Hello, all. I'm DMing my first ever session, and I'm having a lot of fun doing it :) I still miss playing, but no doubt DMing is also fun. Just another kind of fun.
So my players just made level 5. I let them all choose 1 uncommon, wondrous magic item from a local vendor.
I have four players, a Champion shield & spear Fighter, a Battlemaster hand-crossbow dex build, a Tempest Cleric, and an odd Spores Druid - Barbarian mix.
So, the Battlemaster is an optimizer. I do not discourage it, as I also optimize as a player and the the whole "min-max" controversy is a big, separate topic. He's a human variant with XBE and SS.
He chose Winged Boots. He's also very reasonable and he would not cry if I asked him to choose something else, or if I nerfed it. That said, I my philosophy is to use restrictions and nerfs very sparingly.
While you wear these boots, you have a flying speed equal to your walking speed. You can use the boots to fly for up to 4 hours, all at once or in several shorter flights, each one using a minimum of 1 minute from the duration. If you are flying when the duration expires, you descend at a rate of 30 feet per round until you land.
The boots regain 2 hours of flying capability for every 12 hours they aren't in use.
This reads to me like straight up, non-concentration flight with a long enough duration that it might as well be limitless. Pretty dang powerful for an uncommon item. I do know that at some point, flight becomes a thing in D&D. I'm just unlucky and most of my games have fizzled out early, and I never got to the higher levels. We started with 2 so I gave them a generous standard array, and they all have pretty good magic items already. Point being: I'm throwing way bigger monsters at them than their level would normally dictate.
Otherwise: What are some tips for dealing with flying, ranged characters? Dungeon crawls obviously neutralize the advantage, and those will happen sometimes. Outdoors, ranged attackers and enemies that can also fly will be useful. I haven't dug into the spell list yet, but off the top of my head, blindness/deafness, hold person, would be useful. What are some other spells? More tips?
Also, if you think I should just disallow or nerf it, I'm not leaning that way but I'm always open to hearing other perspectives.
You can mix in flying and ranged enemies in open areas.
You can also utilize dungeons where the flight doesn't allow them to get out of weapon-reach of enemies. If you do this, I would still make sure to allow the use of the boots to fly over traps such as trip wires or pressure plates, and maybe include a chasm or river that allows this character to carry a rope across for the party to cross, giving the player the advantages of flight, without it always being the answer to every situation.
You could even throw in an unscrupulous noble who wants the boots, and keeps hiring brigands to try to take them, resulting in occasional ambushes on the party at inopportune times. The party could even find a note on a brigand detailing the amount of reward for the boots and where to deliver them. This could even factor in to a larger story arc about corruption in a city. You might keep this option in your back pocket until after you see if excessive use of the boots is making it harder for you to challenge the party (A person flaunting their flight in a city would reasonably draw attention, including from shadier elements who'd want that ability for themselves).
Find way to knock him prone while he's flying. He gets that gentle fall if he's flying and runs out of time, but if he gets hit with a sleet storm, he's coming crashing down and taking fall damage. Don't do it all the time, just throw it out there enough to keep him honest and think about if he really wants to be flying in any particular encounter. Or make him the target. If the enemies have an archer or two in their group, they can either shoot into melee where they have allies, or at this guy, just hanging up in the air begging to be used as target practice.
As fayette suggested and you noted, indoors low ceilings will make flying almost useless. Outside, if they're in a forest, the tree canopy could give enough cover that being up in the air could work against him. Or any other kind of terrain where the enemies can get under something so he doesn't have a line of sight.
The real big thing to watch out for is after they go up a few levels and the wizard puts a greater invisibility on him.
Flight isn't *that* much of a major arcana. Fly, the spell, is only a third level spell, so getting it at level 1 (while still a good get) is not getting it that much earlier.
Flight at level 1 isn't necessarily unprecedented either. Arakokra, owlin, winged tieflings, all start out with flight. True, a lot of DM's don't allow those races when starting at level 1, but it's not by any means universal. Just make sure enemies have access to ranged attacks and flying speeds from time to time as well.
