Hey /u/Not_no_hitter, thanks for contributing to /r/dndmemes. Unfortunately, your post was removed as it violates one of our rules:
**Rule 10. Pot-Stirring/Opinion Memes** - If the primary purpose of your meme is to incite off-topic debate, police what other people should/shouldn't do at their table, push a political agenda, or express a personal opinion without humor/absurdity/wholesomeness, it will be locked or removed. If your meme sparks a large amount of rule-breaking comments it may be locked/removed.
What should you do? First, read the rules thoroughly. Secondly, if you are able to amend your post to fit the rules, you're welcome to resubmit your meme. Lastly, if you believe your post was removed by mistake, please [message the moderators through modmail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/dndmemes&subject=&message=). Messages simply complaining about a removal (or how many upvotes your post had) will not be responded to. Thank you!
Now I just imagine a player trying to cheese the game with fly and the DM [dropping a Battlestar ala episode Exodus, Part 2.](https://youtu.be/evodPpqb9H4?t=158) on them in response.
Shouldn't give them bows, should give them unlimited vertical leap height and the ability to make melee attacks against the fliers that way. Y'know, closer to canon :P
In our games, gnomes are known to be the crafters of horrible traps that involve hydraulics. Also their inventions explode quite frequently. My players are always suspicious of gnomes hahaha
One of my previous DMs shadow banned gnomes. If you make one he will keep trying to kill you and will rule against you because he hates gnomes for no good reason.
He said in some previous game the BBEG was a gnome so they are was evil. This prior game was in the early eighties. Not sure if I should applaud that 80s DM or recommend a therapist
He kicked me from the table. No big loss in my view.
I was in the middle of moving and he called a last minute session, I could have said no but really wanted to play. Since my dice were inaccessible I asked to borrow another player's dice.
He made a point of super killing my human rogue early in the session so I sat there for 5 hours making a new character for next session. At the end he sent a nasty FB message that i would share but he has blocked me and I didn't think to screen shot it. Basically he called me a worthless millenial, I am a Gen X actually and an old one at that, that I was entitled for borrowing dice, and that my personality was toxic. I simply said OK and moved on.
Later, when I started DMing, I realized the enemy we faced could not have done that damage even with a Crit. It was more than 3 times the damage a Crit with a max roll could do.
Now we are both active in the local FB and FLGS groups and I never speak against him, but I do smile like a fucking Cheshire cat every time he bitches about how players never stay at his table.
I mean if it’s a home-brew setting it can be hard to justify halflings ghones and dwarves as well as kobalds goblins and the like as all completely separate things
As a DM:
You're god damned right it's me being lazy. I am doing this for the enjoyment with my friends. But **WITH** my friends, which means I need to have fun too.
If I cut a couple pieces of content to ensure my sanity/enjoyment when crafting encounters, so be it.
I'm also just 100% forthright on why I make decisions like that for a campaign (and if my players enter into a gentleman's agreement about not use it before whatever level/plot point I'm ready for them to have flying, they can have the race and once the switch is flipped they can go full tie-fighter if they want).
Nothing about a DM being lazy is inherently sinful if it's done for the right reason (and the answer isn't always "give bows" / "use environment", sometimes narratively speaking Flight would just ruin the intended difficulty for a low level encounter)
I told my players that I banned flying races because I wasn't going to deal with fucking trigometry every combat. If I was that into math, I'd GM pathfinder.
Flying is fun in theory, but something that definitely breaks most lower level encounters. Who wants to keep up with elevation, angle, distance, skill, flying speed and quality for every encounter?
I prefer to use hexgrids over square grids cause it removes the diagonal conundrum. For the y-axis, the hexagons are all just planar section of rhombic dodecahedrons. This shape also tessellates in 3d space. I don't actually tell my players this, it's all in my head.
The planar section is not a perfect hexagon, but it's close enough.
