Making your own arrows?

[Oryan77]

Bowmaking allows you to craft your own arrows right?

My situation is that I have an Archer player that created such a character that allows him to fight with his bow in range & melee combat, using 2-3 arrows per round. He wasn't keeping track of his arrows properly and I'm making sure he does now.

Now that he realizes how many arrows you use up when you only fight with your bow, he's trying to come up with a way where he'll always be stocked with arrows while adventuring. So he wants to craft his own arrows.

I dont know much about making arrows and I imagine it can take some time for 1 person to search for wood every night, carve it into an arrow, attach feathers to it, and attach arrowheads. How long would it take to do something like this? I think he's expecting to just create a new quiver of arrows every night while they camp.

 

[Land Outcast]

He needs 1d4 hours to find useful pieces of wood for 30 arrows. (my guess)
I assume he does recover the arrowheads.

Then just follow the crafting guidelines.

 

[Ranes]

Don't forget he can recover arrows after a fight. Arrows that miss their target have a 50% chance of being recoverable.

As for fletching arrows on the fly (ugh, sorry), he'll need artisan's tools if he wants to avoid a -2 penalty to his craft roll. No DC is given for making arrows but, if you make it 15 (the same as a bow) and he just makes the check, he can still make 20 arrows in one day (DC15 x 15 = 225cp: 2.25 times the cost of twenty arrows).

A lot of this depends on how much access you grant him to raw materials. Fresh wood, for example, is no good. The arrows need to be created from dry, dead wood. He'll need feathers for flights and he'll need pre-fabricated arrowheads or access to fragments of flint, slate, obsidian or similar stone.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

Forget RAW even after it's been shot arrows or bolts can be reused, just pull them out of the corpse. That's how archers supplied themselves in battle for thousands of years.

 

[Krafen]

Unless the players are really low-level, don't worry about it. Use the breakage/recovery rules for magic arrows and arrows made from special materials. For mundane arrows, just figure he has all he needs.

 

[frankthedm]

The crafting rules cover this. A full day's work makes his Craft Check [bowmaking] x DC in copper peices provided he has at least 1/3 raw materials to work with. If the DC to make an arrow is 10 and he gets a 10 on his craft check, he makes about a gold's worth a day, 20 of them. 5 for two hours work. If he want to make shabby arrows with penalties to hit and damage, that sounds reasonable to make only in downtime.

Arrows are cheap and don't wiegh much at all for heroic characters, if he is too cheap or too scrawny, he deserves to run out.

But really, I don't see how a D&D character won't have a decent suppy of arrows from the foes they fight. A few regiments of humaniod archers always make for a nice arrow refresh after they pepper the party.

 

[hong]

What level is the group?

If high enough, get a portable hole. Fill with 6,000 arrows in sacks. Enjoy!

 

[Felon]

He wasn't keeping track of his arrows properly and I'm making sure he does now. Now that he realizes how many arrows you use up when you only fight with your bow, he's trying to come up with a way where he'll always be stocked with arrows while adventuring. So he wants to craft his own arrows.

Honestly? The impression I'm getting from your post is that he doesn't want to make his own arrows, but rather that your insistance that he account for every arrow he fires put him on the spot. He can either be loaded down with arrows, or craft them in the field, or just expect to run out and not be an archer until he can find some more. D&D's encumbrance table is pretty harsh, at least in respect to the weight they've assigned to some equipment. If DM's actually cracked down on this, a good many rogues and rangers would be crestfallen to discover they are not carrying the light load they think they are.

D&D's designers provide the same patch they provide for most of life's harsh little realities: magic items. Characters are supposed to get bags of holding, handy haversacks, or--in the case of archers--efficient quivers. Then they tote around hundreds of pounds of junk in hammerspace.

 

[hong]

Then they tote around hundreds of pounds of junk in hammerspace.

The spacetime equivalent of hammertime?

 

[frankthedm]

The spacetime equivalent of hammertime?

The extradimensional space where cartoon / anime characters store their 2 handed Greathammers.