I'm annoyed at archers.

[The Sigil]

The answer is painfully obvious.

DM Rule #1: What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

If I'm the DM, I start throwing twinked archers back at your group - and since they believe in the power of the bow over the power of the "Tank" they ignore the slowly approaching tank to blast the heck out of your archers. Alternatively, use spellcasters to rain down fiery destruction on your archers from behind the safety of a wind wall.

Repeat again and again and again until archers give up their twinkdom.

The problem with twinking (as a player) is that all the DM has to do to stop it is take the twinked character, copy it, and advance it a couple of levels to do you worse than you can do him. Twinks tend to be a little less enthused when the find a twink that's better at doing their "thing" than they are.

Adversarial? Certainly. Does it usually solve the problem? You betcha.

--The Sigil

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Adversarial? Certainly. Does it usually solve the problem? You betcha.

Creating an adversarial relationship with your players isn't likely to be a win in my experience.

The player's behavior will only change if they see rewards for other behavior. The usual response to twinked NPCs is more heavily twinked PCs.

Choosing between specialist and generalist abilities is perfectly valid within the context of the game. If the players can make a group of specialists work well through good teamwork, they should be rewarded for that.

 

[Berk]

Don't know if this was said or not, don't feel like reading a 3 page post atm, but not all opponents think like animals, and then again even animals can come up with slight forms of tactics. Don't always attack head-on with the opponents. Split the field up, have some attack head-on while the rest sneaks around behind. Use mages to dim door behind the advancing melee types while they each bring along their own melee type. Just some suggestions, know you didn't ask for them but couldn't help myself. I personally think archers are nowhere near a nussance(sp?) and pretty easy to kill.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Melee:
human L7 fighter TWF bastard sword twink
lizardfolk L5 barbarian 27 AC, long sword/shield twink

Archer:
elven L4 fighter L3 rogue archer twink
elven L7 cleric of elf domain archer twink

Part of the problem is the word twink.

Maybe archers make better twinks than fighters, but be glad your melee fighters aren't toting buckets of snails. Even worse, when a rogue with a Wand of Improved Invisibility does the same thing... or when a druid does insane amounts of damage and blinds his foes at the same time. (Sigh)

I've learned the hard way not to use simply melee brutes. There are a lot of monsters like that in the party, and they are weak against archers... intentionally. There are also lots of monsters that are agile, use spell-like abilities or caster levels, have special defenses, and a few can even dodge arrows (eg thri-kreen, gambol - both in the MM2).

The average AC in the MM is 16. Why aren't your fighters using melee attack? Why aren't they far ahead of the archers, to get those blows in?

You can use monsters that can surprise the party. There are so many monsters with surprisingly high Hide skill checks.

They can always work beside a mage with an Invisibility spell (that makes closing to melee and surprise a lot easier - a lot). The Dimension Door suggestion was also cool, especially if the accompanying fighter-type has no qualms about Sundering a bow... or maybe Disarm? I don't know if you can Disarm a bow, but I see no reason why you can't. And why can't a mage cast Invisibility, get close, then cast Hold Person? One of those two archers has a cruddy Will save...

Why isn't a druid using Entangle from cover and concealment with leaves, then following up with Summon Nature's Ally (while his own animal companions close in on the PCs)? Even a mobile archer hates it when his Dex is dropped by 4 points.

Picture them in a few levels, after a mage drops a Domination spell on them.

They can twink their own AC - think about any monster with one level of psychic warrior and the Inertial Armor feat Or just use twink NPCs back at them. (If you let them twink, then it's okay to twink back. If you don't want to twink back, then you shouldn't let them twink.)

 

[ConcreteBuddha]

Okay then, I go away for a bit and the thread explodes. Not that I mind, of course... *grin*



Anyway, I'm not going to comment on all of the counter-archer posts. I understand how to counter archers. All of the suggestions listed are viable ways of making archers completely ineffective. That's not the point, however, since there are a multitude of ways to completely negate melee fighters as well.
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A couple of points:


1) As to the rant on my playing DnD like it's a video game: It is an assumption that we do nothing but slay monsters. That is just not the truth. We do a lot of other non-combat related encounters. It just so happens that when we do get into combat, the two melee characters are completely outclassed. And combat is the place they are supposed to shine (which they don't.)


2) Raising the EL of the encounters a couple of notches would destroy the party, since one false move (or some unlucky criticals) would cause a TPW.

shilsen---
In comparison, the archer is a one-trick pony. He causes damage and that's all he's got.

3) Since DnD combat is a hit point based system, dealing large amounts of damage is the best thing you could possibly do.


4) Rapid Shot is really good. It is far better than its equivalents, Flurry of Blows or TWF, because each of the latter need a full attack action 5' foot away from a monster. Granted, Haste can get a melee character into range for a full attack in one round, but then the character is choosing to be subjected to the monster's attacks. (Which is seldom the case for the archer.)


5) I will not use metagaming tactics as my lizardfolk barbarian to nerf the effectiveness of the archers. Example: I will not purposefully get in their line of fire nor will I travel 50 ft. in front of them. This is treating the symptom, and I'd rather fix the cause.


6) Seeking (SaF) is the dumbest special weapon ability ever. So is any PrC or feat that grants concealment reduction. (Although we all know this isn't exactly true; Speed is a lot worse.)



