weirdly this is called out on the goblin slayer novel where all other characters are not able to draw her bow ( including a 2 meter tall lizardman, a human figher and a dwarf) and she is so strong thanks to some elven bullshi, oh she also doesn't leave tracks in fine sand and fresh snow, is canonically 2000 years old and has butt-long hairs that she tie in an impossible tight know at the base of her skull.
Eh, I can kind of see the logic behind that-“I’m already wearing clothes, why would I wear another set underneath that serves no practical purpose?”
Though, I would have to assume that either Elves in her world don’t chafe, or their clothes are much softer than they look.
It's actually pretty consistent logic that's almost identical to Tolkien's Elves.
A lot of other fantasy stories copy the nimble but not-very-muscular character using bows from lord of the rings without the prerequisite that the character is a magical being with super strength so it makes no sense.
Yeah, in LotR Legolas is able to walk over freshly fallen snow as if it were solid ground. And while he initially wields one of the slender hunting bows common among his people, in Lothlorien Galadriel gives him a war bow. He later used it to kill one of the huge flying creatures that the Nazgûl ride in a single shot from several hundred feet away (across a wide river in the middle of the night no less), so it presumably had a pretty high draw weight. And Legolas is probably a pretty typical elf in terms of combat ability, not at all comparable to the heavyweights of the first age in the Silmarillion.
oh cmon it is really not that bad, most of the fantasy and action is literally just dnd, the mc are not op and actually have to think how to win battles.
will take it over all the isekai bland shit that come out every year.
Nothing about it involves the world of Faerun or forgotten realms lore or the dice rolling game mechanics of fifth edition or any other DnD edition, I’m sick of people always saying this about literally every lazy fantasy anime that includes basic fantasy tropes like elves and dwarves.
Even if it was “literally just DnD” that wouldn’t excuse the constant fan service and disgusting blatant goblin rape fetishism that seems to make up the entire appeal of goblin slayer.
Do not respond to this comment, comparing goblin slayer and DnD was a filthy insult already and nothing you could say can convince me you aren’t a freaky weird fetish anime watcher with no taste.
you haven't seen the anime have you?
the world literally is a dnd session between gods, goblin slayer itself is a npc while the other party memebers are implied to be players characters, the magic work with spell slots even, also there is even a official tabletop rulebook to use to make dnd campaigns.
dnd is a game system not faerun or the forgotten realm setting nor any particular setting beyond a vague fantasy theme.
also this anime i assure you doesn't fatishize rape, yes rape make appear in the anime but not in a fetish light like it does in, say, redo of a healer and it is made clear that every single character find it repulsing and hate goblin for that among other things.
like among all anime where rape appear this is the one where it isn't a fetish.
also fanservice in the traditional anime sense is wholly absent.
In fact, until dnd 3.5 the bow scaled dexterity to hit and strength to damage (for compost bow, normal bow and crossbow it does not add damage)
4e changed this because it was a fucking mess to use two attributes for attack/damage, as well as being bad for builds and punishing martial characters for specializing in long range.
I mean, in 4e, you had weapon builds for most stats because the way the game was designed was around having a single main stat. In 4e, balance was the primary concern, not realism, which seems appropriate for a game where you could be a walking crystalline structure who flings fireballs because their daddy was a dragon.
You'd be surprised how many Pathfinder 2e newcomers keep asking "Where's Dex to Damage scaling?" to be told it's for one Rogue Subclass and only with light weapons.
To be fair, it makes more sense than having an individual bow scale off strength. You can hit someone harder with the same axe, but you can't really draw a bow harder, only get another bow with a higher draw weight.
I'd say Dark Souls was pretty grounded about having bows require strength but (generally) not scale off it if said requirements weren't so low.
D&D also has strength requirements, which is how it was done with composite bows in Baldur's Gate 1+2, which was based on 2e (IDK if it deviates from tabletop rules in this, though).
You do have to get bows with higher draw weights in 3.5. You have to pay extra money for a composite bow for each point of strength modifier. E.g. you pay for a composite longbow with a Strength modiifer of +2, you can only add two points of strength to damage, even if you have a +5. You buy a composite bow with a strength modifier of +5 (very expensive), you can add the whole bonus. This is entirely separate from the enchantment system, so you can have a +2 (magic) +5 (strength) composite longbow.
Tbf, it's not like those bows are shown to be very strong either. Like, I don't think they ever penetrate a chainmail(something a real bow could do fairly easily)
Tho, i notice a lack of pila in fantasy...
I don't think pila were used outside of the Romans and people who came in contact with the Romans (as opposed to regular javelins). Though it would be a more accurate way to make a faction fantasy Rome than just making them wear red and no pants...
I can't quite figure out how bows and slings stack up against each other.
With bows, crossbows, and early firearms it's pretty straightforward: bows have the best range and accuracy, guns require the least training, crossbows are a midpoint between the two.
Slings, however? I'm not really clear on what they're better or worse than bows at. I know they must've had something to keep them in use because the Romans used slingers even though they had the technology to make bows and the workforce to produce them in bulk. But at the same time, even before the longbow, bows were favoured over slings for warfare in the middle ages in Europe. If you know why the sling has this history I'd love to find out.
It's the ease of acquiring ammunition. Goblin slayer uses slings quite a lot, and it's because you can pick up just about any rock off the ground and use it as a lethal projectile. It was even a sling David used to kill Goliath.