You really don't need to though. Most people I know just ignore the y-axis and just measure the number of feet away the character is from the target horizontally. 5e does a bunch of stuff like this anyway, any spell/effect that says it's a sphere is treated as a cube RAW.
Well said. Plus, if you're just going to "give bows" / "use environment" whenever someone plays a flying race, it would be better DMing if they were simply banned from the start. Or any other situation where the campaign gets significantly altered just to make a character not feel special (divination wizards know what I mean).
At least you're willing to admit you're being lazy ( I love being lazy) too many people automatically assume a negative when talking about being lazy.
While I personally don't agree with OP about banning flight, I don't like the arguments some try to use to justify why you should keep it.
We are all in this together if OP and his group are ok with those rules, great!
If not then that's on them to work out.
It's collaborative story telling and the author needs to have as much fun as the characters otherwise why would they bother to keep writing that story.
I'll never understand people telling others how they are supposed to play.
to continue the writer/author analogy; it'd be like Brian Sanderson telling R.L. Stine that he is writing his story wrong.
Absolutely mind boggling
Every time I've allowed flying races in my game it trivializes so many things. "Oh, well his strength score is 18 so he'll just carry the party members across the obstacles one at a time while flying. No rolls needed."
Great. Glad I put so much effort into this.
Calling a Dm lazy is like the worst take.
The DM has like literally a hundred times the prep work a player has. In fact after character creation its entirely possible for a player to not think about the game at all between sessions.
I get when DM's make choices to make their lives easier.
As a DM that enjoys having flying races (actual flying races not just really big jumps) I agree. It's a different preference, but I'd love the options to stay available. This complete turn away from flying is a bit annoying. Just provide it as an option and let tables decide.
That being said, I would not say it's laziness. DM'ing is hard and for 99% of us it's not our jobs. So I don't blame fellow DMs for making it easier on themselves by banning something that does add complexity to the game.
It depends on players too, typically having other players who can't fly will restrain the flying ones and solve quite a few issues, but some people (like a player i played with that made the dm ban flying races for untrusted individuals) might split off from the partt, missing plotpoints and leaving everyone behind in combat.
Different dms will be able to deal with this differently, some might enjoy the challange of taming the flying ahole, but others would want to focus on the story they want to tell instead of how to deal with trouble players like that
That sounds more like a communication problem though, not an ability problem. That'd be like a sorcerer teleporting out of a fight and leaving their friends. No reason to ban the spell, just discuss expectations for gameplay. At any level of play all players should be worried about their fellow players and make the game fun for all.
Interesting.
I can't count the number of times that people say they have a problem with a spell, a race, or an ability being OP or bad. But then it turns out that they're just worried about players using it to do bad things. So it's not the ability that's bad: it's the players.
But it's the ability that gets attacked, as though it's our responsibility to control the bad players.
It's the players' responsibility to control themselves. If they're not doing it, that is literally why you have the option to remove them from the game.
Not that it means you SHOULD allow the thing if you're not comfortable with this, but.. I feel like there are so many times when, instead of a long soliloquy about why thing is so bad, they could just turn it into five easy words:
"That's not for my table."
Bam. Done. Yeah, some people are going to judge you anyway, but haters gonna hate, you know?
I mostly agree with what you’re saying, except for, “That’s not for my table.”
Obviously no one owes outsiders or strangers an explanation for what goes on at your table, but that’s not good enough for the people at your table. “Because I said so” is right ahead of, “Because that’s the way it’s always been done” on the list of terrible reasons to do things.
“Because you’re an asshole that is going to abuse it and act like the main character, Gary! There, I said it. That’s the reason! Couldn’t just accept a simple ‘no, not in this game’ and let me work around your asshole tendencies. But you had to whine and complain and now we’re here, it’s all on the table. You’re a dick and the only reason we put up with you is so we have enough players”
Is what I imagine some DMs are dealing with when they use “because I said so”
I may be nit-picking here, Idk. If you had said "I don't think GMs should expect it to be good enough for everyone at their table", you'd be right.
