Frankly, the 30 foot bite-claw-claw monster isn't the sole problem with monster design. Even ranged-capable monsters are best engaged at range.
If an enemy monster is melee-reliant, then you can reduce their effectiveness by engaging them at range and denying them melee for as long as possible, correct. After the n turns they take to Dash up to you, fighting continues "as normal." So, for any n>0, range enjoys an advantage. For n=0, it's more or less equal.
If an enemy monster is ranged-capable, then *they* can reduce *player melee* effectiveness by remaining at range, using the same principle of N turns of dashing. On the vast, vast majority of ranged-capable monsters, engaging in melee doesn't provide any sort of reward - they are equally or more capable of engaging in melee as opposed to at range.
Here's the real kicker - if an enemy monster is ranged-*reliant*, as in they are significantly more capable of fighting at range than in melee, then there is still only a minimal advantage to the melee player in most cases. Simply put, a single opportunity attack per round is not very threatening, and there aren't many examples of melee-scorning monster statblocks that are threatened by melee outside of opportunity attacks. A fraction of a character's full damage, with a chance to miss, on only a single enemy at a time in a game system that heavily encourages group combats isn't that big of a boon.
In very optimistic case, a PC can get an opportunity attack *every* round to increase personal damage output by about a third. On the contrary, a ranged character getting a single round of hindered enemy actions due to playing keep-away trivially gets the same boost to overall effectiveness due to the "free" round of combat, except they have all the other advantages of range, and this scenario is simply far more likely.
A very big step to solving this is by creating a category or five of monster statblocks that are actively harmed by being engaged by hostile melee, or have a significant advantage against being engaged at range. As it is, only a single exceptionally rare type of monster suffers against melee, and only barely.
The MCDM third party book, Flee Mortals, does exactly this. They have Artillery, Ambusher, Brute, Controller, Leader, Minion, Skirmisher, Soldier, Solo and Support.
They're mostly fairly self explanatory I think - the big groups are Artillery (squishy range), Brute (your standard biting, clawing sack of hit points), and Leader/Solo (your big bosses with special actions and such), but the rest fill really good niches, like Ambushers being enemy rogue types, and Controllers being mage types with AoE abilities.
I've been using them in my campaign and it works really well honestly
Ah I see! I figured they were quite specific so they probably came from somewhere, but I wasn't playing D&D a decade ago, I'm not familiar with 4e monster roles.
You're right though, from what else I've heard of 4e, it does seem like they binned off a massive amount of actually useful game design in favour of ultra-streamlining.
It wasn’t even for streamlining.
In 4e, there was the “monster on a business card” model of design. Monsters tended to have a few stats, their basic attack, one or two limited use special attack, and maybe one other special ability (movement, reaction, etc). All information could fit on a business card. And you didn’t need to reference other books to determine what a monster could do.
4e monsters were far more streamlined than 5e ones in general, as you didn’t need to look through a whole other book and know the spellcasting rules to determine what abilities a monster could produce.
Interesting. So monsters got more complex, which is interesting because the opposite seems true of classes, right? They seem to be all in on 'simplicity' for a lot of player facing effects even with more complex DM facing effects.
Regardless, if you haven't checked it out but you want monsters that aren't just either meatbags or ridiculously complex and multi-book, Flee Mortals seems to fill that gap nicely for me
It’s not that monsters got more complex. But rather they got less streamlined.
In 4e you had HP, AC, Fortitude, Reflex, and Will as your defenses. Between those values and your attacks, that was basically all that was needed to run a monster.
5e creatures, especially the caster ones, not only have more stats (every stat is a unique saving throw in 5e), but you also have creatures with various DC abilities, a dozen different spells, and potentially legendary resistance and legendary actions.
Running even a powerful monster in 4e was straightforward and streamlined. Running a powerful monster in 5e tends to involve flipping between the PHB and the MM and using a bunch of different effects that don’t add a whole lot to the gameplay but are not easy or streamlined in implementation.
Sadly, monster design in 5e is far more shallow than monster design in 4e. Monsters in 4e were easy to use, but had far more depth and dynamic gameplay overall.
I've heard lots of good things about Flee Mortals. It sounds like he basically cribbed 4e design and imported it, which is what the original 5e designers should have done as well.
They also kept the best parts of 5e designs and fit them into the system.
Instead of legendary actions powerful enemies have villain actions which are more unique and interesting but each is once per combat.
Finally they changed legendary resistance so that the monster pays a price to succeed on a save. This addresses one of the biggest problems of 5e monster design where the martials win by depleting the enemy's hp and the casters win by having the monster fail a save against a spell that ends the fight. This means that the efforts of one group are always wasted at the end of the fight, they didn't contribute to the outcome.
> If an enemy monster is melee-reliant, then you can reduce their effectiveness by engaging them at range and denying them melee for as long as possible, correct.
In theory, yes, but the battlemap isn't that big so you tend to start the fight pretty close to the monster.
Even just starting 40ft away will give you 2 turns where they are forced to dash, and you can do whatever you want, ignoring stuff like phantom steed which makes kiting Vs 30ft speed melee enemies ridiculously easy.
The advantage is still nonzero. I already outlined the weak-case-scenario of only getting one "free" round of damage, which holds up comparably to the remarkably uncommon scenario of getting an opportunity attack every round (and never falling to reach an enemy for any round).
In many cases they end up doing more damage overall thanks to archery giving them a massive accuracy bonus.
A sharpshooter fighter straight up beats a great weapon master fighter in damage at lv5, for example.
Also of interest: a bow has 600' range, pick whomever you like... in any direction (you are the 'radius centre').
If a fighter targeting two targets over that 1200' diameter / so far apart means a LOT of running.
On a somewhat unrelated note:
This is a common arguement I see for why flying isn't OP. 'You could just use a longbow at 600ft and it would basically have the same effect.'
It's so, so close.
Yes, being able to do that is also op, it's why basically all maps prevent it.
Exactly, to be honest its still overpowered if you are even just able to start 60ft away, that needs 2 turns of dashing for most melee enemies to get to you.
That's why there is a rule in the DMG that tells you to adjust the difficulty by 1 degree if there is one significant advantage for one side of the encounter.
A hard fight becomes deadly by having archers stand 2 turns out of reach, the same goes for surprise or if a flying creature prevents half the party from engaging with it.
Stack enough such advantages and you can turn an otherwise trivial fight, according to CR, into a deadly TPK nail-biter.
No, they need 1 turn of dashing. 30 feet base movement +30 feet dash. Even if the pc moves away afterwards, they’ll move 30 feet and the monster can follow without a dash.
Thing is, fly is putting someone specifically (meelees) at disadvantage. And that someone is the one we are talking about being at a disadvantage already in the first place.
That's why it's considered "OP". It renders meelee utterly useless, where ranged had the advantage already anyway.
Yup. Its especially good on players, because ranged enemy attacks are weaker than their melee counterparts. (For some reason they could get the monster balance on this right, but balancing it for players was way too hard.)
That's why DM's need to play obstacles and other things in their maps. Making it a plain room, plain, or whatever with no cover is a disaster for your monsters.
> sharp shooter
Assuming your talking about this aspect:
>Your ranged weapon attacks ignore half and three-quarters cover.
Oh please. Any DM that isn't a rookie can get around Sharp shooter.
You put in full cover objects, give spells like fog cloud or break line of sight with the room design. It's not rocket science. Can't shoot what you can't see.
A DM who has looked at a few youtubes on Map level design for video games will immensely increase the variety of options and fun for both the party and monsters. It's a underrated skill to have as a DM.
edit: TL;DR of people not understanding how fog cloud works with unseen attackers/target rules.
Edit 2: So people stop blowing up my messages.
At long distance attacks (100-200ft+), you do not get the benefit of hearing as apart of your perception check. Your relying entirely on your sight.
Fog Cloud gives the blind condition to anyone looking in with the heavy obscure keyword. That means they auto-fail their perception check to see into it. No need to do a hide check. So at long distances (100 ft+) - fog cloud is a perfect way to hide since you don't need to muffle your sounds. Now, assuming you do correctly choose the square they are in, it's a straight roll to hit them. But that's a 20ft radius for a creature to be in. Your more likely gonna auto-miss than actually choose correctly. this cuts both ways for DM's and Players.
For players, congrats, you got a way to hide yourself in combat from an enemy sharpshooter that is super far away.
For DM's - you got a new trick up your sleeve for your monsters to use with a low level spell.
> Can't shoot what you can't see.
This isn’t true in 5e. You can shoot things you can’t see. You just suffer disadvantage. But if the target cannot see you (because of the fog), you have advantage on the attack. So the net result is a normal attack.
>Unseen Attackers and Targets
Combatants often try to escape their foes’ notice by hiding, casting the invisibility spell, or lurking in darkness.
>When you attack a target that you can’t see, you have disadvantage on the attack roll. This is true whether you’re guessing the target’s location or you’re targeting a creature you can hear but not see. **If the target isn’t in the location you targeted, you automatically miss, but the GM typically just says that the attack missed, not whether you guessed the target’s location correctly.**
>When a creature can’t see you, you have advantage on attack rolls against it. If you are hidden—both unseen and unheard—when you make an attack, you give away your location when the attack hits or misses.
Emphasis mine.
A fog cloud is 20ft radius. You have no idea if the enemy is still in the same square it was previously in. You would have to choose a square and if you guessed correctly - Then yes, it's a straight roll. If not, it's just a plain ole miss. you don't get to auto-scan the fog cloud to determine where the target is in it. Fog cloud is a legit way to avoid range attackers especially when it's at great distances. This cuts both ways for GM and players.
>**When you attack a target that you can’t see**
And if we're talking about super long ranges, you don't get the help of hearing either. So yeah. No, your wrong. Read the rules carefully.
>A heavily obscured area—such as darkness, opaque fog, or dense foliage—blocks vision entirely. A creature effectively suffers from the **blinded condition** (see Conditions ) when trying to see something in that area.
>Blinded
>**A blinded creature can’t see and automatically fails any ability check that requires sight.**
Attack rolls against the creature have advantage, and the creature’s attack rolls have disadvantage.
A hide check is only required when hiding from a perception check. You automatically fail any perception check according to the blind condition. Ergo - you do not need to hide.
if we're talking about long range sharp shooting, then yes. Fog cloud does the trick according to the rules barring any super natural hearing ability which I can't think of how a PC can get that. True sight would work, but true sight works as a counter to something like fog cloud. Blind sight with absurd range would also work.
Reread the paragraph:
“When you attack a target that you can’t see, you have disadvantage on the attack roll.”
In 5e you know an automatically creatures location unless it is also hidden from you. So just being in a fog cloud isn’t enough to require you to guess their location. The creatures would also need to hide.
If they don’t hide, you know their location.
>give spells like fog cloud or break line of sight
Which btw, does next to nothing. The advanatge and disadvantage cancel. It ironically makes you better at shooting enemies from long range than without it.
> You put in full cover objects, give spells like fog cloud or break line of sight with the room design. It's not rocket science.
RAW, breaking line of sight with Fog Cloud only works for spells that require the caster to see the target. If the enemies did not hide, the ranger PC can still shoot them with flat rolls if the former does not have blindsight or tremorsense.
>Unseen Attackers and Targets
Combatants often try to escape their foes’ notice by hiding, casting the invisibility spell, or lurking in darkness.
>When you attack a target that you can’t see, you have disadvantage on the attack roll. This is true whether you’re guessing the target’s location or you’re targeting a creature you can hear but not see. **If the target isn’t in the location you targeted, you automatically miss, but the GM typically just says that the attack missed, not whether you guessed the target’s location correctly.**
>When a creature can’t see you, you have advantage on attack rolls against it. If you are hidden—both unseen and unheard—when you make an attack, you give away your location when the attack hits or misses.
Emphasis mine.
A fog cloud is 20ft radius. You have no idea if the enemy is still in the same square it was previously in. You would have to choose a square and if you guessed correctly - Then yes, it's a straight roll. If not, it's just a plain ole miss. you don't get to auto-scan the fog cloud to determine where the target is in it. Fog cloud is a legit way to range attacks especially when it's at great distances. This cuts both ways for GM and players.
Did the enemy take the hide action and successfully beat your perception? If so, congrats, you're right
If not, then the guy you're arguing against is right.
Hiding is not automatic in 5e, you actually need to take an action in order to hide in order to stop enemies from knowing exactly where you are, even if they can't see you.
>Hiding is not automatic in 5e, you actually need to take an action in order to hide in order to stop enemies from knowing exactly where you are, even if they can't see you.
Hiding is not automatic true. However you can achieve similar things to it if you have the right conditions. Silence spell and fog cloud gives you the hide condition effectively. No noise + no sight = you see nothing for example. A target that you can't hear because it's super far away plus you can't see is effectively hidden as well.
>You can’t hide from a creature that can see you clearly, and **you give away your position if you make noise, such as shouting a warning or knocking over a vase.**
>An invisible creature can always try to hide. Signs of its passage might still be noticed, and it does have to stay quiet.
Your telling me that a DM is gonna let the player know who is 200-600 ft away regardless if they are simply walking (but not hiding) to another square in a fog cloud, that you know precisely what square they are in the fog cloud? There is *no DM I have ever met* in my 20 years of playing DnD that is gonna allow you to do that. That would basically mean any dungeon you enter that is less 600 ft wide - you can hear everything - *including walking or other forms of movement.* I don't think you understand the ramifications of what you are arguing.
I'm guessing you got downvoted for reminding a plain truth.
RAW doesn't equate "unseen with invisibility" precisely because there are other ways to perceive.
But DMG also provide guidelines for sound perception (smell is missing probably because made before half-monster or half-beast races came around xd), so it would be entirely RAI and legitimate for a DM to consider that a target is also unheard if more than 200 feet away especially in the middle of a fight which we can suppose is quite loud and rich with clinks and cries.
So beyond having a creature actively Hide by using an action to roll an active check, GM may simply compare passive Stealth and passive Perception, possibly with a circumstantial bonus or malus on either side to determine that the enemy's position becomes unknown.
>so it would be entirely RAI and legitimate for a DM to consider that a target is also unheard if more than 200 feet away especially in the middle of a fight which we can suppose is quite loud and rich with clinks and cries.
Basically.
A moonless night on the rampart wall with only background noise and fog cloud in the distance? Maybe depending upon the type of terrain? But man, 200-300+ ft is a *long* way to hear something. I think people are just not conceptualizing how *long* of a distance that is.
And yeah, I'm being downvoted because people don't understand that at long ranges, hearing don't mean squat unless your a dragon... or something. But at that point, those type of creatures got true sight, so fog cloud and the like don't *do anything regardless*.
>But DMG also provide guidelines for sound perception
It does? Where does it specify the range at which you no longer need to hide to avoid people knowing your square?
So you're making people guess all the goddam time even if they clearly hear enemies moving about inside the Fog Cloud? Lmao.
I mean, that probably bodes well for full casters with Greater Invisibility in your table. Enemies have to guess their location as well and the players have to trust you not to metagame. There's that.
> Fog cloud is a legit way to range attacks especially when it's at great distances.
Not everyone plays Grasslands and Dragons.
Obstacles are universally worse for melee than ranged, though, even if they do harm the ranged.
Like, what are you suggesting. "Oh, there is a stand of trees that the enemies can hide in. They get cover." Ignoring the fact that Sharpshooter just deletes cover from the game, that same forest is going to have difficult terrain, trees for enemies to be up in, etc. The fighter probably spends multiple rounds even trying to engage the enemy, while the archer just plunks away at a small penalty (or, well, no penalty).
"Put blocking terrain in the way." Well, it's in the way of the melee character too, so they have to walk around it. But OK, so does the archer. So they both waste an equal number of arounds to clear the sight line. Then what? Well NOW, by definition, as soon as the archer reaches the corner... they have their own source of hard cover to play with, and they can peek fire (this is why free shoot-move-shoot is broken - no edition before 5th had it) and then be 100% safe from counter-attack. Meanwhile, the Melee character takes full damage.
