Tuesday 17 September 2013

Swords and Arrows, and Dragonslaying

I'll shut up about universal d6 damage eventually, but there is MORE THAT MUST BE SAID.

In the comments to Sunday's post, two interesting issues are raised, by Ynas Midgard and Picador respectively. In respect of bows, Ynas Midgard makes the excellent point that bows are "harmonically bound" by slings in a d6-for-damage system (no, I hadn't heard of that phrase either); what this means is that, since bows and slings are effectively equal (they both do d6 damage), but slings have side benefits (infinite reloads, probably also concealability and other fringe advantages) you should always choose a sling over a bow in that system. 

The same is true of more or less any melee weapon vis-a-vis swords. Spears can be used for poking and measuring, and for attacking from a rear rank. Axes can smash down doors. Daggers are concealable. Clubs are free and ready-made. Swords are "harmonically bound" by everything else.

I'm not sure, but it seems Ynas Midgard sees this as a downside to the system. I'm partially inclined to disagree, for two reasons.

1) I like the idea of professional dungeoneers making hard-nosed choices about equipment. I view adventurers as being more like bandeirantes than anything else - tough, bloody-minded types whose decision-making is all about substance over style: the efficiency of a weapon which is also a tool would appeal to such folk. But that also means that the selection of a sword or bow as your weapon of choice is a statement. It may be sub-optimal, but it says to the world, specifically, "My character cares about style over substance". Maybe he has delusions of grandeur and wants to be a knight, or a hero. Maybe he envisions himself as a woodsman or Robin Hood-type with a yew hunting bow. Maybe he wants to impress people by gadding about with a poncey rapier. Whatever - it makes a sword or bow a luxury and an extension of the character, rather than just a default.

2) Wherever swords are found in a culture, they are a sign of privilege, because they are difficulty and costly to make in comparison to other weapons. A large part of the reason why swords are so prominent in the mythology of late-middle-ages Europe and Edo period Japan is that only the rich could afford them: they are about power, wealth, and, for want of a better word, bling. Making them a somewhat rare and sub-optimal choice for PCs enhances their status as a statement rather than a mere weapon or tool. 

Picador, on the other hand, writes some excellent comments going back to the early days of D&D:

I know there's been a lot of discussion recently about hit points and the duration of combat between characters of various levels, but it seems to me that if you were interested in preserving the combat dynamics of Chainmail in the context of D&D's more granular HD/HP system, you'd want to have a corollary to the Fighter's ability to engage multiple 1HD targets. It might look something like this:

"When a Fighter is engaged in melee or missile combat with a single other creature, a successful attack by the Fighter deals a number of dice of damage equal to his or her level."

This solves two problems: first, the one-minute combat round can now use more realistic movement rates without diminishing the efficacy of missile weapons; and second, it's now possible to simulate those Conan moments where he impales the giant serpent on a spear or cuts off his opponent's head in the first exchange, rather than thrashing around with the dude for fifteen minutes.

If you wanted to be generous to the non-Fighters (and, true to Chainmail, allow Wizards the ability to beat up on legendary creatures alongside Heroes and Superheroes), you could phrase it thusly instead:

"When a combatant is engaged in melee or missile combat with a single other creature, a successful attack deals damage equal to the combatant's Fighting Capability (e.g. a 6th-level Magic-User deals three dice plus one point of damage to the creature's hit points)."

I like this a lot. It turns Fighters into genuine combat monsters at higher levels, able, as Picador puts it, to impale a giant serpent on a spear - or, perhaps more to the point, slay a dragon with a single mighty and well-placed blow, a la Turin and Glaurung, or Bard and Smaug. 

Two possible tweaks to consider:

1) Allowing Fighters to 'spread' damage and attacks across opponents. So, picture a Level 6 Fighting Man engaging 3 orcs. He has potentially 6d6 of damage to deal out. He decides (when declaring actions for the round) to try to make three attacks, one on each orc, using 2d6 for damage on each one. He rolls 'to attrit' separately for each orc.

2) Whats good for the goose is good for the gander, and allowing monsters to do d6 damage per HD only seems fair. No more endless back-and-forth, trading blows with that ancient red dragon. It's you or him, and it won't be long before one or the other is dead.

