Making Ranged Combat More Realistic

[Urizen]

In the RuneQuest 6 section on ranged combat there is a sidebar about how real-life ranged combat is quite a bit more difficult than is presented in the game, especially against man-sized opponents; the game 'errs on the side of the heroic'.

However, the way RPG-Fantasy characters use bows like they're a gun has been a pet peeve of mine since I was 14; at close range it's basically asking to get killed by anyone with a melee weapon, and at long range it's just not practical as an individual combat technique.

So, I would like to err on the side of real-world ranged combat.

A couple of simple ideas are: changing the Apparent Size tables and upping the difficulty modifiers for moving targets and cover. But I am very new to RQ6 and I don't want to start tinkering and find out what I'm doing doesn't quite work.

[Urizen]

I went ahead and wrote up a blog post on some issues with ranged combat in real life, and another providing a chart to make shooting at range far more difficult.

Bows, Crossbows and Melee Combat [with Slings!]

RQ6 Adjusted Ranged Combat Apparent Size modifiers

[Claybor]

Hola, I too have been trying to make ranged weapons more realistic in all the games that I play, and most recently in RQ6. (That was my post on the RQ6 forum that you commented in.)

I pretty much agree 100% with all your comments on the topic, but I want a fairly simple way to implement it. (Your combat style idea should work very well as a start.) The range chart looks pretty good too, but seems like it may add a bit more complication to a system that's already pretty involved. I may try it anyway, but I hope to come up with something a bit less charty. (yes I made up that word.)

[Urizen]

The range chart looks pretty good too, but seems like it may add a bit more complication to a system that's already pretty involved. I may try it anyway, but I hope to come up with something a bit less charty. (yes I made up that word.)

Well, it's just a modification of the Apparent Size chart in the RQ6 book - I just made it scale more plausibly, so that the long shots are basically impossible and the close-shots against motionless targets are quite easy. I think I might want to modify how much a moving character affects difficulty, but it tends to make shots very 'impossible' quickly because of a limited scale in difficulties.