Options for a lightly armored character?

[Options for a lightly armored character?]

Problem is making things overly hard for heavily armored characters just massively weighs things towards archers as they're so devastating - mysteriously most of the lightly armored characters I've seen.

[Spending "Banked" Advances During Play and Your Game]

I allow banking as its clearly needed for attribute buying (plus book learning skills in my campaign as peopel need to have a source to learn from) but I've stuck to only allowing the spending of advances once a session has ended. I have twice given a free advance in game for achieving certain campaign goals and those were to specific skills - specialisations in both cases that represented putting together a lot of facts and threads and a "Eureka!" moment. In my opinion allowing spending of advances on the fly is asking for trouble as players can counter their enemies whatever they do. Indeed they already have a limited method of doing that, aka fortune points, so why do they need more?

[Gromril Armor crit cancelling ability]

You can always just say the severity rating without revealing the crit effect itself as a "compromise" rule.

 

[Moving from Long Range to Engaged in a single turn]

Beyond the factor that the GM seems to have attacked with a far too powerful group of monsters I see no problem at all with the tactic and in fact beastmen are almost designed for it. Missile weapons are extremely powerful in 3rd edition and it leaves the GM and players with only 3 choices: close the range as fast as possible; try to minimise the chance of being hit via misfortune dice or turn every encounter into a missile barrage.

Its a particular problem with players as you can easily ramp up how devestating missile attacks are with action cards and high attributes. In fact some action combo's like pinning the target in place and then rapid shotting them to death are just plain broken (as much as I hate the word) and become standard tactics.

Thats aggravated by the way Wood elves can mitigate cover in woodland areas and darkness penalties meaning approaching under those doesn't help at all.

That leaves turning Warhammer FRPG into "Ranged Combat RPG" and that totally ruins the enemies and makes them featureless. Plus its as irritating for players to be gunned down at range as it is for monsters.

The "cheat" method from a GM perspective is that you have to lower the encounter ranges but that effectively removes the staring moments for archers so at least with charging them they arrive with damage.

It also has to be said the wood elf archer in my party does have the action card to allow engaged shooting which means he's not a helpless as people expect. There are also other ways to counter the charge - think of traditional tactics as essentially its cavalry vs archers here - stakes, cover, tripwires, hills etc. Warhammer 3rd edition is very flexible.

The real world truth is that if cavalry caught archers in unprepared open terrain they were massacred and beastmen with charge bonuses are essentially that - that was one of their specific roles in a battle.