I'm curious how you guys determine who can hit who in combat.

If the players move in a group (all engaged with eachother?) and an enemy moves close and attacks - do you allow the attacker to direct an attack towards anyone in the group even thou the enemys base only make contact with one of the player's characters?

Unless the engaged group is extraordinarily large or the environment is restrictive, e.g. a narrow passageway, I allow anyone to attempt an action against anyone else in the group. Add (mis)fortune dice for flavor or guarded positions.

I believe the rules on the "Secret Passage" card tell you to restrict engagement to size 4 -- if a 5th person joins, he chooses someone to disengage and move to close range.

The FAQ says:

"If my ally and an enemy are engaged , and i engage the enemy , am i also engaged With my ally ?

Yes. It’s helpful to think of an engagement as a rugby scrum. Every- one in the engagement is theoretically adjacent to everyone else. The participants aren’t standing statically – everyone is moving about, jostling around, jockeying for position, doing their best to protect themselves, etc."

We go with whatever seems logical. As this is an abstract game, our group had a tendency originally to be thinking in terms of old-school gaming like D&D grids and miniatures combat. I still recall a player saying "I'm going behind the coach" in Day Late Shilling Short, and us looking at each other and asking "is he still part of the engagement? Can the beastmen still get to him? "

Now our rule is if the group is in "engaged" with each other, then they are fair game that way unless they say they are doing something in particular such as, "The wizard hides behind the trollslayer."

jh

Coming from a rpg tradition where miniatures aren't used I'd say that we find it easier to just use common sense and narratively appropriate definitions of who's engaged with whom. I suppose that we do it as Emirikol says, using what passes for logic in the group, but I guess that it can be hard to grasp how this actually works and how it doesn't destroy the game mechanics.

I'll give a few examples to show exactly what I mean.

The scene is set:

There's a fight in a cellar. The pc:s, three of them, and their allies (a group of four npc zealots) vs a really bad guy, a rather nasty guy, a group of four cut-throats and a group of four ruffians.

Rolling for initiative, this determines initial positioning to a rather large part. How? Well...

...in this case, most of the pc:s act first, and at the start they're basically just bunched together at the foot of a steep set of stairs. They start by the priest chanting a blessing and another character takes a few steps forward and sets up a guarded position. The third pc fires a crossbow at the cut-throats (catching one of them in the throat, which isn't cut, but pierced) staying behind the pc with guarded position. Their intent is to stay close, so that's what they do - this means that until something else happens they will be a part of the same engagement.

Now, if instead the priest and the other pc would've stepped forward, raising their shields, they could've decided to be engaged and in the way so that the opposition would've had to get past them somehow to get at the other pc and their allies.

Another option would've been to charge at the enemy, thus locking down a few of them in battle.

Can the npc:s attack anyone in that engagement, then? Well...

...yes, to some extent. The pc who set the guarded position was rushed first, since he put himself so firmly in the way. By the ruffians. They didn't get another choice.

Then the cut-throats and the rather nasty guy went for the soft target, the lightly armored but dangerous crossbow-wielding assassin. This was allowed because it seemed reasonable that that's how such people fight, not just rushing headlong into the opposition.

And then the really bad guy went for the priest. Because that's what servants of the ruinous powers do!

What about disengaging? Well...

...we play that differently from time to time. Basically you can't just disengage, not without some distraction (another group of npc:s coming at the pc:s from behind would let the first bunch of npc:s disengage) or a clever manouver (one character of the four was fighting for his life against the rather nasty guy and two cut-throats, he couldn't just back away since they'd just follow him and cut him up; perform a stunt (coordination) 3d was required to get the zealots in between him and the npc:s).

What about disengaging and for example firing a pistol at close quarters? Well, if it seems reasonable to do that, it is allowed. In this fight, we allowed for a character to back up against the stairs and fire his pistol, but that took him out of the engagement and the improved guard the position he had benefited from. In another fight where a pc was up alone against an agile, bouncing beast we decided that he could get enough distance between himself and the beast to disengage and fire (without the penalties for being engaged, that is).

One option is simply running like hell. If you don't perform an action but just try to disengage and run, and the path is clear, we do allow that. The reasoning being that we like the system to allow for fights which aren't always ended at last man standing.

So how do engagements change configurations? Well...

...fluidly. And by clever moves. In the example with the fight in the cellar above, the players had the zealot npc:s charge into the ruffians and they went at it with such a fervor that the other pc:s could concentrate on other things. Without specifically disengaging.

The assassin pc disengaged using a hard perform a stunt - action, as described above.

The rally phase can also be used. When only the really bad guy and the rather nasty guy were standing, the gm called for a rally phase, describing how the npc:s backed away, one of them bleeding an leaning on the other. This broke up all engagements.

Nice examples and advice! I'm starting to get the abstraction now.

You can see some imagery of this here:

http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/90977-play-by-post-new-to-the-game-play-a-quick-encounter/

I like the harsh rules on disengaging you present squisling. Having played some savage worlds I have often disliked how you can just disengage in wfrp. In savage worlds when you disengage, every single foe engaged with you gets a free attack on you, always. You can use tricks to try to make them shaken, so they can't or give up attaking and using a defend action instead. But I really like how that works.

Perhaps only allow disengaging as an action or when your action card gives you the free option. Creates some tactical options viable for abstract combat.