How to have Powerful Ranged without Usurping Melee?

[Altair_the_Vexed]

HELP!

I'm wondering how I can make a verisimilar system that allows very deadly ranged attacks (for example, with firearms) without totally overshadowing melee. In d20 modern, for example, firearms basically win - melee attacks can't come close to the their damage or efficiency.

Or in other words, why would you bring a sword to a gun fight?
What ways do game systems model this - while still being roughly verisimilar?

No particular system in mind here, just let's assume one with some sort of HP.

[kieza]

Make melee more powerful than ranged--maybe melee attacks auto-hit, or deal higher damage--but present obstacles to getting into melee.

That means you want to have lots of obstructions and difficult terrain, at the very least. You could also have some kind of "overwatch" mechanic where a character with a ranged weapon can fire on people who move in their field of view, or a "suppression" mechanic where a character with an automatic weapon can get an auto-hit on anyone not in cover within a certain area.

The idea would be to make melee very powerful IF you can get within melee range, but make it a challenge to do so without getting shot up. Note that the overwatch and suppression mechanics both have simple counters: you can avoid getting hit by overwatch if you flank the enemy and get outside their field of view, and you can avoid suppression if you end each turn with cover.

The caveat is that, to make the game fun, you'd have to be conscientious about placing appropriate terrain and providing routes to assault ranged enemies. If the enemy is a half dozen guys with machineguns, hiding in a bunker with a clear field of view for 300 feet in all directions, melee is going to be useless.

[Spiryt]

Limit guns to say, ~1800 AD level at most?

Otherwise it's going to be kinda hard to do with 'verisimilitude'.

[Broken Crown]

If a significant fraction of your combat encounters take place indoors or otherwise at very close quarters, then melee becomes much more relevant. Realistically, a guy with a knife can beat a guy with a handgun at ranges under 20 feet, because the gun is much less useful if you can get inside it's effective range. (The minimum effective range of rifles is, naturally, even longer, which is why SWAT teams use short carbines and SMGs.)

Just make sure your game mechanics reflect this. For example, the d20 system has people making ranged attacks incur attacks of opportunity from melee opponents. Impose whatever penalties you think are suitable on ranged combatants who insist on trying to shoot enemies who are within arm's length. That way, ranged combat is effective at range, while letting melee combat remain effective in melee, as it should be.

[Berenger]

In d20 modern, for example, firearms basically win

No, they don't. Not unless you charge a gunman in open terrain and take several rounds to reach him.

A guy with a M16A1 and Double Tap can do ~14 damage a round. A guy with a katana, STR 16 and +3 damage from Power Attack can do ~15 damage a round. If the swordsman manages to get into melee, the shooter is screwed because he is at -4 to hit, suffers an AoO for every shot and the katana crits twice as often.

[LudicSavant]

Or in other words, why would you bring a sword to a gun fight?

I would bring a sword to a gunfight if the sword had meaningful advantages over the gun at close ranges and I had some means of getting to close range without suffering too much from the guns (such as by taking advantage of cover, for instance. Or approaching stealthily. Or moving really fast. Or any of innumerable other possibilities).

For a simple example, it's beneficial for a jedi to bring a lightsaber to a blaster fight because he possesses numerous effective defenses against blasters and lightsabers have utility that blasters don't, such as being able to cut through extremely heavy armor without much trouble.

[awa]

in my current home-brew system characters are "undefended" if threatened in melee with out an appropriate weapon of their own out "undefended" characters cant make 5ft steps and suffer -4 deff

that makes it a lot harder on ranged types if guys get into melee with them

[Keltest]

In our homebrew, non-wizard ranged based combat has been designed so that you get numerous attacks off that don't do a lot of damage individually, but hit fairly consistently. An archer will chip away at enemy health over time even if theyre heavily armored. Melee combatants deal significantly better burst damage however, dealing a lot more damage in a single hit.

