With regards to ranged attacks:

I played Vaarsuvias in our 1st game and noted that the Fireball schtick had a range of 4. I went to use this on a monster with a range <4. How does the monster defend?

We played it that the monster was effectively "fighting with no schticks" so therefore as monster's don't roll a defense roll, I would win automatically. The only monsters that had a chance when their range was <0 were any with the "Tricky" ability which then gave them a Defense score of "10" as per the "Tricky" ability to give them +10 (so 0 from lack of range +10 for "Tricky" = 10 total Defense.)

Is this the right way Fireball and any other ranged attacks work against monsters? Some players argued it was too powerful that I could automatically kill these monsters, my argument was that I had to rest after each fight of this type to recover the then flipped Fireball schtick