What role could bows play in a setting with blackpowder weapon? They're inferior weapons so what niche do they play?

Do you mean from the perspective of two armies confronting each other? Obviously taking real life examples the bow isn't going to cut it on the battlefield.

A bunch of adventurers who are out and about with their various skills and experiences not fighting in any sort of convential combat? A potentially useful weapon in such times conditions make the match-lock useless and vice versa.

Two words:

Rocket
Arrows

This. It doesn' matter if the standing army of the time uses the weapon or not, if teh PCs arn't soldiers actively fighting in war they very well may be wielding weapons not proper for war fighting because it's what they do.

That said, you can still hunt with a bow and arrow so one of them could be used to hunting and fighting with one.

>Obviously taking real life examples the bow isn't going to cut it on the battlefield.
You mean the real life where the bow was used alongside the gun for hundreds for years?

>Easier to arm a thousand peasants with bows than flintlocks.

Literally no. A simple gun can take as little as a day to produce, while a bow takes weeks. Further, shooting a gun is far easier than shooting a bow.

A volly of gun shots would still cause more casulties. Arrows suck at killing you dead ASAP. English/Welsh longbows could not pierce plate armour. Hell most bows can't pierce well padded armour. Look up accounts of French Knights fighting muslims during the crusades. Arrows simply suck. Even if one managed to pierce your skin it probably wouldn't kill you unless it got you somewhere important. Bone can stop an arrow.

A lead ball punched through armour easily. It went through your rib cage and you were fucked.

Arrows kill people in the days and weeks after a battle. Guns kill on the field and after too.

>They're inferior weapons so what niche do they play?
You can use them without going deaf.

Bows weren't used for volley shooting, unless you mean a bunch of people stood in one place and were shooting at the same time. They were weapons of individual accuracy, which is why people trained to be able to accurately shoot at long ranges. If they were used in volleys, there wouldn't be nearly the same emphasis on accuracy seen in their use.

Look at history between the late 1300's and early 1700's. There's your answer.

Define inferior. Do you mean ease of training peasants to use them? Stopping power? How quickly ammunition can be made? A bow is definitely inferior in those.

In terms of amount of lead and sulphur required, volume, chance to explode and blow your hands off, the ability to be used in less than perfectly dry conditions or accuracy (assuming primitive enough firearms at various levels) then a bow could be pretty superior.

If all else fails bows could remain as a sport, for recreation, or because learning archery is traditional and still done even if it has no real purpose.

Gunpowder weapons take a long time to reload, aren't very accurate, and are prone to malfunction.
While bows take a much longer time to learn to shot accurately and develop the proper muscles to draw a bow of significant draw weight. Less deadly; although a bow of large draw weight can be just a powerful as a early gun an arrow is a less deadly projectile.

I mean, all you had to do was stick a plug (tambion) in the muzzle when you weren't using it, and cover the lock with a wrap (cow's knee) to keep rain out of it while firing

like in real life a bow is useful if you dont want to shoot your mate in the back in a fight.
indirect fire is useful

That's what mortars are for

Horse Archers.
It wasn't until the Napoleonic era when the gunpowder equivalent of carabiniers became a thing.

>A bunch of adventurers who are out and about with their various skills and experiences not fighting in any sort of convential combat? A potentially useful weapon in such times conditions make the match-lock useless and vice versa.
What situations would those be? A bow just doesn't have much penetrating power compared to, say, an arquebus. And even less compared to a musket, but those were bulky and heavy weapons that required a fork to operate. I've saw a video of a man shooting a proper longbow at a gambeson at close range and the gambeson did a proper job at stopping the arrow. I mean, it's gonna hurt, but it's not going to kill you. A heavy lead ball is probably going to fuck you up badly.
In range I've heard they're more or less the same.
The accuracy aspect is also overrated for bows. There's no aiming mechanism and at longer ranges you're going to arc your shoot so it becomes even more of a guessing game. With a gun you just point and shoot.
The only thing the bow has going for is rate of fire but with low stoppage power the only situation I see it useful for is for lightly armored opponents.

Once we played in a sort of valhalla setting where all brave warriors capture castles for fun and then feast inside until morning when all dead ressurect and war starts again. Bad things happen when new brave warriors from Living World bring firearms and cannons. War stopped being fun, ww1 trench warfare boring stufg, castles destroyed, so viking, samurai, knight and stone age hunter gather party to find gods and whine about it to them.

uh-huh
now try and carry THAT around all day while adventuring.

it was a long time before black powder weapons were a more viable option than bows and crossbows.

