I'm annoyed at archers.

[Darklone]

Why D&D played like this sucks.

Ok. Rant starting here. (Hi buddha )

As I understood, you (as well as many others) play your games rather minmaxxed due to the old D&D philosophy of teaming with other specialists to achieve your goals. Here's your problem. Every character specializes in one area/weapon/whatever and sucks everywhere else ("Hey, get the rogue, I can't open this door...", -"Dude, it's not locked!"). Rogue (trapspringer), fighter (tank, meleemachine), cleric (insert copper coin for cure all), wizard/sorcerer (damage, damage, damage).

Somewhere above someone mentioned why your melee idiots can't shoot with bows too. Somewhere in another thread an archer player whined why his archer sucked in melee (as usual you got both sides complaining, the archers as well as the others about the archers). When someone proposed to him to switch to a melee weapon, he whined that it would decrease his "damage output potential".

You seem to play D&D like a computergame with everyone playing his button X and button Y ability and nothing else. You learned from D&D that splitting the team means death for the single character, no matter how logical it would be otherwise.

Dungeoncrawling is fun sometimes. But in my case a group of heavily armed adventurers entering a dungeon crowded with monsters would simply cause all the monsters to give them chase. At once. No picking them off room by room. No walking through while living from the loot.

Rant off.

What I wanted to say to those who heroically suffered through the rant above :
You play your game like this. If you have problems with that, change the way you play your game. It's easy.

Yet another point: Archers with high strength? Try another point buy system or rolling for character creation. A cleric with high strength and high dex plus high wisdom? Even my players don't roll that good.

 

[bret]

Does the campaign world have no forests? Trust me, a hundred yards of forest makes for Full Cover ... and then some. Which means,of course, 20 or 30 yards is a more-likely initial encounter range.



Your tanks need mounts. That vastly improves their available charge range. Perhaps also some javelins or other strength-helped missile weapons for the first round or two.

As wlel, the DM should be giving the enemy more of a chance to seek cover or concealment, foiling the archer's long-range shots. And at 100 yards, the archers should be taking penalties (even a Heavy Crossbow, at 300 feet, is in it's third range bracket ... suffering two penalty levels to attack).

OK, I'm only in one campaign of high enough level where it would matter. The other campaigns are still below 6th level.

First of all, I had already stated that I haven't seen the problem. I can believe it exists, but I haven't seen it.

Second of all, all our mounts got eatten by a dragon. Inconvenient, especially since in that campaign we don't have time to go back to town and get new mounts. When we need mounts, it means a lot of summoning and using Rary's Mneumonic Enhancer to get enough first level spells.

Lastly, in that campaign our main opponents are giants. We are the ones taking cover and avoiding ranged combat since boulder trumps arrow in every case I've seen. We work hard to get inside their archery range as much as possible.

We just don't see the opponents going down in one or two rounds of archery. Part of this is we are fighting the biggest hit point sinks in the game. Anther part of this is probably because the characters were built before the first splatbook came out and it takes a while to adapt an existing character to a PrC without rebuilding it.

Our encounter distances have started at anywhere from 20 feet to ¼ mile. We have done all sorts of things to try and get it down to as small a number as possible before combat starts. The only time we don't do this is when we split the group, and then all the slow tanks are flying in order to move faster.


My other main campaign is based on sea travel. I'm expecting all of the characters will have a significant amount of archery, with the possible exception of my wizard. In that campaign, the encounter distances are likely to be much longer than in a normal game, to the extent where I expect to be getting the Enlarge Spell feat for use with a Fireball. Too bad really, since I generally prefer Lightning Bolt over Fireball.

 

[Happy Monkey]

When I played warhammer 40k the biggest counter to missile fire was terrain. Same is true for d&d, cover and concealment are available in most natural environments and in many built areas too.

Moving rapidly or being prone helps too.

GMW and arrows (!!$!!) do need to be addressed but not by me.

 

[mkletch]

Also, are y'all using cover rules correctly? If the archers are firing from behind the tanks, or if the tanks are engaged in melee combat with the enemy, the enemy should receive cover from the tanks -- this is in addition to any penalties the archers receive for firing into combat. And it may make an important difference.

And back to a recent poll, this is the value of the Sharp-Shooting feat from S&F.

-Fletch!

 

[mkletch]

Re: Why D&D played like this sucks.

Dungeoncrawling is fun sometimes. But in my case a group of heavily armed adventurers entering a dungeon crowded with monsters would simply cause all the monsters to give them chase. At once. No picking them off room by room. No walking through while living from the loot.

I do this as a DM, but not because of archers. I do it because it makes sense...

-Fletch!

 

[Mulkhoran]

Nonsense. First, not even close to all monsters have DR. And when they do run into those that do, they can use their magic arrows. The only thing changing GMW does is make it so they don't have an unlimited supply anymore.