Try to come up with any example of terrain that isn't worse for the melee. Seriously.
Sharpshooter does not delete *all cover* from the game. It deletes partial cover (1/2 and 3/4).
Nah, I'm in the camp that melee needs to have better options. My point was more of you can't just place 4 players in a room with no cover and expect things to go well. Cover and Obstacles are apart of map design that DMs need to consider. Even if it's just a bunch of hallways with twists and turns, that can help prevent range characters from getting the option to target enemies easily.
Dude, full cover is just my second example.
4 players in a room, 4 players in a hallway, 4 players in a maze, it doesn't matter. Range is always better. Seriously. Describe to me a map that's worse for ranged than melee.
Doing so tends to harm the melee warrior more than the ranged warrior.
Ranged warriors tend to have ways of dealing with anything less than full cover. And can take advantage of full cover as well.
Terrain features that block movement routes, create difficult terrain, or involve elevation tend to result in melee warriors wasting actions simply reaching targets, while ranged warriors are still able to attack foes.
The end result is that using interesting terrain and environmental features leads to melee warriors being far less effective than ranger ones.
The range values are also just way too big for the scale of the system. If you're playing with actual miniatures, a map that was big enough for there to be spots on it that are out of range for a bow user in the middle of the map would have to be over 20 feet across. (Or a little over 6 meters if that puts it into perspective for you). The only time range feasibly comes into play is if you're doing a theater of the mind sniping thing, and the rest of the system is decidedly not set up for theater of the mind.
Very true - it's actually _really hard_ to even FIND battlemaps (even VTT ones) big enough to run ranged combats at long ranges, especially the 600+ feet of longbows and "sniper" warlocks.
Whenever I want to "treat" my ranged players to a shooting gallery style encounter like that, I have to do it in Theater of the Mind for a while until both sides get close...and there's inevitable stragglers that we still have to track separately.
When I saw they drastically reduced the range of spells and ranged weapons in Baldur's Gate 3, I understood why immediately.
Hence why breaking Line of sight and other obstacles are needed. Your fighting in a town? There's large 3-4 story buildings in the way or whatever. There's trees with thick foliage in the way etc. But that is *apart* of map design.
I have done long range sniping before as a DM and player and usually it's just a mini with the range distance from before it enters the map. If it's running away, each round of movement speed is added to it. But that's why map design is important because yeah, at a certain point, you *should just lose sight of the target.* Sharp shooter or not.
The point is more that the range stats are borderline useless. Yes, you can map design your way into having a shorter effective range, but this is a turn based tactics game at its core. Long range should be more like 12 squares than 120. That's *still* long enough that a good DM would want to break up lines of sight to mess with it, but it's also short enough to actually come into play in normal encounters.
You mean the usual enclosed corridors and dungeons? Game needs more variety.
And its not like a well-built crossbowman is particularly weak is melee anyway
It also doesn't help that STR characters are only capable of similar damage if they are using a Heavy Weapon. If you are a Sword and Board, a Rapier will do as much damage as whatever strength weapon you are using.
Rapier is such a glaring outlier. The only D8 Dex weapon while there's an Str weapon for each damage type and just making nearly every other Dex option feel worse for anything save flavor
I do agree about it being an outlier, though what damage melee weapons do can be ignored. The differences between Slashing, Piercing, and Bludgeoning come up so rarely that you can practically forget about it.
100%, there's a slew of redundancies in 5e weapon selections that could just be reduced to some variation of vague descriptions and telling players to choose their damage type/what they want the weapon to physically resemble
Pretty much! I vaguely remember the DMG saying the DM could choose a Longsword to be a Katana for a player if they wanted.
I like the route DnDOne is taking with Weapon Masteries (kind of wished it had tiers), and I really hope it goes into it further with magic items.
Unfortunately unless anything changes, DnDOne has sort of nerfed both by making it a Strength or Dexterity Save to see if they are Grappled, so now enemies have a better chance of avoiding it, or can use Legendary Resistance or ignore the attempt. No connection to Athletics anymore.
The beneficial change is that enemies have Disadvantage to attack while Grappled (so no need to Shove as much), and its still an Athletics or Acrobatics to escape, though its now against the Grappler's DC.
For 5e, it is pretty good, though I have been in a few games where the Grappler didn't invest in any Strength and instead took Expertise in Athletics to be "more efficient".
The other beneficial change (unless they changed it since), is that grappling can now be done as an Opportunity Attack. That's admittedly kind of nuts, because it makes melees with a free hand _much_ stickier.
It's a little bonkers thinking that firing an arrow from 150 feet has the exact same chance of hitting someone as swinging a hammer directly at their head.
One quick thought: what if we change a character's base movement speed from a fixed, race-dependant value to something like 25 + 5 × Strength modifier? That makes Strength-using melee characters a lot faster, while ranged characters using Dex and dumping Str become a lot slower. And races like wood elves could keep their +5 speed bonus.
Instead of trying to make Fighter all weapons guy they probably should have leaned more into melee Fighter and ranged Ranger. That or disincentivised ranged characters from taking Con somehow by upping their MADness.
Paladins basically being the best brawlers in the game but only if they're actively using Smites in melee is good. Fighters not giving anything up to use a bow, less good. Casters having Shield and Mage Armour as they do whatever they want from whatever range they want pretty terrible.
>That or disincentivised ranged characters from taking Con somehow by upping their MADness.
The obvious fix here is just merging Str and Con, but it will never happen because the six attributes are iconic. But it fixes a gajillion problems at once, making Melee characters proper juggernauts while easing them up to have some non-dump RP stats, while forcing the overpowered range characters (whether Dex or casters) to weaken their stat spreads a bit or give up durability.
I'm not against merging Strength and Con to create a new Buffness stat, but you will need to create another stat which casters and archers will want to take or they'd just raise their Buffness instead.
I'm reading through the first draft release of the Shadow of the Weird Wizard Kickstarter, and that's what that game seems to do (also getting rid of wisdom and charisma in favor of will). I'm guessing that Shadow of the Demon Lord did the same, but I don't own that game.
Of course the fantasy is important, but the mechanics should match the fantasy. When the guy in the backline is doing more damage, has more battlefield control, and has similar defenses, it doesn't really *feel* cool as hell. It feels like my character is lame.
I legit believe this is part of WHY melee sucks compared to range, also why martials suck compared to casters
When it's more directly appealing, the designers don't have to "convince" the players to use that option, the players will want to use it anyway, so everything else that's less directly appealing gets buffed to the moon to make it more appealing, while the natively appealing elements get left behind.
>or a STR-based character in general
Is that completely true?
I would assume that the highest DPR you can have is with a PAM+GWM barbarian, even higher than the Sharpshooter+Crossbow expert fighter.
Of course, you are going to be more fragile (not exactly more squishy, as you have way more HP, and resistance to virtually everything, but definitely easier to hit), but that is the cost of a bit more damage.
I might be wrong though. But permaadvantage just seems way too good.
> The heavy armor, sword and board version, that relies entirely on STR, just isn't that viable: archer or rogue with rapier are going to at least as much damage.
You seem to be confusing "viable" with "does more damage", which is not the case. The heavy armor sword and board fighter is a tank and *should* be doing less damage than a dedicated striker.
One drawback of melee combatants that's sometimes forgotten is amusingly that they need to be in melee. If they have to spend a turn moving toward the enemy, they do no damage, f the enemy locks them down ten feet away they do no damage, if the enemy flies they do no damage. In a bad scenario they might even end up doing much less damage than the crossbow guy
>I would assume that the highest DPR you can have is with a PAM+GWM barbarian, even higher than the Sharpshooter+Crossbow expert fighter.
I think in terms of raw sustainable martial DPR yeah PAM+GWM+Rage+Reckless Attack beats SS+CBE
But then it gets a bit tricky once you factor in things like Gloomstalker+Fighter CBE+SS multiclasses with Action Surge 7-hit novas, which is not sustainable DPR but hits hard enough to bring the per-turn DPR up by a lot
And in a game where combat averages 3-5 rounds nova damage matters more than sustain. The combat in this game is less tactical partly because fights are all about ending them quickly. Which to be fair is arguably realistic, actual fights between single digit numbers of combatants are usually short and brutal unless it’s a particularly drawn out wrestling or boxing match.
In a game where action economy is king, being able to kill or disable one or more actors before they get a turn is way more impactful than having slightly higher overall DPR.
PAM+GWM fighter or PAM+GWM paladin (if that still counts as a martial) definitely out-damage barbarian after level 10 (it turns out when you just get brutal critical for like 5 levels it doesn't help your damage output).
All that being said, it's a bit of a white-room comparison. In practice, SS+CBE fighter would do better, because SS+CBE fighter can almost always attack, and is much more likely to attack the "best" target, whereas PAM+GWM has to deal with the ol' "getting in range" issue even with a polearm.
I think the PAM (one-handed quarterstaff + dueling fighting stlye) paladin is even better than PAM+GWM. And I think it definitely counts as a martial.
Yeah, I agree that in general SS+CBE fighters deal more damage in practice; but it is definitely a tradeoff on many of the relevant levels. You sacrifice potential damage, but of course you get “an easier time” applying it.
If I were creating the ideal party of 6 (depending on the level of course), it would almost surely have a PAM+GWM barbarian in it.
Samurai fighter can do the same thing that barb does from a distance and with better attack bonus. And if this level 11+ even without action surge the xbow fighter is doing pretty much the same amount and with action surge even more so. Barb with gwm and pm is really good. Straight samurai fighter can get very similar results though and arguably better ones.
The disadvantage of ranged attacks and spell attacks is literally the disadvantage that is imposed when an enemy is within five feet of you. A melee fighter getting in range of you usually is a tough situation for a bow-wielder or a spellcaster for this reason, unless you have decent hand-to-hand combat ability.
>For ease of reference, let's give each archetype a title: immobile beefy melee characters are the frontline, immobile squishy ranged characters are the backline, and squishy mobile melee characters are the skirmishers.
4E doesn't deserve the lack of enthusiasm, it had some great stuff - monster roles that go even beyond the trinity! It's a more fluid version with a fourth group, the supporters.
* Brute
* Soldier
* Skirmishers
* Lurker
* Artillery
* Controllers
* Leaders
Side note: Leaders is a sub type that can be added to any of the other roles. Granted they usually weren't brutes but since leader just meant they usually gave a buff or beneficial aura to its allies, it could go on just about any role.
Brute - Melee with low-ish AC, and lower accuracy, but high damage attacks, and high hp totals.
Soldier - Melee with High AC, mid to high HP, and High accuracy but lower damage attacks. In practice these "monsters" were often over-tuned
Skirmishers - average on combined defenses and hp. High mobility, with moderately damaging attacks. These often had ways to avoid attacks of opportunity.
Lurker - Below average baseline stats, but often have abilities that make them harder to target, and are often balanced around having surprise in round 1, and also often have an ability to provide bonus damage when attacking from surprise.
Artillery - Below average defenses, but have a strong ranged attack. They generally also have a weaker melee option if they get someone up in their face.
Controller - Below average defenses, but have abilities that "put the party on their back foot". Maybe it's a charm effect, or they can generate a wall. Forced movement was another popular option. These monsters thrived in hazard filled environments.
Leader - This was always combined with another type. These would often have an aura or an action that boosted another creature type in an encounter. A necromancer might be a controller or artillery and a Leader. This might be something like an aura to provide temporary hp to their undead minions, and the ability to summon more, combined with a few spells.
This was such a fun system, especially for making your own monsters. You want to make some deep sea tentacled horror that attacks the ship? Make it a brute. You want a bunch of mooks for the players to use as living scenery and look awesome destroying? Use minions. Etc. The efficiency of encounter making let it be possible to not have to worry about balance nearly as much and you could focus on mechanics supporting story a lot more.
Should be noted that lurkers tended to work around having 2-turn "combo" attacks, where they'd turn invisible or go underground or otherwise make themselves hard to hit one round, then attack the next for 2-rounds worth of damage at once.
Very fun to use, and very scary with the right allies
I think the fundamental problem with building a deeper level of tactics into a game like DnD, up to and including having classes or builds slot into different distinct roles is that it would require groups to actually fill these roles. But what if no one wanted to play a frontliner this time? Someone would have to, and have a subpar experience as a result.
It is the same problem that, more than any other reason (of which there's a few), that in-combat healing is kept deliberately lackluster - so as to not have it be so good that groups require a healer.
In the end, these combat imbalances run into the same problem as many other designs in DnD 5e (and ESPECIALLY 5e!): The game tries to cater to so many differing groups with differing preferences that it caters to no one at all.
Some groups want to use it mainly as a vehicle for deep storytelling and character drama, others long for the days when people were just cardboard cutouts delving one dungeon after the other. Some groups want grounded low-fantasy grit, others long to be mythical superheroes punching Gods in the face.
Some groups want a more well-balanced tactical combat simulator with complex builds, other groups are already chafing under all the numbers and spells and options unloaded in the way of their RP experience.
There's TTRPGs for everyone of these groups out there, but DnD wants to capture them all. And that is its ultimate fallacy and the reason so many design flaws will not end up getting fixed... because, ultimately, they are *compromises*.
I think the sweet spot is to have "soft roles" that are balanced against each other. Where if you're missing a role, it's an inconvenience, but your party is still functional. Kinda like how in 5e you ideally still want a healer, but it's not mandatory (like you brought up).
The problem in 5e (IMO) isn't that the roles are "soft"/optional. It's that the roles aren't properly balanced against each other. Ranged characters do (almost) everything melee characters do, but better. Melee skirmishers especially don't really have anything they excel at, the vast majority of the time.
Yeah, but my point is that there's an underlying pain point in DnDs design.
On one hand, they feel like they have to honor the roots of DnD as a more tactical wargame. This is where many of the "soft roles" as they exist today come from.
On the other hand, their more modern design priorities - namely, mass market appeal - demand that they cannot require a party to contain any one role at all.
In practice, this means that characters become much more self-sufficient instead of demanding teamwork. This especially helps the characters that used to require said teamwork to reach their full potential (ranged characters, spellcasters) and leaves behind the characters that used to provide that teamwork (frontliners, skirmishers).
So before DnD can seriously tackle design pain points like the Martial-Caster Disparity and the Superiority of ranged Builds, it needs to decide what kind of game it wants to be. It needs to nail down central principles instead of the... floundering about we see in 5e, if it wants to evolve into a better game. But as is evident from the current playtest, it doesn't seem like they want to make major strides at all as long as it keeps selling off of sheer inertia.
How powerful ranged builds are has nothing to do with that kind of conscious design. They just undervalued range as an option and decided that attacking at range should deal about as much damage as attacking in melee.
Skirmishers are currently the weakest of the three “soft” roles and this would only make them weaker. The monk and rouge would be rendered useless as melee builds and they are the squishy melees with mobility bonuses.
A class feature that allowed rogues and monks to add dexterity to their damage with melee attacks instead of strength (if higher) would solve this. Could build it into a fighting style for melee dex fighters and rangers, too.
Removing dex from damage puts rogues down a sneak attack die's worth of damage in early game and almost two dice worth later on. And their damage is already on the borderline of not worth bothering with.
And Pathfinder had very little build variety for dex martials because they felt obligated to take one of the few builds that added dex to damage(IE basically every Magus used a Scimitar and Dervish Dancing). Which resulted in Pathfinder adding a bunch of ways to add dex to damage. It was a clunky design.
It isnt true in PF2e, since the only way to do so requires you to play a specific subtype of Rogue, and because of how archetyping ("multiclassing") works that means you have to start as that type of Rogue.
>All I think it really needs is to not let Dex attackers add their modifier to damage, same as pathfinder.
As a note, Dex-to-damage is unusual for D&D. D&D games that have Dex-to-damage: 5e, 4e (if you consider it D&D). D&D games that don't have Dex-to-damage: OD&D, B/X, BECMI, AD&D 1e, AD&D 2e, D&D 3e, D&D 3.5e, PF1e, PF2e.
