I've always thought slings are under-rated. If you ask me, there is something much more frightening about having a rock flung at you at supersonic speed than an arrow - something hideous and terrifying about the thought of a hefty chunk of stone hitting you FULL IN THE FACE and shattering teeth and bone.
From Charles C. Mann's 1491:
Although Andean troops carried bows, javelins, maces and clubs, their most fearsome weapon, the sling, was made out of cloth. A sling is a woven pouch attached to two strings. The slinger puts a stone or slug in the pouch, picks up the strings by the free ends, spins them around a few times, and releases one of the strings at the proper moment. Expert users could hurl a stone, the Spanish adventurer Alonso Enriquez de Guzman wrote, "with such force that it will kill a horse...I have seen a stone, thus hurled from a sling, break a sword in two pieces when it was held in a man's hand at a distance of thirty paces". (Experimenting with a five foot long, Andean-style sling and an egg-sized rock from my garden, I was able, according to my rough calculation, to throw the stone at more than one hundred miles per hour. My aim was terrible though.)
In a frightening innovation, the Inka heated stones in camp fires until they were red hot, wrapped them in pitch-soaked cotton, and hurled them at their targets. The cotton caught fire in mid-air. In a sudden onslaught the sky would rain burning missiles. During a counter attack in May 1536 an Inka army used these missiles to burn Spanish-occupied Qosqo to the ground. Unable to step outside, the conquistadors cowered in shelters beneath a relentless, weeks-long barrage of flaming stone...I'm toying with bumping sling damage up to d6 for my games, or allowing two attacks at d4 damage to reflect the speed with which they can be fired.
They're also one of those weapons that no sensible adventurer should be without. The ideal D&D fighter, in my view, uses a hafted weapon - a spear or trident - and sling combination, probably also with a bola or net if the DM allows it, and a shield, of course. The spear or trident doubles up as a pokey-thing for poking stuff, which is one of the most crucial adventuring tasks. And the sling provides essentially infinite ranged attacks: if for some ungodly reason you can't find rocks to fire, you fling copper coins instead. If push comes to shove, you can also use it is a club by putting a big rock in the pouch and whipping your opponents.
Finally, there are records of troops in resistance movements in World War II using slings to fling molotov cocktails. No problems with flasks not breaking there, I think.
Slings got a raw deal in AD&D, screwed on rate of fire, but thieves and monks pretty much had to live with them as a ranged weapon. The thing about rate of fire is, yes you can lick off shots faster with a bow in a 5 second span, but if you are shooting within the minute long round that D&D's combat chaos assumes, then the slinger is taking as long as the bowman to line up the shot, and the time needed to spin the sling is lost in the aiming time.
ReplyDeleteIn my game sling bullets are d4+1, so comparable with bows and actually better when fighting kobolds, rats and the like (more kill, less overkill). But the sling requires more space to wield than the bow, offsetting its portability.
Fellow sling fan here.
ReplyDeleteCuriously, D&D netx bumps them up to 1d8! How awesome is that.
Of course, Runequest did it first (slings also do 1d8 in RQ 3e) and best (a high enough damage roll to the head will kill you).
I think the D&D Next damage might be bumped up due to halfling racial proficiency.
DeletePlus slings are cheap, almost weightless, and use debris as ammunition. If your class allows you to use one you have no reason to carry one.
ReplyDeleteSome points about slings.
ReplyDeleteNice videos. There's this entire subculture of people on youtube messing around with ancient weapons, isn't there? I once came across a 20 minute video of two blokes in a park in Denmark fighting with glaives.
DeleteThe same guy has a bunch of different videos. This one is, to me, the most informative.
DeleteThese guys have many sparring sessions up.
It's amazing what a difference cheap communications can make compared to being in the 80s and just having the PHB to make sense of.
Yeah, slings get a bum rap. The ancients feared them more than bows etc. because you couldn't see the stones coming in and they could kill an armored man more readily than arrows. But they really took a lot of practice. And while you could sling any stone, the pros preferred cast lead bullets and smooth river stones; I'd give penalties to hit with anything else.
ReplyDeleteBack in the old days, I remember slinging silver pieces at the undead! Cheaper than silver arrows. But that only works if you are keeping the 10 to a pound coins, which is ridiculous.
I never thought of slinging silver pieces at undead. Nice idea.
DeleteI'm sure that in Yoon-Suin any magic-user worth his salt would pick up a sling and practice... It's hardly the same as walking around with a sword or crossbow... Right?
ReplyDeleteAnother tweak you can try is treating slings as hurled weapons, allowing strength bonuses to apply.
ReplyDeleteI recall slings being used to great effect in the novel Hadon of Ancient Opar, a kind of pre-Conan I think, ancient pulp.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to add that slings are easy to make yourself out of cloth or leather, which is impossible for a ruler to deny his people. A despot can't keep his people from slinging. And, if you care about weapon maintenance, slings are again super simple, and there's no worry about maintaining the strings of bows or crossbows, or the mechanical parts of a crossbow, or the glued parts of a composite bow. I've also heard that firing a bow empty causes great stress and could even break on the next shot. Not so with a sling!
It makes me wonder why everyone doesn't use slings. Well, for one, the space required is greater than a bow or crossbow. I'd put one slinger per 10', two bowmen, or three crossbowmen. It's a similar situation to most slashing / blunt melee weapons (1 per 10'), short piercing (2 per 10') or homogeneous spears or pikes (3 per 10').