Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > GURPS

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 10-20-2014, 08:42 PM   #101
sir_pudding
Wielder of Smart Pants
 
sir_pudding's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
Default Re: Typical ST for a war bow?

Quote:
Originally Posted by DouglasCole View Post
I may have wandered far afield, but I took up the overstrength bows question on my blog, giving credit to two ideas I found in this thread.
Yeah, I like the Strongbow Technique variation as well.

I'd still really like to know what the actual intent of the RAW is here, though.
sir_pudding is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-20-2014, 08:50 PM   #102
DouglasCole
Doctor of GURPS Ballistics
 
DouglasCole's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Lakeville, MN
Default Re: Typical ST for a war bow?

Quote:
Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
Yeah, I like the Strongbow Technique variation as well.

I'd still really like to know what the actual intent of the RAW is here, though.
I can't speak to it, though. I suspect that the skill penalty is supposed to be it, and you use the ST of the archer (less than that of the bow) for purposes of range and damage. As I noted, though, I suspect that is too generous, and both damage and range should suffer more due to the partial draw.

"Just use the ST of the archer or the bow, which ever is less, for range and damage" is nice and simple though.
__________________
My blog:Gaming Ballistic, LLC
My Store: Gaming Ballistic on Shopify
My Patreon: Gaming Ballistic on Patreon
DouglasCole is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-20-2014, 09:05 PM   #103
safisher
Gunnery Sergeant,
 Imperial Marines
Coauthor,
 GURPS High-Tech
 
safisher's Avatar
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Default Re: Typical ST for a war bow?

Quote:
Originally Posted by DouglasCole View Post
I may have wandered far afield, but I took up the overstrength bows question on my blog, giving credit to two ideas I found in this thread.
If I were overly worried about heroic archers also being heroically strong axemen (which I am not!), I'd use the Strongbow technique. I came up with the Perk during, I think, the LT playtest. Or maybe it was Martial Arts? Anyway, the technique may be a scootch overpowered, but it makes the best of use of a trained ability to do something impressive. Chalking a lifetime of training on bows to just a Perk seems a bit flippant. The technique sounds more like something you'd invest the time in, or at least MAKE your peasants invest the time in.
__________________
Buy my stuff on E23.
My GURPS blog, Dark Journeys, is here.
Fav Blogs: Doug Cole here , C.R. Rice's here, & Hans Christian Vortisch here.
safisher is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-20-2014, 09:15 PM   #104
sir_pudding
Wielder of Smart Pants
 
sir_pudding's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
Default Re: Typical ST for a war bow?

Quote:
Originally Posted by safisher View Post
I came up with the Perk during, I think, the LT playtest. Or maybe it was Martial Arts?
If you came up with it during the Low-Tech playtest you were beat by several years by the you that came up with it for Martial Arts.
sir_pudding is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-20-2014, 09:36 PM   #105
safisher
Gunnery Sergeant,
 Imperial Marines
Coauthor,
 GURPS High-Tech
 
safisher's Avatar
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Default Re: Typical ST for a war bow?

Quote:
Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
If you came up with it during the Low-Tech playtest you were beat by several years by the you that came up with it for Martial Arts.
It could be. I'm that awesome. Sometimes. ;)
__________________
Buy my stuff on E23.
My GURPS blog, Dark Journeys, is here.
Fav Blogs: Doug Cole here , C.R. Rice's here, & Hans Christian Vortisch here.
safisher is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-21-2014, 12:39 AM   #106
Tomsdad
 
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Brighton
Default Re: Typical ST for a war bow?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
Although people who like to talk up archery point out that there were worries in 1544 that English archery was in decline. The ability of the Scots to survive archery at Flodden had been a nasty surprise even if the English billmen won the battle.
True, but that's probably more to do with the fact that Flodden and Agincourt were different set ups and different troops involved (and if nothing else not so many horses, better ground and longbows by that point were a well known battlefield weapon).


Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
We know that bows and arrows were bought and sold in bulk, and that inventories don't distinguish by size or strength just material and whether they were varnished or not and had horn nocks or not. Since it was possible to order arrows in lots of a hundred thousand, there had to be a vision of the "typical soldier's bow" which defined the properties of the typical arrow. We also have comparative data from Turkey and Japan which shows that there were other traditions where most soldiers' bows had a draw force of 100-150 lbs (although we can't say that all soldiers' bows in all history were like bows in these three cultures). So there is plenty of evidence for gaming purposes to say that some soldiers can draw two or three times the draw weight of a typical hunter without being bigger and stronger than other picked soldiers. Whether that picked soldier has ST 12 or ST 15 is definitely up to the GM.
Oh I wasn't questioning 100-150lb draws, just pointing out the issues of having a large proportion of your actual examples coming from the the Royal flag ship, especially when even those ones had a wide variation.


Quote:
Originally Posted by DouglasCole View Post
Quite simply, my research did not find too many bows of draw strength in excess of around 200 pounds. Setting a maximum human strength bow at strength 20, and looking at basic lift, that provided for the usual factor of four difference in draw strength between ST 10 and ST 20. That meant if I set a ST 20 boat to 200 pounds a ST 10 bow was 50 pounds, which is a typical bow for Hunter.

Basically I wanted to use the entire range of human ST. And doing so spanned the range of bows nicely.
I get it, as a stat normaliser obviously I think you'll have a problem fitting a range that includes bears ;-). but that's a stat normalisation issue not an issue with your basic premise.

Quote:
Originally Posted by safisher View Post
I think that's reasonable, and demonstrates the range of bows and human ST quite well. Suppose, instead, your design goal was to narrowly compress the range of bow using ST to a usable range of 10-14. How would you then model it? That is, assume 40-50 poundish draw is ST10 and 200 poundish draw is ST14.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DouglasCole View Post
Well, you have 2x in basic lift there. You might need to go nonlinear. BL gets you one factor of 2 and skill at DX+4 (say) gets another.
Isn't it 2.5x BL in the Article?

Anyway, you could just add some factor of the skill to the multiplier

If you added Skill x 0.3 to basics 2xBL a ST12 average with a point in Lift ST and a point of strongbow (so ST14 over all not a massively high score, but one specialised for drawing bows) gets draws as follows

Skill 0 (default) = 2xBL = 78lb
Skill 1 = 2.3 = 91lb
Skill 2 = 2.6 = 102lb
Skill 3 = 2.9 = 114lb
Skill 4 = 3.2 = 125lb
Skill 5 = 3.5 = 137lb
Skill 6 = 3.8 = 149lb

Ultimately it's all just picking at what point and how you want to add to ST to get a higher draw.

But either way using the above at first glance it looks like you get a bowman who can fire a historically accurate war bows with some bow specialised training (+1 Lift St and +1 strongbow) and large amounts of archery practice (professional level of skill at +4).

EDIT: Oh and I'll have a look at your blog

Last edited by Tomsdad; 10-21-2014 at 06:23 AM.
Tomsdad is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-21-2014, 12:49 AM   #107
Polydamas
 
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
Default Re: Typical ST for a war bow?

Quote:
Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
The template I posted above can make an archer that can use the heaviest bows on the Merry Rose at only -2 to skill (with the +4 for an area target; that gives a net skill of 16) and if he takes two quirks and uses those points (with the 8 points he has left from Advantages) to upgrade Fit to Very Fit only loses one extra FP at the end of battle; as a 75 point character. I don't think it's unreasonable for Henry VIII to have fielded a company of 75 point guys at all.

If you let Strongbow give Fast Trained ST past DX+2, then he can shoot that 185# bow at only -1 to skill and no extra FP.
Sure ... I have no problems with that template, or with the Strongbow rules in Martial Arts. There are many possible ways to represent this aspect of the real world in GURPS (because attributes, perks, advantages, and skills are all game constructs not things in the real world), but this way is a good one.

Quote:
Originally Posted by safisher View Post
Actually, in Basic Set there's little indication what a benchmark ST relates to in terms of bow performance, except for damage and range.
There is basic lift, and the suggestion to make lifting ability quadratic with ST originally came from people like TBone who like to model real physics in GURPS. I think that anyone who knows a bit about archery and a bit about GURPS would say that of all the GURPS mechanics which could be proportional to draw weight, Basic Lift is the most reasonable choice.

