FRPG have always had issues when it comes to these things. Historically, crossbows were inferior weapons to the long bow and asian reflex bow (composite bow) because of the slow loading times and lack of reliability. BUT its EASIER to learn how to load and fire a crossbow accurately.
The same thing happened with muskets. The original muskets had a slow rate of fire (2/minute) compared to 10-12/minute for a bow and far inferior effective range and no better penetration or killing power. But any fool can learn to fire a musket to military effectiveness in a week. Skill with a bow takes significantly more time to learn and requires more practice to maintain the skill. Additionally, ammunition was cheap and could be supplied in large quantities. This meant musketeers could eventually (over the course of a day) out shoot equivalent archers - especially since the cost of training was nothing - peasant levies and militia were suddenly effective troops - and could be replaced ad nauseum.
In game terms, the difficulty of learning any particular weapon is not often reflected - certainly not in HARP. Sure, you can impose limitations of availability and cost of training, etc - but that's a pain and not particularly fun for players or gamemaster. You could give bonus ranks to "easy to learn" weapons if you like. So, say the first rank actually gives you three ranks instead because its so easy to learn.
And Dr_Sage is right - its skill+luck.
Minamoto Musashi (The Book of Five Rings) won 40 Samurai duels (never lost). The LAST 30, while he had his swords, he would instead fight with a training stick or a handy sapling - and he would KILL his opponent with the stick against a sword. Skill. Its the skill.
Fully agree.
If we try to be too much accurrate introducing sciences and history to our FRPGs we will uttely fail.
Funny you remark about time to learn new weapons. In ADnD 2nd edition the characters had a certain ammount of "weapon slots" that they used to learn weapon skills (1 slot = 1 weapon). I remmember trying to mess up with the system trying to make it more realistic by increasing the slots needed to learn certain weapons and increasing their effectiveness.
Lets face it: A shuriken is crap in my hands, but should be deadly the Master Ninja hands. In ADnD terms it would make aproxmately 1/5 of a sword?s damage. But in the hands of a specialist? We all want our deadly ninjas to use shurikens to "one-shot-one-kill effects". But the Master Ninja would have to train that skill for like 20 years to perfect the art when any idiot can hit a target with a firearm.
The same aply to all exotic weapons, like nunchaku, boomerangs, tetsubishis, zaranbatanas etc.
I think HARP is great in that particular acpect precisely becuse the weapons are equivalent. In our last gaming session the party?s thief disabled and killed a full armored mounted cavalier in 2 rounds using a
dagger. Not many systens allow that.
In my opinion there is a clear distinction between
weapon size and
critical size. To be completely honest I would prefer the criticals to have diferent names reflecting severity like: "light", "moderate" etc. Instead of the "size names" that can be misleading.
So in my opinion the x-bow, bow, or any medieval fantasy ranged weapon must observe game balance first, then we can consider the rest. As I prefer the weapon choice to be part of the character concept, not the other way around (to choose the weapon for its advantages, and then try to justify it).
Sorry for the long text.
Regards,
Andre
