"Medieval" Archery Tricks

[Toxn]

Relevant.

[Donward]

Getting stuck with an arrow is going to ruin your - and your comrade's - day.

I'm always a bit skeptical about the notion of bows being "superior" to early firearms. If this were the case, you wouldn't have seen everyone get shut of them so fast.

Even the Indians were quick to dump bows in favor of even the rustiest, defective trade musket.

[Toxn]

Firearms, even terrible ones, are better because:

- low skill requirements

- loud and flashy

- impressive terminal effects

The first successful homemade musket I made took a wooden shield that had successfully withstood dozens of arrows and spears and shoved a roofing nail though it so hard that it was irreversibly pinned to the tree behind it. Even more impressive, this was after punching through a 2mm steel plate in front.

If I had been a prospective customer weighing up this new-fangled gun thing, you can bet on that demonstration being persuasive.

[xthetenth]

Multiple arrow wounds are good and all for eventually killing a dude, but the fact that so many arrow wound survivors with multiple arrows sticking out of them says something about the ability for a bow to quickly take a person out.

[Collimatrix]

I'm not sure that early firearms enjoyed an enormous penetration advantage over bows and especially crossbows.  The barrels were really shitty, so they couldn't be that powerful.  The reason they're called "barrels" is because they were braced at intervals with bands to keep them from exploding, sort of visually similar to a wooden storage barrel.

[xthetenth]

I believe that was the case more with cannon, and early firearms that really got used had a nice bit of development time after the "vase loaded with spears" look. And yes, there was a long period where armor could be bulletproof (and indeed had a bullet mark as a proof that it was, thus the word), although I think that was high end, nicely heat treated product for the elites and not arsenal plate made for more regular troops. However if I remember right fancy harnesses started compromising on full coverage to get that bulletproof thickness on the vitals. Guns came of age in the era of pike after all, so good terminal effects against foot could make up some serious flaws.

[Donward]

Battlefields from the 1200s to 1500s must have been confusing places what with all the different forms of technology.

 

Here's a guy speared. There's another with a crossbow bolt in him. That gent has been cloven in half with an halberd. There's another one been billhooked. Feathered by an arrow. Sword thrust. Trampled to death. Sun stroke. Ere now! This guy has been shot with a little lead ball.

 

Downright cruel and un-Christian that!

[Collimatrix]

It would only be un-Christian if he were shot dead with a little square piece of lead.

[Toxn]

I'm not sure that early firearms enjoyed an enormous penetration advantage over bows and especially crossbows.  The barrels were really shitty, so they couldn't be that powerful.  The reason they're called "barrels" is because they were braced at intervals with bands to keep them from exploding, sort of visually similar to a wooden storage barrel.

 

As X pointed out, early firearms were developed from early cannon. Wrapped barrels might have been seen in hand cannon, but arquebus were well past that.

 

It should not be forgotten that even the shittiest black powder firearm provides an huge amount more velocity than even the best muscle-powered weapon (200m/s vs 50m/s). They consequently provide an order of magnitude more penetration.

 

 

I believe that was the case more with cannon, and early firearms that really got used had a nice bit of development time after the "vase loaded with spears" look. And yes, there was a long period where armor could be bulletproof (and indeed had a bullet mark as a proof that it was, thus the word), although I think that was high end, nicely heat treated product for the elites and not arsenal plate made for more regular troops. However if I remember right fancy harnesses started compromising on full coverage to get that bulletproof thickness on the vitals. Guns came of age in the era of pike after all, so good terminal effects against foot could make up some serious flaws.

 

What doesn't get mentioned is that the plate was proofed against pistols and lighter pieces. A full-bore musket, on the other hand (up to 20mm bore, barrel up to 1.5m long) was not going to be stopped by anything that a normal person could wear. This meant that proofing was essentially a combination of QC and marketing baffle.

 

 

Battlefields from the 1200s to 1500s must have been confusing places what with all the different forms of technology.

 

Here's a guy speared. There's another with a crossbow bolt in him. That gent has been cloven in half with an halberd. There's another one been billhooked. Feathered by an arrow. Sword thrust. Trampled to death. Sun stroke. Ere now! This guy has been shot with a little lead ball.

 

Downright cruel and un-Christian that!

 

This is why it pains me endlessly to see games wallow in pseudo-medieval nonsense. Can you imagine how much more awesome RPGs would be if they rolled with 15th to 17th century instead of endlessly recreating the 11th to the 13th?

 

This is also the reason why African arms and armour of the 18th and 19th century is so interesting.

