D&D 5E Helping melee combat to be more competitive to ranged.

[FormerlyHemlock]

This seems to me to be one of those cases where the mechanics of the game yield an outcome that is not necessarily to be expected a priori. I seem to have been the only commentator in respect of it, for instance, who predicted without needing to be told that Shield Guardians was being used as a mobile damage-dealing aura. (And not in a very optimised fashion. Combine that with some sort of teleportation ability, or rapid flight, and it gets noticeably stronger.)

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point here. Spirit Guardians is mobile by default. Dodging + Spirit Guardians is a common tactic, so you can move it over gnolls and force them to take 3d8/half (or 4d8/half for a Spirit Guardians IV) as soon as their turn starts. Are you saying that you predicted and CapnZapp confirmed that he was letting the aura do damage as soon as the cleric moved it over the gnolls, as opposed to when they enter the aura or start their turn in it? (That would explain why he says they needed to take damage two times before melee attacking, which makes it twice as strong against the gnolls as it should be by RAW.) If so, good for you, although if so I didn't read that exchange between you.

As far as I'm concerned though, if gnolls place themselves into a position where that can easily happen, and they go on doing so round after round instead of changing targets to another PC or pulling out their longbows and shooting, that is still what I referred to as "mindlessly feeding gnolls into a meat grinder" or whatever language I used. In a pure roleplaying scenario I would just shrug and say, "the DM did it differently," but it just seems really strange to me to do that in a scenario where the DM is explicitly trying to test whether CR 1/2 humanoids can still be interesting foes at higher levels when using the mob rules.

A test of "what happens when there are dozens of attacks per turn" in which you set up a scenario with creatures that can make dozens of attacks per turn and then have them... not... make dozens of attacks per turn... and then conclude that hordes aren't viable challenges...

Relating this back to the topic of the thread: @CapnZapp has made it clear that he prefers D&D in which melee is dominant over ranged. That is a reasonable preference, in my view. In any event, it's one I share.

Sure. And others have pointed out that one of the key advantages of ranged combat is that it allows you to avoid short-ranged effects like Medusa gazes and Basilisk gazes. Spirit Guardians is one of them. One of the suggested mitigations for those who want melee combat to be more important is to remove or radically expand range limitations on these abilities. In the context of this thread, it should be no surprise to anyone that running (apparently) berserk charging melee gnolls against Spirit Guardians is equally poor tactics for gnolls as it would be for PCs. You don't need to run a trial encounter against your actual PCs to find that out--it's obvious prima facie.

CapnZapp has expressed a preference for a different sort of solution, namely, increasing the humanoid hp so the auto damage is not as close to an auto-kill. That's probably not how I'd do it myself - I prefer the swarm approach - but obviously it's one approach to solving the issue.

You could also just run Spirit Guardians by RAW. Gnolls have 22 HP. If there's an 8th level cleric with Wis 20 casting Spirit Guardians IV, that's 4d8 of damage (save for half) with a DC 16, which gnolls (Wis +0) will save against 25% of the time. 4d8 will be at least 22 23% of the time, times 0.75 for successful saves, so 17.25% of all gnolls will be killed by fey spirits/etc. at the start of their turns after the cleric moves his aura onto them. The other 82.75% of gnolls will get to make an attack, and/or grapple the cleric to end her Dodging.

If on the other hand they are so berserk that they do mindlessly charge into the aura on one round and then start their turn in it on the other, then 56% of them will fail both saves (99% killed), 6% will succeed on both and will take only 4d8 damage (23% killed), and 37.5% will fail on only one save (83% killed). Overall, 88% of gnolls who Dash directly into a Spirit Guardians will die before they get a chance to make another attack.

As you can see, the tactics chosen by gnolls makes a huge difference. You can get away with melee gnolls against RAW Spirit Guardians; you can't get away with melee gnolls against a houseruled Spirit Guardians; and you can't really get away with zombie-like mindlessly Dashing melee gnolls in either case.

But what, then, about the picture in Volo's of gnolls without bows?

Or - suppose the gnolls are returning from some other skirmish, and are out of arrows?

Then you shouldn't be surprised if the results of your test are different from normal gnolls, and you shouldn't carelessly generalize from those results.

