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Only a complete lunatic would use a bazooka at point blank ra— oh, yeah. Right.

"I will explain to my Legions of Terror that guns are ranged weapons and swords are not. Anyone who attempts to throw a sword at the hero or club him with a gun will be summarily executed."
Evil Overlord List, Rule #197

The inability of a long-range weapon user, especially a villain, to use said weapon at long range. It seems that they are aware only of the trope that extended weapons get knocked out of hands easily, and thus will hold those weapons close to themselves. Why they monologue and walk closely to their target is unknown, since this is usually a good chance for the unarmed target to wrench it away or for an annoying Side Kick to club them from behind.

This may be because extremely long-range fights don't look as exciting. Watch a YouTube video from coalition forces in the Iraq war or in Afghanistan and notice how rarely you can even see the enemy apart from the occasional muzzle flash. That being said, in many cases, effective range is only a tiny fraction of a weapon's maximum range due to visibility, concealment, battle stress, and suppression fire. It's hard to be accurate at a kilometer even if your weapon can reach that far, unless you have plenty of time to aim.

In a nonmilitary context, this is pretty much Truth in Television. Based on various law enforcement agency data, the vast majority of fatal shootings involving civilian-on-civilian and cop-on-civilian violence in the United States take place under 15 meters (with the FBI citing 3 meters as typical), despite even handguns, shotguns, and submachine guns on full auto typically all having a 25-50 meter effective range, with rifles having ranges of several hundred. There are various reasons for this, ranging from a lot of these instances being point-blank ambushes, to untrained or lightly trained shooters (civilians and police) often having their already-unimpressive accuracy down to dirt during stressful situations, to police trying to deescalate situations by getting close enough to speak to suspects, to some of those civilian-on-civilian incidents being preceded by verbal arguments.

To a certain extent, this happens in virtually every science-fiction show featuring futuristic vehicles or starships. Rule of thumb: if you can see the enemy ship, you're close enough to be instantly vaporized. Because 1 km was not far even for WWII artillery and it's point-blank range for space weapons: to be useful even in ICBM interception, let alone defense from spaceships, they must be effective at least up to 100–1,000 km. Of course, that doesn't make for particularly entertaining viewing, which is why we have nice things like Deflector Shields.

Commonly shows up when using a shotgun or a hand grenade. May result in a No Scope kill with a Sniper Rifle. Contrast Sniper Pistol, where the weapon has range far better than what it's supposed to have in Real Life, and Arbitrary Weapon Range. And don't confuse with No Range Like Point-Blank Range, where getting up close and personal with a long range weapon is a conscious effort.

See also See the Whites of Their Eyes, which is this trope for spaceships. The inversion is Throwing Your Sword Always Works.


Examples:

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    Anime and Manga 
  • Code Geass is so guilty of this trope it's not even funny. Most ranged combat happens within two arms' lengths (allowing those Super Prototype mecha to dogfight around each other and exchange melee blows and gunfire in equal measure while reducing those hapless machine-gun wielding mooks into decorations), and missiles or battleship cannons aren't used at anything over a few hundred meters' worth of distance. Even if we accept that some side effect of the universe's Schizo Tech meant that targeting systems never evolved beyond the 'binoculars' stage, it's still bloody ludicrous.
  • Heavy Metal L-Gaim: This series is pretty bad with this. In many fights the enemy mechas tried to get close to L-Gaim instead of shooting from afar. Sometimes it was justified, though: both mechas were sword-fighting, and one of them suddenly whipped its rifle out to catch its enemy off guard with a quick point-blank shot. And in Episode 12 Daba had to get extremely close to shoot his enemy at point blank range because otherwise the mecha's energy barrier would deflect the projectile.
  • The Major from Hellsing is shown more than once to be a terrible shot; when he hits Integra in the final volume by getting in close, he even notes "for the first time evah, I hit something."
  • Mazinger Z: Mostly averts this trope. Usually both the Mechanical Beasts equipped with long range weapons (beams, bolts, missile launchers, machine guns) and Mazinger-Z avoided getting close to each other more often than they had to. Some Beasts even made a point of this (Jenova M9 was a robotical sniper. Closing with the enemy would be the last thing it would do). There were exceptions: Sometimes Beasts got over-confident and got close (like Kingdam X10. When Mazinger apparently ran out of power and fell face-down, Kingdam dissipated its mirage trick and approached to skewer it with its sword instead of continuing to blast the robot with lightning bolts. Bad idea). And in the original manga, Kouji prefered fighting with punches and kicks, using his robot's long-range weapons to finish their enemies off.
  • Gundam:
    • Partially explained in Mobile Suit Gundam, through liberal application of Applied Phlebotinum that screws with long-range sensors and targeting. The creator realized that futuristic space combat would most likely NOT involve giant robots and energy-sword fights in reality, so he came up with the Minovsky Particle - when spread out over an area, the aforementioned particles destroy unshielded circuitry (making guided missiles useless) and refract all beams and signals pointed through it (so no lasers, guidance beams, or sensors). Thus the Mobile Suit, which is big enough to carry electronic shielding and tough enough to take on the enemy at close range where sensors are unnecessary, becomes the most effective weapons platform. Though they tend to be armed with all sorts of powerful gun-type weaponry (one episode of Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team featured a long-range shootout between two Mobile Suits ten kilometers apart), they are primarily designed to fight things they are close enough to see, thus invoking this trope.
    • Mobile Suit Victory Gundam features an unusual example with Zeon ace Brenev Auggs, nicknamed the "One-Shot Killer" because he would put his gun's muzzle right against enemy machines, ensuring that one shot is all he ever needed.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam 00 has an example in the final episode that's pretty well justified: Lockon's Cherudim Gundam is getting torn apart by a melee-focused enemy and can only maintain Trans-Am for one second, meaning he's in a literal do-or-die situation. So he uses Trans-Am to dodge his opponent's attack, get around behind them, and perforate them at point-blank range with his beam pistol.
  • Naruto shows us a supposed Long Range Division in the Shinobi Army arc that first tries to keep their distance, without firing, and later charges (complete with the command, "Charge!") when the opponents begin to catch up. They did have capacity for artillery present, at the very least.
  • In Guilty Crown, GHQ personnel apparently don't understand that they don't need to be close to melee range to use their weapons.
  • Blame!: Killy has a habit of being in spitting distance of his target before pulling the trigger, despite his weapon having an unstoppable 70km range. It helps to be sure.
  • Averted in Starship Operators. The range of fighting in the anime is really far.

    Comic Books 
  • Repeatedly pointed out to her opponents by Cinderella in the Fables graphic novel "War and Pieces".
  • In Post-Crisis storyline Who is Superwoman?, Reactron has nullified Supergirl's powers, but she's a good enough fighter to drive him back. Still, she's armed with an iron rod, and he's geared with energy blasters. So what does he do - rushes towards Supergirl to fight her at close quarters.
  • Red Robin: Tim Drake is decidedly unimpressed by Detonator's choice of weapon for close quarters fights:
    Robin: "Who uses grenades in close-quarters combat? That guy, apparently."
  • Justice League has a pretty extreme example in the tie-in comics. The Mad Men steal a nuclear missile to kill one man... by standing on his roof and dropping it down his chimney.

