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Old 04-23-2017, 02:00 PM   #16
lordabdul
 
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Default Re: Balanced games for archers

Thanks everyone for the replies! I'll have to take some time to process it but here are some more details on my game:

1) It's a post-apocalyptic game (thanks PK for After-The-End! :) ). Guns are fairly rare so far (since not too many settlements can repair them and manufacture/acquire bullets), so most combats so far have been using Low-Tech gear. The power level is medium-heroic (150 points), but I try to keep the "cinematic" stuff to a minimum. It's not "gritty realism", but it's not too far from it.

2) Environment is Pacific Northwest rocky mountains. This is not a "nuclear wasteland" world, so there's lots of tree and wilderness (albeit mutated in some places). So a mix of open fields and dense rain forest and what not.

3) Starting combat from far away, and having NPCs that are also non-melee fighters (psis/ranged/tacticians/etc.) is good advice, and fits what I thought I needed to do. However there have been a couple of combats that start as an ambush on the road, so this means "starting the combat from far away" doesn't work there (which is the whole point of the ambush so I guess that works!)

4) Note that I _don't_ want to make archers more powerful or anything. I want to make them _interesting_. Again, the main problem so far is in relation to the _players_ who, when they play archers, spend half their turns (at best) not doing anything interesting besides maybe a Fast-Draw roll. It's not necessarily about making the characters do more, it's about making the players do more. And, like I said, it's not necessarily a problem with the rules, and it's maybe entirely a problem of how I design the combats, and of what the players know about what they can/should do.

Any comments on being able to reload a bow while moving? (as per Basic Set, you can only step)

Last edited by lordabdul; 04-23-2017 at 02:03 PM.
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