Quote:
Originally Posted by safisher
This. Soldiers (and farmers and laborers) need ST. That gives them HP, which they also need. If you want them a little weaker, give them Strongbow, but otherwise, just give them ST, and reserve the perk for the PC (or elf).
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No one disagrees with a range of ST, it's just the base ST's needed to draw Historically accurate bows are very high in terms of what else they can do.
Then you also have the other issues that a ST17 longbowmen is actually kind of wasted on a battle field doing 1d+2, when he could be doing 3d+3 with a halbard*. And can wear 110lbs of armour before being lightly encumbered (or roughly three DR5 mail haubucks).
ST17 is almost 3x stronger (in terms of BL) than the average human, I think that once we're talking about thousands of such individuals in medieval England moving that far away from average in such broad terms is pretty unlikely.
Then you have the issues of that if these archers are not mixing it up in melee to take advantage of their ST's than the troops you are relying on in melee have to roughly be as strong or stronger to be there. So that's everyone on the battlefield at that level of ST (or running away from those archers).
Basically there are a lot of knock on effects by saying well just give historical archers the base ST they need to fire such bows.
*Which is of course it own problem, but partially countered by the fact they can wear a lot of DR.