Recently, Tod of Tod’s Workshop came out with a wonderful experiment of the longbow’s effectiveness against armor. See it here. I’m not going to fully examine it, but it did give me some things to look at quickly that I found interesting. Maybe you will too.

The first observation is that, for the arrows show in the video, it took about three seconds to fire an arrow. For the AD&D one-minute round, then, that would be a rate of fire of twenty arrows per round. Hold up, but AD&D only allows two shots per round, AD&D is so inaccurate. Now, this is a decades long complaint. Nothing new here to be complaining about the rate of fire of bows in AD&D. But, Todd’s video has something to add that is relevant to the discussion. Give me a minute.

The second observation is that at the end of the video, they had the group of seven archers fire a continuing volley of six arrows. That volley took about 48 seconds to complete. So, the twenty arrows a minute, what with efficiency of getting arrows on the string and building fatigue, is optimistic. Over the course of a full one-minute, call it eight arrows, but, maybe seven as that fatigue is still building.

Third observation, back to the shots at 60 meters. There they fired 35 total arrows and scored three strikes at 60 meters. AD&D gives the short range of the long bow as 7″ or 70 yards. 70 yards is 64 meters so, the longest shot in the video is at AD&D short range. A 0-level character in AD&D against an unarmored opponent has a 50 percent chance to hit. So, in AD&D, at short range, one could expect on average one of their two shots to hit in a round.

But what about if we matched the success rate shown in the video with the firing rate in the video? Three hits for thirty-five total shots is an 8.6 percent chance of a hit. For eight shots per 1-minute round, that’s 0.69 hits in a round. Less than one hit per round. So, while a realistic rate of fire is much higher, the odds of hitting are almost one sixth of the odds AD&D gives.

Now, this is simplistic. Later in the video, they move closer to forty meters, then twenty meters. And, as they get closer, they score significantly more hits. Now, I’m not talking armor penetration, just strikes to the target. One could argue that AD&D could have parsed the close ranges much finer. However, for the closer shots, it would be a lot more work for me to determine how many actually hit the target. I’m willing to think that the 0.69 hits per round might be driven up to that one hit per round average given by AD&D. More or less. And, really, for these sorts of calculations probably two significant figures is too much.

But look at it this way. AD&D is a game. What’s more fun, rolling a bunch of shots that mostly miss, or taking a smaller number of shots that have a much greater chance of hitting? Which is faster and keeps the game moving? And, produces not that dissimilar result. Yet again, AD&D isn’t as inaccurate as we have been led to believe.

Gygax warns of rules lawyers, that giving in to them will ruin the spirit of the game. In my life, I can’t say how many times players have tried to bully me into giving them extra shots, because the two shots per round rule was “unrealistic”. But, it’s a lot of times. I have never once had a player argue that the odds of hitting with an arrow were dramatically inflated and therefore “unrealistic”. Yet, it turns out that the rules, taken as a whole, are not bad at producing a similar result and that giving in to the complaints would have been misguided.

Addendum:

In a lot of ways, this is very similar to how melee combat is resolved. A melee attack in AD&D is not a roll to hit and a roll for damage. AD&D’s melee attack is a series of rolls to determine the resulting damage that occurs after one-minute of fighting. Missile combat is no different in this regard. Just as AD&D does not model every weapon swing and every dodge, missile fire in AD&D is not really looking at every arrow shot. Nor is tracking one’s “arrows” really keeping an inventory of individual arrows. If AD&D were a simulation, every arrow in a character’s inventory would really be four arrows, and you’d roll eight times per round. But, the game wants to keep things moving.

The thing to remember, AD&D is not a simulation. AD&D is a stochastic procedure designed to be time-efficient in producing a variable, yet representative, result of combat over a standard period of game time.