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Here is first batch of questions that are bugging me.
(it would be great if you could start your replies with "Question X" so others can instantly know to which question you are referring to.

Question #1: Low-Tech Book: Blunt Trauma and Edged Weapons – Using this optional rule cutting weapon will have its damage type changed from cutting into crushing damage unless it can exceed twice the armor’s DR. (example: DR 6 plate armor is still DR 6 but you need to deal (exceed DRx2) 13 damage with a sword to deal cutting damage type. If you deal 12 or less; damage type will be crushing.)
When using cutting weapons, with crushing damage type, against chainmail and other flexible armor do I use armor’s full DR or do they gain -1/-2 vs. crushing depending on the armor in question?

Question #2: Low-Tech Book: Longsword damage typo? - Bastard sword and Thrusting Bastard Sword have +1 increase in both swing and thrust damage when comparing one-handed and two-handed use. That would imply that using a one-handed weapon in two hands gives you an extra “umph” that gives you +1 damage. When comparing tables for Longsword it gains increase only in thrust damage.

Question #3: Low-Tech Book: Longsword vs. Bastard sword reach – This question comes from my knowledge or lack of knowledge and assumptions. Also I know sword classification is opening good, old can of worms and there are different types of classifications.

When speaking of two handed swords I classify them in following manner:
- Longswords & bastard swords: 40-50 inch – sizes were comparable; bastard sword was little heavier
- great swords: 44-55 inch - Claymore – they required two hands to use, but are shorter than what we know as true two-handed swords.
- true two-handed swords: up to 5’10” - 70 inch - famous german zweihander

Longsword reach
swing 1
thrust 1,2

Bastard Sword reach
swing 1,2
thrust 2

Great sword reach
swing 1,2
thrust 2

How come longsword can only swing at reach 1 and how come bastard sword can only thrust at reach 2? If I use my classification how come bastard sword uses greatsword reach tables? In my mind bastard sword is similar to longsword, and book also classifies longsword as light Bastard Sword (low-tech, page 58). What were the bases for those statistics used in Low-Tech book?

Question #4: The Deadly Spring – Crossbows - I really liked that article and how it puts bows and crossbows in line with other, more modern weapons like guns and rifles (Instead of damage based of user’s Strength). It puts them all in same format. It gives cohesion to ranged weapons tables.

I can’t go into complex math so here goes my question, or favor to ask.
There is only one medieval crossbow and that one requires windlass/cranequin.

I need statistics for medieval crossbows, both wood and steel, based on ST 10 human.
Crossbow #1: two-hand pull
Crossbow #2: two-hand pull with stirrup
Crossbow #3: goat’s foot

So those are 6 crossbows (3 steel-limbed, 3 wooden-limbed)

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Two-hand pull with no help is 8xBL, which is only 160 lbs - that probably includes the stirrup. If you have to span a crossbow using two hands but no way to brace it, you're probably looking at not much more than what you can pull with your arms, which is 2.5xBL - 50 lbs. This will get you nearly nothing for a medieval crossbow. Note that the sample provided was 750 lbs or so, and not terribly impressive due to short stroke and inefficient limbs. A goat's foot doubles Basic Lift, pushing draw weight supported to 320 lbs.

ST 10 is pretty poor for this sort of weapon. To span the sample Xbow (750-ish lbs) with a goat's foot you're looking at about 47 lbs of Basic lift, or ST 15 (15.3, but close enough).

Using the equivalent of Strongbow for Crossbows, you can span the crossbow with ST 13.

Thanks for the kind words about the article - I assume you have the v3 spreadsheets that take the math out of your hands?

I'll throw some designs together after work tonight.

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#1: I don't think there's any official ruling on this, so it's up to the GM. I'd personally go with the reduced DR.

#2: This is likely an issue of resolution - the longsword (thanks to its lighter weight and shorter reach) shouldn't do as much damage as the bastard sword when swung. A blanket -1, however, probably overstates the effect, and would also leave the longsword doing less damage than the lighter, shorter broadsword, so they opted to only have the -1 apply to two-handed use.

#3: Another resolution issue. You basically end up with the progression Broadsword->Longsword->Bastard Sword->Greatsword, and the designers opted to give the Bastard Sword a longer Reach than the Longsword. There's not really any place for something between Longsword and Greatsword, however, so they opted to go with the same Reach statistics as the Greatsword.

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Use the armor's full DR - treating the cutting weapon as crushing to reduce DR up until it achieves DRx2 (and which DR?) and becomes cutting again is too much calculation in play.

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You'd use the armor's DR vs Cut to determine how much damage is needed to avoid conversion to Cr. Default GURPS rules are "Subtract DR, minimum damage is 0." The "edge protection" in LT adds in "If damage is Cut, reduce it to Cr if basic damage doesn't exceed twice DR." Adding in "If armor is reduced against Cr, use this value to resist the above Cr damage" isn't too much more complexity. There could be the odd edge case where you'd have done more Injury if you'd rolled 1 point less damage, however.