42 comments:

  1. So I read your other blog post, but not the comments - apologies if this has been covered elsewhere. But picking up on the 'harmonically bound' discussion (great phrase that, by the way), for me what what you're describing is the essential problem with all weapons doing d6 damage - while all the weapons described are lethal, they're not 'equally lethal'. Surely the reason why all knights carried swords is exactly because they were making hard-nosed choices about how to maximise their own survival chances - they were more likely to be able to attack and defend better using a sword than an axe, dagger or spear, so swords were the weapon of choice. In the aggregate, you're more likely to hurt more people, more badly, if you attack them with a samurai sword than a fruit knife (even though of course you can kill someone stone dead with a fruit knife). So I can't see the problem in modelling that aggregate difference in an abstract combat system!

    But if the problem with variable damage, is that it means people gravitate towards to the same optimal weapon choices, doesn't removing it just change the value function to optimise to something else (a sling beats a bow or whatever). In which case, why don't you just exclude any weapons you don't like in your gameworld (say the unique metal in your world gets brittle when it's forged into a sword shape, so they snap) rather than trying to tweak the rules to do that for you?

    Sorry if I'm late to the party and have missed something fundamental about this discussion.

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    1. WRT your 1st paragraph. Swords weren't a knights first weapon of choice. It was a symbol of office. They preferred pole-arms and spears as their main weapons in combat. There are many accounts of knights realizing they would have to fight on foot having their lances cut down to a manageable size.
      Same goes for the samurai. The sword was a symbol of rank that you carried everywhere. If you knew you were going to be in a fight, you armed yourself with something longer.

      Same reason officers used to all just carry pistols until they realized that enemies were using that to specifically pick them out as targets. It showed they were the guys in charge.

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    2. Saroe is probably right. There will be readers of this blog who know more about it than me, I am sure, but to my awareness the use of the sword as a symbol of the samurai evolved in the Edo period, an era of peace in the 17th - 19th centuries. In the previous, more warlike centuries, samurai preferred the use of the spear and the bow.

      I also am fairly sure that in medieval Europe the sword was a symbol of prestige but certainly not the battlefield weapon of choice. By the high middle ages I think armour had evolved to such a point that it could easily deflect swords and the key battlefield weapons were can-opener type tools like warhammers, war picks, mallets, lucerne hammers, maces, etc.

      But that's sort of beside the point, because at most what I am advocating is that swords are viewed as prestige weapons whereas other weapons also have tool-like functions. They still all do d6 damage, so it's not like using a sword is a big disadvantage in combat.

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    3. Fair enough - my 'expertise' in this goes about as far as looking at old suits of armour in castles and watching films, so I'm not going to argue with people who know more! That said though, it's kind of beside the point to me which particular weapon was more effective - the point being that some weapons were more effective than others, and hence combatants gravitated towards them (whether that was swords over spears or spears over swords!). As I understood your post, you want to give players incentives to make hard-nosed choices about weapons - and with that being the case, I'm struggling to understand why you don't just incentivise the weapons you want with higher damage, rather than a bunch of other considerations. Not a criticism of your approach, just a failure of comprehension on my part!

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    4. Interesting question, and one I think I'll elaborate on in a blog post...

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  2. Slings do have a disadvantage--they take a lot of space around you to wield. You generally wouldn't be able to use them indoors unless you're in some big hall type room. And you can't be standing too close to anyone else, either.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kT6EgnVerA

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    1. That's an interesting point, and one I did think about. Actually the crossbow is probably the best underground weapon, because even a bow might be awkward in cramped conditions. I think that's perhaps something for the DM to govern on an ad hoc basis.

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  3. I get what you're saying regarding swords as prestige weapons versus pragmatic, unglamorous tools and that functions as some good world building. However, from a game perspective, I prefer to have everything provide interesting trade-offs. Mechanically optimal choices are boring to me.

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    1. I wholeheartedly agree with you.

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    2. I agree too, but I think what I am saying here is not that swords shouldn't be used because they are sub-optimal, but they should be used in full awareness that they lack the tool-like aspects of other weapons - but may have important social signals.

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  5. Your proposal about boosting creature damage based on HD would absolutely have to be adopted to preserve the power levels of multi-HD creatures relative to Fighters.