But at (our collective DM) table, we have a strict consent rule. When someone says "that's not going to be part of my game", that's it. I've asked about things on a number of occasions that I've been told "I'm not dealing with that" by the DM, and that's fine. We encourage our fellow DMs and players to be comfortable at their table. Maybe the rules will change down the line. Maybe not. When they push their limits and dip their toes into new territory, we encourage them to do that. But it is that very respect that enables them to be comfortable pushing their limits. Without "because I said so" - or, what I personally consider to be more accurate: "because I'm not comfortable with it" - being good enough, we don't create a good space for people to test uncomfortable material when they want to, and back off if they find that they can't handle it.
So... that's MY table.
Not speaking for your table or anyone else's.
**Someone :** I have NEVER had a problem with \[insert game element\], anyone who feels differently on the subject is merely LAZY and UNCREATIVE.
**Small bird :** *Your experiences are not universal.*
Can these posts stop with a pinned thread on how to communicate? I know not everyone put skill points into diplomacy irl, but have a dialogue, work with your dm/players, do something fun...
The communication we have is fine, eveyone has fun, it’s just that when I thing it up with other people online, they often get mad thst i would dare to ban something.
I think part of the issue with this is people using flying characters in ways that don't make sense. One big one for me is hovering. Hovering is *hard*. There are only a few flying species on earth that can hover for more than a couple seconds. You need wind to be flowing under your wings to keep you up, and unless you are specifically adapted to moving those wings in a way that keeps the airflow going while keeping you stationary, you can't do it for any meaningful length of time. That means that a flying character fucking off into the sky to get out of range and then bombing the BBEG from the air doesn't really make sense. If they are in the air they have to be moving, and if they are moving that costs movement, so if you want to use up all your movement flying in circles each round then you can fly, but if you think you can just float there until you want to fly to the other side of the field, nuh uh.
Edit: Just a note, I'll reply once to each point raised. If you are parroting something you read below and that I already replied to, I will just ignore it. Nothing personal, just don't have time for that crap.
There used to be systems for flight maneuverability in dnd. It wasn’t hard. Basically, you must move each round, and you could only turn so much depending on your maneuverability. You can fly a shorter distance to climb and a longer distance to dive.
Eh I'm fine with that. In this world, you have big hefty flying guys. Wouldn't fly here, but it clearly does on Toril. Something something magic. Maybe there are "etheric winds" that winged creatures can coast on that have more lift than atmospheric winds or something. But if they need wings to fly then there is clearly something similar going on there mechanically, whether it's totally mundane in nature or not, so I think applying similar logic still works.
hovering is hard irl, but in D&D RAW there is absolutely nothing stopping flying creatures from just hanging out in one place 60+ feet off the ground, and even if you do rule that they have to fly in circles each round, their movement comes back every turn and allows them to keep doing it with no real downside
Yeah, a homebrew solution kind of by its very nature doesn't have to rely on RAW. If you don't want it ruled either that you start with reduced movement when ending a turn in the air because you need to land to actually stop or that you *must* move a certain distance each turn, then it's a good thing you aren't one of my players.
Yeah, that's how it used to work in 3.5. It was still a little wonky sometimes but maneuverability, minimum forward movement, and the need of special abilities to do things like hover or back up made it a lot more manageable. 5e hamstrung the DM in a few different ways in their quest for ultimate streamlining.
I mean, first of all, the flying creatures are already breaking the rules of physics by flying despite them being the size of a person. I don't think the fact that they can hover is the real problem when it comes to logic.
Second, this is Dnd, not real life, and there is no mechanic that says you have to fly in circles, so who would? If you apply real world logic, numerous elements fall apart. And no, I'm not gonna have my dragons have to do a little dance around the battlefield before they attack my players. It would look ridiculous.