Erm, DR is an essential part of a monster's challenge as they go up in CR. While there may need to be a fix for GMW abuse, it is critical for an archer character to have access to the magical weaponry appropriate for his level. Otherwise, he's doing *nothing*.

I don't really understand all the problems with archers. I'm playing one now, and I've seen them played before. I don't deny that they *can* be extremely powerful. But the limitations on them are more than just one or two arbitrary "counters". Cover and concealment count for a LOT more than is being addressed here on this thread. These aren't contrived excuses to counter the archer, they're what every semi-intelligent creature in the world seeks out when attacked by missile fire. Especially SUPERIOR missile fire.

It depends a lot on initial encounter distance, and the breakout of how often you encounter creatures at x distance, y distance, etc. An archer's effectiveness can be extremely enhanced by how the DM presents encounters.

Also, melee fighters can generally reach better single-shot damage quicker. I realize that Rapid Shot and other things quickly compare to this, but these are still multiple attacks, and that's extremely material to this conversation. Sometimes one attack is all you get, and after a while, 1d8+4 is a little depressing.

I feel the pain of the "wtf???" people about archers. I've spent plenty of time "fighting in the shade" of our female elven Ftr/AA/OOBI/whoknowswhat artillery piece as she sometimes drills 5 arrows a round into disintegrating enemies. But it's all about roles and contributions. One archer does not a party make.

Now an archmage, on the other hand.......

 

[WizarDru]

I am of two minds with this issue. I've found the hard way that more than one specialty archer can serious overpower a group, leaving the rest of the group feeling bored as they slaughter virtually everything in their path before the rest of the group has much of a chance. I knew there was a problem when one Level 10 archer nearly killed a retriever in one round (and had it been subject to criticals, he would have).

Personally, I think removing Mighty bows may be the solution, as I think these allow too much of a boost to damage. More recently, I've had seen an archer do 164 points of damage in one round (with haste, many shot and criticals, mind you)...but I didn't see that as unbalanced for a level 17 AA with some lucky rolls and buffs who landed 7 shots. That same archer was competely useless against some animated crossbows, since he couldn't get past their hardness.

Concealment and terrain help, but honestly they're not that big of a deal at higher levels. When a 34 is a low result for an archer, -10 to the roll is usually not as important. Often, completely obscurring their vision is the best solution, or putting a defensive wind or fire wall.

 

[Bastoche]

I want to point out three points.

point number one: someone asked about "TWF bastard" what is that ? If you meant THF ok. But if that guy is truly fighting with two weapons, there is a HUGE problem there. On the same point, the barbarian aimed for AC instead of damage. Archers are always tweaked toward damage and nothing else. So you compare rotten apples to fresh oranges here. No wonder everybody prefer the oranges.

point number two: what the ability scores ? I got the impression that your character's ability scores may be too high. Could it be the case ? If you go over 36-38 point buy, the balance blows and I speak from experience here.

point number three: In 3E, everyone should be specialists IMO. And I do not mean "taking PrC". I mean finding your role in the adventuring group. In your group, each character has the same goal: blow the enemy's face. I think that's a big problem because in that case you're all competing on the same ground. Tha barbarian could be the trekker with wilderness lore and intuit direction for example. The fighter should be the greatsword weilding tank warrior with high strenght and con and low dex. The rogue/fighter archer should be more rogue than fighter and be the scout for example with hide and move silently and the cleric should be the healer (therefore NOT an archer !). We are starting a new campaign this week (hopefully ) and this time we lowered the hability scores and created the characters together and everyone has his own role. There's the fighter/sorceror with high wisdom (!) who's role will be to fight in darkness with spells to beef up the fighter's part but with a tendency to take more sorceror levels than fighter's. There will be the rogue (me) who's role is to be the spy/scout. There is the bard who's role is to pick all the skills nobody wanted to take: appraise, diplomacy, use magic device, etc. And finally there will probably be a tank warrior. Everyone has his own role both on the battlefield and in the dungeon. Each with his own area of expertise. We're starting at level 2 with ECL +3 races.

 

[Darklone]

I still think that specialists in my games would get bored to hell or die fast. Probably both.

 

[Bastoche]

I still think that specialists in my games would get bored to hell or die fast. Probably both.

I must admit that I don't understand why it would be preferable to make generalist. And I'm speaking general generalist. I don't see the point in having four characters who all sucks in every field. And in that point I consider all aspects of the game: skills, spells, and combat ability.

It's pointless for a non-warrior type (I'd even daresay a non-fighter) to try to excel on the battlefield. It's pointless for a multiclass wizard to try to excel on the spell part. It's pointless for a fighter to try to excel at sneakning around.

I'm not sure I understand what you consider a specialist and a non-specialist... What team would be the best. The one with four specialist fighter, rogue, wizard, cleric or the one with four generalist fighter-rogue-wizard-cleric ? But this is getting off topic.

My point is that the four characters all try to be specialist in the same field. That is much more a problem than simply having four specialist in four area...