Making gunpowder on a scale required to arm an army is difficult and expensive. Arrows are made mostly of plentiful wood. So while guns are superior weapons, they require a lot of industry and infrastructure that a nation doesn't necessarily have.

>They're inferior weapons
Nope, just different advantages and aplications.

Bows would be better for scouts, snipers and skirmishers if your army is mostly made of arquebusiers and/or musketeers.

If in an eastern setting, bows have a status that guns don't.

The 1683 Siege of Vienna ottoman forces had both guns and bows.

greatmingmilitary.blogspot.com.br/2015/12/weather-proofed-arquebuses-of-ming.html

One more word:

Bo-hiya

Addendum: an underfed and sickly peasant can still be an effective arquebusier. Try doing the same with knights and archers, you may lose the battle.

It goes a bit earlier. The mongols used trenches to siege a chinese city around 1230, because it used incendiary and explosive grenades, plus trebuchet ammo against the invaders. It seems to be the first registry of trench warfare.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_mortar
Had lots of fun with one of these.

Use all those unemployed fletchers. Plus, it can't be any wood. England imported wood staves, and even demanded that ships at its ports brought them. And not habing to wait that said staves dry for up to a year sounds nice.

That's what hand gonnes and hand mortars are for

The question of bows being a more physical training-intensive weapon isn't really reflected in most RPGs. Ranged characters are usually alternatives to strength based characters, so bows don't generally have a strength requirement, but in reality you have to be pretty jacked in one arm to make use of a combat-quality bow.

>Nope, just different advantages and aplications.
Eh, history doesn't really reflect this. A quick look at, say, England, the Ottoman Empire, or even Japan refutes this. Were bows still in use? Yes but it was probably because they were still around and a lot cheaper. Here's the cost of weapons in 1566 England.

>According to the historian C. G. Cruickshank, in 1566 a high quality bow of imported yew cost 6 shillings and 8 pence, a bow of second quality was 3 shillings and 4 pence, while a bows of English yew cost a mere 2 shillings. During the latter part of the Queen’s reign, calivers ranged from 12 to 30 shillings and muskets from 18 shillings to £2. With the average cost of a bow being 3 shillings, and a firearm 30 shillings (not including all the associated items that went with musketry), then the cost of refitting a company with gunpowder weapons was very considerable indeed.

So me thinks that bows were still in use because guns were expensive and bows were cheaper. Hence why the Ottoman had both weapons.

Also I don't think a bow would be a sniper weapon or even a skirmish weapon since that was the role of the gunners.

Stealth. Also, flaming arrows - you can't set a building on fire with a firearm, unless you pull some crazy shenanigans.
Watch Brotherhood of the Wolf. Firearms were all the rage, but the guy killed more people with a bow than everyone else did with firearms, just because people were dying before figuring out what was happening.

Better question what role would bows/crossbows play in a modern/futuristic setting?

They're inferior weapons so what niche do they play?

>They're inferior weapons so what niche do they play?
Fucking rate of fire.
I'm in a TL4 GURPS campaign and reloading his musket would take my dwarf about three times as long as any combat situation we've been in over the last IRL year, which is why we just carry a few spare loaded muskets—which are heavy and not always in reach, so after one shot he needs to go melee.
Meanwhile our elf gets to shoot one or two arrows every damn round if she doesn't fumble her quick draw.

Being legal where guns are not.
t. oppressed unfree yuropoor

...

Skirmishing, ambushing, hunting, indirect fire from behind the lines, thus more rounds down range. Find the advantages of flintlocks and bows and their disadvantages, compare to fit them appropriately.

They were trained in accuracy for volley fire, man.

They weren't shooting at targets, they were shooting at markers.

If you're not slaved to the technological level of some specific point in our history, you can always just go back far enough in time to when guns weren't all that good, at which point they can be overall similar, or even inferior if you so desire, to bows.

Or I guess just slap on some stats that seem to make sense to you and then have the two of them occupy niches in the setting based upon what those stat blocks make them good at.

>you can't set a building on fire with a firearm, unless you pull some crazy shenanigans.

Early on they were quite fond of using firearms to launch bolts instead of bullets, including incendiary ones. This goes for both handheld ones and cannons, with the earliest depiction of a cannon (1326) showing it with a bolt stuffed arse first down the muzzle.

Here's an illustration form 1442 showing it in action.

