Martin Greywolf
2021-04-20, 05:46 AM
What do we have here?
This is a rework of the sling's stats, aiming to bring it closer to how the actual weapon works. While I'll be using DnD5 for things like damage numbers and so forth, raw data here, i.e. weights and ranges, can be used in other systems as well.
The data here is based on a host of things, primary sources being Vegetius and Xenophon and their accounts of military slings, as well as archaeological work done in Mediterranean, Egypt Bulgaria and Polynesia. Supplementary sources are modern slinging, whether as sport or as a research topic. I have about a dozen academic articles squirreled away on this topic, if anyone is interested, send a PM my way.
I'll use spoiler tags to hide musings on historical data and pictures.
And yes, I can sling myself, althought not all that well. Yet.
Who is this for?
Basic stats rework is for all games, really. Some of the additional things, like speialist ammunition is probably not that good for your average DnD game, but can be pretty useful if you are trying to run a game in bronze age or ancient setting.
Since slings are bio-degradable, they are rarely left behind. That means we have only the ammunition to serve as evidence, and since the ammo can be plain rocks, that can be hard to identify, especially if the archaeologist in question is not looking for it. Hell, even actual slings have been mis-identified as belts on occassion.
From what we know, sling has been in use since 6000-10000 BC, depending on who you ask, and was used pretty much all over the world at some point. The details are subject to fierce debate, and we really don't have the time to go into specifics here.
Sling - basic stats
Sling itself is pretty uninteresting. Its weight is far too small to track, it can be easily concealed as a piece of string, and can, indeed, be made out of a piece of string in under a minute. You can even make one out of a strip of fabric. Different types of slings behave differently in reality, but the difference tends to be far too small to matter for our purposes.
https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/10050/1000
Sling is a difficult weapon to use - if you don't have some training, you are likely to send rocks backwards. Therefore, there are two ways of gaining ability to use it.
First way is the simplest, sling is a martial ranged weapon. This is serviceable, but doesn't reflect the fact of slings often being weapons of shepherds and farmers. Therefore, second way of gaining sling proficiency is through your background - if you were a farmer, shepherd or other rural worker before your life of adventuring, you can use the sling. These two ways can be used at the same time or spearately, as you wish.
It takes an absurdly long time to get good with a sling. After 6 months of daily practices of ~45 minutes, I'm still not at what we have here as base proficiency. You can achieve this proficiency with a bow in roughly 30 minutes. Historial texts mentioning slingers usually also mention them being trained from childhood, not unlike what we see in middle ages with English longbowmen.
That said, making this realistic in game would mean only people with sling backgrounds would ever touch the weapon, which is not fun for the rest. If you really want to, you can make sling an exotic weapon, requiring background or a feat to use, but I suspect very few people would take such a feat.
Probably the best feature of the sling for budding adventurers is that it is a one handed weapon, and can therefore be used with a shield, should you wish to do so. It can also be used off of horseback.
The sling uses dexterity modifier for its atack and damage.
Sling ammunition
The range and damage of the sling depends on the ammunition it uses. There are three basic ammunition types: stones, glandes and darts. Stones and glandes can be large or small. It the list below, the projectiles are listed in the format of projectile - weight in grams - damage - range in meters - description.
Small stone - 50 g - 1d6 bludgeoning - 20/90 - a small, egg-shaped stone you are likely to find near any riverbed
Large stone - 400 g - 1d8 bludgeoning - 10/45 - a rock of the size of your fist, or slightly larger
Small glandes - 30 g - 1d8 bludgeoning - 50/200 - a projectile made of lead, shaped like an american football ball, about the size of your thumb
Large glandes - 150 g - 2d4 bludgeoning - 25/100 - as above, but significantly larger, just about fits into the palm of your hand
Sling dart - 150 g - 1d4 piercing - 70/250 - a dart about the length of your forearm
https://www.photocase.com/photos/1067237-stones-stony-riverbed-pebbles-beach-sand-round-gray-photocase-stock-photo-large.jpeg
I'm sure all of you can visualize what a stone looks like, for slinging, you want ones looking like this. It's not coincidental they are as close in shape to glandes as you can find.
http://www.collector-antiquities.com/typo3temp/pics/184a656a9d.jpg
Roman lead glandes, with pictures - they often have inscriptions, ranging from solemn to one that expressed hope that a given glandes would find its way right up someone's behind.
There are no finds of darts, but reconstruction that is IMO closest to the original thing can be seen in action here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9gGK1hchB8).
If you are tracking ammunition use, small and large stones can be restocked pretty much anywhere that has stones on the ground, which is most places. Glandes and darts, on the other hand, need to be manufactured by someone who knows what they are doing, and can therefore only be restocked in towns. The prices of glandes would be pretty low, maybe 1/5 that of an arrow, dart would cost about a half.
