Attacking a section of a larger creature

[Talakeal]

My previous thread got derailed with a long discussion about this topic, and I was wondering if any of the rules sages here have any opinions or knowledge of official answers on the subject.

The rules for shooting into close combat mention attacking a "section of a larger creature" and the rules for total concealment say you can attack a single square if you think a concealed enemy is within.

My questions are:

1: Is there any restriction on which squares you can target?

2: Can you shoot "through" a creature's space to target a specific space in the middle or on the far side?

3: If yes to 2, does a creature provide soft cover to itself when shooting through its space?

4: Can you use this to ignore cover, concealment, or total cover? Where is it calculated from?

5: If a creature wouldn't ordinarily have cover / concealment from you, but you are shooting at a space which does (for example a large creature standing half inside the radius of a darkness spell or an incorporeal creature standing halfway out of wall) does it apply to your shot?

6: Any other weirdness I am not thinking of?

I honestly haven't played 3.X since it went out of print, and don't intent to, so I am both rusty on my rules lore and this is mostly just academic, but I used to be super into the game and am really curious about the answer as it is something I don't think ever came up.

Thanks!

[Gruftzwerg]

My previous thread got derailed with a long discussion about this topic, and I was wondering if any of the rules sages here have any opinions or knowledge of official answers on the subject.

The rules for shooting into close combat mention attacking a "section of a larger creature" and the rules for total concealment say you can attack a single square if you think a concealed enemy is within.


I assume you are referring to these rules here:

Shooting or Throwing into a Melee

If you shoot or throw a ranged weapon at a target engaged in melee with a friendly character, you take a -4 penalty on your attack roll. Two characters are engaged in melee if they are enemies of each other and either threatens the other. (An unconscious or otherwise immobilized character is not considered engaged unless he is actually being attacked.)

If your target (or the part of your target you’re aiming at, if it’s a big target) is at least 10 feet away from the nearest friendly character, you can avoid the -4 penalty, even if the creature you’re aiming at is engaged in melee with a friendly character.


1: Line of Sight as always when you make ranged attacks. The part (5ft square) of your enemy that you are targeting needs to fit the regular rules.

2: No, you can't hit the creature from inside of it. You still need to follow Line of Sight as usual.

3: ---

4: Use what? Attacking into a square?
Attacking "blindly" into a square is just that. And it comes with a 50% misschance iirc. Thus it doesn't really help with concealment. It can sole get worse (soft cover is sole 20% misschance..^^)

5: If you don't have Line of Sight to the "normal squares" a creature occupies, I guess you have to deal with the range modifiers (cover/concealment/whatsoever)
But Attacking into a Square can't bypass any kind of cover.

6: Line of Sight maybe? xD Jokes aside, I really think that LoS is the sole limitation here. Follow the LoS rules and you should know what is possible and what not.

[icefractal]

I think that in question #4, the scenario is something like:

ABC#...X
DEF
GHI

Where A-I are the nine squares of a huge creature, # is a column providing cover (or fog providing concealment), and X is the attacker. If X just attacks the huge creature in general, part of it is behind cover. But if they specifically attack square I ... then no cover, no concealment?

And question #2 would be attacking, say, square D from the location of X.

[Talakeal]

I think that in question #4, the scenario is something like:

ABC#...X
DEF
GHI

Where A-I are the nine squares of a huge creature, # is a column providing cover (or fog providing concealment), and X is the attacker. If X just attacks the huge creature in general, part of it is behind cover. But if they specifically attack square I ... then no cover, no concealment?

And question #2 would be attacking, say, square D from the location of X.

Right.

In the other thread people were saying that you could always target square E from any position and ignore all "firing into close combat" penalties as by definition square E was always ten feet away from any potential attacks regardless of size or position.* Which just felt intuitively wrong and RAW extremely unclear.



*Except of course a tiny creature standing in square E, but lets ignore that for now for the sake of sanity...

[Vaern]

Right.

In the other thread people were saying that you could always target square E from any position and ignore all "firing into close combat" penalties as by definition square E was always ten feet away from any potential attacks regardless of size or position.* Which just felt intuitively wrong and RAW extremely unclear.



*Except of course a tiny creature standing in square E, but lets ignore that for now for the sake of sanity...

I don't think creatures typically act as obstructions on the battle grid for the purpose of line of sight/effect. I don't have books on hand to look anything up at the moment, so feel free to correct me, but I don't think there's anything stopping you from targeting E.

Mind you, a creature is not a solid geometric block on the map. You might say that a creature is a huge demon facing forward in the direction of F. Space E might represent the creature's head at the center of the space it occupies, which you could call a shot at. Squares A, D, and G might represent the demon's wings at its back, which you could shoot at over its shoulders. Attacking through part of a creature's area to hit a specific space isn't especially difficult to explain away in-game.
You might need a stronger argument to justify attacking the rear spaces of a gelatinous cube, though, since that is a solid geometric block...

[Darg]

A creature does not stop LoE/S unless they specifically take up the entire space like a gelatinous cube. That said, a square occupied by a creature is cover.

1) as long as you have LoS and LoE you can target anything within your range.

2) mechanics say yes.

3) yes.

4) no. Cover requires lines from your square to the opponent's entire square (except for melee where you can make lines to individual squares) and concealment is determined the exact same way (melee doesn't have a choice of a square, if the target is partially in the area they are not concealed for adjacent melee). Reach is determined using the ranged attack rules for both.

5) cover and concealment are determined using the whole square of the opponent's space except for adjacent melee attacks. If a creature is more than 5 ft from you they are in cover/concealment when partially behind/inside cover/concealment. So the answer is yes because they either have it or they don't. There is no partiality to it.

6) melee thrown weapons aren't allowed to be thrown unless you add some common sense to the letter of the RAW. (Melee thrown aren't classified as ranged weapons and only ranged weapons can make ranged attacks.)