Yes it does. It's called weapon proficiency. The skilled PCs are at +2 for that alone (and typically, a lot of other bonuses due to ability scores, powers, magic items, etc.).
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Firing into Melee
- Thread starter Atreides
- Start date
Yes it does. It's called weapon proficiency. The skilled PCs are at +2 for that alone (and typically, a lot of other bonuses due to ability scores, powers, magic items, etc.).
According to my reading of the 4Ed PHB, every PC class listed is proficient in some kind of ranged weapon.
So the only difference isn't in accuracy- which is what we're discussing- but in damage per successful hit. Which means my point stands.
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Walknot
First Post
Sound like, if you are irripointed by this, could be a good time for a house rule?
Always seemed to me that in 3.5E, a player should be able to drop the -4 for shooting into melee without precise shot, with the addition of an alternative "ally hit chance" or oops-factor. Maybe use 30%; roll your d10 and hope for 4 or up?
Always seemed to me that in 3.5E, a player should be able to drop the -4 for shooting into melee without precise shot, with the addition of an alternative "ally hit chance" or oops-factor. Maybe use 30%; roll your d10 and hope for 4 or up?
Oh, I know I can HR something, but one of the main problems I'm having with 4Ed is that my list of potential HR is already longer than the ones in most of my 3.X campaigns.
The ranger is, thanks to Careful Attack(ranger 1). As far as I'm aware, nobody else can perform a ranged attack with a +2 bonus just because they feel like it.
It's true that 4e allows a cleric to shoot a bow into a melee with the same lack of penalties that a ranger has. This is part of the new notion that the game doesn't have to make sense all the time (since it has never done so anyway). It only has to make sense when we're watching.
For example, minions should be afraid to leave the house- what if they stub their toes and lose a hit point? But this is the wrong way to look at it. Minions have 1 hit point when they're in a fight we're watching, not when they're burning down villages and murdering innocent people.
Or consider a fight between a level 20 warlord and a level 3 goblin. The mighty warlord can't kill the pathetic goblin with a single at-will attack. This seems crazy until you realize that the system was made so fights worked well when combatants were close in level. There is no good reason to have this fight, so the system doesn't care how well it works.
The "Free Ranged Feats for Everyone" notion is the same. Characters that are good at ranged attacks all choose certain feats. OK, let's make those feats automatic. Characters that suck at ranged attacks don't make ranged attacks more than once in a great while. Should we write a new feat that half the classes get for free just so we can include a rule to penalize melee characters for those corner case moments when their best action is a ranged attack? No- it's just rules bloat.
Melee classes choose to make melee attacks overwhelmingly often. As they level up and their main ability scores continue to diverge from their unimportant ability scores, ranged attacks become less and less valuable. In other words, the penalty for using these attacks keeps growing because the bonus for using your main attacks grows faster. Further, melee classes are usually stuck making basic attacks at range. Even if they have weapons that emphasize strength over dexterity, their ranged attacks are pretty marginal.
For classes that dabble in ranged abilities, such as rogues, penalties on ranged attacks force them into one optimal action. Instead of saying, "Hmm, if I move here I can throw a dagger at that dazed guy. Or I can move here and flank this other guy. What's better?" the player says, "Well, the dazed guy is in melee with my ally intervening, so rather than attack at -8, I'll just flank someone and sneak attack, like I do every turn."
In general, the only thing that makes the current rules bad in this case is that they don't look realistic. But they end up performing just fine. Melee characters already have tremendous disincentives against ranged attacks. Why cripple them completely?
For example, minions should be afraid to leave the house- what if they stub their toes and lose a hit point? But this is the wrong way to look at it. Minions have 1 hit point when they're in a fight we're watching, not when they're burning down villages and murdering innocent people.
Or consider a fight between a level 20 warlord and a level 3 goblin. The mighty warlord can't kill the pathetic goblin with a single at-will attack. This seems crazy until you realize that the system was made so fights worked well when combatants were close in level. There is no good reason to have this fight, so the system doesn't care how well it works.
The "Free Ranged Feats for Everyone" notion is the same. Characters that are good at ranged attacks all choose certain feats. OK, let's make those feats automatic. Characters that suck at ranged attacks don't make ranged attacks more than once in a great while. Should we write a new feat that half the classes get for free just so we can include a rule to penalize melee characters for those corner case moments when their best action is a ranged attack? No- it's just rules bloat.
Melee classes choose to make melee attacks overwhelmingly often. As they level up and their main ability scores continue to diverge from their unimportant ability scores, ranged attacks become less and less valuable. In other words, the penalty for using these attacks keeps growing because the bonus for using your main attacks grows faster. Further, melee classes are usually stuck making basic attacks at range. Even if they have weapons that emphasize strength over dexterity, their ranged attacks are pretty marginal.
For classes that dabble in ranged abilities, such as rogues, penalties on ranged attacks force them into one optimal action. Instead of saying, "Hmm, if I move here I can throw a dagger at that dazed guy. Or I can move here and flank this other guy. What's better?" the player says, "Well, the dazed guy is in melee with my ally intervening, so rather than attack at -8, I'll just flank someone and sneak attack, like I do every turn."
