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?

[tetrasodium]

• Converted to 5ft game distance to one inch real world squares:
  • An entire soccer or football field is 6feet of real world table space
  • Olympic sized swimming pool 2.7feet of real world table space
  • The 102 floor empire state building laying on its side , roughly 20.8 feet of real world table space from ground to roof. This is a number that will come up again.

• Longbow, 10ft of table space of table space.
• hexer(pg36) 10ft of table space of table space.
• modify spell & distant spell 3.5ft feet of table space at level 7 & increasing with 6inch increments every level till a full 10ftof table space is reached at at 20.
• light crossbow & shortbow 5.3feet of table space.
• heavy crossbow 6.6ft of table space.
• Musket hand crossbow & sling 1 foot of table space.
• Devil's sight provides a diameter of vision that is four full feet of table space
• standard 30ft PC move speed 1/2 foot of real world table space or double if dashing.

Battlemats made by off the shelf chessex range from 23.5x26inch (1.95...x2.16.. ft)to 48x36(4ftx3ft). PCs shouldn't have abilities that make them look like inappropriately sized hacks. With a VTT capable of scaling to support an unreasonably huge battlefields of space that the GM now needs to both fill and manage the herculean task of running anything that might be in it without just roflstomping their players with a zerg rush using the soon to be forgotten possible extras they are wasting time & brainpower on throughout the combat rather than creating an interesting combat.

How huge? roughly one empire state building on it's side by one empire state building on it's side. That is an excessive burden in the extreme.

 

[grankless]

simply do not make a map as large as the empire state building.

 

[tetrasodium]

simply do not make a map as large as the empire state building.

Is it fair to the GM for players to have offensive options that expect such things without tools for the GM to casually limit it to reasonable map sizes without resorting to dense fog & a world packed with only winding roads through dense tropical rain forests without resorting to fiat? D&D might be mostly dungeon crawling & indoor type combats (with good reason), but eventually something will happen outdoors or in a village/city other than The mazelike Kowloon Walled City

Edit: Also those distances aren't the size of the empire state building's footprint from end to end, they are the height from ground to roof.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

• Converted to 5ft game distance to one inch real world squares:
  • An entire soccer or football field is 6feet of real world table space
  • Olympic sized swimming pool 2.7feet of real world table space
  • The 102 floor empire state building laying on its side , roughly 20.8 feet of real world table space from ground to roof. This is a number that will come up again.

• Longbow, 10ft of table space of table space.
• hexer(pg36) 10ft of table space of table space.
• modify spell & distant spell 3.5ft feet of table space at level 7 & increasing with 6inch increments every level till a full 10ftof table space is reached at at 20.
• light crossbow & shortbow 5.3feet of table space.
• heavy crossbow 6.6ft of table space.
• Musket hand crossbow & sling 1 foot of table space.
• Devil's sight provides a diameter of vision that is four full feet of table space
• standard 30ft PC move speed 1/2 foot of real world table space or double if dashing.

Battlemats made by off the shelf chessex range from 23.5x26inch (1.95...x2.16.. ft)to 48x36(4ftx3ft). PCs shouldn't have abilities that make them look like inappropriately sized hacks. With a VTT capable of scaling to support an unreasonably huge battlefields of space that the GM now needs to both fill and manage the herculean task of running anything that might be in it without just roflstomping their players with a zerg rush using the soon to be forgotten possible extras they are wasting time & brainpower on throughout the combat rather than creating an interesting combat.

How huge? roughly one empire state building on it's side by one empire state building on it's side. That is an excessive burden in the extreme.

Ya know, it would be really helpful if you stated your thesis clearly and in plain language rather than throwing out random fact and letting the readers to try and discern the meaning.
I really do no understand your complaint. I am going to ignore the soccer field, swimming pool and empire state building because I would have to look up the dimensions and I could not be arsed.
So, your issue seems to be that at maximum longbow range you would need 10 feet of tabletop to represent the distance to scale.
You know in 40 year of playing D&D this has never been an issue, either in person or online. There is such a thing as theatre of the mind. There is also such a thing as re-scaling.
If your table inch was 10 feet then the extreme range of the longbow is now reduced to 60 inches or 5 feet and if that is too big for your table battle map, why not change the scale more?
You can always re-scale again as the engagement range closes.

 

[Incenjucar]

Use smaller grids and/or multiple maps for extreme distances.

 

[tetrasodium]

Ya know, it would be really helpful if you stated your thesis clearly and in plain language rather than throwing out random fact and letting the readers to try and discern the meaning.

