Is it practical to keep a medieval crossbow loaded?

This is a question that’s occured to me as an rpg player. Since crossbows don’t rely on human muscle to keep the projectile ready to loose, would it be possible to keep one ready for a significant period of time, or am I going too far down the road of treating a crossbow like a funny looking gun? Say I’m a castle guard and I load my crossbow at the start of my shift so I can shoot an intruder as soon as I see him, or a paranoid noble who wants to keep a loaded crossbow by my bed. What problems am I likely to encounter?

Not an expert on crossbows, but I’m guessing that if the bow is wood it would weaken over time and lose power. If it’s metal, not so much.

I think it is certainly possible for a castle guard to load a crossbow at the start of a shift and keep it that way if he anticipates trouble. It will, if done routinely, weaken a wood bow but you have to remember that crossbows take longer to load than regular bows. You kind of have to have them pre-loaded for maximum utility.

Problems with doing this include accidental discharge (some might have been equipped with a crude safety), degredation of the bow over extended periods of time (days, not just an hour or two), jostling of the loaded bolt potentially leading to a jam, and… that’s off the top of my head.

Clearance drill!
Tap, rack, twang!

No more practical or realistic than the archer scenes in movies where the guy holds the Longbow fully drawn for a very long time.

"Ready… aim… hold… hold…
“Um, no boss, it doesn’t work that way. Just tell us when to fire and we’re good.”

Forget the wood losing its spring - I’d expect the cord to stretch out way sooner than that.

Linen cord does not stretch to speak of and can stay stressed for very long periods, wood however is not as forgiving and will gradually take the shape of what it is pulled into. Metal I am sure it would have some effect but not sure how much.

Thinking about it some more, I will routinely leave my all wood bows braced for periods of 4 hours and sometimes more with no real measurable side effects such as loss of draw weight. However I have accidentaly forgotten them braced and leaned up against a wall and over a period of weeks they did weaken greatly. It might be worth the safety of the king just to replace them as needed but stay cocked while on guard.

The OP asked about “loaded”, not just cocked, so: Would the crossbow bolt fall off the crossbow if you carried it in something other than the firing position?

Why are you worried about real life physics in an RPG?

I sometimes contribute to a message board about an RPG-based webcomic. A few times I’ve made the mistake of using real physics in an argument about something in the comic, only to be slapped down by someone more familiar with the RPG’s rules who points out that the rules contradict what I said. So I’ve learned my lesson: RPGs don’t follow real physics (or chemistry, biology, etc.) except maybe by accident.

Yes. The bolt on a period crossbow sits in a shallow groove.

How would that compare to a modern bow made out of, say, fiberglass? I assume it is mostly a function of the material of construction.

For that matter, how much of a technological advantage would you have with an army equipped with modern compound bows? Could you get the ease of a crossbow combined with the speed of a bow?

Because when I GM, I don’t want to break the player’s suspension of disbelief more than strictly necessary:

GM: The guard aims his loaded crossbow at you - “Stop or I shoot!”
Player : Hold on - he wouldn’t have it loaded, the string would go slack too quickly. (or whatever)
Argument ensues

In the words of Detritus the troll, “When mister safety catch is not on, mister crossbow is not your friend”. Problem being, there were no safety catches (that I know of, anyway). I don’t expect there’d be much issue with keeping the bow itself cocked, but no quarrel readied, to cut down on negligent discharges.

Another problem, depending on where exactly you’re pulling guard duty, is rain.

I forget why exactly, but soggy bow strings apparently lose a lot of power/elasticity, to the point where they might even snap right in yer face. Medieval archers would typically march with their bows unstrung and keep their strings under their helmets (as the pocket had yet to be invented) for this reason - but re-stringing an arbalest is a right pain in the arse, so crossbowmen typically wouldn’t. One of the reasons (among many) Crécy turned into a massacre.
Your strung quarrel will also get soggy which impairs flight as well (added weight, soaked fletching, etc…), and if you’re using a wooden bow rather than a metal one it’ll suffer as well.

But injecting real physics into silly RPG mechanics is tons of fun ! It’s what gave birth to the Peasant Rail Gun, for example.
For those who haven’t heard about that gem, it goes like this : one D&D round lasts 6 seconds. Over the course of a round, each protagonist in a fight gets a turn to do something, by order of initiative (but one can delay their turn at will). That thing can, for example, be “handing an item to an adjacent character”, who can in turn hand it to someone else.
So if you line up ten thousand peasants, each occupying a 5 foot square, they can move a brick 50.000 feet in 6 seconds, with the last peasant throwing it at something.

Now, add real life physics for a second to impart that brick with the momentum D&D rules don’t, and you’ve just accelerated a brick to 9.5 miles per second with next to zero effort. If you have spare room, you can even tell your peasants to use their move action and jog 30 feet before handing over the brick, which brings the final toss to over 300 miles per second. Who needs siege engines ? :smiley:

[archipedantic nitpick mode on]
“Loose”, not “fire”.

Compound bows would be a huge advantage. A 50# compound has about the power of a 70# conventional bow or maybe an 85# all wood bow in most cases.
A fiberglass bow can be left strung for years at a time without any loss of power.

Been reading William Tell again?:stuck_out_tongue:

My experience with my own crossbow says not - there is some tension holding everything in place.

It’s not the same as holding a long bow drawn - that requires muscle power. A cross bow is cocked, then stays that way until mechanically triggered so there is no muscle fatigue involved (well, not once you get it loaded - loading them does require enough effort that even in medieval times mechanical aids of various sorts were provided to get the job done).

Cute! Note that the non-moving version can fire one brick every 6 seconds until you run out of bricks. Real rail guns would melt down or otherwise fail rather quickly at that rate.

But of course, this is supporting my point about RPGs and physics.

Not really. Any reasonable interpretation would state that whatever damage the high speed projectile would do to the target would also apply to the peasants being handed the projectile. (due to the relative velocity difference).

This means after just the first few handoffs, the projectile is going fast enough to kill the next peasant in the line.

Yes, it is rather unfair to ignore momentum and kinetic energy for all the handoffs and then apply it at the end of the turn.