every time you see someone using a bowgun in an ivalice cutscene you know someone is going to die

>>96516951
>Why do they suck in-game though.

Do they? Like in my memory they're actually decent in most systems.
>D&D up to 3.5e
Takes a round reload but gives you good range and damage for being simple weapons that any class can use.
>Warhammer fantasy 2e
Cheap, Long range, Armor Piercing, Str4 damage, and safer than fucking blackpowder weapons that can misfire
>Legend of FIve RIngs
Honorless, but you can have rapidfire armor-piercers made to pin down oni-demons climbing up the great wall

>>96516951
Have you tried not playing D&D? It's usually a good first step when you encounter something retarded in D&D. There are alot of non-D&D games out there that are less retarded.

>>96517206
D&D is not why you are retarded nogames, anon. Crossbows are good in D&D, They may be a slow to shoot but damage is pretty good,

>>96517234
>Damage is good
>Weapon has the loading property and instantly becomes useless for any class that gets Extra Attack at level 5
>Caster cantrip damage also outscales the one attack at level 5.
>Could mitigate the Loading property with Crossbow Expertise, but at that point you might as well just take Sharpshooter and use a Longbow instead for better damage.

Seriously, aside from maybe Rogues, who is actually using crossbows in D&D?

>>96517288
Low level spell casters.

>>96517319
Low level spellcasters who don't have Martial Weapon Proficiency and can't use the Heavy Crossbow that actually does "good damage"? Low level spellcasters who are still better off casting Firebolt or Eldritch Blast?

You know, you really should have some idea what you're talking about before you accuse other people of being nogames.

>>96517383
5e is not the only form of D&D out there nogames tardfag.

>>96517234
>>96517410
Please stop replying to that troll already.

>>96516951
>Weapon that exists solely to let money trump skill
>Why don't people obsessed with weapons like it?

>>96517661
>let money trump skill
You need strength to pull the string back up, even with a loading mechanism (loading mechanism lets you use draw weights that would be absurd for a bow wielded by anyone but Heracles), and hand/eye coordination a.k.a dexterity to aim.

>>96517704
You need to give a laborer five minutes of instruction and boom: he's ready to go. Competent archers take years and years of training. Competent crossbowmen? Literal minutes.

That's why everyone in nerdome looks down on crossbows.

>>96517410
I can see skid marks from how hard you're moving the goal posts now.

>>96517784
The skid marks you see is in your pants, retard.

>>96516951
They don’t, they’re just comparable to the weapons they appeared alongside, like in real life, they are about the same power as bows. The only difference is that you can hand a crossbow to any tom, dick, or Harry and have them relatively competent at ranged combat and they take a fucking age to reload.

>>96517742
>Competent crossbowmen? Literal minutes.
You know that recreational crossbow archery and even crossbow hunting are a thing today, right? Pick up a crossbow and let's see how many minutes it takes you to consistently hit a moving target at 50 yards.

>>96517071
they've sucked in every edition of D&D desu. The loading property unfairly relegates them to the wizard's weapon when they don't have spells, if that.
It's bullshit. These weapons have a cool aesthetic and turned combat completely on it's head for hundreds of years. They deserve more respect.

>>96517901
Would you really need that kind of accuracy in the context of a battlefield? If you miss one guy charging you, there's probably still pretty good odds you'll hit one of the guys beside him, or behind him. And with the kind of power that crossbows had, any kind of hit is doing something. And it's not just going to be one guy with a crossbow firing - there's a whole bunch.

If you're up on a wall shooting down between . . . I forget the name of those little gaps specifically for it . . . you're almost shooting fish in a barrel, which is even better than shooting at a mass of enemies running straight at you.

Although I suppose you could make the counter argument that a few minutes of being shown how to use a crossbow will just go completely out of my head when there's hundreds or thousands of guys running at me and shouting with pointy objects they intend to stab me with. That's a lot more dangerous than people shooting crossbows out of hunting blinds or helicopters.

>>96516951
I can answer for gurps. The good ones take a while to reload, the quick ones don’t do too much damage. This doesn’t make them bad, just niche for games focused around short range skirmish combat.
How do we make them better? Give more combat encounters at ranges where a 10 second reload isn’t the entire battle. Use a secondary weapon and treat the crossbow as an opener.

>>96518175
>Would you really need that kind of accuracy in the context of a battlefield?
Yeah because armor and shields are a thing.
>B-but muh powa
Unless you're taking a minute to shoot with a crank or a windlass, even chainmail armor is gonna prevent serious injury, if not stop it entirely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPQmXB6AmJQ

Medieval crossbowmen were often heavily trained specialists btw.

