Bows vs Slings

[kintire]

Slings fell out of favour historically; if it was such a superior weapon, this would not have happened.

This is absolutely false. The longbow was a vastly superior weapon to the arquebus, but was abandoned in its favour nonetheless. In fact the same can be said of the crossbow. Not until the invention off the minie bullet did gunpowder weapons equal bows in range and hitting power, and it took breech loading for them to match the fire rate. And yet a longbow would haave been laughed off a 16th century battlefield. There are many many considerations other than weapon effectiveness when outfitting armies.

In the case of the sling, I suspect it was difficulty of use.

 

[Themomage]

There are many many considerations other than weapon effectiveness when outfitting armies.

Precisely. You could still fire an arquebus at full effect after an hour's training and at the end of a military campaign even if you were starving and borderline hypothermic. Firing a longbow requires you to be in good physical shape and to have trained since childhood.

A sling also really required training from childhood, simply because the difference between a near miss and something hopelessly in the wrong direction was about 0.1 of a second in the release. Aiming and firing a bow is substantially more intuitive than a sling. It's much easier to put shortbows in the hands of hastily-raised levies, train them for a few days, and then get them to lob enough arrows in the enemy's direction. Everything counts in large amounts!

So the moves to bows and to gunpowder made perfect sense for outfitting armies. This says little or nothing about the effect of such weapons in the hands of very good practitioners, of course.

And if you don't like the MRQ2 stats, change 'em!

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I think the problem is really that no game is going to model these small differences between weapons accurately. You could introduce all kinds of rules to do so (or to get closer to the real thing, anyway), but you have to balance that against the benefit to the game. As Pete already said, I think there are enough in-game reasons for using one or the other. For example, it's a lot easier so sneak around with a sling when you're planning to assassinate a local dignitary than it is with a composite bow. On the other hand, you'll be a lot more obvious before you fire.

Splitting the difference between modeling the small differences versus the in-game reasons versus the character-driven reasons, doesn't the nature of the cults and communities already handle all of that somewhat? That is, if Penelope comes from a culture that uses the sling and Felipe comes from a culture that prefers a bow, then they both likely have cheaper/easier access to training in their respective weapons.

Nothing rules-based stops Felipe's player from deciding to go after the sling as a better mechanical option, but the character will have some marginal development hurdles to clear because of that choice. And if this starts to become a real problem in a specific campaign or with a group of players, it would be fairly easy to modify the availability of training accordingly to compensate.

 

[superc0ntra]

IRL it's a matter of shorter training to master (and very much shorter with a crossbow), and armor penetration/lethality and range.
The first factor is hard to set in an RPG since this would be pre-character generation. The others are just a matter of how detailed your system is.
With a system like RQ which is rather rules-light, the main difference will be a cultural one. More primitive and poorer cultures use slings. Richer, more developed use bows.

 

[kintire]

IRL it's a matter of shorter training to master (and very much shorter with a crossbow), and armor penetration/lethality and range.

I'm convinced by the first, but not the second. Baleric slingers pulverised Parthian heavy cavalry, and they did so in Roman service, who were not the least advanced culture of their day.

 

[Mikko Leho]

The others are just a matter of how detailed your system is.
With a system like RQ which is rather rules-light, the main difference will be a cultural one.

You are the first to describe RQ as rules light.

 

[Simulacrum]

Strikes me that the military utility is not restricted to the cost of manufacture, range, damage or accuracy. Bows may be expensive but you can at least put your archers in a reasonably tight formation, you can shoot over the heads of troops in front with less chance of hitting them - in short slingers are fine for skirmishing in loose order, but bows are probably worth the cost and investment to take up a range of slots in your battle line. Slings are cheap and effective way of arming irregulars and levies, and in keeping up sustained fire during protracted sieges etc (there's good evidence for Roman legionaries being armed with slings in such situations during the civil wars of the C1st BC), as you don't have a massive ammunition cost.

Which all goes to say, whoever you get your previous experience skill bonuses from will dictate which weapons you are trained in according to their needs, not the relative merits of the weapon as provided on the tanbles in the RQII Core Rulebook even if they are all culturally appropriate.

 

[SetentaeBolg]

What he wrote was that the momentum of the sling shot/stone was greater than that of the rifle bullet, not specifically that it was a superior weapon than an AK47. The sling projectile hits with greater force, but will obviously have a different damage profile due to its blunter, wider profile.

