Modern archery is more complex than archery in the days of melee battles, with many kinds of bows and shooting aids, but still, in the end, it’s pretty straightforward.
My wife, a senior citizen as you might expect, recently took up archery as a hobby! This got me thinking about practical uses of archery and warfare and how it’s often portrayed in media and tabletop role-playing games.
Archery Basics
Most modern day archers use self bows (what most people think of when you say “bow”) rather than crossbows. There are compounds, recurves, “barebows”, and others, even a smattering of crossbows. There are aids that were never seen in pre-modern times. Highly-accurate (Olympics style) archery requires extended concentration for consistency, the kind of thing a cricket batsman needs to hit a century.
Archery in close-quarters or time-stressed combat requires long training, so that you can shoot quickly without thinking about it.
The objective of modern archery training is to make it all automatic, but that takes years to achieve.
Historical Ancient and Medieval Times
Movies strongly exaggerate the effect of archery on battles (especially where many wear armor) before the advent of Welsh/English longbowmen. That’s partly because movies by and large are about individuals, not about masses.
In battle, both the power and accuracy of the bow and the firing rate (per minute and overall) are important. Bows used in warfare for thousands of years had poor power and accuracy, and poor overall firing rate (because you quickly ran out of ammunition) even though the initial firing rate could be quite good.
Missile weapons are notoriously inaccurate in close melee (as in RPG adventures). I’m not a pistol user, but as far as I can gather it’s remarkably easy to miss when using a pistol in melee, even at close range. This likely applies to archery as well, especially considering that there may not be enough space for a bow to be used without interference. Further, arrows can ricochet unpredictably off armor.
Keep in mind, most archers in battles over the centuries were not using Welsh/English style longbows. Their bows were much less powerful and less accurate, except for the composite bows used by steppe dwellers (and Byzantines), and some heavy crossbows.
Why were bows displaced by much-less-accurate firearms? It was easier to train people in firearms, compared with training in longbows. Bows require strength built up from youth, while any ordinary soldier can use a firearm. Crossbowmen are easily trained, and fairly accurate though slow firing, yet were also displaced with firearms. In a pitched battle you can expect a missed shot at one person in a mass may hit someone else, helping compensate for less-than-accurate shooting. Perhaps most important, firearm ammunition was much easier to manufacture and to carry. The English made an industry out of producing (and transporting) arrows, rarely did anyone else, so arrows were always in short supply. Fire volume over time beat accuracy in pitched battles.
Sneaky Archers
Insofar as FRPG class abilities naturally fall into spell-casting, hand to hand fighting, and stealth, RPGs are sooner or later going to end up with something like thieves/rogues as a separate class or as a set of abilities for fighters.
For me, stealth includes striking from a distance. You can certainly be stealthy and use a thrown weapon rather than a bow. Thrown axes or knives don’t make much noise until they hit. So how can thieves not be used ranged weapons, including bows? They don’t want to get into hand-to-hand fighting if they can help it, so they need no armor, which allows them to move quickly and flexibly. The bow is an ideal weapon. And what about the tradition of Robin Hood and William Tell (who used a crossbow)?
Different editions of Dungeons & Dragons have characterized “backstabbing” differently. AD&D never explicitly stated thieves couldn’t use a bow to backstab, but the name alone led some to assume it involved a piercing attack from behind, thus the change in later editions to “sneak attack.” I always allowed ranged weapons to sneak attack in my AD&D games, and in 3.5 and later editions, formalized this rule so that sneak attacks could be made within a certain range (30 feet).
On the other hand, combatants in pitched battles rarely wore full plate armor, often next to no armor. Whereas in a dungeon skirmish, heavy armor might be common after the initial experience levels. Historians to this day debate the efficacy of even the best self bows, the Welsh-English longbow and steppe composites, whether they could pierce top-class armor or not, whether it sometimes pierced poorly-made armor, effective range, etc. Modern tests are not definitive.
For a summary of this debate, see sandrhomanhistory “Why Everybody Disagrees on the Efficacy of the English Longbow – A Video Essay“ on YouTube:
YOUR TURN: How effective is archery in your game?
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