    Fan Works 
  • Evangelion 303: During her aerial duels against Shinji, Kaworu and Mari, Asuka got extremely close, even though her Eva was equipped with long-range missiles.
  • Shinji And Warhammer 40 K: As he was fighting Samshel, Shinji picked a rocket launcher and shot it point blank.
  • Thousand Shinji: When Asuka fought Zeruel, she shoved a melta up against its core and fired at point blank range.

    Film 
  • Taken to a ridiculous extreme in the Star Wars prequels. Droids and clones armed with energy weapons (that, in the case of the clones, are about as tall as they are) repeatedly charge into extreme close combat. It might have something to do with both armies being lead by Jedi or Sith, who are really only skilled in melee combat - especially as the Jedi act as generals for the clone troopers and directly lead them in battle - since baddies of any variety armed with guns in the original trilogy are noticeably more willing to fire their guns at range; note the contrast with the first big battle in Return of the Jedi, where the bad guys tend to stay in place and fire at Luke rather than closing the distance to let him cut them down, forcing him to make his way to them instead.
    • The worst offense is in Rogue One, when Chirrut Îmwe first battles Stormtroopers: rather than stand where they are and shoot the blind man armed with only a staff, the Stormtroopers rush forward into melee range... in order to shoot him. They certainly may not be the best shots around, but at no other point in any of the films do stormtroopers ever display such a suicidal form of Mook Chivalry - even at other points within the very same film, they're perfectly willing to use their ranged weapons at range, and naturally end up doing much better than they did against Chirrut.
  • This is a standard trope for soldiers in many monster movies. All gunfire is done at close enough range for the monster to retaliate with his claws and fangs. Tanks, artillery, ships, and aircraft use their weaponry, capable of striking targets from miles away, close enough to the monster to get grabbed by his paws or jaws or melted by his radioactive flame breath. King Kong and Godzilla are the ur-examples of the trope.
    • Also shows up in Cloverfield, most blatantly when the group see a B-2 bomber on a run. Although higher than them, it's still ridiculously low for that type of aircraft. Perhaps somewhat justified in that they were going after a moving target.
    • The original King Kong (1933) manages to avoid this fairly well. A few planes are downed, yes, but they ultimately get him. And a lot of the firepower directed at Godzilla in his debut was from far away. It's just impossible to kill the bastard.
    • Done in Forbidden Planet when the monster is attacking the good guys' ship for the third time. There are super high-powered energy cannons firing at the monster as well as several men with energy rifles and the captain with his little pistol. Two of the men with rifles run up to the monster, even though they can shoot it just fine from where they were, and promptly get slaughtered. After those two die a third, who saw the first two get killed, runs up to the monster, forcing the big guns to stop firing to avoid hitting him, and also gets killed by the monster.
    • When the first Kaiju shows up in Pacific Rim, F-22 Raptors strafe it at short enough range for it to swat them out of the sky. Even if they'd already expended their missiles, the 20mm M61 Vulcan that American jets like the F-22 carry has an effective range of 3 miles.
    • Averted in Shin Godzilla, where the JSDF tanks and helicopter attack from a realistic range for their weapons. Not the maximum possible effective range, but still hundreds of meters away. Of course, this just causes Godzilla to unleash his Breath Weapon.
    • Used by the kaiju themselves in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). Ghidorah’s gravity beams are already an absolutely devastating long-rage Breath Weapon, capable of disintegrating humans and other non-kaiju targets to ash. During his aerial fight with Rodan, Ghidorah’s right and left heads restrain the Terror-dactyl while the middle head fires his gravity beam straight into Rodan’s chest at point-blank range. Rodan is taken out for the remainder of the fight.
    • Justified in Godzilla Minus One because Koichi is trying to provoke Godzilla into chasing him, which means he's got to get very close in order to insure that the monster fixates on him.
  • Equilibrium's Gun Kata riffs on this idea. The Clerics (secret-police-cum-special-forces) use highly scripted movements to fight pitched gun battles at close range, full of pistol whips and point blank shots, with nary a scratch. The really epic scene, however, is the gun fight near the end wherein Big Bad and Preston swap blows, guns in hand, barely swatting the barrel away each time.
  • Ultraviolet (2006) has some of the most blatant uses of this trope, ever. When entering the stronghold at the end of the film, Violet kills dozens of Mooks with assault rifles in the reception area. The next area is a room filled with soldiers with swords. She kills them too. Then a room of guys with more ARs, which have her in a perfect crossfire. They even have cover. Violet kills them too. Walks across a bridge, then reaches the final room before her objective, which is shaped like a tube. One entrance, one exit. The soldiers near the entrance are the ones armed with swords, while the ones in the rear have the rifles. You'd think they'd have the sword guys in the back where they wouldn't block their allies' fire, or even pick her off with sniper fire while she was crossing the long, exposed bridge.
  • In Starship Troopers, entire battalions of assault-rifle equipped troops charge up to spitting range of the bugs. Possibly, this is intentional, to emphasize the untrained nature of the troops and the nature of the military structure that produced them. This is in contrast Heinlein's original book, which has swathes of text describing the training of the Mobile Infantry, explicitly pointing out how terrifyingly difficult that training is, and that by the time they are sent to fight bugs, each is a veritable grandmaster of war and death. In fact, that the humans bother training their soldiers is what sets them apart from the bugs: they just hatch more, and don't bother with any fancy prep.
  • Somewhat differently done in Independence Day: A B-2 bomber launches a nuclear cruise missile from a distance so that it takes the nuke about half a minute to hit. Considering the rather humble speed of a B-2, it would most likely be caught in the blast. Or the EMP. In Real Life, B-2s would launch their nukes over the horizon; if you can see the target, you're already too close. It's a freakin' cruise missile, after all. It can travel over 1500 miles.
  • Seen in the opening of The Mummy, where Brendan Fraser orders his troops to remain "steady" and not fire until the enemy is at point-blank range, despite having decent cover and facing an overwhelming enemy force on horseback. It doesn't end well for Brendan's buddies.
  • Ah-nold took out an army of Mooks in Commando because they chose to run straight at him, rather than fire their guns from cover. There was no reason for this, as they were across the lawn from each other. He even managed to convince The Dragon, who caught him unarmed and held him at gunpoint, to put down the gun and join him in a knife fight.
  • Shows up a lot in Captain America: The First Avenger. Sure, we see him fire a gun a few times, but mostly we get to watch him pummel Hydra goons into the ground. Somewhat justified in that he is much faster than they are, so he jumps them before they can run away, but we also quite often see him land in an empty spot and then the mooks charge him, including those carrying the disintegrator guns that could just dissolve him if, say, two people were to shoot at him at the same time from different directions.
  • In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the helicarriers were designed for super-long range combat, to the point that they'd be permanently parked high enough to be out of range of all conventional weapons. Before they can reach that point, Maria Hill hacks them and has them fire on each other from point-blank range.
  • The final battle in Red (2010) counts, because although not at such close range as some of the other mentions, the range it actually happened at is below (or on the borderline of) the arming range of an RPG-7.
  • The Dark Knight Rises: Apparently the best way to attack a group of trained mercenaries armed with automatic weapons and backed by what are essentially tanks is for the Gotham Police to group up in a large blob, Foley to lead the charge from only ONE direction, and charge into hand-to-hand combat - because Bane's mercenaries shoot for a second, cause far less casualties than they should have, and then charge into hand-to-hand themselves. Although Batman did take care of the tanks, Bane's mercenaries should have taken out the police with the amount of firepower they had (and automatic weapons are not close combat weapons).
  • Wonder Woman (2017):
    • Due to the Amazons' Hollywood Tactics on the beach, the close range skirmish shows several Amazons using their bows at near-point blank distances.
    • The German Gewehr 98 rifles have a range of 500 m with iron sights. The landing party typically tries to use them as clubs.
  • Averted in Cadillac Man where Larry takes Joey O'Brien prisoner in a hostage stand-off. Joey complains about the rifle being shoved into his neck: "It's a gun, Larry. Bullets come out of the end."