    Your other proposal -- about spreading the damage around -- is also a pretty logical extension of the system I proposed. I mean, if a level 6 Fighting Man can either carry out 6 attacks for 1d6 damage each against mooks, or one attack for 6d6 damage against a single monster, then why not three attacks for 2d6 damage against three mid-level foes? It's a sort of interpolation of the gap between the Man to Man rules and the Fantastic Combat rules from Chainmail, in keeping with D&D's much more granular HP/HD/level system as opposed to Chainmail's chunky Man/Hero/Superhero system.

    But I wonder if at this point we've pulled TOO far back from the AD&D blow-by-blow combat system we all grew up playing, and combat starts to look a little too abstract, like a clash of armies in Risk. The system almost starts to look like one in which you compare aggregate HD of the two sides when combat is joined, and the side with the higher total wins, with wounds subtracted from their members equal to the HD total of the losing side.

    Another concern is, of course, balance: when everyone gets this kind of massive boost to their melee and missile weapon effectiveness, all other combat actions diminish in relation to straight-up attacks. Spells, special abilities, even taking a round to drink a potion or take some non-combat action -- if these actions are deemed to take a full combat round of one minute, they can cost the actor much more dearly than in the old system of 1d6-per-round damage.

    Still, I think this is probably the right approach -- or is at least on the right track -- if you're going to go with one-minute combat rounds. It also does model the Chainmail combat rules pretty faithfully while retaining the finer granularity of D&D levels and HP.

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    1. Non-attack actions could theoretically "cost" Xd6 potential damage (for instance, the Level 6 Fighting-Man in the example, after killing those orcs, could drink a potion (-1D), close one of the doors through which incoming enemies are expected (-1D), and fight two more orcs (potentially dealing 2d6-2d6 damage to them).

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    2. Picador: Well, let's not get too carried away - we are getting a little detached from blow-by-blow combat, sure, but we are also still rolling dice. The level 3 fighter might be doing 3d6 damage but he still has to roll to hit/attack/attrit!

      Ynas Midgard: It's a little too complicated for me to think about implementing but it's very interesting - sort of like a Hit Dice economy. Although it is getting into the realm of Warhammer FRP 2nd edition, where everything costs actions or half-actions and so forth. Not that I'm against that.

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    3. noisms: Agreed about your substantive point. And I know you're fighting hard for "roll to attrit", but I just can't follow you there. I could do "to attack" or "to wound", but "to attrit"... I'd at the very least plead for "attrite", which has a longer history than the Vietnam War-era "attrit":

      http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=attrit

      Ynas: Like noisms, I'm also lukewarm on translating HD into generic actions. After all, if different classes deal damage per their "fighting capability" (from the Men and Magic charts), this gives Fighting Men more generic actions than anyone else during combat, which seems like an odd result to me.

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    4. Maybe "attack roll" is a better neutral option.

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  6. Swords were not only prestigious but tended to be extremely wieldy and quick. Outside of formation combat or heavily armoured combat they still tend to be the thing most likely to get the pointy end in the other bloke. Even in formation combat the Romans and various permutations on the rodelero allowed astonishingly effective face-stabbing mobs. Note also that swords become cheap and ubiquitous in the post-armour era as the best thing for chopping up other musketeers.

    I'd be inclined to deal with the difference between different weapons with bonuses/penalties to initiative, attacks against armour, reach, defense and situational modifiers in surroundings - e.g. a pirate-era re-enactor once told me that the cutlass was short and the fighting style involve no strikes from above the head because fighting below-decks made swinging a long weapon over your head folly.

    However, adding all these modifiers detracts from the original elegance of d6 damage so I'm not sure I'd do it that way. I think I'll just continue to read this excellent series of posts to see what you come up with.

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    1. I would be just as happy with a complex system that works in the way you suggest, but it no longer feels like D&D to me that way. (It might do if I was more familiar with 3rd edition.) My main idea for that remains hacking the Cyberpunk 2020 system.

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  7. Heh, old school hack deals with this quite well.

    I would agree with you on this Noism, and keep it relatively simple.

    Swords can be used to impress, bows can be used as bow drill to help start fires, etc, it all comes down to role playing.