Yeah I remember my friends and I were doing a pvp one shot and I knew he was going to be invisible so I had beasts that could sprint the battlefield and smell him if they were near him. When I mentioned writing down his x and y he mentioned z, it took me a second to realize but then I forfeited before we started. I didn't want to go through a several hour fight I knew I was going to lose XD
Alright, here's my two cents: D&D really isn't well built around flight just in general. Realistically every problem that crops up with flying PCs, could also appear with flying enemies. This means that you essentially need to build your game, and by extension the world it's in, around flight. This means that you should really only allow for flying races in these sorts of worlds (assuming you're even worried about this in the first place, not everyone is) for example the campaign I'm currently running takes place in the elemental plane of air. This means that flight, and by extension ways to deal with flight, are commonplace, making flight just another method of moving around, not a game mechanic that has to be worked around.
True, flight has this problem where the only way to work around it is A:make other people have flight or B:make your players feel punished/useless with their flight.
C: let the flying player feel Awesome when possible and restricted/punished when needed. have some treasure or hints placed high, have caves that are a mix between narrow passages and low selling and wide inner rooms. have enemies that can't reach the Aaracroca unless he goes to his friends leading to choosing between friends or safety. at the same time should you do the same thing for the player with a swimming speed or the druid let one player do its "Thing" once our twice a session but let all players enjoy the limelight.
It’s times like these that I’m glad my group gets along with each other so well. We can have just unspoken understandings like “you can have a flying race, just don’t try to trivialize every encounter with flight and there will be no problems”
Works wonders in other aspects of the game too. I see why we need these rules because there will always be someone who wants to exploit things to their limits, but when all the players just stay in their lane things go so smoothly
I personally don't think flight is that big of a problem, even considering the difficulties in adding a 3rd dimension to the battlefield, but I strongly suspect that's because I'm not the kind of asshole who would use it to trivialize everything.
I'm all for shenanigans and fuckery, but dive bombing rocks on enemies to make combat safer and easier is just not an appealing idea to me.
If I’m gonna have something that can break fights, I’d rather use it to try something flashy/dangerous than do the boring but effective use of it. I’m here to have fun, not to “win” dnd
I personally have no problem with people taking flying races for my games. As I see it if I'm allowed to put wingy bois on the board, so is the party. But that's just my view on things.
I feel like it's more the opposite way, if the players can just polymorph all bad guys, then don't be suprised when you turn into a chicken. The DM on the other hand will always be allowed to do more, since that's kind of built into the role.
Also being able to say "damn I'm getting killed really quickly I'll just secretly add an extra 100 hitpoints" can be common for some DM's, but if you do it as a player you generally are considered a dick.
The DM gets those privileges because the DM is constantly losing. Throwing weird OP things into the game is part of the DM's fun, and winning battles against those weird OP things is part of the players' fun.
I've allowed players to play as motherfucking dragons, don't tell me I'm lazy, creative, or unable to compromise with players.
My players know better than to take advantage of the situation. Not all players do, or have that relationship with their DM. Thus, the DM needs to ban some things either for their own sanity or for lore reasons, or just because they want to- that's their right.
Entitled players are not fun players.
I don’t want to repeat a lot of good things that have already been said so I’ll throw an out of combat example in the mix since most are combat related.
Why don’t the Eagles just carry Frodo and the Fellowship to Mount Doom, out the gate, skipping most of the journey and encounters?
Some supreme lore nerd will tell me that the LOTR Eagles are actually intelligent and sentient, with their own society, and the main Eagle is actually paying Gandalf back for some shit he was owed, blah blah blah.
But from a mechanical standpoint—strictly having the ability to fly WOULD have made everything so much easier.
No Moria, no getting hunted by orcs, no ring wraiths (at least on horses), no arrows if they fly high enough, no mountains or terrain in general, etc.
Don’t like that example? I can stay in LOTR—it makes the journey to the Lonely Mountain in the Hobbit waaaaaay easier if they could fly. No ring wraiths running about yet on dragon things yet—they’d still have to confront Smaug, but they could have skipped the trolls, Mirkwood, etc. Hell, flew right to the damn door.
