The Forearm-mounted Crossbow

[Herr D]

Requests: please post any improvements with pic & text, please post char descriptions if you use it.

One of the inherent problems I had with D & D was the dependence on absolute recipe / chart. A good GM should be able to listen to a player’s idea and say: “with the plus you want, which of these minuses do you accept?” After a quick negotiation, continue playing. . .

As someone who’s USED a crossbow, I know that reloading & cocking takes time, but some GM’s don’t seem to understand a few things. 1. Even a repeating crossbow can take cocking time to reload. 2. Multi-tasking makes some things possible with practice, and not others. 3. Even delicate mechanisms occasionally survive bad hits.

The pix below may require improvement, but definitely require explanation. 1. Hold your left arm straight out from your shoulder, palm down. 2. Make a fist and bend wrist down. 3. Without moving your fist, twist your elbow back and forth. Feel that?
With fur, leather, metal, and wood, it should be possible to make a device that looks like this with a reloading action based on twisting the whole thing with that elbow twist. With practice, that twist, pull to cock with the right hand, and a wild shot or sloppy repeat shot should take 1.5 actions, because most of the time it takes to reload, cock, and shoot is repositioning. The other half action could easily be a +1 to the accuracy of a wild shot. By my estimations, this weapon should be between the weight of a sm & med cbow, cost and distance of a medium, bolts and dmg of a small, maximum 5 bolts each without new cartridge, which comes on it’s own curved plate and attaches with 2 more actions.

Yes, the bolt plate is curved around the arm.

http://i1067.photobucket.com/albums/u438/jamais5/hm3/HerrD-fmcb.jpg

text:

cbow
Fri May 18 03:48:52 GMT-0400 2012

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[Herr D]

I would welcome constr. crit. as well as comments on weapon vulnerability and whether it should be considered 2-stage dmg if the bolt-plate is hit first. That way of course, single, manual reloads could still happen. Gamers?

[Author]

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