D&D 5E Helping melee combat to be more competitive to ranged.

[Corwin]

How long are your combats?

Depends. Yours?

Serious question, because you're talking about 10's of rounds to go through 2 quivers of arrows unless your making 4 attacks a round, in which case you probable have a magical solution?

Hahaha. Yes. His very example, multiple times, has been of a hand crossbow fighter making 4 attacks a round. Please don't try to muddy things with misinformation. It just drags these things out and confuses everyone.

 

[Caliban]

FYI - I'm starting a new campaign this weekend. I've instituted the following house rules:

Archery Style gives +2 damage instead of +2 attack bonus.
Sharpshooter doesn't allow you to ignore cover. Instead, you have a +2 attack bonus against any target with half or partial cover.

We'll see if this makes a difference or not.

 

[Corwin]

You say it matters to you, and I'll accept that, but, please, don't presume to speak for everyone. ;P

Show me where I did. Or retract it. Unlike you, I make efforts to avoid trying to argue from a false position of authority.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Show me where I did. Or retract it.

I'll tell you what. I made an observation about the rules not doing something you said they did - not 'for anyone,' and I've backed it up, above. Neither encumbrance system meaningfully penalizes or balances some hypothetical 12 STR archer, the numbers back it up. You came back with a vague personal anecdote as if it were blanket disproof, and accused me of 'speaking for everyone.' I wasn't speaking for anyone, I was addressing the optional encumbrance system. But I point out that you're only speaking for yourself with the same phrasing and you feign indignation?

So, go ahead and retract that, and I'll follow suit.

Unlike you, I make efforts to avoid trying to argue from a false position of authority.

Show me where I did. Or retract it.

 

[LapBandit]

This place is way too lightly moderated. These conversations go way way way off the rails.

 

[Corwin]

Here you go.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Here you go.

That link goes to a page of the thread I don't even have a post on.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Depends. Yours?


Hahaha. Yes. His very example, multiple times, has been of a hand crossbow fighter making 4 attacks a round. Please don't try to muddy things with misinformation. It just drags these things out and confuses everyone.

Are you aware that your posting style is needlessly aggressive and insulting? You've managed to not answer the question I asked and then essentially accused me of acting in bad faith because of what another poster said?

But, okay, I'll chalk it up to a long, contentious thread for this one and respond in good faith.

My combats are typically 4-5 rounds long. There may be some maneuver to contact (my group likes careful approaches), but for actual hammer time, about that long. Longer combats are ones that involve multiple waves and/or a chase where attacks aren't happening every round. The longest combat I've run was a little less than 20 rounds, and that was 40 zombies and 2 skeleton ogres against a 5th level party in a running 'zombie horde' engagement. The party moved between defensible locations, evacuating one when being overrun to move to the next. Good fight, and that's the one time I ever actually stressed the ammunition of my ranger (she took a round to dip into reserve ammo).

So, typically 4-5 rounds. And, assuming that, for some reason, the only archer I can talk about is the crossbow expert, that's 20-25 bolts, call it 30 for an action surge. Assume 40 bolts readily on hand, because that's trivial to do without magic. 1 minute to pick over the combat recovers 15 arrows, leaving 25 left on hand for one more 5 round combat before being tapped. 1 minute after that to pull 12 arrows back out, and another round or 2 to dip into reserve to bring the complement back up to 40. That's 2 more fights, and another dip into the reserve to bring the complement to 24, which limits things for a 5th fight. So, a 20th level character with no magic, carrying only 80 bolts (40 ready and 40 reserve in the backpack) can easily do 5 fights at the average length. If they have a bag of holding, this becomes as many fights as they spent their loot on buying bolts, which at 20th is a lot of bolts.

Now, lets say you run one of those longer fights. At 5 bolts a round, 40 ready bolts, that's 8 rounds of combat. An action surge or taking one round off to pull reserve bolts gives another 4 rounds (assuming you can only pull 20 bolts an action). Another round off gives you another 4 rounds. That's 16 rounds of shooting (less if you're action surging, more if you're using your bonus action for something else) by just carrying a trivial amount of ammunition. A single quiver of Ehlona puts 60 bolts on hand, for 12 rounds uninterrupted. A bag of holding provides effectively unlimited reserve ammunition for restocking. Ammunition just isn't a problem for a player that plans to use a lot of ammunition.

For anyone not the 20th-level-fighter-crossbow-expert machine gun, this just gets better. Ammunition isn't a serious limitation on ranged combat.

