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Flight ability: Does this make the Aarakocra overpowered?
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<blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6618055" data-attributes="member: 5143"><p>I don't think that flying makes them "overpowered". It can ruin certain types of adventures, however. So, if you are a DM who likes to use that sort of adventure, flying can essentially make certain challenges completely moot.</p><p></p><p>Before 5th level, without aarakocra you can safely create an adventure that does something like "The enemy runs across the bridge that spans the 1000 foot wide chasm. He gets to the other side just as you clear the woods and cuts the ropes on the bridge. It collapses. You can hear him taunting you from the other side as he yells out, 'I guess I win this round! I'm sure we will meet again. Until next time.' as he rides off into the distance."</p><p></p><p>With an aarakocra in the group, he just keeps flying after the enemy and likely either kills him by himself or follows him back to his base and tells the rest of the PCs where to find his secret hideout. Which, can disrupt the flow of an adventure if you weren't planning on the PCs finding that information until much later.</p><p></p><p>Even after 5th level, you can run this scene with the knowledge that the PCs MIGHT have fly...but likely don't. If they do, they are both expending one of their daily resources for a real benefit in game(they get to catch the enemy earlier than if they hadn't cast fly and that's one less fireball they can cast that day) and they also made a meaningful choice about what spells to prepare that day.</p><p></p><p>In addition to scenes like that there are also pit traps, puzzles that require the PCs step only on certain tiles to cross a room, scenes where you want them to get lost in the woods for a long time, princesses trapped on the top floor of tall towers filled with traps that are unclimbable due to extremely slippery surfaces(but have windows at the top so that the princess can call down for help), and so on.</p><p></p><p>There's a lot of things that if you use them on a regular basis, flight can become a real issue. As long as flight is a limited resource that the PCs need to explicitly plan to use and become less combat powerful when they do use it, they likely will attempt to find mundane ways of solving a puzzle rather than wasting a spell on it. But when flight if free and infinite and comes from your choice of race, it will be used to solve every problem that flight could solve. If you run very narrative adventures this can be a real pain in the behind. This is the reason the race is banned in Adventurer's League.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Majoru Oakheart, post: 6618055, member: 5143"] I don't think that flying makes them "overpowered". It can ruin certain types of adventures, however. So, if you are a DM who likes to use that sort of adventure, flying can essentially make certain challenges completely moot. Before 5th level, without aarakocra you can safely create an adventure that does something like "The enemy runs across the bridge that spans the 1000 foot wide chasm. He gets to the other side just as you clear the woods and cuts the ropes on the bridge. It collapses. You can hear him taunting you from the other side as he yells out, 'I guess I win this round! I'm sure we will meet again. Until next time.' as he rides off into the distance." With an aarakocra in the group, he just keeps flying after the enemy and likely either kills him by himself or follows him back to his base and tells the rest of the PCs where to find his secret hideout. Which, can disrupt the flow of an adventure if you weren't planning on the PCs finding that information until much later. Even after 5th level, you can run this scene with the knowledge that the PCs MIGHT have fly...but likely don't. If they do, they are both expending one of their daily resources for a real benefit in game(they get to catch the enemy earlier than if they hadn't cast fly and that's one less fireball they can cast that day) and they also made a meaningful choice about what spells to prepare that day. In addition to scenes like that there are also pit traps, puzzles that require the PCs step only on certain tiles to cross a room, scenes where you want them to get lost in the woods for a long time, princesses trapped on the top floor of tall towers filled with traps that are unclimbable due to extremely slippery surfaces(but have windows at the top so that the princess can call down for help), and so on. There's a lot of things that if you use them on a regular basis, flight can become a real issue. As long as flight is a limited resource that the PCs need to explicitly plan to use and become less combat powerful when they do use it, they likely will attempt to find mundane ways of solving a puzzle rather than wasting a spell on it. But when flight if free and infinite and comes from your choice of race, it will be used to solve every problem that flight could solve. If you run very narrative adventures this can be a real pain in the behind. This is the reason the race is banned in Adventurer's League. [/QUOTE]
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Flight ability: Does this make the Aarakocra overpowered?
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