7) Anybody else think Bracers of Archery are underpriced?


8) That's enough for now, I'm starting to hallucinate, as it's 5:30 am right now. Sleep beckons.

 

[IceBear]

I dunno, I guess we tend to have a lot of combat in dungeons and caves where there's not a lot of room for the archers to stay out of harms way for very long to become annoying.

As was posted before, you seem to be complaining about effective teamwork. The archers are doing damage to your enemies while you're protecting them from harm (by taking it yourself). Imagine if both of the melee fighters weren't there, how well would the archers do on their own? In the old Basic D&D days, the fighter protected the spellcasters from harm while the spellcasters did lots of damage. Now, archers have been added.

If you still have issues, ban some of the more blatent archer cheese feats, weapons, etc. I don't think it's not realistic that archers are powerful, they were in history. Their weakness was in melee, and if no one is getting close enough to melee with them, then you're melee fighters are doing their job.

IceBear

 

[Spatzimaus]

My Psychic Warrior's favorite tactic was to stand in front of the casters and archers, and using her Glaive, Combat Reflexes, and Stand Still, keep anyone from reaching her teammates. Against melee enemies, this was huge. There was one time, six enemies charge at us, all six get frozen 10' away from me, and the Wizard pulls out the Chain Lightnings... fun.
Against enemy casters, well, I also had Speed of Thought, Psionic Charge, and a level of Barbarian; I could get to them pretty easily.

If you've got a party full of low-defense high-offense ranged specialists, then it's like IceBear said, it's a better use of your time to protect them than to charge at the enemy. Makes friendly AE spells a lot better, too. It's not a good tactic in every situation; you can't protect them from a big Dragon or a horde of spellcasters, so you'll still want offensive abilities.

The point is, you can't just equate damage output with combat usefulness. Archers and Wizards are DESIGNED for offense. They have practically no defense, and there are more ways to neutralize them than melee people in my experience. So, you can either try to compete with them for damage (and lose, and feel useless), or you can try to protect them, making them more effective in the process.
That being said, certain archer-related Feats and items are a bit overpowered, but to me it's not the catastrophic problem some people are selling it as. Minor tweaks are all that is needed IMO.

 

[ConcreteBuddha]

Imagine if both of the melee fighters weren't there, how well would the archers do on their own?

Actually, they do about the same amount of damage without us. I know because the Fighter/Rogue archer single-handedly cleared out a huge part of the Speaker in Dreams. (We are only halfway through it, so I don't know how relatively large this particular part of the module really is.)

Anyway, I would agree with your point that archers are primarily offensive characters, except that I have personal experiences to the contrary. In general, the archers have just a couple of AC points lower than a tank, and they have about 5% fewer hps. A TWF character cannot have an AC higher than an archer, nor can his hps be exceptionally better. They are, afterall, both wearing mithril chain shirts, and they both tend to have d10 HD (their Con modifiers are not drastically different.)

This is why I do not compare a mage with the archer. Mages have d4 HD and, though they can have the highest AC, this is not common, IMX, since most of their spells are intended for other pursuits.
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All of this talk of being a part of a team, IMHO, is a rationalization of a flaw in the game. Honestly, heroic campaigns are not supposed to be built around waiting for the mage and the archer to kill everything while the melee fighter stands there looking stupid. (Our melee fighters were so useless one battle, that we took out rations and made camp. *grin*)

I am a fan of heroic fantasy. In heroic fantasy, the bad guys and the good guys face off, mano a mano, and duel to the death; they don't shoot at each other from behind shield walls. DnD does not adequately portray the type of game that I would like to play. Therefore, I have made certain changes to archers IMC, so that archery, though effective, cannot be made so useful and overpowering, that the entire sphere of combat revolves around them.

If I wanted to play a campaign where missile weapons dominated the game (as they do in real-life), I'd add machine guns.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Actually, they do about the same amount of damage without us. I know because the Fighter/Rogue archer single-handedly cleared out a huge part of the Speaker in Dreams. (We are only halfway through it, so I don't know how relatively large this particular part of the module really is.)

Anyway, I would agree with your point that archers are primarily offensive characters, except that I have personal experiences to the contrary. In general, the archers have just a couple of AC points lower than a tank, and they have about 5% fewer hps. A TWF character cannot have an AC higher than an archer, nor can his hps be exceptionally better. They are, afterall, both wearing mithril chain shirts, and they both tend to have d10 HD (their Con modifiers are not drastically different.)

...

All of this talk of being a part of a team, IMHO, is a rationalization of a flaw in the game. Honestly, heroic campaigns are not supposed to be built around waiting for the mage and the archer to kill everything while the melee fighter stands there looking stupid. (Our melee fighters were so useless one battle, that we took out rations and made camp. *grin*)

No offense intended, but all this talk about archers being broken is a rationalization for two poorly designed grunts. The real problem is your front line fighters don't do anything particularly well, and you are trying to compare them directly to effective specialist characters.

It so happens it is a bit easier to figure out how to make an effective archer than an effective melee specialist. It also so happens it is quite difficult to build an effective TWF character or one with an ECL mod.

So what?

 

[IceBear]

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