One thing to think of, is that most of the early fantasy/games were all dungeon crawlers which would limit the use of a longbow greatly.

The rule in D&D was that ranges were in feet indoors and yards outdoors.

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 28, 2023, 09:00:58 PM

Quote from: Krazz on January 28, 2023, 06:35:55 PM
And as to rate of fire, I wonder whether that melee attack rate is for getting in a decent strike amongst the various feints and parries. I suspect that bows could exceed that rate, though whether you want that in your game is up to you.

That's my usual argument for why you only get one melee attack per round. An "attack" represents 6 seconds worth of fencing, rather than one swing of the sword. However, I would argue that the same should apply to bows. If you are shooting at targets moving around in the heat of battle, you still need to take a few seconds to pick your shot, especially if you want any hope of wounding an armored opponent.

It's also simple enough to abstract rate-of-fire in the same way: bows get one "attack", just like melee weapons, which represents any number of arrows fired. A quiver holds a number of attacks worth of ammunition, rather than a specific number of arrows. (Yes, you are Legolas already firing two, three or four arrows in rapid succession.)

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 28, 2023, 09:00:58 PM

Quote from: Krazz on January 28, 2023, 06:35:55 PM
If you are adventuring in cramped caverns underground, bows should have severely limited range. To shoot long distances, you have to aim upwards, something that would result in hitting the ceiling in a dungeon.

True, but the flip side is that almost all underground encounters happen at such short range that you could probably shoot a bow at a flat trajectory with minimal issue.

Not in any game where  the archer is toast in melee and has even modest cover rules.  You are at short range.  Either you have no one between you and the target or you do.  If you don't, you get one shot, and then you are in melee.  If you do, it's difficult to clean shots.

What I do is part to simulate this and part enforcing the results I want (hah!):  There's an automatic -2 to hit anyone on the front rank of a melee line, with a chance to hit friends if you try it.  There's an automatic -2 to hit anyone on the second rank of a melee line (e.g. spear wielders), but no chance to hit friends.  Or you can take a shot at someone in the enemy back ranks, where you don't get to pick the target.  Instead, the GM just semi-randomly assigns any hit to an appropriate target in whatever general group you were aiming at.

Result:  Players who can find a ledge, a crevice, a dais--anything to get a clear shot--will grab it.  Usually when they do, it makes them a target for enemy ranged attacks.  Moreover, it greatly discourages "focus fire" in a modestly realistic manner.  If the archer wants to cleanly commit to taking down a prime target, often the most effective means is to take one shot at the charging foes and then immediately retreat through the line.  The melee guys like this.  You took out one of the 3 guys about to fall on me, or you hurt something tough that I now get to kill.  And the archer player has to think a little.

Again, I'm hardly the only person to get this result.  There are multiple ways to do it.  But you have to decide how you want all this to work, how much complexity you are willing to tolerate, and then build the game with those goals ruthlessly pursued. 

Some rules I have typically used (in any game) to limit the long-bow

1. Can't be used on horseback, and the rider gets a penalty to ride checks simply for having the bow on his person. The longbow is HUGE
2. Roll a 1 and you break the string. 2-8 rounds to get the bow re-strung
3. Huge penalties to move silently or hide-in-shadows when carrying a longbow.
4. If the thief is hiding-in-shadows and trying to move silently, the short-bow must be on his back and around the shoulder--one round to ready that weapon, and you will likely be seen

The longbow is a big, infantry weapon, used in pitched battles. It's like a pike

The other thing I modify is missile fire rules according to surprise in the DM's guide for AD&D. PC's should NOT be getting missile fire at x3 per segment of surprise--that was a mistake in the book, and I even talked to Gary about this many years ago. If you use a High Elf from the UA, you can get like 12 attacks in one round if you surprise the enemy (if I remember correctly), which breaks the implicit rule that only one action per segment can be taken, and there are only 10 segments in a round (I limit surprise segments to 2).

Longbows are broken in AD&D and 3e+ --you need to nerf them IMHO

It's a game and doing it more accurately would make swords not that cool on a battlefield when there's distance. Our rpg culture, like many, worship swords. We must be careful not to burst that bubble. I can imagine DMs sighing when some archer gets 5 or more shots a round. I can also imagine DMs then doing their damnedest to use terrain to stick archers in situations that make bows worthless.

Longbows can be used on horseback. This is a problem.

