Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gus L" data-source="post: 9682974" data-attributes="member: 7045072">We do know that bows were frequently mentioned in "viking sagas" and found at many Northern European sites.  They tend to be single stave bows that are fairly long and mentions of war bows (such as in Olafs Trygvasonar's sagas) tend to emphasize heavy draw weights and use at sea. A fair amount of bow use sure but besides heroic highly skilled and miraculously strong archer type heroes they don't get much mention in land war outside of siege. Other then that the use of the bow in medieval warfare seems pretty common, but only really effective with longbows in the hands of the rigorously trained English or Japanese and composite horse bows used by everyone East of Germany.To me the lack of use (as opposed to bows being the royal weapon in the early bronze age suggest they weren't all that unless one had a lot of training and a bow with a very high draw.  But I really don't want to make a historical argument here - I find shooting into melee allows for a few tricks and tactics that I don't like because when the enemy does it (E.g. those hobgoblins putting 10 shortbow shots down the hall at your AC 9 wizard ... or even your AC 2 fighter from behind two ranks of polearms) it makes for dull PC deaths.  If only the party does it, it's a sort of cheat code. I use OD&D - I don't much like anything after it - and I recognize the numerous holes in the system.  Not saying you shouldn't allow missile fire from rear ranks without penalty ... but to me it doesn't work well. It's hard to have a party of 10 in a two combatant wide hallway and give everyone something to do in combat anyway <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Perhaps - it's a bad weapon in D&D generally.  I don't really dislike it as a bad weapon in D&D - Gary certainly built a system where the heroic, nobility related sword was the best weapon and that is something that tracks with his fictional sources.  It's fine, but to me it's an example of the "katana problem" where one tries to take common perceptions, history (which changes constantly) or these days You Tube hot takes and force them into a system.  Like if Gygax had said "Heroes of myth and legend are defined by their swords, just as high level fighters in D&D are the only characters who can wield magic swords, and other weapons are relegated to lesser power and status in D&D because of this." That would be cool - it's world building, it's design and it's acknowledging one's game goals rather then making an appeal to some dubious outside authority.  There are plenty of reasons to favor swords (or any one "fighter" weapon) mechanically due to balancing them against other classes abilities ... in post OD&D the sword effectively becomes the fighter advantage over cleric for example. Similarly, the spear as a 2nd rank weapon that can be used with a shield should arguably be lower damage then a front rank weapon. To me it's not really about the specifics of katanas, spears or shooting into melee - it's about thinking through the mechanical consequences of these rules and owning them rather then appealing to a sort of messy "realism" ... and we haven't even gotten into arguments about how dragons breath fire or what players can do about it with AP bio knowledge.</blockquote>

Verification