Or - suppose instead of gnolls the GM had used orcs, which are also CR 1/2, have fewer hp and so are even more vulnerable to the autodamage, and whose ranged attack is javelins? If they throw one javelin and miss, they have to close. (And they have a feature - aggressive - which, like a gnoll's rampage - makes me think that on the whole they prefer close combat.)

Then 58% of the orcs that charge into the Spirit Guardians will die instantly without making an attack, and the DM will roleplay the orcs' reaction to that event. Clearly they prefer melee; do they prefer it enough to mindlessly charge through a horde of gibbering demons or fey or however else Spirit Guardians manifests? (Would these orcs charge through a Wall of Fire too?) Or will they switch to another PC, or switch to javelin chucking? You realize of course that orcs can kite Spirit Guardians very effectively if they want to: use Aggressive to move into spear-chucking range, chuck the spear, and then move 30' back out of range. The Spirit Guardians caster will have to stop Dodging and Dash to defeat that strategy.

So the orcs can beat Spirit Guardians or other static or semi-static short-ranged defenses, using their standard ranged attacks (of course--see thread title). But will they? That's a roleplaying question for the DM and cannot be predicted from the stats. Why are these orcs even fighting the PCs in the first place?

And even if the orcs, or gnolls, or whatever, see the Spirit Guardians, how are they to know that they will die to them?

Seeing a dozen other orcs die before them might be a clue. Or even just seeing 17% of a dozen other orcs die instantly, and the other 83% take grievous wounds but still live for another few seconds.

Again, why are these orcs fighting the PCs in the first place? Why do they want them dead so badly that they'd charge through fire to kill them? The stats don't tell that story.

 

[Tony Vargas]

To me a "hero doing hero things" is much more about the journey and overcoming the mundane part of life.

That's a very modern take on the hero's journey - everyday, little-guy, heroism. Appreciation for that kind of heroism is why Annie Hall beat out Star Wars for the Oscar.

Not at my table. ;P

Every version of D&D ever has had players being able to earn XP points so as to add new abilities to their PCs. I don't think that this is distinctive to video games.

It's something video games picked up from D&D.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

That's a very modern take on the hero's journey - everyday, little-guy, heroism. Appreciation for that kind of heroism is why Annie Hall beat out Star Wars for the Oscar.

Not at my table. ;P

It's something video games picked up from D&D.

Star Wars is the little guy. Luke's nobody, until he's Luke. Incidentally, Star Wars is one of the few that I can think of where somebody actually gains levels/abilities. Han and Chewie are more or less the same the whole time, as is Leia, but Luke grows mechanically as well as a character. In most of the cases in the Star Wars universe, its the Jedi that are growing in power, or the young novice that's growing to the level of the rest of the characters. But the wins aren't just because they are "better" but smarter, they find a way around the challenge.

I'm thinking The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, the Chronicles of Narnia, etc. The hero in The Hobbit isn't the dwarves or the wizard, it's the everyday hobbit. In Lord of the Rings it's the same, the great heroes have a lot to offer, but it's the hobbits again that save the day.

I'm also talking about the shows where the characters and their development are what make the show interesting. Each episode has a mission, or challenge, or something, but they aren't constantly growing in abilities, but as people. Firefly, Star Trek, X-Files, or non-fantasy/science fiction things like Law & Order, or many other popular shows. The interest is on the challenge and the characters, that's all.

There are grand heroics in my campaigns, and they are a blast, but part of why I think they are so much fun is that there are more routine things between them.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Star Wars is the little guy. Luke's nobody, until he's Luke. Incidentally, Star Wars is one of the few that I can think of where somebody actually gains levels/abilities.

Also, Rocky.

Coincidentally, Star Wars and Rocky both have training as an explicit thing that happens.

 

[OB1]

A test of "what happens when there are dozens of attacks per turn" in which you set up a scenario with creatures that can make dozens of attacks per turn and then have them... not... make dozens of attacks per turn... and then conclude that hordes aren't viable challenges...

Been out of this thread for a while, but have been reading with great amusement, and wanted to come back in to emphasize this excellent point from Hemlock, and to say how lucky we are that WotC has a team of testers that clearly understand how to test the game and have done a phenomenal job. Do things occasionally get missed? I'm sure they do. They didn't have three years after finalizing the design to tease out every possible outcome, but I am positive that the testing they did was done with sound methodology and has led to a game with a very strong foundation for 99% of players.