In general, the only thing that makes the current rules bad in this case is that they don't look realistic. But they end up performing just fine. Melee characters already have tremendous disincentives against ranged attacks. Why cripple them completely?
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No, your main problem is that you are unwilling to accept the game system as a different game system with different core assumptions.
When one goes to see an Iron Man movie, one doesn't bitch that the bullets just bounced off his armor and do not impart kinetic energy to him and knock him back, so it's not realistic.
If you are going to complain that every rule is not like 3E, then guess what? They aren't.
In our campaign, we have two house rules:
1) Close Blast can be either square or cone shaped, caster decides.
2) We changed the economic system because it is so astronomical.
The game plays just fine with two or even zero house rules. Granted, it's a "1.0" version of a game system and there are typos and other minor glitches (plus the skill challenge major glitch), but those will be sorted out for the most part eventually, and many of them will be errataed.
But, the only reason you have a laundry list of house rules (in both game systems) is because you want to. Nobody is forcing you to be so critical or to not like the game system, that is your choice.
Shabe
First Post
You guys need to do more LRP if you do want a "realistic" (note how the word is incased in ironic quotation marks) view on how firing into melee works.
When people are fighting they are not constantly standing toe to toe with each other hands around each others throats, within a round (6 seconds) you will probably be trading 2/3 blows with each other before backing off to size up your opponent (hence 5ft square spaces) at which point the archer can easily get a shot in, and these are with arrows that have heads 3 inches wide and on a bow with a weak 35-45lb draw (doesn't make them go very fast).
Or in other words, yes its easy to get a shot into melee.
If you are standing but 5ft to the side the angle provided will make it even easier that you won't have to even wait for them to stop trading blows.
This is both a nitpick and an ironic comment on questions of realism... but bullets would not knock Iron Man back to any appreciable degree. Bullets in real life don't throw people around the way they do in the movies; and Iron Man is wearing a suit of powered armor which is presumably many times heavier than Tony Stark's meat body. Any firearm packing enough punch to knock Iron Man around would have so much recoil that the shooter would be hurled back into last week.
This is why complaints of "This rule isn't realistic!" need to be taken with a big grain of salt.
Fair enough- Rangers get a bonus.
And if I want to play a non-Ranger sniper, I'm still screwed in 4Ed.
In 3.X, OTOH, I have many options.
Not at all.
I have owned over 100 RPGs in my time (and even did some playtesting), currently down to around 60 or so. Each has different assumptions and mechanics.
My problem is that I dislike 4Ed's assumptions.
Actually, I have almost no mechanical 3.X HRs. For the most part, the only ones I have are campaign specific ones like "X" race, class, or PrCl doesn't exist in this campaign because it isn't appropriate for the setting.
4Ed? For me to be satisfied- not to mention the players in my group (all of whom have examined the game)- I'd have to HR firing into melee, alignment, marking, martial dailies, the skill system, multiclassing, designing classes & races that are absent, and a host of other things that escape me at this moment.
Heck, there are even threads here about how bad the math is in the skill challenge system is- there's already official errata on that. You'd think they'd get the math right before publishing. ( http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?t=236190 )
Like I said, 4Ed doesn't do what I like.
Actually, most rounds don't cause much in the way of knockback. You might fall down, but you're not going to be knocked off your feet by most shots. That's largely a cinematic invention.
In addition, given that Iron Man's mass is somewhere around 450+lbs when fully armored (Source: Marvel Universe) in a suit with impact-diffusing layers (like you see in RW body armor), you'd see as much knockback from hitting him with a standard (ie, not artillery or a sci-fi round) as you'd see if you shot a wall. He might shrug, yes, but he wouldn't be forced backwards at all.
It is easy to shoot into melee. It is difficult to hit what you're aiming for in melee.
I'm posting from someone else's computer right now, but I actually have some statistical data to the contrary, including data on Go/No-Go reaction times in humans, somewhere around .35 seconds for untrained individuals (IOW, not a sniper or pro-level athlete). It takes about .25 seconds for an arrow to cover 60 feet (around .45 seconds for a thrown projectile going 90 mph).
That gives you about .4 seconds of wiggle room for firing an arrow into combat at 60ft, .2 for a thrown projectile. Hesitate, and your ally may be pincushioned. (Half the distance- typical D&D "point-blank" range- and you get twice the wiggle room, naturally.)
Factor in (as Go/No-Go research data does) focusing on multiple variables (like multiple targets, some of whom may be targeting you), health & stress level of the tested individual, and even mechanical differences between one weapon and another (some of the data deals with rifles & their trigger weight, projectiles, and bows) can boost those reaction times as much as 50%.
...Meaning that the wiggle room an untrained person has firing into melee at 60 feet is essentially nil, and at 30 feet, it may be as little as .2 seconds, even with an arrow.
Pro athletes and snipers, OTOH, routinely drop their Go/No-Go reaction times to under .15 sec.
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