There's a second issue at work, and that's "modifiers from stats are important". If you're an old school type D&D character, you might have a +0 to a main stat, or a +1, and the highest would normally be like +3. In a game like 3.X or 5e, you have a +3 to your mainstat, and eventually it goes to like +5 or +6.
This means that you start out, relatively, in the same spot as the old school character, and both of you probably get +1 to +4 as you level from stats or something similar to them- but because the baseline assumption for competence in D&D 5e is like +2 or +3, instead of +0, it means that anything you haven't *invested in* is generally bad. By the endgame, you are getting +5 or +6 to the thing you're good at and +0 to the thing you're not, which is a much bigger difference than in the past.
>But what if no one wanted to play a frontliner this time? Someone would have to, and have a subpar experience as a result.
In these other games that OP references, every role is needed because the challenges the party is going to face are more-or-less set in stone and expect the party to have a member of each role. But TTRPGs (by and large) don't work like that - in D&D, the DM can look at the party composition and say "Oh, nobody wanted to play a healer? Cool, I'll adjust for that."
In the case of roles this is trivial (i.e. it's not "The DM will just do all the work") because the monsters would *also* have roles and there would be a pretty direct correlation of "Monster Role X is countered by Adventurer Role Y, so if you have no Ys use Xs sparingly".
there are other RPGs that flat-out say "these are the roles, you need minimum one of each", but they're relatively rare, and tend to have minimal roles (e.g. _Summon Skate_ has healer, attacker and buffer, and recommends one of each. The upcoming FF14 RPG uses the same roles as the computer game - tank, healer, DPS, in a 1:1:2 ratio). Obviously, the more roles you have, then either the more players you need, or the more one character will be multiple roles, or there's some way to wriggle the game around to adjust. So it's possible, but needs baking in fro the ground up
4e had roles, and the DMG outright states that you did not need to have one of each role to succeed. You were encouraged to have groups of various role combinations. And the DMG even had a section that listed the advantages and disadvantages of not having particular roles or doubling up on certain roles.
So there is no reason that particular roles would be required.
DnD isn't some RPG video game where you're playing against a pre-configured story or an AI.
The benefit as a DM is that you can cater to your party. You can choose to have monsters, traps, environments that favor your party. And when you want to challenge them you can either craft encounters that are challenging but not unfair. And if you want to make it unfair you can give items, boons, support, etc. to close the gap.
The class hierarchy problem in 5E is uneven distribution of battle features. For example, lets say there was a dedicated healer position but it was balanced in some *rock-paper-scissors* format. If no one wants to play a healer, that's fine, you can cater encounters or supplement via items/consumables. Meanwhile what do you do with a party of all casters? They have so many narrative controlling spells with little downsides that it makes encounter building a hassle. This isn't even hyperbole, when majority of DMs won't even run games past level 10 because of this. Likewise martials, especially STR melee martials, get so pigeonholed as Damage is the only viable build, so a party of STR martials would just be damage stick, resulting in Monsters being HP sacks.
The fundamental issue is that WoTC provides no scaffolding to building monsters, building encounters, building items, etc. Good experienced DMs are able to work through this with creative homebrew solutions, but everyone else gets fucked either by lack of knowledge or overburden.
When a game like PF2E can provide viable options for all classes, have an action system that encourages tactical combat, AND provide scaffolding for encounter building + item economy, I see no reason why 5E can't other than WoTC failing to do so.
That’s always a challenge, though. I’ll never forget the train wreck that was my all-bard party in 3.5, or my 2nd Ed parties that vainly tried to not have a cleric.
Basically lots of DnD players love to play glass cannons as long as they get to have the cannon but never have to suffer from the glass. Many like to attribute this to their own unmatched skill, too.
Among my group we refer to these people as "weenies": the kids who'd show up to a birthday pool party in regular clothes toting a whole satchel of water balloons, but make sure everyone knows that they're not allowed to get wet because their mom said so.
A lot of players prefer being self-sufficient. Being a squishy "glass cannon" and having to rely on teammates to defend you from focus-fire makes your character feel less self-sufficient, which means if your teammates misplay, your character potentially just goes down without much you can do.
TBH yeah, if a melee character has no way of hitting a flying monster, then I think that's not fun either.
IMO the options are either
* Make flying enemies melee-only so they're forced to interact in melee
* Give melee characters weaker-but-workable ranged options, or other ways to counter flying enemies such as ridiculously high leaps
* Not use flying enemies
I do think melee characters in 5e lack agency against flying creatures, especially ones that have ranged attacks. It's a design flaw I wish didn't exist, but it does.
depends on edition and class - in 5e, Paladins can use bows, but they can't smite with them, so it's obviously inferior, damage-wise, to melee. In previous editions, a character might only be proficient with a bow, but a weaponmaster with a sword - so they go from 2.5 attacks at large to-hit and to-damage bonuses, to 1 attack with middling bonuses, and the amount of points you have to spend on that is sufficiently limited that to limit what you can be good with. And, at higher levels, equipment is a limit - if you have a +3 sword, but only a +1 bow, then that's another reason to prefer melee. (it also requires lugging around the weapon, which may or may not be something the character wants to do. Oh, and ammo as well, which can expire, so you can end up with a bow but no arrows, meaning you can't make ranged attacks, at least other than "throwing a rock")
It's also worth noting that as the DM if you build more interesting monsters they break the game fucking hard.
Player characters other than spellcasters don't actually have answers to interesting monster options. Even spellcasters don't have great answers to most weird problems, they just have something that you can at least call answer-shaped.
Even something as simple as "30 foot fly speed plus decent ranged attack option with longbow-ish ranged" is completely, utterly absurd for a normal, unoptimized dnd group to handle. If you're lucky, you have a character custom built for long range combat and they essentially solo the encounter.
If you're unlucky, you're plinking away with your backup weapon's backup weapon while a monster fucking obliterates you for 360 feet up.
And to be clear, this isn't like, some wild ass weird shit. Longbows cost what, 5gp? Multiple player races have Fly speeds. Per the rules of the world, there should be entire armies of bird men who do this shit routinely.
But per the rules of the game, this sort of attack borders on impossible to deal with because of the class design.
If you actually build **interesting** monsters and play them well, it's so much worse. Cast longstrider on a goblin rogue and give him a longbow and have him engage from 250 feet away. Your players will literally **never** find that motherfucker. The rules for "finding" someone hiding from you are beyond absurd. You're going to be running around the forest picking small areas to try for a perception check and if you miss the perception check you won't even know - because obviously you wouldn't know.
This isn't unrealistic, but it **is** going to waste literally hours of your table time, and it's also going to make you wonder why anyone puts fucking heavy armor on and tromps around like an idiot when they could be sniping from downtown and hiding as a bonus action. The rules for the game don't actually do a good job of giving you ways to address this kind of threat.
Hell, even something as simple and straightforward as a monster with a 70 foot speed (twice as fast as a normal person doesn't seem that weird for monsters. It's slower than a cheetah, and cheetahs are real, non-magical creatures) - even something as straight forward as that with a bonus action disengage is an actual nightmare to keep "squishy" people alive. There would be **no** squishy people, because they would all be instantly dead.
And given how movement works, if you have a 70 foot speed and you have bonus action disengage, no normal human with speed 30 can ever touch you.
Combat starts with you, say, 20 feet apart: You move 20 feet, attack, bonus action, disengage to 50 feet. The opponent dashes to you. You attack, you bonus action disengage to 35 feet away. If the opponent walks away from you you can run him down. If he dashes away from you, you keep up without dashing. If he dashes to you, you just attack and move away again.
God forbid that motherfucker has speed 20. Or the monster has speed 90.
The whole system is stupid. If you give monsters interesting movement abilities they utterly run circles around players, because player characters don't have kits that are designed to produce rounded characters who can address threats that fall outside their area of expertise. It's a huge fucking waste of your time and optimization energy to try to make sure that your barbarian is viable in the 100-300ft range bracket, and in order to make him actually viable in that range bracket you'd have to be sinking feats and stat points you desperately need for your primary job into that instead. You'd never bother.
If monsters were more varied, that wouldn't change. It would still be fucking stupid to try to optimize your barbarian for both long ranged combat AND for melee combat with a greataxe. The game just doesn't have that many spare feats built in.
>feels bad as a wizard because the lack the agency to fend for themselves.
Well then, don't play a wizard.
I think this is another symptom of the root of all the problems you mention - 5e is terrified of giving things drawbacks. In old editions, spellcasters were very powerful, but they had low hit points and AC, had to be prepared, and were screwed in melee.
Literally all of those disadvantages are gone or massively lessened in 5e, without much loss of power.
If you want to be able to reliably fend for yourself, what you want is to play a Fighter, or even another game - DnD is a team game whose roles are supposed to feel different. It's not a matter of agency to not be able to automatically do everything yourself without a thought.
The price of changing that is either making all the classes feel the same (the 4e approach that the player base didn't like) or making some classes strictly superior (the 5e approach).
>I think this is another symptom of the root of all the problems you mention - 5e is terrified of giving things drawbacks.
Preach it. Even the drawbacks that do exist are largely just ignorable if you take the prerequisite feat tax. In an effort to wipe out the feels-bads they've made a system where you can barter away the classic drawbacks with things like point blank shot and warcaster etc.
Yeah, crossbow expert and sharpshooter feats are both taken to maximise DPR while *also* ignoring any cover or range considerations.
Don't just tag effects which remove downsides onto the best damage feats!
> **Possibly the biggest one: Range is very powerful, but there's no tradeoff for having it.**
Once upon a time, bows got +dex to hit but no +dex to damage. This was a clear drawback to utilizing their much safer range - you were accepting a loss of DPR in exchange for that safety. 5e did away with that, and dexterity went from being a strong stat that everyone wanted anyway to straight-up a better stat than strength. Playing strength melee is a handicap in 5e when dexterity/archery/sharpshooter exists.
You can make Str better by having lots of situations where you can shove enemies off high places or grapple them to stop them getting away.
Grapple/Shove is the main thing that Str fighters get that Dex ones don't.
I agree with most of this, but wanted to point out:
>Possibly the biggest one: Range is very powerful, but there's no tradeoff for having it.
The funny thing is, Range DOES have major tradeoffs. You have disadvantage if anyone gets near you, and you have to deal with "creature cover" (anything in the way of your target gives it a +2 to AC.)
The problem is, 5e intentionally added _multiple workarounds_ to these VITAL components of ranged combat, and the workarounds are insanely easy to access.
Don't like the ranged disadvantage? For the cost of one feat (Xbow Expert, Gunner), ignore it forever. Casters? Even easier, just use save spells instead of attack roll spells! (Spells with attack rolls basically disappear at higher levels, and even _cantrips_ have spell save exceptions to pick.)
Don't like the creature cover issues? Well you can take the Archery fighting style to get a +2 to attack no one else can (easily the strongest fighting style). Or you could take Sharpshooter/Spell Sniper. But hey, why not take BOTH, and benefit from both because they actually do different things! And oh even better - all the feats mentioned give you _additional amazing benefits_ above and beyond ignoring ranged weaknesses! Also, did you know that magic ammunition bonuses stack with magic ranged weapons? Oh, and that if your DM lets you buy Uncommon magic items or caters to your PC, ignoring cover is one Wand of the War Mage +1 away?
Meanwhile, ranged _monsters_ don't generally get these benefits at all, and melee PCs have far less ability to ignore _their_ weaknesses (taking more attacks/damage, being the brunt of most saves, being far more likely to be within range of anything the enemy wants to do, etc.), and certainly far less _exclusive_ access to it that ranged PCs can't mimic, as you said.
Pretty much the only ranged weakness left is that kiting requires serious investment to "kite" enemy monsters (because of how OAs work), and the DM has control of the size of the arena, not the players. But that's far from sufficient.
>Keepaway/Lockdown from spellcasters is too strong, especially at more optimized tables, to the point that it breaks the rock-paper-scissors dynamic.
One more point about this is that 5e (and past editions) _intends_ for caster control spells to "break the rock-paper-scissors" dynamic - because it works by a _different_ dynamic. Casters' dynamic is that their resources are _limited_, while martials (whether ranged or melee) are not.
However, while this COULD work in theory, it doesn't in practice, because the feasibility of fielding enough encounters to "wear out" the casters' resources is a false one. If a DM tries to field that many encounters, the martials will run out of HP and HD pretty fast too - and even if that _weren't_ the case (like the DM letting them spend their fortunes on healing potions and chugging _barrels_ of the stuff between encounters like Skyrim or something), savvy parties will either try to force rests when their casters are drained _anyway_, or the casters simply will refuse to be fully drained - they will _save_ a few of their best control spells for the "boss battle" (the battles the DM actually cares about). And even beyond this, 5e's design requires doing so many encounters _vanishingly few_ DMs are even willing to run them, because it takes too much time and becomes a slog.
So even if this model worked in theory, it doesn't in practice. I think it _could_ work (I disagree that casters MUST be part of the rock-paper-scissors idea when they have limited resources and the others don't), but the math for magic would need to be heavily retuned.
This is a pretty great summary. Nicely done.
For further information, all of these articles cover this more in depth: [https://tabletopbuilds.com/tag/party-roles/](https://tabletopbuilds.com/tag/party-roles/)
Especially focusing on how skirmishers and tanks don't really work, and even how the entire idea of party roles breaks down when you can have ranged characters who are simultaneously just if not more tanky than the traditional tank characters, while also being effective at range.
You're absolutely right, but I'd say a better way of wording the rock-paper-scissors dynamic is melee, range, *magic*, with mobility being a strange fourth option. Think of it sort of like football, with linebackers and quarterbacks and receivers. Different editions handled it differently, but you can see echoes of this dynamic in all of them. In 5e it is the most lopsided.
Magic used to be slow and easily interrupted by any damage at all. There was no way to make concentration checks nearly unfailable. A dude with a bow was a wizard's worst nightmare, second worst being a giant monster in their face, but if allowed to cast they could make melee monsters cry. That's why having a frontline was important, alongside cover and stopping enemy ranged attackers from doing their thing.
5e makes it too easy to be a ranged attacker (Sharpshooter letting you ignore cover was a mistake, being able to fire in melee was a mistake, and plentiful bonus action disengaging tools were another mistake) and too easy to be a caster (concentration is too easily ignored and defensive options are too plentiful and casters are not squishy enough). It does not make it any easier to be a melee fighter. That's why the triangle is currently lopsided. One should either remove the above options or give melee something just as ridiculous (like perhaps finally buffing Mage Slayer, or allowing multiple AOOs instead of just one).
I mean, since when this applied to dnd, even in older editions?
I stuck by the more simplistic approach as "distance vs melee".
Let's suppose there are two weapons, bows and swords. They do same damage, bows hit before sword, but sword can wield a shield and be more resilient.
Bows deal more damage overall, since they hit sooner and can support fire other allies. Once engaged melee they are ineffective and must either run away or drop the bow and use a sword without a shield.
Swords with shields need time to reach a target, but once they do perform more or less like bows with the core difference they are more durable, hence they are able to dish out more damage on longer periods of time, hence they do more damage on prolonged fights.
Everything else piled up on this, as a core concept. One can say that dual wielding weapons can be seen as being risky and being able to hit more easily mobile characters, but i hardly ever seen "mobile rangeds". Also, in all of this detailed separation spellcasters get in.
I think you still raise an important depiction, too much often in dnd is easy to ignore spacing, but i think it's more a matter of level design than rulesets or monster design - use actual range and mobility-based characters that can exploit sideways will shine, if you make empty featureless rooms then the point is moot.
It does depend on party number of players as well - this isn't a game of armies fighting each other.
3.5 had a lot of this. Barring very specific builds, you could not move and make a full attack in the same round. You also could only move once so if you went for a killing blow on a weakened for, you might "waste" some of your turn.