It was the subject line, was my use of shorthand abbreviation for without unclear? "Why is wotc still aiming for PCs with 10 real word feet of range? W/o vision range penalty/limit rules for the GM?" W/o is a fairly standard bit of shorthand that means "without". I apologize if that use of shorthand was unclear without linking to a definition somewhere in the post or if the context left you uncertain if one of the other meanings were intended.

I really do no understand your complaint. I am going to ignore the soccer field, swimming pool and empire state building because I would have to look up the dimensions and I could not be arsed.
So, your issue seems to be that at maximum longbow range you would need 10 feet of tabletop to represent the distance to scale.
You know in 40 year of playing D&D this has never been an issue, either in person or online. There is such a thing as theatre of the mind. There is also such a thing as re-scaling.
If your table inch was 10 feet then the extreme range of the longbow is now reduced to 60 inches or 5 feet and if that is too big for your table battle map, why not change the scale more?
You can always re-scale again as the engagement range closes.

I also listed light/heavy crossbow the new modify spell, the new musket, the new hexer, devils sight & so on.

There are reasons that you didn't see these problems in past editions though but I'll skip 2e because there were so many mechanical system differences that the comparison becomes difficult to make.

The most obvious one would be 3.x though.... Obviously the new hexer & new modify spell did not exist. I can't seem to find any metamagics that grow spell range more than 30ft like reach spell but wouldn't be surprised if one existed. With the 3.5 longbow there was a 100-110ft* range increment that added a flat -2 foreach beyond the first with PCs that could rarely say "but I have 120ft of vision at level one". Finally & most importantly the 3.5 GM could use tools provided to then like bonus types & dm's best friend to start imposing -2/-4/-6/etc penalties for almost any relevant mitigating factors like sun/breeze/they are moving pretty fast/you just can't see clear or the shooting into melee to limit the fight to a reasonably sized battlefield. The GM lacks any of those tools in both the 2014 5e ruleset & so far one d&d packets leading back to the subject.

* 100 for regular & 110 for composite, shortbow was 60/70 while dart & sling were 20 & 50 respectively.

 

[Irlo]

Is it fair to the GM for players to have offensive options that expect such things without tools for the GM to casually limit it to reasonable map sizes without resorting to dense fog & a world packed with only winding roads through dense tropical rain forests without resorting to fiat? D&D might be mostly dungeon crawling & indoor type combats (with good reason), but eventually something will happen outdoors or in a village/city other than The mazelike Kowloon Walled City

Edit: Also those distances aren't the size of the empire state building's footprint from end to end, they are the height from ground to roof.

Are you asking why there aren't rules that allow the DM to tell players that their PCs can't use their long bows effectively at full range in wide open terrain?

 

[UngainlyTitan]

It was the subject line, was my use of shorthand abbreviation for without unclear? "Why is wotc still aiming for PCs with 10 real word feet of range? W/o vision range penalty/limit rules for the GM?" W/o is a fairly standard bit of shorthand that means "without". I apologize if that use of shorthand was unclear without linking to a definition somewhere in the post or if the context left you uncertain if one of the other meanings were intended.


I also listed light/heavy crossbow the new modify spell, the new musket, the new hexer, devils sight & so on.


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There are reasons that you didn't see these problems in past editions though but I'll skip 2e because there were so many mechanical system differences that the comparison becomes difficult to make.

The most obvious one would be 3.x though.... Obviously the new hexer & new modify spell did not exist. I can't seem to find any metamagics that grow spell range more than 30ft like reach spell but wouldn't be surprised if one existed. With the 3.5 longbow there was a 100-110ft* range increment that added a flat -2 foreach beyond the first with PCs that could rarely say "but I have 120ft of vision at level one". Finally & most importantly the 3.5 GM could use tools provided to then like bonus types & dm's best friend to start imposing -2/-4/-6/etc penalties for almost any relevant mitigating factors like sun/breeze/they are moving pretty fast/you just can't see clear or the shooting into melee to limit the fight to a reasonably sized battlefield. The GM lacks any of those tools in both the 2014 5e ruleset & so far one d&d packets leading back to the subject.

* 100 for regular & 110 for composite, shortbow was 60/70 while dart & sling were 20 & 50 respectively.

Why does the DM need vision range rules. Have you ever stood outdoors and looked at something 600 feet away?
Are you restricting what the DM can see or the players?

 

[Vaalingrade]

simply do not make a map as large as the empire state building.

Got it on the first post.

 

[cbwjm]

For my groups battlemap aren't used for extreme ranges, rather it's when they engage close up. I see no reason why anyone would really feel the need to create these excessively sized maps when theatre of the mind is the best way to handle them DnD.