The fundamental cost of bows was in requiring twenty years of training. One can scrounge up more money, but more time? France attempted longbowmen with half-assed training, it didn't pay off.

The whole concept of the double-armed man shows that England liked its bows despite guns being perfected beyond the dead-end of longbow technology. Composite bows lasted somewhat longer.

Guns eventually become the better choice, but only about the 18th century.

Ottomans spent a lot on their bows, importing the materials from several different regions. It is one of the regions why modern turk archery can't surpass the historical records, they don't know exactly which cattle breed horns to use, or a certain bird is extinct.

Bowmen could be used as second or third line infantry. If distance is properly measured by their officer, they could simply loose over the first line into enemy ranks while the first line advances or shoots.

You had pistoleers and people did use light weight guns on horseback.

Incendiary cannon bolt, ca 1330. A metal plate (kinda visible here if you know it's there) nailed to the but keeps it from being blown to splinters on launch.

Because silencers don't work the way video games and TV says they do.

Shotgun shells are incredibly versatile. You can do so much with them because it's really only a matter of what you can reasonably cram into the things. Pellets, granulated materials in general, needles, jury rigged or high quality incendiary compounds. You could probably even use them to deliver straight up explosives, too.

>Debatable whether stopping power had anything to do with it.

Hans von Seldeck remarked on gun's superior penetrative power vs crossbows in letters written during the late 1400s already. He wasn't talking about infantry though, but about mounted crossbowmen who basically were supposed to ride up to other mounted troops and shoot them right in the face.

Which does bear out with what ballistic tests showed.

But apart from youtube videos and the odd lock buster round what actually gets used is pellets or slugs, because that's what works.

youtube.com/watch?v=HD3uP_LNQ5g

The folks dealing with gunpower were called "masters of fireworks" and were in charge of incendaries and explosives.

And really, the first thing anyone with half a mind would notice was that you could make really fricking small arrow launching engines with blackpowder.

10/10, the Romans would adapt.

>Guns eventually become the better choice, but only about the 18th century.

Unless you either had the power of the English monarchy or an archery culture, guns and crossbows pretty much always were the better choice.

>What role could bows play in a setting with blackpowder weapon?

Bows are a good way to tie off things, like hair or belts, don't see how gunpowder would change that.

The English for all purposes dropped the longbow by the 16th century. All one has to do is look at cargo found in the Mary Rose ship in 1545 and the Alderney ship in 1592. The Mary Rose had numerous longbows while the Alderney had no longbows and was packed with guns. England had overgone a weapons revolution spurred by their conflict the Spaniards in the Low Countries. Military veterans like Humphrey Barwick, a mercenary and man who trained to use a longbow from childhood, toted the superiority of the arquebus and especially the Spanish heavy musket, which he claimed would be the ultimate weapon if it could be used on horseback. Pretty much by the end of the 16th century anyone showing up to muster with a longbow was considered unarmed.

If the training aspect was the only factor in favoring the gun then why did the elite of various militaries adopt the gun? The Ottoman Janissaries, the Japanese samurai, etc. In Japan the Tanegashima became a central weapon in uniting the country during the sengoku era. Takeda Shingen proclaimed ""Hereafter, the guns will be the most important arms, therefore decrease the number of spears per unit, and have your most capable men carry guns", and the gun had broken the elite cavalry forces of the Takeda clan in the battle of Nagashino. I really doubt training was the only aspect people sought to acquire these expensive weapons, and the fact that even the elite warriors of these societies made use of them says a lot.
The double armed men you mentioned were more of a novelty too.

>What role could bows play in a setting with blackpowder weapon?
bows are accurate, shoot farther, and don't produce a god-awful racket and cloud of smoke when fired. I'm sure you can find a use for that.

1. Early firearms did not reliably penetrate plate. This is demonstrated in hundreds of museum pieces. Even by the late 1600s, a musket could be stopped with a breastplate.

As late as the fucking Napoleonic wars, breastplates (cuirasses) could stop small cartridges fired from pistols.

2. Accuracy was relatively unreliable for hundreds of years. Remember that rifling wasn't a thing until the mid 19th century.

3. The musket didn't make heavy cavalry obsolete. The pike square did. The battle of white mountain was the death knell of the armoured knight.

then you want a crossbow

Samurai infantry generally fought from behind prepared positons, from hiding or from the cover of pavis, defensive positions that really favour the short-ranged power of guns. They didn't drop bows completely though because their volume of fire still was relevant sometimes.

