How are melee characters expected to deal with flying creatures?

[renau1g]

Absolutely - but shouldn't it work a little better out of the box, too? Mind you, I think my problem would be solved by the harpy not having its aura (which is retarded, anyways) and the dragon's range being 10 instead of 20. So maybe those are just simple mistakes, hopefully not repeated often at higher levels or in later MMs.

Or maybe flight is just a lot more powerful than it used to be and hover is given out just a bit too much. Or maybe the loophole of Grasping Javelins should be championed as a solution rather than the clear loophole that it is. Dunno.

This I agree with. I`m glad that flight is more powerful in 4e than 3e, although there`s no way a blue dragon should have hover (not sure if they do or the harpy). WOTC is not perfect in their monster design either, most DM`s are somewhat aware of this fact so I always review the monsters I use in adventures for a sanity check. Also, I wouldn`t throw more than 1 encounter very rarely that the party isn`t expected to be prepared for.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I can´t imagine a reasonable setting, where a blue dragon hovers at maximum range and fires its breath weapon on a group of adventurers he has never encountered or heard of before...
at least he should announce that his last breath just knocks unconcious talk to the PCs after their defeat.

And yeah, it actually is the PCs responsibility not to get in such encounters unprepaired, but they must have a reasonable chance to do so.
(And i don´t mean they need a reasonable chance to defeat anything they encounter... scaling every encounter by level so that they are just walking xp bags is also bad design)

And it is the same bad design in any other RPG including 3rd edition and 2nd edition D&D.

 

[keterys]

And in 3rd edition and 2nd edition, it didn't have the ability to outrange the party, and characters had methods of fast travel or other getaway methods.

 

[KarinsDad]

So we're back to the dragon having to specifically fight in a suboptimal (or downright stupid) manner so that the party has a chance?

I mean, I hope no adventure ever has a blue dragon in a desert. One of their preferred habitats.

The parties indicated, two fair examples of parties, have nothing they can do about the blue dragon.

They can be found anywhere but prefer to lair in coastal caves, attacking and plundering ships that sail too close.


Sages (and the Monster Manual) maintain that blue dragons prefer coastal regions. More precisely, blue dragons prefer areas subject to frequent, violent storms. Although coastal areas and seaside cliffs fit this description, so too do certain tropical isles and mountainous highlands not terribly distant from the pounding sea.

For their lairs, blue dragons favor enormous stone ruins or caves in the sides of hills, cliffs, or mountains. Blues enjoy taking over structures built by other races. They make their lairs as lofty as possible to survey their domains from the heights. Elevation makes them feel truly part of storms that roll through. Even if a blue dragon cannot find or construct a lair at high altitude, it will likely choose a lair in which it can easily access the main entrance only by flight. Would-be intruders on land must undertake difficult, if not nearly impossible, climbs.


Blue dragons rarely land during combat, preferring flight and far-reaching attacks to lumbering over land in close melee. Because they like to fight from a distance, blue dragons consider combat a long-term engagement. They fly near enough to their opponents to unleash a few barrages, then vanish, and then return—sometimes minutes or hours later.

Where do you come up with a desert habitat? That was true in 3.5, but not 4E.

I think a party could easily head into the Dragon's cave and force it to either follow, or give up it's treasure.

And since Blue Dragons typically lair at high inaccessible elevations, the DM should rarely have them attack PCs out on the plains (or worse yet, deserts where violent storms are the exception instead of the the rule). The PCs should be looking for the Dragon, the PCs should be prepared for flight into the lair, the Dragon should not be aware of them until they are fairly close, etc. A Blue Dragon encounter should not be random and haphazard, but one PCs should prepare for precisely due to the type of lair the Dragon choses.


And, it's not suboptimal for a Blue Dragon to attack at range 20 when it can, but attack at closer range when it must.

I think you are skewing your example too far into the "unfair for PCs" direction and not acknowledging that your example does not take into account the habitat of the Dragon.

 

[FireLance]

And, it's not suboptimal for a Blue Dragon to attack at range 20 when it can, but attack at closer range when it must.

So, the best way to fight a blue dragon is to ready an action to attack it when it comes within range?

 

[DracoSuave]

So we're back to the dragon having to specifically fight in a suboptimal (or downright stupid) manner so that the party has a chance?

The dragon is stupid for the players deciding to do something to counter death from above?

Isn't that like saying your banker is stupid because you didn't drink expired milk and ran out of money?

I mean, I hope no adventure ever has a blue dragon in a desert. One of their preferred habitats.

A dragon is -mighty- in their element. Not all adventures automaticly put -every- monster in their element. And you can have a desert without having it be the sahara. Like, every desert in North America, for example. Desert != a featureless sea of sand.

The parties indicated, two fair examples of parties, have nothing they can do about the blue dragon. In previous editions they'd possibly have access to some more flight mechanisms, a method of teleport, etc. And the party's ranged spells and weapons were almost always more than the dragon's breath weapon or spell options, whether bows or magic missiles.

And you as a DM know this, so you either choose to set up an encounter that allows the players to use their ingenuity to 'solve' the dragon, or you choose to toss them to the wolves to sink or swim.

And whatever happens, it is your choice. You put the dragon there. No one else did.

So it's still not the DM trying to kill the party. It's a core game concept that is not jiving well.

Bull. No where in the books does it say or even pretend to claim that all monsters are appropriate for all games and all parties. The books actually tell you the exact opposite, that you are responsible for what goes inside, and that -appropriate- encounters are far healthier for games than random ones.

I don't know what DMG you've been pulling that 'core game concept' out of. But it ain't the 4th edition one.

You're not always within a minute of total cover. In fact, I'd imagine you're very, very often not within a minute of total cover. And the dragon only needs a minute to kill someone.

Yeah. And you know this as a DM. So be responsible. Don't blame Wizards because you don't understand how -your- choices of which monsters to use when leads to party trouble. The blue dragon is a -good- monster, but like -all- dragons it's not appropriate to -every- party -all the time-.

Absolutely - but shouldn't it work a little better out of the box, too?

It works great out of the box. The box even tells you how to use it, when, and why, and tells you to use it creatively and appropriately. Failure to follow the instructions on the box is not the fault of the manufacturers of the box. If you destroy your house because you used a chainsaw as a wirecutter, no amount of 'It should work better' will mitigate your own personal lack of responsibility.

Mind you, I think my problem would be solved by the harpy not having its aura (which is retarded, anyways) and the dragon's range being 10 instead of 20. So maybe those are just simple mistakes, hopefully not repeated often at higher levels or in later MMs.

Or maybe flight is just a lot more powerful than it used to be and hover is given out just a bit too much. Or maybe the loophole of Grasping Javelins should be championed as a solution rather than the clear loophole that it is. Dunno.

Grasping throwing spears isn't a loophole, it's an intentional feature on a weapon. Take number of spears that aren't polearms. Notice how many are thrown; all of them. The 'spear' entry informs you that they knew full well what they were doing.

But it -is- a solution, and a useful tool. I mean, hello! Encounter power that is tactically powerful on an item? That should recommend it right there.

Regardless, 'open featureless terrain' is frowned upon in 4e on every single level of the game. Flying enemies aside, cover and other such terrain is not 'optional' but is a given assumption of encounter design according to the DMG.

If a monster breaks because you ignore the DMG design advice, that's not the -monster- that is doin' it wrong, is it?

 

[FireLance]

Bull. No where in the books does it say or even pretend to claim that all monsters are appropriate for all games and all parties. The books actually tell you the exact opposite, that you are responsible for what goes inside, and that -appropriate- encounters are far healthier for games than random ones.

I think the key issue here is that some monsters are more iconic than others. "The party kills a dragon of every color" is, I believe, a fairly common campaign goal for several DMs. For some reason, quite a few DMs don't just want their players to fight one or two types of dragons, they want their players to fight every kind of dragon over the course of a campaign.

This means that these DMs will tend to scrutinize the dragons more carefully than most other monsters, and when they realize that because of their players' character choices, they are going to have a harder time fighting dragon type X than their balance-fu says that they should, they complain about it online. [Aside: In addition, you will get the odd DM who did not do the homework and only does the online complaining after the PCs became dragon chow.] For such DMs, it doesn't matter that a character of Class A with Power B or Feat C or using Magic Item D could defeat Dragon X. The PCs in question just don't have the alphabet soup of game elements needed to do the job.

Of course, after grumbling and venting a bit, any halfway competent DM will plant the necessary rumors, information, quests, treasure, etc. in the game, or engineer the circumstances of the meeting so that the PCs will have a fighting chance to defeat Dragon X by the time they get around to encountering it. However, it feels like extra effort, and not extra effort to make the encounter awesome (which few DMs would have problems with), but extra effort to make the encounter work in the first place.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

And in 3rd edition and 2nd edition, it didn't have the ability to outrange the party, and characters had methods of fast travel or other getaway methods.

depends on the level and what you define as outrange

edit: oh and depends on equipment for meleeers (we are spaking of melee party)
i bet a dragon has dispell magic when fighters have equippment to fly

 

[Neuroglyph]

Where do you come up with a desert habitat? That was true in 3.5, but not 4E.

I think you are skewing your example too far into the "unfair for PCs" direction and not acknowledging that your example does not take into account the habitat of the Dragon.

*Agrees with KD*

Even if deserts were the optimal habitat for a Blue, what kinda desert do you envision? All deserts are not the rolling coverless sand dunes of the sahara so often depicted in movies. Pull up some pics of the US desert southwest, or the Kalihari or Gobi. There are rocks, ditches, dense groves of spindly trees... all kinds of cover to make an aerial predator have to hit the ground sometimes to hunt.

Dropping the characters into the middle of a featureless wide open plain and then running an aerial encounter is not only unimaginative, but not even "realistic" given the terrain on our own planet. Where magic can make flying earth nodes and the every D&D planet is riddled with passages into the underdark, no DM should throw out a flat grid map and say "So you're walking across the plains..."

 

[lgw]

Things aren't what they used to be...

Spoiler

Why isn't there anybody concerned how easily your ranged focused Dragon hunting party get slaughtered in random pub fights, seeing how much more common pubs are compared to Dragons ?!