Prism
Explorer
How do doors invalidate recon? It's fairly simple for the scout to open a door. Are you saying all the doors are trapped with magical traps or something and need the rest of the party to dispel them?
It's one thing if the door is a one-way teleportation device, but a regular door shouldn't block recon at all.
Yes it doesn't shut down recon, as most people would listen at the door anyway, but basically as soon as the door is opened the combat might well begin at close range. Now this doesn't bother the hand crossbow build, but for all other archers its not ideal to begin combat within 20' for the nearest opponent. This kind of combat is quite typical for us.
You also have the dilemma of who is next to the door when opened. If the non stealthy party members are near then there is a good chance that the enemy has heard, prepared, sent runners. So it might well be the scout on their own opening the door to face whatever is behind it.
Recon is still useful in planning a close-quarters combat. It's useful to know, for example, where and how many potential combatants are within a building/cave/structure and where to scatter caltrops to inconvenience them and where the best chokepoints are. As has been pointed out several times, ranged PCs are more useful than melee PCs for holding a chokepoint.
It would be pretty unusual for us to be in that much control of an enemies lair. Its usually them controlling the combat flow, retreating, bringing in reinforcements, flanking etc. Wizards and other ranged characters are often open to flanking from behind
A (MM) Balor who teleports directly into melee must necessarily have been within 120' before his teleport occurred. It's one thing for the DM to rule that the Balor wasn't detected because the PCs didn't have detection measures in place; it's another thing for the DM to just fiat the Balor into existence in melee range because his battlegrid is only 30 squares wide and he likes melee combat.
Of course, if the Balor has already been re-statted to be more impressive (Teleport Without Error at will, more HP, better attacks, some nifty spells, maybe some scrying capability, etc.) then the 120' limitation ceases to be a factor. If the Balor knows what he's doing, he will ideally Teleport on top of the party not merely in melee range of the party as a whole, but in melee range of the party wizard at the end of the day when his Mage Armor has expired and he has no Foresight up and he's alone because he's going to the bathroom. (The wizard may or may not have his arcane focus on hand depending on what it is and how paranoid he is.)
Yeah, at higher level the really significant combats are either ambushes (e.g the balor gets gated in by its master), or they are difficult situations to begin with. In one of our recent combats we had to sneak through an army of thousands of devils, in into a 50' square tent to take out the devil general. We were successful getting in but once combat started there wasn't a single round that the ranged guys weren't in melee with some devil or other.
Of course not all combats are like that - far from it - but the really key ones aren't as easy as a bunch of monsters in a group that can be scouted out in advance.