Yeah, this is a very simplified rundown. The types of projectiles I ommited entirely are baked clay balls, lead balls and round rocks. All of these can be used, but are a bit too close to performance to those listed above to bother with for a tabletop.
The damage has beed scaled to be comparable to a longbow, which seems to be about right when consulting Xenophon and Vegetius, ranges have been taken from them as well, but I cut those in half. The reason behind that is the feat you are about to see, and my own experience - I can sling a baseball ball (150 g) to about 80 meters at my almost-proficient level.
As for the projectile weight, they are in a range, spanning from 30 grams all the way to 2 kg in the real world, with most falling into the 30-150 gram range. Weights listed above are a allpark average estimate.
These standard ammunition types aside, you can also sling anything that fits into a small jar out of a sling, the popular option being alchemist's fire and holy water. In all of these cases, a sling extends the range of these weapons to 80 meters.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c1/91/e9/c191e97e0a9321b82837e78a69ac13ba.jpg
A feat to spice it up - Flawless slinger
Prerequisites: can use the sling, dexterity bonus at least +1
Maybe you practiced with the sling from your early childhood, maybe you just really doubled down on practicing after you began adventuring - no matter the method, the outsome is clear. Your technique is almost flawless, your precision unmatched - you can hit a hair from 200 paces, you can knock a bread off of a stick at all times of day and night, and while your sling projectiles don't quite have the force of a musket ball, they aren't that far from it.
All the sling projectiles have double range for you, and the standard five have their damage dice increased one step (1d8, 1d10, 1d10, 2d6, 1d6).
Yeah, as mentioned above, these are ranges given by Vegetius and Xenophon, 180 meters for stones, 400 for glandes. What's more important is that these are matched today, with longest stone throw being at 385 meters and longest sling shot with a dart at over 500. If anything, the ranges here are conservative.
That means that slingers do, as they did in reality, outrange archers, as well as outdamage them. Since the DnD longbow is representative of 110 lbs warbows, this is pretty spot on with historical records. Besides, you have to take a feat to get there, which reflects that only the very best slingers can have this level of power and range.
And the flavor description is in reference to most famous historical slinger proficiency accounts: Benjamites (slinging within a hair's breadth), Balearic slingers (trained children by not letting them eat until knocking bread off of a stick) and Peruvian slingers (European chroniclers comparing sling wounds to musket wounds).
This is a rework of the sling's stats, aiming to bring it closer to how the actual weapon works. While I'll be using DnD5 for things like damage numbers and so forth, raw data here, i.e. weights and ranges, can be used in other systems as well.
The data here is based on a host of things, primary sources being Vegetius and Xenophon and their accounts of military slings, as well as archaeological work done in Mediterranean, Egypt Bulgaria and Polynesia. Supplementary sources are modern slinging, whether as sport or as a research topic. I have about a dozen academic articles squirreled away on this topic, if anyone is interested, send a PM my way.
I'll use spoiler tags to hide musings on historical data and pictures.
And yes, I can sling myself, althought not all that well. Yet.
Who is this for?
Basic stats rework is for all games, really. Some of the additional things, like speialist ammunition is probably not that good for your average DnD game, but can be pretty useful if you are trying to run a game in bronze age or ancient setting.
Since slings are bio-degradable, they are rarely left behind. That means we have only the ammunition to serve as evidence, and since the ammo can be plain rocks, that can be hard to identify, especially if the archaeologist in question is not looking for it. Hell, even actual slings have been mis-identified as belts on occassion.
From what we know, sling has been in use since 6000-10000 BC, depending on who you ask, and was used pretty much all over the world at some point. The details are subject to fierce debate, and we really don't have the time to go into specifics here.
Sling - basic stats
Sling itself is pretty uninteresting. Its weight is far too small to track, it can be easily concealed as a piece of string, and can, indeed, be made out of a piece of string in under a minute. You can even make one out of a strip of fabric. Different types of slings behave differently in reality, but the difference tends to be far too small to matter for our purposes.
https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/10050/1000
Sling is a difficult weapon to use - if you don't have some training, you are likely to send rocks backwards. Therefore, there are two ways of gaining ability to use it.
First way is the simplest, sling is a martial ranged weapon. This is serviceable, but doesn't reflect the fact of slings often being weapons of shepherds and farmers. Therefore, second way of gaining sling proficiency is through your background - if you were a farmer, shepherd or other rural worker before your life of adventuring, you can use the sling. These two ways can be used at the same time or spearately, as you wish.
It takes an absurdly long time to get good with a sling. After 6 months of daily practices of ~45 minutes, I'm still not at what we have here as base proficiency. You can achieve this proficiency with a bow in roughly 30 minutes. Historial texts mentioning slingers usually also mention them being trained from childhood, not unlike what we see in middle ages with English longbowmen.
