Archery in D&D

I was thinking about bows in D&D this morning, inspired by a recent conversation on Monte's boards about how to accurately model firearms in the game. My friend JediSoth let me bounce ideas off of him and offered moral support.

Here's the thing: Bow ranges in D&D are FUCKING RIDICULOUS. I mean, seriously, even a casual perusal of them by someone with an eye for archery would have them thrown out (and I am familiar with bows). They are way too long, with shortbows having a 60'/70' range (normal or composite) and longbows having 100'/110'.. This causes problems for guns, because of one of the major benefits of a gun is that it can be used at longer ranges than a bow. Trying to model this difference creates *ridiculous* ranges for guns, which isn't cool.

Now, bows certainly can be shot that far, just not in a traditional aim-and-shoot thing. You have to arc your shot into a volley. You don't have accuracy with that, but it's okay because usually you have friends with you doing the same thing, and you're shooting at a group of people anyway, so some of the arrows are bound to hit.

So, two things need to be done. First, bow ranges need to be cut. Second, we need good volley rules.

Bow Ranges

Finding a new range for bows is actually pretty easy. When I was discussing it this morning, I popped off 30'/40' for shortbows/longbows right away. It seemed an appropriate distance for a no-penalty zone, both logically and game-mechanically. JediSoth suggested I check the d20Modern SRD, which (surprisingly, to me) backs me up perfectly, listing an archaic longbow as having a 40' range. So, great! Note as well that it lists handguns as having similar ranges, and gives rifles ranges between 60' and 120'. You see why the bow ranges are so bad...

As a side benefit, this makes thrown weapons much less suck-ass in comparison. 10' compared to 100' means "why bother", while 10' compared to 40' means "sort of sucky, but not too horrible".

Before I am drowned in email (yeah, right) proclaiming that bows can totally shoot farther than 40', rest assured that I know this. The rules know this as well, which is why the range number is just for the first range increment. You get ten of those fuckers, which means a 400' max range, you just get progressively less accurate. This syncs up reasonably with the real world.

Volleys

I'm not completely sure what to do with volleys yet. My first plan is to just allow a volley at up to max range. You have to have friends with you, though, and it's an area attack with a Ref save for half. Save DC = 10+some sort of number based on your friends, affected by range in the same manner as a normal shot. This is fine, because even if you have a -16 or something to your shot it just means that the enemy is going to take half damage (full damage on a 1! Woo!). Much better than taking *no* damage like a failed attack roll normally gives.

The issue now devolves into simply ensuring that this makes some sort of sense (it seems to), and then finding a good relationship between number of friends and size/DC of area attack. Also, should you be able to pinpoint your volleys? I'm thinking grenade-like by default (as in, happens automatically). This means that large volleys are still going to be 'accurate', as they can only shift a small amount, but you can't just concentrate tons of fire into a single square. This adds a touch of complexity, but volleys aren't something that will be used regularly in battle so it's okay, plus I'm sticking to recycling establish mechanics as much as possible.