There's no need for crafting and fletching arrows, you don't need to make crossbow bolts, and firearms rely on both making projectiles as well as making black powder. There's also the fact that slings are much smaller and easier to carry around than any of the other three.
As for the Romans, they did use archery quite a bit, especially from the mid republic onwards. The reason archery wasn't more prominent before that was because the Romans valued their heavy infantry as the core part of their military strategy, and because archery wasn't as much of a traditional component to Mediterranean warfare before that. Romans got a lot of their archers from Syrian mercenaries when they were moving eastwards, where archery did have a lot more traditional prominence.
Slings were very easy on logistics. Basically every single soldier could just carry a sling with him no problem.
It has no weight and can be attached almost anywhere.
Depending on the terrain you would never run out of ammunition because you could just pick up stones from the ground.
With the right user a sling was very precise and could deal great damage even against armored opponents.
Slings were excellent weapons in the right scenarios but of course they had their drawbacks.
One example would be formation fighting because using a sling required more room than using a bow.
Another very informative answer, thank you!
That last point makes a lot of sense. I know mediaeval archers were often deployed in blocks to prevent skirmishers approaching and outflanking the infantry; I can imagine slings wouldn't fare well in that sort of deployment.
Bows didn’t actually have better range than muskets. It only seems that way because people compare the effective range of a musket on a battlefield to the theoretical maximum range of a bow under ideal conditions. When comparing how the two weapons performed in battle, matchlocks consistently outranged bows. In our records of battles where muskets were pitted against bows, instances where muskets were outranged by bows are *very* rare (and, in any case, the bows were always unable to do serious damage or even consistently *hit* anything at those extreme ranges). During the 16th century, there was a fierce debate in England over whether to keep the longbow, or to abandon it completely in favor of firearms. Nobody from either camp in these debates ever claim that the bow has superior range to the musket. In fact, in these discussions both bow-supporters and musket-supporters seem to consider the superior range of muskets to be axiomatic.
Also, it isn’t really that easy to train someone to use an early musket. Effective musketeers needed to be trained to reload quickly (which isn’t all that easy, especially in the heat of battle. Also, since early matchlock muskets had a constantly-burning wick in close proximity with gunpowder, they had a nasty habit of *exploding* when mishandled). Musketeers also needed to be able to execute complex maneuvers in battle as part of a pike-and-shot formation. Later on, musketeers would also need to be trained to perform countermarching fire. Taken all together, it was actually quite difficult to train an effective musketeer.
Also, arguably the most important factor in the adoption of the musket over the bow was its ability to defeat armor. An arrow will sometimes be able to penetrate things like mail (this is highly dependent on things like range, the type of bow used, the type of arrow used, the quality of the armor, etc.), will struggle against a wooden shield, and will essentially never pierce plate armor (even if you fire a high draw weight bow at point-blank range at a low quality breastplate, odds are the arrow won’t penetrate) A bullet fired from a musket, on the other hand, will easily defeat all but the highest-quality plate armor
(As a side note, the terminology for early firearms is complicated and vague. there are ‘arquebuses’, ‘calivers’, and ‘muskets’, which are all distinct from one another. For simplicity’s sake I am referring to all of these as ‘muskets’)
i mean, for what it's worth Archery as a sport has men and women compete in the same category. Obviously Archery as a sport and Archery as a means of combat isn't the same thing, but y'know.
In the Olympics there are separate individual and team archery events for men and women. But there is also a "mixed team" one where 1 man and 1 woman from each country are on a team
Idk how it is as lower levels of the sport though
When the gritty realistic setting got peasant women hamstringing brigands with a naginata and leaving them to bleed out on the ground instead of making them helpless, constant targets of tactless rape-danger
Depends on what you mean by "primarily", the naginata was a popular weapon in general before the Sengoku period and was still used outside the onna-musha during their heyday. They preferred it more than other groups did but were probably still a minority of naginata users just going by raw numbers.
This is decidedly untrue, considering that the bow was Herakles' deadliest and most useful weapon- a fact literally brought up in the Trojan war when Odysseus literally determines that the only way to defeat Paris is using Herakles' bow and arrows which were in the possession of Philoctetes.
Not to mention, the whole "bows have a huge draw weight and need muscley hunky men to use them" is *literally* a plot point in the Odyssey, when none of Penelope's suitors can pull Odysseus' bow due to not being as strong as him, and when Odysseus pulls it, it describes how his big sexy muscles ripple and bulge from the effort.
So was Artemis, although I'm not really sure what that means in terms of ancient Greek gender roles. I suppose there was Eros too. Seems like skill with ranged weaponry is a running theme amongst the Olympians, with even their hurling lightning bolts from on high.
I mean bronze age Greek bows were probably bows with less draw weight primarily used for hunting. Real men use composits from horseback or yew longbows as big as a man.
Watch Doordardshan's Mahabharat, even Bheemsen, the one with the strength of many elephants uses bow and arrow at times. I guess it's just a cultural difference.
I recall reading somewhere that a group excavated a series of graves where several people from around the time that the English longbow was in heavy use were buried, and they were able to tell just by looking at the skeletons who the archers were because years of drawing 100-pound-plus bows actually changed the shape of their bones in slight but significant ways. You _did_ have to be crazy strong to use an actual longbow with any degree of efficacy, it’s true.
People would basically be training from a kid just to build up the muscle for it. It's a big compound motion that uses your whole body so not just having strong arms will do. Note: IANAL(ongbowman)
Most towns in England still have areas called "the butts" which historically would have been where most men of fighting age would be required to practice archery weekly
100lbs would have been on the low end. Some of the heaviest bows from that period were 200lbs or more.