For firearms... Hmm. Perhaps give them a comparatively large amount of damage, but make them unable to be magical? The bullets might be enchanted to get through magical resistance like immunity to weapons not at least +x, but not actually add all that much damage, and no magic will make the gun or bullets more accurate. It really depends on what you want your gunmen to be contributing to the battle.

[Thrudd]

HELP!

I'm wondering how I can make a verisimilar system that allows very deadly ranged attacks (for example, with firearms) without totally overshadowing melee. In d20 modern, for example, firearms basically win - melee attacks can't come close to the their damage or efficiency.

Or in other words, why would you bring a sword to a gun fight?
What ways do game systems model this - while still being roughly verisimilar?

No particular system in mind here, just let's assume one with some sort of HP.

You wouldn't bring a sword to a gun fight, except as a backup weapon in case you run out of ammo. So, keep strict account of ammo carried and used, limit it in realistic ways, and it will make sense for characters to want to have a knife as backup when they are low on ammo.

Keep HP totals low, so any/all attacks that hit are potentially deadly. Or use the vitality/wounds system, so crits are likely to be deadly regardless of the weapon. If melee weapons have higher threat range, that would be a reason to choose melee, although I don't think it makes sense for blades to be more likely to deliver a killing blow than a gun.

If you're looking for actual verisimilitude, melee weapons have no advantage over modern firearms, except in fringe cases. Any weapon beats no weapon, firearms beat melee weapons. Most weapons can be equally deadly, it's just a matter of how much skill you need to use them and how close you need to be for it to be effective.

If you're looking to simulate action movie style, where a martial artist with a sword might take out a bunch of gun wielding goons, look at Feng Shui. Your defense rating is also your attack number, and the higher your attack roll the more damage you do. So the better you are at martial arts, the harder you are to hit and the more damage you can do with whatever melee weapon you choose to use. Guns add a set amount of damage to a successful gun attack roll, melee weapons add a low amount of damage plus your strength attribute. Also, damage only matters against named bad guys, most bad guys are unnamed nobodies who don't have HP and go down basically as soon as you hit them. All characters that have HP, PC or NPC, have the same amount that never changes (30), except big bruisers, who get more as their class feature.
The result is, it is equally valid and effective to choose to be a martial artist with high martial arts skill as it is to be a killer or ex special forces or maverick cop with high gun skill, or sorceror with high magic skill, or supernatural creature with high creature powers skill.

[Nerd-o-rama]

The realistic use for melee weapons is mostly quiet ambushes, outmaneuvering gun users in VERY close quarters (in buildings, trenches, ships, etc.), and not escalating fights to the level where you're USING firearms, at least in modern settings.

In pre-modern, post-gunpowder times, of course, you have firearms that are very powerful but wildly inaccurate and difficult to reload, so you tend to have a gun volley and then a charge in large battles. In futuristic settings, there's always the old chestnut of energy shields thay block high-KE projectile weapons but not low-KE pointy sticks.

[awa]

also in not quite so advanced a setting a bullet might rupture a spaceship while a knife is less likely to.

damge types are also a way to due it depending on the nature of your setting. Putting little holes in a vampire or zombie might not be very effective but hacking them to pieces can still work

[Mastikator]

* Make guns, but not knives, illegal.
* Make stealth more important than raw damage and efficiency, guns are very loud, knives aren't.
* Make using guns without hearing protection cause permanent hearing loss and tinnitus.
* Make guns harder to use without proper training.

There you go, not only verisimilitudes but truly realistic!

[squab]

Keep in mind, although guns might be harder to use untrained, it's easier to get basic competence with a gun then getting decent hand to hand combat skills.

[Thinker]

Give options for increased mobility to melee characters that allow them to close the distance with ranged characters with a reasonable refresh cycle. Create opportunities for ranged characters to escape that do not allow them to attack at the same time.

[Lorsa]

What do you mean with "while being verisimilar"? I am not sure such a word exists.

