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<blockquote data-quote="Amrûnril" data-source="post: 8599100" data-attributes="member: 6841183">Long distance engagements certainly aren't limited to white-room scenarios. In a campaign with a lot of outdoor adventuring, it's more or less inevitable that some encounters will fall into that category, which means multiple rounds of unanswered attacks by ranged combatants about melee combatants. This would be one thing if long range shots had intrinsically poor accuracy, could be easily blocked by shields and had poor penetration against armor. But when those long range shots do damage at a rate&nbsp; comparable to melee weapons, melee focused combat approaches quickly start to feel invalidated. Harassing fire from such weapons also makes retreat next to impossible in a lot of scenarios.That said, melee and ranged approaches do feel reasonably well balanced in dungeon crawls and other shorter range environments, which was likely the main focal point during design. And more complicated rules for weapon range would definitely feel anomalous given the relative simplicity of 5E's overall weapon/armor rules. Without a setting worse than &quot;disadvantage&quot; but better than &quot;completely out of range&quot;, though, it's really hard to set ranged weapon properties in a way that's balances what ranged attackers can accomplish without overly limiting what they can attempt.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Amrûnril, post: 8599100, member: 6841183"] Long distance engagements certainly aren't limited to white-room scenarios. In a campaign with a lot of outdoor adventuring, it's more or less inevitable that some encounters will fall into that category, which means multiple rounds of unanswered attacks by ranged combatants about melee combatants. This would be one thing if long range shots had intrinsically poor accuracy, could be easily blocked by shields and had poor penetration against armor. But when those long range shots do damage at a rate comparable to melee weapons, melee focused combat approaches quickly start to feel invalidated. Harassing fire from such weapons also makes retreat next to impossible in a lot of scenarios. That said, melee and ranged approaches do feel reasonably well balanced in dungeon crawls and other shorter range environments, which was likely the main focal point during design. And more complicated rules for weapon range would definitely feel anomalous given the relative simplicity of 5E's overall weapon/armor rules. Without a setting worse than "disadvantage" but better than "completely out of range", though, it's really hard to set ranged weapon properties in a way that's balances what ranged attackers can accomplish without overly limiting what they can attempt. [/QUOTE]

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