
Someone [Austin, be he didn't originally come up with it] mentioned in the House Rules Forum that he had armor turn the amount it protects from into subdual damage. So if you hit a chainmail guy and dealt 7 damage, 2 would be considered real damage and the rest subdual. Since this leads to people falling unconscious before dropping to -10 hp the characters could just as well die at 0. He kept people bleeding even though they had 'real' hp left. That's pretty grim.
If you couple those two and add Defense Rating (Defense equals Base Ref Save+10) instead of Armor Class you have a brand new system. Yay!
It still doesn't work with ranged weapons but the standard rules don't either, do they?
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Desdichado
Hero
Don't make generalizations. True, the plate armor of Agincourt was pretty flexible: I've seen folks wearing "authentic" replicas of Agincourt English armor roll on the ground, jump up and keep fighting. However, at the height of the tournament era, mounted knights couldn't indeed get on their horses by themselves, and if knocked off were unlikely to get back up. But that was more a regional thing (mostly in Germany) and much later than Agincourt, and only existed under special circumstances.
If you'd like a simpler style of "realistic" combat consider switching armor to DR, Str for all damage bonuses (melee and missile), Dex for all to-hit bonuses (melee and missiled), to-hit as an opposed check (to-hit vs. Ref) -- and a vastly increased Crit Threat Range.
If you make any hit a Crit Threat (i.e. Crit Threat Range 1-20), and you make Crit Hits "stack" (i.e. you keep rolling as long as you keep getting Crit Threats), then high-level heroes tend to do much more damage and take much less damage than low-level grunts, but anything can still happen.
If you make any hit a Crit Threat (i.e. Crit Threat Range 1-20), and you make Crit Hits "stack" (i.e. you keep rolling as long as you keep getting Crit Threats), then high-level heroes tend to do much more damage and take much less damage than low-level grunts, but anything can still happen.