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I have spreadsheets but Excel and I don't get along. Even with spreadsheets being automated there are too many options to take into consideration during construction.


How come ST 10 is poor? There is a certain phobia on these forums when it comes to giving characters higher stats :)

I always imagined that crossbows were made in a way that you could give average Joe a crossbow in hand and with little force he could load it. Stirrup, belt hook, goat's foot, and in the end windlass increased the maximum draw strength. That being said I imagined most crossbowmen as regular people with ST 11-12 after longer conditioning to draw the string.

https://archive.org/stream/Book_of_t...e/n81/mode/2up This is what I had in mind when it came to two-hand pull without stirrup. Maybe this has same effect as drawing with it. Dunno. Hope it helps.

Also thanks in advance.

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1) When talking about crossbows, you're talking about trained military (often mercenaries) or athletic hunters - definitely out of the Average Joe argument zone.

2) The whole point of crossbows is being able to trade a longer draw time for more punch, while not suffering from having to hold the heavier draw.

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I've never seen anyone argue that above-10 strength was unreasonable, except perhaps for particularly small characters.

Not all stats are normalized the same way...
You don't have to be strong to use a crossbow, but if you want to use a crossbow that isn't pitifully weak you need to either be very strong (because crossbows are usually less effective for their draw strength than bows) or use major mechanical aids.

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Question #1: I would use full DR because of draw-cuts – a slice across the target can be capable of cutting through flesh and into bone (say 4 points of cutting damage, x 1.5 for cutting modifier = 6 HP of injury = enough to cripple an arm or leg) is not necessarily going to inflict massive bruising against a cut-resistant target.

Question #2: I think the longsword not gaining bonus swing damage when used two-handed is deliberate. The longsword does not suffer the 0U Parry when used one-handed, so it already has an advantage over the bastard sword. I think doing less swing damage than a thrusting bastard sword is there to avoid the longsword being generally better than the bastard sword and making it obsolete.

Question #3: The terms “longsword” and “bastard sword” are labels of convenience, not meant to be a perfect match of real-world sword names. A medieval knight might see a GURPS bastard sword and a GURPS greatsword and call them both “swords of war”, despite there being a size-difference between the two. The terminology that works for historians is not necessarily the terminology that works for game-designers.

Going by your classifications, 40-50 inches for longswords and bastard swords allows a variation of 10 inches; 25% of 40 inches and 20% of 50 inches, this is not an insignificant difference. Think of the statistic line for “longsword” as representing a sword closer to 40 inches, and for “bastard sword” as representing a sword closer to 50 inches (in the 44-50 inch region where according to your classifications longsword & greatsword overlap). It's not a bug, it's a feature, because it allows “smaller longsword” and “bigger longsword”, even if it doesn't quite use those terms.

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ST is obviously trainable. I don't think the cultists object to fairly high ST values.

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Unless it's the Cult of Low Strength. They might object strenuously (as strenuously as they're able anyway).

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This is somewhat counter to how crossbows proliferated historically. One of the 'social issues' that resulted from the use of crossbows was that it was perceived as too easy to use for the average man and too deadly (i.e., it could penetrate armor and kill nobles easier, which was Bad (tm) ). And most medieval fighting men were not professional soldiers: they were farmers conscripted into service as part of their liege's feudal levy.

GURPS doesn't really reflect this, as is. Whereas the crossbow came to replace the bow in the late middle ages because it was more easily used by the common soldier and more deadly than a bow, a GURPS archer is far, far better served equipping himself with a bow rather than a crossbow.

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...unless he wants a higher skill for less investment (Crossbow is DX/E Bow is DX/A), more damage (Crossbow is Thrust+4 the Longbow is Thrust +2), longer effective range (Acc 4 vs 3).
In my experience I see lots of crossbow users and only a handful of bow users. The crossbow men often use it to augment another fighting style or less combat focused characters, while the bow users were dedicated archers.
This fits my understanding of historical examples of archers.

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It does; Crossbow is an Easy skill instead of Average. Crossbows also do more damage for the ST (thr+4 instead of thr+1), higher accuracy (4 vs 2), and have a longer range (x20/25 instead of x15/20). Also, Crossbows have lower min ST and Bulk and 60% of the ammo weight.

Rate of fire is the only real advantage of a bow. With one turn of Aim, it's one shot per four turns versus one shot per six turns.

Given the +3 damage from the crossbow, the bow doesn't even really have an advantage in "DPS" for the extra ammo expenditure. After one minute of firing, the bowmen have thrown 1.5 pounds of ammo downrange to do 37.5 points of damage against DR 0. The crossbowmen have thrown 0.6 pounds of ammo downrange to do 55 points of damage against DR 0. Against DR 4 mail, the numbers drop to 2.5 points of damage per minute for the bow (you have to roll a 6 to do one point of damage) versus 16.7 for the crossbow.