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  8. Reading about this reminds me a lot of MERP/Rolemaster, where your "Weapon Skill" was essentially a pool that you could distribute into multiple attacks or a single ridiculously strong one (once your skill got high, that is) and IIRC, damage was weapon-independent, what weapon type did influence was what kind of critical you caused.

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    1. I didn't think of that, but yes, it is a bit like Rolemaster in that respect. The Rolemaster combat system is brilliant.

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  9. Swords are still awesome because magic swords are the magic weapon you're most likely going to find. How many Axes +2 are there compared to Swords +1, +3 vs. Magic-Users (or all the other permutations of magic sword ...)? So first level adventurers really shouldn't spend money on swords, but once they find a magic sword they should absolutely prefer that to all else, because it will do more damage and be more prestigious.

    Plus, magic swords preserve the Fighting-Man's combat superiority, because only he can use it in conjunction with plate armor and a shield (Thieves can maybe use magic swords ... but without shields and plate and with d4 hit dice they get hacked up pretty quickly in the front, as I've been forced to admit over and over again with my own characters).

    Thus, magic swords allow you to have your cake and eat it too with a universal d6 damage game where swords are still badass.

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    1. Magic swords are certainly an interesting point in this context. D&D places a special emphasis on them, especially when you incorporate rules for intelligent swords.

      Still, I don't know if that, or the other points here, change my mind on d6 damage for all weapons. Even with some of these specialty uses discussed, it's still hard for me to swallow that a dagger -- hell, make it a penknife -- deals out as much damage as a two-handed sword.

      The rationales of a dagger having more thrusts or swipe than a two-handed sword in a round, or that a knife landing in the right location can kill someone no matter its size, don't really matter to me. I think video game designers have this right: by giving each weapon advantages and disadvantages, you force the player to consider trade-offs, to focus on certain strengths and try to minimize weaknesses. I think some of the suggestions Noism listed work in this regard, but at the end of the day, players buy weapons to kill monsters. If it doubles as a can-opener, that's nice, but for every can it opens there's ten monsters to be dispatched.

      House rules attempt to get around this, but since one advantage of d6-for-all is simplicity, why then muddle things up to fix what's easily fixed? Is it really so difficult to just say, in exchange for foregoing a shield and the ability to haul out of the dungeon a little more gp, you get to roll a d8 for damage. Seems clean to me, gives players a straightforward calculation to make when equipping their player, and makes a basic amount of sense.

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    2. I understand what you mean, but I think the mistake is in rationalising it. It's not that a dagger and a two-handed sword do the same amount of damage. It's that they reduce an opponent's hit points at the same rate on average. That means something different.

      I am persuaded there needs to be an exception for 2-handed weapons, though, to make the choice of forgoing a shield interesting. I'm not sure I like using d8 for damage. Especially if fighters are going to be doing x dice of damage per level: 2-handed weapons doing d8 damage would be monstrous in that system.

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    3. I'm a big fan of two-handed weapons giving +1 to attack. That makes them more effective vs. heavy armor (verisimilitude) and mirrors the shield's -1 to AC (balance), making the "shield vs. two-handed weapon" choice one of straightforward defence vs. offence. In a game where bonuses to attack are few and far between (e.g. no Strength bonus, few magical weapons), that +1 is a big deal.

      As soon as we start talking about mapping HP damage to weapon size, we're back into the weird incoherence of the "one successful attack roll = one connecting blow / hit points = physical wound capacity" system we grew up with. Much better to give a bonus to attack, representing the various combat advantages bestowed by using a large weapon with two hands (e.g. superior reach, control, and armor piercing ability).

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  10. A thought: as your post, but stick with 1d6 weapon damage, and give fighters a number of bonus dice equal to their level which could be spent over the course of a given encounter (and would recover after taking a short rest). This would moderate the effect of a fighter-fireball per round (which, let's be honest, is probably too much if you want to not drift the game too much from basic assumptions). Dice could be spent to add to attack, defence, or damage on a round by round basis as desired, but would be consumed when used.

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    1. This would still allow the sort of "beheading the dragon" stunts, but would require players to think before blowing their resources, and thus maintain combat tension.