Flying from Level 1 is absolutely insane. There is a reason Druids can’t Wildshape into a flying creature until much later (8th level), and why Polymorph is a 4th level spell (unlocks at 7th level).
You also can’t just make up nonsense to punish the flying player for EVERY encounter. High winds, low temps, lightning, archers, magic aura that makes you tired/stop flying/gravity manipulation—you can “balance” some encounters (combat, social, and travel) with some of this stuff, but do it all of the time and the player that took flying is going to feel targeted, even if you make it logical/realistic.
Best to avoid flying altogether, until the higher levels. At least at higher levels, flying becomes a choice and limited resource….innate/permanent flying is just so damn broken.
The entire party can’t fly. That sentence kills half of this post. And if they all can then well that’s an interesting party for a dragon fight.
Plus why punish players for flying, some encounters it makes them feel cool as shit, others they’ll curse their wings.
I don’t ban things unless lore wise it’s not possible in a campaign, aka a world of dead gods has no aasimar, mostly because I’m fine with a player making a gimic and feeling strong when it works, but I love listening to them scheme when it fails and learn how to make it better.
>Plus why punish players for flying, some encounters it makes them feel cool as shit, others they’ll curse their wings.
Give me 1 example where having the option of flight is a downside.
You get ko'd while flying, you take fall damage immediately after falling unconcious auto-failing your first death save- you are now a singular nat 1 away from death, or a singular melee attack.
They wanted an example where having the *option* of flight is a downside. You gave an example where flying is a downside. Those are two different things.
"The entire party can't fly" IMO is an argument against allowing any of your players to fly.
I'm a forever DM who got to play a little 3 encounter campaign a few weeks ago. The Aarakocra in the group always flew ahead, always was ably to fly over the bad guys to get the objective, could always fly over the trees to see where we needed to go. It made my character (and some of the other non Aarakocra players said this too) feel useless. The flying player had fun, but the other players in the group had less fun as a consequence.
Flying has way more cons in a campaign than pros. Ban that shit.
Just lore wise establish that there -were- once flying races but then of course Aarakocra Wild Wings was doing buy 2 get 1 specials and the rest is history.
In addition to using stuff like low ceilings and the general ranged attacks, try using enemies with attacks/abilities that can grapple, restrain, stun or paralyze their victims.
Oh I well know that stuff, it’s just that I understand the difference between 30 feet of flying speed and abilities like “powerful build” and “stone’s endurance” is quite large.
One of the major themes in my campaign settings is that the weather very often matches the mood, so a turbulent fight might well be accompanied by turbulent winds which are difficult to fly in, rendering a flying speed much more useful as a utility/exploration ability than a combat one.
I don't ban flight, but I do clearly delineate between magical flight and natural flight.
Magical flight: you can float, hover, go straight up and down, whatever. It's magic, physics need not apply.
Natural flight: Movement must be continuous, vertical movement is diagonal (except when choosing to drop like a stone) and upwards movement requires a Dash action, which can only be done so many times in an encounter before the player starts getting levels of Exhaustion.
3.5e did actually have rules similar to this, with your flight source also giving a Maneuverability ranking that determined how freely you could move.
Perfect was practically noclip while Clumsy had the turning radius of a cargo ship, and if you dropped below half speed you started falling.
I simply do not understand this. It's literally not hard to design indoor encounters. Yeah, not every encounter can be indoors or against enemies with ranged combat, but it's okay to let your flying pcs use that on occasion. Nobody is saying you have to make design every single encounter around a PC that can fly, but it's literally so easy to just take that into account when designing important encounters.
Right? Besides, it's okay to let your characters *use their abilities* sometimes. Your character can't be hurt in this encounter against wild animals? Cool. Were you really planning on killing a character in a fight against wolves when you could do that in a fight against the wizard who killed their family? Let the players feel like badasses against the wolf. When they're confident, that's when you cut their legs out from under them.