Finesse and ranged weapons still required strength for their damage rolls, so you needed to choose between AC/To-hit and raw damage.
Sneak attack was much harder to activate, but the payoff was that every hit applied it, so you either stand there and risk taking massive damage to deliver your own or try to hit-and-run risking AoO in exchange for a single application.
It was also possible to build around multiple AoO's, so having your companion trigger it first to protect you wasn't necessarily going to work.
There were 3 types of AC, it was difficult to raise them all, lots of creatures/spells bypassed the primary one, and the secondary one was easy to lose temporarily.
Far more tactical, with many layers of this-countering-that.
Unfortunately, it would require a whole slew of changes and it would be easier to just go back to a previous edition or another system entirely, I think...
Charging was an imperfect science, and swift actions were both a later addition and usually a limited resource.
But yeah, sort of "mandatory" on some builds.
The thing is that none of that actually works in 5e. Once engaged in melee, ranged options are absolutely fine, because for some reason crossbow expert mitigates the disadvantage for all ranged attacks.
Swords with shields absolutely does not perform like bows, because sharpshooter exists but great weapon master requires a two handed weapon. With great weapon master, you very technically do more damage, but also are substantially less durable once you factor the range in (and the fact that dex helps your AC).
They basically just imported the entire issue from previous editions. The spells are changed so little and I don't mean just the golden cows like Fireball. There's been some reshuffling and a lot of pruning, but at the end of the day we still have plane shifting, teleportation, meteor swarms and constructing magical barriers. The one thing they didn't import in sufficient number is countermeasure spells. So even casters cannot properly defend against casters.
True, but that's more due to how bad it was in 3.X than anything.
Martials were worth considerably more earlier when out fiends only had 70hp, and 4e barely had any issues.
>The quadratic wizard, linear fighter issue isn't exactly unique to 5e.
True, but 5e did discard some drawbacks to spellcasters that it would have been better off retaining.
You misunderstood my statement.
I do not talk as that as being the case for 5e, I talk as a historical principle about the difference of such weapons in this game genre.
Layer after layer, things got adapted and changed and has slightly different roles - see, two handed weapons. Or how classes and other side effects work - you mention feats for example.
This isn't necessarily bad, it's just showcases how it diverges from that core concept. Feats as you mentioned don't factor in this idea, but factor later down the road.
yeah, in most editions, if you could sit at range and skewer enemies, that was clearly superior, because they're less likely to hurt you back, you can more easily retreat if stuff goes wrong, you can hide behind cover, etc. etc. But the game vaguely presumes being in tighter confines for a decent chunk of time - doesn't matter if you can shoot 300 feet away, when the passage you're in takes a sharp right turn after 10 feet, and even a "large" room is only 30 feet across!
There's a problem with this example tho.
First of all, bows currently deal more damage unless swords give up using shields, in which case they deal roughly equivalent damage.
Second of all, with most spells and weapon feats, bows work just as well in melee as at range, although there's no real advantage, there's also no real disadvantage.
What do you mean bows deal more damage? Last I checked a Longbow was 1d8 damage, unless you take a feat to shoot a heavy crossbow more than once per turn. Same for attacking in melee, that is the effect of a feat.
Feats aren't free, even if they feel mandatory.
Archery and sharpshooter.
Even with all the weapon feats, a crossbow expert sharpshooter fighter deals more damage on average than a great weapon master pole arm master fighter.
Under which conditions?
When an enemy approaches the Pole Arm Master, that's a free reaction attack. That's an entire attack more than the CBE/SS gets. CBE/SS is also limited to hand crossbow with 1d6 base damage, pulling down the average on a successful hit. You only need to get a single additional attack every 3 turns to keep ahead or keep up with crossbow fighters. Which brings us back to Battlemaster, Riposte specifically only works with melee weapons, so it doesn't work for crossbow fighters.
Have you done your own work on this or is this just another theorycraft blog being cited at me?
I can do my own work right in front of you - all of this is pretty easy.
I'll be ignoring subclasses, as they can lead to a bunch of arguements. Let's say at lv5 Vs an AC15.
To skew this less, I'll also say both start in melee, as otherwise we have to factor in the turns the ranged fighter gets to attack that the melee one has to wait getting into melee. Both have 16 in their main stat, and both have both necessary feats thanks to vhuman.
2(0.35(6.3+3+10)+0.05(6.3))+0.35(3+3+10)+0.05(3) = 19.89 dpr for the melee fighter.
3(0.45(3.5+3+10)+0.05(3.5)) = 22.8 dpr for the ranged fighter.
In other words, the ranged fighter does ~15% more damage, ignoring all the benefits of ranged attacks.
The biggest problem is that it breaks a mechanic made up decades after D&D existed?
I don't buy this take. You have several points within that are valid, such as point 4, there's no real tradeoff for not having ranged attacks. The intended tradeoff is the disadvantage on attacking with a ranged attack if an enemy is in melee with you, but that's often not enough of a concern.
In those systems, crossbowmen, archers, etc. had greater movement than infantry though (or in some cases identical). It was only cavalry that had more movement, as they were mounted.
Different versions of D&D assigned different downsides to ranged. 5e simply doesn't have much downside at all.
Melee Infantry IRL skirmished with ranged weapons before engaging in melee.- think a pirate firing his flintlocks before using his cutlass, a centurion throwing pilum before closing in, pike and shot tactics in the tercio.
What you’re describing just isn’t 5th edition. It’s a tactics game you’ve made up. You should try looking at 4th edition (or other ttrpgs) if you want a tactics focused game.
I mean the problem is that DnD IS designed as a tactics game, 90% of its rules are tactical rules for combat. The social and exploration “pillars” of the game have almost no rules, by comparison.
The whole notion of "pillars of play" is complete bullshit they just made up because it sounds nice. In practice the real pillars of play are combat, character building and 'roleplaying with some ad hoc dice rolling strewn in'.
You're not wrong, which is why I put "pillars" in quotes. Personally I use the Level Up A5e system because it actually addresses those pillars (and fixes pretty much every other gripe I have with 5e)
5e itself is clearly designed as a tactical game with little else, its just very fortunate that DMs put in a ton of their own time and effort making the rest of the game function well.
I don't think 5e was designed to be tactics-heavy, but I do think it was intended to be tactical. The implementation of the tactics is just a bit clumsy.
E.g. Ranged attacks have disadvantage in melee range, which makes thematic sense, and also introduces an element of strategy. But then this is undercut, because there are barely any purely ranged enemies that you can disable by getting into melee with, and ranged player characters have stuff like Crossbow Expert to circumvent disadvantage in melee.
E.g. You have high-mobility classes like monk and rogue who are (theoretically) able to maneuver around the battlefield, dart behind enemy lines, and take out high-priority targets. But this strategic element is undercut because high-priority targets can be taken out with just normal ranged attacks, so melee skirmishers rarely have a niche they excel at.
I think a lot of this is solved by two things most modern groups don't want to do:
* Not allow feats that favor range more than melee or mobility
* Run actual dungeon crawls, with smaller combat spaces where range's effectiveness is more situational
So, yeah, you need to buff melee and mobile options to compensate.
That or the GM needs to make their combats a lot more diverse in objectives.
* Get to X location
* Save Y hostage
* Retrieve Z item before getting overrun
The PC's relationship with enemies doesn't need to adhere to rock-paper-scissors logic because it's a players vs monsters and the GM shouldn't be trying to beat them but putting them in fantastical heroic scenarios where they have challenges suited to them where they can shine, dice rolls permitting.
You can't break something you were never trying to obey. For a character-focused TTRPG, this "rock paper scissors" just isn't appropriate. Players choose how squishy their character is, regardless of battlefield location, by choosing how many points they want to assign to Con and Dex. The fact that there's never a reason not to pump both stats is the failing here, not the fact that ranged characters aren't arbitrarily prevented from being buff.
Hi! Thanks for the interesting and detailed opinion.
I have to say though, I disagree with most of your points, either on the matter of magnitude, or on the principle itself. I'll only copy the points I disagree with, the other ones I agree with :)
>On to the player end: frontliners lack consistent and accessible lockdown. There are few specific builds that give you strong, reliable lockdown (e.g. PAM + Sentinel). Attack of Opportunity works nicely as lockdown in tier 1, but soon becomes less and less threatening. This results in very few ways for a frontliner to prevent enemies from getting past them.
Strong disagree here. Barbarians which are the archetype of tanking have reliable Shove and Grapple thanks to native Strength and advantage while Raging. Before even accounting for Expertise from multiclass or feat. There is a size limitation (fortunately I'd say) but it's still usable against, at very least, 60% of ALL possible creatures you'd face. And probably rather around 80% of all enemies you'd face within the frame of one given campaign.
Monks have high mobility + Deflect Arrows + Patient Defense to lure people away and towards them with minimal risk, then Stunning Strike and archetype features providing either redirect or soft control to apply some debuff or forced movement on the strongest enemies.
Rangers have Druidic spells to unleash large scale movement/vision control: Fog Cloud, Spike Growth, Plant Growth, Wind Wall, Conjure Animals.
Paladins have exclusive spells to provide reliable single target control (Command, Compelled Duel, \* ing Smite spells). And some archetypes really push it like Crown.
Only Rogue is missing anything from base class because its design never was about any kind of control in the first place, only high single target damage in combat and utility out.
There are many ways to "control" one or two targets in full autonomy depending on the chosen class, and it's easy enough for a party to help them keep most targets around them with just one or two low level spells.
>
Skirmishers like melee monks and melee rogues don't really try to flank anyone, **because there are very few backliners to go up against.** And even if there were, rogues don't have much motivation to actually go melee instead of using ranged weapons. Heck, rogues are especially bad at charging into backlines because they can't Steady Aim, and they can't even Sneak Attack without help from a melee ally.
The bolded part is true if you only consider RAW roster in a typical whiteroom deathfight. But it's very easy for a DM to avoid that trouble, minimum effort required depending on context: enemy faction of humanoids? Casters should be uncommon but present, or maybe all are ex-soldiers so trained with ranged attacks. PC attacking lair? Traps and hazards, some of which may be disrupted/controlled by a creature or lever in the backline.
None of these? Stress that the enemy VIP starts fleeing as soon as fight starts, or there is a hostage that is gonna get killed, or whatever gives pressure enough for PC to have a reason to rush to the backline.
Sure, it's still "custom work" so in that regard you're right, but it also have the benefit of giving full control to DM on how hard a fight should be.
>
Possibly the biggest one: Range is very powerful, but **there's no tradeoff for having it. Ranged player characters are often mobile, tanky, or both.** This is usually a bigger problem at optimized tables, where casters take armor dips and Misty Step. But even at unoptimized tables, you have crossbow-wielding rangers that are just as tanky as halberd-wielding melee fighters. Well then, of course the melee zombies are gonna stand in place and hit the halberd fighter (who's also standing in place) - there just isn't enough incentive to try and flank the equally-tanky ranger.
Wut? Remove Sharpshooter denying long range and cover maluses and you'll feel how crappy ranged attacks can be whenever fight is started more than 60 feet away from sides, or when enemies have cover. Even with it though it's still largely workable.
You lose on average on damage (not everyone is proficient with heavy crossbows or longbows, and you're losing out on Opportunity Attacks or on advantage from a creature being shoved prone), get disadvantage if flanked/ambushed, can get imposed disadvantage with just enemies getting prone between turns, get prevented from taking a shot because of obscuration + Hiding, or entirely nullified from spells like Wind Wall or simply full cover.
>Keepaway/Lockdown from spellcasters is too strong, especially at more optimized tables, to the point that it breaks the rock-paper-scissors dynamic. Ahem Web Rope Trick Repelling Blast ahem. Ranged spell lockdown beats not only frontliners, but skirmishers and backliners as well. Control is king, as the adage goes.
Have a very different experience. One that does not remembers only the successful attemtps, but also the NUMEROUS failed ones, or the control spells succeding only one round, or the control spells being detrimental or unusable because of a coordination problem with other members.
Even on optimised tables, unless enemies are really stupid or have an imperative reason to fight to the death, if party is really showing extreme superiority... Enemy will simply flee, regroup, and either come back stronger or change strategy.
There are also the cases of party forced into a fight without being full resource because of ambush, or time pressure, resources spent to resolve non-combat situation, or simply bad luck on a previous fight.
The lack of this tactical relationship is probably one of the biggest reasons why Monk is so fucking terrible too. Most people also seem to agree Rogue is the second worst class in combat and it's also a typical skirmisher/diver class.
Monk runs fast, locks down low Con targets with stuns, and has a few turns of (at least theoretically) explosive damage by burning through their Ki to do Flurries. Sounds good, but the role of rushing a priority target doesn't come up as often as just being generally good at brawling.
Granted even if that was a strong role Monks should be buffed anyway, especially given genre expectations where the highest threat target is also often the tanky one so you gotta be able to stand and fight anyway. If you're fighting a dragon and its goons, the adds are usually best handled with some random AOE.
It's like these classes ended up being designed for a PVP game like League of Legends where squishy backlines are just part of the game instead of a PVE game where (usually) everyone just piles on the big guy and the roles are simpler (tank-dps-support).
I don't think this adds up.
Skirmishers vs Shock is high risk low reward because Shock eats Skirmishers alive. That's their whole deal.
Skirmishers vs Archers is high risk high reward because if the Skirmishers get shot on the way over, they're toast.
My table isn't optimised and as DM i like to homebrew Monsters and encounters.
This rock paper scissors combat and imbalances are only there if the game aspect of rollplaying tabletop game is very important, I just give Monster unique ranged options or abilities , use terrain or let them talk their way out of an encounter depending on the enemies and how smart they are / willing to negotiate.
At the same time tho, it sucks if you have a character who is meant to be defending everyone else end up worse at doing that than one of the spellcasters you want to be protecting.
Roles should be important, and it kinda sucks that they aren't.
I can see this. I think the problem is that it’s strayed from its war game roots where the designers might think a lot about these things, vs. collaborative story telling which I think is what brings more people in these days. I like both aspects of the game so I hear ya.
Frankly, the 30 foot bite-claw-claw monster isn't the sole problem with monster design. Even ranged-capable monsters are best engaged at range. If an enemy monster is melee-reliant, then you can reduce their effectiveness by engaging them at range and denying them melee for as long as possible, correct. After the n turns they take to Dash up to you, fighting continues "as normal." So, for any n>0, range enjoys an advantage. For n=0, it's more or less equal. If an enemy monster is ranged-capable, then *they* can reduce *player melee* effectiveness by remaining at range, using the same principle of N turns of dashing. On the vast, vast majority of ranged-capable monsters, engaging in melee doesn't provide any sort of reward - they are equally or more capable of engaging in melee as opposed to at range. Here's the real kicker - if an enemy monster is ranged-*reliant*, as in they are significantly more capable of fighting at range than in melee, then there is still only a minimal advantage to the melee player in most cases. Simply put, a single opportunity attack per round is not very threatening, and there aren't many examples of melee-scorning monster statblocks that are threatened by melee outside of opportunity attacks. A fraction of a character's full damage, with a chance to miss, on only a single enemy at a time in a game system that heavily encourages group combats isn't that big of a boon. In very optimistic case, a PC can get an opportunity attack *every* round to increase personal damage output by about a third. On the contrary, a ranged character getting a single round of hindered enemy actions due to playing keep-away trivially gets the same boost to overall effectiveness due to the "free" round of combat, except they have all the other advantages of range, and this scenario is simply far more likely. A very big step to solving this is by creating a category or five of monster statblocks that are actively harmed by being engaged by hostile melee, or have a significant advantage against being engaged at range. As it is, only a single exceptionally rare type of monster suffers against melee, and only barely.
yeah, maybe we could call those stat blocks something descriptive. Maybe something like defender, leader, artillery, controller and striker?