I do have one other general thought on a subject that I've seen come up again and again in this thread. I keep seeing posters say that melee combat is "ineffective" in 5e. This is simply not true. It may be less effective than ranged, but at the base assumptions of the game, melee combat is more than enough to overcome challenges. That is, when facing a CR appropriate foe in an adventuring day budgeted for the correct PC level, melee builds are perfectly capable of doing what needs done. DPR builds by design in 5e make combat easier, and thus less challenging. It was the goal to allow for players to build characters without DPR in mind. The base DPR of each class is more than enough to overcome the assumed challenge level of the game.

Now if you want melee to be better than ranged, fine, do it! Make whatever changes you want to your game to have it be so. Nerf ranged or power up melee or both! I'm happy to discuss and suggest how that can be accomplished. Just understand that none of it is necessary to play the game as designed and that the discussion is about how to homebrew your rules to get what you want out of the game.

 

[pemerton]

why are these orcs fighting the PCs in the first place? Why do they want them dead so badly that they'd charge through fire to kill them? The stats don't tell that story.

At the moment there are two or three threads running concurrently that involve many of the same participants and deal with many of the same issues.

In some of those threads, those who are focussing on mechanics - mechanical solutions to issues they have, or trying to hone in on precisely what mechanical features of the game are leading to them have issues - have been told, more-or-less, that by focusing on the mechanics they are focusing on the wrong things. They should, rather, be focusing on "story" and "flavour text".

That's the context in which I was moved to comment on the gnoll encounter - because the criticisms of the handling of that encounter focus primarily on the gnoll stat block (the presence of longbows - despite the fact that many illustrations of gnolls in this edition, as in past ones, don't include longbows) and on the failure to optimise tactics. Taken as a whole, I see a tension in these two different lines of criticism of CapnZapp. (Although you have not been party to the first - so in your case there is no tension, but you are one of those who seems to be criticising CapnZapp for departing from the stat block and for running the gnolls as slavering berserkers, although that does seem fairly consistent with their flavour text.)

I personally don't see anything wrong with testing a "mob" technique with melee-focused attackers. And if I had the same result that [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] did - of the auto-damage rules meaning that the fiction did not turn out as I expected/hoped for - then I would look at changes too (eg increasing hp).

Along the lines I replied to you quite a bit upthread, I think [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] perhaps frames his issues too much as "WotC needs to fix this" rather than "What are possible solutions to these problems I'm having" - but nevertheless he is actually identifying solutions to his problems. And the isssue of auto damage vs mobs is, in my view, a legitimate problem. It comes up in other games and other editions with auto damage - because auto-damage bypasses action economy and bypasses defence/cover rules, it can produce wonky outcomes when there are large numbers of targets affected by it.

Of course it's possible to treat the auto-damage as a "given" feature of the gameworld, and to have everyone adopt their tactics to it (eg the gnolls form a cordon and wait for the Spirit Guardians to depart). But to me that is letting the mechanical tail wag the fiction dog. Probably the pithiest way for me to put it is that the Spirit Guardians provides better defence against an onrushing horde then would a single powerful angel, which would still be able to make only one OA per initiative cycle, and maybe half-a-dozen attacks on its own turn (depending on details of implementation). To me that is best seen as a byproduct of the mechanics that at best we ignore because it's a corner-case, or else we fix it (as CapnZapp is proposing to do) - but it's not a core case of the mechanics producing appropriate fiction.

"Should" = to make the encounter interesting/threatening/matter

<snip>

I think that if what is desired is for enemies to be a threat, then the first step is to have them behave in a way that makes them a threat. Or at the very least, to not behave in a way that makes them not threatening.

In AD&D, which has relatively little aura-type damage (the only one I can think of available to 8th level PCs is Fire Shield, and it triggers only on an attack being made), this encounter would have beeen threatening. 70 gnolls, entering through a chokepoint in the ceiling, will pose a significant threat to 4 8th level PCs, and a single cleric won't be a very effective defender of that choke point. (Mechanically, the cleric hits an AC 5 gnoll around half the time, for probably around 6 or 7 damage unless wearing Gauntlets of Ogre Power; a gnoll probably hits the AC 0 (or thereabouts) cleric one-quarter of the time for around 5 damage. Even if the gnolls just line up, the cleric can take down a little more than a dozen of them before his/her 40 to 50 hp are ablated.)