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    2. That feels a bit 4th edition "surgey" to me, but I'd like to playtest this and other variations, for sure.

      It's worth considering that although, say, a 6th level fighter would be doing 6d6 damage per round, that means 6 HD monsters would probably last about as long as a 1 HD orc lasts against a 1st level fighter, and vice versa. Combat would roughly stay about the level of dangerousness and speed as at 1st level over the course of a campaign.

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    3. Yeah, I'm not sure I'm actually advocating this system -- I just said that it would be a superior way of adapting the Chainmail rules to D&D (which was the ostensible approach of Men and Magic but which, IMO, got botched in the process of integrating the two systems).

      I agree with noisms that the arbitrary "once per combat" 4E-style stuff sets a bad precedent for other dissociated mechanics to follow along. Of course, I'm of the opinion that Hit Points as originally devised are also a dissociated mechanic, so maybe that ship has already sailed.

      In any case, while I know that fetishizing "balance" is a bugbear of the OSR, Brendan's "fireball" example is a good way to remind ourselves of how screwed Magic Users would be under this proposed system without some additional boost to their abilities.

      On the other hand: one of the complaints about D&D is that Fighters become ineffectual relative to MUs as they both level up. This system makes no changes to Fighters at first level, but adds to their efficacy over time. It also gives non-fighters a weak boost over time (i.e. damage equal to Fighting Capacity). [I would note, as an aside, that in OD&D high-level non-Fighting Men could also engage multiple 1HD opponents in a round, per their Fighting Capacity -- I'd lobby to bring back this feature as well under the proposed system.]

      So maybe it actually balances things out? There are even some circumstances in which MUs' and Clerics' spell-using abilities are in fact enhanced by the new increased damage rules: because combat is generally sped up (fewer rounds of combat needed to deplete a monster's HP), spells with short durations are now more effective. E.g., Hold Person gives your guys a free attack on the target: when that attack can deal multiple dice of damage, the spell looks a lot more impressive.

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    4. I think it's definitely worth further thought and play testing.

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    5. Another issue worth bearing in mind is that fighters are still one-trick ponies in this system. Magic users and clerics are still interesting because they can do more interesting things. I don't think the lure of being able to cast spells is easily outweighed.

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    6. I realize this will be a matter of taste, but these consumable resource dice don't feel the same as 4E encounter powers or surges to me because they don't enable things that otherwise wouldn't be accomplishable (such as some crazy whirlwind attack encounter power or the recovery of HP), but rather provide bonuses to things that can always be attempted. An attack +2d6 in bonus dice (for example) can still fail, while a later attack in the bottom of the ninth with 1 HP left and no bonus dice could come up a natural 20. So the ultimate impression does not seem as dissociated to me.

      This, to me, feels more like a system that represents fatigue and effort. I conceptualize HP the same way, actually, and so HP also don't feel dissociated to me.

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    7. A lot of D&D rules are very profound the more you think about them, and are open to lots of possibilities. I can't tell whether this is due to genuine profundity or just because we are nerds and nerds will discover profundity through obsession even where it isn't there in the first place.

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    8. noisms wrote: It's worth considering that although, say, a 6th level fighter would be doing 6d6 damage per round, that means 6 HD monsters would probably last about as long as a 1 HD orc lasts against a 1st level fighter, and vice versa. Combat would roughly stay about the level of dangerousness and speed as at 1st level over the course of a campaign.

      I wonder if this is not a bug rather than a feature though. It seems some degree in change of dynamics is important, otherwise why not just stay first level fighting 1 HD opponents forever? Though for sure it's not exactly the same thing, there are shades of the 3E escalating difficulty classes (to make up some numbers, first level characters making +1 checks against DC 11 compared to higher level characters making +5 checks against DC 15).

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    9. Well, because your 6th level fighter can kill shitloads of 1 HD orcs and slay trolls like a mighty hero. The power progression and change of dynamics is still there, but it just manifests itself slightly differently.

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  11. Interesting post (and great blog!) but I think you miss a few genuine advantages of swords.

