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[Chaosmancer]

no one is talking about always, nice strawman.

Oh joy. Now we get to play this game. Okay, fine it isn't "always" it is just often enough that you'd rather ban fliers, while making no special considerations for any other similarly challenging feature.

All I said is that encounters need to be adjusted for fliers and they trivialize certain things. That has by now been essentially accepted, but somehow you insist on shifting the goalpost to show that I was wrong when I said so. Now they have to always be an issue that cannot be countered for fliers to be an issue at all.

Earlier nothing else was allowed to also be problematic, because if anything else is, then that apparently means fliers are ok, as if two wrongs do make a right somehow, instead of the obvious ‘more than one thing can be a problem’.

Right. Encounters need to be adjusted for sharpshooting archers, and they trivialize certain things. Ecounters need to be adjusted for ritual casting wizards and they trivialize certain things. Encounters need to be adjusted for darkvision races and they trivialize certain things. Encounters need to be adjusted for Wildshaping druids and they trivialize certain things.

We've accepted your statement because it is, on the whole, rather meaningless. All it ends up being is a statement that flight is impactful. But so are the VAST majority of PC abilities. my argument is that flight is no worse than many of these abilities. Because often people declare something that flight "breaks" only for it to quickly be a trivial thing to solve, or not even actually being a practical problem, or it is something that an ability they don't consider game breaking also solves.

that was not my example, it was yours. You said a solo flier and a solo archer both can accomplish nothing. I showed one way how the flier can theoretically be a problem in a way that is much harder to impossible for the archer.

No, this was YOUR example. I said that flight is very comparable to just having an archer. You said flight trivalizes barricades. I expressed doubts, you brought up castle walls and arrow slits. But this all goes back to you and your insistence that flight trivializes barricades. And since you seem to have a hard time remembering who said what, here is that quote. Heck, can I do a nesting quote here?

What adjustments are needed for flying that aren't needed for ranged attackers in general?

Barricades are not a problem for fliers

But they are for the rest of the party. And if you have sharpshooter a barrier is only effective if it is total cover. And if your enemy has total cover from you... you have total cover from them.

Additionally, Roofs are a thing. Those are barriers to the sky. As are trees. Or are we assuming a perfectly flat plain with only grass and a wall.

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.

So, this all started with your example. Barricades are "not a problem" for fliers. Which has now morphed into you talking about castle walss and how how arrow slits are "essentially" full cover (which they aren't, they are 3/4 cover, which was addressed with the sharpshooter comment I had already made)

And, I had forgotten this, but I did open my response to your barricade example with "but they are a problem for the rest of the party" which... dispels the whole "solo archer vs solo flier" thing anyways. Because I have ALWAYS brought it back to the fact that one of the biggest limiters on flight is that the entire party can't fly. A point that is often ignored when declaring fliers utterly broken.

I also did not say the flier is uniquely disruptive or the only thing that can be. Nice strawman again.

You never used those words, but that is clearly the position. Because low-level flight is treated like it is game breakingly powerful, when in reality... it isn't.

I am not interested in continuing this. Basically everyone agreed to what I said initially but still wants to prove me wrong by showing cases where there is no problem, but I never said that fliers always are, so this proves nothing

Okay, I am interested in continuing this, because you still seem to fundamentally misunderstand my point. For example, flight is a problem because they can turn invisible and fly into a castle according to you, but you don't acknowledge at all that a person who is invisible can also climb into a castle. The exact same end result, without flight needed at all. So is flight the problem? I'd argue it isn't.

well, I considered both a problem, so there is that

Okay, so if both are a problem, then we must either have the game designers ban both Disguise Self as a 1st level spell and flying races. Remember, this entire discussion started with this idea that the game designers have to reign in flight, because it is too powerful. If both of these things are equally problematic, then they should receive the same response from the game designers.

But if they attempted to scale back disguise self... people would be furious. Flight is given special (bad) treatment, and I want to show that it doesn't deserve that treatment.

 

[Emberashh]

Because I have ALWAYS brought it back to the fact that one of the biggest limiters on flight is that the entire party can't fly. A point that is often ignored when declaring fliers utterly broken.

Also good to note that even in a party full of birdpersons, flight isn't a deus ex machina, even with "flight rules are poor/incomplete" thing.

