Maybe I’m over­read­ing some­thing in the rules about ranged com­bat: Isn’t there any penalty for fir­ing at mov­ing tar­gets? I’m talk­ing about a sniper attack against unaware tar­gets, not a melee sit­u­a­tion. Ruleswise, what is, for exam­ple, the dif­fer­ence between fir­ing at some­body stand­ing and some­body running?

Lead­ing the tar­get for a skilled archer should be no harder than a sta­tion­ary.
Put a Maneu­ver– Lead­ing, with a pro­fi­ciency around 6?
Dodg­ing or evad­ing is in the rules– don’t have them with me

i’ve put a sim­i­lar ques­tion a while ago about sneak snip­ing, if you want to look it up

Just expand­ing uppon Alan’s:

No dif­fer­ence at shoot­ing at a stand­ing tar­get and a mov­ing one, as its taken that the char­ac­ter know­sthe bal­lis­tics of the thing.
The details lies actu­ally in “is the tar­get aware?” rather than if he’s mov­ing or not. If he’s aware he gets to roll eva­sion: TN8 for thrown weapons and TN10 for the other faster pro­jec­tiles. Or just TN8 if he’s both aware and has time to ready him­self zig-​zagging around (is that it? its a bit muddy this part), or he can block with a shield. An unaware tar­get sim­ply doesn’t get to roll any defense, thus being eas­ier to “sniper”.

I guess that a defend­ing tar­get never truly just stands if he’s aware that he’s being aimed at, and will ditch stand­ing still with eva­sive maneuers (rolling, duck­ing, zig-​zaging). If in the nar­ra­tive some­one just decides to stand still (be it an npc or a pc) I might just not allow any defense.

My only prob­lem about this and ranged in gen­eral is that, while yeah a skilled archer might have a nor­mal time hit­ting both mov­ing and stand­ing tar­gets, the game allows unskilled but highly per­cep­tive or pas­sion­ated char­ac­ters to over­come this (aka, instantly learn bal­is­tics). Say you have a 9 aim because you are very witty and cun­ning and a mild pas­sion kick­ing, you already have the pool of a skilled archer. A nor­mal aim but a high pas­sion is the same.

If you see this as a movie scene, a shot in the dark in a cli­matic moment is awe­some, but con­sis­tently shoot­ing things because you’re “on fire” or because you have a sharp mind doesn’t cut it with the ‘shoot­ing immo­bile is the same as shoot­ing mov­ing for skilled’. Note that this is a moot point because even if there was a mod­i­fier to mov­ing tar­get it would affect both skilled and unskilled chars. Unless it wasn’t, like the rules regard­ing shoot­ing or fight­ing from horse­back and how it gives a pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive mod­i­fier (or removes a bad mod­i­fier) depend­ing on how good you are at it. For exam­ple, “x” prof. in mis­sile would ignore “y” penal­ties from mov­ing and (per­haps) dis­tance, or even a new “bal­lis­tics” skill. I know, of course, that all of this doesn’t exist for the sake of brevity and sim­plic­ity, its all very pos­si­ble and kinda easy to imple­ment mod­i­fiers to this, only oughta ask a “its wor­thy it?”.

My biggest gripe tho is with the range bands. Well, its not really a gripe because of the way I inter­pret the results, but any­way this is what I mean: Due to the high TN’s far and extreme ranges have, its pretty hard to deal a good dam­ag­ing hit. Most of the time you’re just graz­ing your tar­gets, but the thing is that you graze them A LOT. Its not that hard to beat an eva­sion, spe­cially since its done at a high­ish TN (8 or 10), and at half the tar­gets MP’s, if there’s a defense at all… But since you have a bad TN as well, you have mar­ginal QoS at best.

Its even worse if you take an unskilled per­son shoot­ing at a una­tended object (a tar­get prac­tice, why not). A per­son with a very aver­age aware­ness and no skill at shoot­ing (4−5 dice pool) is look­ing at hit­ting about 76% of the time every time. A defi­cient per­son (1 AP) has about 25% of hit­ting a sit­ting tar­get at extreme range. But all shoots will never be enough to kill\damage any­one or any­thing as the brawn of the mis­siles will prob­a­bly even out with the brawn of the tar­get, nev­er­mind its armor which is bound to at least exist in leather form. I’m lay­man on that field, but I don’t know how wrong to expect that, sta­tis­ti­cally, you are to miss most shots but the shots you hit still have a chance to be very lethal.