The only reason this encounter was not threatening was because of Spirit Guardians. Which is exactly why [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] has indicated a preference to use higher-hp enemies who are not so vulnerable to that spell.

And, as per my maths in the earlier post and as already mentioned in this post, the threat posed by Spirit Guardians in this situation is not about the fiction - it's about the mechanics, and the fact that an aura bypasses action economy, defence/cover rules, etc, and hence becomes disproportionately effective against very large numbers of low-hp attackers. (It's sriking to me how much less effective Fireball - the quintessential 3rd level anti-mob spell - would have been in the scenario CapnZapp describes: the gnolls weren't grouped together until effectively on top of the PCs, and so could not have been fireballed without also inflicting damage on the PCs.

There is nothing remotely absurd, in the fantasy context, about 70 charging, slavering gnolls posing a threat to a group of mid-level PCs. The fact that the Spirit Guardians can so easily cut them all down is an artefact of the auto-damage rules. Deciding to change something to avoid that sort of outcome in the future strikes me as extremely sensible GMing, not bad GMing.

Sure. Maybe don't have all the entry points to the PC location funnel into the area of effect of such spells. Perhaps arm the gnolls with their standard equipment and allow them to threaten the cleric from outside the area of effect. Those would help accomplish what you just described.

I don't see how having gnolls use bows from more than 15' away from the cleric accomplishes "charging.slavering gnolls posing a threat to the group". It seems an alternative to that.

I don't see why gnolls stats (which include longbows) and Spirit Guardian (which is an ongoing aura of auto-damage) are so sacrosanct that the game fiction has to bend to accommodate them, when there are ways of adjusting the way that both work so as to yield the fiction ("charging, slavering gnolls") that CapnZapp seemed to be aiming for.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Along the lines I replied to you quite a bit upthread, I think [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] perhaps frames his issues too much as "WotC needs to fix this" rather than "What are possible solutions to these problems I'm having" - but nevertheless he is actually identifying solutions to his problems. And the isssue of auto damage vs mobs is, in my view, a legitimate problem. It comes up in other games and other editions with auto damage - because auto-damage bypasses action economy and bypasses defence/cover rules, it can produce wonky outcomes when there are large numbers of targets affected by it.

Of course it's possible to treat the auto-damage as a "given" feature of the gameworld, and to have everyone adopt their tactics to it (eg the gnolls form a cordon and wait for the Spirit Guardians to depart). But to me that is letting the mechanical tail wag the fiction dog. Probably the pithiest way for me to put it is that the Spirit Guardians provides better defence against an onrushing horde then would a single powerful angel, which would still be able to make only one OA per initiative cycle, and maybe half-a-dozen attacks on its own turn (depending on details of implementation). To me that is best seen as a byproduct of the mechanics that at best we ignore because it's a corner-case, or else we fix it (as CapnZapp is proposing to do) - but it's not a core case of the mechanics producing appropriate fiction.

In AD&D, which has relatively little aura-type damage (the only one I can think of available to 8th level PCs is Fire Shield, and it triggers only on an attack being made), this encounter would have beeen threatening. 70 gnolls, entering through a chokepoint in the ceiling, will pose a significant threat to 4 8th level PCs, and a single cleric won't be a very effective defender of that choke point. (Mechanically, the cleric hits an AC 5 gnoll around half the time, for probably around 6 or 7 damage unless wearing Gauntlets of Ogre Power; a gnoll probably hits the AC 0 (or thereabouts) cleric one-quarter of the time for around 5 damage. Even if the gnolls just line up, the cleric can take down a little more than a dozen of them before his/her 40 to 50 hp are ablated.)

The only reason this encounter was not threatening was because of Spirit Guardians. Which is exactly why [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] has indicated a preference to use higher-hp enemies who are not so vulnerable to that spell.