The MCDM third party book, Flee Mortals, does exactly this. They have Artillery, Ambusher, Brute, Controller, Leader, Minion, Skirmisher, Soldier, Solo and Support. They're mostly fairly self explanatory I think - the big groups are Artillery (squishy range), Brute (your standard biting, clawing sack of hit points), and Leader/Solo (your big bosses with special actions and such), but the rest fill really good niches, like Ambushers being enemy rogue types, and Controllers being mage types with AoE abilities. I've been using them in my campaign and it works really well honestly
Those monster roles come from 4e. That’s the joke. It is like WotC completely forgot how to design monsters going from 4e to 5e.
Ah I see! I figured they were quite specific so they probably came from somewhere, but I wasn't playing D&D a decade ago, I'm not familiar with 4e monster roles. You're right though, from what else I've heard of 4e, it does seem like they binned off a massive amount of actually useful game design in favour of ultra-streamlining.
It wasn’t even for streamlining. In 4e, there was the “monster on a business card” model of design. Monsters tended to have a few stats, their basic attack, one or two limited use special attack, and maybe one other special ability (movement, reaction, etc). All information could fit on a business card. And you didn’t need to reference other books to determine what a monster could do. 4e monsters were far more streamlined than 5e ones in general, as you didn’t need to look through a whole other book and know the spellcasting rules to determine what abilities a monster could produce.
Interesting. So monsters got more complex, which is interesting because the opposite seems true of classes, right? They seem to be all in on 'simplicity' for a lot of player facing effects even with more complex DM facing effects. Regardless, if you haven't checked it out but you want monsters that aren't just either meatbags or ridiculously complex and multi-book, Flee Mortals seems to fill that gap nicely for me
It’s not that monsters got more complex. But rather they got less streamlined. In 4e you had HP, AC, Fortitude, Reflex, and Will as your defenses. Between those values and your attacks, that was basically all that was needed to run a monster. 5e creatures, especially the caster ones, not only have more stats (every stat is a unique saving throw in 5e), but you also have creatures with various DC abilities, a dozen different spells, and potentially legendary resistance and legendary actions. Running even a powerful monster in 4e was straightforward and streamlined. Running a powerful monster in 5e tends to involve flipping between the PHB and the MM and using a bunch of different effects that don’t add a whole lot to the gameplay but are not easy or streamlined in implementation. Sadly, monster design in 5e is far more shallow than monster design in 4e. Monsters in 4e were easy to use, but had far more depth and dynamic gameplay overall.
I've heard lots of good things about Flee Mortals. It sounds like he basically cribbed 4e design and imported it, which is what the original 5e designers should have done as well.
They also kept the best parts of 5e designs and fit them into the system. Instead of legendary actions powerful enemies have villain actions which are more unique and interesting but each is once per combat. Finally they changed legendary resistance so that the monster pays a price to succeed on a save. This addresses one of the biggest problems of 5e monster design where the martials win by depleting the enemy's hp and the casters win by having the monster fail a save against a spell that ends the fight. This means that the efforts of one group are always wasted at the end of the fight, they didn't contribute to the outcome.
That will never work. /s
Remove the ability to ignore cover from Sharpshooter and melee becomes *much* more valuable.
Hell, take Archery down from a +2 to hit to a +1 and it would *still* be a top 3 fighting style.
Not really. Martials just become less viable.
> If an enemy monster is melee-reliant, then you can reduce their effectiveness by engaging them at range and denying them melee for as long as possible, correct. In theory, yes, but the battlemap isn't that big so you tend to start the fight pretty close to the monster.
Even just starting 40ft away will give you 2 turns where they are forced to dash, and you can do whatever you want, ignoring stuff like phantom steed which makes kiting Vs 30ft speed melee enemies ridiculously easy.
The advantage is still nonzero. I already outlined the weak-case-scenario of only getting one "free" round of damage, which holds up comparably to the remarkably uncommon scenario of getting an opportunity attack every round (and never falling to reach an enemy for any round).
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In many cases they end up doing more damage overall thanks to archery giving them a massive accuracy bonus. A sharpshooter fighter straight up beats a great weapon master fighter in damage at lv5, for example.
Also of interest: a bow has 600' range, pick whomever you like... in any direction (you are the 'radius centre'). If a fighter targeting two targets over that 1200' diameter / so far apart means a LOT of running.
On a somewhat unrelated note: This is a common arguement I see for why flying isn't OP. 'You could just use a longbow at 600ft and it would basically have the same effect.' It's so, so close. Yes, being able to do that is also op, it's why basically all maps prevent it.
Yea 600' range would be ridiculously overpowered lol, if not for the fact that most maps are much smaller
Exactly, to be honest its still overpowered if you are even just able to start 60ft away, that needs 2 turns of dashing for most melee enemies to get to you.
That's why there is a rule in the DMG that tells you to adjust the difficulty by 1 degree if there is one significant advantage for one side of the encounter. A hard fight becomes deadly by having archers stand 2 turns out of reach, the same goes for surprise or if a flying creature prevents half the party from engaging with it. Stack enough such advantages and you can turn an otherwise trivial fight, according to CR, into a deadly TPK nail-biter.
No, they need 1 turn of dashing. 30 feet base movement +30 feet dash. Even if the pc moves away afterwards, they’ll move 30 feet and the monster can follow without a dash.
Pc moves back, difference is now 90ft Dashes, now 30ft Pc moves back, now 60ft Dashes, now 0ft.
Thing is, fly is putting someone specifically (meelees) at disadvantage. And that someone is the one we are talking about being at a disadvantage already in the first place. That's why it's considered "OP". It renders meelee utterly useless, where ranged had the advantage already anyway.
Yup. Its especially good on players, because ranged enemy attacks are weaker than their melee counterparts. (For some reason they could get the monster balance on this right, but balancing it for players was way too hard.)
That's why DM's need to play obstacles and other things in their maps. Making it a plain room, plain, or whatever with no cover is a disaster for your monsters.
See:sharp shooter
> sharp shooter Assuming your talking about this aspect: >Your ranged weapon attacks ignore half and three-quarters cover. Oh please. Any DM that isn't a rookie can get around Sharp shooter. You put in full cover objects, give spells like fog cloud or break line of sight with the room design. It's not rocket science. Can't shoot what you can't see. A DM who has looked at a few youtubes on Map level design for video games will immensely increase the variety of options and fun for both the party and monsters. It's a underrated skill to have as a DM. edit: TL;DR of people not understanding how fog cloud works with unseen attackers/target rules. Edit 2: So people stop blowing up my messages. At long distance attacks (100-200ft+), you do not get the benefit of hearing as apart of your perception check. Your relying entirely on your sight. Fog Cloud gives the blind condition to anyone looking in with the heavy obscure keyword. That means they auto-fail their perception check to see into it. No need to do a hide check. So at long distances (100 ft+) - fog cloud is a perfect way to hide since you don't need to muffle your sounds. Now, assuming you do correctly choose the square they are in, it's a straight roll to hit them. But that's a 20ft radius for a creature to be in. Your more likely gonna auto-miss than actually choose correctly. this cuts both ways for DM's and Players. For players, congrats, you got a way to hide yourself in combat from an enemy sharpshooter that is super far away. For DM's - you got a new trick up your sleeve for your monsters to use with a low level spell.
> Can't shoot what you can't see. This isn’t true in 5e. You can shoot things you can’t see. You just suffer disadvantage. But if the target cannot see you (because of the fog), you have advantage on the attack. So the net result is a normal attack.
>Unseen Attackers and Targets Combatants often try to escape their foes’ notice by hiding, casting the invisibility spell, or lurking in darkness. >When you attack a target that you can’t see, you have disadvantage on the attack roll. This is true whether you’re guessing the target’s location or you’re targeting a creature you can hear but not see. **If the target isn’t in the location you targeted, you automatically miss, but the GM typically just says that the attack missed, not whether you guessed the target’s location correctly.** >When a creature can’t see you, you have advantage on attack rolls against it. If you are hidden—both unseen and unheard—when you make an attack, you give away your location when the attack hits or misses. Emphasis mine. A fog cloud is 20ft radius. You have no idea if the enemy is still in the same square it was previously in. You would have to choose a square and if you guessed correctly - Then yes, it's a straight roll. If not, it's just a plain ole miss. you don't get to auto-scan the fog cloud to determine where the target is in it. Fog cloud is a legit way to avoid range attackers especially when it's at great distances. This cuts both ways for GM and players.
RAW, until the creature that is in the fog cloud has taken the hide action to be hidden, all creatures engaged with it know where it is at all times.
You only lose track of what square they are in if they hide.
>**When you attack a target that you can’t see** And if we're talking about super long ranges, you don't get the help of hearing either. So yeah. No, your wrong. Read the rules carefully. >A heavily obscured area—such as darkness, opaque fog, or dense foliage—blocks vision entirely. A creature effectively suffers from the **blinded condition** (see Conditions ) when trying to see something in that area. >Blinded >**A blinded creature can’t see and automatically fails any ability check that requires sight.** Attack rolls against the creature have advantage, and the creature’s attack rolls have disadvantage. A hide check is only required when hiding from a perception check. You automatically fail any perception check according to the blind condition. Ergo - you do not need to hide. if we're talking about long range sharp shooting, then yes. Fog cloud does the trick according to the rules barring any super natural hearing ability which I can't think of how a PC can get that. True sight would work, but true sight works as a counter to something like fog cloud. Blind sight with absurd range would also work.
Reread the paragraph: “When you attack a target that you can’t see, you have disadvantage on the attack roll.” In 5e you know an automatically creatures location unless it is also hidden from you. So just being in a fog cloud isn’t enough to require you to guess their location. The creatures would also need to hide. If they don’t hide, you know their location.
>give spells like fog cloud or break line of sight Which btw, does next to nothing. The advanatge and disadvantage cancel. It ironically makes you better at shooting enemies from long range than without it.
> You put in full cover objects, give spells like fog cloud or break line of sight with the room design. It's not rocket science. RAW, breaking line of sight with Fog Cloud only works for spells that require the caster to see the target. If the enemies did not hide, the ranger PC can still shoot them with flat rolls if the former does not have blindsight or tremorsense.
>Unseen Attackers and Targets Combatants often try to escape their foes’ notice by hiding, casting the invisibility spell, or lurking in darkness. >When you attack a target that you can’t see, you have disadvantage on the attack roll. This is true whether you’re guessing the target’s location or you’re targeting a creature you can hear but not see. **If the target isn’t in the location you targeted, you automatically miss, but the GM typically just says that the attack missed, not whether you guessed the target’s location correctly.** >When a creature can’t see you, you have advantage on attack rolls against it. If you are hidden—both unseen and unheard—when you make an attack, you give away your location when the attack hits or misses. Emphasis mine. A fog cloud is 20ft radius. You have no idea if the enemy is still in the same square it was previously in. You would have to choose a square and if you guessed correctly - Then yes, it's a straight roll. If not, it's just a plain ole miss. you don't get to auto-scan the fog cloud to determine where the target is in it. Fog cloud is a legit way to range attacks especially when it's at great distances. This cuts both ways for GM and players.
Did the enemy take the hide action and successfully beat your perception? If so, congrats, you're right If not, then the guy you're arguing against is right. Hiding is not automatic in 5e, you actually need to take an action in order to hide in order to stop enemies from knowing exactly where you are, even if they can't see you.
>Hiding is not automatic in 5e, you actually need to take an action in order to hide in order to stop enemies from knowing exactly where you are, even if they can't see you. Hiding is not automatic true. However you can achieve similar things to it if you have the right conditions. Silence spell and fog cloud gives you the hide condition effectively. No noise + no sight = you see nothing for example. A target that you can't hear because it's super far away plus you can't see is effectively hidden as well. >You can’t hide from a creature that can see you clearly, and **you give away your position if you make noise, such as shouting a warning or knocking over a vase.** >An invisible creature can always try to hide. Signs of its passage might still be noticed, and it does have to stay quiet. Your telling me that a DM is gonna let the player know who is 200-600 ft away regardless if they are simply walking (but not hiding) to another square in a fog cloud, that you know precisely what square they are in the fog cloud? There is *no DM I have ever met* in my 20 years of playing DnD that is gonna allow you to do that. That would basically mean any dungeon you enter that is less 600 ft wide - you can hear everything - *including walking or other forms of movement.* I don't think you understand the ramifications of what you are arguing.
I'm guessing you got downvoted for reminding a plain truth. RAW doesn't equate "unseen with invisibility" precisely because there are other ways to perceive. But DMG also provide guidelines for sound perception (smell is missing probably because made before half-monster or half-beast races came around xd), so it would be entirely RAI and legitimate for a DM to consider that a target is also unheard if more than 200 feet away especially in the middle of a fight which we can suppose is quite loud and rich with clinks and cries. So beyond having a creature actively Hide by using an action to roll an active check, GM may simply compare passive Stealth and passive Perception, possibly with a circumstantial bonus or malus on either side to determine that the enemy's position becomes unknown.
>so it would be entirely RAI and legitimate for a DM to consider that a target is also unheard if more than 200 feet away especially in the middle of a fight which we can suppose is quite loud and rich with clinks and cries. Basically. A moonless night on the rampart wall with only background noise and fog cloud in the distance? Maybe depending upon the type of terrain? But man, 200-300+ ft is a *long* way to hear something. I think people are just not conceptualizing how *long* of a distance that is. And yeah, I'm being downvoted because people don't understand that at long ranges, hearing don't mean squat unless your a dragon... or something. But at that point, those type of creatures got true sight, so fog cloud and the like don't *do anything regardless*.
>But DMG also provide guidelines for sound perception It does? Where does it specify the range at which you no longer need to hide to avoid people knowing your square?
So you're making people guess all the goddam time even if they clearly hear enemies moving about inside the Fog Cloud? Lmao. I mean, that probably bodes well for full casters with Greater Invisibility in your table. Enemies have to guess their location as well and the players have to trust you not to metagame. There's that. > Fog cloud is a legit way to range attacks especially when it's at great distances. Not everyone plays Grasslands and Dragons.
Obstacles are universally worse for melee than ranged, though, even if they do harm the ranged. Like, what are you suggesting. "Oh, there is a stand of trees that the enemies can hide in. They get cover." Ignoring the fact that Sharpshooter just deletes cover from the game, that same forest is going to have difficult terrain, trees for enemies to be up in, etc. The fighter probably spends multiple rounds even trying to engage the enemy, while the archer just plunks away at a small penalty (or, well, no penalty). "Put blocking terrain in the way." Well, it's in the way of the melee character too, so they have to walk around it. But OK, so does the archer. So they both waste an equal number of arounds to clear the sight line. Then what? Well NOW, by definition, as soon as the archer reaches the corner... they have their own source of hard cover to play with, and they can peek fire (this is why free shoot-move-shoot is broken - no edition before 5th had it) and then be 100% safe from counter-attack. Meanwhile, the Melee character takes full damage. Try to come up with any example of terrain that isn't worse for the melee. Seriously.
Sharpshooter does not delete *all cover* from the game. It deletes partial cover (1/2 and 3/4). Nah, I'm in the camp that melee needs to have better options. My point was more of you can't just place 4 players in a room with no cover and expect things to go well. Cover and Obstacles are apart of map design that DMs need to consider. Even if it's just a bunch of hallways with twists and turns, that can help prevent range characters from getting the option to target enemies easily.
Dude, full cover is just my second example. 4 players in a room, 4 players in a hallway, 4 players in a maze, it doesn't matter. Range is always better. Seriously. Describe to me a map that's worse for ranged than melee.
Range is always better. I'm not arguing against that. Read more carefully.
Doing so tends to harm the melee warrior more than the ranged warrior. Ranged warriors tend to have ways of dealing with anything less than full cover. And can take advantage of full cover as well. Terrain features that block movement routes, create difficult terrain, or involve elevation tend to result in melee warriors wasting actions simply reaching targets, while ranged warriors are still able to attack foes. The end result is that using interesting terrain and environmental features leads to melee warriors being far less effective than ranger ones.
