[Vespers War]

A year later, some more thoughts on bows.

I'm trying to keep my modifications as simple and easy to drop into existing rules as possible; swaghauler's got the extensive modifications down, so my niche is minor modifications that amend rules rather than replace them.

Here's where my thinking is these days:

1. Change the divisor for damage from 15 to 5, so that the formula for damage is the square root of energy (in joules) divided by 5. Most bows will be 1d6 or 2d6 for damage. This is the base damage for bodkin arrows.

2. Ignore the firearm style Pen. Instead, bows deal damage like melee weapons, and armor subtracts either its parenthetical (for ancient armor) or double its AV (for modern armor) from the damage rolled. This holds for flexible armor (maille or Kevlar). Solid armor (plate or SAPI) doubles its damage reduction against arrows (so 4x AV for modern rigid armor). This is still for bodkin arrows.

3. Broadheads add 1d6 damage to whatever bow they're used with, but all armor is doubled (so flexible modern armor subtracts 4x AV and rigid modern armor 8x AV from the damage roll).

This gives us bows that are fairly useful, and gives a reason for different arrowheads. It gets rid of that pesky Pen problem. Rigid armor has done much better than flexible armor in the tests I've seen, which is why it gets doubled in protective value against arrows. I'm sure it could be tweaked a bit more, but this should give relatively simple drop-in rules that don't require changing anything else in the existing rules.