Hello guys, i have a question, why bows are so bad on Pendragon? It´s near impossible kill an armored knight with them. Same thing happens with the bear, he does 3d6 damage two times, i have modified 3 bears since i am playing this game because they make laugh my players :P

Bows:

It should be almost impossible to kill an armored knight with a bow because:
1) This is a game about knights, not about commoner archers mowing down knights with a hail of arrows.
2) That is kinda the way it was, historically. Look at the crusades, we have accounts of knights riding around looking like pincushions from all the Turkish arrows. Arrows simply won't penetrate riveted mail that easily. Once you get to plate armor, the knights become pretty much impervious to arrows, again, historically correct. Even longbow arrows mainly bounce/glance from in-period cuirasses.

That being said, bows are actually murderously effective in vanilla KAP 5.1 under the right conditions! Given that the movement rate of a knight is a measly 2-3 yards per round, if your archer gets to start from 100 yards, it will take those knights over 30 rounds to get there on foot. That is 30 shots. Assuming an archer skill of 15 (not that difficult to achieve) and basic chainmail (10 points of armor) and shield (-6 cover bonus) for the knight, this is skill 9 to hit. That means you hit the knight with 45% of the time, and 5% are criticals for double damage!

So, you will get on average 1-2 critical hits, and 40% * 30 = 12 normal hits. Sure, 50% of those normal hits don't cause any damage (3d6 vs 10 armor) and the majority of the rest cause only 1-3 points, but it accumulates. If we assume 2 points of damage for 6 hits, that is 12 points of damage. Each critical is likely 10-12 points of damage, and can quite easily be 14+, likely a Major Wound, putting that knight out. So even assuming just one critical hit, the knight has likely taken around 22 points of damage by the time he gets to the archer... who, being likely lightly armored, can simply sprint away and resume the arrow storm from a safe distance. And that is assuming that the knight has more than 28 hit points, because otherwise, he is unconscious. In other words, on a level plain, one archer can shoot an armored, dismounted knight to death.

But wait, you say, the knight would be on horseback! Indeed, and then it is a slightly different ball game, as the movement rate of a horse is higher, around 8 (didn't check). So this would be just 12 rounds before the archer gets impaled by a lance, and he can't run away. On the other hand, for the same price as a knight you could support 8 archers, so this lone knight is actually charging through 96 shots, not 30. That is about 5 criticals. He is dead, Jim.

That is the rules as written in KAP 5.1, and it comes down to the fact that the bow reload time is too quick (medieval machine guns) in comparison to the movement rate. The reason you may have missed it is that in Battle rules, the archers only roll once in Battle Round, and if you face archers outside of Battle, the GM is usually smart enough to limit the number of times that the archers can shoot. I hope it will get fixed in future editions.


Bears:

Yeah, bears seem a bit underpowered. The bear comes instantly more threatening if the hunters are NOT wearing chainmail (10 points) but padded armor (4 points) or just leather clothing (1 points). That laughter dies quick when they realize that they are about to get swatted by two hits of 10 points past the armor each. The other thing I have done is to up the bear damage to 4d6 each (or more). That helps, too. I also think that you should calculate the sum of the bear damage for knockdown purposes; a bear is certainly able to knock a man down with its paws.

The argument that the bear should do more than 3d6 per paw:
1) Brawling attacks (punches, kicks) by humans in Pendragon do is 1d6 - 3d6 (achievable by 6d6 base damage). Bears are bigger and stronger than humans (usually, at least, although the rulebook does say that these are a smallish variety of brown bears) and have claws (admittedly, blunt ones, but still long and nasty).
2) There are historical accounts of staged lion vs. bear fights during the gold rush. Bear won each time, one swipe, lion's skull crushed. Now, Pendragon Lions are Better, since they are Noble Animals, so we should not beef the bears too much. And the bears were probably grizzlies, so very big bears. But that does give a hint of how strong bears can be.

So I think there is ample justification of making bears 4d6, or even 5d6 or 6d6, in legendary size cases.
Small bear (human sized): 3d6
Medium bear (the rulebook version, slightly bigger than human): 4d6 (IMHO)
Large bear (the 'oh crap' version): 5d6
Huge bear (the 'run away' version, faerie/legendary): 6d6

Incidentally, the Great Black Bear of Forest Sauvage has 5d6 damage. This matches just perfectly with my bear scale, which +1d6 to the vanilla/book version damage.

Thank you i will take in consideration your opinion about the bows, perharps i´m influenced by epic movies. And the bear, yeah increase his damage was the solution i had :D

In the GPC a nastier bow is developed in the tournemant phase: The Long bow (4d6+10 damage) and a longer range than the standard bow.

Aside from what Morien mentioned also consider this:
The knight was a formidable shock trooper. the impact of the heavy lances broke most units. they were almost impervious to any form of missile.
So in a battle it is wise to protect the archers against them with walls of spears and pikes. There is also a reason that the crossbow was introduced. Its impact could penetrate the armor of the knights.
But most of all: This is in a battle.

In a simple one on one combat the archer is slaughtered, always and all the time. In an individual combat the archer needs an advantage (have more friends and a long distance) to win. Another option would be they could take up an elevated position that is difficult or maybe impossible to reach by the knights on horse. It will frustrate the PKs if they have to climb up and being pelted by measly bows. Its the critical or the number of small wounds that makes this a challenge.

In the GPC a nastier bow is developed in the tournemant phase: The Long bow (4d6+10 damage) and a longer range than the standard bow.


Please note that in Book of the Entourage Revised (1.3), the longbow damage was scaled back to a more reasonable 3d6+6 (about 5d6).

Why the change, you may ask? 4d6+10 would go through even Gothic plate like paper, is equivalent to 7d6 in damage (lance charge with an Andalusian), and does more damage than an arquebus (3d6+10). Longbows didn't do that.

There is one more thing that I dislike about the bows and that is that the damage doesn't depend on the user, which is clearly wrong. A petite lady with a 30 lbs draw small-game bow should not be doing the same damage with her bow as a muscular archer with a 120+ lbs draw war bow. A quick fix would be to say that the bow damage is capped by your base damage. Thus, in order to get the full use out of a longbow, you will need to have at least 5d6 damage, where as a 2d6 waif would need an even lighter bow than the 3d6 one.

That's an elegant, easy solution, Morien.


T.