Ranged combat system

Introduction

Shooting a wild boar in a thick wood is harder than shooting it in an open field yet the vanilla version of Neverwinter Nights 2 does not account for such matters such as trees or rocks and considers all ranged weapons equally good even for long distance shooting. The ranged combat system developed by Rasael adresses those two issues.

Player characters as well as monsters use it.

Objects on the path

The system looks for obstacles that are near the target (near meaning situated in a 4 feet cube centered on the target) and that are between the shooter and the target. Each obstacle adds some penalty :

Object type	Penalty applied
Creature	Creature size (2 for medium, +1 for each size over that)
Door	2
Placeable (environment : wall, trees, rocks, chairs)	2 if no penalty, +1 to penalty otherwise

The penalty caps at 12

Distance and weapons used

There is a penalty applied if the distance to the target is great, that distance depends on the weapon used.

Weapon type	Max distance before penalty	Distance penalty formula
Heavy crossbow	35 feet	(distance-35)/3
Light crossbow	26 feet	(distance-26)/2
Longbow	40 feet	(distance-40)/4
Short bow	30 feet	(distance-30)/3
Anything else	19 feet	(distance-19)/3

This penalty also caps at 12, both penalties are applied to the attack bonus.

To put things in perspective keep in mind that a fireball spell has a 20 feet radius.