Level Up (A5E) Why is non-magical flying so limited for PCs?

[Faolyn]

I said I don't want it to be the only ones. Don't put words into my mouth. Encounters with things like dire animals and the like ought to be a viable encounter, especially early on. That doesn't mean I'm saying there should be no encounters with ranged attackers or fliers, but I don't want things that don't land in that to be ones that overly favor a particular character. Let's not act like that's an extreme position.

Sure--and there are also dire/giant flying animals. Bats, owls, vultures, eagles, (potentially reskinned) pteranodons, plus flying swarms, plus all the homebrew dire beasties you could ever want. Throw bat wings on a worg and call it a gnasher, or on an owlbear and create an imaginatively-named winged owlbear. And the fun thing about them is that they'd give your flying PCs a chance to shine since they'd be the only ones who can engage them in melee.

 

[Faolyn]

there's 32 official heritages (33 if you count the elementaari as separate from other planetouched), meaning ~21% of heritages can get access to some form of flight from their heritage.

Wrong. One of those heritages gets flight: the chrysalians. The birdfolk can glide, and for everyone else (including the birdfolk), they only get actual flight if they take a gift--and the air elementaari only get non-magical feather fall and super jump, not flight, at least not until level 10.

So one out of 32/33 heritages can fly and another one gets glide, so either 3% or 6%, depending on if you count gliding as flying.

And out of (if I counted correctly) 77 heritage gifts, four grant flight. 5%.

Those are tiny fractions, IMO.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

Wrong. One of those heritages gets flight: the chrysalians. The birdfolk can glide, and for everyone else (including the birdfolk), they only get actual flight if they take a gift--and the air elementaari only get non-magical feather fall and super jump, not flight, at least not until level 10.

So one out of 32/33 heritages can fly and another one gets glide, so either 3% or 6%, depending on if you count gliding as flying.

And out of (if I counted correctly) 77 heritage gifts, four grant flight. 5%.

Those are tiny fractions, IMO.

...that's all "access to flight", which is what both you and i said. they can get access to flight. having it as a gift or paragon option is, i would say, "any access".

also, i was agreeing with you, and was just crunching numbers for fun.

 

[Faolyn]

...that's all "access to flight", which is what both you and i said. they can get access to flight. having it as a gift or paragon option is, i would say, "any access".

also, i was agreeing with you, and was just crunching numbers for fun.

Ah, sorry.

 

[Stalker0]

Because sometimes it makes sense that that would happen. Life (even simulated life) is messy sometimes, and games feel more real (to me, anyway) when you allow for logical stuff to happen. I don't want to play or run a RPG where the world is presented in bite-sized gameable chunks. If you do, and the rules as they stand work for you, what are you complaining about?

This is where I lose you. On the one hand you are saying that you want the world to be logical (sure makes sense). But on the other your saying you expect encounters to always have flying creatures and every NPC to carry a bow.... that is not logical to me.

I feel like flying PCs in fact forces less logic into my world, because I either have to tweak my encounters with creatures that should in theory be rare, or assume every NPC is a marksman with a bow even though those are martial weapons and should take a lot of training....or I can accept that my flying PC will just be invincible in a decent portion of fights.

 

[Stalker0]

You seem to be assuming that every player in the party will have flying abilities. How often has that actually happened? Most likely, you only have one flying PC, maybe two, assuming you have any at all--there are a ton of heritages out there, and only a tiny fraction of them have any access to flying abilities.

Which might lead to an even worse problem....splitting the party. If you have a couple of flying PCs in the group, and the rest aren't.... I mean why shouldn't the two flyers go grab the doohicky in like an hour and come back, instead of slog through a two day climb filled with terrible dangers?

 

[Stalker0]

Those are pretty easy to solve though. The Dark Forest has a MacGuffin inside it so you need to actually enter it. And there are a tribe of Buckawn (potentially hostile Brownies that use poison) who can shoot at people from the trees.

The mountain is also the aerie of some arctic Griffons who have learned how to tackle and knock prone flying prey.

The trap filled hallway is too narrow to allow winged flight by a Medium-sized character (a typical 5' wide corridor would be sufficient for this).

The players have a reason to enter the haunted town, perhaps to find a lost treasure.

Or, just as easily, you have demons with flight, like Vrocks.

This right here to me is the crux of the debate.

No one on the "no fly" club is saying flying PCs are completely unmanagable. Yes we can tweak every encounter, and add special restraints in our combats, and create reasons why the flying guy doesn't just fly over and do the thing in like 5 minutes instead of taking an hour for the whole group, and XYZ. That is all possible.

But it gets really really really old when you have to do that time and time again, adventure after adventure.

I use the same argument for counterspell. Counterspell is absolutely manageable as a DM....and I was managing it, I just got damn tired of doing it for every single spellcasting monster I wanted to be more than a laughable encounter.

At some point we want the game to respect the DMs effort and time. If 1 PCs choice causes me to constantly need to switch up my plans and encounters.... than that PC simply has too much narrative power.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Which might lead to an even worse problem....splitting the party. If you have a couple of flying PCs in the group, and the rest aren't.... I mean why shouldn't the two flyers go grab the doohicky in like an hour and come back, instead of slog through a two day climb filled with terrible dangers?

Well, in that particular case because they could (probably rightly) be concerned that if they do run into something that can address fliers, they're not going to have any backup. Splitting parties is often a bad idea not just on a player level.

 

[Chaltab]

This is where I lose you. On the one hand you are saying that you want the world to be logical (sure makes sense). But on the other your saying you expect encounters to always have flying creatures and every NPC to carry a bow.... that is not logical to me.

I feel like flying PCs in fact forces less logic into my world, because I either have to tweak my encounters with creatures that should in theory be rare, or assume every NPC is a marksman with a bow even though those are martial weapons and should take a lot of training....or I can accept that my flying PC will just be invincible in a decent portion of fights.

The DM controls what is fought and where it is fought. Just... don't put melee-only monsters in open spaces where flight makes a character 'invincible'. You don't even need to break game logic for that to make sense: in a world with rocs and wyverns, wolves would stick to tree cover or go extinct.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This right here to me is the crux of the debate.

No one on the "no fly" club is saying flying PCs are completely unmanagable. Yes we can tweak every encounter, and add special restraints in our combats, and create reasons why the flying guy doesn't just fly over and do the thing in like 5 minutes instead of taking an hour for the whole group, and XYZ. That is all possible.

But it gets really really really old when you have to do that time and time again, adventure after adventure.

I use the same argument for counterspell. Counterspell is absolutely manageable as a DM....and I was managing it, I just got damn tired of doing it for every single spellcasting monster I wanted to be more than a laughable encounter.

At some point we want the game to respect the DMs effort and time. If 1 PCs choice causes me to constantly need to switch up my plans and encounters.... than that PC simply has too much narrative power.

Its possibly just a terminological thing, but more to the point he gets to, to one degree or another, define what big parts of the campaign are about. Even games that are very focused on having the game be very much about the PCs usually don't do that to that degree with a subset of them (or even just one).