Hand Crossbow Thought & Suggestion

[ArteF]

Good day kind folks,

The topic is about specifically the hand crossbow and it's usage with a melee weapon and two-weapon fighting.

I'm completely aware of the issue with reloading without a free hand and so I'm going to try to remove this issue in a very narrow way. I'm aware that most DM's house rule that you simply reload regardless as the damage is pretty much the same if you just use the hand crossbow by itself, if anything simply using the hand crossbow by itself is superior in every way... but screw it rule of cool.

I am trying to come up with a suggestion I can send to the considerate folks at Wotc and wanted all the pro player and DM opinions that I can find here before I get to find out how game breaking the suggestion is and why it was never applied... assuming they had even thought of it.

The alteration deals with the hand crossbow itself adding a property to the raw for "Special".

Martial Ranged Weapons:
Crossbow, Hand || 75GP || 1d6 piercing || 3lb || Ammunition (Range 30/120), light, loading, special

Special:
Crossbow, Hand:
While a readied Hand Crossbow is being wielded or after at least one turn of wielding a hand crossbow in one hand, as part of the attack action a light melee weapon can be unsheathed once per round.


What this does and addresses:
The big issue with the concept of using a melee weapon with a hand crossbow is that to reload you need a free hand; that makes sense, the issue arises when you realize that to sheathe or unsheathe you need to manipulate an object, which can only be done once a turn as part of your movement. What that does is it prevents you from stowing your weapon at the end of your turn so you can reload your crossbow when you go to attack with it again.

The way I went at this is I tried to avoid the player being able to draw two weapons at once, you can have your crossbow at the ready before the encounter and on your first turn draw a short sword or dagger as part of the attack action. The other way is that you draw the hand crossbow first, if you do this then on the next turn you get then you can draw your next weapon if it's light as part of the action.

Now with feats like dual wielder the light requirement changes but it should work the same without offering any added bonus that was not intended by the feat, with crossbow expert the obvious bonus is that you can use the crossbow expert provided bonus attack at its near optimal ability without wielding only one hand crossbow.

This DPR wise changes nothing or shouldn't change anything as the highest dice finesse light weapon is a 1d6, however with dual wielder it's a d8 but if you've invested two feats to get dual wielder and crossbow expert then I think it's probably fair.

That's my idea on what to suggest, if anyone has a better idea or way of getting this done, I'm all ears. Have a wonderful day and thanks for your input.


--Edit

Also I apologize if anything here comes across as impenetrable to read, I'm working on 2 hours of sleep.

[LordEntrails]

Can you layout how this would work over a couple of rounds of use? i.e. something like;
Round 0:
Hand crossbow readied and loaded
Round 1:
Attack with hand crossbow
Draw light melee weapon
Round 2:
...?

[JohnD]

Personally I'd allow one shot at point blank range, maybe giving a +2 to hit bonus. After that, in my game, you'd need a round where you weren't engaged in melee to reload and use it again.

I suppose someone skilled in bluffing would be able to possibly make an opponent think that you're going to fire a bolt at them again before you've had a chance to reload, but only under certain circumstances.

This is why you need to find or commission a magical self loading hand crossbow.

[ArteF]

Hi,

@JohnD
Well magical things are the realm of the DM, I'm trying to see if this suggestion can work out with the raw.

I'm unsure what you mean by the rest of your post, as in I'm not seeing what a point blank shot has to do with adding a special attribute to hand crossbow, are you saying that you would rather the special give a +2 to hit bonus at point blank? Or are you talking about if the player has crossbow expert? I'm a little lost here.

@LordEntrails, certainly

I have to do this twice, once will be with a Round 0 that the hand crossbow is readied and one without.

Assuming the player is a 5th level Fighter with Extra attack just to complicate things and assuming the user has crossbow expert so the hand crossbow will be used on the bonus attack, as a reminder the ammunition property loads the arrow/bolt as part of the attack action.

