Revenge of the Sling [PEACH]

[Cieyrin]

So from reading this thread over in the roleplaying forums, I felt inspired to bring back the staff sling, as well as a feat for faster sling reloading.

Simple Weapons

	Cost	Dmg (S)	Dmg (M)	Critical	Range Increment	Weight	Type
Staff Sling	-	1d8	1d10	x2	80 ft.	4 lb.	Bludgeoning
Bullets, Staff Sling (10)	1 sp	-	-	-	-	5 lb.	-

Staff Sling: A staff sling is just that: a long stick with a sling on the end. This simple weapon lets you use the full force of both arms to throw large lead bullets, rocks the size of a halfling's head or any number of alchemical flasks. You apply 1.5 times the character's Strength bonus to damage. You must use both hands to fire and load a staff sling. It takes a full round action to reload a staff sling, which provokes an attack of opportunity.

You can hurl ordinary stones with a staff sling, but stones are not as dense or as round as bullets. Thus, such an attack deals damage as if the weapon were designed for a creature one size category smaller than you and you take a -1 penalty on attack rolls.

You can hurl alchemical flasks with a staff sling, using the staff sling's range increment instead of the flask's range increment.

Finally, you may use the staff sling as a quarterstaff for melee purposes.

Bullets, Staff Sling: Bullets come in a leather pouch that holds 10 bullets. A bullet that hits its target is destroyed; one that misses has a 50% chance of being destroyed or lost.
NOTE: I'm aware that this is the same weight of normal sling bullets, as according to the PHB. It's of my opinion that normal sling bullets are vastly overweighed, given they historically weighed around an ounce, so a simplification for normal sling bullets' weight is putting them at about 1 lb. to the 10 of them and reducing their cost to 2 cp.

Now, for the feat.

Rapid Slinging[General]
You're practiced at using slings, so you are able to more rapidly reload and fire your sling.
Prerequisites: Weapon Proficiency(sling or staff sling).
Benefits: The time required for you to reload a sling is reduced to a free action or a move action for a staff sling. Reloading a sling or staff sling still provokes an attack of opportunity.
When firing a sling, you may fire that weapon as many times in a full attack action as you could attack if you were using a bow.
Normal: A character without this feat needs a move action to reload a sling, or a full-round action to reload a staff sling.
Special: A fighter may select Rapid Slinging as one of his fighter bonus feats.
NOTE: Yes, this is Rapid Reload for slings, minus choosing a sling to do it with, as I don't think it's that game breaking when there are only 2 slings currently (3 if you count the Halfling Warsling, which would also benefit from this feat). If you disagree, feel free to comment.

So, there it is. Comments are welcome. Tell me why you think this is awesome or why this is horridly broken for a simple weapon, as long as you provide support for your supposition, as baseless grumblings doesn't really help me or anyone else in making this better.

[AstralFire]

If I'm not mistaken, a staffsling looks to be basically an atlatl. Rather than making it rapid reloady which doesn't make much sense for how the weapon works, I'd make it work as a two handed weapon for Power Attack.

It should be a martial weapon in its ranged form.

[Cieyrin]

But how is Power Attack applicable to ranged attacks, given Power Attack only affects melee attacks?

Also, if you look at its stats, it's about the same as a heavy crossbow in terms of damage and reload, making it on par for a simple weapon. I don't think the alchemical launching necessarily pushes it into martial range, either, really.

[AstralFire]

Originally Posted by Cieyrin

But how is Power Attack applicable to ranged attacks, given Power Attack only affects melee attacks?

Also, if you look at its stats, it's about the same as a heavy crossbow in terms of damage and reload, making it on par for a simple weapon. I don't think the alchemical launching necessarily pushes it into martial range, either, really.

Martial was with my suggestion.

And right, I was busy thinking in the magical world where archery and thrown weapons would actually be somewhat worth it if they could be power attacked with, without exotic class features or strange web enhancement weapons.

(Why is it harder to throw a rock really hard than it is to hit someone with a sword really hard?)

[Cieyrin]

Well, thrown weapons have Brutal Throw and Power Throw from Complete Adventurer, which I could make the Staff Sling compatible with, I suppose.

As for it being atlatl-like, I did have a look at it briefly in Sandstorm before deciding that they underpowered it, considering it's basically a marital sling that does piercing and costs and weighs more.

[AstralFire]

A marital sling, hm? A husband-powered weapon could be pretty brutal.

And I wasn't even aware they'd published an atlatl weapon, I was just asking because the amount of damage you can do in one hurl with an atlatl from a trained and fit user is huge, hence my original suggestions.

[Cieyrin]

Yeah, the atlatl could have been good if they'd built it off of normal javelins but no, they thought it would be unbalancing, so they made it suck instead. 1d4/x3 Piercing w/ a 50' range increment doesn't do it for me w/ a martial weapon.

Ah well, we got the Eagle Claw, Great Scimitar and Falchion out of Sandstorm too, so it wasn't all bad for new weapons, I suppose.

[Jergmo]

Yes, but a crossbow doesn't give you a strength bonus. A sling does.

[Cieyrin]

They're both simple weapons w/ reload times, one of which was previously unmitigatable. Slings allowed full strength, Crossbows offered superior range and crit range. You could also fire both with one hand, if you care to know. The main thing was the reload preventing Rapid Shot, Manyshot and full attacks.

The staff sling (which may lose access to Rapid Slinging, if there's further argument in that direction) just follow the natural progression of using both your hands to swing it like a hand-powered catapult, which is what it is, really. Hence why 1.5 Strength bonus to damage is applied, as it's the same motion as swinging your greataxe or other large implement of making people bleed.

[Shpadoinkle]

In my games the stats for a "sling" in the PHB are used for slingshots. Since hunting slingshots are capable of bringing down small game like rabbits and squirrels, and aren't exceptionally difficult to become proficient with, that works fine.

I re-statted ACTUAL slings like this.

Exotic ranged, 1d10/1d12 X3, 1 GP, 100' range, neg. weight, bludgeoning, treated as thrown weapons. Firing a sling only requires one hand but reloading it requires two, and is a move-equivalent action.

Normal stones can be used as ammunition, but have half range and deal 1d6/1d8 damage, and the slinger takes -2 to his attack rolls.

Because of the amount of room required to fire a sling, the slinger must have two unoccupied squares adjacent to him, on opposite sides of his square.

[Cieyrin]

I don't know about slingshots, given the lack of truly elastic materials being available and those that were available probably were prohibitively expensive to make such things common, let along making them a simple weapon.

As for your normal slings, I could see that as being functionally sound, except for the 2 squares of space to fire, as we know that people certainly don't take up all the space in a 5 foot square and slings, given they could be used as a headband or wristband, don't need 10 feet of space to operate in. Historically, slingers could be put into close order with each other to make a rain of stones or lead, much like bowmen can, so they certainly didn't need that much space.

The range seems closer to historically accurate, given the distance you could cover with a launched bullet from one. Also making them exotic makes sense as well, given the famous slingers of old had years of practice from childhood on to get the lethal accuracy that they were known for.

Finally, I'm not sure about normal stones as ammo dropping the range and damage so dramatically. They certainly weren't as aerodynamic or dense as a lead bullet but performance didn't drop THAT much. I'd drop damage one size category, -1 to attack and maybe drop range 10'-20', certainly not in half.

Them's my 2 coppers. Take as you will.