I don't have an agenda here so I hope you won't mind if I respond to individual points instead of trying to drive to some sort of resolution here--I think there's no resolution to be had, since we all have different preferences, but that doesn't mean useful observations can't be made.

(1) Spirit Guardians is, of course, not the only auto-damage effect in 5E. The exact same thing would have happened with a Wall of Fire, or even (as happens sometimes) with regular jars of flaming oil from the PHB, each of which does 5 HP to anything that passes through it.

(2) Spirit Guardians is one of the things that make this encounter play out differently from AD&D, but the existence of Dodge is a huge one too. Dodge magnifies the effect of high AC. In AD&D there is now way to get hit less than 5% of the time, but in 5E you can reduce it to 0.25% by imposing disadvantage.

(3) In AD&D, a 9th level spellcaster would have not only won the encounter, but also taken over the whole gnoll tribe as the new chief. (Thanks, Magic Jar!) 5E magic is generally weaker and more tactical. At 8th level, an AD&D wizard could have produced a 2d4+2d6+8 Wall of Fire which would be approximately 100% lethal to all the 2 HD (2-16 HP) gnolls that charged into it, and that Wall of Fire would last for as long as he cared to keep concentrating on it, or else eight minutes if he decided to just walk away instead of concentrating on it. There are probably other options too which I'm overlooking due to being decades out of practice with AD&D.

Obviously, if you want to change the fiction, you can change the mechanics to match, but that isn't 5E-specific. You'd have to change the AD&D mechanics too to make this scenario work there, unless you were willing to change the gnolls' behavior instead.

(4) Encouraging the bad guys to clump up so you can hit them with an AoE is a classic tactic, and one of the things that Dodging is good for. E.g. the cleric Dodges until all the zombies are nicely grouped around him, and then cuts loose with a Turn Undead to blast them all to smithereens. (This can go sour fast if the zombies are the grabby and grapply type, but it works fine against smiters and biters. In the case I'm remembering, the zombies were not the grabby type and the cleric got to be awesome. There were also three hobgoblin vampires in the fight and taking the zombies out of play sure helped the PCs focus.)

 

[OB1]

I don't see why gnolls stats (which include longbows) and Spirit Guardian (which is an ongoing aura of auto-damage) are so sacrosanct that the game fiction has to bend to accommodate them, when there are ways of adjusting the way that both work so as to yield the fiction ("charging, slavering gnolls") that CapnZapp seemed to be aiming for.

I don't see the problem of there occasionally being the perfect solution to a problem. If you wan't charging, slavering gnolls without longbows to attack the party, do so. If they happen to have a cleric with Spirit Guardian who thinks to use it and they beat the encounter in a round, good for them!

If that's not the outcome you or your party want, next time, have the Gnolls use longbows and attack from a distance, or have one hoard throw themselves at the party while another shoots arrows at the cleric.

The outcome of one encounter, specifically tailored on both PC and Monster side to a narrow circumstance in the PC's favor to show a particular outcome, doesn't mean that the spell isn't functioning within acceptable limits of design.

 

[happyhermit]

... Gnolls have 22 HP. If there's an 8th level cleric with Wis 20 casting Spirit Guardians IV, that's 4d8 of damage (save for half) with a DC 16, which gnolls (Wis +0) will save against 25% of the time. 4d8 will be at least 22 23% of the time, times 0.75 for successful saves, so 17.25% of all gnolls will be killed by fey spirits/etc. at the start of their turns after the cleric moves his aura onto them. The other 82.75% of gnolls will get to make an attack, and/or grapple the cleric to end her Dodging.

If on the other hand they are so berserk that they do mindlessly charge into the aura on one round and then start their turn in it on the other, then 56% of them will fail both saves (99% killed), 6% will succeed on both and will take only 4d8 damage (23% killed), and 37.5% will fail on only one save (83% killed). Overall, 88% of gnolls who Dash directly into a Spirit Guardians will die before they get a chance to make another attack. ...

I appreciate this math, I was "sure" the rules would produce results along those lines but my head is not all that clear, so I though I might be mistaken.

So;
Gnolls who are just outside of that radius when they start their turn will have an excellent chance to melee immediately.
Gnolls that find themselves inside the aura because it was moved onto them have an excellent chance to melee on their turn.
Gnolls who enter the aura with not enough of their speed to engage in melee on their turn, would take the damage twice before attacking, and thus have a poor chance at getting to melee.

