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Originally Posted by Icelander
Me and DouglasCole agreed that the optimal draw weight for a trained archer was between 2.5xBL to 3xBL.
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There's also very little difference between changing the BL multipliers for things like skill and special exercises and whatnot and increasing the ST of the bow.
If one had a quickie formula for draw weight, draw length, and efficiency to energy (for example, weight x length x effieciency) and then convert to damage (need to know effective cross-section of the arrow, or just assume they're all the same) through another factor, then going with alterations to basic lift would be the most sensible.
So for example, Strongbow would allow you to go from (say) 2.5x basic lift to 35% higher than that (the equivalent of a ST12 to ST14 bow), or 3.375xBL. The Special Exercises perk would be about +15% to +20% to draw weight per level. In fact, for both of them, I'd suggest Strongbow be +20% to draw weight at DX (or DX+1, whatever the rule is) and +40% at DX+2. Same with special exercises...+20% to draw weight for each level, rather than truly adding ST, at 4/level or something. This is slightly less useful than generic ArmST, but basically becomes the equivalent of ST for "bow only," which assumes that your exercises are so special they're only good for one thing.
The great part about all this percentage stuff is that it's so easy in play: each level of the above adds 0.5 to your BL multiplier. So from BLx2.5 to 3.0 to 3.5...up to a max of BLx4.5 for "normal" guys.
This means that BL20 (ST10) guy with lots of practice and training and exercise can draw up to a 100lb bow. Someone who's ST20 and does all of these things in addition to being uber-strong can potentially draw a bow of up to 80x4.5 = 400lbs(!). However, you'd probably need higher tech level stuff (spring steel? carbon composites? magic?) to have such a bow actually be buildable.
Still and all, in the Runelords series by Farland, "Endowments of Brawn" allow people to have the strength of "ten men" and whatnot, and they make explicit mention of steel bows that only Force Soliders can draw, which is nice because it allows GURPS to model such. A ST20 person (4x basic lift of a ST10 average guy) would be a person with the strength of 4 men, and having him be able to draw a 400lb bow would be cool.
Now, in terms of the actual damage formula, if we assume (ha!) the basis for a longbow's efficiency gives a 150lb bow 1.5 dice of damage (which is about right when all is said and done), then the damage done by other power bows is (sqrt (Bow Draw/150)) x 1.5 dice.
that would give us roughly this:
Code:
Draw Points Dice
36 2.5 1d-1
70 3.5 1d
113 4.5 1d+1
170 5.5 1d+2
197 6 2d-1
273 7 2d
354 8 2d+1
You have to pull a bow of equal or greater draw weight to get that amount of dice, but it puts a 150lb longbow at 1d+1 like it should be based on previous discussions, and puts the scaling of bow damage on the same page as firearms...sqrt(KE). A typical hunting bow at 70lbs draw woulud be 1d, warbows would mostly be 1d+1 except for a few exceptional bows at 170-180lbs (consistent with the high end of history) at 1d+2, and super-bows at 200lbs and higher.