NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6711075" data-attributes="member: 6787650">This is key. The thing that makes space-constrained combat (a little) harder is when monsters ignore the front-liners and eat an opportunity attack to tear into the back line. If your front line is AC 21 (plus Shield) and your back line is AC 16, and a pair of Chuuls who are low on HP overrun the front line and Dash over to the back line, then the back line guy can't just Dodge the way the front-liner can and assume he'll be safe: rolling a 10 at disadvantage is far easier than rolling a 15 at disadvantage. Instead, the back-line guy has to expend at least a first level spell like Expeditious Retreat to get away, unless he already has Longstrider precast or is Mobile. Then the Chuuls can potentially Dash over again to pin the back-liner against the side of the arena, and if they get lucky they may even hit him a couple of times and maybe even paralyze him. In the test combats so far, the party still performs very well, but combats which would be trivially easy (near-zero resource expenditure) in an open-ended space become a little dicey in a cage match if you try to get cheap with them, and you wind up expending some spells and HP to keep the difficulty down.By open-ended space I mean "any area that you can freely exit." A cramped labyrinth is open-ended, and so is Australian scrub, even though sight lines in either may only be 40' or so. The ability to disengage from melee (forward or backward) is key, although forward is riskier if there might be more monsters ahead.Another side note: the scariest CR 4 encounter I've rolled today on kobold.com is 8 draft horses. 40' movement, 19 HP, +6 to hit for 9 points of damage each... if 8 draft horses are for some reason driven into a murderous rage, they can do some serious damage without eating up much of your XP budget.</blockquote>

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