    Literature 
  • Dune played with this trope with the Deflector Shields in common use for the military: they deflect long-range ordnance and energy weapons cause them to have a Critical Existence Failure in the form of a nuclear-scale explosion. Therefore, the only reliable weaponry that can be used in soldier-to-soldier combat are things that can move slowly enough to pass through them which requires being very up close and personal with your foe. However, on Arrakis, shields can't be used, since they attract Sand Worms, so guns become useful again. In fact, when attacking the Atreides in the first novel, Baron Harkonnen brings back old-fashioned artillery, since the Atreides can't use shields to block the exploding rounds.
  • In the Gaunt's Ghosts novel The Armour of Contempt, being able to connect with a "tread fether" anti-tank missile at 300 meters is considered great. Problem is, even back in 'Nam the RPG-7 and LAW were good up to 200 meters. In contrast, 1990s technology like the Javelin is good up to 2500, and guided to boot. Unless the Guard has regressed to Vietnam levels of technology, less than 300 meters is awful. Considering the setting, however, that explanation is entirely plausible.
    • May be justified in that effective range under fire due to battlefield conditions tends to be a third or less of actual range. Weapons may be able to theoretically go hundreds of kilometers, but that's on a good day, and in the grim darkness of the far future, there are no good days.
  • Played with, and provides the solution to the whodunnit in the Father Brown short story "The Arrow of Heaven".
  • Murphy of The Dresden Files invokes this in Aftermath, mentioning that the RDS on her (highly illegal) P90 was zeroed for relatively close range, because in all her years of being a cop and fighting at Harry's side, she'd fought in less than five long-range encounters.

    Justified, however, in that she lives in a big city, so most of her combat is in an urban environment with shorter line-of-sight. Plus many of her foes are supernaturally fast and rely mainly on fighting up close, making them more capable of and reliant on closing distance much faster than humans can.
  • In The War Against the Chtorr, an important part of McCarthy's training is to learn that a flamethrower jet can easily cross a football field.

    Live Action TV 
  • People in Andromeda don't seem to use much personal long range weaponry, but the ones they do, Gauss pistols and force lances, are effective at shorter ranges than modern pistols. Most firefights take place with less than 20 meters between people, sometimes MUCH less. However, this trope is averted in space battles, where tiny, powerful, long-range missiles are used to destroy ships that are light-seconds away.

    In one episode of the first season, before it became Hercules in Space, one of the characters explains that they wear jammers made to screw with the seekers of the smart bullets (called effectors) that every small arm in the show fires. This makes hitting a target more than 2 meters away highly problematic. This makes one wonder why they wouldn't simply switch back to "dumb" rounds, however…
  • Played straight in the first season of the TV show Heroes, wherein grim future Hiro leads a charge into a critical building. As the group stands in the main lobby, dozens of armed men take aim at them from upper balconies, hallways, etc- perfect firing positions against unarmed foes. Cut to another scene for a short while, then back- and the armed men are now RUSHING FORWARD to be sliced and diced by Hiro's sword.
  • Justified in Stargate SG-1. The Goa'uld staff weapons are incredibly impractical to aim (seeing as they have no sights of any kind) and mostly used at much shorter range than their power would allow. In one episode this is stated to be because their main purpose is intimidation rather than actual fighting. A couple of characters have used staff weapons long enough to be able to hit at range on par with guns; conveniently enough one of them a member of SG-1 and the other is the Old Master who trained him.
  • On Arrow, Oliver Queen frequently uses his bow when in close quarters combat.
  • In Fear the Walking Dead Morgan demonstrates his aikido skills by using a staff to disarm a pistol=packing woman. If she had stepped back two feet she could easily blown a hole in him before he reached her.
    • Martha uses a walker on a catch-pole to threaten a survivor armed with an automatic rifle. The survivor is fearful that shooting will draw more walkers, but she could run from them while easily ending the threat against her.
  • In one episode of Person of Interest, John Reese goes up against an ageing Stasi agent who's spent the whole episode tracking down his own former teammates then torturing them for information before murdering them. You'd think that Reese, an ex-CIA and Special Forces agent, would grasp the danger, the need for caution, and the way to use distance to his advantage when going up against the guy. Indeed, Reese gets him at gunpoint... and then slowly closes to melee range, allowing the man to easily knock him out, tie him up, torture him for information, and very nearly kill him.note 

    Tabletop Games 
  • Common in Tabletop Games, which typically operate in the 25–30mm scale (IE one inch = 5 feet or so). There are plenty of reasons for this – realistic weapon ranges would require either tables the size of tennis courts or miniatures the size of pinheads, armies that focus on close combat would be boned in most situations (like they are in real life), games would take forever to play, etc. – but that doesn't stop it from looking pretty silly at first glance. Examples include:
    • Warhammer 40,000, where a typical assault rifle has a maximum effective range of 120 feet (and is most effective within 60 feet), and the longest-ranged conventional artillery in the game has a maximum effective range of only 1,200 feet. While that range of artillery is painfully short for real life purposes, it's tantamount to infinite as far as the tabletop is concerned. Unless you have a battlefield more than 10 feet long in any direction.

