There is an encounter distance chart in the Wilderness Set Dungeon Master's Screen.
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D&D (2024) Why is wotc still aiming for PCs with 10 *real word* feet of range? W/o vision range penalty/limit rules for the GM?
- Thread starter tetrasodium
- Start date
Tod on the YouTube Channel Tod's Workshop has some very good stuff on arrow vs armour and the like. My chief takeaway is that armour and shield were in general pretty effective, and D&D probably overstates the effectiveness of offense particularly with the better armours. That said D&D also probably understates the endurance effects, in activities that are a mix of hillwalking and spelunking.
I am generally willing to accept this for playability purposes and think it is best not look too closely at the issue of how realistic it all is.
Since we are talking about a core mechanics design issue, lets shift away from blaming any specific GM & use some examples from wotc
TRIGGERING RANDOM ENCOUNTERS
Because you want random encounters to build on the
intended narrative of a game session, not compete with
it, you should choose the placement of those encounters
carefully. Think about a random encounter under any of
the following circumstances:
• The players are getting off track and slowing
down the game.
The characters stop for a short or long rest.
• The characters are undertaking a long,
uneventful journey.
The characters draw attention to themselves when
they should be keeping a low profile.
C HAPTER 3 C R EATING ADVENTURES
85
Because you want random encounters to build on the
intended narrative of a game session, not compete with
it, you should choose the placement of those encounters
carefully. Think about a random encounter under any of
the following circumstances:
• The players are getting off track and slowing
down the game.
The characters stop for a short or long rest.
• The characters are undertaking a long,
uneventful journey.
The characters draw attention to themselves when
they should be keeping a low profile.
C HAPTER 3 C R EATING ADVENTURES
85
Here's another one
Two twig blights hide among the weeds that flank the
cottage's open doorway.
cottage's open doorway.
The faint smell of smoke hangs on the air as you ascend a
rugged ridge on the lower slopes of the hill. Fifty yards away,
a cave mouth opens up at the bottom of a ravine. Hunkered
down by a boulder twenty yards outside the cave, keeping
watch, is a single ore.
rugged ridge on the lower slopes of the hill. Fifty yards away,
a cave mouth opens up at the bottom of a ravine. Hunkered
down by a boulder twenty yards outside the cave, keeping
watch, is a single ore.
As you crest a low ridge, you spy the crumbling ruins of an
old watchtower standing amid the rugged hills. The place is
so old that the walls are only mounds of rubble enclosing a
courtyard of sorts, adjacent to the broken stump of an old
tower. A colorful tent has been set up in the middle of the
courtyard, but no one is in sight.
On more than one occasion I've seen different groups respond to that by deciding to hang out on the ridge & wait to see who comes out of the tent... keep waiting... "actually I'm an outlander I can give everyone food & water"...
old watchtower standing amid the rugged hills. The place is
so old that the walls are only mounds of rubble enclosing a
courtyard of sorts, adjacent to the broken stump of an old
tower. A colorful tent has been set up in the middle of the
courtyard, but no one is in sight.
On more than one occasion I've seen different groups respond to that by deciding to hang out on the ridge & wait to see who comes out of the tent... keep waiting... "actually I'm an outlander I can give everyone food & water"...
On the east side of the stream flowing from the cave mouth, a
small area in the briar thickets has been hollowed out to form
a lookout post or blind. Wooden planks flatten out the briars
and provide room for guards to lie hidden and watch the
area-including a pair of goblins lurking there right now!
small area in the briar thickets has been hollowed out to form
a lookout post or blind. Wooden planks flatten out the briars
and provide room for guards to lie hidden and watch the
area-including a pair of goblins lurking there right now!
That's part of the reason it's such a problem. anything the GM does is raw fiat certain to generate a chorus of "but I have $reasonForDisagreeing" at some point or is just an obvious hack attempting to make the battlemat work for a job that not even the table itself beneath the mat itself is likely to meet the needs of -and- it creates an encounter that much of the group is simply unable to participate in. Changing square size to 1inch squares10ft instead of 5 so things drop from 10ft of table space & empire state building height across sized battlefields to half that size doesn't really solve much & problems start creeping in. If you use battletech style 30ft ones you just change one problem for a bunch of others as PCs find themselves with one square of movement per turn & all kinds of other stuff breaks down with an endless list of things like a burning hands that may not even leave the caster's square & certainly won't leave the square of an adjacent monster s a simple example. With a VTT things start straining the social contract as those hacks shift to running into "I totally could show that on the map, but I won't" without flexible tools for the GM to lean on
Is this for real?Since we are talking about a core mechanics design issue, lets shift away from blaming any specific GM & use some examples from wotc
I could comb through the various wotc adventures & provide a much much longer list, CoS has a few encounters while traveling on roads too plus yester hill IIRC.. so does DiA & others. I decided to go with examples primarily from LMoP because it's a fairly short & generally well regarded adventure that very nicely shows a wide selection of very reasonable examples reflecting a good chunk of the kinds of outdoor encounters a group is going to have in the other adventures as well as those made by many GMs. As you note, the melee characters totally deserve to participate in these battles they are unable to really do so with. There are plenty of reasons to have outdoor encounters & if the design intent is to forbid the GM from using those, the ranges are obviously beyond excessive for a dungeon crawler. Blaming the GM for not building outdoor dungeon crawl arms races when those kinds of events occur naturally highlights the fact that characters with abilities covering ten feet of tablespace is not justified by the gameTRIGGERING RANDOM ENCOUNTERS
Because you want random encounters to build on the
intended narrative of a game session, not compete with
it, you should choose the placement of those encounters
carefully. Think about a random encounter under any of
the following circumstances:
• The players are getting off track and slowing
down the game.
