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Welcome to version two of my Guns and Gears supplement.
Since the release of the original version I've gotten my hands on an old DND 3.5 book called Arms and Equipment Guide which had a couple of really nifty crossbows in it that inspired me to update this document.
This supplement now contains:
- over a dozen new crossbows of various categories and types, including combination weapons and strength based crossbows.
- balance adjustments. Several of them got rebalanced to better reflect the power budget of the existing weapons in Guns and Gears, especially the strength crossbows that work off my Strongarm trait, which are now more in line with Kickback and Propulsive weapons.
- 2 new sections for equipment and special crossbows. They are a bit barebones at the moment but I can expand on them later after I figure out the balance on a crossbow with stave charges.
The document can be found here.
Good to have some free home-brewed Crossbow stuff out there for PF2e, VictorThell. ;)
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Good to have some free home-brewed Crossbow stuff out there for PF2e, VictorThell. ;)
Is this..are you..a bot? Going through the post history is interesting.
Cool stuff VictorThell. As the above...enthusiast...says, it is good to have more options. I like your version of the Pavise.
However, on the crossbow department, it seems that if you do meet the prerequisites of Strongarm, you just get a better crossbow? From a Crossbow 1d8 simple, to an Arbalest 1d10 deadly d6, at the same reload.
Have you tested any of these? I wonder how much they improve crossbow builds in relation to bows and guns.
For anyone looking into crossbow design, use and history, I strongly reccomend "Book of the Crossbow" by Ralph Payne Gallwey.
Also this thread about 1500s or so crossbows
http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?s=f58c935e52f081b8c00077a53e7b 1c12&t=7516&pp=30
And also looking through some of the museum collections, like the Brussels Crossbow museums.
Finally, youtube and Tod's Workshop offers good demonstrations of power, penetration and time reloading.
You have no idea how excited I am to finally talk about how I made the arbalest. Thanks for the awesome link (definitely archiving that for later) and sorry if this gets too rambly but I need to give some context first.
The short answer is yes. Strongarm is to Crossbows what Propulsive is to Bows and Kickback is to Firearms. A stronger version of the weapon that requires investing in Strength.
However I wanted Strongarm to be more flexible, too give players incentive to stick with a 12 or a 16 strength score as a dedicated ranged striker, so I didn't make strongarm just be kickback but with a reload penalty instead of a -2 to hit.
Thus the current iteration of Strongarm, in which depending on the score required, you are rewarded with different traits: 10 extra range, agile, or in the case of the arbalest, a deadly die that was 2 steps lower than the weapons damage die.
So, the question now becomes is a low enough deadly die equivalent to propulsive at 18 strength? I was inclined to say yes, hence the current iteration.
Now propulsive is a bit tricky to quantify, as it's power diminishes as you gain magic items, but even at it's worst it can be compared to half a damage die step increase to the weapon. That part is important because we have weapons we can compare and see that PF2e is willing to trade a damage die step for deadly (like the Naginata and the Halberd).
So from there all that was left to do is see if a low enough deadly die is comparable to propulsive/kickback at 18 strength, and most of my damage calculations showed that as long as the deadly die was low enough, firearms would still overtake it in damage once you can crit on a 19 in the early game, or an 18 in the lategame, which was about as close as I could reasonably ask.
Obviously deadly get's better on lower AC targets, which is why I only used this combination twice. My hope is that since propulsive stays useful on higher ac enemies due to consistency, the arbalest will act as an alternative to the arquebus, rather than a replacement. If feedback tels me no, I'll bite the bullet and switch it to a +1 damage with a variable requirement depending on the weapon.
Thanks for going through your thought process. I like the strength investment, it forces balanced attribute spreads and helps out switch hitters.
I do like that Propulsive is a direct gradient reward to strength investment, but Strongarm does a good job in visualising that you need power to reload a crossbow without machine leverage.
See, I've been muling over this too, and recently made a couple of threads on it. First is my version of an arbalest
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs43k62?Crossbows-Easy-to-implement-changes-and
Essentially Propulsive + a single shot damage trade off, but always staying above 2 reload. A little different in concept as I didnt design it to direclty compete with bows/guns, but still playing with similar levers to you, Str and reload.
Then here's a thread about making a switch hitter crossbow build, got some good answers on what people have been playing:
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs43k66?Building-a-hitandrun-Crossbow-shooter
Have you thought of what would be a fun magical version of the Pavise?
...
Have you thought of what would be a fun magical version of the Pavise?
Outside of a darkwood variant for more hp no.
I was currently hung up on combining staves with a crossbow to better simulate how the deathwand crossbow worked in 3.5, but I got stuck when I found out you're not allowed to put property runes on staves, which makes them a million times harder to balance.
Good to have some free home-brewed Crossbow stuff out there for PF2e, VictorThell. ;)Is this..are you..a bot? Going through the post history is interesting.
Heh, sorta like Clarke's 3rd Law, anything sufficiently involved with tentacled aberrations will eventually look/sound a-lot like a technically advanced bot. ;p
PS. More seriously, it's been a habit of mine to comment about the free stuff on the boards... among other things. ;)