Advice For Ranged Combat In Mythras

[VonKatzen]

6 minutes ago, Raleel said:

Odd, I frequently get critiques of quite the opposite - folks whining that RQ6 and Mythras bows are far too difficult to use. Reload times that are in the 5 second range (2AP to reload, 1 to fire), ranges that are realistic (125m for an effective range), etc. A guy sprinting at you from 50m can make 35m in a single 5 second round conservatively - making a single shot possible, but you will have people in your face next round. Said archer is going to be facing a 50% of skill penalty IN ADDITION to range (one step harder) - he's only going to be hitting at 10% of his skill. He's not going to get off a second shot before Mr Sprinter plows through him. Even at 125m, he might be getting off a couple of shots, but they are even going to be HARDER than the 10% ones - functionally impossible.

so... I guess I'm not understanding your "more realistically" - seems like they do exactly what you want?

I would have to find my old papers to remember exactly what I didn't like about the numbers, but IIRC it wasn't all one way. In some ways the rules were too conservative with bows, in other ways they were too liberal. Mostly it had to do with effective ranges and firing rates. The actual rules for firing on moving targets are fine.

I'm also talking about fantasy RPGs in general - i.e. elves shooting bows down hallways at hobgoblins wearing half-plate. That's very likely to end poorly for the elf, but most FRPG rules treat it as a totally viable option and take no account of the problems from being unable to arc a shot, from the failure of bows to penetrate solid armor most of the time. A lot of this is because of the IGOUGO initiative systems, where you can basically do whatever you want to a frozen and hapless opponent who can only react after you're done. Unlike RQ these games have little or no 'back and forth' - partly because they're abstracted, which is fine, but the MISSILE combat isn't abstracted. Melee and hit points are loose concepts for multiple attacks and wearing down an opponent, but missile fire is a single weapon where a hit indicates a physical injury? Well, it can't be both ways! D&D is a clusterfack because of its Chainmail roots, but if you fix it you end up with...RuneQuest.

[Opiyel]

I've been reading up a bit on the drones and the XM25 rifle with some interest. While the drones seem like interesting enemies for the players to deal with, a part of me doesn't quite know how to handle the laser guided smart ammunition aspect of it. Especially if the players encounter that.

[Raleel]

2 hours ago, VonKatzen said:

I would have to find my old papers to remember exactly what I didn't like about the numbers, but IIRC it wasn't all one way. In some ways the rules were too conservative with bows, in other ways they were too liberal. Mostly it had to do with effective ranges and firing rates. The actual rules for firing on moving targets are fine.

 

well, if you find those, I'd love to hear about them. It's been a bit of a thing with my group. I point to videos of folks shooting bows (not Lars) at reasonable rates and showing "yes, it does take a certain amount of time here", but they've not necessarily bought into it. They really have a Legolas fighting at close range sort of view - and frankly I look at that as some kind of extra long range melee weapon  it's also, frankly, not a lot of fun to go "I reload" on your turn.

[VonKatzen]

5 hours ago, Raleel said:

well, if you find those, I'd love to hear about them. It's been a bit of a thing with my group. I point to videos of folks shooting bows (not Lars) at reasonable rates and showing "yes, it does take a certain amount of time here", but they've not necessarily bought into it. They really have a Legolas fighting at close range sort of view - and frankly I look at that as some kind of extra long range melee weapon  it's also, frankly, not a lot of fun to go "I reload" on your turn.

Firing and aiming takes a lot of time. For a very strong person who is quite experienced, though, a bow can have effective shots (effective against targets in little armor, at least) of more than one per second. You can see Mongols doing this today, and the Persianids could certainly 'rain arrows' and even held 2-3 arrows in their hand in addition to the one they were firing. However, aiming this at a specific target is nowhere near as easy. And anyone who hasn't been shooting for years - maybe even more than a decade - will not be able to match this feat with any accuracy or power.

A close-range attack is almost necessary for armor penetration, especially on a straight shot. Part of the power of a bow on a long-shot is that it arcs up and falls back down, accelerating before impact. An aimed shot - usually a straight one - will simply lose power and velocity the further away the target is. But since using a bow at close range is VERY dangerous, the only way to effectively do it is to also be a bad-ass rider so you can pop in, shoot a couple guys, and take off again on your pony.

Movie Legolas is a joke. Nothing about Peter Jackson films should be in any way mistaken for either history or Tolkien. Even stabbing someone with an arrow is a bit questionable - shafts are quite flexible, and if the guy is wearing boiled leather or anything harder it might just bend and pop out of your hand instead of penetrating.

And your bow would get broken very quickly. Bows are permanently ruined quite easily. In fact, if your players aren't starting out every fight with their bows unstrung then they may have to face damage and failure of their bow - most of them are not capable of being kept in tension without deformation of the stave and loss of tension on the string.

