Quote:
Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth
...But you wrote a whole post about how not exposing your own PC to danger was what made being an archer desirable even if your contributions were feeble.
Division of labor works if everybody's labor is valuable, like with the actually-contributing back-rankers you mention. If your division of labor is 'you take all the damage and do almost all the damage, I do just a little damage and never get hit', that's...not a division that makes any sense to the second person unless they also put a high premium on the archer PC (rather than their own PC) not getting hurt.
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I think we're actually in agreement here.
There
is a high premium on archers and other "back-rankers" not getting hurt because of their ability to do things that melee guys cannot do, like shooting down fliers, taking out other archers, taking out melee enemies before they close range, etc. I'm not disagreeing with you that in a situation where everyone in the battle is basically a guy with a sword in melee with another guy with a sword, the archer will do less damage. I'm just saying the party might be better off with the archer staying back and taking pot shots than pulling out a sword that he's mediocre with and risking getting killed, when he will be absolutely necessary for the party's survival in all the encounters that aren't
pure melee.
And now that I think of it, even in the pure melee the archer has an important advantage, which is better target selection. One of my melee guys manages to injure an enemy? Archer can take him out while he's weak. One of the enemies seems kind of dangerous? Concentrate all firepower on that Super Star Destroyer! You get the idea... Melee fighters are more restricted by position, reach, etc. (Of course firing through your friends can be hard, so even the archer doesn't have perfect target selection--I've found however that on a hex map it's usually not too difficult to get a clear shot, with the generous targeting rules on B389.)