Making Ranged Attacks While Engaged

Sometimes, a character may want to make a ranged attack even though they’re locked in hand-to-hand combat with an enemy. Such an action can be risky; a character may find it hard to take the time to line up a shot while an opponent is swinging an axe at them!

Any opponent engaged with a character when the character makes a ranged attack (no matter who the target is) may add b to their next Brawl or Melee check against that character. They automatically lose this bonus if they and the character are no longer engaged with each other.

In addition, the difficulty of some ranged attacks increases while the attacker and an enemy are engaged, and other ranged attacks become impossible. See Table I.6–4: Ranged Modifiers for more information. You should note that this chart differentiates based on types of weapons, because in the core rules, there is only one kind of combat skill that lets you attack at range. If your setting has multiple ranged combat skills (such as separate skills for “light” and “heavy” ranged weapons), then the ranged modifiers can be determined by skill, rather than weapon size. Generally, it should be obvious which of your combat skills match up with which ranged modifiers.