Not in the context of a massed military formation. The extra damage is important when you're facing armor (as in your knight-threatening quotes), the extra range is a tactical advantage, and the lower logistics requirements also help an army.

And quite possibly not even in the case of a D&D-style adventuring party. One fairly common GURPS party-munchkin tactic is for _everyone_ to carry a crossbow as heavy as they can crank for one volley when closing. The reload time is irrelevant here, as that never happens in combat, so you can use even stronger crossbows that require mechanical assistance (effective +4 ST). The extra damage becomes even more important in a short combat where the RoF of the bow doesn't get to shine, and against armored foes it also becomes important.

What makes you say a GURPS bow is "far, far better"? Certainly, bows win the Rule of Cool. No right-thinking Legolas would use a crossbow. But only because he'll look cooler, not because the game stats are better.

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Even on the Rate of Fire front, the crossbowman can quite reasonably do his reloading from behind cover, mitigating any disadvantage the longer reload time might cause.

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As Mathulhu points out, the crossbow is superior in terms of stats that make shots count in Basic rules. (Under The Deadly Spring, they're not necessarily better in damage.)

The one place bows are superior is rate of fire...which looks really important when you're running a hugely strong, absurdly skilled Heroic Archer PC (with the benefit of over-the-top Basic damage levels and probably AP arrowheads) who likes using his bow in near-melee situations. Which is an incredibly bad model for historical combat environments. Even so, the elite longbowmen kept their longbows and their value...crossbows were useful for the vast majority who didn't have that kind of training.



Tangent: Why no 'crossbows' with long, vertical spans? A vertical span would make arms comparable to regular bows more manageable than the horizontal arrangement, allowing for a longer, more efficient draw. They'd be less handy than a more normal crossbow and heavier than a bow, but seem like they might perform better than either.

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This is my take too. A sword is not as effective at dealing bashing damage as a mace is. If you're using the cutting edge of the sword, and the armor effectively blunts it, you do not get a bonus to crushing damage.

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My understanding is that they were most heavily used in the military by mercenaries (professional soldiers) or small specialized units, not by armies handing one out to every conscript, like rifles in WW2. If there was a period where this happened, I'd love to know about it because I really want to read about it.

They were also used by nobles as hunting weapons (very light examples) because of ease of use from horseback, plus power of a small compact crossbow, which can't be equaled from a similarly small bow. But here the restriction to nobility was, I understand, as much a function of how legal hunting was as how expensive the bow was, not out of fear that hordes of commoners would mow down every deer. That was already illegal in many places.

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I would like to echo two points here.


Real-life weapons terminology is an arbitrary set of labels assigned by archaeologists, historians, hoplologists, and other social scientists who often have no idea what the period terms were for weapons; frequently discover that what words they have were used differently in various regions and cultures; and routinely disagree among themselves on "correct" usage. As these people are documenting the past from incomplete records, uncertainty is expected and tolerated.

Weapons terminology in games is an arbitrary set of labels assigned by designers who also don't always know the "right" terms . . . but who have the major advantage of being able to control precisely how their chosen words are used. As these people are writing technical manuals for people to use for simulations, certainty is both expected and a higher priority than historical accuracy.

The upshot is that it's likely that real-world people might use "longsword" to refer to what GURPS calls a "bastard sword," and vice versa – and it's practically a given that historically, no warrior uttered the word "broadsword." Evidence is that most people called their sidearm by the most popular local term for either "sword" or "blade" at the time. But a generic game that puts dozens of weapons in play at once, often in made-up fantasy realms, can't call all of them "sword" or "blade," so it differentiates using the arbitrary labels I mentioned, occasionally borrowing terms from learned discourse because they sound familiar (e.g., "longsword"), rather than making up names from whole cloth ("Let's call it a forkworkler!").


Even in GURPS, crossbows are superior weapons to bows in the sense used by military historians. Thanks to higher Acc and 1/2D, they shoot effectively at ranges between 35% and 100% greater than bows, depending on which stat you value and what kind of bow you consider the standard "war bow." Add in +1 to skill for Easy vs. Average and the crossbow's effective range advantage goes up – best-case, to 200% greater. And its damage pierces armor far more readily. In a massed military formation, this translates into mowing down distant enemies in the time it takes them to close the gap . . . and most important, this means stopping the armored enemies on horseback who are most swiftly closing the gap.

