Crossbows, Bows and the Dungeon

As a referee, I am known among my players for emphasizing the capricious nature of missile weapons. I believe in the chaos of melee, and when a character fires into melee and misses, I often have them make a second roll to hit against a nearby target. Often an ally. That's not to say I don't like missile weapons. When I was younger I wasn't half bad at archery, though mostly with modern compound bows. My father did a lot of hunting and while I picked roleplaying over hunting deer, I did a good deal of practice.

(My father did have a friend who used a hand-crafted recurve bow on a boar hunt. Even my dad had the sense to use a compound bow.)

D&D of course has three kinds of bow: self bows (short and long), laminates (composite bows) and crossbows. In Holmes the differences are mostly technical ones to do with range, and even Moldvay with variable weapon damage sticks them all at d6. So why would you use one over the other?

Bows are fast. Crossbows are slow. That's a fundamental difference - bows should fire quickly while crossbows need reloading. In reconstructed Holmes combat I'd think about giving bows 2 fires per round while keeping crossbows to 1/round and heavy crossbows at once every other round. So why would you have a crossbow at all?

The reason turns out to be simple. A crossbow is designed to be drawn and held at tension. You cannot be a sniper with a longbow. You can't hold someone at the point of an arrow for more than a handful of seconds; if the string has a reasonable draw weight, you'll start to waver sooner rather than later. If you want to wait for an enemy to pop his head around a corner and fire, you want a crossbow. If you intend to hold a victim at the point of a weapon, a crossbow is the better solution. If you want to do your dungeon exploration and be able to fire on an opponent at a moment's notice, that's a job for a crossbow.

A crossbow seems like a dungeon weapon to me in a way a self bow doesn't. Traditionally self bows and composite bows were fired up, to get a better trajectory, and were used for raining down hundreds of missiles rather indiscriminately on an enemy force. Crossbows were more of a siege weapon, the kind that really feel like dungeon combat.

In a dungeon, I figure that most arrow traps are crossbow-type rigs. This makes it easy to have a pressure or tripwire switch that releases the tension and lets the arrow fly. Besides, the kobolds who go around checking on the traps probably aren't strong enough to pull it on their own and need a winch.

When fighting in a dungeon environment, it's probably best to keep rules that encourage characters to drop their missile weapons and switch to hand-to-hand fighting once in range, so when I run a Holmesian game I might not go with adding a second bow fire and stick with once per round. After all, that aiming has to happen at some point. And meanwhile my players may want to check for crossbows....

Moldvay and Holmes, and Fighters

I've been running games using the Moldvay basic set recently, and using the variable weapon damage rules therein, which are basically similar to the ones found in Supplement I: Greyhawk except that Moldvay doesn't differentiate between damage to small, medium and large creatures.

In Moldvay at least, variable weapon damage enforces the use of swords. A Moldvay sword (or a Greyhawk or AD&D one) does 1d8 damage, or 4.5 damage on average. Since an average 1 HD monster has 4.5 hp, the Moldvay fighter with a sword will kill it in one successful hit (this is enhanced by the likelihood of +1 or more to damage due to Strength). In Holmes the monster hp amounts are the same, but the fighter will only do 3.5 points of damage to it (1d6), leaving it 1 hp.

With Holmes, an orc has AC 7 and the fighting-man hits it on a 12 or better (45% of the time). Moldvay orcs have AC 6, but an average fighter should have Strength between 13 and 15 (due to additional points from other scores) and likewise hits on a 12 or better. On the whole, a fighter should hit an orc every other round. So the Holmes fighting-man should kill an orc in 4 rounds, while the Moldvay fighter takes closer to 2. If we assume that the average fighter has 4.5 HP and AC 4 (chain+shield) and the orc does 3.5 damage, the Holmes fighting-man is likely to win with 1 hit point left, while the Moldvay fighter has a good chance of getting out without a scratch.

The Holmes rules are fairly pitiless for our fighting-man. There's a lower chance of Constitution bonuses to hit dice, no Dexterity modifier to armor class, and no Strength bonuses to hit or to damage. A Holmesian fighting-man with scores of 13 in each score has only a Dexterity bonus to hit with missile weapons, while a Moldvay fighter with 13s in all three scores has +1 to hit, damage, AC and hit points. Plus, the Moldvay fighter's sword does d8 while the Holmes fighter's does only d6.

Looking at this situation, where I've said before that Holmes is clearly the magic-user's favored system, Moldvay seems to favor the oft-overlooked fighter. But one simple tweak could change the whole game: running Holmes, which is strongly rooted in OD&D, with d6 for hit dice. The earliest printings of the rulebook didn't have this, per Zenopus Archives, and without following it we find our Holmes fighting-man is much more capable. Now he kills orcs at the same rate as his Moldvay counterpart, and we didn't need to use Strength bonuses or variable damage.

The side effect of this is that clerics, who can't use swords, find themselves more or less at parity with fighters at low levels. Of course, clerics advance more slowly in fighting, and more importantly they can't use magic swords - which are far and away the most common magic weapons. The parity is sort of a good thing, though, considering how few spells clerics get at lower levels; it's sort of like they start off even but fighters branch off to more fighty stuff while clerics go towards more cleric-type doings.

The other advantage that Holmes has is that it's not locked into the B/X ruleset which does not feature multiple attacks. Pretty much any multiple-attack rules the referee chooses can be worked more easily into Holmes, using 4th level ("Hero") as the trigger point. So while Moldvay does have advantages for the fighter, Holmes is probably more amenable to being tweaked in the right direction.