Re: Questions

From: flynnkd2 <flynnkd_at_...>
Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2004 01:21:44 -0000

>
> How do people in general handle missile fire?
>
> Thanks
> Rob

They dont. HQ and HW do not handle missile fire well at all.

To be specific, my character (follower of Odalya) wants to fire his bow at another and inflict damage. We are using an extended contest, so he will make an AP bid. If he goes for a kill he uses a large bid.

My biggest problem is - what is it resisted by? Close Combat seems inappropriate to defending vs distance combat, but actually probably isnt. Close Combat would surely include training in handling attacks from arrows. Dodge might appear to be better but not all players would have a Dodge skill, and often it isnt improved and would be weak against a trained archer.

My next problem was the overly nasty effects of fumbling a bow shot. A bad roll or a clearly superior enemy results in the archer suffering unusual results, well what I considered unusual. Working on the assumption that a trained archer knows how to use his weapon, isnt in imminent danger of being clobbered, then an archer should be resonably safe from repercussions. That is after all one of the reasons for doing an attack at distance. This gets complicated however when shooting into a melee.

Eg archer behind a wall shoots at advancing enemy - little risk of soemthing bad happening, so in our game we ruled that they didnt suffer any negative effect results. A negative was simply a miss (short of a fumble).

eg archer behind wall shooting into a melee (which actually is a really BAD idea unless your target can be clearly differentiated). The strange result of this is that the archer can eliminate himself from the fight by the presence of a superior enemy. If the archer shoots a superior enemy he will probably lose the contest and lose AP, which is a bit wierd (and most of the narrative explanations for this are lame - no right minded hero would every run out of arrows or break his bow). And if you say he missed and shot a friend, well why does the archer loose AP? Embarrassed yes, but a proffessional archer would just mark it up to bad luck and notch the next arrow (and now has a clearer shot)... it is the poor target who should be losing APs.

What it resulted in was that none of my players would use a bow. As far as I have seen HQ and this list still has yet to come to terms with this (or if they did I missed the post and would LOVE to be corrected).

So in most cases we simply all agreed that a safe archer never took negatives unless there was a clear reason as to why he should. He simply misses.

I do apply some modifiers: no shield -10. Not actively conscious of the archer -10. Soemthing like this, dont have my list with me.

Dont extend this to magic at a distance however - magic is an exchange of magical powers and failing CAN result in bad effects on the caster.

Powered by hypermail