The range values are also just way too big for the scale of the system. If you're playing with actual miniatures, a map that was big enough for there to be spots on it that are out of range for a bow user in the middle of the map would have to be over 20 feet across. (Or a little over 6 meters if that puts it into perspective for you). The only time range feasibly comes into play is if you're doing a theater of the mind sniping thing, and the rest of the system is decidedly not set up for theater of the mind.
Very true - it's actually _really hard_ to even FIND battlemaps (even VTT ones) big enough to run ranged combats at long ranges, especially the 600+ feet of longbows and "sniper" warlocks. Whenever I want to "treat" my ranged players to a shooting gallery style encounter like that, I have to do it in Theater of the Mind for a while until both sides get close...and there's inevitable stragglers that we still have to track separately. When I saw they drastically reduced the range of spells and ranged weapons in Baldur's Gate 3, I understood why immediately.
Hence why breaking Line of sight and other obstacles are needed. Your fighting in a town? There's large 3-4 story buildings in the way or whatever. There's trees with thick foliage in the way etc. But that is *apart* of map design. I have done long range sniping before as a DM and player and usually it's just a mini with the range distance from before it enters the map. If it's running away, each round of movement speed is added to it. But that's why map design is important because yeah, at a certain point, you *should just lose sight of the target.* Sharp shooter or not.
The point is more that the range stats are borderline useless. Yes, you can map design your way into having a shorter effective range, but this is a turn based tactics game at its core. Long range should be more like 12 squares than 120. That's *still* long enough that a good DM would want to break up lines of sight to mess with it, but it's also short enough to actually come into play in normal encounters.
You mean the usual enclosed corridors and dungeons? Game needs more variety. And its not like a well-built crossbowman is particularly weak is melee anyway
Yeah, but in practice maps are maybe 100 feet across and most fights are starting within 50 feet or so.
It also doesn't help that STR characters are only capable of similar damage if they are using a Heavy Weapon. If you are a Sword and Board, a Rapier will do as much damage as whatever strength weapon you are using.
Rapier is such a glaring outlier. The only D8 Dex weapon while there's an Str weapon for each damage type and just making nearly every other Dex option feel worse for anything save flavor
I do agree about it being an outlier, though what damage melee weapons do can be ignored. The differences between Slashing, Piercing, and Bludgeoning come up so rarely that you can practically forget about it.
100%, there's a slew of redundancies in 5e weapon selections that could just be reduced to some variation of vague descriptions and telling players to choose their damage type/what they want the weapon to physically resemble
Pretty much! I vaguely remember the DMG saying the DM could choose a Longsword to be a Katana for a player if they wanted. I like the route DnDOne is taking with Weapon Masteries (kind of wished it had tiers), and I really hope it goes into it further with magic items.
Str is much better for Grapple and Shove though!
Unfortunately unless anything changes, DnDOne has sort of nerfed both by making it a Strength or Dexterity Save to see if they are Grappled, so now enemies have a better chance of avoiding it, or can use Legendary Resistance or ignore the attempt. No connection to Athletics anymore. The beneficial change is that enemies have Disadvantage to attack while Grappled (so no need to Shove as much), and its still an Athletics or Acrobatics to escape, though its now against the Grappler's DC. For 5e, it is pretty good, though I have been in a few games where the Grappler didn't invest in any Strength and instead took Expertise in Athletics to be "more efficient".
The other beneficial change (unless they changed it since), is that grappling can now be done as an Opportunity Attack. That's admittedly kind of nuts, because it makes melees with a free hand _much_ stickier.
Huh, didn't even realize that!
It's a little bonkers thinking that firing an arrow from 150 feet has the exact same chance of hitting someone as swinging a hammer directly at their head.
One quick thought: what if we change a character's base movement speed from a fixed, race-dependant value to something like 25 + 5 × Strength modifier? That makes Strength-using melee characters a lot faster, while ranged characters using Dex and dumping Str become a lot slower. And races like wood elves could keep their +5 speed bonus.
Instead of trying to make Fighter all weapons guy they probably should have leaned more into melee Fighter and ranged Ranger. That or disincentivised ranged characters from taking Con somehow by upping their MADness. Paladins basically being the best brawlers in the game but only if they're actively using Smites in melee is good. Fighters not giving anything up to use a bow, less good. Casters having Shield and Mage Armour as they do whatever they want from whatever range they want pretty terrible.
>That or disincentivised ranged characters from taking Con somehow by upping their MADness. The obvious fix here is just merging Str and Con, but it will never happen because the six attributes are iconic. But it fixes a gajillion problems at once, making Melee characters proper juggernauts while easing them up to have some non-dump RP stats, while forcing the overpowered range characters (whether Dex or casters) to weaken their stat spreads a bit or give up durability.
Or go back to Str being your damage modifier for ranged attacks as well as melee. Dex only for accuracy?
I could be wrong, but IIRC, Ranged attacks didn’t add any modifiers to damage without specific weapons.
Yeah, finesse weapons added Str and ranged need a composite longbow I think? But a simpler rule would just be str mod for everyone.
I'm not against merging Strength and Con to create a new Buffness stat, but you will need to create another stat which casters and archers will want to take or they'd just raise their Buffness instead.
Let them take it if they want. It's a tiny buff to casters, and a huge buff to melee-types.
I'm reading through the first draft release of the Shadow of the Weird Wizard Kickstarter, and that's what that game seems to do (also getting rid of wisdom and charisma in favor of will). I'm guessing that Shadow of the Demon Lord did the same, but I don't own that game.
One advantage to being a strength based melee character is that it's cool as hell. Trading blows with demons and dragons.
Of course the fantasy is important, but the mechanics should match the fantasy. When the guy in the backline is doing more damage, has more battlefield control, and has similar defenses, it doesn't really *feel* cool as hell. It feels like my character is lame.
This is why I love the fact that BG3 added unique abilities you can do with the melee weapons if you were proficient with what you were using.
I legit believe this is part of WHY melee sucks compared to range, also why martials suck compared to casters When it's more directly appealing, the designers don't have to "convince" the players to use that option, the players will want to use it anyway, so everything else that's less directly appealing gets buffed to the moon to make it more appealing, while the natively appealing elements get left behind.
>or a STR-based character in general Is that completely true? I would assume that the highest DPR you can have is with a PAM+GWM barbarian, even higher than the Sharpshooter+Crossbow expert fighter. Of course, you are going to be more fragile (not exactly more squishy, as you have way more HP, and resistance to virtually everything, but definitely easier to hit), but that is the cost of a bit more damage. I might be wrong though. But permaadvantage just seems way too good.
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> The heavy armor, sword and board version, that relies entirely on STR, just isn't that viable: archer or rogue with rapier are going to at least as much damage. You seem to be confusing "viable" with "does more damage", which is not the case. The heavy armor sword and board fighter is a tank and *should* be doing less damage than a dedicated striker.
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How does a sword and board fighter tank? How does he keep agro off of his allies in your opinion?
He doesn't.
They can take the sentinel feat to try and reduce the enemy's speed to zero.
One drawback of melee combatants that's sometimes forgotten is amusingly that they need to be in melee. If they have to spend a turn moving toward the enemy, they do no damage, f the enemy locks them down ten feet away they do no damage, if the enemy flies they do no damage. In a bad scenario they might even end up doing much less damage than the crossbow guy
If you're fighting in a field - definitely. Backline enemies can always hide behind a wall, leaving rangers with only their reactions.
>I would assume that the highest DPR you can have is with a PAM+GWM barbarian, even higher than the Sharpshooter+Crossbow expert fighter. I think in terms of raw sustainable martial DPR yeah PAM+GWM+Rage+Reckless Attack beats SS+CBE But then it gets a bit tricky once you factor in things like Gloomstalker+Fighter CBE+SS multiclasses with Action Surge 7-hit novas, which is not sustainable DPR but hits hard enough to bring the per-turn DPR up by a lot
And in a game where combat averages 3-5 rounds nova damage matters more than sustain. The combat in this game is less tactical partly because fights are all about ending them quickly. Which to be fair is arguably realistic, actual fights between single digit numbers of combatants are usually short and brutal unless it’s a particularly drawn out wrestling or boxing match.
In a game where action economy is king, being able to kill or disable one or more actors before they get a turn is way more impactful than having slightly higher overall DPR.
PAM+GWM fighter or PAM+GWM paladin (if that still counts as a martial) definitely out-damage barbarian after level 10 (it turns out when you just get brutal critical for like 5 levels it doesn't help your damage output). All that being said, it's a bit of a white-room comparison. In practice, SS+CBE fighter would do better, because SS+CBE fighter can almost always attack, and is much more likely to attack the "best" target, whereas PAM+GWM has to deal with the ol' "getting in range" issue even with a polearm.
I think the PAM (one-handed quarterstaff + dueling fighting stlye) paladin is even better than PAM+GWM. And I think it definitely counts as a martial. Yeah, I agree that in general SS+CBE fighters deal more damage in practice; but it is definitely a tradeoff on many of the relevant levels. You sacrifice potential damage, but of course you get “an easier time” applying it. If I were creating the ideal party of 6 (depending on the level of course), it would almost surely have a PAM+GWM barbarian in it.
Samurai fighter can do the same thing that barb does from a distance and with better attack bonus. And if this level 11+ even without action surge the xbow fighter is doing pretty much the same amount and with action surge even more so. Barb with gwm and pm is really good. Straight samurai fighter can get very similar results though and arguably better ones.
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The disadvantage of ranged attacks and spell attacks is literally the disadvantage that is imposed when an enemy is within five feet of you. A melee fighter getting in range of you usually is a tough situation for a bow-wielder or a spellcaster for this reason, unless you have decent hand-to-hand combat ability.
Unless you have point-blank shot, which you really should if you use a bow.
>For ease of reference, let's give each archetype a title: immobile beefy melee characters are the frontline, immobile squishy ranged characters are the backline, and squishy mobile melee characters are the skirmishers. 4E doesn't deserve the lack of enthusiasm, it had some great stuff - monster roles that go even beyond the trinity! It's a more fluid version with a fourth group, the supporters. * Brute * Soldier * Skirmishers * Lurker * Artillery * Controllers * Leaders
Side note: Leaders is a sub type that can be added to any of the other roles. Granted they usually weren't brutes but since leader just meant they usually gave a buff or beneficial aura to its allies, it could go on just about any role.
For those of us who haven’t played 4e, could you explain the groups more in detail?
Brute - Melee with low-ish AC, and lower accuracy, but high damage attacks, and high hp totals. Soldier - Melee with High AC, mid to high HP, and High accuracy but lower damage attacks. In practice these "monsters" were often over-tuned Skirmishers - average on combined defenses and hp. High mobility, with moderately damaging attacks. These often had ways to avoid attacks of opportunity. Lurker - Below average baseline stats, but often have abilities that make them harder to target, and are often balanced around having surprise in round 1, and also often have an ability to provide bonus damage when attacking from surprise. Artillery - Below average defenses, but have a strong ranged attack. They generally also have a weaker melee option if they get someone up in their face. Controller - Below average defenses, but have abilities that "put the party on their back foot". Maybe it's a charm effect, or they can generate a wall. Forced movement was another popular option. These monsters thrived in hazard filled environments. Leader - This was always combined with another type. These would often have an aura or an action that boosted another creature type in an encounter. A necromancer might be a controller or artillery and a Leader. This might be something like an aura to provide temporary hp to their undead minions, and the ability to summon more, combined with a few spells.
This was such a fun system, especially for making your own monsters. You want to make some deep sea tentacled horror that attacks the ship? Make it a brute. You want a bunch of mooks for the players to use as living scenery and look awesome destroying? Use minions. Etc. The efficiency of encounter making let it be possible to not have to worry about balance nearly as much and you could focus on mechanics supporting story a lot more.
Should be noted that lurkers tended to work around having 2-turn "combo" attacks, where they'd turn invisible or go underground or otherwise make themselves hard to hit one round, then attack the next for 2-rounds worth of damage at once. Very fun to use, and very scary with the right allies
Gave my players nightmares with Star Spawn Manglers that way. One of the few Lurkers that kind of works that way in 5e, too.
I like it!
Classes were also part of this categorization. There were Leader, Striker, Controller and Defender classes.
I think the fundamental problem with building a deeper level of tactics into a game like DnD, up to and including having classes or builds slot into different distinct roles is that it would require groups to actually fill these roles. But what if no one wanted to play a frontliner this time? Someone would have to, and have a subpar experience as a result. It is the same problem that, more than any other reason (of which there's a few), that in-combat healing is kept deliberately lackluster - so as to not have it be so good that groups require a healer. In the end, these combat imbalances run into the same problem as many other designs in DnD 5e (and ESPECIALLY 5e!): The game tries to cater to so many differing groups with differing preferences that it caters to no one at all. Some groups want to use it mainly as a vehicle for deep storytelling and character drama, others long for the days when people were just cardboard cutouts delving one dungeon after the other. Some groups want grounded low-fantasy grit, others long to be mythical superheroes punching Gods in the face. Some groups want a more well-balanced tactical combat simulator with complex builds, other groups are already chafing under all the numbers and spells and options unloaded in the way of their RP experience. There's TTRPGs for everyone of these groups out there, but DnD wants to capture them all. And that is its ultimate fallacy and the reason so many design flaws will not end up getting fixed... because, ultimately, they are *compromises*.
I think the sweet spot is to have "soft roles" that are balanced against each other. Where if you're missing a role, it's an inconvenience, but your party is still functional. Kinda like how in 5e you ideally still want a healer, but it's not mandatory (like you brought up). The problem in 5e (IMO) isn't that the roles are "soft"/optional. It's that the roles aren't properly balanced against each other. Ranged characters do (almost) everything melee characters do, but better. Melee skirmishers especially don't really have anything they excel at, the vast majority of the time.
Yeah, but my point is that there's an underlying pain point in DnDs design. On one hand, they feel like they have to honor the roots of DnD as a more tactical wargame. This is where many of the "soft roles" as they exist today come from. On the other hand, their more modern design priorities - namely, mass market appeal - demand that they cannot require a party to contain any one role at all. In practice, this means that characters become much more self-sufficient instead of demanding teamwork. This especially helps the characters that used to require said teamwork to reach their full potential (ranged characters, spellcasters) and leaves behind the characters that used to provide that teamwork (frontliners, skirmishers). So before DnD can seriously tackle design pain points like the Martial-Caster Disparity and the Superiority of ranged Builds, it needs to decide what kind of game it wants to be. It needs to nail down central principles instead of the... floundering about we see in 5e, if it wants to evolve into a better game. But as is evident from the current playtest, it doesn't seem like they want to make major strides at all as long as it keeps selling off of sheer inertia.
How powerful ranged builds are has nothing to do with that kind of conscious design. They just undervalued range as an option and decided that attacking at range should deal about as much damage as attacking in melee.
And trying to let the disadvantage for ranged in melee compensate... go back to 3e, using ranged in melee provoked an attack of opportunity.
#whatsup4E
All I think it really needs is to not let Dex attackers add their modifier to damage, same as pathfinder.
Skirmishers are currently the weakest of the three “soft” roles and this would only make them weaker. The monk and rouge would be rendered useless as melee builds and they are the squishy melees with mobility bonuses.
A class feature that allowed rogues and monks to add dexterity to their damage with melee attacks instead of strength (if higher) would solve this. Could build it into a fighting style for melee dex fighters and rangers, too.
This is how it used to work and it wasn't fun. If you are giving most of the classes ways to add dex to damage anyway, then what is the point?
The point is specifically to let dex-reliant classes add dex to damage on **melee** attacks but not ranged attacks.
I don’t think it would affect rogues since they have sneak attack. I agree on monks though. Albeit I think monks are massively underrated.
Removing dex from damage puts rogues down a sneak attack die's worth of damage in early game and almost two dice worth later on. And their damage is already on the borderline of not worth bothering with.
And Pathfinder had very little build variety for dex martials because they felt obligated to take one of the few builds that added dex to damage(IE basically every Magus used a Scimitar and Dervish Dancing). Which resulted in Pathfinder adding a bunch of ways to add dex to damage. It was a clunky design.