A much more practical one-man weapon is the crossbow, which is easier to aim, more accurate, doesn't require arc fire, hits harder, has better range and is overall superior in every way except for complexity and reloading time. A powerful crossbow is a flea's knee away from an outright firearm.

[Raleel]

53 minutes ago, VonKatzen said:

Firing and aiming takes a lot of time. For a very strong person who is quite experienced, though, a bow can have effective shots (effective against targets in little armor, at least) of more than one per second. You can see Mongols doing this today, and the Persianids could certainly 'rain arrows' and even held 2-3 arrows in their hand in addition to the one they were firing. However, aiming this at a specific target is nowhere near as easy. And anyone who hasn't been shooting for years - maybe even more than a decade - will not be able to match this feat with any accuracy or power.

can you point me to one 1/second firing my mongols? I've been able to find 1/2-3 seconds (

 for example), but am unable to find any examples of anything faster that doesn't have dubious strength bows (Lars, for example).

This also does point at high skill and ability to withstand a high penalty (range). against a mass of targets, I imagine you'd account for the size of the unit, and it would be much bigger than your average human, thus able to give you effective archery at long ranges. This, in turn, would give you more access to rapid reload, which would speed up your time.

I don't wonder if it would be reasonable to do a Clout Shooting style, which arced the arrows high and bought them down at range, and thus gained you a better chance of hitting the head or shoulders (1d10+10 on hit location), and only allowed it at longer ranges (outside of Close range for sure, maybe outside of Effective range)

[VonKatzen]

1 hour ago, Raleel said:

can you point me to one 1/second firing my mongols? I've been able to find 1/2-3 seconds for example), but am unable to find any examples of anything faster that doesn't have dubious strength bows (Lars, for example).

Offhand I know of no link, but also shooting that fast is going to result in a weak draw and a poor aim - this is basically something you do when you're showering arrows.

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This also does point at high skill and ability to withstand a high penalty (range). against a mass of targets, I imagine you'd account for the size of the unit, and it would be much bigger than your average human, thus able to give you effective archery at long ranges. This, in turn, would give you more access to rapid reload, which would speed up your time.

Yes, and you're also typically having MANY archers fire into the target unit - it's basically the world's clumsiest machine gun, at least until they get tired or run out of arrows.

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I don't wonder if it would be reasonable to do a Cloud Shooting style, which arced the arrows high and bought them down at range, and thus gained you a better chance of hitting the head or shoulders (1d10+10 on hit location), and only allowed it at longer ranges (outside of Close range for sure, maybe outside of Effective range)

I think this would be included in a more general Combat Style (depending on how you divide yours up) like Steppe Nomad, but when you're firing arrows that fast I doubt you could hit much except at very close range. Because showering arrows is more of a battlefield tactic than a personal combat tactic it's probably best dealt with in something like Ships & Shield Walls. The steppe archers would be capable of doing this based on their Combat Style, but it would only be relevant when you've got a fairly large target and a decent number of shooters. Otherwise it's mostly trick shooting.

[Joerg]

Chiming in as another archer, I want an option to lay covering fire with a bow - shoot fairly rapid fire.

Carrying around a bundle of arrows is noisome if you are moving through difficult terrain.

I never owned 48 arrows fit to any of my bows at any  a single time. This full military load-out is three to four times the amount of ammo I carry into a field archery tournament of 30 targets, which may be 90 shots if it is round target archery, and anywhere between 30 and 90 shots if it is animal silhouettes or 3D targets.

Creeping around potentially slippery territory, facing drops that will destroy your equipment even if you yourself come out of it fairly unscathed, maneuvering between low-hanging branches - those are things where carrying around a six foot longbow is a big inconvenience, and having to drag along 35 inch arrow containers (my draw length is at about 33 inch) anywhere on your body in addition to that bloody unwieldy and surprisingly fragile bow while struggling to keep your balance and not to get entangled anywhere are aspects of doing archery in such an environment which don't usually carry over into rpgs.

I also had to take shots kneeling down to avoid entangling either my upper bow or my arrow flight path in low-hanging branches. I had one shot make contact about half-way to the target, sort of entangling a flexible branch, and heading off almost vertically into the terrain. For all I know, the arrow still is rotting somewhere out there.

These things, and the difficulties of aiming at vertically removed targets (asymmetric ballistic curves) aside, for someone who knows his life expectation hangs on his proficiency with that bow, these matters are solveable.