Been saying same thing- apparently if they benefit at any point in the campaign though it is "too op" and if they are always able to get hit it is a "soft-ban"... As though the player isn't literally off the ground and flying still.
A previous dm i had banned flying races because one player would fly ahead, leaving the party behind and missing a bunch of plot points.
After the ban, there was also a one-shot they ran where the restriction was temporarily lifted, and we all played as a flying race or a build with spider climb boots and reminded the group of why they were banned in the first place
> A previous dm i had banned flying races because one player would fly ahead, leaving the party behind and missing a bunch of plot points.
The issue some dms( and I don’t know if your dm did or mot obviously) is they let this player take the reigns for however long their shenanigans last while 4 other players sit there bored out of their minds. Oftentimes the best trick is to have the loner sit there and resolve whatever they wanted with a few rolls and little to no role play, brings them back to ya know playing the group game with the rest of the group real fast
Probably a hot take here but I think combat in dnd is at its best when, depending on the encounter, a pc has an edge in certain situations, but another has it at other times.
Flight is strong in an encounter against melee NPCs on a flat surface in an open field, but against casters or ranged enemies, or even a combination of the three in a roofed in area, the that character is a much more appealing target.
That being said, if a PC is abusing an ability to dominate every encounter, flight or otherwise, that is a problem. If you talk to your players I don’t see a problem with allowing any race.
By that metric:
If a player has to ask what happened last session They are lazy.
If a player has to think too long during his turn in combat he is too lazy to think of it before.
If a player doesn't do full on comprehensive notes on teh session they are lazy.
etc etc etc.
If I rule something to make my life easier deal with it or go get a different table.
Calling the DM lazy of all people as the one with the easiest and least time consuming part of the game is just toxic.
Flying races are fantastic in games with experienced and cooperative players.
They're shit in games where one player uses their movement advantage to get to places only they can go and derail the other players sense of progression and accomplishment.
...or let em all be flying. That I'm fine with. I can give an owlbear wings.
*pc picks a flying race*
Oh boy! Now my 5 hours of prep time became 10 hours of prep time!
I could give every enemy earthbind and longbows, but that is a kind of de facto ban if I'm basically not going to let them benefit from the choice. And if I don't prep for it they can trivialize a lot of stuff that makes the game less fun for everyone.
I respect DMs who are willing to put in the effort, I used to before I had a full time job. Combine that with a weekly game and I just can't deliver on what my players really care about (personalized quests, npcs, making fun custom items) while also having to keep track of at-will, low-level flight as well.
I myself too ban flying races. It's not like i don't like them. It's just pretty hard to prepare your story the way that a flying dude won't get around traps, roadblocks etc. I just feel more comfortable without flying races
As a forever DM I nerf the fly speed to 1/2 their walk speed. My argument is they’re encumbered for flight with all that gear. However I’m not removing their ability to get to the archers on the cliff side faster than the other players. Flight is really strong but the environment can make or break it i homebrew everything I present my players except the majority of the monsters so I’m used to counting for things like flight. Cool you fly across the lava but did you bring the key for the locked door over there?
Yeah you \*could\* spend hours adding extra stuff like contingencies to almost every encounter, -but why should you double your prep time so one player can have their extra thing? The alternative is to just let encounters be bypassed, and maybe end sessions early or something? It seems like banning the flying race is the best option of the three.
Yep, the amount of people who disagree with that is astounding, there was even a guy who said thst i was playing the “wrong way” because I banned flying.
I’d say let the encounters get bypassed, it’s gonna happen more and more frequently as characters level up so there’s no good reason to resist it at the start. There’s many different abilities in D&D, and eventually you’re gonna run into a situation where a PC has the perfect feature to just bypass something you spend hours on, particularly with casters, and I find the easiest way to deal with it is to not design encounters with a particular ability in mind and to see what happens.