Quote:
Originally Posted by safisher View Post
Those are nowhere in Basic Set directly related to the lifting power ST, at least that I'm aware of. The ST and damage table goes all the back to the 1980s, and probably has very little to do with Mary Rose bows and all that anyway. Stat normalization, as being carried out in this thread, is generally not something the adventure game designers of GURPS have ever much cared about.
Its good that I have been saying nothing about the damage rules or stat normalization, isn't it? Those tend to turn into long digressions, whereas this thread has been relatively focused and productive.

Quote:
Originally Posted by safisher View Post
It's certainly entertaining to posit the self-consistency of the system, and sometimes informative about what those decisions are, but it's really not something the writers I know work on to the exclusion of ease of use, or fun in play, or just simple brutal utilitarianism.
The authors I know, including Kromm, Dan Howard, and Douglas Cole, quite like to be consistent with the rest of the system, and Doug Cole tried very hard to be reasonably consistent with physics and the existing GURPS rules. Consistency makes for ease of use.
__________________
"It is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of knowledge." H. Beam Piper

This forum got less aggravating when I started using the ignore feature

Last edited by Polydamas; 10-21-2014 at 01:03 AM.
Polydamas is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-21-2014, 06:19 AM   #108
DouglasCole
Doctor of GURPS Ballistics
 
DouglasCole's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Lakeville, MN
Default Re: Typical ST for a war bow?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
The authors I know, including Kromm, Dan Howard, and Douglas Cole, quite like to be consistent with the rest of the system, and Doug Cole tried very hard to be reasonably consistent with physics and the existing GURPS rules. Consistency makes for ease of use.
Don't forget Shawn wrote High-Tech along with Hans, for which I was lead playtester. If there's anyone who is cognisant of the fact that hewing with the rules makes for easy play, it's Shawn. After all, in nearly every armor thread he gets knocked for . . . hewing to the rules and not making up and changing a bunch of stuff about coverage and what DR means and etc. for body armor.
__________________
My blog:Gaming Ballistic, LLC
My Store: Gaming Ballistic on Shopify
My Patreon: Gaming Ballistic on Patreon
DouglasCole is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-21-2014, 06:13 PM   #109
safisher
Gunnery Sergeant,
 Imperial Marines
Coauthor,
 GURPS High-Tech
 
safisher's Avatar
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Default Re: Typical ST for a war bow?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
The authors I know, including Kromm, Dan Howard, and Douglas Cole, quite like to be consistent with the rest of the system, and Doug Cole tried very hard to be reasonably consistent with physics and the existing GURPS rules. Consistency makes for ease of use.
I've written over half a dozen GURPS products, from 3e to 4e, and I've co-written some of those books with Kromm and Hans. I've also been lead playtester for several books, including Low-Tech 3e, when a lot of what's in 4e was hashed out. In fact, I'm playtesting and contributing to several projects right now, one of which makes "consistency" a very big requirement. Doug Cole made a judgment call in The Deadly Spring, and one which I supported when I looked over his early drafts, and one which I still support. It's not the only one he could have made, and his recent blog post acknowledges that. This is what game writers often do -- explore other ways to utilize the system. There are several formal processes in place in which we often do that -- review the work of other writers. And yes, generally you can do that without tearing others down in the process.
__________________
Buy my stuff on E23.
My GURPS blog, Dark Journeys, is here.
Fav Blogs: Doug Cole here , C.R. Rice's here, & Hans Christian Vortisch here.
safisher is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-25-2015, 07:43 AM   #110
LBurger
 
Join Date: Aug 2010
Default Re: Typical ST for a war bow?

Hey.

So, all you guys think that a character only needs to buy Arm ST for only one arm to draw a bow effectively? Isn't this an effort from BOTH arms?

Thx in advance.
LBurger is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Tags
archery, bow, deadly spring, draw weight, pyramid 3/33, strongbow

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 05:50 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.