1st Example:
Round 0: Readied Hand Crossbow and Loaded
Round 1: Melee Attack(Unsheath), Melee Extra Attack,Bonus Attack (already loaded).
Round 2: Melee Attack, Melee Extra Attack, Movement (Stow), Bonus Attack (load and fire)
Round 3: Melee Attack (Unsheath), Melee Extra Attack, Movement (Stow), Bonus Attack (load and fire)
Round 4: Melee Attack (Unsheath), Melee Extra Attack, Movement (Stow), Bonus Attack (load fire)

For giggles I'll add an action surge to Round 5.

Round 5: Melee Attack (Unsheath), Melee Extra Attack, Movement (Stow), *Action Surge, Ranged Attack(load and fire), Ranged Extra Attack (load and fire), Bonus Attack (load and fire)

In the way the current system works, a person would have spend an action to stow their weapon thus making an action surge pointless here unless you do silly things; below is an example.

Round 5: Movement(Unsheath), Melee Attack, Melee Extra Attack, *Action Surge, Drop the melee weapon, Ranged Attack (load and fire), Ranged Extra Attack (load and fire), Bonus attack (load and fire)

Of course after dropping that weapon the player may have a set of identical weapons to simply draw on... it gets weird. Anyway that is what you'd have to do to get similar results to the change I'm thinking about suggesting to hand crossbow's.


Similar to above this is assuming you have crossbow expert and so on.

2nd Example:
Round 0: Not readied and not loaded
Round 1: Ranged Attack (Draw the Hand crossbow load and fire), Ranged Extra Attack (load and fire), Bonus Action (load and fire)
Round 2: Melee Attack (Unsheath), Extra Attack, Movement(Stow), Bonus action (load and fire)....

I hope that helped you understand what I'm going for here.

[Hecklerus Prime]

While this is a cool idea, I don't understand what about the hand crossbow makes the character able to draw a weapon as part of the attack when this could not be done before. There is nothing physically different about the crossbow, so it looks like (and is) a change made solely for the awesome factor. A blow gun is not only lighter but smaller than a hand crossbow, so why can't I draw a weapon as part of the attack while holding the blowgun?

Looking at a traditional Chinese repeating crossbow, I think it would be possible to create a system of gears and levers that would allow the action arm to be strapped to the wielder's arm. Then a pumping motion would be used to cause the reload and subsequent firing. Admittedly, this would probably be very cumbersome and inaccurate. The point is that it's possible and, with training, might not be so impractical.

How's this fit into game mechanics? It not only brings back the Repeating Crossbows (joy of joys) but also creates a Single-Handed Repeating Crossbow (better name needed). A repeating crossbow still requires two hands but loses the Loading property, meaning a character fortunate enough to have multiple attacks can fire multiple times. On the other hand (no pun intended), a SHRC could be used in one hand leaving the other hand open to hold a melee weapon, wield a wand, cast a spell, or hold another SHRC (personal fav). I'd make the Repeating and Single Hand abilities modifications that could be applied to an existing crossbow. Each modification would impose certain penalties as a way to offset the rather large benefits gained.


Repeating Modification | +50 gp | Reduce Damage Die by 1 (1d10 -> 1d8 -> 1d6 -> 1d4) | Increase Weight by 50% | Reduce Range by 10/20 |
Single Hand Modification | +100 gp | - | Increase Weight by 50% | - | Requires Repeating Modification; Bestows Disadvantage on attacks until properly trained (see Training under Downtime Activities in PHB) |

Please keep in mind that I completely made these mechanics up on the fly for this post. I understand that the Repeating modification is made redundant by the Crossbow Expert feat, but perhaps a character would rather drop coin in lieu of training (taking a feat). Recall that historically the repeating crossbow was often used by untrained or minimally trained personnel.

Side Note: Why the hand crossbow costs more than the heavy crossbow is a complete mystery. TBH, I'm a little upset at the prices in general, as crossbows are surprisingly easy and cheap to make. I believe this is one of the reasons for their popularity over bows. Just another way game balance is not reflective of real life.