[Sturgeon]

Hell, I'd like a Medieval RPG that would recreate the 4th-7th centuries. There's a lot of material there, but nope, errybody loves plate armor too much.

That's why I got excited for Skyrim, even though I knew better. I thought "maybe, finally, here is the Migration Period fantasy adventure I've been waiting for!"

Nope! Here's shit, instead!

[Toxn]

Eh, I enjoyed it fine. I just wish things would, you know, move on a tad from endless pseudo-medieval stasis. I mean, they managed to un-invent the crossbow and spear somehow.

What is it about magic that seems to make societies develop steel working but not gunpowder, blast furnaces, mechanical looms or urbanisation?

[Sturgeon]

I'll agree with you on everything except that Skyrim wasn't shit. That point is simply not debatable.

[Donward]

Wouldn't RPGs in the 4th to 7th Century be starving or suffering from the plague while small gangs of bully-boys squabbled over the remains of society until Justinian literally kills everyone left alive while trying to "liberate" the Italian Peninsula during the Gothic Wars?

[Sturgeon]

NO BEOWULF DUH

[Donward]

Oh sure. If you want to squabble over livestock up in Geatland.

[xthetenth]

Battlefields from the 1200s to 1500s must have been confusing places what with all the different forms of technology.

 

Here's a guy speared. There's another with a crossbow bolt in him. That gent has been cloven in half with an halberd. There's another one been billhooked. Feathered by an arrow. Sword thrust. Trampled to death. Sun stroke. Ere now! This guy has been shot with a little lead ball.

 

Downright cruel and un-Christian that!

 

Heh. That's more a crossbow thing, by the time of guns they'd kind of gotten used to it.

 

 

 

What doesn't get mentioned is that the plate was proofed against pistols and lighter pieces. A full-bore musket, on the other hand (up to 20mm bore, barrel up to 1.5m long) was not going to be stopped by anything that a normal person could wear. This meant that proofing was essentially a combination of QC and marketing baffle.

 

I'd contend that for a decent subset of uses, that's about the right level of protection. For example, 30 Years' War kurassiers in heavy plate and armed with pistols to fire on the charge (experience showed it worked better than the lance, which is the sort of awesome thing about the period) would likely be facing enemy cavalry often and rarely be going for an unbroken tercio. So protection against pistols and melee weapons would be about right.

 

However, there is definitely a marked trend towards the armor for the elites to be made from steel and carefully heat-treated, although cheaper armor was iron or iron and a small amount of phosphorus.

 

This is why it pains me endlessly to see games wallow in pseudo-medieval nonsense. Can you imagine how much more awesome RPGs would be if they rolled with 15th to 17th century instead of endlessly recreating the 11th to the 13th?

 

This is also the reason why African arms and armour of the 18th and 19th century is so interesting.

 

My great hobby ambition in life is to make an RPG that doesn't do history a disservice. It's amazing how RPGs that spill a huge quantity of ink on a huge variety of races in many areas and they end up having less cultural and social variation than a single relatively culturally homogenous area with a single very dominant ancestor state dominating their political lineages, let alone other areas.

 

The early modern period is one of the most incredibly awesome and nuts settings imaginable, but it's usually just putting the thinnest notions of super abstracted disney park feudalism over a generic modern idea of a nation, so they can get to adding other homogenous groups.

 

 

Wouldn't RPGs in the 4th to 7th Century be starving or suffering from the plague while small gangs of bully-boys squabbled over the remains of society until Justinian literally kills everyone left alive while trying to "liberate" the Italian Peninsula during the Gothic Wars?

 

Third century RPG, basically Roman fallout lite. The fourth to seventh centuries would be really interesting in most any place. A bunch of tribes invading who really desperately want to be Roman but don't know how and the Romans not wanting or being able to take them, Rome itself falling apart while Constantinople is still an incredible repository of knowledge and an incredible mess, and various awesome stuff up north.

[Toxn]

Just making an RPG not do physics a disservice seems to be a challenge for developers, let alone history.

 

Speaking of Justinian, my mind sort of got blown reading about the Corpus Iuris Civilis, not only because it showed the long sweep of legal history (we have a partly Roman-Dutch legal system), but because it's like the wasteland survival guide becoming the foundation text of fallout civilization and being actively taught to students till 4000AD.

[Sturgeon]

So... Is it wrong if I say the latter problem is easier to solve than the former?

I mean, not like ultra-fidelity historical representation, but at least a reasonable reflection of the current state of historical understanding.

[Toxn]

I don't mean physics as in Havok (although that would be nice) but physics as in 'a sword works something like a real cutting instrument instead of a club which knocks off HP'.

