Hi, all,

Been reading up on the Combat rules and thought I'd better check something:

Short Range (+10 BS) is between two metres and 25% of the weapon's listed range (page 249).

Long Range (-10 BS) is twice the weapon's listed range or greater, with Extreme Range (-20 BS) being anything over three times the weapon's listed range.

So a Standard Attack for a Godwyn-patter Bolter is taking a shot at anything between 50 and 200 metres away from the shooting Marine.

I do have that right, right?

If so: Wow! You can have HUGE battles before having to worry about negatives to hit.

Actually, it seems like it'd give a Marine half a chance against a Genestealer. Even a Running one would still need two turns to close with its intended target before it could Charge.

It's 50% of the listed range for short but you got the example right. and remember the absolute maximum is four times. So full ranges for standard bolter is PB 0-2, short 2-50, normal 50-200, long 200-300, extreme 300-400.

This means your standard pistols can fire up to 120m and your Lascannon has a max range of 1.2km and Tau Broadsides and seeker missiles can shoot you from 2km.

This is why genestealers try not to fight in open spaces and Tau put the kroot up front.

Ah! Thanks for pointing that out, Nathiel.

Which means that if you set up a battle on a 20x20 grid, where each square is 5 metres - a Marine with a Bolter is going to be at +10 to hit for half the battle area! Yikes!

Battle maps don't really scale very well past 1 square=1meter. You will start to have problems when one player has a movement that is anything other than a multiple of 5. It gets even worse when you go much past 5 meters per square. Then anything less than a full move doesn't even register on the map, which ends up destroying movement that is related to getting into melee range.

You are probably better off just abstracting distances and ignoring the battle map in long ranged battles. That also solves your problem of short range for half of the battle map since the map doesn't really mean anything as far as distances are concerned.

Yeah I house ruled where long range started. I consider the given range to be the upper end of normal. Having double that be the upper end of norml with no penalty just seemed like a bad way to write it and way too forgiving. With BC attack rules this makes the players think a lot more tactically.

DJSunhammer bring up a great point;adstracting long range is a great idea for 2 main reasons. One it leaves you a little more free to concentrate on the mood and setting, increasing the experience as a whole, instead of being bogged down in large scale accounting. Two it open things up for larger battle scenes since it cuts down on that total amount of info you need to process. You just need to know about how long it will take the valient space marines to charge across no-man's land while firing their bolters and being covered by the devastator to get into melee and smite the vile Tau. It lets you make that feel suitably epic without slowing down the game.

Plus it helps for when you have limited table space.

100 meters is not very far, and any realistic conflict that is going to take place in a confined area is going to start at much greater than that range.

When I was GMing Final Sanction, the Hordes would open fire as soon as they saw the enemy, which given that the Marines were walking down the middle of large throughfares was about 250 meters.

Not every combat is in a space hulk.

Kshatriya said:

I do exactly the same for Deathwatch, Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader. It makes the weapon easier to use, mean being at Long Range actually happens once in a while and just feels more natural.

Coolduff said:

Not only limited table space. I would be surprised if you could find a 20x20 foot battle map. Much less anything larger than that.