I have taken shots at trick targets moving roughly towards me,  or running more or less orthogonally to my fire arc. Objects with constant or predictable speed and acceleration can be hit. Someone sprinting at you from 50 meters will face at least two somewhat aimed shots (and time to switch to a melee weapon), and unless he is very confident in his armor or shield might have some reservations at doing so.b'

One fun shooting we did on our archery club range was one person shooting an apple on an arrow tip in a low speed arc and the other people trying to shoot that apple in flight. For a bunch of bloody amateurs, the results were fairly satisfactory. That's not something you do with your tournament quality arrows, though, and using air-braking fletching is advisable.

12 shots in a minute are quite manageable, with considerable aiming possibilities. You would want to do that behind a ditch and sharp stakes.

Shooting into a melee isn't something I have done (obviously), but I have shot numerous "plus-minus" targets where hitting the "hostage target" meant a serious setback to your score.

Aiming with bow and arrow is about as exact as aiming a rifle without having a rest for it. That kind of archery goes against instinctive archery, though, which is what you want to use when firing at someone or something coming at you at speed.

 

Why would anybody shoot weak bows? 

It's a matter of physique. In many cultures, archery is regarded as a somewhat elegant social activity, and is performed by people who wouldn't go to battle with a bow. (They might go hunting from howdahs or ambush.) Even a weak ranged weapon is a lot better than having none at all, and if proficiency with it advances both social standing and survival chance, it is a good weapon for a non-fighter.

 

Why would any fighter shoot a weak bow in a combat situation? I use a pretty weak bow (about 40lbs at full draught) for target archery. It performs well at the ranges that are offered in target archery, with the right set of light but durable arrows. To get to about the same range with wooden arrows and a longbow, I draw a bit over 70lbs, and lose out on precision, though not at all on impact.

Archery pretty much has two very different forms of aiming. Horizontal aiming is a matter of the correct technique releasing the arrow, choosing the correct arrow strength for that draw length and power of the bow. Getting this right can be trained to quite some efficiency. That's before calculating in the effects of wind, though, especially if the wind conditions change on the flight path e.g. shooting across a ravine.

Vertical aiming requires lots of experience, whether you do it instinctively or by calculation. Any vertical difference between you and your target will turn a symmetric ballistic curve into something quite different. Not knowing or misjudging the distance due to optical tricks like broken ground, open bodies of water, or massively different lighting of different parts of the flight path is a major factor. Fortunately, all of that matters a lot less if a six foot humanoid is running towards you, that gives you 4 foot of error margin on target - way more than an archery target allows you. The much higher ballistic curve of an arrow makes those mistakes a lot graver than for a high-speed missile with rather flat trajectory.

 

I cannot really speak out of experience how mutilating arrow wounds are. Hunters will know about this, and adjust their arrow tips accordingly. Realistically, if an arrow lands a meaningful hit, it impales. How deeply is another question, but if it doesn't get stopped by armor or slowed by textiles, it will create a puncture wound, with the arrow tip stuck in the wound. (The shaft may be designed to break off a few inches behind the tip - IIRC they found this technology even with mesolithic arrows or javelins.)

Everybody has had thorns penetrating obnoxiously into their flesh, making every use of the surrounding musculature painful and causing more damage (or undoing any clotting effect that the body may have exerted to the wound). While the object stays in, it slows blood loss unless it is yanked about.

Adrenaline can be a game changer towards wounds. I have been on adrenaline highs a number of times which allowed me to ignore serious damage, whether strong compression of bones after an impact (I could see the ripples on the outer bones on the X-rays, even though nothing was broken, and I have since returned to my full size) or pain from bleeding wounds where significant (to me, at least) amounts of skin and other tissue were lost. It should be evidently possible to be doomed to die and yet fight on for quite a bit, so peppering that berserk running at you with a couple of arrows better had cause some functional damage. Him bleeding to death won't give you much satisfaction once he has dismembered you.

 

So, what do I want arrows to be capable of? Taking out an opponent not in any form of berserk mode. While professional fighters probably have a higher proportion of people able to take damage, a majority of people hit by a missile will prefer to be out of combat if they have a choice. This goes for faceless minions as well as for non-combatant specialists picking a lock or removing some other obstacle for the muscle.

In heroic mass combat, archers like Paris take considerable risk by entering the combat in rather poor armor, trading for mobility instead, but they also deal quite a lot of critical wounds from effectively point blank range before sauntering out of the way of friends of the target. Much like Marvel's Archer does, too - some of those maneuvers could come directly from the Iliad.

In a way, bow and arrow behave pretty much like a 17th century rapier, with slightly longer reach. Anything Zorro inflicts on the Spanish troopers with his pig-sticker should be manageable for a nimble-footed archer dodging just out of range of their melee weapons. So, depending on the amount of swashbuckling your game allows, this type of archers should be put on an even footing.

