Your experiences with flying and aerial combat

[RangerWickett]

I love flying. I've had the chance to be in freefall before (thanks NASA!), and the best dream I ever had involved me flying around suburbia at dawn. In D&D, I tend to have lots of flying opponents, and one of the villains I liked most was an air mage who had a whole monastery of trained flying monks.

I wonder sometimes if I'm capturing how cool it must be to be able to fly. My game is fairly high level, so PCs get to do it a lot, so it's started to seem a little mundane, but I try to spice things up by making aerial combat take place around solid structures like towers and bridges, so you can fly and still have cover and interesting terrain. I don't usually use a battle mat, so the manueverability differences are sort of done casually.

I'd like to hear your experiences with aerial combat. What has worked well, either for PCs or for DMs planning interesting fights? What tactics are useful? What mistakes have you made? How do you like the rules for maneuverability? How 'cool' is flying?

 

[alsih2o]

In a past campaign we all ahd different flying styles, for color.

My sorcerer flew like Magneto, standing straight up. The barbarian flew like superman. Yada, yada.

It is a minor touch, but it really does add soem cool color.

One thing that annoys me is the lack of change to AC for flying creatures. If you lie down in combat you get an AC bonus, why not if oyu fly prone? (Vs. another flying opponent)

 

[Hand of Evil]

I have wanted to work more with it myself, see Race of Eigth Winds for Eberron, but have never been able to catch the spirit of it. I think my problem is that I try and overwork it, speed, skills, abilites, dealing with height and 360, it all wants me to use the Dawn Patrol rules.

 

[diaglo]

most of the PCs should fly like the Greatest American Hero...sans instruction booklet.

 

[MrFilthyIke]

most of the PCs should fly like the Greatest American Hero...sans instruction booklet.

diaglo, I agree!

 

[Turhan]

We've done flying many times in our games. Flying ships, Spelljammers, winged beasts, dragons and rings of flying. In battle it has never once worked out well. Spelljammers are the worst for tactical battle as absolutely no one completely understood where the enemy was or how all the movement relationships worked out. We often had arguments about maneuverability and overtaking speeds. No amount of hand-flying examples and battlemat positioning helped.

A few things did work well: PC's flying low with a magic ring, and sneaking around or fleeing when not in direct battle; flying ships using aerial bombardment; and dragons doing flyby attacks on grounded PC's. That's pretty much it.

Now, I object to flying machines and aerial battles in our games. It isn't worth the risk of confusion and arguing.

 

[Richards]

My party's most memorable aerial combat was when they were in a flying rowboat (long story) fighting an attacking wyvern. The fighter managed to kill it while it was directly above them, so its corpse fell on top of them, crushing everyone to the bottom of the boat, and then the creature's added weight overloaded the boat's ability to remain airborne, so they all plummeted to the ground. The silly thing proved more deadly to them once it was dead than it had been while alive.

Johnathan

 

[VoiceOfReason?]

In battle it has never once worked out well. Spelljammers are the worst for tactical battle as absolutely no one completely understood where the enemy was or how all the movement relationships worked out. We often had arguments about maneuverability and overtaking speeds.

I've had similar experiences as soon as more than 1 or 2 PC's leave the ground. Rules confusions are the enemy in this case. My past couple experiences DMing multiple flyers in combat went more smoothly.
The last incident involved half a dozen PC's riding half a dozen large (old+) metallic dragons racing half a dozen Ogres (special demon type, ogres didn't exist in their traditional sense, they were half giants) riding half a dozen half-demon black and red dragons. Due to the titanic proportions of the combatants, I fudged the combat map and called each square 15 feet and smoothed over any problems this made by saying "the wind at this altitude is unpredictable, had your character the tools and faculties to measure such a difference, your dragon has been shifted (5 or 10) feet to the left/right" as needed. The combat went fine, nobody had rules arguments except for 1 misinterpretation of the wingover maneuver.
1 person in the group had been involved in a large-scale aerial combat in a previous game, and he and 3 other players had ridden mounts before-that was the extent of the group's familiarity of the combat rules past the text in the book.
Basically, I think it worked because I made it clear to the players from the start that the altered scale of the combat map would call for some adjudications with movement in all directions, and they dealt with it without complaint (on the contrary, from my estimates, the combat turned out to be a smashing success as far as player interest).

The instance prior wasn't really a single combat. The wizard of the group decided from an early level (after aquiring a magical weapon that did 1d4 damage for each point of int mod as a ranged attack), that he would expend as many spell slots and magical items as he needed to in order to never touch the ground again. Needless to say the rest of the campaign forced us both to learn the aerial combat rules up, down, and backwards.



So all in all, the only ways I've found to make aerial combat work is to, in one form or another, make sure everyone knows how the rules work. Whether they know how they work in the book or how they work in your game (if different).