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Helping melee combat to be more competitive to ranged.
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<blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6982203" data-attributes="member: 6787650"><p>Very true. Even though I am <em>aware</em> that ranged combat is dominant in the 5E ruleset, I am also aware that 5E is a game in which the DM is supposed to "lose" over and over and over again. Accordingly, I typically avoid giving the PCs intelligent, tool-using foes like humanoids in any scenario that is supposed to be a fun dungeon crawl. Fighting humanoids like hobgoblins and drow is intended to be a big deal in my game, both emotionally and tactically, no matter how low their CR is.</p><p></p><p>Also, even intelligent foes like Hobgoblins aren't smart enough to reinvent their whole tactical doctrine in thirty seconds of combat against the PCs, so if the PCs have a working strategy, it generally keeps working up until the point where some enemies escape to report back to their base and give specific intel on the PCs. So that adds time pressure and an incentive not to let enemies escape, which incidentally increases the value of opportunity attacks. (Also, melee attacks are the only way to make guaranteed-nonlethal attacks for taking prisoners, e.g. if you have moral compunctions about killing guards for doing their job you can just take them down instead.)</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Well, maybe. I had one player who was sad about how ineffective his Barbarian was in certain scenarios (they'd been going up against a lot of tool-users in space at the time, and there was an ongoing hobgoblin invasion) and asked me for advice. I had to tell him, "Yeah, you're perceiving things accurately. Melee really is kind of weak in 5E, just like in real life. Your best bet might be to try stealth to sneak up on enemies." Around that same time, he created a 1st level Warlock and spent about half of his time levelling up that PC instead.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="FormerlyHemlock, post: 6982203, member: 6787650"] Very true. Even though I am [I]aware[/I] that ranged combat is dominant in the 5E ruleset, I am also aware that 5E is a game in which the DM is supposed to "lose" over and over and over again. Accordingly, I typically avoid giving the PCs intelligent, tool-using foes like humanoids in any scenario that is supposed to be a fun dungeon crawl. Fighting humanoids like hobgoblins and drow is intended to be a big deal in my game, both emotionally and tactically, no matter how low their CR is. Also, even intelligent foes like Hobgoblins aren't smart enough to reinvent their whole tactical doctrine in thirty seconds of combat against the PCs, so if the PCs have a working strategy, it generally keeps working up until the point where some enemies escape to report back to their base and give specific intel on the PCs. So that adds time pressure and an incentive not to let enemies escape, which incidentally increases the value of opportunity attacks. (Also, melee attacks are the only way to make guaranteed-nonlethal attacks for taking prisoners, e.g. if you have moral compunctions about killing guards for doing their job you can just take them down instead.) Well, maybe. I had one player who was sad about how ineffective his Barbarian was in certain scenarios (they'd been going up against a lot of tool-users in space at the time, and there was an ongoing hobgoblin invasion) and asked me for advice. I had to tell him, "Yeah, you're perceiving things accurately. Melee really is kind of weak in 5E, just like in real life. Your best bet might be to try stealth to sneak up on enemies." Around that same time, he created a 1st level Warlock and spent about half of his time levelling up that PC instead. [/QUOTE]
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