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Message: <blockquote data-quote="vandaexpress" data-source="post: 6636024" data-attributes="member: 6790472">I'm the same way. I think a major difference between you and I is simply experience with the game itself. I get the feel that you and your group are a bit further along in system mastery than me and mine, so I'm not quite as confident of the conclusions you draw, preferring to draw my own conclusions after testing things myself. And Celtavian, humbling though it may be to admit, I often do find myself agreeing with you over time (this was certainly the case with GWM and TWF on that other thread). You are a very smart guy and I consider you and emdw45 to have the highest level of system mastery of any poster here, I just sometimes chafe at the way you express your viewpoints and feel the need to stick up for the guy you're pummeling--it's definitely not anything personal against you or the way you play the game, which actually seems to be very similar to me and my group. So I want to apologize if it seems like I've gone after you personally on the boards here and clarify that I have a lot of respect for you and your posts... 99% of the time. <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=";)" />The reason I play the core rules, I think, is the same you do - I don't believe in throwing in house rules and tweaks until I'm very confident I understand how the game plays according to the vision of the designers. In particular, I want to understand how the game plays across all level tiers to prevent me from jumping to conclusions about something seeming really powerful at low levels but not being that big a deal at high levels or against more challenging foes (like Heavy Armor Mastery in the other thread).The reason I playtested the Adult White Dragon fight six times before running it was because my gut reaction was that the party was going to get absolutely hosed, and, in fact, if not for the limited area height and if I hadn't researched high jumping and suggested it to the barbarian player, I'm fairly certain the fight would have ended in a TPK for my group 80-90% of the time.Same, I just haven't deployed any real tweaks yet, but I plan to.Agreed again. As my party progresses through the upper levels, I'm finding myself throwing out much of Tyranny of Dragons included encounters because I can't see how many of them will reasonably challenge a tactically-minded high level group. I find myself having to spend an increasing amount of time building and "enhancing" monsters for high level play. Or maybe I don't need to, and the encounters are more challenging than they look on paper. I look forward to seeing more people's perspectives on high level 5e play. Their surveys have indicated that many people tend to play 1st - 12th levels, so it makes sense that's where so much of their focus has been. I understand it from a business perspective, but it does worry me as my group approaches the third tier. I hope it doesn't all start falling apart like in 3e.I don't disagree on any particular point. I think WotC/Kobold Press wanted to have an 'epic' dragon showdown to cap their first module and realized that a Dragon with full mobility, even a lowly white, would kill most groups of that level if played intelligently in an open space, so they deliberately handicapped it by putting it in a cave. The fact that they chose to do so may be, more than anything, evidence to support your assertion that Ranged > Melee. In fact, the DMG expressly boosts the CR of creatures below CR 10 that have a ranged attack and flying for precisely this reason. I am just going to wait until my party clears through tier 3 before I firmly and finally declare full support for the "Range is superior" argument. To date, my personal opinion of the most OP feat is Sharpshooter, particularly when combined with Crossbow expert - I actually feel that SS is incredibly strong even at low levels because it eliminates one of my most useful tools for mitigating ranged firepower: using cover.I have a hunter ranger in my party that is, far and away, the most deadly. Part of the reason I have such strong views about the "ease" of shutting down ranged characters is because I have to custom tailor most of my challenging encounters to do precisely this (limit the power of Ranged) in order to challenge the party as a whole (without killing them) due to the Ranger's power level being insane compared to everyone else's. At this point, I'm willing to admit that if you play the game out of the box against vanilla encounters like those presented in Tyranny of Dragons, Ranged attacks seem to be a very attractive option for the levels I've played at. Holding off on final judgment until I wrap up the campaign, however. And it's possible that my perspective will be skewed by the fact that I invested a lot of time into balancing the big boss encounters specifically to challenge ranged characters in order to give melee-ers a chance to shine.I started doing this once I ran a boss battle with an elite succubus (I gave her a bunch more hit points) that the party sniper took down incredibly fast. It was a disappointing encounter and the only time I will admit to fudging dice rolls as a DM in order to make it more challenging. Ever since then, I've playtested big encounters over and over again... because if I don't, the party ranger seems to make them much easier than intended. We likely have the same perspectives on range, but some choose to address it through house rules, whereas I choose to address it, and most game balance issues, by modifying encounters. House ruling is likely the less labor-intensive solution, but as I mentioned before, I'd rather accumulate more gameplay experience with RAW before tweaking, in case there's something I'm missing or some sort of paradigm shift that occurs at higher level encounters to bring melee back to the playing field. Based on your experiences, however, this is likely not the case.Another poster who completed Tyranny expressed similar frustrations to you, particularly during the final battle, where his caster was essentially relegated to casting fly on the party melee'ers during the final battle with Tiamat.I'm just hoping to find something that others have missed, I guess, because for low levels, I absolutely loved everything about 5e and I'm sort of desperately holding out that the awesomeness continues uninhibited at higher levels, I really don't want to have to start implementing house rules. I may just end up giving boots of flying or whatever to the melee'ers, I don't know.As for small dragon lairs... I agree that the CR should be lower for these encounters, one could argue that the DMG encounter building guidelines technically account for this with the circumstantial difficulty modifiers but they're vague, and at first glance, a newer player may not recognize that the dragon in a lair with a 30' ceiling is at a significant disadvantage and overestimate the party's power level and deadliness, it would be nice to have more specific statements indicating that flyers without full use of mobility take a hit to their CR, similar to how some creatures, when faced in their lairs, get an increase to their CR.</blockquote>

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