>>96517964
>The loading property unfairly relegates them to the wizard's weapon when they don't have spells
Bullshit. In Basic if your PC have Str18 you can reload a heavy crossbow every turn, because you're chad who don't need a goat's leg or a crank.
Also 3~3.5e it's not bad. Light is a move action so if you're not forced to move and in a good position you're better off than most starting archers (pre-lv9).

>>96518250
Thanks for the video. It does soundly challenge the preconceived notion I have of crossbows being a very potent anti-armour weapon which has been reinforced by constant popular depictions as such.

I'd be interested to see that kind of test repeated with the mail over a ballistic dummy like you can see guntubers like, say, Garand Thumb or Kentucky Ballistics use (I'm sure there's many more, but I'm just passingly familiar with those two).

I'm somewhat skeptical as to whether chainmail produced with period accurate material and labour would perform as well as those tested - I'm going to be honest I just watched the part where they shot at the dummies and didn't go through the section where he rated them 1 to 3 on how historically accurate the pieces were, just looked at the score card at the end where a lot of them get a 0 - and maybe I should've listened because I wonder if these pieces would represent 'premium' pieces. He probably answers both questions.

Anyway, thank for reading my blog. I concede I have a lot of misconceptions and this video helped dissuade me on them.

>>96518382
>Bullshit. In Basic if your PC have Str18
Kek

>>96516951
>Why do they suck in-game though.
Action economy of single-player-character RPGs is incredibly harsh.

>How do we fix them?
Either have the action economy scale to not-ass so it doesn't get left behind bows, or balance them to the static action economy as single very hard hits. If you crunch them enough you could have them be a sliding scale of relative investment in the same (sub)system, likely converging at the tail end as individual functions reach their limits.

>>96517071
In 3.5, its scaling cost falls off terribly compared to the rather large variety of alternatives.

>>96517288
>>96517784
You're missing "up to 3.5", prior to 4e it wasn't quite as much of a drag and had a lot more ways around it. Still comparatively bad because of the hoops to jump through, but the hoops being things like Repeating Crossbows asking for a single feat to get 5 attacks per action spent reloading made for a fine-enough time.

>>96518175
>Would you really need that kind of accuracy in the context of a battlefield?
As a lone combatant trying to take out a specific target, yes. That's the crux of the issue, crossbows were practical specifically from one rich fuck buying a load of them for entire units of relatively low-skilled levies to plink at great distances, while in RPGs engagements frequently start in immediate charge range with enemies frequently taking the completely-hopeless-in-melee windlass varieties.

>>96518820
>crossbows were practical specifically from one rich fuck buying a load of them for entire units of relatively low-skilled levies to plink at great distances
One of the most retarded takes in the thread so far btw, this is what bows were for congrats.

>>96518830
>this is what bows were
...No, bows were so much not this that there were laws specifically requiring practice and statements of needing to start with the grandfather to get a decent archer. Similar per-projectile performance from crossbows is "decently fit rando with maybe a minute to wind up".

>>96518820
>Either have the action economy scale to not-ass so it doesn't get left behind bows, or balance them to the static action economy as single very hard hits. If you crunch them enough you could have them be a sliding scale of relative investment in the same (sub)system, likely converging at the tail end as individual functions reach their limits.

Wouldn't you end up with the same problem as implementing "accurate" guns then?

>>96518884
>...No, bows were so much not this that there were laws specifically requiring practice
In England and England alone. This was very unusual and how England was able to raise thousands of professional bowmen for their wars.

Everywhere else? You hope the locals have a tradition of it or you hand out cheap shitty bows in desperate times because they're cheap. Crossbows are a terrible choice because they're expensive and easy to break, and you'd be better off hiring mercenaries, which is why your description is pure fantasy. Most of the time, Crossbows were just highly skilled mercenaries.

>>96518884
>...No, bows were so much not this that there were laws specifically requiring practice and statements of needing to start with the grandfather to get a decent archer.
England isn't the whole world, there are bows other than the longbow.

>>96518884
>needing to start with the grandfather to get a decent archer.
The specific quote is for longbowmen, not "archers", and is apocryphal and wouldn't have made sense for him to say anyways. Most longbowmen had been training for maybe 5-10 years by the time they went to war.
Most of that training was just for maintenance and honing accuracy though as you can build up the muscles to shoot a 100lb bow in under a year with ease. You can't keep shooting that unless you regularly practice though.