Getting bows right is something way outside the D&D sphere. It's on the same level as hit points making sense. It's best to nod and go along with them in any D&D game.

I'm amazed nobody mentioned the first sin against the use of longbows, it requires lots of uper body strenght to do so, those things are fucking hard to draw.

Firing them from horseback? pfft, We know you can if you train, as demonstrated by the Samurai and those Japanese monks.

Firing 2-5 arrows per turn? Pfft, we know it is possible.

You don't leave a bow stringed for long periods, true, but when you're heading into battle you do string it BEFORE since doing it after you can see the enemy means they caould fire upon you while you can't. Also I'm not sure you'd take a full round just to string it, I've seen demonstrations, properly trained warriors could string and fire one shot in one turn I'm sure.

The reason firearms won was (as others have pointed out) you didn't require as much training OR upper body strength. Instead of years of training your soldiers you spend your money in the firearm, costly in the upfront, but anyone can pick up the weapon of a fallen enemy/friend and use it WITHOUT training at close range, it requires a little training to get used to the kick and boom and to reload it fast.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on January 29, 2023, 08:38:55 AM

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 28, 2023, 09:00:58 PM

Quote from: Krazz on January 28, 2023, 06:35:55 PM
If you are adventuring in cramped caverns underground, bows should have severely limited range. To shoot long distances, you have to aim upwards, something that would result in hitting the ceiling in a dungeon.

True, but the flip side is that almost all underground encounters happen at such short range that you could probably shoot a bow at a flat trajectory with minimal issue.

Not in any game where  the archer is toast in melee and has even modest cover rules.  You are at short range.  Either you have no one between you and the target or you do.  If you don't, you get one shot, and then you are in melee.  If you do, it's difficult to clean shots.

What I do is part to simulate this and part enforcing the results I want (hah!):  There's an automatic -2 to hit anyone on the front rank of a melee line, with a chance to hit friends if you try it.  There's an automatic -2 to hit anyone on the second rank of a melee line (e.g. spear wielders), but no chance to hit friends.  Or you can take a shot at someone in the enemy back ranks, where you don't get to pick the target.  Instead, the GM just semi-randomly assigns any hit to an appropriate target in whatever general group you were aiming at.

Result:  Players who can find a ledge, a crevice, a dais--anything to get a clear shot--will grab it.  Usually when they do, it makes them a target for enemy ranged attacks.  Moreover, it greatly discourages "focus fire" in a modestly realistic manner.  If the archer wants to cleanly commit to taking down a prime target, often the most effective means is to take one shot at the charging foes and then immediately retreat through the line.  The melee guys like this.  You took out one of the 3 guys about to fall on me, or you hurt something tough that I now get to kill.  And the archer player has to think a little.

Again, I'm hardly the only person to get this result.  There are multiple ways to do it.  But you have to decide how you want all this to work, how much complexity you are willing to tolerate, and then build the game with those goals ruthlessly pursued.

I was mostly meaning a range where you could shoot the bow at a flat trajectory without any serious ballistic consequences. You're right that flat shooting into a melee would be a big problem. I've mostly been trying to address that by treating intervening combatants as giving cover to enemies on the other side of them.

Sounds interesting. Sounds like you're using something akin to the system in The One Ring, where you have semi-abstracted combat ranks rather than a strict battle gird? I'm in the process of switching my games off of the battle grid, so a rank system could be useful.

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 28, 2023, 04:50:18 PM
Bit of a weird rant here, but what the hell....

Doing a little preliminary prep work for a Helveczia campaign I want to run, and it got me thinking about bows in D&D and related games. I find that bows, particularly longbows, are wildly over-represented and frequently overpowered in almost every fantasy or historical game I've ever played.

[. . .]

Really just spit-balling on it at the moment, but I wondered if this phenomenon bothers anyone else, or if others have placed homebrewed limitations on bows to balance them a bit better.

I've seen this in just about every D&D campaign I've played in, but it's just not a thing when I run 1E.

For what it's worth, I think the real issue is that, fundamentally, the bow really is faster and more capable of penetrating armor than the crossbow. But the crossbow takes a lot less skill to use. All the other gripes notwithstanding, these facts by themselves explain why you see crossbows as more common historically but bows the favored choice for player characters.

Here are the subtleties I see in 1E that effectively "solve" this disconnect.

