A Simplified Heroic Archer

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Having played a few arrow-spewing archers of my own... I was pretty willing to run around like a dip and rain arrows down, but I usually was All About That Dual Weapon Attack option from GURPS Martial Arts, which isn't applicable here (and for good reason).

In my first DF game my Archer player was having issues with his combat effectiveness. Heroic Archer adds a lot, and the Dual Bow Attack dramatically increases his effectiveness. However, Heroic Archer was always kind of a tweaky advantage with a lot of effectiveness baked in that is not exactly obvious.

Originally Posted by Bruno

What it does is reduce overall Scout DPS. That, to me, is a generally desirable effect. It also made my life as a Scout more lively as occasionally I dropped (sometimes quite expensive) arrows on my feet instead of in the enemy's eyesocket, and instead of capering away cackling found myself bumbling around for a turn (more if I'm recovering expensive dropped arrows). This makes things like my own personal defenses more relevant, and made my character require more involvement to play than a World of Warcraft macro.

My Archer player never had an issue with making three rolls to Fast-Draw/Nock/Fire his bow.

If I wanted to simplify things the way I would do it is to bake everything into one Bow-skill roll for the entire Draw/Nock/Fire procedure at -1 skill. A failure by exactly 1 simply means a failure to Draw or Nock the arrow; roll Fast-Draw to determine which: success means it was Drawn but not Nocked, failure means it wasn't Drawn properly, and critical failure means a dropped or thrown arrow.