 

Dwarf fortress was great for me in this regard, because even though the physics is a bit loopy (you threw a pile of sand and removed both sets of eylids), it was coherent enough so that all the weapons were distinct in their effects and some real truths emerged as a consequence. DF adventure mode is a game where running into a group of bandits is damn near impossible solo, because Lanchester's law is fully in play. Every one of those arrows could have your name on it (unless you're in plate, in which case it becomes entirely about how shitty your luck it) and three dudes whaling on one epic swordsman will have exponentially better chances than two.

 

Plus, you know, caved-in skulls and severed limbs and wounds being calculated to include shearing of subcutaneous fat. 

[xthetenth]

One thing I find is that simulationist rulesets usually fall on their face pretty hard once things that aren't baked into their simulation come up. Functionally I find abstracted rulesets are perfectly capable of leading to realistic outcomes and more importantly realistic decisionmaking processes, it's just that once you start making a game of things pure heavy realism starts to strike people as not fun.

 

Speaking of Roman fallout, Age of Decadence is literally intended to be pretty much that and does a very good job of a deterministic gamey system where combat you aren't ready for is a fantastically stupid idea, and taking on multiple people can suck for even good fighters. It however doesn't go into the full realism aspect with regards to wounds after the fact, which is a big area that gets glossed over for very good reasons from a gameplay (both not making things drag on too long and also having bad outcomes have a clear cause) perspective.

 

A 30 years' war RPG where unlucky wounds causing death happens and making new characters isn't a big deal could be all kinds of amusing though as some sort of pencil and paper Cannon Fodder.

[Donward]

I am by no means a game expert, but I've never had any issue with the rolling dice mechanic to determine attack against armor and hit points way of gameplay. It's a useful way of simulating notional combat and has been around for decades with the pencil-and-paper set. Modern computer games just do it faster and without hours spent scouring the errata tables for loopholes.

 

Backing up Xthetenth, I just want the action where I can make game-play decisions without hours of micromanagement. It's why I always laugh at the scrubs on the WoT forums screaming for "more realistic" game play.

 

Now am I opposed to a hyper realistic RPG? Not necessarily. But I suppose clubbing someone over and over with a blunt axe head while he screams for his mother and is fending off your attacks with his flailing hands, forcing you to straddle him and mash his face into a pulp with your axe handle might seem a bit extreme.

[Toxn]

The old debate on top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to simulation is always fun. I'm not adverse to using either, although I am a huge fan of emergent gameplay mechanics and so have a bit of a bias towards simulation.

 

Anyway, now that my bias is known I should mention that I've had a few goes at making a system to allow for more realistic table-top RPGs.

The most workable* involved a D6 hit determining roll (head, arms, upper torso, lower torso, legs and choose-your-own), with multiple dice + choice to represent aimed shots and skill mods. Damage rolls would take the form of a card draw, with piles for each body part. There would be no HP, only card-specific wound rules (bleeding out = roll per turn to die or similar). With crit wounds, characters would end up with a permanent trait upon survival, with severity being affected by the type of care received. This would allow all the fun of playing an increasingly scarred veteran, but would also lead to cases where a character becomes completely non-viable for their build (armless archer or similar) and has to re-orient.

The making of back-up characters would be strongly advised.

 

* Warning: may not actually be in any way playable. GM discretion advised.

[Toxn]

{Looks at previous page of thread}

 

Fuck it, making a 'design an RPG thread'.

[Toxn]

Back to bows

 

I had a brainwave during the heatwave last night, and have come up with a really nifty way to estimate the suitability of different materials for use in bows. What you do is take the modulus of resilience (J/m³) and divide it by the density (kg/m³) to get the yield mass energy density of the material (J/kg). A selection of materials shows why some things are better for making bows out of than others:

• 4340 steel (oil-quenched and tempered) - 807J/kg
• Linear strand fibreglass-epoxy - 5500J/kg
• Woven fibreglass-epoxy - 2765J/kg (est.)
• Cow horn - 3970J/kg (est.)
• Yew - 880J/kg
• Hickory - 767J/kg
• Bamboo - 583J/kg (ave.)
• Red Oak - 781J/kg
• Pine - 495J/kg

Bamboo is the only real outlier here, as it is known to be great in bows but doesn't do so well ITO energy density. Then again, the figures I have show wild variation. Taking the highest tensile strengths and you get something in the region of 835 - 1580J/kg.

[xthetenth]

Might the bamboo have something to do with the way it's structured in bows not being reflected in your source?