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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2219225" data-attributes="member: 4937">One thing that has bothered me about D20 for a long time now is that a horse 200 yards away is just as hard a target it is just standing there looking at you, or if its galloping all out at 40 mph perpendicular to your facing.  I'd like to fix this with a house rule that gave moving targets an additional dodge bonus.  I could do this very simply by simply giving a moving object a +1 dodge bonus per 40' that it moves in a round (rounded down).  This - however simple - is fraught with subtle problems both from the standpoint of balance and the standpoint of realism.  The balance problem is abit obvious.  Charging Barbarians are harder to hit than intended.  It's not serious, but it's also not my intention to make a Barbarian charging straight at you harder to hit.From the standpoint of realism, this problem arises because a target moving straight at you is generally easier to hit than one moving perpendicular to you because the apparant motion is higher in the latter case.  This can be modelled by drawing a circle around the attacker.  If the target's motion lies on a line which crosses within the circle, then the apparant motion is not sufficient to throw off the attacker's aim.That's better, but's its ugly and I need clearer wording so that ideally every 12 year old can figure out what I mean. But, we are also not finished with the complexity.The above rule is adequate so long as we are all using laser weapons or magical rays, but most weapons are enough ballistic in thier flight that rapidly changing in the ranges to the target present just as much of a problem was changes in the direction to the target.  Firearms are only barely balistic, but if we move the range out far enough we'll be forced to accept that a target moving rapidly toward or away from us is going to require subtle continious changes in aim.  Most D&D missile weapons are even more ballistic and require at a distance large changes in elevation to compensate for changes in range.   Some weapons - like say mortars, howizters, and trebuchets - are entirely balistic.And there is an additional problem.  What about movement that isn't in a straight line?The above rule covers most situations, but if you get in a chase sequence with a target, the relative motion between the targets depends on thier difference in relative speeds.  Again this leaves us with unwieldy caveats.That's as far as I've gotten, and I don't particularly like it.  Does anyone know of a product that addresses this issue already?  Can anyone think of a better wording to clarify my meaning?</blockquote>

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