In individual combat, bows are preferable because they allow a higher rate of fire. But neither the bow nor the crossbow is a weapon of individual combat. At the ranges where a couple of seconds of extra readying time might mean you're overrun and killed, historical users of either weapon would already have switched to hand-to-hand combat weapons or effected a retreat. Roleplaying games allow for superheroic archers who bound around a melee using ranged weapons, but that's fantasy . . . and in such fantasy, yes, bow-users are fighting at distances where the range advantage of crossbows isn't relevant, are skilled enough that Easy vs. Average doesn't matter, and get all kinds of cool, cinematic tricks to compensate for the damage disadvantage of bows.

—

The moral of the story is that referring to military history for your information on how individual combatants in fantasy-land will fight isn't a useful exercise.

Re: Question batch #1
 

All of this is true in Basic (and Low Tech) GURPS, though rate of fire definitely isn't negligible to mowing down an enemy charge. (Unlike a siege, where it often doesn't make much difference how much time you spend in full cover behind the battlements readying your weapon between shots.)

It is perhaps interesting to consider with regard to historical battles, though, that in the (probably more realistic) The Deadly Spring perspective crossbows, while more accurate (possibly the most important point) don't throw harder or farther than even moderately strong combat bows and are no better at defeating armor.

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Up to a point. Sticking to GURPS as written, because that's the "official" simulation we have:

Suppose knights are charging at Move 8, which is typical for a GURPS armored warrior on a GURPS heavy warhorse. Let's assume that our shooters will stop shooting when the mounted enemy is at 16 yards, which will leave them a couple of seconds to maneuver, draw melee weapons, pick up spears, or whatever. Let's further assume that we have enough soldiers dispersed along both sides that it makes sense to look at averages.

A GURPS crossbow in the hands of a ST 11 man can start shooting effectively at 1/2D 220. The horsemen need (220 - 16)/8 = 25.5 seconds to get too close for comfort. One nominally aimed shot every six seconds (Ready×4, Aim at general area, Attack/All-Out Attack) allows 4.25 shots. Raw damage output at thrust+4 (1d+3) is 27.6.

A GURPS longbow in the hands of a ST 11 man can start shooting effectively at 1/2D 165. The horsemen need (165 - 16)/8 = 18.6 seconds to get too close for comfort. One nominally aimed shot every four seconds (Ready×2, Aim at general area, Attack/All-Out Attack) allows 4.66 shots. Raw damage output at thrust+2 (1d+1) is 21.

This analysis ignores the effects of Acc, which is higher for the crossbowmen (4 vs. 3), and Easy vs. Average skill, which might give the crossbowmen +1 if they receive the same amount of training as the longbowmen (which they won't, but see below for logistics). If you factor in such things, damage output skews further in favor of the crossbow, as more of the average damage finds a target. You probably wouldn't use the standard ranged-combat rules for this, but if treating massed archery as artillery of sorts, effective skill will still matter.

This analysis also ignores the fact that on a per-hit basis, 1d+3 imp will injure a man in DR 6 harness (plate, heavy mail over padding, whatever) half of the time and inflict a grievous (major) wound 1/6 of the time, while 1d+1 imp will at best inflict an annoying wound 1/6 of the time. That skews things toward crossbows even further.

Moreover, as far as GURPS is concerned, the crossbowmen each use up $8.50 and 0.26 lb. of ammo doing this, while the longbowmen each expend $9.32 and 0.47 lb. Over multiple engagements, then, the crossbowmen are logistically superior. This advantage grows when you consider replacement costs for $150 crossbows vs. $200 longbows, and training expenses for men learning an Easy skill vs. men learning an Average skill. On that latter point, evidence suggests that crossbowmen and longbowmen were about equally skilled but that longbowmen trained longer to get there. Somebody has to pay for their arrows, bowstrings, lost productivity as farmers, etc. while they train.

Finally, while RPGs – including GURPS – ignore how fatiguing it is to keep operating muscle-powered weaponry at full rate of fire, that's a real limitation. Cocking crossbows is about as tiring as drawing bows if you do both frenetically at the highest speed practical. However, crossbows have the hidden advantage of not requiring much effort from the user to hold ready, so over an afternoon, those Aim maneuvers will take their toll on the longbowmen but not the crossbowmen.

I'm willing to concede that many of these points hinge on the rules as written, which might fail to simulate reality well at the micro level. But the overall simulation does support historical claims regarding the deadliness of crossbows, and if you lower damage and raise Acc for crossbows, you probably don't significantly change this final analysis, because more hits will balance the slightly lower chance of injury, and it'll still be cheaper to train and field crossbowmen, who will still be able to keep up their barrage for longer on a given budget of ammo and calories.

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Hmph. The forkworkler is clearly more closely related to the fauchard than to the falchion. I'm not sure why you'd even bring it up in a discussion of swords.

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I thought it would be the ideal alternative name for a trident.

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I hope you don't mind, but I'm totally using that name for something in my DF game...probably a longsword...

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Go right ahead! I'm honored to have coined a worthy term. This is unacceptable: