Firing Into Melee & Precision Attacks
If characters become clustered together during a fight, it becomes hard to draw a bead on their target. Sometimes, characters will accidentally hit something other than their intended target.
Firing into Melee
If a character attacks an enemy who has other characters within 5 feet of them, roll a dice to determine which is being hit before the To-Hit roll is made. Use the smallest character in the melee to represent 1 side of a dice; double the value for every larger character involved.
For instance, an orc bandit fires an arrow at a goblin whilst two other orc bandits are attacking them. The goblin's Small size gives them a value of 1 in this, whilst each orc bandit is Medium - one size category larger. This means that each Orc has 2 points, bringing the total value of the group to 5. To roll this, we would roll 1d10 and halve it, rounding up. On a 1-2, one orc is hit, on a 3-4, the other orc is hit and on a 5, the original target is hit.
In this instance, the archer gets a 3 - hitting one of their allies! With their back turned away from the archer, they are flatfooted against the attack and give the archer a +1 bonus they didn't even want to have on hitting a friend!
Enormous Size Differences
If a target is three or more Size categories larger than all other targets, the character cannot hit any other targets involved - unless they make a Precision attack. If the larger creature is the subject of an Overbear attempt, however, they must still roll for Firing into Melee.
Precision Attacks
To avoid the risk of Shooting Into A Melee, the character may consider their attack to be a Precision Attack with a -4 penalty. If this misses, no one is harmed (unless, for instance, the attack was with a grenade).
If a character has the Precision Combat Style, they have an easier time with this. The first level decreases the Precision Attack penalty by 2 points to -2 by default. The second level makes all Precision Attacks have no penalty, though the character is free to roll to see who they hit if they wish.