Personally, I don't nerf it. However, flying is ultimately a very powerful tactical advantage for most ranged characters. Your optimized battlemaster will make great use of it.
In terms of challenging the party - I think you mentioned most if not all of the tactics you can use.
- ranged attackers
- spells
- dungeons where the ability to utilize flight it limited
- flying attackers
- attackers that come from multiple directions
Usually the AC on your XBE/SS characters tends to be less since they need two hands for a bow or a free hand to load their hand crossbow. Either way, they won't have a shield and since he used the level 4 ASI for SS, he likely doesn't yet have 20 dex (though you did mention generous stat arrays).
Fighters are usually weak against wisdom saves until after they pick up resilient wisdom so spells that target wisdom like hold person are a good start. Most opponents will realize that the flying hand crossbow battlemaster is dealing out a lot of single target damage - so they will become a priority target for crowd control spells.
Honestly, I would ask him to choose something else. Sure, you can deal with a flying ranged player but it can be a headache to work around. As you said you are new to dm, I would encourage him to take something else in order to spare you a lot of extra work to balance encounters. I would also openly communicate that to him.
This reads to me like straight up, non-concentration flight with a long enough duration that it might as well be limitless. Pretty dang powerful for an uncommon item. I do know that at some point, flight becomes a thing in D&D. I'm just unlucky and most of my games have fizzled out early, and I never got to the higher levels. We started with 2 so I gave them a generous standard array, and they all have pretty good magic items already. Point being: I'm throwing way bigger monsters at them than their level would normally dictate.
You're discovering that 5e is balanced without the inclusion of magic items. That's why your party can puch well above their body-weight. Nothing surprising there, but I might suggest throttling back on the magic items utill the monsters catch back up with the party. Otherwise, you may find yourself in the middle of a homebrew monster arms race to make a single combat encounter challenging.
Otherwise: What are some tips for dealing with flying, ranged characters? Dungeon crawls obviously neutralize the advantage, and those will happen sometimes. Outdoors, ranged attackers and enemies that can also fly will be useful. I haven't dug into the spell list yet, but off the top of my head, blindness/deafness, hold person, would be useful. What are some other spells? More tips?
Also, if you think I should just disallow or nerf it, I'm not leaning that way but I'm always open to hearing other perspectives.
My number one tip: Don't focus on one character when desiging your encounters. IMHO, this is the definition of being adversarial, as you are designing a way to counteract a PC. Instead, challenge the party. D&D is a group game, challenge the group.
After that, throw things like weather (cold, wind, heat, fog...) at them. Change up the environment (underwater, underdark, inside the tavern...) that the encounters occur in. I just finished a multi-session dungeon crawl with my party. They loved/hated it. They had to retreat from the kobold den and come back after some first aid and a meal. Two of my PCs have items that grant flight. It wasn't a big party saver. And I didn't alter anything in the adventure but the final boss battle.
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
Most monsters have a ranged attack and that will work just fine against him. He chose something that gives him an advantage in combat - don't try to neutralise that. Let it be an advantage. At level 5 it's going to be pretty powerful, but flying is not without its dangers! Getting put to 0 hit points guarantees 1 failed death save provided he falls just 10 feet.
My party have had Winged Boots since level 7 and it doesn't really hurt combat encounters. It's more annoying when designing traps, puzzles, and environmental challenges. Occasionally I just have a room with "Magical items cannot be activated in this room" if I'm feeling lazy.
Most monsters have a ranged attack and that will work just fine against him. He chose something that gives him an advantage in combat - don't try to neutralise that. Let it be an advantage. At level 5 it's going to be pretty powerful, but flying is not without its dangers! Getting put to 0 hit points guarantees 1 failed death save provided he falls just 10 feet.
My party have had Winged Boots since level 7 and it doesn't really hurt combat encounters. It's more annoying when designing traps, puzzles, and environmental challenges. Occasionally I just have a room with "Magical items cannot be activated in this room" if I'm feeling lazy.