      One White Dwarf article justified this - the units doppler out at long range. In the rulebook of the very first edition of Warhammer 40000 it was explained that this was done for game balance reasons, and that the real ranges of the weapons are 10 times longer than those given in the game. So a Lasgun would have a range of 1200 feet, roughly the same as an AK-47.
      • The Deathstrike Missile given stats in the 5th Edition Imperial Guard codex takes this to new heights of absurdity. It's an intercontinental ballistic missile with a maximum tabletop range of 960 inches — yes, that's 80 real-life feet, just in case you feel the need to play games on a basketball court or something. In game scale, this means that our ICBM has a laughably short maximum range of less than a mile, but whatever. The truly funny part comes when you look at the minimum range for the Deathstrike Missile: 12 inches on the tabletop, equivalent to 60 feet in real life. How do you shoot someone 60 feet away with a freakin' ICBM?! (As of the official errata, the Deathstrike's maximum range is officially unlimited, but you can still shoot people standing just off the launchpad with it.)
      • There is a small nod to this in the old Daemonhunter and Witchhunter Codexes regarding the Orbital Strike support power. The orbital strike is one free shot every turn you can make, centered on a piece of terrain. It's rule is called (In)Accuracy, where it would deviate up to 18 inches from where you intended for it to hit if you rolled poorly, and can still deviate up to 12 inches if you rolled great. This is references at how targeting tiny people running around on a small battlefield is next to impossible from orbit, and the gunners make the best of the situation and just aim in the general area. It's almost precision close Orbitally, laughably bad from the ground.
      • Possibly justified in general in that the universe is full of great big alien monstrosities and Khorne-worshippers and Orks who want to get up close and in your face as fast as possible and that many battlefields are extremely enclosed ruined cities or starship-boarding actions, making range secondary to rate of fire and stopping power in the mind of weapon manufacturers. A lasgun is at least as powerful as a real-life gun, has zero recoil, and is logistically absurdly simple; shorter range in a universe with few situations in which long-ranged fire would be called for is excusable.
      • The RPG systems provide considerably greater range on the small arms. For example, the standard Lasgun has a maximum usable range of 400m. Very rarely will a GM put together a fight that puts anything but pistols out of 'short' range s that would mean even the fastest moving player characters would struggle to maneuver in the slightest.
    • Not so bad in Epic, the no longer supported 6mm version of Warhammer 40,000. Although still not entirely realistic, ranges are at least five times better than in the better known 28mm game.
    • The WARMACHINE and HORDES games set in the Iron Kingdoms, where a typical sniper rifle has a maximum effective range of 70 feet and a mortar has a maximum effective range of 100 feet. The range in lore is much higher as we see rifles accurately hitting targets hundreds of yards away and sniper rifles being able to headshot humans over 500 yards away.
    • BattleTech — where powerful, futuristic weapons have effective ranges as short as 60 meters (the heavy machine gun, for example)! The latest incarnation of the ruleset explicitly acknowledges that this is for playability only. (It's a little harder to excuse the fact that ballistic weapons tend to lose range with increasing caliber, though, especially when the same is most definitely not true for energy-based ones…)note 
      • Supposedly, this was commented upon by a FASA game designer who told a convention audience that they would be happy to sell maps and rules for more realistic ranges - if the gamers could find a football field on which they could play such a game. The alternative, he added, would be to make the hex sizes so much larger that melee/point blank range would be 100 meters or more.
      • There was an interesting and elaborate Fix Fic about this very problem. It tried to justify the problem by saying that armor manufacturing has progressed to the point that in order to compensate, warheads had to become so bulky that Autocannons were effectively more like short-ranged mortars, with larger ones barely capable of firing beyond 100 meters. Likewise, missiles were limited by fuel capacity. Artillery, at least, has kilometers-long range.
      • Likewise, other fics paint it as an accuracy concern, based on poor quality fire control and recoil compensators. An AC 5 has little enough recoil that it can consistently pot enemies at long range, but AC10s and AC20s have enough barrel jump that they can't aim that accurately. Though, really, this should be fixable simply by lowering the rate of fire enough to allow for the barrel to be relaid.
      • It's worth noting that in Battle Space, the ranges were drastically upgraded so that ranges were measured in thousands of kilometers. Too bad it didn't sell, because, along with being insidiously complex and requiring significantly more paperwork (with hundreds of hit boxes and critical hit locations per ship, and weapons loadouts that were could fill a page) than the land-based game, space combat made the series' signature 'Mechs (and their MechWarrior pilots, by extension) Point Defenseless turrets tethered to their ships at best, and helpless cargo at all other times.
    • Fairly averted in Infinity. A standard Combi Rifle has a maximum range of 48 inches on the tabletop. This (extremely roughly) equates to 85 meters, or 280 feet. What this means is that in most games of Infinity, your basic models can and will be able to shoot clean from one side of a table to another. Additionally, Infinity is a game based around close-quarter warfare, and the flavor information on the above mention Combi Rifles being specifically optimized for "extra precision at short and medium distance". This also means that the 96" maximum range of a sniper rifle or other long-range weapon, plus the ability to react in your opponent's turn, requires a lot of terrain to permit the game to not end in a hail of bullets on turn 2.
  • GURPS space combat takes place on a different scale than normal. Anything less than 20 miles (32km) is classified as point blank (and combat bonuses reflect this by making it virtually impossible to miss). For personal combat, though, the trope is played somewhat straight, due to the default assumption being moderate realism.
  • Lampshaded in a supplement for Tales from the Floating Vagabond. It described scale ranges for its weapon ranges. The longest ('See That Dot?') range was given the appropriate scale, sponsored by the Society to turn Alaska into a Sand Table.
  • Justified in Cyberpunk 2020 due to a serious case of Showing Their Work in regards to shootouts between amateurs and street hoodlums. Most firefights are fought well inside 12.5 meters (the "close" range band of pistols) and are usually decided by the first lucky hit. On average, they last all of fifteen seconds (five turns).
  • Completely averted in most cases in Shadowrun, where the extreme range limit for most weapons is about where the extreme ranges of real weapons would be (e.g. 1,500 meters for a sniper rifle under the Shadowrun rules; that has been exceeded in real life in seven cases ever).

    Video Games 
  • The Fallout series has extremely short ranges for a lot of its weapons, with basic pistols topping out at 25 meters, and the very best sniper rifles maxing out at a mere 60. This is chiefly caused by the Rule of Fun, along with the isometric view not being much good beyond throwing distance - these would not be fun games if you got instantly blasted by an impossible-to-see foe with a sniper rifle as soon as you entered a raider camp, or something.
  • Played with in Fallout 3, since it no longer uses an isometric view.
    • Many weapons can now be used to hit targets way beyond throwing distance, but enemies still don't go out of their way to keep the distance in between the player and them. Some will switch to more appropriate weapons as they or the player gets close, but many will cheerfully keep using laser and sniper rifles at spitting distance. However, most weapons are rather ridiculous in terms of how much the shots spread from the point you're aiming at, keeping this trope in effect to an extent. Though it probably has been a while since when those weapons were made. However, this is even worse than you think: many weapons, the sniper rifle included, actually have an arbitrary range at which bullets inexplicably disappear, and will as such deprive you of your perfectly-placed Boom, Headshot! to punish you for foolishly trying to use a sniper rifle to hit someone from long range. Worse still, the sniper rifle actually has a shorter range than an ad-hoc crossbow made at your tool bench out of a paint gun, a toy car, some medical tubing, and radscorpion venom; the best long-range weapon in the game is a lever-action rifle with iron sights, because it does a lot of damage and has no spread.
    • Also strangely inverted as well, as the standard hunting rifle, one of the more effective long range weapons (slightly less than the sniper rifle's range) lacks iron sights entirely. This would make the weapon near impossible to aim at anything further than very close range in real life. The hunting rifle model was given proper iron sights in New Vegas, which was required as that game introduced the ability to actually look down them. However, the sights added to the hunting rifle – both the default iron sights and the optional scope – are unfortunately off-center (almost all of the returning weapons from 3 have wonky or otherwise barely-usable sights because they were neither designed for actually using them, nor modified to fit the game that lets you).
    • All of this is very much a case of design based on engine limitation, as the Gamebryo engine is not capable of having combat go on at the ranges such weapons would be used at in real life.
      • Completely averted with the the PC console-activated .44 Magnum (the very gun the Mysterious Stranger uses). It always scores a critical hit and WILL kill EVERYTHING (except your allies if you have the Broken Steel DLC) when you fire it. This means that random shots at vaguely-visible targets on the horizon can cause the game to notify you that you killed them with a critical hit, even if you can't even see what you hit.
    • Fallout: New Vegas does let you hit targets from as far as you can see them with the right guns (or, at least, it isn't as blatant about this trope as 3 is), so instead deprives you of your perfectly-placed Boom, Headshot by putting large, tall rocks or other scenery with even larger and taller collision boxes all over the Mojave, making actual sniping pretty much impossible since your target is always either hidden from view until you're five feet away from them or on the far side of an invisible wall. A perfect demonstration is in the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, if you've sided with the NCR – the Legate's camp has a sniper nest that, in real-world terms, is placed perfectly to overlook the entire camp and snipe any intruders, but in game-engine terms, is entirely useless because it is impossible for either the occupant to shoot out of it or you to shoot into it. There's also the fact that actual sniping even with a scoped weapon is still difficult anyway because even the dedicated sniper rifle's scope only zooms in about 3x.
  • Played With in World of Warcraft, depending on the version. All manner of ranged attacks, be they bows, guns, or magic fireballs, have a maximum range of 30–45 yards. As of the Mists of Pandaria expansion, this trope is played straight on retail servers, as there is no longer a minimum distance on ranged weapons. However, it is averted to a degree on Classic servers where guns, bows, crossbows and thrown weapons also have a minimum range, so if the enemy gets too close you're forced into melee combat.
  • Mass Effect limits all guns (sniper rifles, assault rifles, missiles, tank cannons…) to 400 meters maximum range. Every gun is technically a mass driver; however going by the game's own logic, the rifle is as powerful as a 12 gauge shotgun. The sequel does a better job by setting almost every firefight in a confined space (skyscraper, spaceship, warehouse, underground base, whatever). There's one blatant instance of the sequel playing it straight when Miranda says she can nail a shot at a hundred meters. This is further out than most fictional gunfights, but it's still spitting distance for a real-life trained rifleman - except Miranda only uses heavy pistols and submachine guns in combat. Hitting a target at 100 meters with a handgun would still be an impressive feat, made even more so considering she's firing a sand grain sized pellet through an atmosphere.note 

