The Drunken Lizard Pub

Regarding arrows. Rather than waiting for armorers to get them in stock or traveling around to all the shops to gather some up, perhaps if a character has a reasonable Bow skill and a foraging skill he could make some while camping (sort of along the lines of repairing armor).

While there were fletchers whose profession was to manufacture arrows, Part of the job of archers in medieval times was to fashion arrows while in the field. They would also recover arrows after a fight and if practicable reuse and/or refurbish them.

It is likely that some of the arrows that miss or bounce off an opponent during a fight could be recovered. Even some of the arrows that hit should be recoverable. After the ugly dies, some percentage of the arrows shot in a melee could be recovered. The missing ones representing arrows that are actually lost or too damaged to be reused. The number of arrows that are recovered would depend on the characters skill with bows. For example an arrow that causes a critical hit could be unrecoverable (too damaged). As the character's skill went up, the number of arrows that are recoverable might actually go down as more shots would result in better hits and there would be fewer misses.

If the character ran away from a fight then no arrows would be recovered.

My character ended up with a fairly good bow skill and I used the named bow from the ranger in the woods quite a lot. However, later in the game I was expending arrows faster than I could get more. I spent a fair amount of time making the rounds of the weapon shops to get enough arrows to be useful for a trek.

Hey Bob the Thief,

Good ideas, and we've been recommending them pretty much since development of Book II started.

I think the recovering arrows part may have required too many things to keep track of (the program would have to keep track of how many arrows you fired at a particular target and generate a random number from 0 to that number for recovery in the loot). BW already has so many things being tracked that it may have been too much room for error. I'd rather the program stayed lean and stable than bloated and glitchy.

Somewhere around, though, in the recommendation stuff, you'll see that I proposed similarly allowing additional effects for combined skills, like "finding" basic arrows if you have Bow and Foraging skills above a certain level (effectively creating a fletching skill). Similarly, people with thrown weapons should be able to forage at least rocks and jagged rocks (clearly things like darts, throwing knives, and tomahawks are not so easy).

In terms of using up a lot of arrows late in the game, that's odd to me, as once I had Bow skill around 35 (with Warmoth and the pendant), I almost never fired my bow without the Feat, saving me a LOT of arrows. At that point, I started just carrying the high-end arrows around and using those (to further increase the damage from the Feat). I think I finished the game with over 100 still in inventory.

I actually just finished up my first Ranger-type game last night, and the one area of the game where arrows seemed hard to come by was the endgame, because the weapons dealer on Picaroon Isle doesn't stock too many of them (and never the "basic" ones - not that affording the expensive ones was a problem by that point). I actually ended up doing the save/reload trick when he was regenerating, so I could get a decent arrow stock.

Of course, it didn't help that I couldn't go back to Mistfell to buy more, because I had killed everyone (except the guy in Edom, of course) before I left, so there wouldn't have been more stock for me back there, either. And also of course, when I started this playthrough I decided to really exploit what I knew about the game world and had been all the way to Port Kuudad and Durnore before I even bothered killing anything, so obviously the beginning-game arrow supply wasn't a problem.

So perhaps my observations aren't exactly valid. :)