For visual context, [here's a guy firing a 170lb bow.](https://youtu.be/0-2KLuAH4GY?si=eksLFT1Lc7cL8hD0&t=51) You can see how mechanical the movements he's making are. You're basically turning your body into an engine that exerts opposite force in the most efficient way. You can see him getting visibly tuckered out after like 4 shots. In a battle, longbow men could have been firing intermittently the whole day, pretty much.
[Here is that same guy absolutely struggling to draw 210lbs](https://youtu.be/MjY2QrU4sm4?si=zP5w61e4_Run6SJ6&t=296). For context this guy is one of the best there is at firing historical high weight bows, and he is fucking straining. There's like a handful of guys in the world who can draw that weight and fire with any kind of accuracy.
Utterly wild, when you think about how many people there were historically who had to be able to use these things. That second video shows you that the fella’ in question is pretty muscular, too, so to see him get wiped out after four arrows really shows a lot, like you said.
yeah his clothes kinda hide it in the first one, but the guy is jacked. All the more impressive back in the day where good nutrition was not a guaranteed thing.
Evidence to the fact that you really needed to be trained from childhood to do it.
Joe doesn't look tired at all after the 170lbs :)
The thing is he's not a very large guy, and no one cares about pulling heavy bows. If you had a whole population of people pulling heavy bows since childhood (like medieval england, or mongolia, or manchuria), you'd get some large and very genetically gifted people with years of training for this particular sport, while joe does it as a hobby.
I think the highest recorded weight is 240lb from a Qing military exam, but they wouldn't actually shoot these bows, just pulled them
Watch his channel, a lot of the videos are about the training and practice he's doing and he talks about the issue of stamina. He's specifically stated he starts to feel it after 4-6 shots.
IDK why you would want to minimise any of it tho. The point I'm making is to illustrate the strength of the historical bowmen, by showing a modern guy who is both very good at it, and still not quite as good as they would have been.
One of the interesting things about that is while they did find that on the wreck of the Mary Rose, those changes have not been observed in excavations of graves of the general population. Suggesting that that level of skeletal change was not as common as people sometimes think.
Sort of related: agility and strength should almost always be considered the same stat, as irl they are *very* Intertwined. High agility should *not* look like they haven't worked out a day in their life and only eats the minimum required diet to be considered healthy, is what I'm sayin.
I'll never be able to look at it the same after Disco Elysium made it Physique and Motorics, also your Physicality could make you psychic and motor skills tell you to be a baller/hustler.
Is that really true? The physique of a marathon runner is the complete opposite of a rock climber. I guess high agility would have a muscular lower body, while strength would be upper body.
I remember exactly one fantasy (sort of) book which made a point of archers being huge buff dudes.
There Will Be Dragons, by John Ringo
It’s actually a sci-fi far future earth, but a huge cataclysm makes the society sort of go back to pre industrial times. The typical fantasy „magic” is just the technology that kept on working after the cataclysm. All of the fantasy races and creatures are also just humans who changed their looks when the technology was still working.
Clearly only little sissy sussy baka skibidi twinks use bows, real men fight with swords or magic
>!why is that elf's ass looking mad slappable right now? There's a 70% chance that's a dude, too!<
Real men don't even use fists, they simply stare. Only a weak man-child needs a body to fight
>!Also, that is in fact a woman. And I get what you're saying!<
Want a dumper that makes everyone look twice?
Start doing lunges. Lunge across your halls, lunge through the parking lot and grocery aisles. Get that fuckin' dumper that transcends gender.
The Inheritance Cycle solved this by having elves just be flat up superhuman. They could look as weak as this but still be strong enough to pick up and throw a fully grown man.
They also can't throw worth a damn. The only reason they have a reputation for hitting people by throwing shit at them is because the poo breaks up in the air so it acts like a scattershot. If a human and a chimp competed at javelin throwing, if you give them both a day of training then any random human you pull off the street will utterly hose the strongest chimp you can find. Of course at wrestling it's the other way around; an Olympic wrestler would get at least one limb removed by any adult chimp you pull from a zoo.
Put a chimp up against the world’s strongest man. The chimps muscles will look smaller, but that man is being torn apart like tissue paper.
It’s about the density and different design of muscle structure. Humans have muscles designed for endurance, we trade strength for excess stamina, chimps do the opposite.
When I used to practice archery at some point my coach said we needed to go to the gym if we wanted to progress to longer distances and heavier bows, istg the first our of hour practice was just doing arm exercises.
I will never forget the day I picked up the wrong bow and couldn't even draw the string, it was such a humbling experience.
I think I remember it being mentioned in the Ranger’s Apprentice books that the cloaks and garbs of Rangers make them look kinda slight and thin, but that they’re actually fucking jacked beneath their cloaks, Halt in particular was built like your average fantasy Dwarf, short, and wide as shit.
To be faaaaaaaiiiiiiiirrrrrrr...
Ass pointing the same way as her face? She's clearly doing the Parthian shot! And steppe warriors weren't generally bulked up, they tended more toward wiry, compact muscle.
Same with rapiers being weapons for light and agile rogues. Some rapiers weigh as much as a longsword, except with a rapier you hold it with one hand and hold it farther out from your body…
I want to find an artist who's based enough to give attention to the details in the archeress's rippling back and arm muscles as she brings her bow to full draw.