>2. Accuracy was relatively unreliable for hundreds of years. Remember that rifling wasn't a thing until the mid 19th century.

Rifling was a thing during the 1500s already. There's just little point in mass-adaption as black poweder fouls barrels like crazy and rifling makes loading a pain in the butt. And - as some German noticed and pointed out in that nice book'o war that nobody read before the outbreak of WW1: Infantry without officers will always and reliably grab the lighter, faster-firing gun.

>1. Early firearms did not reliably penetrate plate. This is demonstrated in hundreds of museum pieces. Even by the late 1600s, a musket could be stopped with a breastplate.

We got tests, we got documentations of historic useage and we got acutal period comments on the subjects - at close range, guns absolutely did penetrate armour. Body armour noticably changed in reaction to the threat of firearms.

>3. The musket didn't make heavy cavalry obsolete. The pike square did. The battle of white mountain was the death knell of the armoured knight.

It's more likely that the wheellock pistol wielded by cavalry was what reduced lanciers to specialist roles.

as long as we are talking front loading guns a bow can fire much faster then a powder weapon
adventurers lay a trap and the archer can shoot 4 times before the attacked even cocked their flintlocks
>but with low stoppage power
depends entirely on the used bow, you have to be strong to use the stronger ones properly tho

>Remember that rifling wasn't a thing until the mid 19th century.

For military weapons we should add. Hunting and target shooting weapon were the early adopters there, as reload speed and fouling issues form sustained firing weren't so important.

>Infantry without officers will always and reliably grab the lighter, faster-firing gun.

Before promptly dropping it and running for the hills.

>at close range

This is the key sentence here.

>1500s rifling

Was not in any way significant to warfare until the 19th century.

>Wheelock cavalry
Used to attack & redirect said pike squares that rendered knights obsolete.

user, none of these things you mention make a bow sound better than a gun. We're not picking away the flaws of early blackpowder weapons but why would one pick a bow over one in a setting that features them.

I mean all three points you made can easily be applied to a bow. Well, maybe not 2 but the bow wasn't an accurate weapon either. Try aiming a 180+ pound warbow, it's not possible to aim it like a rifle and those bows didn't have anything to help aim and if you nock your arrows at an arc it's even more unreliable.

>Used to attack & redirect said pike squares that rendered knights obsolete.

They weren't considered effective against pike squads. They're lightly armed cavalry with relatively little shock power and paltry firepower, heck that Swede actually told his cavalry to draw swords and just ride the infantry down exactly because guns weren't enough.

>This is the key sentence here.

Yeah, but the key issue isn't rifling or black powder but Minié bullets. The first significant leap in range and power came from the switch from non-sealing ball ammo to self-sealing conical projectiles.

As you're including the crossbow and dismissing archery cultures, I agree.

It wasn't, this very thread shows more factors. Try to read the thread you're posting in.

And if poor training is a problem, it's obvious that better training can solve that.

One reason why the gun X bow debate can find historical cases and testimonies in favor of both is that even up to the Napoleonic Wars, even counting only Europe, there was a very unbalanced mix of training and quality both of equipment and recruits when it comes to musketeers and arquebusiers. The very same country could have both kinds at the same time.

But poorly trained firearm troops could still be effective, it simply wasn't possible to poorly train archers and expect something of them.

And I know they were more of a novelty. As I said, longbows reached the dead-end.

Shock cav á la tatars?

I'm not completely sure on this, but if I am remembering correctly crossbow bolts will penetrate Kevlar.

Anything pointy or sharp will penetrate kevlar, it doesn't resist being stabbed much.

But most armor these days integrates solid plates for resisting rifles anyway.

Ottomans still used bows because they had trouble getting enough gunpowder.

The earlier versions of blackpowder weapons were really shitty for a long, long time. And so were crossbows. Bows were better but required more training, basically.

Fun fact : even in the 18th century, bows STILL had more range than your average musquet.

If a bowshot has any sort of significant arc it is going to have very little power behind it.

If they've moved on to wheellocks, the advantage is negated.

Ganz an sheit

I know that even late into the 20th century in China, the bow had a lot of social and dare I say spiritual importance - it was considered a civilized weapon for nobles to use, and a rigorous amount of training was spent on just learning the proper stance, let alone how to draw and shoot. It was brought into battle, but by the time guns started becoming common, it wasn't expected to be used.