He has a hand crossbow, but imagine he decides to pick up a longbow. 600 foot range! He has sharpshooter.
You're discovering that 5e is balanced without the inclusion of magic items.
It was, unfortunately, balanced with the inclusion of magic items. They just actively did it badly.
The rarity of a magic item does not always have a strong correlation to how powerful it is. Winged Boots is a prime example of an item that is significantly more powerful than its rarity would suggest.
It can be misleading, because sometimes it seems like rarity is a power scale. Like when a +1 is uncommon, a +2 is rare, and then a +3 is very rare. That feels like an indication that all magic items are scaled where rarity=power but that is just not true. Some are, others very... very much are not.
Turns out, rarity is just a metric for how rare something is. And something being rare doesn't make it powerful and something being common doesn't make it weak.
The issue, really, is in giving out items based on rarity alone is prone for this type of abuse, where the player zeroes in on an item that is significantly stronger than anything else of similar rarity. A better solution, if you do want to give characters starting magic items, is to ask them what category of item they want, wonderous, armor, wand, etc, and if that doesn't narrow it down enough then ask them if they want offensive, utility, or defense, and then pick something for them yourself that isn't too out of bounds on the scale of power but that also sorta fits their vibe.
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I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
I have to agree that I wouldn't recommend letting the players choose anem item of X rarity as some players will just be drawn to the most powerful and their is little correlation between rarity and power.
For example a vicious weapon is rare and on average does an extra 0.35 damage per attack (7 on a Nat 20). A +1 weapon is uncommon and has an extra 5% of hitting so a 1d6 weapon with a +3 attack modifier will match this but on top of that when you hit you do an extra one damage with a 60% chance to hit this would mean a +1 weapon would do about 3 times as much extra damage as a vicious weapon dispite being more common.
If you want ot give the players some choice give them a selection from a limited choice for example buy having a magic shop with a limited range or having an NPC nobel reward them by each PC being able to choose one item from his collection. For example there might be an offensive item suitable for each character (+1 weapon or wand of the war mage), some defensive options (+1 armor, ioun stone of protection) and some utilitiy options (goggles of night, eversmoking bottle, necklace of adaption), that way you can ensure that there is nothing very powerful but the players or making a choice of what their characters get.
He has a hand crossbow, but imagine he decides to pick up a longbow. 600 foot range! He has sharpshooter.
The boots grant a Fly speed equal to walking speed:
(1) If the player is continuously at maximum altitude, then they will burn through the duration very quickly. This also likely means that they can't reliably communicate with the party. They would also be obvious from several miles away.
(2) If the player flies up at the start of combat, it would take them 10 rounds dashing (1 minute) to reach 600 feet. The combat is likely already over and they're an easy, vulnerable target the whole way up.
In most cases, if the player spends 2+ rounds getting into position (120ft), they're losing more combat effectiveness than they're gaining.
In my exp, flying items like brooms/winged boots aren't as overpowered or game breaking as people make them out to be.
-In most indoor setting it provides little to no benefit -Vs ranged attackers it has little to no benefit -A ranged PC just getting full cover behind terrain is just as unhittable as a flying creature, sometimes even harder to hit. -The rest of the party isn't flying, there for they will be getting hit still. One PC at full HP an the rest a low HP is still a party that needs to rest up. -If 1 PC cant be hit, that just means that enemies will be focusing fire more, which is arguably going to make encounters harder. -Boots require attunement, at some point he will be giving something up to have them on -Being knocked prone or grappled or restrained will cause a flying creature to fall and take fall damage. -At level 5, there are going to be fewer and fewer enemies that don't have a ranged option. -You can just tune encounters so that enemies have a ranged option if needed.
Mostly the option to fly will give the PC a chance to do creative things, which is good, it will only break combat if you somehow get a scenario where enemies have no range, and also cant hit anyone else in the party for some reason.