That said, making this realistic in game would mean only people with sling backgrounds would ever touch the weapon, which is not fun for the rest. If you really want to, you can make sling an exotic weapon, requiring background or a feat to use, but I suspect very few people would take such a feat.
Probably the best feature of the sling for budding adventurers is that it is a one handed weapon, and can therefore be used with a shield, should you wish to do so. It can also be used off of horseback.
The sling uses dexterity modifier for its atack and damage.
Sling ammunition
The range and damage of the sling depends on the ammunition it uses. There are three basic ammunition types: stones, glandes and darts. Stones and glandes can be large or small. It the list below, the projectiles are listed in the format of projectile - weight in grams - damage - range in meters - description.
Small stone - 50 g - 1d6 bludgeoning - 20/90 - a small, egg-shaped stone you are likely to find near any riverbed
Large stone - 400 g - 1d8 bludgeoning - 10/45 - a rock of the size of your fist, or slightly larger
Small glandes - 30 g - 1d8 bludgeoning - 50/200 - a projectile made of lead, shaped like an american football ball, about the size of your thumb
Large glandes - 150 g - 2d4 bludgeoning - 25/100 - as above, but significantly larger, just about fits into the palm of your hand
Sling dart - 150 g - 1d4 piercing - 70/250 - a dart about the length of your forearm
https://www.photocase.com/photos/1067237-stones-stony-riverbed-pebbles-beach-sand-round-gray-photocase-stock-photo-large.jpeg
I'm sure all of you can visualize what a stone looks like, for slinging, you want ones looking like this. It's not coincidental they are as close in shape to glandes as you can find.
http://www.collector-antiquities.com/typo3temp/pics/184a656a9d.jpg
Roman lead glandes, with pictures - they often have inscriptions, ranging from solemn to one that expressed hope that a given glandes would find its way right up someone's behind.
There are no finds of darts, but reconstruction that is IMO closest to the original thing can be seen in action here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9gGK1hchB8).
If you are tracking ammunition use, small and large stones can be restocked pretty much anywhere that has stones on the ground, which is most places. Glandes and darts, on the other hand, need to be manufactured by someone who knows what they are doing, and can therefore only be restocked in towns. The prices of glandes would be pretty low, maybe 1/5 that of an arrow, dart would cost about a half.
Yeah, this is a very simplified rundown. The types of projectiles I ommited entirely are baked clay balls, lead balls and round rocks. All of these can be used, but are a bit too close to performance to those listed above to bother with for a tabletop.
The damage has beed scaled to be comparable to a longbow, which seems to be about right when consulting Xenophon and Vegetius, ranges have been taken from them as well, but I cut those in half. The reason behind that is the feat you are about to see, and my own experience - I can sling a baseball ball (150 g) to about 80 meters at my almost-proficient level.
As for the projectile weight, they are in a range, spanning from 30 grams all the way to 2 kg in the real world, with most falling into the 30-150 gram range. Weights listed above are a allpark average estimate.
These standard ammunition types aside, you can also sling anything that fits into a small jar out of a sling, the popular option being alchemist's fire and holy water. In all of these cases, a sling extends the range of these weapons to 80 meters.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c1/91/e9/c191e97e0a9321b82837e78a69ac13ba.jpg
A feat to spice it up - Flawless slinger
Prerequisites: can use the sling, dexterity bonus at least +1
Maybe you practiced with the sling from your early childhood, maybe you just really doubled down on practicing after you began adventuring - no matter the method, the outsome is clear. Your technique is almost flawless, your precision unmatched - you can hit a hair from 200 paces, you can knock a bread off of a stick at all times of day and night, and while your sling projectiles don't quite have the force of a musket ball, they aren't that far from it.
All the sling projectiles have double range for you, and the standard five have their damage dice increased one step (1d8, 1d10, 1d10, 2d6, 1d6).
Yeah, as mentioned above, these are ranges given by Vegetius and Xenophon, 180 meters for stones, 400 for glandes. What's more important is that these are matched today, with longest stone throw being at 385 meters and longest sling shot with a dart at over 500. If anything, the ranges here are conservative.
That means that slingers do, as they did in reality, outrange archers, as well as outdamage them. Since the DnD longbow is representative of 110 lbs warbows, this is pretty spot on with historical records. Besides, you have to take a feat to get there, which reflects that only the very best slingers can have this level of power and range.
And the flavor description is in reference to most famous historical slinger proficiency accounts: Benjamites (slinging within a hair's breadth), Balearic slingers (trained children by not letting them eat until knocking bread off of a stick) and Peruvian slingers (European chroniclers comparing sling wounds to musket wounds).