Why is flight considered a game breaker?

[Leatherhead]

I often hear of game breaking abilities being used in games. Stuff like open ended abilities, vague interpretations and clarifications, or even bizarre combination's of rules that create monstrosities. But there is one ability that leaves me scratching my head whenever I hear it being sited as a game breaker. That ability is flying.

I cannot fathom how people have difficulties with flying, unless for some reason the GM only uses ground-bound melee-only brutes with the mental capacity of an angry chihuahua in wide open featureless planes. It's not like you can't have encounters, puzzles, traps, and even entire "dungeons" in the sky. Or just have them indoors or under a canopy with a limited ceiling height. Heck, even a few bows or a good old fashioned rock can help get things going in the right direction.

Is it adapting the metagame that leaves people in a fluster? Are people put off over climbing and jumping skills not being good enough? Are the rules too much of a headache to keep track of? Is getting from point A to point B without having to get tangled up in the bushes some sort of deal breaker? Really, why is flying a problem?

 

[Nightson]

It's not like you can't have encounters, puzzles, traps, and even entire "dungeons" in the sky.

Like what exactly? (mainly with regards to the non isolated combat encounter area, just curious)

Plenty of monsters have either no ranged attack or a ranged attack that is much weaker then the melee attack. Yes low ceilings can solve this, but with flight you just can't have melee focused critters in the open. I mean, there's pretty much nothing that makes the game unplayable and has no counter whatsoever, it's an issue of how much an effect it has compared to other things.

 

[cwhs01]

It circumvents a lot of potential monster abilities, hazards and traps and why would you want to allow that?
Especially in 4e permanent flying makes a lot of tactics involving terrain features pointless. For example if pc's avoid most traps and obstacles by flying, it could also make skills such as athletics and acrobatics irrelevant.
IMO one of the interesting features in 4e combat is the creative use of terrain. Permanent flying would make it alot more difficult to make terrain matter i think.

However, i could see a number of potential hazards (like giant spider webs etc.) that could make arial encounters very interesting. I just think that it would be a problem for the game as it is now, if a pc had permanent flight ability..

 

[Doug McCrae]

ground-bound melee-only brutes

That's a heck of a lot of monsters right there.

The traditional medieval knight
Normal animals - lion, bear, wolf, crocodile, snake, etc
Giant arthropods - scorpion, spider, praying mantis, centipede, etc
T-Rex and other dinosaurs
The tarrasque
Zombies and most corporeal undead. Mummy with a longbow feels wrong, somehow.
Bruisers - golem, earth elemental, ogre, minotaur, troll
D&D weirdness - owlbear, carrion crawler, oozes, gelatinous cube, otyugh, purple worm, displacer beast, shambling mound

 

[Dausuul]

As others have pointed out, flying makes it possible to circumvent many traditional foes - pretty much any unintelligent monster that doesn't have some kind of built-in ranged attack. It also makes it possible to ignore a lot of traps and challenges.

The 3E tarrasque was a joke because you could just hover overhead and bombard it. It took some work to come up with attacks that could overcome its regeneration and massive resistances, and you had to scrape up a wish spell from somewhere if you wanted it to stay dead, but it couldn't actually threaten PCs at a comparable level.

In 4E, they gave it a special power that pulls flying enemies out of the air. That power doesn't fit very well with the traditional "giant uber-brute" conception of the tarrasque, but it had to have something like that if it was to pose any kind of a challenge to late-game PCs. IMO, any time you find yourself giving monsters special abilities solely to enable them to deal with Tactic X, you should be taking a hard look at Tactic X.

Yes, you can build adventures that allow for flying PCs. You can build adventures that allow for anything.

Say one PC has an at-will attack that targets Will with a +10 bonus on the attack roll and does 500 points of radiant damage a hit. Broken, you say? Why would that be a problem? Unless the DM is using a lot of monsters that don't have Will defense 10 points above their other defenses, or that lack resist radiant 495, I don't see why this ability would cause issues.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

It's pretty simple, really.


For situations where there are counters, it's NOT a problem.

For situations where there are not counters, it IS a problem, an "I win" button, if you will.



This is true of many (all?) game elements.


But it's about believability and rate. It simply doesn't make sense to always have counters to flight. While I could easily imagine a game built around flight, one that has a ton (every?) monster/npc/trap/obstacle related to flight, that's a very specific case.

In your average fantasy game, there are overland journeys (or above land if flying) that can result in missing entire plot elements (yes, alternative plot elements could be introduced, but, again, then we're specifically addressing flight). There are uber monsters, like the Tarrasque, with no ranged attacks. There's the average Joe NPC focused on melee combat...because how many people even have a scaled magical bow unless they are archery focused?

Seriously, have any of you ever had a non-archery focused PC or NPC with a nice, fancy magical bow available in case of flying creatures? MAYBE pc's think like this, but usually not. NPC's? With their very limited resources for buying equipment? Never.


In short, flying requires that you build the game/adventure around it...in ways that, for example, fireball, does not.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Plain and simple: Bad DMing - Okay, maybe that is harsh but it takes the game into the 3rd dimension which requires additional thought. You can also say, game design issues. You have stuff like ceilings (how high something can go), angles for distance effect, wind speeds, cover provided by trees, Line of Sight, etc.

You may ask youself why? Wish I knew, as flight is part of the game, it should be thought about.

Things I use to combat flyers: swarms and familiars (crows, owls, hawks can mess with a flying magic-user). You also need to remember the rules for cover, ground forces can get a lot of protection from trees in the spring and summer, not so much in the winter.

 

[Gilladian]

I never found a SINGLE flying PC to be game breaking at appropriate levels. However, I did find the flying familiar game-breaking at low levels, because it allowed the PCs wayyyyy too much freedom to scout ahead and discover things I didn't necessarily want them to.

I also found that giving the whole party flight (magic boat, specifically) allowed them too much freedom to circumvent many obstacles that would otherwise have been level appropriate.

So my rule is; no flying familiars until about 4th level, and no magic that lets the whole group fly continuously for long periods of time. Not that I wouldn't let them hire a flying boat for a day's travel, but I would not let them own a flying carpet for the whole group.

 

[Umbran]

Really, why is flying a problem?

Most of the complaints I recall are not about flying alone. They are about flying plus invisibility.

Think about a battlemap, for a moment. If you are ground-bound, there's a limited number of squares you can be in. If you are flying, the number of locations you can be in skyrockets, as you effectively stack many levels of battlemaps on top of each other. Now include invisibility, where the opponent has to guess which square to attack, and the problem becomes much nastier.

Basically, if you have to swing blind, the problem is still tractable if you know you have to swing on your own level, but ceases to be tractable if the sky's the limit on your location.

 

[pawsplay]

I think that if you run enough superhero games, flying seems like a trivial problem.