    Strangely, the Mass Effect 3 trailer clearly shows Major Coats wielding a sniper rifle against targets on the ground from the clock face of Big Ben. It's a longer range than any gunfight in the series.
  • Makoto Sawatari of Eternal Fighter Zero wields a gun as her primary weapon, but only one of her specials (and one super) actually uses the gun as a long-range attack. It doesn't make much sense why her firing the gun straight forward only counts as a close-range attack.
  • Both of the opening cinematic of Star Wars: The Old Republic are guilty of this, but it's most blatant in the 'rage' opening for Imperial players. A skilled Sith is walking into enemy territory with no fear and the 6 mook soldiers decide to walk right up to him brandishing weapons. Here's a tip, when a guy who clearly outclasses you by order of magnitude and wields a short range weapon is approaching, 1) don't get close, 2) don't ask questions before shooting, and 3) better yet retreat back and regroup with your stronger forces where you actually may be of some use rather than dying in a second.
    • And of course in the game itself, the maximum range for any weapon, including sniper rifles, is a whopping 30 meters. Just to add insult to injury, one of the Jedi classes gets a buff that lets them double that when throwing rocks.
  • The Fire Emblem series of video games exhibits this trope. The battle map is arranged into a grid of squares, and all diagonal distances are doubled (IE, moving to a diagonally adjacent square costs two points of movement). Melee weapons all have a range of one square: they can only attack adjacent opponents directly above, below, or to the side of the melee-armed character. Okay, fine, that makes sense. The problem is, most bows and other ranged weapons have a maximum range of two squares, and the best archers in the game have a range of three squares. That's right, a trained longbowman is lucky if he can hit a target more than 10 feet away. The option exists to zoom in on each individual engagement between warriors, which makes the scale a bit more realistic, but only a bit; archers are still shown engaging each other at a distance of only thirty feet or so, and this at a scale where the melee combatants are shown charging at one another from about fifteen feet apart. Shining Force, being essentially a clone of the series, has the same deal.
  • In Fate/stay night, the Archer class of Servant is supposed to specialize in long-range combat. But the Archer summoned in this particular Holy Grail War prefers to fight with two short swords. To be fair, though, these are special throwing swords with an explicit boomerang property. He can also fire tracking, exploding arrows at a machine gun-like rate of fire and velocity, but only does this a few times in the game. The OTHER Archer, Gilgamesh, also fights up close, though to his defense Gates of Babylon is relatively short-ranged and Gilgamesh is the type of person who likes to see his enemies crumble at his feet. In practice the Servants' class names often only make sense when we see their ultimate attacks. The name "Archer" is something of a misnomer, however - "Archers" focus more on close combat, apparently being a justification for why they can dual wield.

