Crossbows and early firearms in Pathfinder have one key thing about them that is absolutely unrealistic but I am willing to overlook for the sake of game balance: they reload absurdly fast compared to their real counterparts.
Reloading a two-handed firearm, a heavy crossbow, or a repeating crossbow is a full-round action. That means that another shot is ready to fire in six seconds. Unless you're absurdly strong, you're not going to be able to pull a heavy crossbow's string back with its windlass within six seconds and you are not going to have time to carry out all of the required steps for loading a matchlock firearm such as those that the firearms in Pathfinder presumably are given the general technology level of the setting. Even flintlock firearms, which take less time to load, could only be fired at four shots per minute by the best-drilled soldiers in the setting. Light crossbows, hand crossbows, and one-handed firearms have a similarly absurd rate of fire, but I can't easily discuss it because only full-round actions have a specific time duration (as a single round is six second).
As I said, I am willing to overlook this for the sake of game balance, but some things really seem to have been done wrong.
Crossbow range increments are definitely too long. Ten feet longer than a comparable bow (heavy crossbow/longbow, light crossbow/shortbow) is ridiculous. Even if, at what for a firearm would be called "muzzle velocity," a projectile from a bow and a crossbow were the same, the crossbow's bolt/quarrel/whatever you call it would slow down much faster than the arrow because of the fact that it is a much smaller projectile. This, combined with the slow rate of fire, meant that the only reason why it was more widespread in military use in the late medieval/Renaissance era than the longbow was because it took years and years of practice to build up the strength required to use a military-strength bow and that practice was very rare outside of England.
The crossbow in PF is generally (with the exception of one fighter archetype and one gunslinger archetype) used by characters who don't focus on ranged weapon combat. It's a weapon for characters who do not have proficiency with either shortbows or longbows and who are clearly in a lot of trouble if they have to use any ranged weapon at all. This includes nearly all nine-level spellcasting classes (the cleric may have a bow as his religion's favored weapon, in which case, he should take it) and a very small number of others (though the alchemist has a much better ranged attack as a class feature). Because of its status as an emergency backup weapon, I see no problem in cutting its range increment to something that makes more sense.
I also don't like that early firearms bypass armor and roll against touch AC. When you consider that in the era when firearms and full suits of plate armor coexisted, one way that armorsmiths demonstrated the quality of their product was to shoot it at close range (buyers looked for a dent that became known as the "bullet proof," leading to the phrase "bulletproof"), this really doesn't make sense. In my opinion, it would be better to increase the damage of all firearms across the board and to eliminate that rule for early firearms, though for advanced firearms (when not making a scatter shot), it still makes sense.
No comments:
Post a Comment