He wrote that it has a greater terminal effect. He may have meant that it hits with more force, but that is not clear from what he wrote.

That in itself is woolly thinking. The greatest momentum the shot will have is when it immediately leaves the sling. It doesn't gain any additional energy because it is falling from an arc.

I may have misunderstood the pdf, but the author seemed to be saying that slings were deadlier when using plunging fire (because of the force gravity exerts on the stone). While what you are saying makes sense, it seems to contradict the alleged academic - that may be a product of my misreading.

As an example of accuracy at range, Hawaiians for example were 'able to strike a small stick at fifty yards distance, four times out of five' and there are other recorded incidences of hitting a small bird at a hundred yards. Which sounds to me just as accurate as any bow. Polynesians were 'powerful and expert marksmen, and the stones when thrown horizontally four to five feet from the ground, were seen with difficulty and often did much execution.'

I can believe those ranges, but they are well shy of the 400 yard range claimed in the pdf article. But a longbow used for direct-ish fire can reach 180 yards.

See above. The sling is at its most deadly when used at close range, just as an arrow is. As for damage, classical sources indicate sling stones could break bones under armour. Since a broken bone in RQII is the equivalent of a serious wound, 1d8 seems perfectly reasonable.

A baseball bat can break bones, a dagger can break someone's breast bone, all under armour. I can see 1d8 as a reasonable damage dice for just about any effective weapon, but the system doesn't reflect that (for good reasons) - it has a wide range of damages for weapons broadly reflecting their killing power.

Is 1d8 correct for a sling - possibly, but giving it the same damage as an arrow with a superior range (which, admittedly, is a minor point in the situations most PCs find themselves) means it is a superior weapon when compared to the bow.

The sling was probably abandoned for the same reason as the bow was when firearms came along, i.e. ease of use. It takes a lot longer to achieve competence with a sling than it does with a bow.

In addition, you are missing out on the fact that in some cultures the sling was never made obsolete by the bow. Central and South America continued using it in preference (in war) over the bow until the sixteenth century, as it was across the Pacific until Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century explorers turned up with guns. Classical armies used it until the Dark Ages, since it had superior range on the battlefield, could be used one handed and during wet weather too. Archers on the other hand could form in closer ranks and thus provide a greater density of fire. There's countless reasons why cultures did or didn't stop using the sling, from changes in warfare tactics to environment.

Central and South American cultures were undeniably primitive by comparison to Western cultures - more akin to classical civilisations than those of the middle-ages and especially renaissance. I accept the general point though.

The ease of use is a compelling reason to take up the bow (although the English/Welsh Longbow took a lifetime of drilling to master) in real life, but it doesn't translate to the game very well. I don't want to mess with the elegance of determining base skill at things, so this aspect of sling vs bow is difficult to model.

Is the sling really 'king' of RQII ranged weapons? Most of the missile weapons are similar in damage and reload times, and the better bows actually have a higher penetration 'SIZ' than the sling. personally I don't think I've played in a game where missile exchange was ever done at full distance, or couldn't be easily countered, so a 25m range advantage is pretty negligible.

To be honest, it's the cheapness and universal nature of a sling that make it most attractive to PCs (coupled with its broad equality with the longbow). It's an extremely practical weapon with no down sides. Given that the sling as a weapon exists and is used in all cultures (even if it's not a particularly favoured weapon in many), it's difficult to justify not taking it as a weapon from a competence minded player, even if that player is eager to be a good roleplayer accurately modelling his culture.

This has turned into a bigger deal than I imagined it would; I think the lack of an aim option with a sling is probably the best one to go for, but even then, knowing my players, I doubt that will put them off the weapon greatly. That, in itself, is no big deal; I have no personal beef with a party of slingers.

I may have over-reacted a little to that pdf giving a sling an overall "deadliness" number equal to half of a modern firearm, SUBSTANTIALLY over the javelin and other ancient weapons. The academic was using some dodgy scholarship as well, ignoring previous studies because of claimed flaws in their methodology and then "guessing" the results they might have had if they'd used proper methods. Put me off.

Anyways, I'll implement my house rule and hope it is sufficiently persuasive I don't end up with all-slingers, all-the-time!

 

[kintire]

To be fair, the high performance against armour and deadliness were achieved with lead bullets. Stones were less effective (though still perfectly credible on the field). You might want to make stone firing slings d6, and price lead bullets fairly high.