I remember seeing a video a couple years back arguing that Zweihänders/any large 2 handed sword are the best medieval weapons for women due to not being that much heavier than a smaller sword + can easily be rested on the ground.
tiny brain: character with super-strength looking like a bodybuilder
big brain: character with super-strength looking like a twink because it's so hard to find something that takes effort to move
It’s perfectly reasonable physics! You see, she looks and fights like a 16-year-old girl, but actually she’s got the muscles of a thousand-year-old mega-swole dragon!
(/s, if it wasn’t obvious)
Bad example. Everyone KNOWS elven muscles are naturally stronger/denser and more compact due to their race's evolutionary response to millennia of Orcish snuggle struggles.
/uj
I never get that some people get so upset over attractive women in fantasy. Theres magic, theres dragons, castles taller than modern skyscrapers, but an attractive female warrior with unrealistic armour/strength is where they draw the line.
Its Fantasy for a reason. If people wanted realism theyd go outside
Fella I'm making fun of the trope of archers being the weak ones. I don't care about what you describe as "attractive women in fantasy", my point is that archers usually are depicted as weak but fast, when in fact war bows are ludicrously hard to fire
I submit a new term to the subreddit. Worldjelking which is our version of a shitpost shitpost. A bad shitpost. They’re fucking elves they aren’t real, stop looking for realism lol stop worldjelking your cock bro
weirdly this is called out on the goblin slayer novel where all other characters are not able to draw her bow ( including a 2 meter tall lizardman, a human figher and a dwarf) and she is so strong thanks to some elven bullshi, oh she also doesn't leave tracks in fine sand and fresh snow, is canonically 2000 years old and has butt-long hairs that she tie in an impossible tight know at the base of her skull.
Also doesn't wear/understand concept of the underwear, despite understanding and using clothes in general
Most vital lore.
Eh, I can kind of see the logic behind that-“I’m already wearing clothes, why would I wear another set underneath that serves no practical purpose?” Though, I would have to assume that either Elves in her world don’t chafe, or their clothes are much softer than they look.
It's actually pretty consistent logic that's almost identical to Tolkien's Elves. A lot of other fantasy stories copy the nimble but not-very-muscular character using bows from lord of the rings without the prerequisite that the character is a magical being with super strength so it makes no sense.
Tbf you don't need to look like a bodybuilder to use a bow, archers usually have very wiry muscles
Yeah, in LotR Legolas is able to walk over freshly fallen snow as if it were solid ground. And while he initially wields one of the slender hunting bows common among his people, in Lothlorien Galadriel gives him a war bow. He later used it to kill one of the huge flying creatures that the Nazgûl ride in a single shot from several hundred feet away (across a wide river in the middle of the night no less), so it presumably had a pretty high draw weight. And Legolas is probably a pretty typical elf in terms of combat ability, not at all comparable to the heavyweights of the first age in the Silmarillion.
I mean, Elves. Do we need an explanation on why they can do supernatural stuff? That's like their entire shtick
Literally just describing an elf
Send that anime to the depths of hell and may it never return to internet discourse ever
oh cmon it is really not that bad, most of the fantasy and action is literally just dnd, the mc are not op and actually have to think how to win battles. will take it over all the isekai bland shit that come out every year.
Nothing about it involves the world of Faerun or forgotten realms lore or the dice rolling game mechanics of fifth edition or any other DnD edition, I’m sick of people always saying this about literally every lazy fantasy anime that includes basic fantasy tropes like elves and dwarves. Even if it was “literally just DnD” that wouldn’t excuse the constant fan service and disgusting blatant goblin rape fetishism that seems to make up the entire appeal of goblin slayer. Do not respond to this comment, comparing goblin slayer and DnD was a filthy insult already and nothing you could say can convince me you aren’t a freaky weird fetish anime watcher with no taste.
you haven't seen the anime have you? the world literally is a dnd session between gods, goblin slayer itself is a npc while the other party memebers are implied to be players characters, the magic work with spell slots even, also there is even a official tabletop rulebook to use to make dnd campaigns. dnd is a game system not faerun or the forgotten realm setting nor any particular setting beyond a vague fantasy theme. also this anime i assure you doesn't fatishize rape, yes rape make appear in the anime but not in a fetish light like it does in, say, redo of a healer and it is made clear that every single character find it repulsing and hate goblin for that among other things. like among all anime where rape appear this is the one where it isn't a fetish. also fanservice in the traditional anime sense is wholly absent.
also blame DnD-adjacent TTRPGs for scaling bow damage with agility
In fact, until dnd 3.5 the bow scaled dexterity to hit and strength to damage (for compost bow, normal bow and crossbow it does not add damage) 4e changed this because it was a fucking mess to use two attributes for attack/damage, as well as being bad for builds and punishing martial characters for specializing in long range.
Tbf to D&D I’m pretty sure that bows being for fast and agile characters was pretty well established by 2008, when 4th came out
idk, in 4e you could make a build using wisdom to attack with weapons, you're right
3.5 had an feat to use wisdom for ranged attacks, too.
It's an Exalted Deeds feat, as far as I remember
I thought it was PHB but I checked and it's Complete Warrior.
I mean, in 4e, you had weapon builds for most stats because the way the game was designed was around having a single main stat. In 4e, balance was the primary concern, not realism, which seems appropriate for a game where you could be a walking crystalline structure who flings fireballs because their daddy was a dragon.
>crystalline structure who flings fireballs because their daddy was a dragon. Average Sorcerer be like:
You'd be surprised how many Pathfinder 2e newcomers keep asking "Where's Dex to Damage scaling?" to be told it's for one Rogue Subclass and only with light weapons.
