Dear Bethesda. And CD Projekt Red. And Ubisoft, EA, From Software, blah blah blah, the list
goes on. You know what, this is an open letter to everybody ever who makes fantasy RPG games
with swords and sorcery and all that bullshit. This is for you.
I’m writing to all of y’all on behalf of Edwin Abramson, who’s not convinced that
your depiction of bows and arrows is entirely accurate. And you know what? I see his point.
You guys treat arrows in your games like they’re merely inconvenient splinters as opposed to
lethal projectiles that used to make or break entire battles by embedding themselves into
people’s flesh and bone in an age without sterilization and dentists would try to channel
the Eldritch cosmic deities through your mouth.
But in all serious, Edwina brings up a really good point, and something I hadn’t thought
of until now. Are arrows really less harmful than swords? Should fantasy games be upping
their game when it comes to medieval-style combat? In order to answer this question,
we’re going to have to do something a little bit different today: we’re gonna have to
put on our historian hats. Never fear though, there will still be some SCIENCE!
In this day and age of firearms, swords and arrows have been relegated to renaissance
fair tchotchkes and tools for backwoods hunters, but for thousands of years, these were the
primary weapons of war, and were tools engineers and craftsmen spent their entire lives perfecting
and trying to counter. Weapons both dictated and were dictated by technology, with counters
to different combat technologies building on each other for generations.
Eventually, arrows gave way to black powder guns, which were equally-if-not-more effective,
required less extensive training to be fatal, didn’t require you to be an olympian weight
lifter to draw the string, and as an added bonus, were a lot more difficult for the enemy
to reuse against you. You can pick an arrow up off the ground in the heat of battle and
fire it back, but doing so with a tiny-as-fuck ball that likely squished on impact? Not quite
so easy.
Bullets and arrows have a lot of similarities in how they operate, both in the physical
sense but also in their roles in combat. They hit targets from a great distance, can be
used to suppress and control the battlefield, and completely and totally suck to get hit
with. So...bullets and arrows are effectively the same thing, right? Totally. Wrong.
While both bullets and arrows fly through the air, are affected by wind resistance and
gravity, the way they impact what they come into contact with and how they do damage are
totally and completely different.
For one thing, bullets fired from a gun carry a lot of energy in a very tiny space. Even
guns that big machismo manly men scoff at .22 caliber rounds definitely wouldn’t want
to be shot with one. When a bullet makes contact, it dissipates its kinetic energy extremely
quickly--and as it embeds itself into someone and passes through flesh and muscle, this
energy spreads out into surrounding tissue due to an effect called Hydrostatic Shock,
which makes a bullet dangerous to organs and blood vessels a long way away from the entry
wound and path the bullet takes. This is why, ultimately, there really isn’t a particular
safe place to get shot with a gun--vital organs and arteries are absolutely everywhere, and
they can get shredded into ribbons by hydrostatic shock.
Even the most energetic arrows from medieval times carry significantly less energy in a
much larger package than even the weakest of firearms sold on the market today. So what’s
so dangerous about them?
While it’s true that they carry less concussive impact force and hardly create hydrostatic
shock on the level seen with even tame firearms, arrows are still incredibly dangerous, and,
under some circumstances, way, way worse to get shot with.
For one, it doesn’t take that much energy at all to pierce flesh and organs. Our bodies
are notoriously soft and pliable, and the yield strength is incredibly low. Arrows are
easily able to pierce skin and muscle, and as the arrow head passes through, it slices
and tears anything in its path. A wide cutting surface means that even one arrow can wreak
an incredible amount of havoc on anything it comes into contact with.
But what’s worse, however, is the long term prognosis. You see, a bullet, as we mentioned
before, is very, very small. If you happen to survive a gunshot wound, particularly in
the early days of firearms, your body could actually heal around the bullet. You could
live your entire life with bullets lodged in you without it affecting you too much.
An arrow, by contrast, is way, way, WAY too large, and if it isn’t removed guarantees
life-threatening infection. The problem is, most arrowheads were designed so that they
couldn’t easily be pulled out. It either has to be pushed entirely through your body
and pulled out the other end, or if it hit bone, it needs to be surgically removed--in
an age without anesthetic and sterilization, an arrow wound was almost always a death sentence.
So why do fantasy game designers treat arrows like they’re inferior to swords, axes, and
maces, when they could be just as, if not more fatal? Well, it could be because of laziness
or game design. Or it could be due to something we haven’t even touched on yet: armor.
You see, earlier I said that weapons dicated and were dictated by wartime technology, and
nowhere was this more evident than in armor. Armor was designed to protect ground troops
from the tools of death their enemies employed, giving them a slight-yet-precious advantage
on the battlefield. Over the years there have been thousands of different techniques, styles,
and shapes, all of which were designed to counter very specific tactics and weapons,
the pinnacle, and perhaps the trademark of both fantasy and medieval history, being Full
Plate Armor. A warrior, clad in hardened steel from head to toe, was like a living, breathing
tank on the battlefield. Full Steel Plate armor was so effective, in fact, that knights
frequently completely abandoned shields in favor of simply brandishing one sword, or
even dual wielding. After all, why would you need a shield if you’re essentially wearing
one already all over your body?