So many monsters can compete with them even in open air and thats before you get to mages, and nevermind the really beefy flying things. A dragon isn't going to be bothered by some birdpeople.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Just my usual reminder to use weather:

''A flying creature in a strong wind must land at the end of its turn or fall.''

That and super rare environment features such as...canopies or otherwise half-covered-by-webs ruins...will balance those fliers quite easily, allies or foes.

 

[Emberashh]

That and super rare environment features such as...canopies or otherwise half-covered-by-webs ruins...will balance those fliers quite easily, allies or foes.

Thats too much. You can't seriously expect anyone to design something else other than blank white rooms.

/s

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Just my usual reminder to use weather:

''A flying creature in a strong wind must land at the end of its turn or fall.''

That and super rare environment features such as...canopies or otherwise half-covered-by-webs ruins...will balance those fliers quite easily, allies or foes.

Yeah I'm always perplexed by these people who have terrible trouble with flying characters. It tends in my experience to be a mixed blessing.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Thats too much. You can't seriously expect anyone to design something else other than blank white rooms.

/s

Yeah, I'm always weirded by the ''what about that encounter with 3 goblins with no bows and no warrens entrances under a clear sky!'' claims.

I mean, if I design such an encounter, I know it would barely be a speedbump. Why would someone be surprised or frustrated that it isnt more complicated if they dont change it a little?

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Yeah, I'm always weirded by the ''what about that encounter with 3 goblins with no bows and no warrens entrances under a clear sky!'' claims.

I mean, if I design such an encounter, I know it would barely be a speedbump. Why would someone be surprised or frustrated that it isnt more complicated if they dont change it a little?

Sounds like a waste of the spell slots, frankly. Also: In what world would we want this encounter to be anything other than a quick slaughterfest?

 

[Emberashh]

My suspicion is that it stems from not embracing a more sandbox style of world design.

When you design your adventures in sandboxes, the circumstances of encounters are derived from their place in the world rather than some arbitrary narrative or meta concern.

In such worlds you don't really care about whether or not an encounter is able to counter a warband of Birdpeople because half the point is that the Birdpeople would be leveraging fights to be in their favor anyway, and where they can't do so, they'll in all likelihood be at a disadvantage despite their flying capabilities.

Theres no real contrivance necessary. If the Birdpeople travel into some dank cavern, it isn't going to automatically be this labyrinthine thing with 500ft cielings unless it happens to be the specific labyrinthine cave with 500ft cielings in whatever region.

And generally speaking, the gameplay that results from players working to get a fight out into the open, where their flight will let them roflstomp their hapless victims, is actually desirable. They're engaging with the gameworld and thinking about how to leverage their parties abilities tactically and strategically. You want this, even if your bespoke goblin encounter has to be roflstomped to get it.

And meanwhile the same overall logic applies to enemy composition. It would follow consistently from the world being presented, and where the Birdperson Warband excels is where they should be excelling, and if there are no places where they do not excel, then your world isn't really following any sort of identifiable logic.

It reminds me of the debates over druid wildshapes and whether or not people would react to random animals, insects, and arachnids creeping around places. It follows logically that in a world where Druids are a known thing that not only would there be defenses against them, but that at least some people would be suspicious if some cat suddenly shows up to the place they're guarding when cats don't just show up there out of the blue.

But if you're really insistent on arbitrary meta/narrative concerns, then you're going to argue against that simple logic because "bAlAnc3" or whatever.

 

[Emberashh]

Yeah, I'm always weirded by the ''what about that encounter with 3 goblins with no bows and no warrens entrances under a clear sky!'' claims.

I mean, if I design such an encounter, I know it would barely be a speedbump. Why would someone be surprised or frustrated that it isnt more complicated if they dont change it a little?

Plus theres also the fact that often the refrain is that "homebrew doesn't fix this!!!!" even though it'd actually be homebrew to have goblins without shortbows

 

[Vaalingrade]

So I've been talking about how 5e doesn't have sufficient guidance. So I went to look up what D&D even has to say about flying.

...

Well it turns out it basically has no rules at all:

Flying Movement​

Flying creatures enjoy many benefits of mobility, but they must also deal with the danger of falling. If a flying creature is knocked prone, has its speed reduced to 0, or is otherwise deprived of the ability to move, the creature falls, unless it has the ability to hover or it is being held aloft by magic, such as by the fly spell.

That's it. That's the joke.

And what a joke it is.