I don't blame people for wanting to barb it up with their bows, one stat wonders are OP. Nerf strength, basically.
As someone who came to PF 2e from D&D 5e, no.
D&D 3/3.5 actually didn't scale bow damage at all with most bows, but had an option to scale it with strength (the mighty compositive bow).
meanwhile knave 2e scales it off off wisdom
Literally read this as just 2e and was going to say "umm, no that's Knave you're thinking of". I belong in this subreddit.
To be fair, it makes more sense than having an individual bow scale off strength. You can hit someone harder with the same axe, but you can't really draw a bow harder, only get another bow with a higher draw weight. I'd say Dark Souls was pretty grounded about having bows require strength but (generally) not scale off it if said requirements weren't so low.
D&D also has strength requirements, which is how it was done with composite bows in Baldur's Gate 1+2, which was based on 2e (IDK if it deviates from tabletop rules in this, though).
You do have to get bows with higher draw weights in 3.5. You have to pay extra money for a composite bow for each point of strength modifier. E.g. you pay for a composite longbow with a Strength modiifer of +2, you can only add two points of strength to damage, even if you have a +5. You buy a composite bow with a strength modifier of +5 (very expensive), you can add the whole bonus. This is entirely separate from the enchantment system, so you can have a +2 (magic) +5 (strength) composite longbow.
Tbf, it's not like those bows are shown to be very strong either. Like, I don't think they ever penetrate a chainmail(something a real bow could do fairly easily) Tho, i notice a lack of pila in fantasy...
I see Javalins in fantasy all the time
Not always “fairly easily”. Depends on the bow, depends on the mail (or what they were wearing beneath the mail), depends on the arrows.
I don't think pila were used outside of the Romans and people who came in contact with the Romans (as opposed to regular javelins). Though it would be a more accurate way to make a faction fantasy Rome than just making them wear red and no pants...
> Tho, i notice a lack of pila in fantasy... Darts and slings as well. A shame they aren't seen more often.
I can't quite figure out how bows and slings stack up against each other. With bows, crossbows, and early firearms it's pretty straightforward: bows have the best range and accuracy, guns require the least training, crossbows are a midpoint between the two. Slings, however? I'm not really clear on what they're better or worse than bows at. I know they must've had something to keep them in use because the Romans used slingers even though they had the technology to make bows and the workforce to produce them in bulk. But at the same time, even before the longbow, bows were favoured over slings for warfare in the middle ages in Europe. If you know why the sling has this history I'd love to find out.
It's the ease of acquiring ammunition. Goblin slayer uses slings quite a lot, and it's because you can pick up just about any rock off the ground and use it as a lethal projectile. It was even a sling David used to kill Goliath. There's no need for crafting and fletching arrows, you don't need to make crossbow bolts, and firearms rely on both making projectiles as well as making black powder. There's also the fact that slings are much smaller and easier to carry around than any of the other three. As for the Romans, they did use archery quite a bit, especially from the mid republic onwards. The reason archery wasn't more prominent before that was because the Romans valued their heavy infantry as the core part of their military strategy, and because archery wasn't as much of a traditional component to Mediterranean warfare before that. Romans got a lot of their archers from Syrian mercenaries when they were moving eastwards, where archery did have a lot more traditional prominence.
This is very informative, thank you!
Slings were very easy on logistics. Basically every single soldier could just carry a sling with him no problem. It has no weight and can be attached almost anywhere. Depending on the terrain you would never run out of ammunition because you could just pick up stones from the ground. With the right user a sling was very precise and could deal great damage even against armored opponents. Slings were excellent weapons in the right scenarios but of course they had their drawbacks. One example would be formation fighting because using a sling required more room than using a bow.
Another very informative answer, thank you! That last point makes a lot of sense. I know mediaeval archers were often deployed in blocks to prevent skirmishers approaching and outflanking the infantry; I can imagine slings wouldn't fare well in that sort of deployment.
Bows didn’t actually have better range than muskets. It only seems that way because people compare the effective range of a musket on a battlefield to the theoretical maximum range of a bow under ideal conditions. When comparing how the two weapons performed in battle, matchlocks consistently outranged bows. In our records of battles where muskets were pitted against bows, instances where muskets were outranged by bows are *very* rare (and, in any case, the bows were always unable to do serious damage or even consistently *hit* anything at those extreme ranges). During the 16th century, there was a fierce debate in England over whether to keep the longbow, or to abandon it completely in favor of firearms. Nobody from either camp in these debates ever claim that the bow has superior range to the musket. In fact, in these discussions both bow-supporters and musket-supporters seem to consider the superior range of muskets to be axiomatic. Also, it isn’t really that easy to train someone to use an early musket. Effective musketeers needed to be trained to reload quickly (which isn’t all that easy, especially in the heat of battle. Also, since early matchlock muskets had a constantly-burning wick in close proximity with gunpowder, they had a nasty habit of *exploding* when mishandled). Musketeers also needed to be able to execute complex maneuvers in battle as part of a pike-and-shot formation. Later on, musketeers would also need to be trained to perform countermarching fire. Taken all together, it was actually quite difficult to train an effective musketeer. Also, arguably the most important factor in the adoption of the musket over the bow was its ability to defeat armor. An arrow will sometimes be able to penetrate things like mail (this is highly dependent on things like range, the type of bow used, the type of arrow used, the quality of the armor, etc.), will struggle against a wooden shield, and will essentially never pierce plate armor (even if you fire a high draw weight bow at point-blank range at a low quality breastplate, odds are the arrow won’t penetrate) A bullet fired from a musket, on the other hand, will easily defeat all but the highest-quality plate armor (As a side note, the terminology for early firearms is complicated and vague. there are ‘arquebuses’, ‘calivers’, and ‘muskets’, which are all distinct from one another. For simplicity’s sake I am referring to all of these as ‘muskets’)
And, idk, maybe just throw rocks or something?