Archers as snipers are a different type of adventurer hero. Their impact on a melee should be just the same as for a modern sniper, just at a much lower distance. My favourite historical fictional character here is Einar Tambarskjelve, a companion of Olav Tryggvason on his last journey. Snorri Sturluson describes one of the most fascinating and epic archery duels in that chapter of his Heimskringla.

 

In a narrative framing, this is the kind of spotlight a dedicated archer character wants. In a more gritty simulationist game, the effects of archery should allow this for combatants in high skill levels.

For Einar or Paris to work in a D100 game, they would need an effective archery skill of roundabout 300% to achieve the number of impales that the stories credit them with. That means they need some way of "berserking" to get into this archery "zone", at will.

 

Maybe this is a general issue with these games - they don't allow highly proficient characters to enter the "zone". Land of Ninja's Ki skills reflected this a bit, but the mechanic of applying this only to 100%+ skills was broken, IMO.

 

[Raleel]

32 minutes ago, Joerg said:

For Einar or Paris to work in a D100 game, they would need an effective archery skill of roundabout 300% to achieve the number of impales that the stories credit them with.

First off, wow, thank you for the detailed insight! I admit, I had not considered what carrying 90 arrows might look like at all. Lots of juicy bits in there. 

As for The impales above, in Mythras you don’t need a special success or a crit to impale unlike some other d100 systems. Just a regular success and to do damage. It lets you roll damage twice and pick the best, and might impose a penalty if the weapon is big enough. Arrows generally inflict a 1/3 off skill penalty when they impale a human (small humans might take a bigger one).

So maybe not 300%, but it is a Saga and all! Thanks, going to go read that now

[...]

On ‎12‎/‎24‎/‎2017 at 2:48 PM, Opiyel said:

I've been reading up a bit on the drones and the XM25 rifle with some interest. While the drones seem like interesting enemies for the players to deal with, a part of me doesn't quite know how to handle the laser guided smart ammunition aspect of it. Especially if the players encounter that.

Maybe not immediately useful, except I think that adding a Grenadier to combat styles would be good. Now, with a old M203, a grenadier can put a grenade through a bunker aperture or in a foxhole (or even through open tank hatches!) and around 100-150m; the XM might be better represented for ease of use? Maybe range, or a trait. Drones, I could almost imagine a Neuromancer style deck with a Heads Up Display in a helmet to operate them; autonomous, maybe another trait. Flying drones have around 10% of the endurance of a ground crawler, due to the flying quality taking up so much of it's battery. If drones are there, you could have a net gun fired by a grenadier, such as an optional grenade. EMP grenades like a miniature of Boeing's CHAMP could take out flying drones especially, and even gyro-aimed shotguns or lasers could too take out drones.

[g33k]

On 12/27/2017 at 5:52 PM, dragoner said:

... Flying drones have around 10% of the endurance of a ground crawler, due to the flying quality taking up so much of it's battery...

It occurs to me that a drone could extend its range with a motor-off "glide" mode.  I'm not sure how to maximize the payoff there -- most-efficient-design for gliders is relatively high-drag for powered flight, and of course the little "quadcopters" (as linked above in the vid) have no lifting surfaces whatsoever.

I see this has occurred to other people, too...

https://www.popsci.com/new-software-lets-drones-surf-winds-for-hours

I'm not sure how well these things would convert to striking weapons, though:  they are unpowered "sailplane" models!  Maybe add a short-burn solid-fuel rocket in the rear, a warhead in front, and have some way to drop the wings?  All of which add weight, of course...   

 

[Raleel]

On 12/27/2017 at 5:52 PM, dragoner said:

 Maybe range, or a trait. Drones, I could almost imagine a Neuromancer style deck with a Heads Up Display in a helmet to operate them; autonomous, maybe another trait. Flying drones have around 10% of the endurance of a ground crawler, due to the flying quality taking up so much of it's battery. If drones are there, you could have a net gun fired by a grenadier, such as an optional grenade. EMP grenades like a miniature of Boeing's CHAMP could take out flying drones especially, and even gyro-aimed shotguns or lasers could too take out drones.

Autonomy would be good, and defined in the spirit section quite well. it would mesh pretty well with my off the cuff drone rules above, as they are based on animism.

the ones i propose also only have a single location. Said net would entangle that location quite well, removing them from the action. 

I could see several variants of the spirit combat abilities being used to emulate the EMP, but I think the sonic disrupter, slightly retuned, would be the best choice outside of Ion Weapons in the Supplement That Shall Not Be Named. It does pretty much the same thing anyways

Ground Crawlers sound like they probably have a greater Endurance as a whole. The model might just have greater energy capacity, or flight might be a "moderate activity", causing it to "tire" soon.