Crossbows are rad. Coolest of the fantasy ranged weapons. Why do they suck in-game though. How do we fix them?
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 3.5eTakes a round reload but gives you good range and damage for being simple weapons that any class can use. >Warhammer fantasy 2eCheap, 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
>>96516951Have 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.
>>96517206D&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?
>>96517288Low level spell casters.
>>96517319Low 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.
>>965173835e is not the only form of D&D out there nogames tardfag.
>>96517234>>96517410Please 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 skillYou 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.
>>96517704You 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.
>>96517410I can see skid marks from how hard you're moving the goal posts now.
>>96517784The skid marks you see is in your pants, retard.
>>96516951They 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.
>>96517071they'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.
>>96517901Would 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.
>>96516951I 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 powaUnless 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=KPQmXB6AmJQMedieval crossbowmen were often heavily trained specialists btw.
>>96517964>The loading property unfairly relegates them to the wizard's weapon when they don't have spellsBullshit. 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).
>>96518250Thanks 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 Str18Kek
>>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.>>96517071In 3.5, its scaling cost falls off terribly compared to the rather large variety of alternatives.>>96517288>>96517784You'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 distancesOne 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 practiceIn 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.
>>96518886Only on the "single very hard hit" direction, and that's fine because you're allowed to have a weapon be only part of your combat strategy. If you have both as competing investments, this relatively naturally lends itself to the action economy scaling being for dedicated users while boosting the alpha-strike potential fits backup use better.>>96518907>Crossbows are a terrible choice because they're expensive and easy to breakCompared to becoming a heavy cavalryman, it's a pittance.>and you'd be better off hiring mercenaries...They have to afford the crossbows themselves then upcharge for their tangential expenses.>>96518910Which are far less able of dealing with armor than rather basic crossbows and still take more time, so putting up with the bill and saving the drill still gets you more ranged unit value.>>96518960And accuracy's a lot easier with a crossbow while strength is greatly reduced by far better geometry of application.To all three of you, I repeat:>Similar per-projectile performance from crossbows is "decently fit rando with maybe a minute to wind up".This applies MUCH more to the low end of bows you three are focused on. It's quite similar to what happened to slings, spending wealth to acquire weapons that took less skill with frequently lesser peaks in the period of overlap.
>>96519124>Compared to becoming a heavy cavalrymanNobody's making that comparison, congrats retard.>...They have to afford the crossbows themselvesYeah, which is why they were mercenaries, duh.
>>96519124>And accuracy's a lot easier with a crossbowA little, but not as much as you think. You have to practice for a while to get consistent with it. And crossbows are much more troublesome in other ways, like being very easy to break or injure yourself with.>This applies MUCH more to the low end of bowsNot really. On the low end of bows (70lb range if it's meant for war, which any fit man can use. Less and it was probably just meant for hunting), they're faster, and much cheaper.For comparable performance from a crossbow, you're looking in the 500lb+ range. For crossbows made for warfare explicitly you want them to go even higher.At minimum this means everyone will, at least, need spanning belts, but those only go up to 350lbs with pulleys. More than that and they might need the familiar goats foot levers, possibly good for up to 500lbs or thereabouts. These are JUST for hunting crossbows that aren't all that good for war.More still and they need a Cranequin, or a Windlass, which can go over 1000lbs.And also you need to train everyone how to use those reliably and consistently, without getting tired or fucking up. Does that take less time than it takes to train a good bowman? Absolutely. But a month or two of training is still not "Just throw it at a bunch of levied peasants and they'll manage."Importantly too, you can't buy complex weapons like that en-masse, on short notice. It would also be ludicrously expensive. It could cost anywhere from 120-360 days worth of a common laborer's wages, 1-3 pounds. Even an English Yew Longbow was merely 6-18 days worth of labor, or a shilling to three shillings, while weaker bows of more commonly available materials would likely be worth less than a shilling. And that's before we account for the cost of belts, levers, cranequins, or windlasses.So for the cost of buying 50 peasants a crossbow they lack the tools to even span, you could afford to hire 50 soldiers for an entire year.