    First, they give greater reach than most "hand weapons". An one-handed sword is (generally) significantly longer than a one-handed battleaxe or mace, and has a much longer offensive area - perhaps the best part of a metre or more versus a few inches. Most importantly, that cutting edge can be deployed with the flick of a wrist, which avoids the swordsman having to expose his arm to a counterstrike. A mace- or axe-wielder has no choice. "Don't strike by bending your elbow" is one of the basic principles of sabre fencing, for good reason. If you do, you expose your forearm to quick counter-attacks. And a sword's long cutting edge makes it a better bet than an axe or mace if the fight ends up in grappling. You can grab an axe-haft more easily than a sword's blade.

    Second, a sword is more versatile. It can cut and thrust, and the latter allows it to take full advantage of the reach advantage. A lunging swordsman could hope to run an axeman through while the latter was still "winding up".

    Third, a sword offers much greater protection to its wielder's hand, through quillons at the very least and a basket hilt at best, as well as through the fact that there's no harmless haft. If you are wielding a bludgeon or an axe against a swordsman, your fingers are at far greater risk than his. There's a (hyperbolic) example in one of Moorcock's Elric books, when Elric slides Stormbringer down the haft of an axe, sending fingers flying. But it underscores a real advantage.

    Plate armour (with gauntlets) negates most of this. But up until that stage, a swordsman has the edge (and the point). A shield also changes things; a swordsman and a mace-man are more evenly matched when they both have shields to parry with.

    How to reflect all this in a game? I think a swordsman should get an advantage over opponents armed with other hand weapons (or even spears), both offensively or defensively, so long as those opponents are without heavy armour or a shield. That advantage might be quite considerable (+2? I'm not familiar with D&D mechanics), allowing sword-armed young aristocrats to feel quite safe on nights out on the town, despite the streets being full of thugs and bravos with daggers and cudgels. Should the same young aristocrats stumble into a raiding party of heavily armoured goblin soldiers with shields (Tolkien's Uruk-hai, for example), that sense of security would evaporate all too quickly ...

    And there would be other implications. Swords would confer status *by dint of their mechanical virtues* in urban and other civilian settings. Can anyone carry one? Or just the high-born? Or do only the high-born generally carry them because they're expensive? Might adventures start off as bravos with cudgels who have to watch out for drunken aristos when "off duty"? Affording swords might be worth a few low-level adventures. And so on.

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  12. In the example of slings vs. bows, I'd say a big advantage of bows is weight of ammo. I'd make 60 arrows equal the encumbrance of 15 stones or 30 bullets.

    Smooth stones of the right size for slinging aren't everywhere - some effort may be needed to find them. That means time, which means random encounter checks. Fired clay spheres are ok but cost money - removing the sling's supposed advantage. Improper stones would give an attack roll penalty because they veer off unexpectedly when slung.

    You can fit more bullets in a pouch because while they're the same weight, they're smaller so less encumbering. But bullets must be purchased or made, hence not freely available, and also while they may not break on impact they could easily be buried in an enemy or in the ground or tree and so they're just as difficult to recover as arrows are.

    Anyway, now the sling + ammo is actually heavier than the bow + ammo, which is balanced out by the sling being cheaper and more concealable. The sling also has an "infinite free ammo" feature but with an attack roll penalty - not the best option.

    If your initiative system allows for it, you could let bow-users hold a shot for a round or two, giving them a free shot at the start of a combat if they know it's coming (bashing through a door, ambush, etc). Crossbow users would be able to "hold a shot" for much longer - perhaps this, along with the extra range and maybe a +1 to hit, would balance out a longer reload time.

    Plus, sling with rough stone having -1 to hit would nicely balance a crossbow with +1 to hit.

    I've heard slings have similar, if not surpassing, range compared to bows. Crossbow of course have superior range. I think you could get away with having one range for thrown weapons, one for bows and slings, and one for crossbows.

    ---

    Related to this, melee weapons can be balanced against each other by offering a throwing range, reach for pole weapons, offhand use for light weapons, choice of one- or two-handed use for medium weapons. The big problem I keep running into is that (6'-7') spears qualify for everything. They're a super weapon! I don't need everyone running around with slings and spears. And I want to limit the extra house rules, so ...

    You know. Work in progress.

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    1. Good point about the weight of the ammo. Maybe arrows = 3 per cn, sling shot = 1 per cn?

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