Source (https://www.atarn.org/chinese/rept_xbow.htm) for Repeating function

[ArteF]

I've read about the repeating crossbow before however it seems a bit too much of a drastic addition which is why I didn't go for it. In a sense I'm keeping with simplicity and the repeating crossbow has just a bit too much going on, I mean if you want to suggest that you can go ahead, but I'm talking specifically about the hand crossbow here.

As far as your comparison with other light ranged weapons like a blowgun, I don't see why not either, I'm not saying other light ranged weapons cannot have the same function, the only problem is that there is no blowgun expertise so you still have to deal with blowgun's loading property.

In the case of my suggestion, if the player is a fighter at level 5 with a hand crossbow and do not have the crossbow expertise they would still have to spend an attack action reloading the hand crossbow. Also for clarification and as a reminder, you do not need to attack with the same weapon when using extra attack unless it's the Warlock invocation.

Example:

Round 0: readied hand crossbow (blowgun).
Round 1: Melee attack (unsheathe), Extra Ranged (loaded) (It's best to leave the melee weapon unsheathed here in the case of a provoked AO)
Round 2: Movement (stow), Load, Extra Attack (unsheathe)

Something similar would happen with a blow gun, the only advantage the blowgun would get in this case is that you could be ready for AO's... but honestly why would be at melee with a blowgun?

Edit--- Also I'm not sure if you are aware, but when I say "light" I'm not talking about the items weight but the property of the item. There is litterally a "light" property similar to how their is a "finesse" or "versatile" property and many more. Blowgun itself isn't a light weapon, which comes with the idea that the designers didn't consider it a item that is easy to manipulate in just about any situation.

Case in point the Glaive, that's a pretty darn light weapon based on it's weight but it's considered a "heavy" weapon because it's got a lot of situations where it will be difficult to wield it, it's DM fiat but that's what it is.

[LordEntrails]

Source (https://www.atarn.org/chinese/rept_xbow.htm) for Repeating function

Interesting source, thanks for sharing. Do note that per that description, these crossbows had very light bolts. Also from the images it can be seen that the bolts had no fletching, therefore the range and accuracy must have been pretty poor. Worse I would think than your minus 10/20 on the range. And note, though you certainly don't suggest the rate of fire that article does, it does seem... troublesome and improbable in a combat situation, imo.

As for the special rule suggestion, I don't see it. To me it just seems like a construction to enable a concept that really wouldn't be feasible. i.e. sheathing and drawing a weapon every round to enable someone to load a hand crossbow every round. Not something I would allow as a DM even if it were RAW.

[ArteF]

@LordEntrails

Sorry if you misunderstood but this thread is not about if you'd allow it in your game or not it was about absorbing suggestions on how to make this better or pointing out any clearly game breaking results that I may have missed.

That said I respect that you wouldn't allow such a thing because it wouldn't be feasible, but by what standard wouldn't it be feasible, I'm unsure what you are using as a ruler to decide that, perhaps some exposition might be needed here? I have already explained that exactly what I described is already possible as per the raw, all a person needs to do is carry 6 daggers and 2 short swords, they could drop each weapon every other turn for 9-10 turns depending on if the hand crossbow started loaded and they have the crossbow expertise feat.

If you are using a real world standard to make that issue about feasibility then I'll note that Iaijutsu is all about what I've described and with much longer blades than I'm talking about, of course because I'm unsure what you're using to determine your lack of feasibility statement I can't really attempt to address your concerns and the point of this thread wasn't to either raise or address those kinds of concerns anyway.

[LordEntrails]

I agree, I don't understand the purpose of this thread. Therefore I will withdraw. Hope others are able to help with what you are seeking.

[ArteF]

I agree, I don't understand the purpose of this thread. Therefore I will withdraw. Hope others are able to help with what you are seeking.

Fair enough, on the third line in my opening post I wrote "I am trying to come up with a suggestion I can send to the considerate folks at Wotc and wanted all the pro player and DM opinions that I can find here before I get to find out how game breaking the suggestion is and why it was never applied... assuming they had even thought of it."

That is the point of this thread if that helps.