Now, all this isn’t really a prob­lem if I just rule that low dam­age is actu­ally a not-​hit, and that most of the time all this are to not mat­ter, but its still stands that the ranged rules (although far bet­ter than the ones in TroS) aren’t nearly as per­fect as the mostly flaw­less melee rules. — - imho.


edit:
i’ve toyed with the idea for a non-​variable TN for ranged weapons, instead giv­ing dice for the defense based on how far the tar­get is — which are always rolled despite aware­ness or not, might even squeeze in some dice if the tar­get is moving\running. Rules-​wise its not a far-​cry from the sim­i­lar rul­ing with the shock mechan­ics, where you give bonus dice to an attack­ing crea­ture because of the dis­abil­ity of another. Of course, i’ve not toyed with enough to enter­tain it in my table with­out more tin­ker­ing, and maybe dis­cussing with you guys. No point in trad­ing 6 for half a dozen aswell.

Allan wrote:
The rules actu­ally derive not only from my under­stand­ing that all archers etc. always “lead” their tar­gets, but also from my own expe­ri­ence with archery, which is very lim­ited. I once attended an after­noon work­shop and was told that I am quite tal­ented, but some five, six hours of archery are the full extent of my expe­ri­ence — so I am by no means an experieced archer, Pro­fi­ciency 1 at best, if one is being very gen­er­ous to me.

Still, once I had got­ten the hang of the basics I did not find it any more dif­fi­cult hit­ting a swing­ing, pendulum-​like tar­get and a tar­get being dragged dan­gling along a line than a sta­tion­ary one — as long as those move­ments were reg­u­lar. Once the one tar­get was dragged at an uneven speed and the pen­du­lum tar­get swung in a way so that it kinda ric­o­cheted, I found it nigh impos­si­ble for me, at my skill level, to hit it at all. In fact I recall that, under those cir­cum­stances, I was only able to hit the ric­o­chet­ing pen­du­lum once, the other not at all.

The ease with which I hit reg­u­lary mov­ing tar­gets, I.e. tar­gets I could eas­ily “lead” even with my prac­ti­cally nonex­ist­ing skill, stringly influ­enced the rule, which I find to cor­rectly sim­u­late mat­ters.

Anarak wrote:
You are intro­duc­ing a dis­tinc­tion which the mechan­ics do not make, a dis­tinc­tion between nat­ural apti­tude (Attribute), acquired skill (Pro­fi­ciency), and the cer­tain extra “oomph” which is best left unde­fined (Pas­sion). If you begin think­ing along those lines, the whole sys­tem will unravel. I am aware that you know well that Blade does not want to sim­u­late how real life plays out, but how adven­ture fic­tion plays out. And in this con­text, things are not “real­is­tic” in the sense of what “por­tion” of the out­come derives from which cir­cum­stances.

A die is a die. Period.

Anarak wrote:
Well, thanks. And I grant you that we might not have lav­ished as much care on mis­sile com­bat than on the — to us, and prob­a­bly not only to us — more excit­ing melee combat.

Anarak wrote:
I’m not sure, if that really is the case. Admit­ted, I’m not an expert — like Michael, I spent only one day train­ing with a bow and that’s all. But I believe it is eas­ier to hit none mov­ing things. You just don’t have to analyse the speed and the direc­tion of move­ment. For me this seems to com­pli­cate aim­ing. Well, I might house­rule that, maybe with an AC based on speed.


Michael wrote:
I agree, melee is far more excit­ing. But per­fect archery rules would be nice, too. I’ve never seen it in any game I’ve played. Maybe a project for a revised Blade? I would love to see more options, per­haps some maneu­vers.

Regards, R.

If you want com­pre­hen­sive ranged rules have a look at Thieves Guild issue 8
Shield rules in issue 5
And all things thiev­ing all through them.
You can still pur­chase the books, love my TG.
Not to con­fused with Thieves World.
The Free City of Haven, all pack­aged up for break and enter.
I own a bow and do a lot of archery,