D&D 4E Ranged Cover rules all hosed up in DDM2 (/4E?)

[Benimoto]

That's not a new rule. That's been there all through 3.5. If even a colossal dragon's toenail has cover, the whole dragon has cover.

To determine whether your target has cover from your ranged attack, choose a corner of your square. If any line from this corner to any corner of the target’s square passes through a square or border that blocks line of effect or provides cover, or through a square occupied by a creature, the target has cover (+4 to AC).

I didn't see this rule applied evenly or often at tables I was at, even in "rules heavy" campaigns like Living Greyhawk. I suspect that it often wasn't intuitive that someone standing somewhat near a target, only blocking maybe 10% of the square, would provide the full +4, but so be it.

Cover penalties in DDM2 are greatly reduced. It's -2 instead of -4 for any type of cover. Additionally, there's no penalty for firing into melee. I'm not sure whether these changes are also in 4th edition, but they may be. So maybe the lesser penalty will encourage people to actually apply the penalty more, or maybe people will ignore it just as much, but at the same time it won't matter as much that it's ignored.

 

[Nikosandros]

It does seem a little odd, but think of it this way. There is part of the dragon you can't hit with an arrow, because there's a wall in the way, so logically that WILL decrease the odds that you'll hit him. Granted you're aiming the part you can see, but thats now a smaller target, so its 'harder' to hit. A Big big monster already gets a penalty to AC due to its size, so if its now a smaller target, it should get some of that penalty back, hence the cover bonus.

First of all, are we sure that large creatures will still get a size penalty to AC?

Furthermore, it is true that a small part of the dragon is covered, but that's certainly not the part that the archer would shoot at.

 

[Celebrim]

It does seem a little odd, but think of it this way. There is part of the dragon you can't hit with an arrow, because there's a wall in the way, so logically that WILL decrease the odds that you'll hit him. Granted you're aiming the part you can see, but thats now a smaller target, so its 'harder' to hit.

This logic applies to a system with some granularity. It doesn't apply to the non-granular system apparantly in effect. The problem is that if a huge monster covers up what is objectively 1/8th or himself or smaller, the net effect is that there is still much more target area to hit than there would be in the case of a monster of the next smaller size class. In this case, the rules suggest that the dragon recieves so much cover from the area hiding the tip of his tail, that the exposed target area is smaller than medium size.

 

[Celebrim]

That's not a new rule. That's been there all through 3.5. If even a colossal dragon's toenail has cover, the whole dragon has cover.

Reason #84 that I didn't convert to 3.5.

 

[Imban]

That's not a new rule. That's been there all through 3.5. If even a colossal dragon's toenail has cover, the whole dragon has cover.

I looked up the 3.5e rule, but it seems rather inconclusive whether it means one square or the corners of every square the target occupies.

 

[Thaumaturge]

Under this situation in 3.5, C2 would have cover.

Weird x2. I knew the exception for melee, and I suppose I forgot it was just an exception for melee.

Thanks.

The -2 for cover does make it less of a big deal as well.

Thaumaturge.

 

[Nikosandros]

Well, you people are right... this rule existed already. I think it is telling that many were ignoring it...

 

[blossoms]

Interesting. If it was changed to something along the lines of:

"To determine ranged cover, the attacker chooses a corner of its square. If the attacker can draw a line from this corner to every square in the defenders space with no blocking terrain there is no cover."

It might be a bit more sensible

A few diagrams demonstrating this below. In the fourth case there is cover, as no line can be drawn to the bottom squares of the dragon. Does this make more sense?

 

[Nikosandros]

Does this make more sense?

Yes, it certainly does.

 

[Celebrim]

A few diagrams demonstrating this below. In the fourth case there is cover, as no line can be drawn to the bottom squares of the dragon. Does this make more sense?

It does to me, though I must point out that you can still design edge cases. Suppose instead that the dragon is collosal and its south edge is 5' below the current case. Then, even though there is 30' of dragon extending north beyond the wall, and only 1 square that can't be seen, the dragon gets just as much cover as if only 5' of the dragon extended beyond the wall and only one square of dragon could be seen.

The basic problem is the lack of granularity. Whatever absolute rule we come up with is going to have problems describing something this complex.