Bow House Rules?, Because Bows seem pretty broken to me... Options

[Legs]

Hey all,

I was just wondering if anyone had any house rules for Bows that they could share.

Bows seem incredibly broken to me. I have a player making a troll adept who uses a bow and I can see this becoming a HUGE power issue. He'll basically be hurling missles with piercing damage greater than an assault cannon. Sure his rate of fire won't be as great as a gun, but it won't really need to be.

Anyone else encountered this?

[Muspellsheimr]

SR4A "fixes" the Troll Archer issue.

By fixes, I mean put in a poorly-thought-out & inelegant/clumsy limiting factor that in practical application does basically nothing except in the most extreme circumstance.


What I use is (Str / 2) + 3P. All other rules apply normally (Collapsible bows [Arsenal] deal [Str / 2] + 2P)

[Adarael]

That's precisely what I do, as well.

[Psikerlord]

SR4A errata caps bow strength at 8 doesn't it? I would have thought that's a nice simple fix?

[Legs]

That makes the damage value the same as some sniper rifles and greater than light machine guns, etc...

Doesn't seem to make sense to me. Maybe I'm not reading something right. I dunno.

[Critias]

I just hate how it seems impossible to find a happy middle ground between "Hey, that reasonably strong fellow with the bow doesn't completely suck as a character," and "LOLOLOLOL, troll shoots thru tanks LOLOLOLOL." Balancing the latter without gimping the former seems to be something they can't pull off.

[Cthulhudreams]

Muspellsheimr's fix seems good. I mean, yes, a Troll with strength 16 will still have an 11P weapon, but frankly if you've got strength 16 you deserve a good trick from it!

[Shrike30]

Our group continues to have never had a problem with a trollbow devastating the opposition. SR4A is actually being implemented with the "Max rating 8" rule being ignored.

Troll bows don't have autofire, don't have a blast radius, and don't do cool things like bypass half armor because they're lasers or gauss weapons. They've just failed to become a major issue.

[Raizer]

SR4A "fixes" the Troll Archer issue.

By fixes, I mean put in a poorly-thought-out & inelegant/clumsy limiting factor that in practical application does basically nothing except in the most extreme circumstance.


What I use is (Str / 2) + 3P. All other rules apply normally (Collapsible bows [Arsenal] deal [Str / 2] + 2P)

I also use this same house rule in my campaign. ITs worked beautifully.

[Legs]

Stupid question...

When you say SR4A do you mean the anniversary PDF? As in SR4Anniversary?

[Stahlseele]

Yes. Because nobody likes the Sound of SR4.5

[Zaranthan]

And because that's the official abbreviation. "SR4.5" won't appear in any products.

[Malachi]

The "unofficial" abbreviation being WWLOMTRAPT - What Was Left Of My Tax Return After Property Taxes, coined by BlueMax.

[paws2sky]

Yes, I've seen the uber archer and honestly, its a non-issue for me. If I did feel like it was an issue, I'd probably go with Muspellsheimr's house rule.

IMO, the SR4A fix is... meh. But if you like your rules RAW and wriggling, that's what you ought to use.

Anyway, there are many, many better weapons one could be using than a bow.

-paws

[Critias]

Anyway, there are many, many better weapons one could be using than a bow.

To me, it's less an issue of their being "better" weapons than a bow, and more the issue of the absolute retarded silliness of an arrow piercing a tank or shooting through a school or something.

[ludomastro]

I just hate how it seems impossible to find a happy middle ground between "Hey, that reasonably strong fellow with the bow doesn't completely suck as a character," and "LOLOLOLOL, troll shoots thru tanks LOLOLOLOL." Balancing the latter without gimping the former seems to be something they can't pull off.

Unless you start using non-linear decay functions which pnp games will never do.

Hey, I'm an engineer, what can you say? This is also why so many of my homebrew systems fall apart - I start using math that you need a degree to understand and then what the point?

[paws2sky]

To me, it's less an issue of their being "better" weapons than a bow, and more the issue of the absolute retarded silliness of an arrow piercing a tank or shooting through a school or something.

