If, on the other hand, you travel the underdark as you do when playing Out of the Abyss, there are plenty of instances where the terrain is essentially a long tube. A jacked frazzled tube with lots of cracks and fissures, sure, but still essentially a tube.
Shadowdweller00 addressed this one nicely (not that you will listen or take anything away from it) so I will leave it at that.
All I'm saying is that those of you that simply plop down enemies right within pouncing distance (so that initiative decides who gets jumped), that's okay, but that's not what the rules lead to, and more importantly, I hate that kind of gameplay as a player, so I tend to not overuse it as a DM.
Who said they were plopping enemies down in pouncing range? I have had many outdoor encounters where my PCs, either through just seeing in the distance or scouting with a familiar, have seen the enemy at a very far range. I just used a spare 3 brain cells and designed it in a way that my party couldn’t sit back from 200ft and destroy them. I built cover to hide behind and played the monsters like…oh I don’t know… in a way that wasn’t pants on head retarded. I chose the monsters with abilities that would mitigate the ranged battle. More or less, everything that you do NOT do.
I don't want my players to spend time on precautions and being overly cautious, so I don't bend the rules to invalidate their standard procedure (either the imp or the monk going on point; the monk stands a very good chance of gliding out of any ambush and instead leading the monsters back into the rest of the party's warm welcome)
There is no reason to invalidate it. Characters often have skills or abilities specifically for things like this and there is no reason to nerf a character’s ability. Let them find the monsters at range, let them strategize and come up with a plan, let them enact the plan. Just make sure you correctly designed the encounter to make them have a plan that is not “stand at range and kill everything with sniper fire”.
How do you tweak the rules to make players build more slow Dwarves with Axes!?(While still remaining as fun as possible to everyone)![]()
And I think Dorian_Grey answered this one. If you continually design encounters that favor ranged to the exclusion of everything else, there is nothing you can do that will make your players want to play slow melee. Nothing! Why would anyone in their right mind want to play a slow melee in your game? You build your game like a shooting gallery and wonder why people are shooting….maybe you aren’t just trolling….