The Gaming Den

I'm pretty sure Lars Andersen's crazy arrow shenanigans have already been mentioned on the Den. But here's a video of him doing crazy Legolas bullshit anyway. Now several posters are on record saying that we need to nerf archers so their sword fetish can be supported. Well fuck that shit we're not doing the K thing where people aren't allowed to do the things they can do in real life.

Andersen learned those sick moves by reading historical documents and then trying to pull of the things historical archers were capable of, so I think we can safely say the raelizarm argument is also invalid. Shooting three arrows per round while doing crazy parkor bullshit isn't even heroic tier archery. It's expert tier archery. Some middle age danish guy actually learned to do this shit as a hobby.

So where does that leave sword guy? Like I can understand when you say you're kicking Nynaeve and Gilgamesh out of the fellowship because they make Conan feel small in the pants but when you're kicking Lars Anderson out of the fellowship too I think the problems might be with Conan.

If you ever feel like pissing away several hours of your life, go talk to a couple HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) types about what is the best weapon. And the thing is it depends. Depending on the area and the time, the available laws and technology and cultural practices, you see different weapons being used and different techniques being used with those weapons, and not a lot of that translates well to RPGs, because it's not a case of "Swords do more damage" or "Bows are awesome," it's lots of really tedious shit like "You can't legally carry a halberd around with you in the city," and "Judicial duels do allow you to unscrew your pommel and throw it at people, and we actually have reports of that in the medieval manuals, but we're tried to renact it and it's fucking stupid." I mean, there are old fighting manuals where people are dueling with scythes for fuck's sake.



If you want realism, fine. Try to work up some good mechanics for it, and devote the rest of your fucking life to the ensuing shitstorm of arguments. Or, you can just abstract things and roll your fucking attack dice.


When men were men and...well no, fact is this book was written for money and was full of bullshit.

Conan uses bows. It's not even especially rare.



The guy you're kicking out is Razor-Fist.


I think we can all agree that's a small loss.

Slightly out of context, but my wife has scoffed at Lars's videos many a time for bragging about 'discovering' a technique her tribe hasn't stopped practicing.

Your wife's tribe should really make some videos then.

It should be pointed out that like no one in history used all bows. The fucking Parthians, of Parthian Shot fame, did not use all bows. I would presume there is a reason for that.

name_here wrote:It should be pointed out that like no one in history used all bows. The fucking Parthians, of Parthian Shot fame, did not use all bows. I would presume there is a reason for that.

Probably because you don't want to waste arrows on people routing.

Lord Mistborn wrote:So where does that leave sword guy?

Higher level characters and most monsters have little to do with realism. The damage they take from swords and arrows can be balanced however you want, regardless of the number of shots and accuracy you want to allow for your realism.

No, the Parthian army at Carrhae was 10% cataphracts, which are extremely heavy cavalry. They would charge the Romans when they got into their tesudo formations, which were famously almost immune to arrows.

I'm guessing that the reason is that people with melee weapons either had armor and shields and thus were relatively difficult to shoot to death, or were entirely capable of jumping around like crazy too.

Beyond the fact that anyone watching Larscher can tell his form is shit, there's also this blog by an archery instructor which actually dismantles the entirety of that video- http://geekdad.com/2015/01/danish-archer/

Seriously, it amounts to "if I hold the arrows in my drawing hand, and don't worry about whether my target is moving, and don't worry about whether I could reliably evade people trying to take my head off, I can unleash tons of fucking arrows!"

MfA wrote:

Lord Mistborn wrote:So where does that leave sword guy?

Higher level characters and most monsters have little to do with realism.

Like-a-dis

You are forgetting that ammunition is much more limited in history. Making arrows was a tedious thing, and armies ran out of arrows all of the time.

In RPGs limited ammunition just doesn't really happen. If people are required to keep track of their ammunition, they just buy so much that they don't have to worry about it.

name_here wrote:No, the Parthian army at Carrhae was 10% cataphracts, which are extremely heavy cavalry. They would charge the Romans when they got into their tesudo formations, which were famously almost immune to arrows.

I'm guessing that the reason is that people with melee weapons either had armor and shields and thus were relatively difficult to shoot to death, or were entirely capable of jumping around like crazy too.

I'm not saying that was the only reason, I'm saying it is a good reason, a sufficient reason all on it's own, absent anything else, for people to have melee weapons.

True, that's a decent reason for why archers would carry short swords and such. What I meant, though, was that historical armies frequently included a rather large number of people who didn't have bows at all. Chasing fleeing enemies could cover cavalry in areas that didn't have much in the way of horse archers, but is obviously not the reason for heavily-armored infantry or cataphracts in an army otherwise entirely comprised of horse archers.

Nynaeve needs to be kicked out of the Fellowship because she is a wretched bitch. Nothing to do with Conan.