Anything is possible in a system like D&D, and there are dice involved, but typically with more numbers these things seem to even out. As you have shown, the rules can be expected to produce an outcome very different from one where there are no melee attacks (due to the spirit guardians), barring some other exceptional circumstances not given in the example. This seems to be important to a discussion of the problems the OP was addressing.

 

[hawkeyefan]

At the moment there are two or three threads running concurrently that involve many of the same participants and deal with many of the same issues.

In some of those threads, those who are focussing on mechanics - mechanical solutions to issues they have, or trying to hone in on precisely what mechanical features of the game are leading to them have issues - have been told, more-or-less, that by focusing on the mechanics they are focusing on the wrong things. They should, rather, be focusing on "story" and "flavour text".

I don't believe that anyone was saying "rather than..." in those discussions so much as "in addition to..." It's not an either or, stats or fiction.

I also believe that you're conflating the two discussions a bit. In the thread about how crappy ogres are, there was a part of the discussion about how they stink as solo monsters. A poster then said perhaps look beyond the stat blocks because in the flavor text, it is stated that ogres will work with other monstrous humanoids whenever possible. So the implication there is that they aren't really meant to be solo monsters.

In this instance with the gnolls, it really isn't about the fact that the longbow is present in their stat blocks...that just makes the issue more noticeable. It's more about doing what makes sense for the Monster to do.

If the intention is that the gnolls have been driven into such a frenzy that they have no sense of self preservation and will willingly die to try and harm their foes...then that's fine. But clearly that narrative choice is going to impact the encounter.

That's the context in which I was moved to comment on the gnoll encounter - because the criticisms of the handling of that encounter focus primarily on the gnoll stat block (the presence of longbows - despite the fact that many illustrations of gnolls in this edition, as in past ones, don't include longbows) and on the failure to optimise tactics. Taken as a whole, I see a tension in these two different lines of criticism of CapnZapp.

No one is insisting the gnolls be run in a specific way.

The only reason this encounter was not threatening was because of Spirit Guardians. Which is exactly why [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] has indicated a preference to use higher-hp enemies who are not so vulnerable to that spell.

I would say that the only reason this encounter was not threatening was the combination of spirit guardians AND the lack of any kind of tactical thinking by the enemies.

That is not to say that is a mistake or that it is wrong for the DM to do so. But as you already acknowledged, less tactics equals less threat.

Spirit Guardians is a great spell. My players use it quite often and it's really effective. But it does not trivialize every combat. It does not even trivialize every combat against low HP enemies.

And, as per my maths in the earlier post and as already mentioned in this post, the threat posed by Spirit Guardians in this situation is not about the fiction - it's about the mechanics, and the fact that an aura bypasses action economy, defence/cover rules, etc, and hence becomes disproportionately effective against very large numbers of low-hp attackers. (It's sriking to me how much less effective Fireball - the quintessential 3rd level anti-mob spell - would have been in the scenario CapnZapp describes: the gnolls weren't grouped together until effectively on top of the PCs, and so could not have been fireballed without also inflicting damage on the PCs.

The gnolls were entering the cave from four different tunnels, if I recall correctly, one of which was above. So they were divided up and approaching from different directions.

I don't see how having gnolls use bows from more than 15' away from the cleric accomplishes "charging.slavering gnolls posing a threat to the group". It seems an alternative to that.

It would be a threat, that's for sure. As for charging and slavering, I don't know if that behavior must preclude shooting a bow or throwing a spear.

Rampaging and slavering enemies is one thing....rampaging and slavering enemies who don't have enough sense to avoid destruction is another.

I don't see why gnolls stats (which include longbows) and Spirit Guardian (which is an ongoing aura of auto-damage) are so sacrosanct that the game fiction has to bend to accommodate them, when there are ways of adjusting the way that both work so as to yield the fiction ("charging, slavering gnolls") that CapnZapp seemed to be aiming for.

That's fine. There are a few ways the problem could be addressed. I think simply having the gnolls attack from range is the simplest, and I don't think it disrupts the image of a mindless, rampaging horde.