Improbable Aiming Skills



"There, you see, is a man who could hunt flies with a rifle, and command a ducal salary in a Wild West show to-day if we had him back with us."

- Mark Twain, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences"

"With this, Talinia could split a hair on your head at 500 yards. Blindfolded."

- Item description of Bow of Destiny, Neopets

If a hero picks up a sword, he will instantly gain Implausible Fencing Powers... and, similarly, if he picks up a gun, bow, crossbow, throwing-knife, shuriken, or other long-range weapon, he'll instead gain Improbable Aiming Skills.

Basically, this is the natural flip-side to the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy—while villainous Mooks are terrible at aiming, heroes are inversely superb at it. This enables such feats as Blasting It Out of Their Hands, creating a Pinball Projectile, knowing how to Lead the Target from kilometers away, or the Offhand Backshot (the firearm-based answer to the Offhand Backhand), and is in no way dependent on the factual accuracy of the weapons in question. A frequent user of this trope is The Western, where the heroes are often using guns that were, in real life, notoriously inaccurate at anything other than point-blank range, for feats that would make a modern-day sniper with a top-tuned high-tech rifle turn green with envy.

Improbable Aiming Skills is a prerequisite if The Archer wants to pull off a Multishot successfully.

Warning shots might take the form of a Knife Outline or William Telling.

Is sometimes parodied by implying that the shooter meant to do something entirely different and messed up in a spectacularly lucky way.

The Achilles' Heel to someone with this ability is someone who can Dodge the Bullet. They tend to have little problem with Human Shield situations.

Almost always used by The Gunslinger (or, in fantasy settings, The Archer). Contrast with A-Team Firing, More Dakka (which emphasizes quantity over quality), Shoot the Rope and the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. When the computer AI pulls this off, it's The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard. See also Always-Accurate Attack.