Quote Originally Posted by Slipjig View Post
Part of this also depends on the sverity of the aforementioned penalties for firing into melee. It's absolutely realistic that it would be harder to hit your target AND you would have a real chance of hitting your allies.
However, realistic isn't always fun, and if most rounds of combat involve the majority of enemies being in melee with the frontliners, that's going to be frustrating for archers and some casters. You might want to create a "Precise Shot" feat that reduces the penalty and eliminates the possibility of hitting an ally.
I think a lot of that can be mitagated as a GM by creating more dynamic combat encounters. Have opponents approach from multiple directions, or be positioned on different levels, or have some enemy combatants take cover and fire at the PCs instead of marching in a line/horde directly into melee every single time. This is difficult to do if every fight is in a dungeon delve type situation, with 10' wide hallways and flat empty 10' tall rooms of various sizes so they all fit on a simple graph paper map. When you start varying the terrain, creating vertical encounters (and no, I don't mean flying creatures, although that's possible too), and having opponents who move around and use the environment as well, you find that there is more potential for different combat tactics than the stock "put our fighters up front while the ranged folks stand in the back and fire through them at the same enemies".

A relatively basic example of this: Party travels down a tunnel entrance and comes into a chamber. It's roughly bean shaped, with a roundish end just to the left, and a longer roundish end to the right. To the right is a group of enemies who have heard them and are gathering weapons to come fight them. Past them to the right is short tunnel leading to another small chamber with more enemies who will enter in a couple rounds. To the left on the opposite wall is another tunnel that leads deeper into the tunnel complex. There's an enemy priest there with a couple of big nasty zombies. He's going to spend the next round or so buffing them and then send them in, while he runs off to raise the alarm. A bit further to the left of that tunnel, there is a sloping ledge that runs along the back wall, traveling upwards from left to right to a gallery that runs 15' wide or so along the opposite side of the chamber they enter. Up there are a number of smaller enemies who will line up attack any unengaged party members with javelins and slings (they're somewhat low tech enemies here).

Note what this does. The party has to deal with the immediate threat, which is positioned off to the right in the form of armed opponents. That's where their melee folks will have to go. There is a little bit of a bottleneck here (the "bean shape" of the room narrows a bit to the right). The rest of the party, if they just stand around will be subject to attack from the gallery on the opposite side of the chamber. They can run up the sloped ledge to get to them, but only one at a time (it's a narrow ledge). Alternatively, they can counter fire with their own archers back (which is what they actually did when I ran this. quite successfully, given they had two elves with good archery skills). So the main fight focuses to the right, but there's some missile weapon exchange to the leftish. Sufficient reserves come from farther to the right to keep the focus there, but then these two zombies show up, which have to be dealt with. If they leave just spell casters and archers there, they may have some issues (hey. No free ride here, right?). Which, as it happened when played out was frankly hillarious, since in this game system, arrows do like minimal damage to zombies, so these two poor elves, holding up the rear and wiping the floor with the wimpy folks and their thrown weapons, suddenly find themselves face to face with a couple seriously buffed up zombies.

In my game, we run combat scenarios like that all the time. Very very rarely is it as simple as "group of opponents attack from a single direction, just in melee, and you can just line up and fight them". I mean, it does happen. But not very often.

Quote Originally Posted by Slipjig View Post
If your ranged characters are annoyed by enemies who take cover, well... yes, an opponent who only has only 10% of themselves exposed is tough to hit. Frontal assaults on targets in cover are very much a losing proposition, the ranged characters may need to change tactics (or at least relocate to a spot with a better angle). On the flip side, if you are the GM, give the players some opportunities to take cover, too. And the squares where the players take cover should be seeded with traps no more than 25% of the time.
Yup. Allow for and use cover. Don't have fights occur in featureless rooms. Put stairs on one side leading to a balcony and put opponents up there. Have them walk into a courtyard and find that there are folks up on the walls, and in towers who are now firing down at the party from various directions, while the party also has to fight there way to <whatever>. And yeah. Let them fire back (with cover effects of course). Make the floor uneven. Put slopes in, that have to be clambored up (or around). Put in pillars and ceiling supports that may provide cover as well.

And yeah. If you want to be really evil, have the bad guys trap the obvious cover locations in the room. Sheesh!