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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6982118" data-attributes="member: 42582">Among the participants in this thread, these seem to be the most contentious issues.I think it was you, not too far upthread, who posited that a significant number of encounters would happen in dungeons, and hence at relatively short range. It seems, though, that that may not be the case for those who find that ranged combat is a dominant strategy (and it is worth remembering that this view is not limited to those who focus on DPR alone - see eg [MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] in this very thread).To me it seem consistent with the general tenor of 5e design, but not necessarily the best possible design all things considered, that this matter is put more in the GM's hands than the players'. (Whereas, for instance, one could imagine melee character who have the ability to close range with rapid bursts of speed - and without having to eat up their action surge, which is a good chunk of their DPR - to do so.)I think they worried very much about balance - hence the very non-traditional die spreads for healing, for damaging spells, etc, as well as the 6-8 encounter per day baseline (without which spell-using classes, especially ones with good attack spells, can tend to dominate).But I also suspect they made assumptions about the context and framing of encounters that aren't spelled out in the rulebooks, but in the absence of which ranged combat can tend to dominate.But anyway, my comment was really a slightly ironic allusion to 4e - in effect, your argument over your past few posts has been that because melee fighters are (in 4e parlance) defenders, the fact that they are second-tier strikers (again, using 4e parlance) compared to archers does not matter.4e was designed precisely along these sorts of lines - so a player knew what s/he was getting into with the choice of class/sub-class, and the mechanics for each class (especially the defender, who needs supporting mechanics like some of those you have identified - controlling attacks, damage mitigation, etc) were designed to feed clearly into these distinctions. (Or, when they blurred them, they did so in an obvious way, so that - again - everyone goes in with eyes open.)5e is clearly less transparent in its design intentions, and leaves all this stuff to be worked out by players via analysis and bitter experience. In this respect, at least, 5e's design and presentation resembles 3Es, and in light of this, it doesn't surprise me that we're seeing threads about issues with PC build and PC balance similar to those which are common in relation to 3E.For clarity, I'm not saying that the complaints about imbalance are sound (in the 5e case - I think they fairly clearly are in the 3E case). I'm saying that the fact that they exist at all is a symptom of a deliberate feature of 5e's design and presentation, namely, the avoidance of transparency about what sorts of functions for particular classes/builds will produce at least a rough degree of mechanical effectiveness under some particular parameters or other.</blockquote>

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