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[Emberashh]

Now in 5e plus the current oned&d rules any type of flight also grants hover & perfect maneuverability

Which doesn't mean much unless you're comparing editions for some arbitrary reason, as though you're trying really hard to prove theres no problem with one thing (contrary to what most everyone else believes) by pulling any argument out of thin air that supports some other thing being a problem.

It is, in fact, okay to say that both these things are not well designed and that they, as a result exacerbate each other.

Its not an either/or.

And meanwhile, the assertion is false anyway. Flight got simplified, but hover is still an explicit ability with a changed definition.

If anything, the best fix is to enact a minimum movement for flyers each turn, and to make movement and speed identical rather than separate. This way, flyers have to underspend their rate to stay airborn, which will temper the usefulness of it.

Heck, the GM even needs to houserule that a player lacking hover can't use flight to ignore rough terrain & dangerous terrain (ie grease/caltrops/etc) unless the player actually uses some of their flight speed to not be standing on the ground

Thats not a houserule thats just how flight works if you don't have hover and haven't begun your turn in the air.

I see it more as the standard and what a large portion of players use, and certainly as an example for others, no matter how flawed you think it is

Which does not mean that adventure design as WOTC has presented is actually good, desirable, or anything the game needs to be revolving its rules around to make work properly.

Its like designing a buggy video game and then changing entire game mechanics around to avoid just fixing the bug.

You seem to have no qualms badmouthing just about every part of D&D (in various threads), but flyers somehow are apparently essential, that is a weird take and tells me more about you than D&D

Not everything in 5e is bad, and those other threads are most often covering its most egregious problems.

Flight isn't one of them, and at no point did I suggest or imply that they're "essential".

And again this cuts both ways, you defend something because for whatever reason you like it. All this is, is personal preference

I have no strong preferences towards flight at all. Your assumption that Im emotionally invested in flight being unchanged is unfounded. Not seeing a reason to overcorrect flight rules when your reason for doing so is to accomodate a far more broken and fundamental game design problem is not the same thing as loving flight rules as presented.

and published adventures need bigger adjustments when you have fliers.

If you buy an adventure and it cannot accomodate official content thats existed since 2015 then the problem isn't with the content.

We can extend the benefit of the doubt to adventures released prior to the Aarakocra itself, but since then, and especially since the race has been republished twice over, there is no excuse for official adventures to fall apart just because of one official race.

this never was my claim

throwing out fliers instead is a perfectly valid and simple alternative

Do keep in mind theres a couple different trains of thought going on here; this one in particular is in regards to DM created adventures, not officially published ones. So do not take this and try to argue that its an argument to disprove theres a problem with official adventures.

or maybe I design the adventures the way I want in the setting I want and flying is no part of that, and certainly not common at a minimum, because flying gets in the way of that.

Banning flying races is a valid option if you don't want to design encounters to accomodate them. (Disregarding that good encounter design would naturally accomodate them anyway, without any special effort)

does not mean that it needs to be am essential feature in every campaign.

Kind of strange to assume that just because flight exists its always going to be a factor and you have no choice. Like, you know ahead of time what your players are going to be playing as, and you always have the option to ban the races if thats your fancy, and if your players are agreeable to that then theres literally no problem.

And if your players are the anti-social types who will pitch a fit if you do this, and will otherwise go out of their way to abuse anything they can to make your life as a DM miserable, then all anyone can tell you is to find a new group.

 

[mamba]

Which does not mean that adventure design as WOTC has presented is actually good, desirable, or anything the game needs to be revolving its rules around to make work properly.

agreed, it doesn’t need that, the game needs flight even less however.

So far no one defending it has given me any reason for it, they just try to debunk the reasons against it. I would assume you have more than just a ‘it is not that bad’ to defend it

Not everything in 5e is bad, and those other threads are most often covering its most egregious problems.

fair enough

Flight isn't one of them, and at no point did I suggest or imply that they're "essential".

you are defending them quite a bit though for that.

I have no strong preferences towards flight at all. Your assumption that Im emotionally invested in flight being unchanged is unfounded.

good to know, it appeared that way to me

Not seeing a reason to overcorrect flight rules when your reason for doing so is to accomodate a far more broken and fundamental game design problem is not the same thing as loving flight rules as presented.

so your complaints about encounters / encounter building are then unrelated to flight. Not sure why you chose to reply to the flight topic with them / at all

If you buy an adventure and it cannot accomodate official content thats existed since 2015 then the problem isn't with the content.

that can really go both ways again. Getting rid of flight is easier than changing all adventures, and for the most part flight is optional anyway, ie races that have it are optional

I continue to lean towards a grittier game, you lean the other way. That is ultimately all this is

 

[tetrasodium]

Which doesn't mean much unless you're comparing editions for some arbitrary reason, as though you're trying really hard to prove theres no problem with one thing (contrary to what most everyone else believes) by pulling any argument out of thin air that supports some other thing being a problem.

