Steven Barker
First Post
We had our first combat recently in one of the games I'm playing with, and we had some confusion and debate about how some positional modifiers applied (or didn't) in certain situations.
- Do ranged and melee fighting characters count as "attackers" for each other when considering flanking and crossfire? That is, can an allied melee fighter contribute to a ranged attacker's crossfire bonus if they're at least 90 degrees apart? (The ranged attacker would have a "firing into melee" penalty, but a crossfire bonus, if it applied, would partially offset it.) Can a ranged attacker who's on the opposite side of an enemy give a melee character a flanking bonus? Or do crossfire bonuses only come from other friendly ranged attackers and flanking bonuses only come from other friendly melee attackers?
- How do flanking/crossfire modifiers deal with characters that move after attacking? In our party, one of the characters is a Zetan, so she gets an extra action every turn but can still only move or attack with two actions (if the first two actions were the same, the extra action needs to be used for something different). Often she'd attack twice, then make a move afterwards, and we weren't sure if that changed how the flanking/crossfire bonuses would apply. Should we use her location when she made her attacks, or her position at the time the crossfire was attempted?
- Is there normally a penalty for ranged weapons firing an an adjacent enemy? The "sidearm" weapon trait says that weapons with it "do not suffer a penalty for firing at an adjacent target in melee" (they get a bonus instead), but I don't see any rule actually saying what the penalty is. Is it considered "firing into melee" even if there is no ally involved? How about if the enemy is also using a ranged weapon rather than a melee weapon? (And now I'm envisioning a gun-kata style fight with rifles taking place at melee range, which would be really cool.)
