Missile Fire
Like melee combat, when firing ranged weapons, you roll your HD in an attempt to equal or exceed the DC of your opponent. There may be an additional modifier based on the range to the target.

Dortmund, a 1st level fighter (1HD) with DEX 15 fires a bow at a goblin (DC4) and rolls one die. Normally he’d need 4+ to hit, but because of his DEX, he only needs 3+.However, the goblin is at far range (-1) so he still needs 4+. 

If you have more than 1HD and you have several targets, you may split your HD between your opponents up to the number of missiles you have available or shoot at just one of your targets.

Dortmund is now 4th level (3HD) and has several goblin targets. This time he’s got a couple of javelins to hand, so whilst he has 3HD, his limit is the number of javelins he has. Therefore, he can throw two javelins at two of them, one with 2HD and the other with 1HD or throw one javelin at one of them with all 3HD.  

Some missile weapons are slower to load; crossbows can be fired up to three times in a round and heavy crossbows only twice. There is no limit for bows and slings other than the availability of arrows or sling stones.
 

Last edited by Simon W (8/25/2014 12:42 am)

The GIT! wrote:

Hang on - are you saying you can fire a crossbow three times in 10 seconds? A heavy crossbow can be reloaded every 5 secs? That's actually twice as fast as is realistically possible. If you adjusted the combat round to be 12 secs instead of 10 you could reasonably say that a crossbow can be fired twice in a round while a bow can be fired up to 4 times a round. This is based on saying that a crossbow could be fired 5 times in 30 secs while a regular bow could be fired 10 times in the same time. This link explains some of the ratios in shooting speed between the bows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossbow#Comparison_to_conventional_bows) and these are the videos demonstrating the tests (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g-0-RK3cjk and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HagCuGXJgUs&feature=grec_index); I just averaged them out to a 5:10 ratio for ease.

I know you're not going for outright accuracy but I do feel some realism may be worthwhile. Also, I still feel the range adjustments of -1 for Medium and -2 for Long should be retained.

I'm only tinkering...I'm thinking of adjusting the combat round to be something a little more "fluid"...the range adjustments of -1 and -2 are retained
 

The GIT! wrote:

I know you're tinkering Simon, and good on you for doing so
I just thought I'd put that out there about shooting rates in case you do decide it's worth considering. At the end of the day it is a fantasy game (albeit a rather gritty one) so anything goes really.

You are right though, things have to have some basis in reality, but then it is a game and only has to approximate reality!
 

A note about the powerful blow could be mentioned  somewhere as it might the the only way a mundane weapon could get to bypass a demon of protection's armor.

Last edited by hoplitenomad (8/25/2014 8:31 pm)

Editing:  Merchant is mentioned as an NPC class on the contents page but not on the character class page as the other NPC's are.