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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9612146" data-attributes="member: 7026594">AD&D lightly implies that it's limited to melee "Back stabbing is the striking of a blow from behind, be it with club, dagger, or sword." (PH page 27)The original OD&D description just says "By striking silently from behind the thief gains two advantages". (Greyhawk page 4)B/X also uses a more open phrasing "When striking unnoticed from behind". (B10)Archery in the game is an interesting thing.It's certainly true that the actual capacity, encumbrance and unwieldiness of a quiver of arrows gets glossed over a lot.  The small quiver I used with my target bow when I was a teenager only comfortably fit 4-5 arrows, and those were with round target heads, not with broadheads which could catch on one another if crowded in the quiver.  In real life a quiver of 20 arrows with broadheads would be pretty substantial, close to a backpack on its own, or regularly needing a hand on it while walking if worn at the hip.  The quiver shown below is advertised as fitting 20 target arrows, but there are about 10 or 11 in the picture, and you can see how they'd be tightly packed if you tried to get 20 in there.  Make those broadheads and there's a strong chance that drawing one tangles up with others and spills them out on the ground.In keeping with Lew's comments about limited ammo, remember too that they'll get broken a lot in battle.  Even if the enemy isn't wearing hard metal armor for them to break on, shots hitting stones or walls getting embedded in trees, or shafts getting snapped when the victim falls dead or someone steps on them, are common occurrences.  Outdoors, a bow powerful enough to penetrate armor is often going to send arrows long distances on missed shots and just have them get lost. Fitting a replacement arrowhead or new fletchings to arrows is a task we often assume archers know how to do for themselves (and a reason so many of us took Bowyer/Fletcher nonweapon proficiency in AD&D), but proper thread and glue for fletching, knives for the work, and especially tools like a lathe to cut and shape perfectly straight new arrow shafts aren't always things we can assume people would have in the wild.This isn't even getting into the range issues with archery.  Where in real life shooting at someone 50' away who can see you often means they can side-step or lift a shield to block a shot, because it's not a bullet.  AD&D bow ranges are taken almost exactly, directly from Chainmail archery ranges, which are of course meant for massed units of archers shooting at massed units of ranked soldiers, where you're not just shooting at one guy in a field at 630' (max range for a longbow in OD&D, no to hit adjustment, see Greyhawk p17).  And those ranges have changed very little over the various editions.  (Longbow in 5E max range 600').Delta did some <a href="https://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2014/04/a-model-of-archery-for-d.html" target="_blank">observation </a>of, <a href="https://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2015/02/archery-field-experiment.html" target="_blank">experimenting with</a> and <a href="https://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2019/03/more-missile-modeling.html" target="_blank">applied math on</a> amateur archery and his data found that accuracy rapidly drops off at even moderate ranges due to the target relative size shrinking massively from the perspective of the firer.  There is still a modern sport of shooting at clouts which uses ranges not far off D&D long ranges, but a basic "hit" in those competitions involves getting the arrow to land within a 12' diameter circle, and hits within the 18" center circle (similar width to a person) are quite rare.  And this is with stationary targets, of course. OTOH, SCA archers show us examples of how at short range with a distracted target, and guards to intercept the enemy from getting at them, archers can often snipe enemies very reliably who are engaging their friends in melee.</blockquote>

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