It is, in fact, okay to say that both these things are not well designed and that they, as a result exacerbate each other.

Its not an either/or.

And meanwhile, the assertion is false anyway. Flight got simplified, but hover is still an explicit ability with a changed definition.

If anything, the best fix is to enact a minimum movement for flyers each turn, and to make movement and speed identical rather than separate. This way, flyers have to underspend their rate to stay airborn, which will temper the usefulness of it.



Thats not a houserule thats just how flight works if you don't have hover and haven't begun your turn in the air.



Which does not mean that adventure design as WOTC has presented is actually good, desirable, or anything the game needs to be revolving its rules around to make work properly.

Its like designing a buggy video game and then changing entire game mechanics around to avoid just fixing the bug.



Not everything in 5e is bad, and those other threads are most often covering its most egregious problems.

Flight isn't one of them, and at no point did I suggest or imply that they're "essential".



I have no strong preferences towards flight at all. Your assumption that Im emotionally invested in flight being unchanged is unfounded. Not seeing a reason to overcorrect flight rules when your reason for doing so is to accomodate a far more broken and fundamental game design problem is not the same thing as loving flight rules as presented.



If you buy an adventure and it cannot accomodate official content thats existed since 2015 then the problem isn't with the content.

We can extend the benefit of the doubt to adventures released prior to the Aarakocra itself, but since then, and especially since the race has been republished twice over, there is no excuse for official adventures to fall apart just because of one official race.







Do keep in mind theres a couple different trains of thought going on here; this one in particular is in regards to DM created adventures, not officially published ones. So do not take this and try to argue that its an argument to disprove theres a problem with official adventures.



Banning flying races is a valid option if you don't want to design encounters to accomodate them. (Disregarding that good encounter design would naturally accomodate them anyway, without any special effort)



Kind of strange to assume that just because flight exists its always going to be a factor and you have no choice. Like, you know ahead of time what your players are going to be playing as, and you always have the option to ban the races if thats your fancy, and if your players are agreeable to that then theres literally no problem.

And if your players are the anti-social types who will pitch a fit if you do this, and will otherwise go out of their way to abuse anything they can to make your life as a DM miserable, then all anyone can tell you is to find a new group.

It means a lot if the rules fail to cover how flight without hover actually works as 5e & oned&d fails to do. Past editions where the rules were complete in this area rather than relying on the GM to finish flight rules makes for a perfect comparison that shows what is granted through the omissions
.

Spoiler: this pg45 rule for example

A Fly Speed can be used to travel through the air.
While you have a Fly Speed, you can stay aloft
until you land, fall, or die.
While flying, you fall if you lack the Hover trait
and have the Incapacitated or Prone condition or
your Fly Speed is reduced to 0.

 

[Chaosmancer]

yeah, there are limits to that, unlike when you fly, and no one is following you around for six rounds like you seem to believe (further down in your post)

So, if given optimum conditions for kiting... it is just as good or superior to flight, as no one will continue to pursue you. If we are to give the enemy intelligent reactions to kiting, why are we insisting that flight will always allow a single character to destroy the enemy completely with no reaction?

great, so the assumption is you are outside their range, can stay outside that range indefinitely while being able to hit them, and they make no attempts to hide

Yeah, if this is how your fights play out I agree, then flying does not make things much worse

Those are exactly the same assumptions you are making about Flight. Exactly. That you are outside the enemy's range. That you can stay outside their range indefinitely. And that they make no attempts to hide, or that hiding is impossible. I find it strange that you want to mock these assumptions, when they are endemic to the thing you are worried about.

But they can have close to full cover while you have none. Ever seen these narrow slits in castle walls? They exist to shoot arrows from while being essentially in full cover.

Ah, so not "a barricade" but "a castle wall with arrow slits". Now, here is a question. Can a single archer with range safely assault a castle by themselves? No. Can a flier? Also no. Because the flier is in the exact same situation. The enemy has 3/4 cover, you have none. So this isn't a difference at all between the two.

I did not say no encounter can deal with them, I disagreed with the notion that they are no issue for encounters in general

Well in general too much gold can cause issues for encounters. But that doesn't mean those issues are severe, game-breaking, or not dealt with rather easily.

But you have planted your flag alongside flight being uniquely disruptive. With your best example being a character with flight soloing a castle. Which is not a good argument, since it ignores many, many factors.

