Re: archery commentary

["Rick Myers" <leviathan_60@hotmail.com>]

>Combined comments on Rick's and Wright's post follow. 
>
>> From: Wright Frazier <khelek>
>>
>> > From: Rick
>> > 
>> > There has been a lot of discussion regarding bow range extension.  
On 
>> > the one hand, I do like Johns idea of baseing it on the archers bow 
>> > skill.  However, noone has mentioned that the addition of the 
Keiron 
>> > Great bow last saturday has already increased bow ranges by 225% 
(160 to 
>> > 360).  I would like to see what effects there are on the game from 
more 
>> > than than doubling the bow range before we try to add a skill 
option 
>> > boosting it by up to 450%.
>
>Using a bow skill to allow for the increase sounds good. There should 
still
>be the increases based on the type of bows introduced. Maybe the ranges 
should
>be dropped back down a bit but I don't believe they should get dropped 
down
>as far as they were. If warriors don't like being picked of by arrows 
they
>should ditch the armor sprint to the bowman and KILL him quickly and 
efficiently.

With a bow range of 720 feet (200% of Keiron Bow Range), your naked 
warrior takes 11 rounds of fire to get into melee range.  With the 
Bowman switching over to quickdraw once you're inside 360ft you take 8 
or 9 Broad-tips at a d10 each before your warrior arrives to BEGIN 
killing him quickly and efficiently.  Sprinting will help do a marginal 
degree, but being a naked target, the bowman with descent missile mod 
won't miss.  Expect to take 6d10 damage if you can make a sprinting 
check, 8d10 if you cannot.  
 
>Or get a firemage to go forth and blow them away with a fireball. 8d6 
in one
>round after being the target of a couple of arrows is a risk.

Again with a ruling that the range can be extended by skill to 720 feet, 
it's not a couple arrows it's 7 to 9 (depending on sprinting, assuming a 
naked mage) before the firemage gets to 120 feet to toss a fireball 
(this does ignore finessing).

Imagine the above scenerio with an archer who has Flaming Arrows.  The 
sprinting warrior eats 6 to 8 arrows at 1d10 + 1d8 each.

I like seeing the bow range extended to make missile weapons more 
useful.  But quading the bow range (Keiron Great Bow with skill is a 
450% bow range jump), is likely to unbalance things in the opposite 
direction.

 The only problem
>I see with the range situation is that there tend to be scores of 
dedicated
>archers for the enemies while we, as adventurers, tend to be diverse.
>

Yes, the above examples assume a single archer.  Banks of archers now 
become unassailable as there range with skill is 5 or 6 times the 
longest ranged spells.
>
Oh, sorry about the NKOTB thing Greg...didn't mean to catch you on the 
back swing :).

Rick

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