Validating GURPS's ranged model : a GM on the range.

I often wondered what is my skill level in archery. I've been shooting for two years and have seen striking improvements between what the club beginners can do and how I shoot today. Let's crunch the numbers and figure out what is my skill level, and whether this is consistent with GURPS mechanics. I want to specify that I didn't try to make it fit as well as it did: I just threw in values that seemed reasonable from a GM's perspective. This post was inspired by a recent post by +Douglas Cole that can be found here. i once tried the same exercise with AD&D, and it didn't made a lot of sense.


Let's assume that I have a DX 10, which is reasonable and a good assumption in absence of other supporting evidence. I have a good quality, mid-level recurve bow (+0 quality), with a sight and a stabilizer (+2 for both as my dispersion goes from 3" to 8" if I take them off and keep everything else unchanged). I assume that the bow has an intrinsic Accuracy of 3 ( as per basic rules), although it isn't a "longbow". It is, after all, a target shooting/tuned bow. We'll assume that the bonus to be "on the range" is +7.  At 15 yds (-5), I shoot about 50% of my arrows within 3" (-8) of the bull's eye (I eyeball this, my average is around 26/30).

In summary, my modifier for any given shot is: Range (-5), Size (-8), Aiming (+5), Sight/Stabilizer (+2), Quality (+0), "On the range" (+7) = +1 . This means that to have a 50% chance of hitting such target with a +1 modifier, my net skill must be 9. This means DX-1 (or one rank for a DX/A skill), which implies one character point into bow for me. I've been shooting for about 80 hours total, unsupervised by a teacher (not enough to put a second point into it). This makes perfect sense, assuming that the "On the range" bonus is reasonable.

Now, let's consider the newcomers at the club. There are a lot of them since the "Hunger Games", and "Brave", and some other TV series that I don't know much about. A newcomer essentially will be putting 50% of their arrows within 2ft (-4) at 10 yd (-4). Club bows are not as finely tuned, so let's downgrade their Accuracy to 2, but of a normal quality.  In summary: Range (-4), size (-4), Aiming (+4), "On the range" (+7) = +3. The net skill has to be about 7 to get a 50% chance of success, or DX-3. This kind of makes sense because the default for bow is DX-5, and that this levels really applies only for the first few arrows. The world seems to make sense, if anything, the default DX-5 may be a little stiff.

Ma' Girl, shooting a high-density foam wolf.
Heee-haah!

Let's see if this makes sense. Here is a picture of a 3D tournament. For the non-archer in the audience, a 3d shoot involves 20 targets at undisclosed ranges, of various shapes and sizes. The mean target size is 3ft, so let's call it 1 yd (-2), with the "vitals" being size 1ft (-5), and the heart 3" (-8). The ranges in the recurve category are between 15 yd to 30yd (-5 to -7). As I'm not outfitted as a hunter, my sights has only one setting. I think that this degrades the "On the range" setting to +5.

My probabilities of hitting "things" are thus as follow: range (-6), Aiming ( +5 ), Equipment (+2), "On the range" (+5) = +6 without range penalties.

• Animal (-2) : +4 [+9=13], or 83%, 13 arrows * 5pt = 65 
• Vitals (-5) : +1 [+9=10], or 50%, 14 arrows * 8pt = 112
• Heart (-8) : -2 [+9=7], or 16%, 6 arrows * 10 pt = 60

If I tally all of these scores, this gives me a tournament final score of 237. Which is, shockingly, just about what I scored last December (Can't remember the precise score, I think that it was maybe 225 or so)!

In conclusion, I ascribe that in most cases, people's shooting tend to get better largely because equipment upgrading (hunting sights, side-stabilizers, clickers, quality +1 equipment) rather than a progression in character points. I also think that anyone who makes it to DX +1 or above would tend to lose their edge very fast if they stop shooting.