Find Familiar, the spell that takes an hour to cast and results in a familiar that cannot attack, very useful in combat

Good thing I was talking about, how did you phrase that? "Getting to hard to reach points" You didn't say "Getting to hard to reach points and being effective in combat". So I assumed you were talking about exploration, which is the realm usually discussed when speaking on flight being "broken" but it seems you were talking about getting somewhere hard to reach during combat. So... do you have an example? Something that, once again, can't be dealt with or accomplished through other means? Because I don't even know what this argument is supposed to be if you are completely ignoring exploration.

 

[Emberashh]

So far no one defending it has given me any reason for it, they just try to debunk the reasons against it. I would assume you have more than just a ‘it is not that bad’ to defend it

Because whether or not flight as a concept is desirable is a wholly different topic to whats being discussed. Id recommend starting a new one if you want to discuss that question.

you are defending them quite a bit though for that.

More Im disputing that your solution is whats best for the game itself, particularly in regards to official adventure design, where your apparent viewpoint is "do nothing and warp all rules to ensure we do nothing to change adventure design".

Keep in mind I went into the spiel about how best to design adventures for a reason. Its advice WOTC writers need to take to heart just as much as any common DM should. A well designed encounter doesn't have to go out of its way to provide a counter for a flying player, and not all encounters have to counter them at all.

It means a lot if the rules fail to cover how flight without hover actually works as 5e & oned&d fails to do.

But as a DM you should be interpreting unclear rules in a way that makes the game work. Regardless of how you feel the book should present the rule, you shouldn't be reading an unclear rule and then carrying an interpretation into the game that breaks the game.

And Id also argue the rules aren't really unclear on this at all. Your movement and speed are separate terms, and the interaction between this and hover directly implies a minimum amount of movement is expected each turn.

And this follows given 5e was designed on the assumption DMs would be experienced with past editions, so that expectation would be assumed.

As said in a previous post, thats easily adjusted by just stating it directly, and I also added that unifying speed and movement would be best as well, which simplifies what you posted in that first tweet without really losing much.

 

[tetrasodium]

But as a DM you should be interpreting unclear rules in a way that makes the game work. Regardless of how you feel the book should present the rule, you shouldn't be reading an unclear rule and then carrying an interpretation into the game that breaks the game.

And Id also argue the rules aren't really unclear on this at all. Your movement and speed are separate terms, and the interaction between this and hover directly implies a minimum amount of movement is expected each turn.

And this follows given 5e was designed on the assumption DMs would be experienced with past editions, so that expectation would be assumed.

As said in a previous post, thats easily adjusted by just stating it directly, and I also added that unifying speed and movement would be best as well, which simplifies what you posted in that first tweet without really losing much.

This is not an "unclear" rule, it's a flatly & obviously incomplete rule.

 

[Emberashh]

This is not an "unclear" rule, it's a flatly & obviously incomplete rule.

I don't believe the distinction matters here, and it doesn't change that as far as playing and running the game is concerned, you shouldn't be assuming an interpretation that breaks the game. A minimum movement speed makes sense for the reasons given, and it isn't some egregious effort to just rule that movement and speed are identical if you want to take it to the next step.

Ultimately, the fix here is simple and you should probably just focus on that rather than getting distracted trying to be right about whether its incomplete or unclear.

 

[tetrasodium]

I don't believe the distinction matters here, and it doesn't change that as far as playing and running the game is concerned, you shouldn't be assuming an interpretation that breaks the game. A minimum movement speed makes sense for the reasons given, and it isn't some egregious effort to just rule that movement and speed are identical if you want to take it to the next step.

Ultimately, the fix here is simple and you should probably just focus on that rather than getting distracted trying to be right about whether its incomplete or unclear.

It matters very much because the GM is prevented from saying "bob you need to follow the flight rules, write down the page number on your sheet next to your fly speed if you can't remember them" instead of completing those rules and regularly taking time away from the game to remind bob of how they were completed every time he conveniently forgets.

 

[Emberashh]

It matters very much because the GM is prevented from saying

As said, you cannot read a rule like this and then run it in a way that breaks the game.

5e in particular is a known quantity at this point. There is no excuse to run a crappy game just because some its rules are unclear and/or incomplete. You can just play something else if you're unwilling to address these problems with the game.

As said, the fix is simple, and frankly I don't believe you're actually coming from a place of running the game strictly and obtusely RAW. I don't believe you believe anyone runs the game that way, and Id be incredibly incredulous to have you reply and confirm you're the one in a million DM who would refuse a simple fix just because its not explicitly written in the book.

 

[Chaosmancer]

or maybe I design the adventures the way I want in the setting I want and flying is no part of that, and certainly not common at a minimum, because flying gets in the way of that.
LotR would be a very different story if Frodo could fly and not for the better.

And this is true of the VAST number of magical abilities classes have access to. So... who cares? LotR would be very different with teleportation or Raise Dead too.