For verisimilitude, you only need a game system and world that is consistent in itself. For example, you could have game mechanics where you can dodge bullets, or deflect them with swords, and uphold verisimilitude if you have a world where those things are possible (such as playing Star Wars or Matrix the RPG).

On the other hand, if you want a realistic game, then there is currently no known way to have a game with powerful ranged without usurping melee. Unless you move into specific scenarios, applied constraints on the scenario in question, to make ranged weapons less good. Some such constraints have been offered here (close quarters, lack of visibility, limited ammunition). It remains a fact though, that powerful ranged weapons are realistically superior to melee.

Creating a game where this isn't so would require melee weapons to do even more damage, be much harder to dodge (whereas dodging bullets is easy), or in other ways have rules that compensate melee for its lack of range. As long as your game world incorporates those parameters, upholding verisimilitude isn't hard. Like mentioned before, several movies have done just that.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Limit guns to say, ~1800 AD level at most?

Otherwise it's going to be kinda hard to do with 'verisimilitude'.

This.

If you want to do this with any sort of realism a setting between roughly 1500 and 1860 is probably best. It's before copper cartridges, one of the main inventions that led to modern guns. Guns from this period are single shot, take several rounds of D&D time to reload and (at least the muskets from the earlier parts of are pretty inaccurate when loaded for battlefield conditions (rather than say a shooting competition for which the barrel would be completely clean allowing for the use of a bullet of the exact right size). Bows are faster but weaker, at least versus armor, and take more training to use. Handguns can be exceptions to the one shot rule. There have always been experiments (during this period) with multi barreled contraptions and from about 1835 onwards revolvers (still very slow to reload, but multiple shots none the less) are starting to sell well. But for simplicity sake you can limit anything special like that to PC's and notable enemies if you're using them at all, plus the handguns are much weaker and even less accurate than the muskets. Speaking about accuracy: from about 1800 onwards you'll also see rifles starting to get used for other purposes than hunting. They take longer to reload than muskets at that time, but are more accurate. Avoid getting shot by. Maybe take Spiryt's advice on the period just to be sure.

This is why pulp hero's like Zorro (+-1820) and the Three Musketeers (+-1620) get away with using swords for most of their fighting. Guns are dangerous, but with a good dexterity bonus to armor class you can avoid getting shot while running around and stabbing people. The idea is probably mildly inaccurate, but close enough, and fun.

[LudicSavant]

What do you mean with "while being verisimilar"? I am not sure such a word exists.

Expand your vocabulary! http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/verisimilar

[Cluedrew]

Besides going back your other option is to go forward. As weapons technology improves so do the defences against them. Now nukes will probably still level everything nearby, but perhaps side-arms have fallen behind personal shield generators or cloth armour made of carbon nanotubes or something like that.

In this example you might have (since you said HP) Damage Reduction by 10 points, ignored by cutting. Swords still threaten to cut people in half, while gun fire is like a really heavy punch. Of course some guns might shoot bladed bullets and a good shot might get through the armour anyway, but melee weapons still have there advantages under this system.

[Vknight]

Eclipse Phase.
Ranged Weapons have many benefits but your more often going to be in corridors, cities, space stations where you can move around and that can be played with.

The key is a matter of setting determines which is better.

All determined by technology and other limitations
In the end environment also helps

[Lorsa]

Expand your vocabulary! http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/verisimilar

Look at that! You learn something every day.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

Thanks for all the input!

I think I'll go with applying a ranged penalty for very close ranges (depending on the weapon type), and a defence penalty when only armed with ranged weapons against melee.