 

[nswanson27]

RE: topic

I'm running a game with a rogue ranged focused character and a ranger with ranged focus. The rogue is entirely manageable (they usually get advantage from hiding, and usually get sneak attack, but that's perfectly fine. The ranger, though, I often joke that I have to add more bad guys just to offset the damage put out by the ranger. In reality, it's not to horrible, but she averages 40ish dpr a round since 5th level (magic bow, hunters mark, collossus slayer, 20 dex). The party is now 11th, and the battlemaster fighter is just now reaching something akin to parity in damage output with 3 attacks (he can burn superiority to go higher, of course). He's not max DPR, going shield master, dueling style, and using a pick, so he hits pretty often (often has advantage) and does d8+8 with his magic pick per attack, so right in the same ballpark. The difference I see, though, is that the battlemaster often loses an attack or can't make any attacks at all due to positioning. I don't run many fights at long range for the bows, and most start within 100' (most actually within 50'), but that single round or the need to reposition loses the melee fighter attacks. I'm generous with allowing multiple thrown weapons on a single interaction, so he has javelins (2) and hand axes (2) which he throws, and that helps as he often goads with those to control the field, but the ranger archer almost never cannot attack, so she manages a much better damage throughput. And this is without the ranger having sharpshooter (her choice) at all. IN fact, the ranger is built to do much more than just shoot things, and is a vital part of the exploration pillar of my game. If I had a player bring in an actually optimized ranged character, they would far outpace the others in contribution to combat (I'm a firm adherent that killing monsters faster is almost always the best tactical option due to the way D&D does hitpoints).

So, yeah, I see that ranged can be unbalancing to the game, if players feel like they should have fairly equal contributions. If they don't, or you, like me, have players that aren't that interested in optimization, then it's not much of an issue. But if there was a fix put in to "level" the field, then likely my players wouldn't notice. I will say that I nerfed sharpshooter earlier to remove the -5/+10 and add +1 DEX, so that may be why it hasn't been that attractive to my ranger. The rogue took it first chance, though, but mostly because that players HATES taking penalties in any form and would have taken the feat if it did nothing other than eliminate cover OR range penalties -- either would have been sufficient for him to take the feat. Heck, I could have made it two separate feats, one to eliminate cover and the other to eliminate range disad, and he'd have prioritized those feats anyway.

Long and short: I clearly see that ranged CAN be very destablizing to a game. Telling people who have this complaint that they should just change the way they play to accomodate the way the ruleset allows this is a bit annoying. Pointing out "hinderances" that really aren't is also a bit annoying. I don't have much of a dog in the fight other than to say that the rules do allow it to be out of hand, but that it's a specific table issue.

Don't get me started on the borkedness of sorlocks (a violently broken combination -- xd10+x*5+x*d6+10 ft pushback @ 600 feet range for the cost of 5 levels of Warlock and the spellsniper feat (either pushback OR 600ft range for 2 levels), up to twice a round AND synergizing with other area spells like wall of fire? Nope, not a cool combination.

And minions are right out.

But those two existing and be more egregious than the martial ranged vs melee disparity doesn't mean the ranged disparity doesn't exist or can't be an issue for some tables. All of them are rules failures.

Just curious - have you ever run a table without any melee PCs? In the games I've been apart of without them (and crowd control as well), the PCs get rushed and things are get more dicey for winning fights, even with good dpr.

 

[Corwin]

Are you aware that your posting style is needlessly aggressive and insulting?

Are you aware that you read aggressiveness and insults into posts?

You've managed to not answer the question I asked and then essentially accused me of acting in bad faith because of what another poster said?

I did answer you. Sorry if it wasn't the answer you wanted. But it was clearly an answer. And an accurate one at that. And, as I have done many times here, if I wanted to acuse you of acting in bad faith, I would have said so. Again, it seems like you are projecting or reading into things.

But, okay, I, too, will chalk it up to a long, contentious thread for this one and respond in good faith.

[buncha white room stuff intended to bolster a particular POV]

Can't recall the last time I saw, or read of, a fantasy archer regularly running around with multiple quivers on their hip/back/wherever, and a handful more in a backpack. This, IMO, falls into a similar playstyle category as [MENTION=6774887]Ashkelon[/MENTION]'s archers carrying around a dozen rapiers and/or daggers to whip out momentarily between turns, before promptly dropping them, just so they can get in on OAs.