One rule that I’ve never been happy with is the firing ranged weapons into a melee quagmire. Honestly, I haven’t been able to develop a better system.

As stated in 2e rules, the DM makes a die roll and assigns a value to each person in the melee. Tiny figures get 1/3 pt. Small ½, medium sized gets 1 point, large 2, huge 4, gigantic gets 6. All of the numbers are added together and whatever dice works best, you throw it. THIS IS CRAZY!!! It might work fine when fighting a giant, but who is going to miss a gigantic character that is towering over all of the fighters?

In my current campaign we are using guns, and we’ve still got to keep to this insane rule, regardless of the fact that it is much easier to aim and fire a gun accurately then it is to fire a bow. So far it’s only come up once. A character fell on top of a large creature, and a fellow adventurer accidentally shot him instead of the Carrion Crawler, GOOD TIMES! This I felt to be accurate, however what do you do in situations where you’ve got a gun slinger, and he fires into a struggle? There should be some way of determining friendly fire that accounts for skill, but is really quick to compute during a round.

Of course I am open to all suggestions. I haven’t ever read any rule system above 2nd Edition so maybe they developed something better, but for right now, I’d like to brainstorm on the subject with you.

There should be some factors involved, well of course there should be judgment. A definite need to use this rule to begin with. I don’t use miniatures, but I think that if a monster or person is being swarmed by 3 people or things, then it’s time to use the rule. I guess that it will take place any time a clean shot can’t be taken.

The Dexterity Factor

DEX should play a factor in this, anything over a 16 gets a bonus, but that is only to hit with ranged weapons, we really don’t have a solid system for accuracy. I really do like ability checks, no matter how many levels a character gets, these rolls always stay the same. Now we just have to ask ourselves what to blend with it, because it isn’t just Dexterity which guides us so that we don’t paste our close friends in combat, it takes Intelligence to remain cool under pressure. Most of the time our friends aren’t just standing there chatting with bad guys about the weather, they are normally getting chewed on, or being hit by sharp pointy objects. We have to keep our cool and remember what to do to handle the situation, but we also need to use our Wisdom. If we aren’t wise, then we won’t see a clean shot when it presents itself to us. So, to determine our first roll we’ll add DEX+INT+WIS and divide it by 3. This will give us our ability check to see if we can accurately take a shot at the intended target.

Now, the problem with this is that if a monster is intelligent enough, or mean enough, he may not give a ranged fighter an opening, especially if he is using the victim as a captive, but then we’ll use a different rule set of cover and concealment, for this article we’ll just be focusing on firing into a melee.

Now that we’ve got a number that we can work with, we can determine if the fighter can get a clean shot on his intended target. It’s up to you if you want to make this roll yourself, or let the player do it. Success means that they think that they can see an opening and can attack normally. A mild failure means that they cannot find an opening, a bad failure means that they think that they can find an opening, but they really can’t and their target is generated randomly, per the old rule.

The Dexterity Problem

Now, the problem with this system is that we don’t always know what the ability scores of our NPC’s are. We might have some clues! Intelligence is listed in the Monster Manual, and we can usually safely assume that their Wisdom will be compared to that number as well. For DEX, we just look at their AC and try and determine how much can be attributed to high dexterity.

Some problem creatures with this system are Skeletons, they are listed as having 0 intelligence, but have high dexterity. Standard AC for them is 7 which could be because they are made of bone, but in the movies, these things are really fast! I think that it is safe to say that they have a base DEX of at least 16, and since they don’t have INT or WIS we won’t worry about them and just do a standard DEX check to see if they can take a shot on who they want to.

For humans, we can just assume they have average abilities of 8, or you can roll up the number itself according to your standard method of generating the scores.

Proficiency & Specialization

Proficiency with the weapon is a necessity to qualify for the above rules, specialized characters should always be able to fire at their intended target, however they might not be able to fire all of their shots into a really crowded melee, for situations like that, cut their number of attacks in half, but they always get at least 1 attack.

Noneweapon Proficiency

Alternatively we can go the route of creating a new NWP.

Sharp-shooting is listed under Warrior; it costs 2 NWP slots, and is treated automatically.

Sharp Shooter: This skill indicates that the character has devoted a great deal of time and effort to the mastery of a specific ranged-weapon. A ranged weapon must be selected when the skill is purchased. A Sharpshooter may be skilled with more then one weapon if a proficiency slot is allocated for each weapon.

Initially, this skill adds a +1 bonus to the intended target’s points when the DM is determining the actual target. This skill can be bettered by spending additional Noneweapon Proficiency slots on it, which would each add a +1 bonus to the intended targets points, making him easier to hit.