Apparently I've also provided today's vocab lesson - "Verisimilar" is the adjective from which we get the noun "verisimilitude". I want to have verisimilitude in my game, so I want the rules to be verisimilar. :smallsmile:

[Fizban]

In our homebrew, non-wizard ranged based combat has been designed so that you get numerous attacks off that don't do a lot of damage individually, but hit fairly consistently. An archer will chip away at enemy health over time even if theyre heavily armored. Melee combatants deal significantly better burst damage however, dealing a lot more damage in a single hit.
Since the OP wants "deadly" ranged attacks then do the reverse: ranged weapons hit inconsistently for high damage, while melee attacks will wear the target down through constant battering. Honestly I'd say this is the most realistic, pretty sure most people find it incredibly hard to hit a fast moving human target who's trying not to be hit. It's only in games that archers can somehow put 2 arrows per second into a speeding target with perfect accuracy. While in melee, every block still deals a little damage that will build up if you don't end the fight.

although I don't think it makes sense for blades to be more likely to deliver a killing blow than a gun.
Depends on what you mean by "likely." High crit/low multiplier weapons aren't as likely to one-shot a target due to the low multiplier, but the broad crit range of a sword represents that it can hit a broad section of flesh with more potential to inflict shallow cuts on vitals. Bows and guns usually have x3 crits for for the opposite. d20 games basically have crits as the main descriptor of how a weapon works, but crits don't happen on every attack so it's not as noticeable.

If a significant fraction of your combat encounters take place indoors or otherwise at very close quarters, then melee becomes much more relevant. Realistically, a guy with a knife can beat a guy with a handgun at ranges under 20 feet, because the gun is much less useful if you can get inside it's effective range. (
Could give a penalty for being within a move action of the target, except the target's speed could be anything. Adding a minimum range to existing range increments seems a little annoying.

[NichG]

Might be a bit late, but my advice would be the following:

1. Have ranged weapons and melee deal about the same amount of damage. Use an armor system that treats armor as DR rather than avoidance.
2. However, have ranged weapons capable of missing, with a hit rate around 60-70%. However, make it so that melee never misses.
3. In exchange, have most ranged attacks inflict some kind of short-term debuff even on a miss (e.g. suppression fire), as well as ways to gain reactive extra attacks against e.g. movement through protected areas.

The result is that melee gives you an effective take-down at the cost of potentially needed to occasionally waste a round moving when there are no viable targets in reach (thus the damage being essentially increased by 1.5x to 2x over ranged). At the same time, even with its misses, ranged attacks still provide debuffs that protect the party from being overwhelmed by the opposition, and can help control the field.

You can go a bit further and partition things like armor negation/armor reduction/etc among the two branches. The main thing to keep in mind is that the entire point of melee in this schema is to take out enemies decisively, so melee has a low affinity for debuffs and things like that. On the other hand, ranged attackers should not expect to take out non-mook targets, but rather should soften them up for melee and restrict their ability to be a threat. So e.g. if you want to have an ability like 'reduces the target's armor', it makes more sense to associate it with ranged rather than melee in this picture.

There are more genre-specific things you can do. For example, in a crime/heist themed game, you could have a party-wide variable called 'Heat', which represents the intensity of police investigations as a result of the party's illegal actions. With a low 'Heat' value, certain things become mechanically easier/better for the party (fencing stolen goods, recruiting/getting favors from other criminals, etc), and the DM doesn't have as many tools to mess them up. With a high 'Heat' value, the DM gains sort of anti action-points they can use to have the cops show up, have one of the PCs be pulled off the street for interrogation at an inopportune time, to fortify the heist with security reinforcements, etc. Heat lowers on a per-game basis, so drawing Heat is undesirable. In such a system, ranged weapons can be simply out and out better than melee in every way, but evidence of their use causes a large increase in Heat. So in such a system, you wouldn't ever want to be a ranged specialist, but you might keep a ranged weapon as a backup for when things get bad (or use them as bluster and intimidation without actually ever firing them).

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Besides going back your other option is to go forward. As weapons technology improves so do the defences against them. Now nukes will probably still level everything nearby, but perhaps side-arms have fallen behind personal shield generators or cloth armour made of carbon nanotubes or something like that.

In this example you might have (since you said HP) Damage Reduction by 10 points, ignored by cutting. Swords still threaten to cut people in half, while gun fire is like a really heavy punch. Of course some guns might shoot bladed bullets and a good shot might get through the armour anyway, but melee weapons still have there advantages under this system.

