Height Advantage and Cover

[cjais]

How do you rule height advantage and cover, if any?

A situation arose where the party wizard fell into a 10ft pit and wanted to continue firing scorching bursts and magic missiles at the enemies atop him. Now, if it were a three dimensional environment, I'd have a hard time seeing him hitting anything while in that cramped pit, but the rules didn't spell this out at all, AFAIK.

So I'm tempted to give creatures a +2 cover save if they're on a ledge and higher than the opposition. No advantage for firing down on people below them, although this could be reversed with an ad hoc combat advantage to everyone using ranged attacks and firing from above.

However, the real problem I'm seeing is what happens to those creatures above who step away from the ledge and stand, say, 3 squares away from the edge of the cliff. Can they be hit at all with ranged attacks?

Do the rules just tell you to ignore height differences when working out line of sight and cover? I can't tell.

 

[timmy]

I don't think there are any rules for height advantage.

However, for cover, you should simply use the normal cover rules but use them in the 3rd dimension. Enemies at the top of the 10' pit will have cover, and enemies 1 square back from the pit either have superior cover (-5) or can't be seen at all. Obviously if either party is very tall then you need to account for this as well.

 

[Brain]

cover for scorching burst (as an area burst attack) is determined from the origin square of the burst (where the spell is aimed). So let's say the wizard is in a 10' deep pit which has monsters all around the top. The wizard could scorching burst the square just above the middle of the pit and have no cover against any of the monsters.

I'd say that his targetting options would be limited based on what he could see from the bottom of the pit.

 

[Syrsuro]

I translate the three dimensional arrangement into two dimensions.

Thus someone at the bottom of a 10' pit looking up is equivalent to someone along a wall looking at a corner 10' away. The person at the top has cover versus the person at the bottom, but the person at the bottom does not have cover versus the person at the top.

In the case of the scorching burst - unless the pit is only a 5' square at the bottom he can probably use that quite effectively against someone at the top as he can manuever to place it on any of the ledge squares and it will hit those around that square with no cover.

There is, afaik, no rule for height advantage in 4E but our group discussed it and decided that they wanted to retain the +1 for higher ground from 3.5 (both for them and their opponents) so we house ruled that back in.

Whether or not we will keep it remains to be seen. I'm ambivalent because I think its overly simplistic and thus no better than having no benefit (it should be more situational).

Carl