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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6688711" data-attributes="member: 6787650">Sorry, I don't mean to pick a fight. But there literally was someone on this forum the other day who described a "standard encounter" as "kick down the door and roll initiative." It's a valid playstyle, and such games will find that melee guys are lots of fun. So will any game that generally sticks to Medium or occasional Hard encounters. (This is not a claim that a game where melee guys have fun is restricted to Medium/Hard encounters. It's a sufficiency claim, not a claim of necessity.)But when I play, I design my PCs for sandbox play--e.g. I want a level 3 character who has a good chance of taking on CR 17 threats successfully, or at least living to tell the tale by fleeing. I don't want to build my character around a metagame assumption of "appropriate" encounters, and flipping through the Monstrous Manual makes one thing obvious: melee is dangerous. Whether it is Medusas (30' petrification) or umber hulks (30' confusion) or ancient red dragons (90' breath weapon) or a Balor's/Fire Giant's fiery aura (damages when you strike in melee), there's a lot of bad things that are designed specifically to hurt a melee opponent. Furthermore, there are a fair number of opponents who can do bad things to a melee guy before he ever gets to attack them, maybe without him ever getting to attack them--look at prior complaints from certain posters about how wizards are relegated to buff-bots for Fly so that the warriors can attack the monsters. That's because a melee-focused party has no other way to deal with a dragon strafing.What I mean by "doesn't scale" is "doesn't scale with party size." In military terms it's the difference between Lanchester's Linear Law and Lanchester's Square Law. You'd much rather be Square than Linear, especially because concentrating melee force makes it vulnerable to AoE attacks like Hypnotic Pattern.When someone blows that Horn of Valhalla at my table, he'll get a whole bunch of berserkers for an hour, but unless the situation is dire there is a good chance that most of those berserkers will be doing nothing but Dashing on any given round. If those berserkers were hobgoblin mercenaries instead they'd be impacting the combat for lots of damage on every single round and they could do it from a dispersed formation. (Same thing goes if they are hobgoblin enemies avoiding Fireballs from PCs.)Anyway, from your point (b) above it sounds like you play a style of fantasy where melee is very strong and bare-chested barbarians are the heroes of the day. I just wanted to emphasize that that is a particular style of D&D, not universal. But as you say, "If your players can't make mighty bare-chested barbarians that manly wade into melee combat work, then you might want to dial down on the number of foes with effective ranged weapons and/or mobility greater than the party," so clearly you are aware of this point. So I'm good.RE: (c), yes, spellcasters are quite good in 5E, especially at tables where you use DMG spell point rules. They don't usually overshadow warriors at consistent single-target damage but they complement them nicely via control spells like Hypnotic Pattern, summoning spells like Conjure Animals/Animate Dead, and utility spells like Pass Without Trace. (Summoning spells can overshadow warriors rather easily if the players let it, but it will be quite obvious when that happens because the first thing the bard does in any fight will be to throw down a half-dozen animals and retreat behind total cover.) However, in a game calibrated for melee warriors, that kind of spellcaster support will probably feel unnecessary and redundant. Who would bother to conjure an Air Elemental just to fight [hits Random at kobold.com] a Nightmare, an Orc War Chief, and a Winter Wolf? That's a Medium encounter for four level 10 characters, and if all four of those guys are melee-specialized warriors, they will eat those three CR 3 (4) monsters alive and never miss the wizard. Spellcasters are redundant unless and until you start fighting monsters with CRs closer to your own level--if that same level 10 party went up against a Bone Devil and 2 Yuan-ti Abominations, then they might wish one of them were a wizard/bard. But that's a double-Deadly encounter, not Medium.</blockquote>

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