    The sequel does show him shooting his bow from kilometers away, sniping from the roof of a skyscraper. Nobody managed to get close to him at all until someone equally ridiculous just outright leapt four kilometers in an instant, getting in melee range before he could even ready his swords.
  • The main reason that Naked Snake's CQC techniques work so well against Ocelot's troops at the beginning of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Several times, he takes down soldiers who were charging at him from about six feet away with their rifles, when if they'd just shot him, the game would have been a lot shorter (doesn't help that soon before this, Ocelot had been mocking Snake's "judo" and his troops had laughed right along).
  • Solid Snake takes this trope to the next level in his Super Smash Bros. appearance—he fires an RPG at his own feet as a smash attack. He is also capable of clubbing his enemies with his mortar, and then blowing them up with the shell after they've flown maybe three feet above him.
    • This is partly explained by the family friendly nature of the series. The creator of the game openly stated that Snake doesn't use a realistic handgun because it wouldn't fit with the tone of the series, and as an extension he also deliberately misuses dangerous-looking weaponry and explosives to make things more whimsical.
  • Mirror's Edge is a heavy offender: the firearm-slinging Mooks will always try to club you with said firearms rather than gain distance and continue shooting. Not that it'd help them much, plus it makes disarming easy as pie, so nobody is complaining.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics and its progeny has it both ways: archers have ridiculously short ranges if you consider they are archers, but guns tend to not have a range restriction other than "straight line" and "nothing in the way". On the other hand, as the height of the archer increases relative to other units, the range of the bow increases vastly. This doesn't happen with guns.
  • Hellgate: London. The maximum range of the sniper rifle is less than 100 meters, even when extended with sniper skill.
  • In NeoGeo Battle Coliseum, the Metal Slug Shout-Out Marco's pistol has an effective range of its muzzle flash.
  • Also shows up, shamefully, in the online MMO Tabula Rasa, where due to whatever limitation the designers put on it, limits the range of its ranged weapons to a maximum of around 240 feet (80 yards) for the sniper rifle – never mind that the real-life "accurate" range of a current .50 caliber sniper rifle is 2,000 yards (6,000 feet – over a mile). Most of the other weapons in the game have "optimum" ranges of less than 30 meters (90 feet). This makes sense for rocket launchers, which actually do have optimal ranges (close enough that the enemy can't really do anything to dodge before it hits, but not so close that the launcher gets caught in the resulting blast)... but a pistol with a maximum range of 60 feet, rather than just a maximum effective range? Being that the game is from a fictional future, and most of the weapons involved are quite exotic, this is a baffling limitation.
    • ...which is fantastic range compared to another sci-fi MMORPG, Anarchy Online where most sniper rifles have a range of 35 meters(!) or less.
  • All MechWarrior games. Long range missiles can hit about a kilometer away (don't even ask about short range ones), as can large lasers (apparently the concept of coherent light doesn't work too well in the BattleTech universe). Machine guns are limited to 200 meters, and in a bizarre violation of elementary ballistics heavy, large-caliber autocannons have drastically shorter ranges than low-caliber ones. Want a sniper weapon? Well, there's the Gauss rifle – a coil gun of impressive power and with very limited ammunition that, like autocannons, bizarrely becomes longer ranged the lighter it is, up to a whopping 1200m for the Light Gauss Rifle, and a pathetic ~600m for Heavy Gauss rifles.
    • This is a legacy from the boardgame, where the ranges are in fact even shorter.
    • Mechwarrior Living Legends has the longest ranged weapons in the series with its dedicated artillery pieces – the Long Tom Artillery Piece has a roughly 1,600m range on flat ground (in standard gravity), and the Arrow IV cruise missiles cap out at 3,000m but can only achieve an independent target lock within 1,500m, requiring a Target Spotter. Light autocannons can hit targets beyond 1,200m but they suffer from extreme damage drop-off past their indicated max range.
  • One of the many failings of the A.I. in Soldier of Fortune: Payback is that many enemy soldiers will actually run at you from several dozen feet away to club you with their rifles instead of actually, you know, shooting at you. Even worse, if they remember what their guns are for and open fire after bashing you, you will die thanks to the game quadrupling all damage done by point-blank gunfire.
    • Inverted with Soldier of Fortune 2, where your enemies have pixel-perfect accuracy at long distances, and your guns are horribly inaccurate at said distance, even when they're the same gun as the enemy's. One of the many ways The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard.
    • Played mostly straight with non-sniper enemies in the first game, especially the shotgunners.
  • Bloodline Champions has projectiles disappear once they reach their maximum possible range to travel.
  • Team Fortress 2 curves damage from the vast majority of weapons to be most effective at short range, about 10 meters. Past 20 meters or so, bullets deal half damage. Since the secondary weapon for most classes is a shotgun, and the other weapons (a minigun, a few kinds of pistols, a flamethrower) either have enough spread to be hard to use at long range, or retain a great deal of accuracy at long range (the revolver, the sniper rifle, the rocket launcher), it's Justified.
    • Averted on any critical hits, as Crits ignore damage fall-off and will deal the full damage of the weapon plus the critical even at the most extreme ranges. This is useful for stuff like the Rocket Launcher and Pistols, where they can be launched much further away with a critboost and hit enemies not even aware of your presence, but is lackluster for weapons that also has spread like the Scattergun and Minigun, since the Critical does not curb bullet spread.
  • In Battle for Wesnoth, you have trolls punching with their bare fists, swords, flying firebreathing dragons, spellcasters, archers, and one unit with a gun. All of the above have a one-hex range for all attacks.
  • Most long range combat in RuneScape falls into this territory. There are three styles of combat: ranging, melee, and magic. Mages are almost entirely Squishy Wizards who have an advantage when they fight at a distance… but in Runescape, fighting at a distance while still being close enough to fight means being only a few seconds away. And if you try running away, you break off from fighting, and casting a spell will stop you where you are.
    • If you unlock Ancient Magic, however, you can invert this somewhat. The four elements in this spellbook are Smoke, Shadow, Blood, and Ice, and some of the spells in each will hit multiple opponents. The last one will have the effect of not only dealing heavy damage, but also freezing an opponent to the spot for enough time to get off a few more shots. By standing even one square out of melee range, a high level mage can decimate a small group of melee fighters.
  • In Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, heroes and monsters DO have decent ranges. A high-level Ranger can actually shoot farther than what you can see in a screen.(The Ranger will be outside the screen to the left, the target will be outside the screen to the right, you'll just be seeing a flying arrow.) However, when the enemy gets close enough to melee, heroes and monsters keep using ranged attacks or spells. They shoot enemies in the face while getting hit by swords. Units can hit, can run, but cannot do both at once. Once a unit decides he can't win the melee, he turns tail and runs off, never resuming combat unless something changes his mind (i.e. being healed, spell effects, etc.). Word of God is that they put in hit and run at first, but it made ranged units just too strong, so they made them stupid instead.
  • Played egregiously straight in City of Heroes. The Sniper Rifle attachment for the Assault Rifle powerset starts with a base range of 150 feet, keeping it in line with similar Powers from less tool-oriented sets (like Sniper Blast from Energy Blast). Meanwhile, enemy snipers have ranges that extend into (and beyond!) visual range, and it's almost never a good idea for any Player Character with an Assault Rifle to opt for the Brawl ability at close range. Enemy in your grill? Ram the barrel down his throat!
  • Ace Combat, so much. And since actual air combat tends to take place beyond-visual-range, we can hardly blame them. In Shattered Skies, the standard missile was good up to only 900 feet. A real-world short-range IR AAM, like the AIM-9 Sidewinder, can reach at least 1 km, three times that. The Shattered Skies XLAA "advanced long range air-to-air missile" topped out at almost 3000 feet. For comparison, the MBDA Meteor BVRAAM, which the Eurofighter's XLAA is modeled after, has an operational range exceeding 100 km. A hundred times that. Later games made the ranges slightly longer, but still not to real-world levels.
  • H.A.W.X. is slightly better than AC in this; for example, the MultiAA locks on at around 6,000 meters, which while still a third of the 18km max op range on the real-world Sidewinder, is a vast improvement over the AC range limit. That said, HAWX seems to take three times as long to lock onto irregularly-moving targets as Ace Combat does, so if the former's standard missiles have any longer range than the latter's, it'll be hard to notice in normal gameplay.
  • Zigzagged in Digital Combat Simulator. The short-range AIM-9 variants can hit targets from up to 22 miles out, while other missiles can hit from beyond-visual-range (BVR). However, owing to the non-functional proximity fuses on the missiles, in multiplayer you'll often find yourself having to close distance significantly with your opponent in order to guarantee a kill before the missile runs out of energy.
  • Vector Thrust is even better, at least for lock-on ranges; most variants of the Sidewinder actually do start to lock on at a kilometer. It's just getting your missile to hit the target at that range that's the issue, especially since this game acknowledges that countermeasures exist and the AI actually knows how to use them. There's even achievements for killing targets from a range greater than 37km.
  • In Gears of War, the standard assault rifle has a chainsaw bayonet. The issues with weight and fuel in real life don't appear in the game (though the protagonists are muscular and huge), as well as the probability of mucking up the rifle's barrel by getting blood and flesh in it, but as humanity's alien enemies, the Locust, have tough hides and favors swarm tactics, it just may be justified in-universe.
  • In Silent Scope, it doesn't matter if the enemy is two or two-hundred meters away; you kill him with your sniper rifle.
  • Wasteland had its maximum range be about 30 to 40 meters. This was generally too far for any weapon, whether assault rifle or laser rifle.
  • Aya Brea in Parasite Eve was described as something of a sharpshooter. Yet her range, based on the size of the dome and her height, was generally measurable in feet, and not many of them.
  • Noel Vermilion is the only combatant in BlazBlue to use guns. Their range is equal to the length of their muzzle blasts unless you use her Optic Barrel special, which still can't hit at full screen width. Justified, as her "guns" aren't ballistic weapons, but a delivery mechanism for magical explosions. The muzzle blast is the most damaging thing about the whole system, as creating the explosion inside the barrel and projecting it that way focuses the impact.
  • In the first Metroid, as well as the remake Zero Mission, your Power Beam has a very short range until you collect the Long Beam power-up, which removes the range cap. Thus, until you get the Long Beam, this trope is imposed upon the player by the game. Every other game keeps the Long Beam's effects, even when Samus otherwise loses access to all of her powerups.
  • In the original Command & Conquer games, Rifle Infantry have such short range that splash damage from supporting infantry behind them will often damage the rifles in front. Particularly bad when one considers that a hand grenade can be tossed farther than these rifles can shoot. Also, ballistic artillery will only barely outrange a tank's cannon.