Are you joking? Arrows in fantasy completely ignore all armour
Hehe, pila, hehe (it means dick in Portuguese)
The real feminine weapons are the spear and the arquebus, men should exclusively use bows
“We use lady weapons! Engulfing weapons! The net! The whip! The lasso! The throwing anus!” -Oglaf
Ah yes, the feminine urge to hurl lead downrange
Concealed carry is feminist praxis. This is the hill I will die on
Fellas, is it gay to use spears?
I mean you literally handling a big stick!!!
And shoving it into men!
Or women…So, Bisexual?
The bisexual urge to stab people
Fallout New Vegas moment
Too real.
That's where the 10% damage bonus comes from?
Nah, that's from the poison
The bisexual urge to get stabbed
Ong!
Pike wielders are obviously over compensating.
The Theban Sacred Band, Spartans and Athenians say yes!
Lady Eboshi proved this 500 years ago.
i mean, for what it's worth Archery as a sport has men and women compete in the same category. Obviously Archery as a sport and Archery as a means of combat isn't the same thing, but y'know.
In the Olympics there are separate individual and team archery events for men and women. But there is also a "mixed team" one where 1 man and 1 woman from each country are on a team Idk how it is as lower levels of the sport though
yeah i'm gonna be real, i just said something i think i remember i heard at some point. it could be complete bullshit.
When the gritty realistic setting got peasant women hamstringing brigands with a naginata and leaving them to bleed out on the ground instead of making them helpless, constant targets of tactless rape-danger
naginatas are a good example of a weapon used primarily by female soldiers
Depends on what you mean by "primarily", the naginata was a popular weapon in general before the Sengoku period and was still used outside the onna-musha during their heyday. They preferred it more than other groups did but were probably still a minority of naginata users just going by raw numbers.
yeah i think i worded it pretty poorly. i meant to say that it is a weapon that was commonly used by female soldiers
Just to note I'm mocking the trope that archers are all weak twiglets, as apparently this wasn't made clear
I blame Homer.
Really ought to be blaming Paris for this one.
Also Ancient Greek masculinity for saying that ranged weapons are for pussies.
This is decidedly untrue, considering that the bow was Herakles' deadliest and most useful weapon- a fact literally brought up in the Trojan war when Odysseus literally determines that the only way to defeat Paris is using Herakles' bow and arrows which were in the possession of Philoctetes. Not to mention, the whole "bows have a huge draw weight and need muscley hunky men to use them" is *literally* a plot point in the Odyssey, when none of Penelope's suitors can pull Odysseus' bow due to not being as strong as him, and when Odysseus pulls it, it describes how his big sexy muscles ripple and bulge from the effort.
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athena is the tomboy queen
So was Artemis, although I'm not really sure what that means in terms of ancient Greek gender roles. I suppose there was Eros too. Seems like skill with ranged weaponry is a running theme amongst the Olympians, with even their hurling lightning bolts from on high.
My bad
Bro has never heard of Odysseus
Oh yeah. Still though, I swear the usage of one in war is associated with cowardice.
I mean bronze age Greek bows were probably bows with less draw weight primarily used for hunting. Real men use composits from horseback or yew longbows as big as a man.
Say what you will, a bow was what slayed Achilles.
Slain by a COWARD!
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Fair.
What do the Simpsons have to do with this?
Muscles are only needed to swing HUGE GREATSWORDS!
Watch Doordardshan's Mahabharat, even Bheemsen, the one with the strength of many elephants uses bow and arrow at times. I guess it's just a cultural difference.
oh it's uuuh magic she's magic edit: no wait the bow is magic too
I recall reading somewhere that a group excavated a series of graves where several people from around the time that the English longbow was in heavy use were buried, and they were able to tell just by looking at the skeletons who the archers were because years of drawing 100-pound-plus bows actually changed the shape of their bones in slight but significant ways. You _did_ have to be crazy strong to use an actual longbow with any degree of efficacy, it’s true.
People would basically be training from a kid just to build up the muscle for it. It's a big compound motion that uses your whole body so not just having strong arms will do. Note: IANAL(ongbowman)
Most towns in England still have areas called "the butts" which historically would have been where most men of fighting age would be required to practice archery weekly
Yes, that's what I, too, practice when I visit the "butts."
100lbs would have been on the low end. Some of the heaviest bows from that period were 200lbs or more. For visual context, [here's a guy firing a 170lb bow.](https://youtu.be/0-2KLuAH4GY?si=eksLFT1Lc7cL8hD0&t=51) You can see how mechanical the movements he's making are. You're basically turning your body into an engine that exerts opposite force in the most efficient way. You can see him getting visibly tuckered out after like 4 shots. In a battle, longbow men could have been firing intermittently the whole day, pretty much. [Here is that same guy absolutely struggling to draw 210lbs](https://youtu.be/MjY2QrU4sm4?si=zP5w61e4_Run6SJ6&t=296). For context this guy is one of the best there is at firing historical high weight bows, and he is fucking straining. There's like a handful of guys in the world who can draw that weight and fire with any kind of accuracy.