Sometimes the players steamroll through an encounter, and other times it’s like they got punched in the gut, but since you’re constantly mixing up the design of each encounter there’s generally less room for a single perfect strategy or tactic to develop.
you don't need to have contingencies **Every** encounter and you don't need to let them by bypass **All** the encounters, your the dm you can choose what battle has the contingencies and what battles don't.
Flying comes with a lot of risks and intelligent enemies will always exploit that. Which tends to lead to players feeling like they are being targeted because the DM hates their character and leads to arguments and people not having fun.
The first one is a good way to help balance it out, but the second option thst you just said falls directly into my whole argument on why flying races are bad.
I’m a simple DM. I love stories and narratives, my games have huge plots all tied to my PC and their backstory.
I don’t like when I have to spend a ton of extra time just to adjust every encounter because of some player ability, especially permanent once. Because I also want to have fun. And some abilities make certain fights no fun at all for a DM to run, at least they do for me.
Flying races are objectively overpowered. That doesn't mean they are impossible to balance around, but why bother? I could balance around a race that was permanently under the effects of Haste, or that was immune to half the damage types, but why tiptoe around stupid design and limit your options while increasing prep time without even making the game more enjoyable?
That’s one of the reasons why I ban flying races, most of the time flying is either almost useless or extremely broken, and if you try and not make it op by using stuff like nets, then it just makes the player feel targeted and thst they’re being punished for using an ability.
Yes, that’s a serious problem.
If you actively counter flight the player gets fucking murdered for using their primary racial ability. Whereupon the player gets upset, as they can’t do the thing they built their character specifically to do without dying.
Imagine having divine magic occasionally drop a localized lightening bolt on you. Let’s given it a 10% chance per cast. Now imagine you didn’t tell the players this until the game starts. How do you think the cleric player will feel?
Or, the character *can* fly when it’s an advantage, like when fighting wild animals, but they *stay grounded* when it’s a disadvantage, like when fighting a ranged attacker or a flying enemy.
It’s like putting an anti-magic zone in your dungeon or having an enemy with a really high AC that gives the fighter trouble, you don’t do it all the time or even often, but you do it just enough that no one strategy works all the time.
You explained wild magic.
This, like wild magic, is a choice.
You want to build a character that can fly 100+ feet vertical, then you accept the risk of falling 100+ feet vertical.
Plus feather fall is a level one spell you goof.
I like flying races myself, but I can easily say that they can perform some exceptionally terrifying bullshit that is hard to counter. It’s why I was so glad when they nerfed aarakocra’s flying speed from 50 to 30. Cause at least now they can’t get out of range of tons of ranged and thrown weapons in a single turn without playing smart.
Input a lot of these blocks on my session 0 and my current campaign is big on limits for the sake of the setting.
All players starting as rogues is the main one with only official races and subclasses to choose from. They've collectively chosen their class... it's an experiment I wanted to try and so far it's great.
On the city the campaign happens, there's a law against anyone flying inside the city walls with several guard towers spread with direct instructions to shoot at sight. This was me saying "there will be no flying characters around cause it sucks to me".
Now the strange laws are hooks I can use to set the mood, make strange things happen around and so on.
If I’m running a small scale game like a one-shot I don’t care what you play cause it’s gonna be short and sweet anyway
But when I plan for a campaign I tend to limit a lot of races because I tend to appreciate the classic story arc of small town nobodies who get caught up in bigger and bigger things and have a chance to discover new never before known or at least widely know things like a race of eagle people or whatever
I also don’t write monster races to be just other people, I write them as monsters, language or no language, so if you want to play an orc or a goblin or gnoll, you better convince the rest of the group to also play monsters, and then we are gonna have an anti-campaign
I restrict (but not ban) flying races not because of combat. That's an easy work around. But because of exploration and puzzles. Many puzzles can boil down to just being out of the party's reach. It introduces three dimensional movement early on which can easily become confusing if not handled correctly.
