The Crimson Binome
Hero
On the one hand, it's easy to criticize players for building an obvious weakness into their character; not having a viable ranged option is a fairly obvious weakness. On the other hand, that doesn't excuse the designers for turning obvious character builds into traps, that require significant amounts of system mastery in order to overcome; a straightforward barbarian or paladin should be a viable choice, and it shouldn't be critically hamstrung in common scenarios.So is there a way to make primary melee classes not completely suck at range strait out of the box? Or will it require house rules?
Personally, for the long campaign I ran, one of the only house rules was that javelins could be drawn like ammunition. If you don't want to house rule, you could instead make sure that they find a couple of flying potions, or some sort of melee weapon that can throw and return. If that's too heavy-handed, then you may have to rely on the wizard to fly them over in those situations.