You can't really see this in modern China at all because they pretty much dropped bow shooting entirely, whereas Japan managed to keep the practice alongside their practices of modernization.

range != effective range

The range a warbow could actually reasonably hurt someone at was lower than a gun for most of the time period they were used together.

But you can't see shite from behind your mate. You'll be shooting blindly.

Silence is good

>The earlier versions of blackpowder weapons were really shitty for a long, long time. And so were crossbows.

This is the earliest documented version of the crossbow in Yrop. It's already a dedicated siege weapon.

This variant is probably two hundred years younger than that one.

>They're inferior weapons so what niche do they play?

The niche of inferior people (technologically), duh.

And this one's another two hundred years younger.

Anybody got one of them Han Dynasty crossbows in a pic to compare?

Thanks Mao!

This

Cost aside, early blackpowder weapons were horrible, you were just as likely to miss the target completely as you were to have the weapon blow up in your face. Guns were only easier to train with as advancements in weapon technology were made.

Aren't Han way more recent than classic greeks?

>accuracy at range
Bows are complete shit at range.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Churchill
>Churchill resumed his commission after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. As part of the British Expeditionary Force to France, in May 1940 Churchill and his unit, the Manchester Regiment, ambushed a German patrol near L'Épinette (near Richebourg in the Pas-de-Calais), France. Churchill gave the signal to attack by cutting down the enemy Feldwebel (staff sergeant) with a barbed arrow, becoming the only British soldier known to have felled an enemy with a longbow in the war.[10] According to his son Malcolm, "He and his section were in a tower and as the Germans approached he said 'I will shoot that first German with an arrow,' and that's exactly what he did."[11] After fighting at Dunkirk, he volunteered for the Commandos.

Thank you user for making this thread. The knife-eared faggots who know nothing about real archery is fucking hilarious.

Depends on how early you're talking about? If you're talking about handgonnes which were basically metal tubes filled with gunpowder, maybe.
But weapons like the OP were game changers and not only because of the training aspect. You have a weapon that has better penetrating power and is easier to operate. Armor technology at that point was pretty good. Most armor could deflect arrows, especially plate armor. Even a gambeson could protect you and adding a shield makes arrows less effective.
Later you had even heavier guns that required a rest to use but those had even further range, more stopping power and better accuracy.
Also, guns weren't cheap if that's what you're implying. That's a myth.

Crossbows in China date back to at least the eastern Zhou (770-221 BC), which could easily place them between one and two hundred years before the greek crossbow (around 300 BC).

Look at all those handgonnes. Seems that with proper preparations, they were good enough to give a crusading army or three a run for their money.

>What role could bows play in a setting with blackpowder weapon?

Weapon used by those of backwards barbarian shitters who can't afford guns.

>They're inferior weapons so what niche do they play?

Saving money by not expending your gunpowder when hunting, and that's about all. Even assuming completely unarmored opponents bows are just straight up inferior against enemy that shoots back.

So I'm currently running a 5e game in a world with relatively gunpowder weapons used in war - cannon are common, while personal weapons are arquebuses and early flintlocks.
If the PCs go sailing or try to build a base, I have to problem with giving them a few cannons or a troop of gunners to command. But guns are explicitly impractical in situations adventurers get up to. Confined spaces, places full of water, fireball-flinging wizards and such.

If they do want to shoot a gun, easy: it's about on par with bows and crossbows in terms of range and damage, but take a DC 15 Sleight of Hand (Dex) check to reload.

's alright?

>it was a long time before black powder weapons were a more viable option than bows and crossbows.

Actually it was pretty much immediately after Europeand came up with matchlocks in the later quarter of XV century, and even before that handgonnes were strong competitors.

The key was penetrating power and lethality. Guns BTFOed every type of armor but the best European plate. Even the best, most complicated man-portable crossbows were weaker, and bows could not compete at all - even against opponents with scarcely more protection that clothing (i.e., an average XVI century Japanese or Korean footsoldier) their effective range was noticeably lower.

And that is only possible by giving the bow a very unrealistic rate of fire. Rapid-firing a bow drastically reduces its stopping power (same for those Chinese repeating crossbows).

Well, in most GW games, the Handgun/Bow/Crossbow balance is something like

Handgun: More power and ignores armor
Crossbow: Cheaper, less damage and more range
Bow: Cheapest, least damage, all ranks can fire in volleys rather than just the first two ranks

Shock cav á la Reiters

Guys, when are you supposed to stop bowing whne you make a crossbow? I'm up to six and not sure if I should continue or not.

20 is a good place to stop