Ranged Attack Hitting Your Buddy

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

50 / 50.

 

[Philip]

Striking the Cover Instead of a Missed Target

If the covering character has a Dexterity bonus to AC or a dodge bonus, and this bonus keeps the covering character from being hit, then the original target is hit instead. The covering character has dodged out of the way and didn't provide cover after all. A covering character can choose not to apply his Dexterity bonus to AC and/or his dodge bonus, if his intent is to try to take the damage in order to keep the covered character from being hit.

This always led to following weird situation:

- You miss the enemy, let's check by how much
- You miss by 1 - 4 points, so you hit your friend who provided cover
- Friend: but I have 18 Dex!
- So, your friend dodge out the way, and in retrospect, you do not miss, but actually hit the enemy.
- Player: ??

In other words: the enemy gets a cover bonus of +4 for anyone that covers it, minus the Dodge bonus of the creature that provides the cover, for a minimum of 0.

Since many characters in our party had at least a +4 Dodge bonus, the penalty for shooting at enemy's who got cover from one of the other characters was actually meaningless. So only the -4 penalty for shooting into melee was applied.

Making the rule optional made it a lot less complicated (especially since some people never seemed to be able to grasp the 3.0 rule)

 

[irdeggman]

Could I have a page number for this variant rule? There is a similar situation come up in a PBMB, and I need to have things clarified.

pg 24 of the 3.5 DMG has the variant rule

 

[green slime]

pg 24 of the 3.5 DMG has the variant rule

Thanks!