Volley Fire

[Nim]

Are there any official rules someplace for volley-fire with ranged weapons? You know, indirect fire into a crowd by a large group of archers, as opposed to actually aiming at someone specific?

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

This tends to fall into the realm of mass combat rules.

There's lots of different systems for that, though none of them are WotC publications (though the Mini HB has a little bit of this, it's still to fine-grained for your purposes, I believe).

 

[Oberyn]

There are full rules for it on page 124 of Complete warrior.

 

[Nim]

This tends to fall into the realm of mass combat rules.

There's lots of different systems for that, though none of them are WotC publications (though the Mini HB has a little bit of this, it's still to fine-grained for your purposes, I believe).

That might do it, actually. I'll take a look. Thanks!

 

[Alpha Polaris]

Actually, such rules appear in MiniHB and Heroes of Battle. If I remember clearly (HoB) there are two types of volleys, regular ones and concentrated fire. The basic system is to have the commander of one unit do a special attack using it's int bonus against the AC of the target unit, and the everyone in the target square(s) gets a reflex save (DC 15 + arrow enhancement). In the case of regular fire, the target zone is a rectangle of the same size that the firing unit, and each target creature inside the zone saves or takes one arrow. In the case of concentrated fire, each archer fires as many arrows as it can in one round, and the creature in the target square takes 1/4 of the arrows fired and saves for half damage.

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

It's covered in detail in Heroes of Battle. I think the numbers get a little broken though if you allow multiple groups of archers to all concentrate fire on on target.