Quote:
Originally Posted by Railstar
If we have ranged weapons and our enemies don’t, then let’s put a fence in the way. Barricades, cover positions, caltrops, bear traps – anything to make it difficult to get into melee range. Plan around, “it’s about 30 yards to the fence (1 or 2 aimed shots in the time to cover that), about 5-10 seconds to tear through the barricades (another 1-3 aimed shots), then another 10-15 yards to where the archers are (maybe 1 aimed shot?).”
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It occurs to me that:
1) 30 yards away gives -7 to shooting. Even with All-Out Attack, you probably need to aim a round or two to be able to effectively target a limb (like I said, shooting arrows at torsos is ineffective because it probably takes 2 arrows to get an NPC to half move, whereas you can cripple a leg in one arrow).
2) On a pure gaming practicality aspect, most combat mats I've seen don't have enough room to handle scenes that require a, say, 50 yards radius... so it means either starting the combat scene without the minis for the ranged combat preamble, and then taking out the mat/minis when everybody gets closer... or somehow use a different scale/mat for the beginning of the combat, or something like. It's clearly possible, but that just never occured to me before :)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Railstar
Melee PCs can try to chase them, but with no guarantee of catching them, and during the chase the melee guys might be facing downtime while the archers are able to draw and shoot. So much of the time spent loading and aiming for archers is spent chasing for the melee guys.
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Well that's the problem I think -- and why I'm considering this "All-Out Ready" maneuver... how can the archers keep their distance from the melee guys running at them? They can't reload their bow while running away... so they either have to run away (doing nothing else) until they somehow get in a place where they can spare standing still for a round so they can reload... otherwise you basically have characters running after each other in a silly way until someone runs out of FP?