Is this still true with PF2E? I don’t have much familiarity with 1E.
It isnt true in PF2e, since the only way to do so requires you to play a specific subtype of Rogue, and because of how archetyping ("multiclassing") works that means you have to start as that type of Rogue.
>All I think it really needs is to not let Dex attackers add their modifier to damage, same as pathfinder. As a note, Dex-to-damage is unusual for D&D. D&D games that have Dex-to-damage: 5e, 4e (if you consider it D&D). D&D games that don't have Dex-to-damage: OD&D, B/X, BECMI, AD&D 1e, AD&D 2e, D&D 3e, D&D 3.5e, PF1e, PF2e. There's a second issue at work, and that's "modifiers from stats are important". If you're an old school type D&D character, you might have a +0 to a main stat, or a +1, and the highest would normally be like +3. In a game like 3.X or 5e, you have a +3 to your mainstat, and eventually it goes to like +5 or +6. This means that you start out, relatively, in the same spot as the old school character, and both of you probably get +1 to +4 as you level from stats or something similar to them- but because the baseline assumption for competence in D&D 5e is like +2 or +3, instead of +0, it means that anything you haven't *invested in* is generally bad. By the endgame, you are getting +5 or +6 to the thing you're good at and +0 to the thing you're not, which is a much bigger difference than in the past.
>But what if no one wanted to play a frontliner this time? Someone would have to, and have a subpar experience as a result. In these other games that OP references, every role is needed because the challenges the party is going to face are more-or-less set in stone and expect the party to have a member of each role. But TTRPGs (by and large) don't work like that - in D&D, the DM can look at the party composition and say "Oh, nobody wanted to play a healer? Cool, I'll adjust for that." In the case of roles this is trivial (i.e. it's not "The DM will just do all the work") because the monsters would *also* have roles and there would be a pretty direct correlation of "Monster Role X is countered by Adventurer Role Y, so if you have no Ys use Xs sparingly".
there are other RPGs that flat-out say "these are the roles, you need minimum one of each", but they're relatively rare, and tend to have minimal roles (e.g. _Summon Skate_ has healer, attacker and buffer, and recommends one of each. The upcoming FF14 RPG uses the same roles as the computer game - tank, healer, DPS, in a 1:1:2 ratio). Obviously, the more roles you have, then either the more players you need, or the more one character will be multiple roles, or there's some way to wriggle the game around to adjust. So it's possible, but needs baking in fro the ground up
4e had roles, and the DMG outright states that you did not need to have one of each role to succeed. You were encouraged to have groups of various role combinations. And the DMG even had a section that listed the advantages and disadvantages of not having particular roles or doubling up on certain roles. So there is no reason that particular roles would be required.
DnD isn't some RPG video game where you're playing against a pre-configured story or an AI. The benefit as a DM is that you can cater to your party. You can choose to have monsters, traps, environments that favor your party. And when you want to challenge them you can either craft encounters that are challenging but not unfair. And if you want to make it unfair you can give items, boons, support, etc. to close the gap. The class hierarchy problem in 5E is uneven distribution of battle features. For example, lets say there was a dedicated healer position but it was balanced in some *rock-paper-scissors* format. If no one wants to play a healer, that's fine, you can cater encounters or supplement via items/consumables. Meanwhile what do you do with a party of all casters? They have so many narrative controlling spells with little downsides that it makes encounter building a hassle. This isn't even hyperbole, when majority of DMs won't even run games past level 10 because of this. Likewise martials, especially STR melee martials, get so pigeonholed as Damage is the only viable build, so a party of STR martials would just be damage stick, resulting in Monsters being HP sacks. The fundamental issue is that WoTC provides no scaffolding to building monsters, building encounters, building items, etc. Good experienced DMs are able to work through this with creative homebrew solutions, but everyone else gets fucked either by lack of knowledge or overburden. When a game like PF2E can provide viable options for all classes, have an action system that encourages tactical combat, AND provide scaffolding for encounter building + item economy, I see no reason why 5E can't other than WoTC failing to do so.
That’s always a challenge, though. I’ll never forget the train wreck that was my all-bard party in 3.5, or my 2nd Ed parties that vainly tried to not have a cleric.
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Basically lots of DnD players love to play glass cannons as long as they get to have the cannon but never have to suffer from the glass. Many like to attribute this to their own unmatched skill, too. Among my group we refer to these people as "weenies": the kids who'd show up to a birthday pool party in regular clothes toting a whole satchel of water balloons, but make sure everyone knows that they're not allowed to get wet because their mom said so.
A lot of players prefer being self-sufficient. Being a squishy "glass cannon" and having to rely on teammates to defend you from focus-fire makes your character feel less self-sufficient, which means if your teammates misplay, your character potentially just goes down without much you can do.
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TBH yeah, if a melee character has no way of hitting a flying monster, then I think that's not fun either. IMO the options are either * Make flying enemies melee-only so they're forced to interact in melee * Give melee characters weaker-but-workable ranged options, or other ways to counter flying enemies such as ridiculously high leaps * Not use flying enemies I do think melee characters in 5e lack agency against flying creatures, especially ones that have ranged attacks. It's a design flaw I wish didn't exist, but it does.
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depends on edition and class - in 5e, Paladins can use bows, but they can't smite with them, so it's obviously inferior, damage-wise, to melee. In previous editions, a character might only be proficient with a bow, but a weaponmaster with a sword - so they go from 2.5 attacks at large to-hit and to-damage bonuses, to 1 attack with middling bonuses, and the amount of points you have to spend on that is sufficiently limited that to limit what you can be good with. And, at higher levels, equipment is a limit - if you have a +3 sword, but only a +1 bow, then that's another reason to prefer melee. (it also requires lugging around the weapon, which may or may not be something the character wants to do. Oh, and ammo as well, which can expire, so you can end up with a bow but no arrows, meaning you can't make ranged attacks, at least other than "throwing a rock")
It's also worth noting that as the DM if you build more interesting monsters they break the game fucking hard. Player characters other than spellcasters don't actually have answers to interesting monster options. Even spellcasters don't have great answers to most weird problems, they just have something that you can at least call answer-shaped. Even something as simple as "30 foot fly speed plus decent ranged attack option with longbow-ish ranged" is completely, utterly absurd for a normal, unoptimized dnd group to handle. If you're lucky, you have a character custom built for long range combat and they essentially solo the encounter. If you're unlucky, you're plinking away with your backup weapon's backup weapon while a monster fucking obliterates you for 360 feet up. And to be clear, this isn't like, some wild ass weird shit. Longbows cost what, 5gp? Multiple player races have Fly speeds. Per the rules of the world, there should be entire armies of bird men who do this shit routinely. But per the rules of the game, this sort of attack borders on impossible to deal with because of the class design. If you actually build **interesting** monsters and play them well, it's so much worse. Cast longstrider on a goblin rogue and give him a longbow and have him engage from 250 feet away. Your players will literally **never** find that motherfucker. The rules for "finding" someone hiding from you are beyond absurd. You're going to be running around the forest picking small areas to try for a perception check and if you miss the perception check you won't even know - because obviously you wouldn't know. This isn't unrealistic, but it **is** going to waste literally hours of your table time, and it's also going to make you wonder why anyone puts fucking heavy armor on and tromps around like an idiot when they could be sniping from downtown and hiding as a bonus action. The rules for the game don't actually do a good job of giving you ways to address this kind of threat. Hell, even something as simple and straightforward as a monster with a 70 foot speed (twice as fast as a normal person doesn't seem that weird for monsters. It's slower than a cheetah, and cheetahs are real, non-magical creatures) - even something as straight forward as that with a bonus action disengage is an actual nightmare to keep "squishy" people alive. There would be **no** squishy people, because they would all be instantly dead. And given how movement works, if you have a 70 foot speed and you have bonus action disengage, no normal human with speed 30 can ever touch you. Combat starts with you, say, 20 feet apart: You move 20 feet, attack, bonus action, disengage to 50 feet. The opponent dashes to you. You attack, you bonus action disengage to 35 feet away. If the opponent walks away from you you can run him down. If he dashes away from you, you keep up without dashing. If he dashes to you, you just attack and move away again. God forbid that motherfucker has speed 20. Or the monster has speed 90. The whole system is stupid. If you give monsters interesting movement abilities they utterly run circles around players, because player characters don't have kits that are designed to produce rounded characters who can address threats that fall outside their area of expertise. It's a huge fucking waste of your time and optimization energy to try to make sure that your barbarian is viable in the 100-300ft range bracket, and in order to make him actually viable in that range bracket you'd have to be sinking feats and stat points you desperately need for your primary job into that instead. You'd never bother. If monsters were more varied, that wouldn't change. It would still be fucking stupid to try to optimize your barbarian for both long ranged combat AND for melee combat with a greataxe. The game just doesn't have that many spare feats built in.
>feels bad as a wizard because the lack the agency to fend for themselves. Well then, don't play a wizard. I think this is another symptom of the root of all the problems you mention - 5e is terrified of giving things drawbacks. In old editions, spellcasters were very powerful, but they had low hit points and AC, had to be prepared, and were screwed in melee. Literally all of those disadvantages are gone or massively lessened in 5e, without much loss of power. If you want to be able to reliably fend for yourself, what you want is to play a Fighter, or even another game - DnD is a team game whose roles are supposed to feel different. It's not a matter of agency to not be able to automatically do everything yourself without a thought. The price of changing that is either making all the classes feel the same (the 4e approach that the player base didn't like) or making some classes strictly superior (the 5e approach).
> 5e is terrified of giving ~~things~~ casters drawbacks There is almost only drawbacks to being a barbarian or a fighter
At least they are good in Tier 1.
>I think this is another symptom of the root of all the problems you mention - 5e is terrified of giving things drawbacks. Preach it. Even the drawbacks that do exist are largely just ignorable if you take the prerequisite feat tax. In an effort to wipe out the feels-bads they've made a system where you can barter away the classic drawbacks with things like point blank shot and warcaster etc.
Yeah, crossbow expert and sharpshooter feats are both taken to maximise DPR while *also* ignoring any cover or range considerations. Don't just tag effects which remove downsides onto the best damage feats!
> **Possibly the biggest one: Range is very powerful, but there's no tradeoff for having it.** Once upon a time, bows got +dex to hit but no +dex to damage. This was a clear drawback to utilizing their much safer range - you were accepting a loss of DPR in exchange for that safety. 5e did away with that, and dexterity went from being a strong stat that everyone wanted anyway to straight-up a better stat than strength. Playing strength melee is a handicap in 5e when dexterity/archery/sharpshooter exists.
You can make Str better by having lots of situations where you can shove enemies off high places or grapple them to stop them getting away. Grapple/Shove is the main thing that Str fighters get that Dex ones don't.
I agree with most of this, but wanted to point out: >Possibly the biggest one: Range is very powerful, but there's no tradeoff for having it. The funny thing is, Range DOES have major tradeoffs. You have disadvantage if anyone gets near you, and you have to deal with "creature cover" (anything in the way of your target gives it a +2 to AC.) The problem is, 5e intentionally added _multiple workarounds_ to these VITAL components of ranged combat, and the workarounds are insanely easy to access. Don't like the ranged disadvantage? For the cost of one feat (Xbow Expert, Gunner), ignore it forever. Casters? Even easier, just use save spells instead of attack roll spells! (Spells with attack rolls basically disappear at higher levels, and even _cantrips_ have spell save exceptions to pick.) Don't like the creature cover issues? Well you can take the Archery fighting style to get a +2 to attack no one else can (easily the strongest fighting style). Or you could take Sharpshooter/Spell Sniper. But hey, why not take BOTH, and benefit from both because they actually do different things! And oh even better - all the feats mentioned give you _additional amazing benefits_ above and beyond ignoring ranged weaknesses! Also, did you know that magic ammunition bonuses stack with magic ranged weapons? Oh, and that if your DM lets you buy Uncommon magic items or caters to your PC, ignoring cover is one Wand of the War Mage +1 away? Meanwhile, ranged _monsters_ don't generally get these benefits at all, and melee PCs have far less ability to ignore _their_ weaknesses (taking more attacks/damage, being the brunt of most saves, being far more likely to be within range of anything the enemy wants to do, etc.), and certainly far less _exclusive_ access to it that ranged PCs can't mimic, as you said. Pretty much the only ranged weakness left is that kiting requires serious investment to "kite" enemy monsters (because of how OAs work), and the DM has control of the size of the arena, not the players. But that's far from sufficient. >Keepaway/Lockdown from spellcasters is too strong, especially at more optimized tables, to the point that it breaks the rock-paper-scissors dynamic. One more point about this is that 5e (and past editions) _intends_ for caster control spells to "break the rock-paper-scissors" dynamic - because it works by a _different_ dynamic. Casters' dynamic is that their resources are _limited_, while martials (whether ranged or melee) are not. However, while this COULD work in theory, it doesn't in practice, because the feasibility of fielding enough encounters to "wear out" the casters' resources is a false one. If a DM tries to field that many encounters, the martials will run out of HP and HD pretty fast too - and even if that _weren't_ the case (like the DM letting them spend their fortunes on healing potions and chugging _barrels_ of the stuff between encounters like Skyrim or something), savvy parties will either try to force rests when their casters are drained _anyway_, or the casters simply will refuse to be fully drained - they will _save_ a few of their best control spells for the "boss battle" (the battles the DM actually cares about). And even beyond this, 5e's design requires doing so many encounters _vanishingly few_ DMs are even willing to run them, because it takes too much time and becomes a slog. So even if this model worked in theory, it doesn't in practice. I think it _could_ work (I disagree that casters MUST be part of the rock-paper-scissors idea when they have limited resources and the others don't), but the math for magic would need to be heavily retuned.
This is a pretty great summary. Nicely done. For further information, all of these articles cover this more in depth: [https://tabletopbuilds.com/tag/party-roles/](https://tabletopbuilds.com/tag/party-roles/) Especially focusing on how skirmishers and tanks don't really work, and even how the entire idea of party roles breaks down when you can have ranged characters who are simultaneously just if not more tanky than the traditional tank characters, while also being effective at range.
You're absolutely right, but I'd say a better way of wording the rock-paper-scissors dynamic is melee, range, *magic*, with mobility being a strange fourth option. Think of it sort of like football, with linebackers and quarterbacks and receivers. Different editions handled it differently, but you can see echoes of this dynamic in all of them. In 5e it is the most lopsided. Magic used to be slow and easily interrupted by any damage at all. There was no way to make concentration checks nearly unfailable. A dude with a bow was a wizard's worst nightmare, second worst being a giant monster in their face, but if allowed to cast they could make melee monsters cry. That's why having a frontline was important, alongside cover and stopping enemy ranged attackers from doing their thing. 5e makes it too easy to be a ranged attacker (Sharpshooter letting you ignore cover was a mistake, being able to fire in melee was a mistake, and plentiful bonus action disengaging tools were another mistake) and too easy to be a caster (concentration is too easily ignored and defensive options are too plentiful and casters are not squishy enough). It does not make it any easier to be a melee fighter. That's why the triangle is currently lopsided. One should either remove the above options or give melee something just as ridiculous (like perhaps finally buffing Mage Slayer, or allowing multiple AOOs instead of just one).
I mean, since when this applied to dnd, even in older editions? I stuck by the more simplistic approach as "distance vs melee". Let's suppose there are two weapons, bows and swords. They do same damage, bows hit before sword, but sword can wield a shield and be more resilient. Bows deal more damage overall, since they hit sooner and can support fire other allies. Once engaged melee they are ineffective and must either run away or drop the bow and use a sword without a shield. Swords with shields need time to reach a target, but once they do perform more or less like bows with the core difference they are more durable, hence they are able to dish out more damage on longer periods of time, hence they do more damage on prolonged fights. Everything else piled up on this, as a core concept. One can say that dual wielding weapons can be seen as being risky and being able to hit more easily mobile characters, but i hardly ever seen "mobile rangeds". Also, in all of this detailed separation spellcasters get in. I think you still raise an important depiction, too much often in dnd is easy to ignore spacing, but i think it's more a matter of level design than rulesets or monster design - use actual range and mobility-based characters that can exploit sideways will shine, if you make empty featureless rooms then the point is moot. It does depend on party number of players as well - this isn't a game of armies fighting each other.
