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Hi, I have a question about this mechanic:

"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.)

Precise Shot: If you have the Precise Shot feat, you don’t take this penalty."

Note the wording: "FRIENDLY character".

This implies that if a player were to shoot at two enemies engaged in melee combat, there would be no penalty.

However, Precise Shot makes no distinction between two enemies engaged in melee combat, and a friendly + enemy engaged in melee combat - it simply states "an opponent engaged in melee".

"Precise Shot

You are adept at firing ranged attacks into melee.

Prerequisite: Point-Blank Shot.

Benefit: You can shoot or throw ranged weapons at an opponent engaged in melee without taking the standard –4 penalty on your attack roll.

Note: Two characters are engaged in melee if they are enemies of each other and either threatens the other."

So my question is:

1) Is the Shooting Into Melee rule designed to simulate only the danger of hitting a friendly target, in which case it does not apply to enemy targets engaged in melee with other enemies, or:

2) Is it also designed to simulate the difficulty of hitting an enemy that is engaged in melee combat and thus is parrying, dodging back and forth, maneuvering in an unpredictable manner, etc, in which case it does apply to enemy targets engaged in melee with other enemies?

The reason I'm asking this is partially in case this scenario ever occurs, and also because a player is asking me if he can forsake the -4 penalty and simply risk hitting the relevant friendly target instead.

I'd be really grateful if someone could illuminate me on how this works.

Hypothetical:

- Shield Master ("Add your shield’s enhancement bonus to attack and damage rolls made with the shield as if it were a weapon enhancement bonus.")

- +3 Heavy Spiked Shield of Bashing ("An enhancement bonus on a shield does not improve the effectiveness of a shield bash made with it, but the shield can be made into a magic weapon in its own right.")

- Add a +1 Flaming enchantment to the shield as a 'weapon' enchantment. The shield now has +3 enhancement on the 'armor' part of the shield, and +1 Flaming on the 'weapon' part of the shield.

- I now perform a Shield Bash, using Shield Master.

- The shield's base damage is 1d8, because Bashing increases the die by two steps, and Spiked increases it by one step, and the largest increase takes effect... is that right? Or do I get 2d6 base damage?

- Shield Master allows me to use the +3 enhancement to hit and to damage. (Add your shield’s enhancement bonus to attack and damage rolls made with the shield as if it were a weapon enhancement bonus.)

- My shield also has the Flaming enchantment, so I get +3 to hit/damage, and +1d6 fire damage.

Please point out any errors in my reasoning!

PS: I would REALLY like to know how to calculate the cost of this item. For example, how much does it cost to add the spikes?

Hi, so I had a player in my game do this a couple of times, and I was just wondering how you guys feel about it, whether you think it's balanced, how to deal with it as the GM when it happens, etc.

So basically the Gunslinger character is carrying many cartridges, some of them are dragon's breath cartridges too.

The first time this happened was against a Tunnel Worm, the player was caught near the mouth of the worm and was in a bad position, so he decided to shove his bag of cartridges into the worm's mouth and ignite them. I decided this was a pretty cool move so I told the player that it was an automatic critical, which killed the worm outright.

So that was fine, because the worm was only intended to be a temporary threat anyway, I intended it to go away once it had taken a bit of damage from the party. They were too low level to take it on properly.

Anyway so later on the party is up against the BBEG and the same player decides to have his character commit suicide, by blowing up all his cartridges and powder horns, that are strapped to his body, while standing right next to the BBEG.

He manages it (eventually) and the damage ends up well into triple digits, killing the slightly-wounded BBEG (and blowing up a party member in the process, but let's not go there). The BBEG actually made his saving throw but due to the high damage involved, it still killed him.

Obviously, this kind of damage output would be well outside the realms of a low level character (below level 10). What do you think of this?