1) The BtB prices for hiring different types of mercenaries has it substantially more expensive to hire bowman over crossbowmen. If we're playing a game where each side is given X amount of GP to hire their armies, the crossbowmen is the more effective unit. You can hire twice as many of them, offsetting the difference in rate of fire, but if they are forced to melee, you've got twice as many of them than if you went with bowmen. In a broader scope, sure, there's a lot more to it than that, but in the end, if you follow the BtB incentives, there's no reason you wouldn't expect crossbows to be a lot more common than bows among NPCs.

2) As for PCs, the BtB prices for buying starting equipment are such that you generally can't afford to begin with both a good armor and a good bow. If you want good armor, you're going to have to settle for crossbow as your ranged weapon. You invest the weapon proficiency. And once your initial slots are set in, it's going to be a few levels before a new slot opens up. If you want to play a bowman and start with a good bow, you can maybe start with scalemail armor at best if you're lucky. In the long run, PCs do mostly use bows. But for low level characters, it's a pretty even mix of bows and crossbows, maybe even 60/40 favoring crossbows.

QuoteUsually the ranged weapon alternatives in a game are bows (long, short, recurve, etc.) versus crossbows, and occasionally black-powder firearms. Relative to a bow, the disadvantages of crossbows and muskets are that they are slower to load, and in the case of a musket possibly less reliable. Games virtually always have rules to model those disadvantages. On the other hand, the relative disadvantages of a proper high-poundage war bow are that it is:

-Tiring to use
-Harder to aim
-Awkward to carry
-Unwieldy in tight spaces

It's even worse for a heavy crossbow, which really just a smaller scorpion that can be operated by a single individual. And it's also not a given that the crossbow is easier to aim than a bow. Some experts claim the opposite. 1E rules certainly has the rules to differentiate on this point via the weapon vs armor tables.

QuoteGames almost never have rules for that sort of thing. They usually try to compensate by giving the crossbow or gun slightly more damage or armor penetration, but it's rarely enough to compensate for the longbow having 2-5 times the rate of fire. (The rate of fire gets particularly absurd in some games, with bows sometimes having a higher attack-rate than melee weapons. I'm happy to concede that you can shoot a bow faster than you can shoot a musket, but I don't buy that you can do it faster than you can stab with a dagger.) So you often get a world in which no one uses any ranged weapon other than a longbow, and anyone who is not using one is making an objectively sub-optimal choice. This has always annoyed me. Partially, because if longbows were that objectively superior, nobody would have bothered with other ranged weapons. Mostly, because I think a well-designed game is all about different options having pros and cons, such that you might choose differently for different situations or purposes.

Well, the long bow really did have a rate of fire twice that of the (light) crossbow. Yet other ranged weapons were also used. I think it comes down to the difference in skill requirements. Even when the king isn't literally paying his fighting men, the 3 hours a day a serf spends practicing the long bow are 3 hours a day he's not working the fields. It can be obscured, but one way or another, there's a price to be paid for the skill differential, and this will mean there will be many times the crossbow is the preferred ranged weapon.

QuoteBut it got me thinking about possible homebrew rules to counteract the supremacy of the longbow in future games. Possibilities would include:

-Bows are not carried around already strung. Choosing to do so damages your bow.
-If attacked in melee while using a bow, make a saving throw or have it broken.
-Longbows cannot be sheathed, OR while carrying one you cannot also carry a large shield or polearm.
-Longbows cannot be shot from horseback. Short/Composite bows require special training to do so.

I think the 1E rules assumed it was understood that short bows can be used from horseback, and long bows cannot. Likewise, heavy crossbows are not usable from horseback. It's also assumed that gamers would know the difference between the composite and non-composite bows. That bows would need to be strung prior to use, but that a trained archer could string a bow in virtually no time within the 1 minute round, but which is why the surprise rule that gives missiles a higher rate of fire only applies when the weapon is readied.

Quote from: MerrillWeathermay on January 29, 2023, 10:22:35 AM
The other thing I modify is missile fire rules according to surprise in the DM's guide for AD&D. PC's should NOT be getting missile fire at x3 per segment of surprise--that was a mistake in the book, and I even talked to Gary about this many years ago. If you use a High Elf from the UA, you can get like 12 attacks in one round if you surprise the enemy (if I remember correctly), which breaks the implicit rule that only one action per segment can be taken, and there are only 10 segments in a round (I limit surprise segments to 2).