The characters stop for a short or long rest.
• The characters are undertaking a long,
uneventful journey.
The characters draw attention to themselves when
they should be keeping a low profile.
C HAPTER 3 C R EATING ADVENTURES
85
Here's another one
another,,Two twig blights hide among the weeds that flank the
cottage's open doorway.
The faint smell of smoke hangs on the air as you ascend a
rugged ridge on the lower slopes of the hill. Fifty yards away,
a cave mouth opens up at the bottom of a ravine. Hunkered
down by a boulder twenty yards outside the cave, keeping
watch, is a single ore.
Still moreAs you crest a low ridge, you spy the crumbling ruins of an
old watchtower standing amid the rugged hills. The place is
so old that the walls are only mounds of rubble enclosing a
courtyard of sorts, adjacent to the broken stump of an old
tower. A colorful tent has been set up in the middle of the
courtyard, but no one is in sight.
On more than one occasion I've seen different groups respond to that by deciding to hang out on the ridge & wait to see who comes out of the tent... keep waiting... "actually I'm an outlander I can give everyone food & water"...
On the east side of the stream flowing from the cave mouth, a
small area in the briar thickets has been hollowed out to form
a lookout post or blind. Wooden planks flatten out the briars
and provide room for guards to lie hidden and watch the
area-including a pair of goblins lurking there right now!
That's part of the reason it's such a problem. anything the GM does is raw fiat certain to generate a chorus of "but I have $reasonForDisagreeing" at some point or is just an obvious hack attempting to make the battlemat work for a job that not even the table itself beneath the mat itself is likely to meet the needs of -and- it creates an encounter that much of the group is simply unable to participate in. Changing square size to 1inch squares10ft instead of 5 so things drop from 10ft of table space & empire state building height across sized battlefields to half that size doesn't really solve much & problems start creeping in. If you use battletech style 30ft ones you just change one problem for a bunch of others as PCs find themselves with one square of movement per turn & all kinds of other stuff breaks down with an endless list of things like a burning hands that may not even leave the caster's square & certainly won't leave the square of an adjacent monster s a simple example. With a VTT things start straining the social contract as those hacks shift to running into "I totally could show that on the map, but I won't" without flexible tools for the GM to lean on
Are you really claiming that your players will not accept "Theatre of the mind" or map re-scaling?
Bacon Bits
Hero
I have a hard time remembering the last time an encounter began at a distance further than 100 feet. I think it was literally when either us or the NPCs were in a fortification of some kind (observation tower, palisade, etc.). Long ranges have mostly been about taking down fleeing opponents in my experience, or about shooting at flying opponents.
Oh, no, I've got it. It was in Descent to Avernus against Raggadragga's gore-guts hellriders, but those things had a move of like 100+. I do remember the vehicle weapons having uselessly short ranges. Before that... I think it was against some flying creatures in a previous campaign, but that might've been within 100 feet.
Oh, no, I've got it. It was in Descent to Avernus against Raggadragga's gore-guts hellriders, but those things had a move of like 100+. I do remember the vehicle weapons having uselessly short ranges. Before that... I think it was against some flying creatures in a previous campaign, but that might've been within 100 feet.
Willie the Duck
Hero
I think others have reasonably pointed out that this is based on longbows. In Chainmail/AD&D, they had a Long Range of 21" (210 yards) -- perfectly reasonable for most wargame sand tables or battlemats (when used), especially since you were rarely on one corner shooting to the other. This became ~600' in-game, which gamers have normalized as a reasonable max range for missile weapons (heavy crossbows sometimes being longer). When standard battlemat sizing shifted from 10' squares indoors/10yd. squares outdoors to 5' squares, bows retained their expected range in feet, rather than in battlemat squares. That a longbow now reaches across two standard folding tables or whatever hasn't been considered an issue because the situation doesn't often come up, and when it does, it isn't always clear that any given fix would have resolved it (if the distance were merely 48", that would fix it for some battlemats -- if and only if you were starting at one corner instead of the middle). Beyond that, there have been ways since this switch to exceed 600 (spell sniper eldritch spear, plenty of things in 3e, PF, and 4e), so any given fix wouldn't resolve any and all problems. Thus people find solutions when it does come up (switching to small graph paper and 10" squares for long-distance battles, theater of mind, etc.).