Embrace your inner pink mohawk. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/silly.gif)

-paws

[Larme]

To me, it's less an issue of their being "better" weapons than a bow, and more the issue of the absolute retarded silliness of an arrow piercing a tank or shooting through a school or something.

Yeah, that's my problem with it to, especially when you factor in redlining cyberarms. I don't think that bows are too powerful, but I do think that it breaks reality when they can exceed the power of a missile launcher. The real crap of it is that according to RAW, your bow can be a traditional wooden longbow, yet there are no limits to bow ratings. Per RAW, you could have a strength 20 longbow made from oak by hand with a sinew string, and that's just too much. Even though I almost never use realism to justify house rules, this would be one case. Of course, it's more or less fixed in SR4A, I would have liked to see the cap lower, but it's close enough.

[Zaranthan]

RAW is actually mute on bow materials. I'd say it's fair to force bows that require superhuman strength to string and draw have equally exotic constructions. Some sort of phlebotinum metal string with a steel recurve, perhaps.

[Stahlseele]

I still laugh about people who are totally OK with Magic and Ware but not with People who use this Strength to make Bows hit harder.

[Critias]

I still laugh about people who are totally OK with Magic and Ware but not with People who use this Strength to make Bows hit harder.

I don't care about how realistic magic and cyberware are, because they're not real things in the real world that I can draw a real comparison to. I know bows. I know how they work, I know how to handle one, and I know what you can expect one to do with anything anywhere near human strength. They're impressive -- damned impressive -- but they shouldn't be doing anything on par with assault cannons, shooting through tanks, or similar silliness.

[Summerstorm]

Well, i have NO problems at all imagining a bow with requirement strength 14 or so. You can just take a Scorpio for example: It is pretty much a stationary sniper-crossbow. Built with technology of over 2000 Years ago. Using a winch like modern crossbows. It had little trouble firing through four heavily armored warriors on the field. I can easily picture that thing picked up by a cybertroll and use is like a bow (Well he can rip the unesseccary parts of.) I don't think that there is cap on strength bit a bow due to material on that low a level.

Also we can say... when we build a longbow for a troll we can make it over three meters long. With highly efficient technologies and materials. (Composite, with pullies and such you can expect a really insane bow)

Let's see... mongolian bows for riders (A very short one, but with composite materials horn and different woods) could have a pull of around 70 kilograms max. An English Longbow (which has more height than its user may have about.. 50?? kilogramm pull.

So i have no problem with a... let's say 3.20 Meter composit longbow, trollsized with a pull of 300 kilogramms and a 200 gramm arrow, firing about 400 meters. No problem at all... yay for 18S-Bows.... or, well 10DV Bows... depending on taste and edition.

[JaronK]

Frankly, I have no problem with the idea of trolls blowing holes in armor with a super bow. Have you guys actually seen what a modern hunting bow can do? I've seen one fire an arrow through a tree (accidentally, the guy using it didn't realize how strong it was... and the guy was not particularly strong himself). Considering that, I'd say that an even more advanced bow used by someone with more than double average human strength would have incredible penetrating power.

JaronK

[Dumori]

A well made bow built for a troll would be deadly if HUGE. Bows are likely made manly for tolls as the can make them deadlier than some more "high-tech" weapons. However I am in favor of increasing the availability and cost of the strength 9+ bows and there arrows. as well you'd be using something more in line with a small spear.

[Stahlseele]

I guess people's main beef and reason foir calling them Broken is twofold:
a) original SR4 Bows were the only weapon to realy DIRECTLY on Strength only, not on STR/2 plus something.
b) while people can accept the bow being more penetrative than even a cyber dick combined with the jackhammer modular accessoire, they can NOT accept that the DAMAGE is higher and thus the HOLE would have to be bigger, while, and i loathe to use the word in any context concerning shadowrun, REALISTICALLY *shudders* The Arrow should just pierce through most things without doing too much harm to the intended Target. Which would be taken care of by bows doing STR/2+4 Damage so high Strength Characters don't get shafted completely, while getting more of an negative AP bonus after a certain strength. Maybe make them Minimum Strength to use and calculate Damage from that point and every point of strength above the minimum strength would give an additional -1 AP.