None of this is correct. The mistake isn't in the book. It's in the interpretation. The book says readied missiles during surprise get "three times the normal rate"--and the given rates of fire, of course, are per round. Some people chose to interpret that as per segment. There's a question about it in the Gary Gygax Q&A on DF. Some people take Gary's response as affirmation that this obviously wrong interpretation is correct. But Gary only affirmed it as, insofar, if that's what you decide as DM, so be it. He literally said he felt it was possible, but unlikely, and would require ideal circumstances, including having all those arrows lined up, stuck in the ground for easy grabbing.

Specialization of bows in UA allows for 4 attacks per round (and so if you triple that, you do indeed get 12), but you have to be at least 13th level to get that rate of fire. The level limits on high elfs do not permit them to reach 13th level. The only relevance being a high elf could possibly have is that they can score 4 surprise segments due to the elf surprise ability. For the record, I'm not a fan of weapon specialization or the increased level limits in UA.

If you take the 2/1 rate of fire on bows, multiply it by 3 per the surprise rule, you get 6 shots per round. Presumably 3 in the first half (first 5 segments) and 3 in the second half. Which would mean segments 1, 3, and 5, but the elf surprise will only ever get  you to 4, so at most you get 2 attacks during the surprise round.

The example of combat given in the DMG supports this, where a RoF 1 missile weapon was not given 3 attacks on segment one despite being readied. It was not even allowed an attack on segment 2. Because 1 times 3 is 3, when divided across the round, would presumably go off on segments 1, 4, and 7, but on a 2 segment surprise, the 4th segment never comes into play, so it's just one attack for slings and crossbows.

Did you know San Marino has a crossbow corps?

https://www.federazionebalestrieri.sm/palio-delle-balestre/

Quote from: Jason Coplen on January 29, 2023, 12:23:20 PM
It's a game and doing it more accurately would make swords not that cool on a battlefield when there's distance. Our rpg culture, like many, worship swords. We must be careful not to burst that bubble.

I dunno, for as long as the internet has existed (which is a long time) people have always insisted swords are actually bad, spears or pikes are better and there's some sort of conspiracy that promotes sword (the sword lobby?).

And yet, the Romans conquered most their world with swords. Short swords. Beating great phalanxes who used spears.

The Romans had teamwork, which is far more important than whatever tool you're using. Remember: don't split the party!

Quote from: JeremyR on January 29, 2023, 10:48:48 PM

Quote from: Jason Coplen on January 29, 2023, 12:23:20 PM
It's a game and doing it more accurately would make swords not that cool on a battlefield when there's distance. Our rpg culture, like many, worship swords. We must be careful not to burst that bubble.

I dunno, for as long as the internet has existed (which is a long time) people have always insisted swords are actually bad, spears or pikes are better and there's some sort of conspiracy that promotes sword (the sword lobby?).

And yet, the Romans conquered most their world with swords. Short swords. Beating great phalanxes who used spears.

Well they also had javelins. So they would start with a longer range weapon and then move to a close range weapon. Spear -> Sword -> Unarmed is a pretty common training progression.

  youtube Lars Andersen.  Once you see what a guy can do with a bow, it might make those assumptions change a bit regarding how bows are treated in combat in some RPGs.  I think one issue is we treat how a weapon like that can be handled through the lens of hobbyists and not trained professionals who trained for decades to constantly improve.   Granted Lars uses a 50-55 pound bow for his demos, but that is not so far from a war bow and Lars is probably not even a buck fifty and over 50 years old. 

Quote from: JeremyR on January 29, 2023, 10:48:48 PM

Quote from: Jason Coplen on January 29, 2023, 12:23:20 PM
It's a game and doing it more accurately would make swords not that cool on a battlefield when there's distance. Our rpg culture, like many, worship swords. We must be careful not to burst that bubble.

I dunno, for as long as the internet has existed (which is a long time) people have always insisted swords are actually bad, spears or pikes are better and there's some sort of conspiracy that promotes sword (the sword lobby?).

And yet, the Romans conquered most their world with swords. Short swords. Beating great phalanxes who used spears.

Well once you get to the High and Late Medieval periods, swords are almost useless against full plate armor.  That's when knights dropped using shields and started using poleaxes/polearms or heavy mace against their opponents.

As to the Romans, the pilum they used against opponents shield walls were made to stick through the shield and then bend, thus bringing the opponents shields down due to the weight added to it.

Their Testudo formation (turtle) was also very effective against spears to where they would march in it up to the opponents and strike at gladius range.