D&D 5E Cover: Who Has It?

[Joddy37]

I agree with doctorhook. Being adjacent (max 5ft away) to the cover does matter. Because you can reach around and shoot without penalty. You cannot do that if the obstacle is more that 5ft away from you, so your target gets cover benefit also.
[MENTION=53176]Leatherhead[/MENTION]

Moving out - shooting - moving in may not work well against foes that ready their action to you.

 

[Leatherhead]

Moving out - shooting - moving in may not work well against foes that ready their action to you.

I thought about that, then I realized that it would be silly for the enemy to do so: You can only ready an action that can fit into the time of a reaction, which would leave the enemy wide open to retaliation without a move to get out of the firing squad squad line. Yeah, they get one clean shot, but revive one shot for each ranged PC in return.
It would be much more tactical for any ranged enemy to do the same thing as the PC's in this case. Just pop up, shoot, duck to cover. Kind of like a "modern" FPS or old trench warfare.

 

[baradtgnome]

The player says the sorcerer's attack shouldn't be penalized because it's "like ducking around a tree trunk,"

Well if the paladin will stand as still as a tree trunk, and be as easy to hit with a ranged weapon as a tree trunk, then I would grant it. Otherwise, as was noted above, the paladin is moving and there is some difficulty in shooting around him.

We have kept things simple and ruled creature cover is cover regardless of which direction and how close you are to the creature. (obviously there will be corner cases where this makes no sense). I think if you start making exceptions to that, you could be creating complexity or rules that might favor the player characters over the opponents.

When a player steps out from behind a tree in the forest, are they using movement to move to another square? Or are you just allowing them to shoot from behind the tree? Do they have full cover whenever they are not shooting because they have ducked back? Do you allow them to see if they do so? Those questions may seem unrelated, but you can see how a player might go down this line of questions is you start to make exceptions to the straight forward creature cover rule.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

For sheer simplicity's sake there are precious few times I would allow characters to be cover for other characters. In some cases (a character being held tight with a knife to their throat), I might. But the system is not meant to be a true-to-life tactical simulator, rather an armature for telling heroic stories. Use it that way.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I apply the -2 for partial cover both ways whenever the source of cover is a creature. Everyone in combat is moving so even someone adjacent to you isn't going to negate the cover penalty.

Most PC groups are extreme skirmish scale, each individual fighting as such. How could they NOT be with individual turns each combatant doing whatever strikes his/her fancy on their own turn. That is not how a disciplined fighting unit operates at all. A unit fights as one, and everyone does their assigned duty and knows that the fighter beside them will be doing the same. As a precision unit, a group can fight together and take adventage of multiple ranks without getting in each other's way. Individuality and personal freedom need to be sacrificed for the good of the unit, and most players want to do their own thing because its more fun.

The cost of that fun is a cover penalty.

 

[jayoungr]

When a player steps out from behind a tree in the forest, are they using movement to move to another square? Or are you just allowing them to shoot from behind the tree?

They haven't tried hiding behind trees so far, but if I don't allow them to shoot from behind the tree, isn't that back to eliminating the attractiveness of a front and back row of fighters? Doesn't it mean that any creature that ever takes cover has to attack at a penalty?

Not saying this is not the way to go--I have to think about whether it is. But I definitely want to think through the implications before I make a ruling.

Do they have full cover whenever they are not shooting because they have ducked back? Do you allow them to see if they do so?

Hypothetically, I would say half cover unless it's a huge tree. Only half the body has to be blocked for half cover, and it seems reasonable to me that a person could attack and see in that case.