    • As part of their elite status, Commando-type units have much further range than other infantry types. The original game tried to justify this by giving its Commando some fictional .50-caliber sniper rifle-type weapon to explain this, but then it dipped into complete ridiculousness in the Red Alert games, where the Allies' analogue to the Commando has consistently been an Action Girl with dual pistols; somehow, her twin 1911s (max effective range around 50 meters) give her greater reach and power than opposing infantry armed with submachine guns (PPSh-41, Spectre M4 and MP5 used by Soviet conscripts, Allied GIs, and Navy SEALs in RA2, reach between 150 to 200 meters), assault rifles (Soviet AK-47 used by general troops in RA1 and Boris in 2, reaching 350 meters, or the M16 used by the first game's Allied troops reaching to 550), and mounted infantry machine guns (the aforementioned GIs' deployable M60, can reach over 1,000 meters).
  • Inverted in Kid Icarus: Uprising: Clubs, unlike other weapons in the game, only have projectile capabilities when charged; however, the Earthmaul Club's (basically a solar system on a stick) charge shot has the longest range of any attack in the game.
  • In the Splinter Cell series, aiming the F2000 gives the impression that Sam Fisher suffers from Parkinson's disease. Hitting someone at a distance of 100 meters is extremely difficult. With a modern, customized rifle. Fitted with optic sights. Used by a top-notch black ops operative. Granted, leaving enemies alive is encouraged in this series, holding his breath (for all of ten seconds or so) gives Sam the stability of a rock wearing night-vision goggles, and the F2000 is generally very loud.
  • Played horribly straight in Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening with the Kalina Ann rocket launcher, which has projectiles that automatically detonate a short ways from Dante even if there are no enemies in range.
  • Gunfights in Valkyria Chronicles typically take place at ranges of about 20–40 feet for rifles, and at about 5–10 feet for SMGs; good luck trying to hit anything at ranges longer than that. This is also a universe where consistently landing headshots is the most efficient method of combat and most enemy troops can't hit you even at those ranges, so we're not exactly talking the height of realism here in the first place, even before you take the magic rocks and superpowers into account.
  • Front Mission, playing similarly to Fire Emblem but with MechWarrior stylings, doesn't just play this straight, it rams into it full-speed on jet-powered roller skates. Nothing but missiles and special artillery can shoot above 1 square's distance away, and that square is shown to be about 30–50 feet to someone who doesn't know wanzer specs by heart. And considering you're fighting using wanzers, it's proportionally closer to being 10–15 feet away from each other.
  • Halo:
    • It's entirely possible to "no scope" an enemy, meaning you shoot them dead with a sniper rifle without using the scope. As the rifle has a really long barrel and most players prefer to move while firing instead of standing in one spot, this is somewhat difficult to do; while the games initially trended towards making it easier (relative to actual scoped firing) to no-scope, they've since trended back towards making it more difficult again.
    • Guns in general have ludicrously short range. The SMG, automatic plasma weapons, the Spiker, the shotgun, and the AR tend to be the ones to fall victim to this trope the most, though the turrets can be somewhat silly, too.
  • In Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Nazis will frequently move in and melee your Red Shirt Army allies to death, as the latter are too dumb to fight back at close range or shoot them from long range. The player's pistol is practically useless for anything more than a couple meters away, averting the Sniper Pistol trope. Ditto for the SMG's, particularly the MP40.
  • In the Tactical Strategy Odium, nearly all weapons are infuriatingly short-ranged. A pistol can only fire a square or two further than a thrown knife. A rifle only fires a square or two farther than a pistol. No weapon (except for the ion cannon) fires further than eight steps away. At the very limits of a weapon's range its damage output decreases dramatically.
  • Act of War: The naval units in the expansion will fire their anti-ship missiles at each other at about visual range. Which is probably 1/100th the distance at which real life modern warships can engage targets at. Then again, the game wouldn't be playable if the action took place on a realistic scale.
  • Call of Duty
    • Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and later have a form of this, where specific weapons will be unable to damage anyone past certain ranges depending on their class (a sniper rifle will reach farther than an assault rifle, which reaches farther than an SMG, and so on). This has some unfortunate side-effects, such as making actual long-range sniping with anything other than the Barrett .50cal a waste of time and ammo, and shotguns worthless all the goddamn time.
    • To the other extreme is quickscoping, making perfectly-accurate sniper shots without having to truly look through the scope, which is commonly used to make easy sniper kills from less than ten feet away. This sort of thing is taken to an extreme in one campaign level of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, where the player's sniper rifle has a red dot sight mounted on the side of the barrel, just because; you can likewise opt to just use ironsights on certain normally-scoped rifles in Call of Duty: Black Ops II and Call of Duty: Ghosts, with later games allowing the sniper rifles the use of the same short-range optics as any other non-explosive weapon.
    • The AI introduced for the Black Ops series' multiplayer Combat Training modes has a bit of a problem with this, often forgetting they have a gun in their hands and opting for knife kills on enemies who are far out of knife range and actively aiming at them. Conversely, when they are in knife range, they tend to forget they have a knife, too.
    • A story-based variation comes in the Call of Duty 2 levels "Crusader Charge" and "88 Ridge", where the player and his fleet of tanks have to close to within spitting distance of the German Panzers while under fire because the Crusaders' guns have a lower effective range than the enemy's. The narrator providing brief history lessons for each set of levels notes how dangerous this strategy is, but it works well enough for the player.
  • Battlefield: Bad Company 2 treats its sniper rifles much the same way as every other gun in the games - that is, the default sniper scope doesn't have to be attached to it. You can go for a red dot sight and use it just like you would a battle rifle. Games starting from Battlefield 3 even allow you to forego an optic entirely and use the regular ironsights. The game also goes to the other extreme in one instance during its campaign - a section where you are to defend yourself in a wooden shack from enemies who start out only fifteen to twenty meters away is seen as adequate justification to hand you the biggest bolt-action sniper rifle (with attendant slowest bolt-cycling animations) in the game, thus making the section far, far more difficult than it needs to be until you can get your hands on an assault rifle again.
  • In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
    • Offensive spells has a maximum range after which they stop doing damage. If you throw a firebolt at a deer standing too far away, the shot will just pass right through, then possibly cause a harmless burst of flame if it hits the ground or a stationary object. For some reason, the target still reacts as though it was attacked (said deer will run off, a bandit will attack you back).
    • Deer and other wild animals are programmed to run away to maximum distance. Arrows have a maximum range just the same as spells do. When a deer stops running away, it's then just outside of maximum range, and shooting arrow after arrow at it will not hit anything.
  • One of Joker's finishing moves in Injustice: Gods Among Us involves shooting his opponent at point blank range both with a big gun and a bazooka. Any other character with ranged weaponry will inevitably play this straight, as the characters are rarely more than fifteen feet away from each other. Notable examples include Deathstroke and Green Arrow shooting opponents right a few feet away with a sniper rifle and a bow, Lobo firing an absurdly Short-Range Shotgun that has only a little more range than his melee attacks, and Lex Luthor using an orbital laser to blast an enemy right next to him.
  • Many of the later units in Civilization V, despite being classified as ranged (or using weapons that ought to be ranged), can only attack from one hex away. This leads to Fridge Logic situations such as wooden bows having a longer range than machine guns or mechanized infantry engaging the enemy at sword-range.
  • Wargame: Red Dragon zigzags this trope. On the one hand, the weapons used by most land vehicles and infantry are realistically ranged. On the other hand, the ranges for aircraft, artillery, and shipboard weapons are painfully short compared to real life. This because the maps are sized to make a land battle both manageable and entertaining to watch close up, a few miles square at most. It would simply be harder to make the game entertaining if you could realistically rain naval gunshells on your opponent from 10 miles away. If you made the maps big enough to accommodate the actual ranges instead, the units would be unavoidably tiny.
  • Dawn of War: Averted by most units who use Sword and Gun as appropriate (the game allows you to switch units from ranged to melee stance). The most outstanding example of this trope has to be the Vindicare Assassin, a Cold Sniper who can nearly one-shot any infantry and periodically fire at range matching artillery. If spotted and engaged in melee, he pulls out a pistol... and pistol-whips the enemy with it. An interesting counterpart is the Tau Commander, who doesn't have a melee weapon. Instead, his animations involve blocking hits with his guns and occasionally jumping into the air to fire Death from Above.
  • The Far Cry games have a maximum range at which you can damage enemies. It's usually not that apparent, as most of the time you're in heavily-forested areas and will only be able to attack from close range even if you sneak around and take them by surprise, but when you get out of that forest and into a clear area, like the deserts of the south in Far Cry 2 or the much-clearer second island of Far Cry 3, it can be a real eye-opener when you try to fire a sniper rifle at someone from atop a nearby hill and accomplish nothing. The third game also has the recurve bow, which obviously has a shorter range than the various guns and requires you to compensate for gravity affecting your fired arrows. There's even an achievement for managing to kill someone from a hundred meters away with it, which basically requires a stationary enemy and/or a lot of luck; there is a marksman sight to tell you how far up to aim to compensate for distance, but it only goes up to 80 meters and does nothing for moving targets, leaving it entirely up to your own sense of how fast the arrows move and prayers that your target doesn't change direction or stop moving while it's on the way.
  • Terraria:
    • Mostly averted, but the Jester arrows tend to explode into a harmless cloud of flashing lights a few feet after they are shot.
    • The Celebration, sold by the Party Girl in late-Hardmode, fires two fireworks that explode after a short distance, placing it squarely in Awesome, but Impractical territory. The Celebration Mk. 2, dropped by the True Final Boss, averts this.
  • Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden: Each tile is equivalent to about six feet or two meters. Shotguns have a base range of 8 tiles. Assault rifles and grenades have a base range of 10. That comes out to a base range of only 16 meters for shotguns and 20 for rifles and grenades.
  • In Brawlhalla, three weapons that typically would be used at long range (guns, cannons and bows) merely can be used to shoot at a pretty short distance. This is even referenced in Xull's backstory.
    Xull seized command of the Iron Legion from the Troll Titan with a brutal down stroke. His first order was to create a cannon brigade. His second order was that cowardly long-range combat would not be tolerated.
  • Hyrule Warriors:
    • Tetra's pistol doesn't fire as far as one would expect, though she is wielding a flintlock which are not the most renowned for their accuracy.
    • Linkle's Crossbows fire their quarrels further than most melee attacks but given the nature of the game, most of her attacks are launched up close and personal.
  • Firearms in Symphony Of War can only be used against adjacent enemy units, making them essentially indistinguishable from melee weapons in the game. Even longer range weapons such as bows can only be used against an enemy one tile away (except when the range is extended by terrain or structural factors). The tier 3 upgrade of archers does extend their range to two tiles away though.
  • Andrew in Samurai Shodown 6 fights using his musket... or rather, he uses the bayonet of his musket as a sword, only shooting it during special moves.