Of course, because in the future nobody uses bullets, at least not in say Star Wars or Trek. And energy weapons can be shielded against, and often aren't even very lethal when the recipient is not shielded.

[Morty]

In a modern setting, firearms are going to be strictly more efficient in hurting and killing than hand-to-hand combat. So like others have pointed out, if you don't want guns to overshadow swords in a realistic setting, the firearm technology needs to stay at a certain level.

Of course, people do still use hand-to-hand weapons in the modern era for a variety of reasons. But they have to do with logistics, law, covertness and such, not efficiency.

[Cluedrew]

To Lvl 2 Expert:
Apparently, Storm Trooper armour would actually ignore most of our modern day hand weapons, so it seems like blasters although they don't do a lot of damage have a lot of piercing ability. Also buried away in the lore is a type of armour, made of microbes or something, that completely absorbs all blaster fire. Even considering it doesn't do much against other types of damage you think that would be rather popular.

That is a little of topic so I will reiterate my comment for melee and range balance to make sense you just have to set it in almost any setting other than modern warfare. Even in the days of muskets cavalry charges were a viable and glorious tactic.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

To Lvl 2 Expert:
Apparently, Storm Trooper armour would actually ignore most of our modern day hand weapons, so it seems like blasters although they don't do a lot of damage have a lot of piercing ability. Also buried away in the lore is a type of armour, made of microbes or something, that completely absorbs all blaster fire. Even considering it doesn't do much against other types of damage you think that would be rather popular.

Science fiction doesn't have to be too realistic if the end result is cool enough. In the Star Wars movies pretty much the only hand to hand weapons are light sabers, which work on the theoretical basis of shut up jedi are awesome, but in some games and stuff based on the setting there are some more swords and sharp weapons. In Star Trek's First Contact the Borg are constantly adapting to the phasers, which are kind of useless because of that. Captain Picard in a glorious moment demonstrates how even holographic bullets, which fridge logic dictates must be energy weapons, are more effective than anything they have. The uselessness of the firearms everyone uses is also the reason Klingons get away with using blades whenever they feel like it. Every franchise has its own explanations for how and why, and the Star Wars expanded universe probably moves up and down between "guns are awesome" and "guns are useless" with every other writer. But the most important thing is: it can be done without seeming ridiculous upon the first viewing, which I totally forgot when writing the first post I made in this thread.


That is a little of topic so I will reiterate my comment for melee and range balance to make sense you just have to set it in almost any setting other than modern warfare. Even in the days of muskets cavalry charges were a viable and glorious tactic.
In fact the usefulness of cavalry went up after bayonets were invented and pikemen were switched out for more muskets. Lancers basically came back from the brink of extinction now they no longer had to choose between getting shot to death slowly or charging yourself to death really, really fast.

[goto124]

But what about ranged spells? Fireball, Acid Arrow, Scorching Ray? (Nevermind that they're DnD spells)

[veti]

I can see several basic angles:

Rate of fire. A Napoleonic musket took ~20 seconds to drop, load, shoulder and fire. A rifle of the same period was even slower. Medieval crossbows were slower still.
Reliability. Early firearms were deadly, but also highly inaccurate and prone to jamming. Particularly in the rain or damp, the misfire rates with matchlock muskets were huge.
Accuracy. Again, early firearms were manufactured to such loose tolerances that the bullet would likely ricochet its way down the barrel, and emerge in just about any direction within an arc of 10 degrees or more - which means accuracy at anything more than point-blank range is appalling. Even high-tech energy weapons may still have accuracy issues - for instance, if there's more than a few milliseconds' delay between pulling the trigger and the weapon actually discharging.
Convenience. Missile weapons (and/or the ammo to use them) may be any combination of "bulky, heavy, rare, fragile, expensive", while melee weapons can be the opposite.
Ease of use. A medieval longbow or composite bow was deadly in trained hands, but the training to use it correctly - was well beyond the means of most people. In D&D terms, these weapons shouldn't be on any list of "common weapons" - they should require their own dedicated proficiency slots (or should, arguably, only be available to characters of the right race and nationality).
Precision. Fireballs can be deadly, but throwing them into a general melee - gives a whole new weight to the term "friendly fire". If missile weapons have a significant splash radius, there will be many situations where it becomes infeasible to use them.

