CLOK BBS

So several of us were talking about firearms, crossbows, and generalized archery this evening on discord. Revolvers and pnuematics also had some comments added to them. The basis of the discussion largely revolved around how slow it would be to skill up crossbows as opposed to any other ranged weapon, being their own skill with long roundtimes. There's no way to efficiently train up crossbows, like there is with all the other types of ranged weapons on the basis of round time alone. There is room for the discussion to go either way, really. Crossbows are incredibly powerful weapons and take considerable time to reload. On the other hand, it would take considerably longer to train them up, or keep up with other ranged users.

In discussing this, we came up with a compromise that included Revolvers and Pnuematics. Since crossbows, revolvers and pnuematics all operate under much different skillsets than your traditional flintlock technology or bow and arrow, what if we coined them as "Exotic" weapons, sort of the opposite of "Improvised" and tied them all to their base skills (I.e. Archery for crossbows and firearms for the others)? In doing so it'd streamline training with all the ranged weapons, putting them in similar places across the board. HOWEVER, to effectively use these more exotic pieces, it requires a specialization for it. LIke improvised, anyone can use them at a large penalty and if someone wants to use them to their full potential, they can take a specialized ability for them to negate that penalty.

The other option that was brought up is a skill requirement for crossbows, revolvers and pnuematics (with them still being tied to archery and firearms, respectively) that once met, negates SOME of the penalty for using them untrained. To negate all of the penalty, one would have to take a specialization for them that instead grants a positive, whatever that might end up looking like.

Thoughts?

Edited to add: This began with a discussion about muskets being similar in round time and damage to crossbows, but relying on the same skill as other firearms. Meaning one could feasibly train to use them with a 4 second RT pistol (3 for loading, 1 for firing) whereas crossbows can ONLY be trained up by using crossbows with a 10 second roundtime (I'm not sure this is accurate, but it what was said I think)

Crossbows take about 7 seconds to reload and fire. 6 if you don't aim. You can think of it like using a longbow, but with the load and fire times broken into two stages. They're not that difficult to train up. However, some lighter faster options like hand crossbows would be welcome I think. I think crossbows were initially made their own skill because they were far more rare. There weren't even any trainers for them. It kind of made sense back then.

I'm not a fan of moving crossbows into archery personally. I don't have any interest in using bows. If there were an exotics system put into place, I'd also expect it to affect various melee weapons as well. Weapons like the falx, falcata, khopesh, and kukri. Personally I'm fine with how things are. I'd like to see hand-crossbows be a thing though.