    Machinima 
  • Red vs. Blue. Though many characters own sniper rifles, they rarely use them for long range combat, preferring to just use their scopes as makeshift telescopes. Donut once asked Sarge why they never just shoot the enemy if they can get them in the rifle's sights, to which Sarge responded that that was the coward's way out. As for the blue team, Caboose is too dumb to use one properly, Tucker didn't have one for most of the series and Church? Well... Lopez lampshades this in the third episode of the Where There's a Will, There's a Wall miniseries.
    Simmons: Alright Lopez, there's the tank... but where are all the Blues?
    Lopez: [Probably off spying on us while using a sniper rifle as a telescope.]
    Simmons: Oh wait, there they are. ...What are they doing?
    Lopez: [Seriously. This whole thing could be over in three shots. Just pull the damn trigger.]

    Real Life 
  • During the reconquest of Burma in 1945, the retreating Japanese fell back on a fortified city that still had massive, thick, medieval walls and made it clear they were going to defend it to the death. Faced with the not especially appealing prospect of spending a long time and losing a lot of men in a siege followed by protracted hand-to-hand fighting, the British commander, General Slim, brought up his super-heavy artillery, normally used to fight from several miles away, and emplaced them within a few hundred yards of the walls, shielded by tanks. In a throwback to a medieval siege, the British then shelled the walls from close range. Even then the walls took a lot of pounding before coming down. Once through the breaches, the demoralized Japanese were dealt with swiftly.
  • It isn't uncommon to see anti-aircraft artillery intended for use against aircraft at ranges of hundreds to thousands of yards being adapted for use as anti-armor or anti-infantry weaponry at much closer ranges. Among the more infamous examples is the 8.8 cm Flack gun used by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, which was originally designed for long-ranged air defense. Its large caliber shell, high velocity, excellent mobility and long range capabilities made it equally suitable as a static anti-armor defense gun, and a modified version of the cannon was the main armament of the infamous Tiger I. A more modern example is the ZU-23-2, a Soviet-era double-barreled rapid-fire anti-aircraft cannon originally designed to attack helicopters and low-flying airplanes, which is frequently mounted to trucks and other vehicles as an improvised infantry support weapon for use against targets in hard cover such as buildings, frequently at much shorter ranges than it was originally designed for.
  • There was the highly-grisy execution method of "blowing from a gun" that consisted of firing a cannon with the victim tied over the muzzle of the cannon. Performed by a number of peoples, it's especially associated with the British's colonial rule over India since it extends the punishment "beyond death" to Hindus, as the scattered remains prevents cremation. Naturally, it's not a big problem to use a long-range cannon on a person tied directly to it rather than someone who's actively fighting against it, but this execution method actually remained a tad dangerous for those not being executed since spectators facing the mouth of the cannon could be accidentally hit by the grapeshot fired or those too near to the cannon could get struck by the flying bits of bone or flesh.


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