Dungeon crawls = narrow hallway combat & door jam combats, ugh!

[Scorpio616]

Here's a 3.5 rules question that popped up recently... Ranged attacking through a narrow, cluttered battlefield... are there rules to Cover and Concealment that apply to targets that lie 10'+ beyond a line of active combatants? Are they considered cover or are they clear targets?

Thanks folks!

Cover. If Range attacks or Ranged Touch attacks pass through anything's space, generally there is cover granted.

If the target is in melee with an enemy, then there is also the firing into melee penalty.

Shooting at someone fighting your buddy, while being behind your buddy is 8 points harder than shooting at an open target. Your shot gets -4 to hit because you are shooting into a melee, the target gets +4 AC from cover from being behind your buddy{relative to your position.]

 

[Grogg of the North]

It should be noted that if you're firing at something that is big or using reach, you can ignore the -4 for firing into melee.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Set the doorways on fire some of the time. Oil and a tindertwig. (Or some sort of trap). Your PCs are making sensible decisions - so change the situation.

 

[GX.Sigma]

I've been wondering how to solve this problem for a while. (A related problem is avoiding situations where the PCs can win by standing 50 feet away and just shooting it until it dies). For example, the kobold cave in Keep on the Borderlands always devolves into the players bottlenecking the kobolds, because kobolds are best when they surround their enemies. It occurs to me that the kobolds stupidly chose to make their home base in a massively disadvantageous environment. They should have been building traps to separate intruders, digging interlocking tunnels to surround and ambush intruders, etc.