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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Noinarap" data-source="post: 4391353" data-attributes="member: 59730">It's true that 4e allows a cleric to shoot a bow into a melee with the same lack of penalties that a ranger has. This is part of the new notion that the game doesn't have to make sense all the time (since it has never done so anyway). It only has to make sense when we're watching.For example, minions should be afraid to leave the house- what if they stub their toes and lose a hit point? But this is the wrong way to look at it. Minions have 1 hit point when they're in a fight we're watching, not when they're burning down villages and murdering innocent people.Or consider a fight between a level 20 warlord and a level 3 goblin. The mighty warlord can't kill the pathetic goblin with a single at-will attack. This seems crazy until you realize that the system was made so fights worked well when combatants were close in level. There is no good reason to have this fight, so the system doesn't care how well it works.The "Free Ranged Feats for Everyone" notion is the same. Characters that are good at ranged attacks all choose certain feats. OK, let's make those feats automatic. Characters that suck at ranged attacks don't make ranged attacks more than once in a great while. Should we write a new feat that half the classes get for free just so we can include a rule to penalize melee characters for those corner case moments when their best action is a ranged attack? No- it's just rules bloat.Melee classes choose to make melee attacks overwhelmingly often. As they level up and their main ability scores continue to diverge from their unimportant ability scores, ranged attacks become less and less valuable. In other words, the penalty for using these attacks keeps growing because the bonus for using your main attacks grows faster. Further, melee classes are usually stuck making basic attacks at range. Even if they have weapons that emphasize strength over dexterity, their ranged attacks are pretty marginal.For classes that dabble in ranged abilities, such as rogues, penalties on ranged attacks force them into one optimal action. Instead of saying, "Hmm, if I move here I can throw a dagger at that dazed guy. Or I can move here and flank this other guy. What's better?" the player says, "Well, the dazed guy is in melee with my ally intervening, so rather than attack at -8, I'll just flank someone and sneak attack, like I do every turn."In general, the only thing that makes the current rules bad in this case is that they don't look realistic. But they end up performing just fine. Melee characters already have tremendous disincentives against ranged attacks. Why cripple them completely?</blockquote>

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