D&D 5E How much range is enough?

[ro]

Elsewhere I have been discussing options for making weapon choice more consequential, and hopefully interesting.

In your experience, how significant is range, and what range is significant?
Does it impact you in actual gameplay if your ranged weapon can shoot 600 feet? How important is this in weapon selection?
If long range is not so significant, want ranges are significant? 30 ft? 15, 60, 90, 120, 150, 200 ft?

 

[iserith]

Range does come up regularly in my games, but almost never more than around 150 feet, tops. I tend to think of things in terms of maps I'm willing to create and those tend to be around 30 squares by 30 squares at the most and often a great deal smaller. In general, especially in dungeons, we're dealing with short range on most things except on those occasions where we might get into a stormtrooper-esque corridor battle.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

I'm with [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION] - mostly short range is important.

Can't really say the need for a 600ft range has ever come up in the game I run. That said, if a PC did have that ability, I would certainly try to work out an encounter where they could use it so that PC could get some of the spotlight for something out of the ordinary.

 

[Stalker0]

The first breakpoint is 35 ft. You can fire at that range and move back 30. This means the standard 30 ft speed creature even with a double move can’t get in melee with you.

Or even if you can’t move back, at 35 ft a standard speed creature can’t move in and melee you.

So that’s a pretty big advantage

 

[Nevvur]

Agreed with the others.

I'm reminded of a discussion I had with a player back when I was running AL Expeditions. He seemed inordinately pleased with his Eldritch Spear/Spellsniper warlock. I informed him no module I was aware of featured combats with ranges where it would be useful. Whether I should have divulged that information is questionable, but it came up during a friendly conversation about optimization, and he was grateful for helping him avoid a trap build.

The extent to which extreme range (which I define as in excess of 150 feet) is useful/powerful will depend a lot on how the DM/publisher approaches encounter design. If there's a lot combat in wide open spaces, it's great. However, I think most DMs (and probably players) would find it boring if the majority of encounters occurred in such environments.

An aside, I don't think most people choose a longbow over other projectile weapons because of its range. They choose it because it has the highest damage of any ranged weapon besides heavy crossbow, while not constrained by the loading property.

In my experience, significant ranges in feet are 10 (auras, reach weapons), 20 (most thrown weapons), 30 (typical creature speed), 60 (typical dash), 90 (spells, and for normally requiring more than 1 round to close the distance on foot). The practical effects of range at points between or in excess of these figures do come up, but not with enough regularity for me to consider significant. Creature speed is an important exception, but varies enough from one creature to the next that the word significant would lose its meaning when applied in this context.

 

[5ekyu]

Right there with Stalker0 and Nevvur. Range breaks pretty much matter mostly in relation to movement and "short range". Beyond 90 ft is rarely a significance.

One filter for this is how many can,operate at a given range. A party likely holds off until all or most of their crew has an effective actiin so as to maximize concentration of fire. So even with a very long range character able to setup his long range shot its not often they will choose to let them initiate combat at that range.

Sent from my VS995 using EN World mobile app

 

[Li Shenron]

Elsewhere I have been discussing options for making weapon choice more consequential, and hopefully interesting.

In your experience, how significant is range, and what range is significant?
Does it impact you in actual gameplay if your ranged weapon can shoot 600 feet? How important is this in weapon selection?
If long range is not so significant, want ranges are significant? 30 ft? 15, 60, 90, 120, 150, 200 ft?

I tend to favor dungeon adventures over wilderness, and for some reason I almost never have PCs who use thrown weapons, which always have a short range. For these reasons, the only weapon which has a problematic range in our game is the sling, which is currently used by a Druid PCs. Everyone else use bows and crossbows, the range of which normally doesn't matter.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

High range is important occassionally in my game in field encounters. If there are monsters that have a 600ft attack range on an open field, then they will start attacking the PCs at that range. This means there can be several rounds until the PCs can even fight back.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

I've generally found that the most common situation where extreme range becomes important is where flying creatures are involved.

 

[ro]

The general consensus, then, is that long range doesn't usually matter. Is there a way to shorten weapon ranges to make them broadly significant while still retaining access to an extra-long range option for the edge cases?