[AceOfFools]

One danger of early fire arms is the need to carry large amounts of expensiven and heavy in bulk explosives.

Granted, this is based more on fiction than any historical knowledge. But to use firearms, especially in large quantity or with cannon, you need to have easily sabatoged points of failure (your powder reserves).

Pirates of the Caribbean had two ships destroyed by fire getting into the powder magazines. Modesitt's Recluse series has "explode gunpowder" as a basic mage spell, but a spell to do damage comparable to a bullet (technically a ball iirc) was a major working that would drain a mage after a very limited number of shots. As a result, firearms were a liability if you were going up against mages.

[dps]

Pirates of the Caribbean had two ships destroyed by fire getting into the powder magazines.

This has always been a danger since guns started being mounted on ships. Of course, shipboard fires get started because the ship get hit by enemy gunfire (or by on-board accidents), not because an opponent hits the ship with a sword or his fists.

Ranged attacks have an inherent superiority to melee attacks in that if you can hit an opponent at a distance, an he can't hit you, as long as you can keep that distance, you'll eventually win. Historically, ranged weapons generally didn't dominate the battlefield in the pre-gunpowder and early gunpowder eras simply because things like rate of fire and lack of accuracy kept the ranged attacks from doing enough damage to keep the opponents from closing to within melee range. With modern firearms, those checks on the relative efficiency of ranged attacks are greatly lessened. (Keep in mind that "ranged" is a relative term as well. Muskets in the ACW era weren't particularly more accurate or faster firing that 16th or 17th century muskets, but they had much longer ranges, which let small-arms fire dominate mid-19th century battlefields to a greater extent than ever before--or even afterwards, because in the 20th century artillery dominated.)

So. Basically, how you keep ranged attacks from dominating depends a lot on the setting:

1) For historical (i.e., non-magical) settings without modern firearms, the efficiency of ranged attacks is limited by rate of fire, accuracy, lack of trained slinger/spear-throwers/archers/gunners, limited ammunition, fairly low range.

2) For historical settings with modern firearms, you'll have to limit the efficiency of ranged attacks by environmental/tactical factors--extremely bad visibility, a need for stealth, very closed quarters, etc.

3) For settings where magic is in use, it's all about how the magic system is designed. If a wizard can cast a spell that can cause a million enemies at once to age centuries in 5 seconds and die of old age, the wizard will dominate any battlefield. To limit the power of ranged magical attacks, you need to do 2 things. First, limit the power of any given spell. Second, limit the number and frequency of spell that can be cast. This can be done in several ways. You can go the DnD route of having to prepare spells ahead of time, but you can also impose casting costs, and/or require a period of rest between spells. You can also do things like make casting spells gradually erode the health/sanity etc. of casters, but that will only come into play in the long-term, not necessarily in an individual encounter/battle.

4) For SF settings, the same environmental/tactical factors that limit modern real-world firearms can be used (though sensors might decrease the limiting effects of poor visibility unless there are strong ECMs in use). You can also put powered armor or shields that block ranged attacks in your setting, as in Dune (though I find the idea of shielding that blocks bullets and energy blasts but not knives a bit contrived).

[SowZ]

Is there magic? Things like teleportation make melee more viable and buffs that only apply to melee attacks. Enchanting melee weapons can be easier.

Large bonus for attacking someone without a melee weapon of their own. Severe penalties for leaving melee range when someone has a melee weapon/using a ranged weapon in melee are also a balancing factor.