D&D 5E On fairies and flying

[iserith]

I think aarakocra should be banned altogether just because it's an annoying word to spell.

Now there I will agree!

But seriously, I really want flying PCs in my game. I love the dramatic aspect of having encounters on the Y axis. But it's a drag a lot of the time. Yeah, you can do this and that with setting and range fighting to accommodate a flying PC but there you are, doing it, putting their advantages before your imagination. Or ignoring it, and having them park somewhere and meta the hell out of everything.

And boy, if you do hit one with a range weapon after they haven't taken damage in a dozen or so straight encounters, be prepared for the moaning. I have a player who is still complaining about getting hit by a longbow from a Yuan-Ti Abomination once. Apparently it's preposterous that a creature of this kind would have one. Wait until he runs into my dwarves with home-brewed bola-bows.

I think this speaks to a point I made upthread that often the objection to the flying race is the kind of player that is attracted to it or the tactics the player is using. So it's not really about the tool but the person wielding it and how.

I have a human wizard in my swamp hexcrawl right now who rolled poorly on Constitution, so the running joke is that he always stays on the very edge of the map, face down in leafy water, to avoid any attention. This disincentivizes ranged attacks against him and, provided the rest of the party does their job, the melee monsters are not getting up to him. So for all intents and purposes, this character may as well be a flying PC in that I rarely get to him. And even ranged attacks against him are problematic as compared to attacking a flying PC!

 

[JiffyPopTart]

That's a great rulling!

Until the party has to get the dead party member back to town.

 

[ad_hoc]

I highly dislike the DMing philosophy of altering challenges based on the character's abilities.

If I'm playing a rogue I don't want there to be more locked doors just because I'm a rogue. Instead of helping with the doors now I'm just making it worse by conjuring them into the world.

There is much more player agency in being able to have abilities that can address the challenges that are going to be there regardless. And then there are challenges where no one has expertise and they need to get creative.

Having a flying character and then changing the game around that is a hard no from me.

 

[iserith]

Until the party has to get the dead party member back to town.

Who does that? We just loot the corpse, kick it a few times, and leave it in a ditch. Or sometimes do a whole Weekend at Bernie's thing for laughs before tossing the body in an anthill.

 

[Bolares]

I highly dislike the DMing philosophy of altering challenges based on the character's abilities.

If I'm playing a rogue I don't want there to be more locked doors just because I'm a rogue. Instead of helping with the doors now I'm just making it worse by conjuring them into the world.

There is much more player agency in being able to have abilities that can address the challenges that are going to be there regardless. And then there are challenges where no one has expertise and they need to get creative.

Having a flying character and then changing the game around that is a hard no from me.

I agree with some of this. But I think it's a Dm's job to mold the encounters around characters abilities, to correctly challenge them. I think you should let the players use their features to solve the encounter, but not trivialize it every time. A flier should be able to use their flying speed to win some encounters, but creating some encounters were flying isn't possible/doesn't give tactical advantage is okay.

 

[iserith]

I agree with some of this. But I think it's a Dm's job to mold the encounters around characters abilities, to correctly challenge them. I think you should let the players use their features to solve the encounter, but not trivialize it every time. A flier should be able to use their flying speed to win some encounters, but creating some encounters were flying isn't possible/doesn't give tactical advantage is okay.

I have a player pool with more players than available seats for a given session. And often each player has 2 PCs, if not more, one of which they can play per session. So I honestly don't know which PCs will be in a session until we turn up to play. Thus, it would be something of a waste of time for me to try to tailor challenges for specific characters. Instead, I simply make sure that my prep is focused on producing robust challenges regardless of who is playing and sometimes they have a composition that just rocks it and sometimes they don't. That strikes me as the right balance.

 

[ad_hoc]

I agree with some of this. But I think it's a Dm's job to mold the encounters around characters abilities, to correctly challenge them. I think you should let the players use their features to solve the encounter, but not trivialize it every time. A flier should be able to use their flying speed to win some encounters, but creating some encounters were flying isn't possible/doesn't give tactical advantage is okay.

Then you don't agree with it at all.

This is exactly what I'm against and hate when it is done.

 

[Bolares]

Then you don't agree with it at all.

This is exactly what I'm against and hate when it is done.

So, I shouldn't challenge my players specific skills?

 

[cbwjm]

I tend not to specifically target my players skills, rather I set up an encounter or obstacle and it is up to the players to look at their skills and abilities to figure out how to defeat or bypass it. It's probably why I don't really worry about flying PCs, and wouldn't make any changes to something like Tomb of Annihilation. I'm running some old Thunder Rift modules and haven't changed a thing (unless something, normally a monster, doesn't exist in 5e, then I might make a replacement). One of the players is playing a homebrewed pixie that can fly and turn invisible, he'll often scout out a large portion of the dungeons, but the thing is, the players still have to get through the dungeon.

With homebrewed adventures, the only things I specifically tailor to my players are items that might be useful and fun for their class. I don't do this for all items, but just enough that each player ends up with something. For the Thunder Rift modules though, I just throw in whatever the modules have. Players are getting a heap of items and treasure, I'd almost forgotten how much these modules gave out, but then considering how deadly they are, I guess you kind of need them.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

If you design a broad range of challenges and enemies, and your world is living and reactive you shouldn't need to change anything just because a PC can fly.