Indoors flying can have great benefits, many are out of combat but for example if the scout is flying they will not set off pressure plate or trip wire based traps and after bypassing them are very likely to see signs of the trap itself (eg holes in the wall where arrows come out of). In my experience at least half the time inindoor combat the ceiling is high enough to get out of range of melee attacks. While most monsters at this level will have a ranged option itwill often be much weaker than a melee attack.
Some combats can be trivialised with flight, for example have a weak enemy shooting from a castle window and taking cover. A party without flight have to hold action with ranged attacks or possibly burn spell slots on something like misty step but flight means the enemies have to be much stronger and 5he combat is little different from any other.
Of course the DM can tune encounters, but they have to consider that the party has flight when doing so and that removes a lot of their options.
It isn't just magic items however, when 5e first came out no player races had flight now a player can have flight at level 1 if they choose winged telling, arakokra or something.
My main point is that rarity has little correlation to power and items of the same rarity vary enormously in power. If a wizard can choose any uncommon item they are not going to choose a wand of the war mage (although it was a good option pre Tasha's) because an arcane grimoire is strictly better.
Hello, all. I'm DMing my first ever session, and I'm having a lot of fun doing it :) I still miss playing, but no doubt DMing is also fun. Just another kind of fun.
So my players just made level 5. I let them all choose 1 uncommon, wondrous magic item from a local vendor.
I have four players, a Champion shield & spear Fighter, a Battlemaster hand-crossbow dex build, a Tempest Cleric, and an odd Spores Druid - Barbarian mix.
So, the Battlemaster is an optimizer. I do not discourage it, as I also optimize as a player and the the whole "min-max" controversy is a big, separate topic. He's a human variant with XBE and SS.
He chose Winged Boots. He's also very reasonable and he would not cry if I asked him to choose something else, or if I nerfed it. That said, I my philosophy is to use restrictions and nerfs very sparingly.
Here's how it reads:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/magic-items/winged-boots
This reads to me like straight up, non-concentration flight with a long enough duration that it might as well be limitless. Pretty dang powerful for an uncommon item. I do know that at some point, flight becomes a thing in D&D. I'm just unlucky and most of my games have fizzled out early, and I never got to the higher levels. We started with 2 so I gave them a generous standard array, and they all have pretty good magic items already. Point being: I'm throwing way bigger monsters at them than their level would normally dictate.
Otherwise: What are some tips for dealing with flying, ranged characters? Dungeon crawls obviously neutralize the advantage, and those will happen sometimes. Outdoors, ranged attackers and enemies that can also fly will be useful. I haven't dug into the spell list yet, but off the top of my head, blindness/deafness, hold person, would be useful. What are some other spells? More tips?
Also, if you think I should just disallow or nerf it, I'm not leaning that way but I'm always open to hearing other perspectives.
You can mix in flying and ranged enemies in open areas.
You can also utilize dungeons where the flight doesn't allow them to get out of weapon-reach of enemies. If you do this, I would still make sure to allow the use of the boots to fly over traps such as trip wires or pressure plates, and maybe include a chasm or river that allows this character to carry a rope across for the party to cross, giving the player the advantages of flight, without it always being the answer to every situation.
You could even throw in an unscrupulous noble who wants the boots, and keeps hiring brigands to try to take them, resulting in occasional ambushes on the party at inopportune times. The party could even find a note on a brigand detailing the amount of reward for the boots and where to deliver them. This could even factor in to a larger story arc about corruption in a city. You might keep this option in your back pocket until after you see if excessive use of the boots is making it harder for you to challenge the party (A person flaunting their flight in a city would reasonably draw attention, including from shadier elements who'd want that ability for themselves).
Find way to knock him prone while he's flying. He gets that gentle fall if he's flying and runs out of time, but if he gets hit with a sleet storm, he's coming crashing down and taking fall damage. Don't do it all the time, just throw it out there enough to keep him honest and think about if he really wants to be flying in any particular encounter. Or make him the target. If the enemies have an archer or two in their group, they can either shoot into melee where they have allies, or at this guy, just hanging up in the air begging to be used as target practice.