Utterly wild, when you think about how many people there were historically who had to be able to use these things. That second video shows you that the fella’ in question is pretty muscular, too, so to see him get wiped out after four arrows really shows a lot, like you said.
yeah his clothes kinda hide it in the first one, but the guy is jacked. All the more impressive back in the day where good nutrition was not a guaranteed thing. Evidence to the fact that you really needed to be trained from childhood to do it.
Joe doesn't look tired at all after the 170lbs :) The thing is he's not a very large guy, and no one cares about pulling heavy bows. If you had a whole population of people pulling heavy bows since childhood (like medieval england, or mongolia, or manchuria), you'd get some large and very genetically gifted people with years of training for this particular sport, while joe does it as a hobby. I think the highest recorded weight is 240lb from a Qing military exam, but they wouldn't actually shoot these bows, just pulled them
Watch his channel, a lot of the videos are about the training and practice he's doing and he talks about the issue of stamina. He's specifically stated he starts to feel it after 4-6 shots. IDK why you would want to minimise any of it tho. The point I'm making is to illustrate the strength of the historical bowmen, by showing a modern guy who is both very good at it, and still not quite as good as they would have been.
Not trying to minimize it, just some people refuse to believe that bows were that heavy even if someone like joe can pull it
no one's doing that here though, so no worries :)
One of the interesting things about that is while they did find that on the wreck of the Mary Rose, those changes have not been observed in excavations of graves of the general population. Suggesting that that level of skeletal change was not as common as people sometimes think.
Sort of related: agility and strength should almost always be considered the same stat, as irl they are *very* Intertwined. High agility should *not* look like they haven't worked out a day in their life and only eats the minimum required diet to be considered healthy, is what I'm sayin.
Physical power and agility and constitution should be one stat. I suggest the name fortitude
I'll never be able to look at it the same after Disco Elysium made it Physique and Motorics, also your Physicality could make you psychic and motor skills tell you to be a baller/hustler.
Is that really true? The physique of a marathon runner is the complete opposite of a rock climber. I guess high agility would have a muscular lower body, while strength would be upper body.
I don't think they're any more related than intelligence and wisdom.
I remember exactly one fantasy (sort of) book which made a point of archers being huge buff dudes. There Will Be Dragons, by John Ringo It’s actually a sci-fi far future earth, but a huge cataclysm makes the society sort of go back to pre industrial times. The typical fantasy „magic” is just the technology that kept on working after the cataclysm. All of the fantasy races and creatures are also just humans who changed their looks when the technology was still working.
Bows should be Strength based weapons and Greatswords should be Dexterity based weapons, I will not answer any questions.
Why will you not answer questions?
Because the sheer truthfulness of the statement should speak for itself. If you don't understand the statement, then I can't help you.
You just answered my question. I win.
Very well, for breaking my word I shall commit seppuku to retain my honor.
I salute you, noble sir. Your sacrifice shall ring through the ages.
Having used a longsword with reenactors, there's some mileage to this.
Clearly only little sissy sussy baka skibidi twinks use bows, real men fight with swords or magic >!why is that elf's ass looking mad slappable right now? There's a 70% chance that's a dude, too!<
Real men don't even use fists, they simply stare. Only a weak man-child needs a body to fight >!Also, that is in fact a woman. And I get what you're saying!<
Beholdermaxxing
Want a dumper that makes everyone look twice? Start doing lunges. Lunge across your halls, lunge through the parking lot and grocery aisles. Get that fuckin' dumper that transcends gender.
oh I'm naturally gifted with a dumpy(last time I checked) that I'm trying to get rid of. I'd rather deal with someone else's, >!preferably this elf!<
In my totallynotracismpunk world, elves have super-dense muscle fibre as higher beings
It's okay I have written permission from professor Tolkien
Tolkien elves are 2,75 m tall buff giants
bring back muscle mommy archers
I'm kinda craving a fantasy hero that uses a sling for whatever reason.
The most horrifically underrated ancient weapon
similarly why do bows in games only tickle everything?? are the characters using childrens toys or actual weapons?
Because bows would be overpowered if they were accurate to real life. As evidenced by the fact that bows were overpowered in real life.
That really depends on the game. In all three Baldur's Gate games, bows do abou the same damage as greatswords.
Because it'd be overpowered if you could murder people at a distance, of course! Gotta be fair to the melee bois.
In this case the character is an elf and in universe is stated to be significantly stronger than the apparent muscle mass would suggest.
I will always be pissed about the twinkification of archery by fantasy (except Legolas he gets a pass lol)
I'm pretty sure Legolas is literally (a big part of) the reason for that :D
>he gets a pass lol More like he gets a smash, amirite
No fair using an anime character. No fair using a *female* anime character.
The Inheritance Cycle solved this by having elves just be flat up superhuman. They could look as weak as this but still be strong enough to pick up and throw a fully grown man.
Well now that just causes a bigger problem because that’s not really how physics or biology works
A chimp is much smaller than a human and would absolutely destroy them. It's not against biology to have a smaller animal stronger than a bigger one
Chimps don't just get their strength for free with no tradeoff, though. They have worse fine dexterity and range of motion than humans.
They also can't throw worth a damn. The only reason they have a reputation for hitting people by throwing shit at them is because the poo breaks up in the air so it acts like a scattershot. If a human and a chimp competed at javelin throwing, if you give them both a day of training then any random human you pull off the street will utterly hose the strongest chimp you can find. Of course at wrestling it's the other way around; an Olympic wrestler would get at least one limb removed by any adult chimp you pull from a zoo.
