Good day, everyone! I'm almost 10 sessions in to my first campaign, and I have a question regarding flying monsters. In my next session, I plan on having a wyvern or two attack my party as they are traveling in a boat. My question is how do I deal with opportunity attacks of a flying creature and the sentinel feat? I intend to have the wyvern sweep in and make strafing runs on the group, but I'm worried my barb could use sentinel to completely shut that down. I know the wyvern doesn't have the Flyby trait that some other monsters have that prevent this, and it would make sense if I were to add it here. Should I add that trait to my enemies, or do you think this is a good chance to allow my player to revel in the satisfaction of seeing their feat work perfectly?
One thing to note is sentinel doesn’t completely shut down the encounter. With 2 wyverns the barb will have to choose one to hit with sentinel as a reaction, and that’s also if they hit. If there’s more enemies backing up the wyvern(s) then you have chances to flush their reaction. I do think sentinel is very powerful, but at below level 10 it’s not nearly as good as it is in higher tiers of play.
It is also important to give characters moments to shine though as well, (giving the rogue a door to lock pick, giving the spell caster who took a different spell the opportunity to use it), so this might be a case where you give the barbarian their moment.
Overall I’d say don’t change the wyverns statblock, it sentinel might or might not work as effectively in the battle thanks to good or bad rolls, but give the player the satisfaction of choosing a cool feat when it works.
Well, if the barbarian isn't using a polearm the wyvern can just exploit having 10' reach on bite and stinger and not draw any opportunity attacks at all, but I don't see a reason to nerf sentinel, that sort of thing is why they took the feat in the first place.
Good day, everyone!
I'm almost 10 sessions in to my first campaign, and I have a question regarding flying monsters. In my next session, I plan on having a wyvern or two attack my party as they are traveling in a boat. My question is how do I deal with opportunity attacks of a flying creature and the sentinel feat? I intend to have the wyvern sweep in and make strafing runs on the group, but I'm worried my barb could use sentinel to completely shut that down. I know the wyvern doesn't have the Flyby trait that some other monsters have that prevent this, and it would make sense if I were to add it here. Should I add that trait to my enemies, or do you think this is a good chance to allow my player to revel in the satisfaction of seeing their feat work perfectly?
Thanks in advance!
One thing to note is sentinel doesn’t completely shut down the encounter. With 2 wyverns the barb will have to choose one to hit with sentinel as a reaction, and that’s also if they hit. If there’s more enemies backing up the wyvern(s) then you have chances to flush their reaction. I do think sentinel is very powerful, but at below level 10 it’s not nearly as good as it is in higher tiers of play.
It is also important to give characters moments to shine though as well, (giving the rogue a door to lock pick, giving the spell caster who took a different spell the opportunity to use it), so this might be a case where you give the barbarian their moment.
Overall I’d say don’t change the wyverns statblock, it sentinel might or might not work as effectively in the battle thanks to good or bad rolls, but give the player the satisfaction of choosing a cool feat when it works.
Well, if the barbarian isn't using a polearm the wyvern can just exploit having 10' reach on bite and stinger and not draw any opportunity attacks at all, but I don't see a reason to nerf sentinel, that sort of thing is why they took the feat in the first place.
Plus, it justifies the attention of the Wyvern.
Round One: Wyvern does a fly by and the barbarian activates Sentinel for extra pain.
Round Two: Wyvern directly attacks the barbarian with all of its actions because that barbarian needs to die first.
The feat gets to be awesome, so does the Wyvern.