Contrary to popular belief, full plate armor wasn’t all that heavy. At its thickest it
was about 3 millimeters, and weighed about twice as much as American Football gear. Warriors
clad in this were relatively fast and agile, and could withstand infinitely more punishment
than lesser-armored foes.
But if full plate was so effective, why did people still use arrows and swords at all?
Well, for a few reasons. For one, properly made full plate was expensive, and entire
armies were rarely equipped with it. But for another, while full plate did offer incredible
protection, it didn’t render the wearer invincible. Not by a long shot. And if you
weren’t careful, you were definitely, DEFINITELY going to end up fucking dead.
Funnily, in almost every game that has a pseudo-medieval or renaissance setting, hacking and slashing
is the norm. But the truth is, hacking and slashing at steel armor was all but a useless
exercise to tire your arms out. Steel cannot possibly be hacked through with a sword by
anybody other than a fucking robot with super strength, but that doesn’t mean that swords
were useless. In fact, entire fencing schools and disciplines existed to teach men how to
fight against heavily-armored opponents, and it looked almost nothing like we see in movies
and video games. While functionally immune to weapon edges, wearers of plate armor were
still highly susceptible to high blunt force trauma, so knights in combat would use a technique
called Mordschlag, literally “murder strike,” where they would grab their swords by the
blade and use the pommel as a hammer. Knights would then wrench their swords into weak points
in the neck or shoulders gripping the blade to get better leverage.
Arrows could find these weak points as well, and gain entry in the eye slits of armor,
which were particularly vulnerable. But this was pretty uncommon--no arrows, on the battlefield,
were about harassment and control. Sure, arrows may not embed themselves in your flesh, but
getting pelted with a hundred of them over the course of an hour doesn’t exactly make
you feel good about yourself.
Steel plate was designed to deflect arrows in the same way modern tanks are designed
to deflect bullets and artillery shells; however, at the end of the day, this steel was incredibly
thin, and an English Longbow could fire a 1000 grain arrow weighing 64 grams at a frighteningly
fast 55 meters per second. Traveling this quickly, an arrow with a bodkin point, if
it lands at the perfect angle, is strong enough to wedge itself through even steel plate armor,
and any lessor armors might as well have been tissue paper.
So where does this leave us? Arrows are fatal. Swords are fatal. But neither of them appear
in games as they were used in real life. Why is that? Well. For fun factor, of course.
But there’s more to it than that. The stories we like to tell ourselves and participate
in, these stories of lone, strong heroes, who can single-handedly shape the history
of nations, has almost nothing to do with what war and combat was really like in medieval
and renaissance times.
War and fighting wasn’t just one person against five or even twenty or hacking and slashing their
way through the countryside.
They were bloody,
brutal, lengthy brawls--epic and ruthless clashes of tens of thousands of men who were
trained to coldly aim for the weakest part of the faceless, nameless, identityless enemy
soldier in front of them before moving on to the next, or invariably dying in the process.
There was little chivalry and art in combat, but there was skill.
What’s more, even a slight injury, even were it not enough to kill you or even knock
you out of the battle entirely, was nearly always a death sentence. There’s no guard
duty after an arrow in the knee. There’s only pain, disease, amputation, and invariably
death. Homelessness, if you’re lucky. Maybe.
At the end of the day, the truth is far more complicated than any current game can hope
to cover in its entirety. Armor types, thicknesses, speeds, and force are all just too much. There
are too many variables--and, for the most part, one man, with one bow is going to be
completely fucked against one woman, properly armored, with one sword. But an army of archers?
That’s a force to fucking reckon with.
Sincerely, Austin
P.S.
Sailor Moon Crystal just ended. Season 4 hasn’t been announced yet. I’m--what am I going
to look forward to on mondays? I mean. I guess I could watch them all again. Do any of you
watch Sailor Moon? Yes, I have no shame admitting that I, a thoroughly masculine man, totally
enjoy the hell out of Sailor Moon. It’s got cute girls, themes of love and friendship,
and cats. And gay people. It’s the best. If you’ve not checked out the reboot yet,
you totally can, on Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll is the leading destination for anime, manga,
and even live action tv and movies. For only 6.95/month, you can get all of these shows
and more. And, hey, if you’re skeptical, you can go to crunchyroll.com/shoddy for a
free 30 day trial. That’s a whole flippin’ month of HD anime! Crunchyroll gives a portion
of their revenue back to the people who make the shows that you love, so you can peruse
without guilt, knowing that you’re giving back to the artists that make things possible.
And if you like Sailor Moon, and you’ve already watch it, you should check out Madoka
Magicka--it’s...it’s different. And a little--well, I won’t spoil it. So, head
on over to crunchyroll.com/shoddy and start your 30 day free trial right now. Don’t
forget the /shoddy otherwise you only get a 14-day free trial and they want you to know it came from us.
Oh! And I’m actually going to be out of town for the Fourth of July, so I won’t
be streaming. But I will be next week! A lot of you voted in my poll last week, and it
looks like I’m going to be streaming Overwatch. GOODY.