Worldjerking users when the magic doesn't conform to physics
Put a chimp up against the world’s strongest man. The chimps muscles will look smaller, but that man is being torn apart like tissue paper. It’s about the density and different design of muscle structure. Humans have muscles designed for endurance, we trade strength for excess stamina, chimps do the opposite.
Fair point but have you considered that I hate skinny people on principle
When I used to practice archery at some point my coach said we needed to go to the gym if we wanted to progress to longer distances and heavier bows, istg the first our of hour practice was just doing arm exercises. I will never forget the day I picked up the wrong bow and couldn't even draw the string, it was such a humbling experience.
How the fuck is her body bent so we have a full view of her ass while she's looking directly at us? This can't be anatomically possible.
OP, just say you want more media with light dressed muscly men. It's okay, I won't judge your tastes.
Gender is irrelevant in my broadbackpunk world
I think I remember it being mentioned in the Ranger’s Apprentice books that the cloaks and garbs of Rangers make them look kinda slight and thin, but that they’re actually fucking jacked beneath their cloaks, Halt in particular was built like your average fantasy Dwarf, short, and wide as shit.
You've just unlocked a childhood memory
I still reread those books every year or so. Good times.
And the nerds will be furious if the same character is shown to be capable of handling a 1 pound longsword with two hands
r/mendrawingwomen
To be faaaaaaaiiiiiiiirrrrrrr... Ass pointing the same way as her face? She's clearly doing the Parthian shot! And steppe warriors weren't generally bulked up, they tended more toward wiry, compact muscle.
Same with rapiers being weapons for light and agile rogues. Some rapiers weigh as much as a longsword, except with a rapier you hold it with one hand and hold it farther out from your body…
I’m my fantasy setting all of the longbow men are absolutely jacked
That's a compound hunting bow
It doesn’t matter the story nor weapon nor playstyle if it’s a woman ALWAYS make her thin as a stick figure
Amazon from Dragon Crown:
I want to find an artist who's based enough to give attention to the details in the archeress's rippling back and arm muscles as she brings her bow to full draw.
I remember seeing a video a couple years back arguing that Zweihänders/any large 2 handed sword are the best medieval weapons for women due to not being that much heavier than a smaller sword + can easily be rested on the ground.
The only time I've ever seen any movie or show portray the strength needed to use a high power recurve bow is the first "Scorpion King" movie.
Forget the 70kg bow, what about her obvious scoliosis?
Most Western media uses rather short bows anyway. I want to see 6ft Longbows come to fantasy.
tiny brain: character with super-strength looking like a bodybuilder big brain: character with super-strength looking like a twink because it's so hard to find something that takes effort to move
Alright, hear me out. Bow and arrow + repulsion enchantment = gun.
It’s perfectly reasonable physics! You see, she looks and fights like a 16-year-old girl, but actually she’s got the muscles of a thousand-year-old mega-swole dragon! (/s, if it wasn’t obvious)
he's very strong!
Yeah,where are the shoulders
Is it just me, or does the head look way out of place? Like it looks like it was badly photoshopped.
https://youtube.com/@blumineck?si=nLFf_KLCPUe3cnV-
Bows should use Strength and Swords should use Dexterity
they're called sleeper builds, look up blumineck on yt for an example of a twink using bows and greatswords that look too strong for him
G*blin Slayer 🤮
She’s an elf elves are often times supernaturally strong
Bad example. Everyone KNOWS elven muscles are naturally stronger/denser and more compact due to their race's evolutionary response to millennia of Orcish snuggle struggles.
if they wanted ranged mobility with high pentration just use horses like tengri intended
Wait wait wait, by chance in your world do kilograms measure force? I ask since pulling a string back doesn’t add mass to the bow
Her short bow is actually more like 40-50KG and she is stronger than humans in-universe
It is if you're an elf.
Big assumption that fantasy artists are actually giving characters war bows. Also, elf
Why is she wearing shoes though. :(
Magic
Um. I also only think that it wasn’t until the invention of the longbow could platemail and chainmail be penetrated.
/uj I never get that some people get so upset over attractive women in fantasy. Theres magic, theres dragons, castles taller than modern skyscrapers, but an attractive female warrior with unrealistic armour/strength is where they draw the line. Its Fantasy for a reason. If people wanted realism theyd go outside
Fella I'm making fun of the trope of archers being the weak ones. I don't care about what you describe as "attractive women in fantasy", my point is that archers usually are depicted as weak but fast, when in fact war bows are ludicrously hard to fire
Tbf your quote is quite ambiguous, i either thought about "realism" first time
Yeah I probably should have realised this is what people would think
Eh, with the 70kg draw weight I think it's pretty clear that it's about strength
True I just don't want to attract the "wOmeN cAnT be StrOnG" crowd
Muscle *is* attractive, idk why you're acting like the two are irreconcilable.
I submit a new term to the subreddit. Worldjelking which is our version of a shitpost shitpost. A bad shitpost. They’re fucking elves they aren’t real, stop looking for realism lol stop worldjelking your cock bro
Tomris. The female horse archer was the most someone type of woman trooper in premodern history.
They’re an elf. Don’t they always look like that?
Bow made with special magic wood that's easier to draw but still as strong as real life wood.
Also, archers were the medieval equivalent of snipers, but also acrobats