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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3293413" data-attributes="member: 4937">A longbow has a range increment of 100 ft.  A heavy crossbow has a range increment of 120 ft.With far shot this increases to a 150 ft, and 180 ft. respectively.Since projectile weapons have a maximum range of 10 range increaments, this means that a longbow's maximum range in D&D is 1500 ft. and a heavy crossbow has a maximum range of 1800 ft.Suppose your sniper uses a longbow and sets up 1500 ft. from his target.  The target will have a -150 penalty to spot checks to detect your sniper.  A medium level character with decent hide can pretty much snipe with impunity on any being short of an omniscient diety.  And sure, you've got a -20 to hit but for a mid to high level character with a focus in archery that's not a big obstacle against most targets using your full BAB - and we are talking about maximum range.  And quite clearly you can put yourself just 300' out (-30 to spot, -4 to hit) and be perfectly safe against most targets.There are of course all sorts of problems with this.  Five hundred yards is a pretty extreme shot for a 30 caliber rifle, much less a long bow.  More realistic useful maximum range for a longbow is about half that, and the outside maximum range of a bow that a person can draw is in the neighborhood of 360 yards and at that range with a bow you are hoping to hit the broadside of a barn.  It is my opinion that ALL of the range increments in D&D are about twice as large as they should be.  So to begin with, if you are going to make sniping an important part of your campaign, I suggest you half the range increments of all weapons (base 50' for a longbow, and base 60' for a heavy crossbow).  If you think this is unreasonable, have your party attacked in hill country by a CR appropriate war party of gnoll rangers with heavy crossbows that have scattered themselves about a 300-600' radius (maybe in two concentric circles) and see how it works out.   By the rules, your party will never even see whose doing the shooting, and the gnolls can fire off as many bolts as they like without any fear of retaliation.The spot and listen penalties should be something more like a logrithmic scale than a linear one in order to achieve realistic results.  (If something is twice as far away it looks half as tall (or at worst 1/4th the area of vision).  It's not ideal, but just for the speed with which you can count it, I apply a -1 penalty to spot/listen for 10' range increaments up to 100', then a -1 penalty for range increments of 100' up to 1000', and then a -1 penalty for range increments of 1000' up to 10000' and so forth.  This changes the spot/listen penalty at 1800 feet from -180 to -20, which is closer to a number that plays nice in the D20 universe.</blockquote>

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