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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 7234835" data-attributes="member: 12731">I'm not sure how to respond. You're just making things up. The real "power of melee" is that people like playing melee heroes. It's a cornerstone of fantasy, manly striding into combat using brave man to man tactics, instead of cowardly or sneaky ranged shots. Everything in fantasy rpg combat revolves around making the melee hero viable, because in real-life he sure ain't (remember, adventurers comprise small-scale skirmishes, and any battlefield comparisons are off). Starting with the very concept of hit points in itself (the idea that you remain perfectly capable as long as you're not dead, greatly diminishing the value of striking first)I don't see anything that makes a comparison to american sports relevant. If D&D had had an aggro mechanism, something that would give the player some control over monster behavior, and this being much better for melee builds, I could have seen it. But you're just making up this "power of melee". It might be there in basket, I wouldn't know, I know next to nothing about sports. But if I'm not mistaken, basket players aren't allowed to cast Spike Growth or Wall of Fire, so interfering with the opposing team's tactics is much better handled with battlefield control spells in D&D than actually being there yourself.Other than that, you should try playing a party which denies the monsters their melee attacks sometimes. <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=":)" /> It's real easy: just stay out of their reach. Of course, it helps if you don't only do dungeon bashes where you never spot monsters more than 30 ft away, and where the DM actively prevents you from scouting ahead. You should find that this considerably reduces the threat of perhaps 90% of Monster Manual entries. If monsters are reduced by, say, a third, that amounts to the party being boosted 50%, and no melee build can match a party-wide +50% buff.Even if ranged fire was only half as damaging as melee, the advantage would still go to range, considering how much easier it is for a party to focus ranged fire (remember how hp makes a monster just as effective at 1 hp?) than melee fire.TL;DR: There is no "power of melee", only "power of ranged". 5th edition forgot that the dominance of melee, a staple of the fantasy genre, only exists as long as the game enforces it.</blockquote>

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