As fayette suggested and you noted, indoors low ceilings will make flying almost useless. Outside, if they're in a forest, the tree canopy could give enough cover that being up in the air could work against him. Or any other kind of terrain where the enemies can get under something so he doesn't have a line of sight.
The real big thing to watch out for is after they go up a few levels and the wizard puts a greater invisibility on him.
Flight isn't *that* much of a major arcana. Fly, the spell, is only a third level spell, so getting it at level 1 (while still a good get) is not getting it that much earlier.
Flight at level 1 isn't necessarily unprecedented either. Arakokra, owlin, winged tieflings, all start out with flight. True, a lot of DM's don't allow those races when starting at level 1, but it's not by any means universal. Just make sure enemies have access to ranged attacks and flying speeds from time to time as well.
Personally, I don't nerf it. However, flying is ultimately a very powerful tactical advantage for most ranged characters. Your optimized battlemaster will make great use of it.
In terms of challenging the party - I think you mentioned most if not all of the tactics you can use.
- ranged attackers
- spells
- dungeons where the ability to utilize flight it limited
- flying attackers
- attackers that come from multiple directions
Usually the AC on your XBE/SS characters tends to be less since they need two hands for a bow or a free hand to load their hand crossbow. Either way, they won't have a shield and since he used the level 4 ASI for SS, he likely doesn't yet have 20 dex (though you did mention generous stat arrays).
Fighters are usually weak against wisdom saves until after they pick up resilient wisdom so spells that target wisdom like hold person are a good start. Most opponents will realize that the flying hand crossbow battlemaster is dealing out a lot of single target damage - so they will become a priority target for crowd control spells.
Honestly, I would ask him to choose something else. Sure, you can deal with a flying ranged player but it can be a headache to work around. As you said you are new to dm, I would encourage him to take something else in order to spare you a lot of extra work to balance encounters. I would also openly communicate that to him.
You're discovering that 5e is balanced without the inclusion of magic items. That's why your party can puch well above their body-weight. Nothing surprising there, but I might suggest throttling back on the magic items utill the monsters catch back up with the party. Otherwise, you may find yourself in the middle of a homebrew monster arms race to make a single combat encounter challenging.
My number one tip: Don't focus on one character when desiging your encounters. IMHO, this is the definition of being adversarial, as you are designing a way to counteract a PC. Instead, challenge the party. D&D is a group game, challenge the group.
After that, throw things like weather (cold, wind, heat, fog...) at them. Change up the environment (underwater, underdark, inside the tavern...) that the encounters occur in. I just finished a multi-session dungeon crawl with my party. They loved/hated it. They had to retreat from the kobold den and come back after some first aid and a meal. Two of my PCs have items that grant flight. It wasn't a big party saver. And I didn't alter anything in the adventure but the final boss battle.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
Most monsters have a ranged attack and that will work just fine against him. He chose something that gives him an advantage in combat - don't try to neutralise that. Let it be an advantage. At level 5 it's going to be pretty powerful, but flying is not without its dangers! Getting put to 0 hit points guarantees 1 failed death save provided he falls just 10 feet.
My party have had Winged Boots since level 7 and it doesn't really hurt combat encounters. It's more annoying when designing traps, puzzles, and environmental challenges. Occasionally I just have a room with "Magical items cannot be activated in this room" if I'm feeling lazy.
He has a hand crossbow, but imagine he decides to pick up a longbow. 600 foot range! He has sharpshooter.
It was, unfortunately, balanced with the inclusion of magic items. They just actively did it badly.
The rarity of a magic item does not always have a strong correlation to how powerful it is. Winged Boots is a prime example of an item that is significantly more powerful than its rarity would suggest.
It can be misleading, because sometimes it seems like rarity is a power scale. Like when a +1 is uncommon, a +2 is rare, and then a +3 is very rare. That feels like an indication that all magic items are scaled where rarity=power but that is just not true. Some are, others very... very much are not.
Turns out, rarity is just a metric for how rare something is. And something being rare doesn't make it powerful and something being common doesn't make it weak.