I hadn't read anything beyond the first post when I posted that.

Well, if your archers aren't disciplined enough, a cavalry charge would scatter them. And even if they are disciplined troops, it is still good to have pike-men in front of them to stop any cavalry that do get through.

Mistborn, did you really start another thread because ISP has all but admitted he's a troll wants there to be conflict? I sincerely thought better of you than that.

Lord Mistborn wrote:I'm pretty sure Lars Andersen's crazy arrow shenanigans have already been mentioned on the Den. But here's a video of him doing crazy Legolas bullshit anyway.

Not one of these tricks probably would count as an attack in DnD terms, or would be worth shit in real life. Nobody fucking cared what sort of trick shots you could pull off at 10 steps, even before discussing stopping power, when a charging enemy mob is within 10 steps at you it would smash into your line in a second.

Lord Mistborn wrote:Now several posters are on record saying that we need to nerf archers so their sword fetish can be supported.

Historically bows were good at making unprotected rabble scatter (that's why in low-tech environments amassing a force of good archers, particularly chariot and then horse archers often rocked), but any sort of decent-for-its-age armor stopped them cold. A hoplite shield, helm, breastplate and greaves already were a hard counter for foot archers when put on motivated infantry; jack+chainmail combination allowed people to walk under horse archer fire for many hours and consider it a lesser invonvenience than sun overhead; plate armor, of course offered pretty much immunity to missiles except firearms and the most powerful crossbows (and in large part because of the concussive effect, not because of certainty of penetration). The problem was inability to equip more than a tiny elite portion of your army with bow-proof armor, but PCs are a tiny elite force, so they don't care.

Why not just use a bow AND melee weapon?



Pretty much every image I find of various Chinese dynastic cavalry shows they carry polearms, swords, and bows all together. The samurai are also known for bows, spears, and swords all at once.

You also see Eastern European forces like winged hussars with a mix of melee and ranged weapons too.



Playing video games like Final Fantasy XI I liked the idea of my warrior being able to fire off arrows from a bow before engaging in melee with a greataxe.

Bows, swords, who cares? Slings get no love.

The Romans feared slings because they could kill a heavily-armored soldier relatively easily. A headshot would transfer concussive force right through the helmet, easily proving lethal. And ammo was relatively plentiful. Major battles in the ancient world were decided by slingers. And what do we get in D&D? 1d4 bludgeoning.

Meanwhile, in the real world, armies used pikes because they won. Right up to the point where the longest pikes could be safely tumbled past, and military units of sword and buckler men really did that. Up until the corned-powder matchlock made them all redundant. With pikemen complaining it was demoralising to get shot at all day and never be allowed to charge, so could they please just have guns instead.

Halberds or bills sometimes beat pikes on rough or boggy ground due to the difficulty of keeping the line square. Mongols won their battles with lance-armed cavalry, after the tens of thousands of archers made defenders shell-shocked enough to break formation.

But really, go back thousands of years, long spears and polearms dominate warfare for almost all of it. Those periods of time when people try to kill other people. Not bows. Cultures with an axe fetish built pole axes. Cultures with a sword fetish put them on the end of long poles. Cultures with a bow fetish won fights with heavy cavalry using lances the same as every other culture. Battles supposedly won by the actual archers are always about those people putting down their toys and picking up something with a long handle on it so they can go and fucking kill people, rather than just annoy them.


Not to say that bows don't have a place. They are super annoying, those arrows can really hurt, and often leave nasty little infections in their wake in the following weeks. There's even the odd idiot looks up and gets hit in the eye. But large archer formations? History says eventually the cavalry catches them without their fence up, and then they all die. All of them. No survivors. Because having a bow is fucking useless if someone with a real weapon gets to you. And they hate you, so they're going to try all the time.


Y'all know how cops like to put about 12-14 bullets in people to make them stop? With the nice hollow-point expanding heads and all. Guess how long it takes you to put a dozen AP arrows in that guy running at you with the skull-splitting device. It's too long, isn't it, that's what you're thinking. It should be what you're thinking.

I don't actually know much about the actual history of medieval warfare; that said, I was under the impression that the Battle of Agincourt was dominated by the English Longbow because charging into a bunch of archers standing behind wooden spikes was decidedly super-unpleasant for French cavalry (esp. largely unarmored horses). Was this the exception that proved the rule, or was something else going on?

Agincourt was one big mudhole. It was about as feasible for the French to charge the English archers as it would have been to call in airstrikes against them.

Schleiermacher wrote:Agincourt was one big mudhole. It was about as feasible for the French to charge the English archers as it would have been to call in airstrikes against them.

Heh:

"Where is le close air support?"
"It hasn't been invented yet."

Lord Mistborn:
> Lars Andersen's crazy arrow shenanigans

My RSS feeder recently spat out an article about this guy and his shenanigans.

Author was not impressed.