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Message: <blockquote data-quote="vandaexpress" data-source="post: 6634571" data-attributes="member: 6790472">Dude. You're preaching things as being absolute truth, throwing around words like undisputable, no empirical evidence, and DPR when you're failing to account for all tactics available to enemies and party members. Whenever someone calls you on this and presents you with evidence to the contrary, you throw a hissy fit and default to a "well you just don't understand the game, my position is infallible, such badwrongfun" argument that doesn't hold water--as neither arrogance or bluster make for convincing arguments. I seem to recall that, according to you, I am the least-informed poster on these boards and I don't understand the basic principles of D&D rules. You rely on hyperbole not only in your point of views (my position is "indisputable") but also when you verbally abuse and put down those who disagree and, dare I say, prove you wrong.Case in point, the above statement about ranged being "more powerful" than melee and it not being disputable. Yeah. If your DM is a moron, I guess I could see that being the case.I'll humor you, though.Range is laughably easy to shut down because it relies on LoS against a distant foe. Assuming the archer is hanging back, all you have to do is kill their LoS with first level spells like fog cloud or silent image positioned near their target to block view. Or a sleet storm in between the caster and the archer, archer can't see through, has to move through difficult terrain and make dex saves or become prone, so repositioning takes forever. The blocking LoS doesn't do much against melee combatants, since they can just run through the fog or the illusion and whack the caster, but archers have to waste rounds disbelieving the illusion or running around to restore LoS. Generally, he's forced to waste rounds repositioning himself closer to the melee if he wants to take any shots, at which point he's easy to pick off. Heaven help you if you're fighting a high level caster or anyone capable of erecting barriers to block your ability to move, like wall of stone or wall of ice, which is, incidentally, a lair action for the white dragon, cutting off not only your LoS, but often your ability to reposition to a more favorable position from the rest of your party. This is to say nothing of spells that force disadvantage on ranged attacks like wall of water or the like.If you're using fly or haste over and over again, you would be completely boned against any DM wanting to challenge the party. All he would have to do is hammer you with enough damage to kill your conc, and your fighters are SOL, falling from whatever height or losing a turn from the loss of haste. Or hit you with a sleet storm and box you off from escaping it, or simply casting dispel magic or countering your spells. If you're casting your spells immediately before combat, the monsters hear the verbal component and will prepare themselves accordingly for impending combat and alert guards to chomp at your casters from the rear.I disagree, he brings many valid points to the table that are relevant to the discussion, even if you don't understand how. Additionally, he's civil about it.Ah. Here we go again with the absolutes like "never" and "100% guarantee".The unfortunate truth is, you can't 100% guarantee <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />, dude. Let me pull my own example:I had a party of that level take on an adult white dragon in its lair w/ lair actions in Hoard of the Dragon Queen. They didn't rely on heavy ranged firepower, because I used the above tactics to remove that aspect of combat from play. I playtested the encounter 6 times before running it and yeah, they lost, TPK, about 4 out of the 6 times I tested it, in nearly all cases, the ranged DPR wasn't able to play much of a role because the dragon shut them down using the tactics I detailed above. So was it deadly? Yeah, but not a 100% guarantee of a loss by a long shot. Anyway, they were able to emerge victorious. Here's how it went:The two stealthiest members of the party (bard and ranger) got a surprise round after they used pass without trace, <s>bless</s>, and bardic inspiration to sneak up on the dragon through a side tunnel, yes, they beat its insanely high passive perception, thanks to bless and a bit of luck. They got an opening volley on the dragon then retreated back into the tunnel to avoid its breath weapon while the rest of the party charged in through another entrance, separated so as to prevent them from being wiped out with a single breath.Unfortunately, the retreat of the ranged artillery into the tunnel made it trivially easy to remove them from the rest of the fight thanks to the lair action for wall of ice blocking where the tunnel connected back into the lair, forcing them to go around the long way, then they got hit by frightful presence and were unable to approach it for most of the combat, they were literally stuck, frightened, in that tunnel for three rounds or so with no Line of Sight and no way to contribute to the rest of the party. When they finally made it close to the other entrance into the lair, the ice wall moved, once again blocking them from entering.The rest of the party, a barbarian, paladin, and sorcerer fought the dragon for most of the combat. It remained on the ceiling of the lair and used its breath weapon, frightful presence, and legendary actions to reposition and whack people with its tail, occasionally swooping down to melee before returning to the ceiling. The Barbarian was able to land melee hits on the dragon using a greatsword and high jumps because, per the written module and map, the ceiling was 30ft high and the dragon occupied a 15x15' cube, meaning the barbarian could, according to the rules for High Jumping, hit it with a high jump on a running start thanks to his character height (a 7 foot reghed barbarian) and high strength score (18). Granted, it was only one hit per round, but he was able to hit pretty consistently, dealing significant damage with Hazirawn, the weapon awarded by the module earlier in the dungeon. When the dragon was moving around too much, he fell back on throwing his +1 spear or javelins.Being a ranged threat, the dragon prioritized the sorcerer and bitch-slapped him at every opportunity, knocking him out early and resulting in the sorc contributing fairly middling damage overall due to the dragon's legendary resistance, he got brought back by lay on hands, then was knocked out and killed by the dragon.The dwarven paladin readied an action to climb onto the white dragon's back when it used its tail attack on him (using the rules for Climb onto a Bigger Creature found on p271 in the DMG), crawled up, attacked the dragon twice with advantage, hit twice, including one critical, converted both hits into smites, burning both 2nd level slots, rolled well, and seriously injured the dragon. He was knocked off by the wing buffet and knocked out, but he probably did far more damage than anyone else in that encounter. Using a melee weapon.The majority of the damage the dragon took was from the melee'ers. The breath weapon was pretty scary, but the party scattered and got lucky on a few saves. One character was killed, the rest survived. They knocked the dragon down to 40hp and then, per the module description, it fled. I feel pretty confident in saying that they could have killed it if it kept fighting.In fact, overall it's not uncommon for this dragon to get killed by the party at this level, from what I've read online of other people's playthroughs of the module.Ah, here we go again. My favorite part is "I could prove wrong 99% of what you're stating". Dude, that doesn't even make sense. Are you saying that he's made 100 points and you could dispute 99 of them? What are you even talking about here?It's gonna be okay, bro. Let's just calm down and hug it out, okay? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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