The issue, really, is in giving out items based on rarity alone is prone for this type of abuse, where the player zeroes in on an item that is significantly stronger than anything else of similar rarity. A better solution, if you do want to give characters starting magic items, is to ask them what category of item they want, wonderous, armor, wand, etc, and if that doesn't narrow it down enough then ask them if they want offensive, utility, or defense, and then pick something for them yourself that isn't too out of bounds on the scale of power but that also sorta fits their vibe.
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
I have to agree that I wouldn't recommend letting the players choose anem item of X rarity as some players will just be drawn to the most powerful and their is little correlation between rarity and power.
For example a vicious weapon is rare and on average does an extra 0.35 damage per attack (7 on a Nat 20). A +1 weapon is uncommon and has an extra 5% of hitting so a 1d6 weapon with a +3 attack modifier will match this but on top of that when you hit you do an extra one damage with a 60% chance to hit this would mean a +1 weapon would do about 3 times as much extra damage as a vicious weapon dispite being more common.
If you want ot give the players some choice give them a selection from a limited choice for example buy having a magic shop with a limited range or having an NPC nobel reward them by each PC being able to choose one item from his collection. For example there might be an offensive item suitable for each character (+1 weapon or wand of the war mage), some defensive options (+1 armor, ioun stone of protection) and some utilitiy options (goggles of night, eversmoking bottle, necklace of adaption), that way you can ensure that there is nothing very powerful but the players or making a choice of what their characters get.
The boots grant a Fly speed equal to walking speed:
(1) If the player is continuously at maximum altitude, then they will burn through the duration very quickly. This also likely means that they can't reliably communicate with the party. They would also be obvious from several miles away.
(2) If the player flies up at the start of combat, it would take them 10 rounds dashing (1 minute) to reach 600 feet. The combat is likely already over and they're an easy, vulnerable target the whole way up.
In most cases, if the player spends 2+ rounds getting into position (120ft), they're losing more combat effectiveness than they're gaining.
In my exp, flying items like brooms/winged boots aren't as overpowered or game breaking as people make them out to be.
-In most indoor setting it provides little to no benefit
-Vs ranged attackers it has little to no benefit
-A ranged PC just getting full cover behind terrain is just as unhittable as a flying creature, sometimes even harder to hit.
-The rest of the party isn't flying, there for they will be getting hit still. One PC at full HP an the rest a low HP is still a party that needs to rest up.
-If 1 PC cant be hit, that just means that enemies will be focusing fire more, which is arguably going to make encounters harder.
-Boots require attunement, at some point he will be giving something up to have them on
-Being knocked prone or grappled or restrained will cause a flying creature to fall and take fall damage.
-At level 5, there are going to be fewer and fewer enemies that don't have a ranged option.
-You can just tune encounters so that enemies have a ranged option if needed.
Mostly the option to fly will give the PC a chance to do creative things, which is good, it will only break combat if you somehow get a scenario where enemies have no range, and also cant hit anyone else in the party for some reason.
Indoors flying can have great benefits, many are out of combat but for example if the scout is flying they will not set off pressure plate or trip wire based traps and after bypassing them are very likely to see signs of the trap itself (eg holes in the wall where arrows come out of). In my experience at least half the time inindoor combat the ceiling is high enough to get out of range of melee attacks. While most monsters at this level will have a ranged option itwill often be much weaker than a melee attack.
Some combats can be trivialised with flight, for example have a weak enemy shooting from a castle window and taking cover. A party without flight have to hold action with ranged attacks or possibly burn spell slots on something like misty step but flight means the enemies have to be much stronger and 5he combat is little different from any other.
Of course the DM can tune encounters, but they have to consider that the party has flight when doing so and that removes a lot of their options.
It isn't just magic items however, when 5e first came out no player races had flight now a player can have flight at level 1 if they choose winged telling, arakokra or something.
My main point is that rarity has little correlation to power and items of the same rarity vary enormously in power. If a wizard can choose any uncommon item they are not going to choose a wand of the war mage (although it was a good option pre Tasha's) because an arcane grimoire is strictly better.