Greetings everyone!

I would like to hear your opinion about ranged combat as I had very long confrontations about it with my players.

They overall think that ranged combat - and with ranged combat I mean ranged action cards in particular - is far better than melee combat. Their assumptions are based on 1 vs 1 fights pure melee vs pure ranged, with the same experience, that start engaged one another.

We are all aware that these kind of arena-fights are just pure speculation; they will hardly present themselves during normal gameplay, but we find them useful for training and balance considerations.

We were all used to ranged characters in previous rpgs, that:

1- cannot shoot while engaged

2- almost useless in hand to hand combat

That seems not true anymore in WFRP: they have plenty of choices for close (and very close) combat, some of which make sense and some not so much. We had the most problems with immobilising shot and definitely powerful, not to say overpowered. Most people around the forum describe these action as something to block a charging enemy, but it seems equally powerful to block someone who is targeting you, step back and keep on shooting him from distance. When he breaks free, the archer will be quite far and the action almost ready to be used again.

We didn't find any solutions for the poor warrior :-) He just keeps on dying, unless he wins initiative AND gets extremely lucky on his first hit.

How do you other guys handle this card? The most astonishing thing to me is that it has no penalties for being engaged. Its prerequisite is "within close range" and we assumed that an enagement is within close range, but why no penalties? Most similar cards have it.

Before houseruling what seems to us a mistake, I would like to read your 2cps :-)

Well, remember WFRP is cinematic … so, and I hate to say it, but it is very “Legolas” to shoot while engaged in melee. ( i.e., cinematic and heroic to do so). So, as a GM I *might* apply some modifiers to shooting while engaged, but I would be wary of making it anything too severe.

Ok, now I haven’t had a PC take this particular card, so I’ve just grabbed it and am looking at it to see what it does. Hmm… not bad.

Ok, so looking at Green side, a normal attack will put 4 recharge on the card. Remove 1 at the end of the archer’s turn, so 3. Melee enemy uses 1 action to reduce that to 2. Archer’s turn comes around and at end of archer’s turn it is reduced to 1. Melee PC then spends an action to reduce the recharge to 0, and is free, still having a maneuver left.

Archer has gotten 1 action between pinning the melee and the melee freeing himself.
Melee has lost 2 actions.

A boon would add 1 recharge, which actually only ends up worse for the archer (in a 1v1), since it means that the card won’t be available to use on their turn (and the recharge would go to 0 at the end of their turn, so not affecting the melee).

A bane removes a recharge, which would mean that the melee enemy would only lose 1 action instead of 2.

It’s certainly a decent card, although it usually won’t do much damage (best would be normal damage).
Honestly, if you feel it is too powerful, I’d allow the target to use both Maneuvers AND actions to reduce the recharge tokens. Or, as an alternative, allow the target to also take a Wound for each extra recharge token they want to remove, representing the target pulling themselves off the arrow without being cautious. (I kind of like the Wound idea, myself now that I thought of it).

Anyway, those would be house rules, of course.
IMO it’s a useful, and fairly powerful, action card no doubt. Only in certain situations, though. It does add [bB] to the action too, so it is a bit more difficult to achieve.

As GM I have one PC with Immobilizing Shot action card, has not been a problem yet but it's early days.

That said, have not had 1:1 melees, but rather groups. So immobilizing that one foe doesn't mean others don't run up and whale on you etc., rather it's a tactic to limit those running up to do so - try to keep a big bad at distance. In an upcoming melee with a big bad, I expect it may be one of the few ways the PC's can not be overwhelmed. In test melees, the big bad has good armour adding even more black dice to the ranged attack etc.

The basic ranged attacker routine is even if engaged spend maneouvre to disengage to close then shoot, whereupon NPC spends m. to engage and attack, repeat - not so unbalanced as long as there's room to step back.

I suspect a big part of controlling ranged attacks is that while in abstract system, it still possible to describe how "the wall, cliff, river means that you can't move back further than Medium from the road" etc. (just as if they can choose it, the archer wants to be on the wall, at top of cliff, other side of river). Similarly describe how cover allows anyone beyond medium to be impossible to hit (without Trick Shot of course) etc., how the first wave of grunts screens the big bad so you can't get a shot at them etc. Make party work to open a shot up before the big bad engages.

That said, some "reaction" cards triggered by smacking at engaged targets that try to disengage would spice up that sequence of course.

This is something that's been bugging me lately as well. It seems like there are certain ranged action cards that should have been printed with the "not engaged" restriction on them and I'm not sure if it's an oversight or not. Immobilising Shot is one example, but there are a few others as well like Covering Fire and Arrowstorm that come to mind.

Also, I don't have any direct experience with it, but Immobilising Shot seems like it could easily abused. I think one of the biggest problems with the card is that it works equally well whether the target is a snotling or a river troll, in terms of the pinning effect. It seems to me like stronger creatures should be able to shrug off the effects much more easily.

We house-ruled same size or smaller to the card and the character can spend a maneuver to get out of it. This was after a major NPC Ogre got immobilized to a wall and the PC'S just rocked him.

How easy it is to disengage from combat is the thing I like least about the system - and to be fair it is only a small dislike. It seems to me that it should be harder than just stepping backwards, poking your tongue out and taking the next shot...

As for Immobilizing Shot - I have a player with it. His party is only 2 PCs and neither of them are combat experts, so I have to control the number of enemy to make the battles taxing without being deadly. This makes IS very powerful... I have been playing the 'exchange wounds to unpin' house rule, and it seems to work well... I have also been using range limitation techniques, terrain, strong winds, etc and this also has helped prevent the archer from just marching backwards and firing.

Generally for any range shot being made while engaged, I toss in some extra misfortune dice because it should be a tough shot to make.

ncervellati said:

According to the rules, you can add bonuses and penalties as appropriate. If you think a penalty for shooting while engaged is appropriate (I certainly think so), then add a misfortune die.

But in general, I do agree that ranged combat is a bit too powerful and flexible.

In terms of penalties for ranged attacks while engaged, the Ranged Shot action card says it flat out can't be used if engaged with an enemy. Not sure if every ranged attack says that.