All of which is a long way of saying I recognize the issue you are raising, and the explanation for why nothing has changed is that the juice hasn't been worth the squeeze, it hasn't been anyone's priority, and some people used to the current situation might complain, so no one has a real vested interest in fixes (any one of which probably won't fix things for most people).
My takeaway from Tod and Scholagladatoria and such is that once you start putting in variables like force at a given range, all the simplifications that D&D does (like treating plate and mail&shield and armors that cover everything vs those that leave parts bare as a linear numeric scale) make attempting to approximate reality a minefield. One thing they all seem to point out is that, after a certain distance, there's enough hang-time that aware opponents (not in packed formation with nowhere to go) can see the arrow coming and move. This is a point where basing your game off a wargame runs into the issue that what D&D adventurers (and their opponents) do doesn't look much like a battlefield. It would be perfectly reasonable for D&D bows to have ranges of "200'*," with the * some caveat about except for complete surprise/unmoving targets or something.
MonsterEnvy
Legend
Ok I barely understand what you are on about with these examples. That ranged weapons will hit enemies first? Like I don't get how that applies to the hidden Twig blights. The Orc that will probably run inside the cave if shot at, and the Tent that does not even have a hostile person in it, unless the party decides to make it hostile. Or the Goblins that are hidden from plain sight.Since we are talking about a core mechanics design issue, lets shift away from blaming any specific GM & use some examples from wotc
I could comb through the various wotc adventures & provide a much much longer list, CoS has a few encounters while traveling on roads too plus yester hill IIRC.. so does DiA & others. I decided to go with examples primarily from LMoP because it's a fairly short & generally well regarded adventure that very nicely shows a wide selection of very reasonable examples reflecting a good chunk of the kinds of outdoor encounters a group is going to have in the other adventures as well as those made by many GMs. As you note, the melee characters totally deserve to participate in these battles they are unable to really do so with. There are plenty of reasons to have outdoor encounters & if the design intent is to forbid the GM from using those, the ranges are obviously beyond excessive for a dungeon crawler. Blaming the GM for not building outdoor dungeon crawl arms races when those kinds of events occur naturally highlights the fact that characters with abilities covering ten feet of tablespace is not justified by the gameTRIGGERING RANDOM ENCOUNTERS
Because you want random encounters to build on the
intended narrative of a game session, not compete with
it, you should choose the placement of those encounters
carefully. Think about a random encounter under any of
the following circumstances:
• The players are getting off track and slowing
down the game.
The characters stop for a short or long rest.
• The characters are undertaking a long,
uneventful journey.
The characters draw attention to themselves when
they should be keeping a low profile.
C HAPTER 3 C R EATING ADVENTURES
85
Here's another one
another,,Two twig blights hide among the weeds that flank the
cottage's open doorway.
The faint smell of smoke hangs on the air as you ascend a
rugged ridge on the lower slopes of the hill. Fifty yards away,
a cave mouth opens up at the bottom of a ravine. Hunkered
down by a boulder twenty yards outside the cave, keeping
watch, is a single ore.
Still moreAs you crest a low ridge, you spy the crumbling ruins of an
old watchtower standing amid the rugged hills. The place is
so old that the walls are only mounds of rubble enclosing a
courtyard of sorts, adjacent to the broken stump of an old
tower. A colorful tent has been set up in the middle of the
courtyard, but no one is in sight.
On more than one occasion I've seen different groups respond to that by deciding to hang out on the ridge & wait to see who comes out of the tent... keep waiting... "actually I'm an outlander I can give everyone food & water"...
On the east side of the stream flowing from the cave mouth, a
small area in the briar thickets has been hollowed out to form
a lookout post or blind. Wooden planks flatten out the briars
and provide room for guards to lie hidden and watch the
area-including a pair of goblins lurking there right now!
"Default" meaning the games rules don't assume you have one. In the combat section of the PHB it refers to the Variant: Playing on a Grid.
600 feet is in fact the historical lethal range of the longbow. The problem isn't the fact that this range exists, but that 5E doesn't impose further penalty after short range. The longbow had the same range in 3E without significant problems because at the max range suffered a greater penalty than just outside of short range (also you didn't add Dex to damage). If you feel the longbow needs a lower range because it's rare to actually hit someone at max range, then you need to proportionally lower the distance of every ranged weapon for the exact same reason, which I feel players will have a greater problem with.
It's a product of 5E, where HP bloat is intentional and the majority of attacks are intended to deal damage. In AD&D you were less often hit, but those hits were more dangerous, making combat very swingy (like IRL).
As I mentioned earlier, can a bow get to that range sure. And if you have a mass of archers all firing at a battlefield 600 feet away, I could believe they would kill people on it.
But there is a massive difference between mass volley fire and expecting an archer to hit a moving target that may have some form of armor or protection while they themselves have to avoid danger....that is where its just ludicrous.
I retain that the simplest solution is to shorten the ranges for most ranged weapons, and provide some ability to "sniper" at double or triple the range but with very very strict restrictions.
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