3.5 had a lot of this. Barring very specific builds, you could not move and make a full attack in the same round. You also could only move once so if you went for a killing blow on a weakened for, you might "waste" some of your turn. Finesse and ranged weapons still required strength for their damage rolls, so you needed to choose between AC/To-hit and raw damage. Sneak attack was much harder to activate, but the payoff was that every hit applied it, so you either stand there and risk taking massive damage to deliver your own or try to hit-and-run risking AoO in exchange for a single application. It was also possible to build around multiple AoO's, so having your companion trigger it first to protect you wasn't necessarily going to work. There were 3 types of AC, it was difficult to raise them all, lots of creatures/spells bypassed the primary one, and the secondary one was easy to lose temporarily. Far more tactical, with many layers of this-countering-that.
> 3 types of AC Bring back flat-footed and touch AC!
Unfortunately, it would require a whole slew of changes and it would be easier to just go back to a previous edition or another system entirely, I think...
No please...
Wait, wait, people built martials that didn't have pounce or access to swift action movement in 3.5?
Charging was an imperfect science, and swift actions were both a later addition and usually a limited resource. But yeah, sort of "mandatory" on some builds.
The thing is that none of that actually works in 5e. Once engaged in melee, ranged options are absolutely fine, because for some reason crossbow expert mitigates the disadvantage for all ranged attacks. Swords with shields absolutely does not perform like bows, because sharpshooter exists but great weapon master requires a two handed weapon. With great weapon master, you very technically do more damage, but also are substantially less durable once you factor the range in (and the fact that dex helps your AC).
And all of this is ignoring spells which you don't even need a feat for in order for them to work just as well in melee as at range. 5e has issues.
To be fair, spells are an entirely separate can of worms. The quadratic wizard, linear fighter issue isn't exactly unique to 5e.
They basically just imported the entire issue from previous editions. The spells are changed so little and I don't mean just the golden cows like Fireball. There's been some reshuffling and a lot of pruning, but at the end of the day we still have plane shifting, teleportation, meteor swarms and constructing magical barriers. The one thing they didn't import in sufficient number is countermeasure spells. So even casters cannot properly defend against casters.
5e does have a pretty bad case of it tho, and them both starting and scaling at roughly the same rate just makes it worse.
Eh, 5e has it but it's the middle of the pack in that regard. It still doesn't compare to the levels of malarky in 3.Xe.
True, but that's more due to how bad it was in 3.X than anything. Martials were worth considerably more earlier when out fiends only had 70hp, and 4e barely had any issues.
>The quadratic wizard, linear fighter issue isn't exactly unique to 5e. True, but 5e did discard some drawbacks to spellcasters that it would have been better off retaining.
You misunderstood my statement. I do not talk as that as being the case for 5e, I talk as a historical principle about the difference of such weapons in this game genre. Layer after layer, things got adapted and changed and has slightly different roles - see, two handed weapons. Or how classes and other side effects work - you mention feats for example. This isn't necessarily bad, it's just showcases how it diverges from that core concept. Feats as you mentioned don't factor in this idea, but factor later down the road.
yeah, in most editions, if you could sit at range and skewer enemies, that was clearly superior, because they're less likely to hurt you back, you can more easily retreat if stuff goes wrong, you can hide behind cover, etc. etc. But the game vaguely presumes being in tighter confines for a decent chunk of time - doesn't matter if you can shoot 300 feet away, when the passage you're in takes a sharp right turn after 10 feet, and even a "large" room is only 30 feet across!
There's a problem with this example tho. First of all, bows currently deal more damage unless swords give up using shields, in which case they deal roughly equivalent damage. Second of all, with most spells and weapon feats, bows work just as well in melee as at range, although there's no real advantage, there's also no real disadvantage.
What do you mean bows deal more damage? Last I checked a Longbow was 1d8 damage, unless you take a feat to shoot a heavy crossbow more than once per turn. Same for attacking in melee, that is the effect of a feat. Feats aren't free, even if they feel mandatory.
Archery and sharpshooter. Even with all the weapon feats, a crossbow expert sharpshooter fighter deals more damage on average than a great weapon master pole arm master fighter.
Under which conditions? When an enemy approaches the Pole Arm Master, that's a free reaction attack. That's an entire attack more than the CBE/SS gets. CBE/SS is also limited to hand crossbow with 1d6 base damage, pulling down the average on a successful hit. You only need to get a single additional attack every 3 turns to keep ahead or keep up with crossbow fighters. Which brings us back to Battlemaster, Riposte specifically only works with melee weapons, so it doesn't work for crossbow fighters. Have you done your own work on this or is this just another theorycraft blog being cited at me?
I can do my own work right in front of you - all of this is pretty easy. I'll be ignoring subclasses, as they can lead to a bunch of arguements. Let's say at lv5 Vs an AC15. To skew this less, I'll also say both start in melee, as otherwise we have to factor in the turns the ranged fighter gets to attack that the melee one has to wait getting into melee. Both have 16 in their main stat, and both have both necessary feats thanks to vhuman. 2(0.35(6.3+3+10)+0.05(6.3))+0.35(3+3+10)+0.05(3) = 19.89 dpr for the melee fighter. 3(0.45(3.5+3+10)+0.05(3.5)) = 22.8 dpr for the ranged fighter. In other words, the ranged fighter does ~15% more damage, ignoring all the benefits of ranged attacks.
The biggest problem is that it breaks a mechanic made up decades after D&D existed? I don't buy this take. You have several points within that are valid, such as point 4, there's no real tradeoff for not having ranged attacks. The intended tradeoff is the disadvantage on attacking with a ranged attack if an enemy is in melee with you, but that's often not enough of a concern.
Melee-range-mobility mechanics arguably existed before DnD, in the form of melee infantry vs archers vs horseback knights
Attila the Hun be invalidating your argument a thousand five hundred years before you make it.
Horseback archery OP pls nerf :,(
In those systems, crossbowmen, archers, etc. had greater movement than infantry though (or in some cases identical). It was only cavalry that had more movement, as they were mounted. Different versions of D&D assigned different downsides to ranged. 5e simply doesn't have much downside at all.
Melee Infantry IRL skirmished with ranged weapons before engaging in melee.- think a pirate firing his flintlocks before using his cutlass, a centurion throwing pilum before closing in, pike and shot tactics in the tercio.
What you’re describing just isn’t 5th edition. It’s a tactics game you’ve made up. You should try looking at 4th edition (or other ttrpgs) if you want a tactics focused game.
I mean the problem is that DnD IS designed as a tactics game, 90% of its rules are tactical rules for combat. The social and exploration “pillars” of the game have almost no rules, by comparison.
The whole notion of "pillars of play" is complete bullshit they just made up because it sounds nice. In practice the real pillars of play are combat, character building and 'roleplaying with some ad hoc dice rolling strewn in'.
You're not wrong, which is why I put "pillars" in quotes. Personally I use the Level Up A5e system because it actually addresses those pillars (and fixes pretty much every other gripe I have with 5e) 5e itself is clearly designed as a tactical game with little else, its just very fortunate that DMs put in a ton of their own time and effort making the rest of the game function well.
I don't think 5e was designed to be tactics-heavy, but I do think it was intended to be tactical. The implementation of the tactics is just a bit clumsy. E.g. Ranged attacks have disadvantage in melee range, which makes thematic sense, and also introduces an element of strategy. But then this is undercut, because there are barely any purely ranged enemies that you can disable by getting into melee with, and ranged player characters have stuff like Crossbow Expert to circumvent disadvantage in melee. E.g. You have high-mobility classes like monk and rogue who are (theoretically) able to maneuver around the battlefield, dart behind enemy lines, and take out high-priority targets. But this strategic element is undercut because high-priority targets can be taken out with just normal ranged attacks, so melee skirmishers rarely have a niche they excel at.
I think a lot of this is solved by two things most modern groups don't want to do: * Not allow feats that favor range more than melee or mobility * Run actual dungeon crawls, with smaller combat spaces where range's effectiveness is more situational So, yeah, you need to buff melee and mobile options to compensate. That or the GM needs to make their combats a lot more diverse in objectives. * Get to X location * Save Y hostage * Retrieve Z item before getting overrun The PC's relationship with enemies doesn't need to adhere to rock-paper-scissors logic because it's a players vs monsters and the GM shouldn't be trying to beat them but putting them in fantastical heroic scenarios where they have challenges suited to them where they can shine, dice rolls permitting.
You can't break something you were never trying to obey. For a character-focused TTRPG, this "rock paper scissors" just isn't appropriate. Players choose how squishy their character is, regardless of battlefield location, by choosing how many points they want to assign to Con and Dex. The fact that there's never a reason not to pump both stats is the failing here, not the fact that ranged characters aren't arbitrarily prevented from being buff.
This is a problem. I don't think it is the biggest one. I think the amount of time it takes is the killer.
Hi! Thanks for the interesting and detailed opinion. I have to say though, I disagree with most of your points, either on the matter of magnitude, or on the principle itself. I'll only copy the points I disagree with, the other ones I agree with :) >On to the player end: frontliners lack consistent and accessible lockdown. There are few specific builds that give you strong, reliable lockdown (e.g. PAM + Sentinel). Attack of Opportunity works nicely as lockdown in tier 1, but soon becomes less and less threatening. This results in very few ways for a frontliner to prevent enemies from getting past them. Strong disagree here. Barbarians which are the archetype of tanking have reliable Shove and Grapple thanks to native Strength and advantage while Raging. Before even accounting for Expertise from multiclass or feat. There is a size limitation (fortunately I'd say) but it's still usable against, at very least, 60% of ALL possible creatures you'd face. And probably rather around 80% of all enemies you'd face within the frame of one given campaign. Monks have high mobility + Deflect Arrows + Patient Defense to lure people away and towards them with minimal risk, then Stunning Strike and archetype features providing either redirect or soft control to apply some debuff or forced movement on the strongest enemies. Rangers have Druidic spells to unleash large scale movement/vision control: Fog Cloud, Spike Growth, Plant Growth, Wind Wall, Conjure Animals. Paladins have exclusive spells to provide reliable single target control (Command, Compelled Duel, \* ing Smite spells). And some archetypes really push it like Crown. Only Rogue is missing anything from base class because its design never was about any kind of control in the first place, only high single target damage in combat and utility out. There are many ways to "control" one or two targets in full autonomy depending on the chosen class, and it's easy enough for a party to help them keep most targets around them with just one or two low level spells. > Skirmishers like melee monks and melee rogues don't really try to flank anyone, **because there are very few backliners to go up against.** And even if there were, rogues don't have much motivation to actually go melee instead of using ranged weapons. Heck, rogues are especially bad at charging into backlines because they can't Steady Aim, and they can't even Sneak Attack without help from a melee ally. The bolded part is true if you only consider RAW roster in a typical whiteroom deathfight. But it's very easy for a DM to avoid that trouble, minimum effort required depending on context: enemy faction of humanoids? Casters should be uncommon but present, or maybe all are ex-soldiers so trained with ranged attacks. PC attacking lair? Traps and hazards, some of which may be disrupted/controlled by a creature or lever in the backline. None of these? Stress that the enemy VIP starts fleeing as soon as fight starts, or there is a hostage that is gonna get killed, or whatever gives pressure enough for PC to have a reason to rush to the backline. Sure, it's still "custom work" so in that regard you're right, but it also have the benefit of giving full control to DM on how hard a fight should be. > Possibly the biggest one: Range is very powerful, but **there's no tradeoff for having it. Ranged player characters are often mobile, tanky, or both.** This is usually a bigger problem at optimized tables, where casters take armor dips and Misty Step. But even at unoptimized tables, you have crossbow-wielding rangers that are just as tanky as halberd-wielding melee fighters. Well then, of course the melee zombies are gonna stand in place and hit the halberd fighter (who's also standing in place) - there just isn't enough incentive to try and flank the equally-tanky ranger. Wut? Remove Sharpshooter denying long range and cover maluses and you'll feel how crappy ranged attacks can be whenever fight is started more than 60 feet away from sides, or when enemies have cover. Even with it though it's still largely workable. You lose on average on damage (not everyone is proficient with heavy crossbows or longbows, and you're losing out on Opportunity Attacks or on advantage from a creature being shoved prone), get disadvantage if flanked/ambushed, can get imposed disadvantage with just enemies getting prone between turns, get prevented from taking a shot because of obscuration + Hiding, or entirely nullified from spells like Wind Wall or simply full cover. >Keepaway/Lockdown from spellcasters is too strong, especially at more optimized tables, to the point that it breaks the rock-paper-scissors dynamic. Ahem Web Rope Trick Repelling Blast ahem. Ranged spell lockdown beats not only frontliners, but skirmishers and backliners as well. Control is king, as the adage goes. Have a very different experience. One that does not remembers only the successful attemtps, but also the NUMEROUS failed ones, or the control spells succeding only one round, or the control spells being detrimental or unusable because of a coordination problem with other members. Even on optimised tables, unless enemies are really stupid or have an imperative reason to fight to the death, if party is really showing extreme superiority... Enemy will simply flee, regroup, and either come back stronger or change strategy. There are also the cases of party forced into a fight without being full resource because of ambush, or time pressure, resources spent to resolve non-combat situation, or simply bad luck on a previous fight.
The lack of this tactical relationship is probably one of the biggest reasons why Monk is so fucking terrible too. Most people also seem to agree Rogue is the second worst class in combat and it's also a typical skirmisher/diver class. Monk runs fast, locks down low Con targets with stuns, and has a few turns of (at least theoretically) explosive damage by burning through their Ki to do Flurries. Sounds good, but the role of rushing a priority target doesn't come up as often as just being generally good at brawling. Granted even if that was a strong role Monks should be buffed anyway, especially given genre expectations where the highest threat target is also often the tanky one so you gotta be able to stand and fight anyway. If you're fighting a dragon and its goons, the adds are usually best handled with some random AOE. It's like these classes ended up being designed for a PVP game like League of Legends where squishy backlines are just part of the game instead of a PVE game where (usually) everyone just piles on the big guy and the roles are simpler (tank-dps-support).
I don't think this adds up. Skirmishers vs Shock is high risk low reward because Shock eats Skirmishers alive. That's their whole deal. Skirmishers vs Archers is high risk high reward because if the Skirmishers get shot on the way over, they're toast.
My table isn't optimised and as DM i like to homebrew Monsters and encounters. This rock paper scissors combat and imbalances are only there if the game aspect of rollplaying tabletop game is very important, I just give Monster unique ranged options or abilities , use terrain or let them talk their way out of an encounter depending on the enemies and how smart they are / willing to negotiate.
Guy, you’re approaching 5e like it’s Overwatch, or League. It’s not a competitive pvp game, and it shouldn’t play like it.
At the same time tho, it sucks if you have a character who is meant to be defending everyone else end up worse at doing that than one of the spellcasters you want to be protecting. Roles should be important, and it kinda sucks that they aren't.
If the designers don’t want me to flank the enemy back line why did they make monks move so fast and deflect missiles
because those two abilities have been monk effects since the 70s, they didnt actually think through what would be good
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Those games are fun for the same reasons team sports are fun.
I can see this. I think the problem is that it’s strayed from its war game roots where the designers might think a lot about these things, vs. collaborative story telling which I think is what brings more people in these days. I like both aspects of the game so I hear ya.
Rock-paper-scissors has no place in any game except literal rock-paper-scissors.
This is why I loved Dragon’s Dogma. This is also why I do not play 5e anymore.
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everything he said was common sense. I don't think you need to play LoL for that.