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Old 07-17-2015, 08:43 AM   #24
Noctifer
 
Join Date: Mar 2015
Location: Kernersville, NC
Default Re: [Combat]: Do you bow, bro?

Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
That's actually the essence of it right there. Archers in real wars were not main combat troops. You put them on a high place, where they could shoot at the enemy, usually in massed fire, and you put a line of armored infantry between them and the enemy. They were the moral equivalent of artillery in that case. Or you put them in chariots or on horses, so they could keep away from the enemy and shoot at them from a safe distance. They were lethally vulnerable at close quarters—so the whole trick to using them was to ensure that the enemy never closed.

If you want to take an archer into a dungeon setting, you don't treat them as front line fighters. You want a row of knights or barbarians or other tough hand to hand fighters between them and the monster. They amount to nonmagical substitutes for fireball-throwing wizards.
My initial problem was that, with some of the errors I was making, an archer wasn't even effective at range. With those errors corrected, I'm tons more comfortable with archery in GURPS.
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