D&D 5E What does it mean to you for a character/class to be "good in melee"?

[cmad1977]

What does it mean to you for a character/class to be "good in melee"?

I'm always impressed by melee classes that
1:know the jumping rules and use them.
2: use the Dodge action wisely.
3:shove and grapple wisely.

I love it when the DM is befuddled because the champion cleared a 15' ravine with a simple jump and slices up the mage on the other side.

'I jump the ravine'
'Um..... ok... er... that'll be a... athletics check?'
'Nope. 15' gap? 16 Str. So... with this run... I clear it.'
'Wait... just... no roll?'
'Unless landing hard smooth stone is difficult terrain'
'Well... no... but...'



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[Tony Vargas]

"good in melee" is relative.

"My big brother will beat you up!"

(Because he's a relative who's good in melee... get it?)

I love it when the DM is befuddled because the champion cleared a 15' ravine with a simple jump and slices up the mage on the other side.

His fault for giving a precise distance or using a grid. Well, and for not knowing the rules better than his players, of course, Gygax told us that one back in the day.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

His fault for giving a precise distance or using a grid. Well, and for not knowing the rules better than his players, of course, Gygax told us that one back in the day.

Or perhaps he does know the rules better than the players and is merely acting befuddled for the players' sake, in order to align their emotional state with the PCs' emotional state when the PCs see the mage's befuddlement.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

If five adventurers go into my dungeon and six adventurers come out.

At least two of them are Doppelgangers.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

The thing is, I think that still holds true here.

If you take a 12th level Wizard who passed on ASI's and magic feats to be a better fighter, they'd still get absolutely destroyed in combat with a thing that the Fighter handles easily, while suffering lower save DCs, getting easily disrupted by Concentration checks, and using their action that could be slinging a high level spell in the process. And, it took this long for the feat combo to come together, so they've been less effective the whole time.

So, yeah, their single attack will hit. It'll do decent damage. But they did a single attack, when they could have been casting a spell that's worth three attacks or more.

So, I guess I'm not quite seeing the problem. 5E seems to work fine - when a spell caster resorts to a weapon, they're not missing all the time like before - they're hitting fairly often - but their hits don't have much oomph unless they create some freakishly narrow build that severely gimps their spell casting in the process.

I'd say most of my problem is that it's a drastic change from how it was handled before. I don't disagree with your assessment. It's just after 35ish years I'm used to the idea that the fighter classes should be better at hitting stuff than other classes in combat.