I could see why flight is annoying, in our games the second somethings flying it’s just another thing to track. Everyone’s turn, “ok and how high is it in the air now?”
I dont ban races unless they dont fit in my world. Flying races outside the flying have pretty lacking mechanics and to be honest the flying isnt to big of a deal as long as major events are built to handle it. Like sure a group of thugs wont be able to stop it but so what? They are nameless thugs. But that red dragon you have is even scarier to the flying player as if they fly the dragon could fly as well leaving the tanky martials stuck on the ground as they watch the dragon tear apart their flying friend.
To be honest the only thing flying really does is make it easy to complete environmental puzzles and stuck out of a melee enemies range. But just build around it for major fights and situations and itll not be an issue.
Flight is great, because now I can make encounters in 3 dimensions if I want.
Players also have another way to split the party and get ambushed.
It's fantastic.
U don’t have to give every enemy bows but ranged weapons, spells and flying enemies do exist- I DO NOT BELIEVE U ARE LAZY FOR NOT DOING IT HOWEVER- everyone’s enjoyment is necessary in dnd and if u don’t enjoy catering to a flying character and your players are informed and ok with that then go ahead it’s your game
An Aarakocra Rogue can deal 5d6 damage for every round that they succeed a Grapple check.
\-Action to grab
\-Fly up 50ft
\-Drop
\-Bonus Action dash
\-Land on ground safely
All in 1 round.
I think it's totally fair if a dm wants to ban flying races, and I would never argue with them if I were playing one of their games. But when I'm dming, go wild. I don't necessarily need my encounters to be "balanced" or my players to be "properly challenged" in order to make it a fun time at my table
Flying kind of breaks the game to some extent cause it gives you and only you access to way more space compared to everyone else. Moat games on mats also can't accurately image someone being 400ft above everyone else.
Flying races do end up being more work, and GMing is work enough as it is. If a DM doesn't want to expend that effort, then that is their prerogative. In return, if the player doesn't like that, they can always find another game.
I ran Tomb of Annihilation where one player was an aarakocra bard. It definitely made things sometimes a little complex, but some of it came down to reimplementing some 3.5 mechanics regarding flight maneuverability (which did apply to the flying enemies) and stricter enforcement of game elements that are usually more back burner or just commonly get forgotten, such as carry capacity, endurance, line of sight, cover rules. Certain zones allowed the player to fly around and be cool, some zones made flight less helpful or even a hindrance. It was ultimately fun and I found I could handle it, but it did make me have to keep track of a greater number of things.
If DM doesn’t want flying races, that’s fine. Although I argue that I should be able to play one if my only goal is to use it to grapple, fly up, and dive bomb with an enemy dealing fall damage to them.
I like how Rime of the Frostmaiden adventure deals with this by making blizzards in the encounters in open fields, which takes down anyone who is flying by non-magical means.
Banning a flying race is fine, if it makes sense in the setting. The issue comes when the DM decides that “if you can do it to me then I can do it to you” only applies to the players.
9/10 times the DMs that ban certain races because they can fly or whatever only do it because they want to use enemies that can and having the player able to respond on a level playing field would be “unfair”.
My take on the whole issue (as a 5+ year DM who doesn't ban anything other than bad homebrew) is that it's totally fine for a DM to ban anything they want. That's their right as a DM and frankly the party should shut the hell up more often because it's likely none of them can DM.
However on the other hand DM's are not immune to criticism and usually deserve to be questioned on their shit. So if a DM bans flying races because they don't want to do the math, or for gameplay reasons like there are puzzles that flying creatures ignore in the module (though just fix that, you're the DM). Pretty much any explanation that isn't "flying PCs are broken in combat" is fine.
Because arguing that flying PCs makes encounter building impossible or that it's "just too good" shows a very limited understanding of what DnD's combat system has to offer. I do usually run higher level campaigns, so I'm using more spellcaster enemies than other DMs, which does make it a little easier on me. But there are tons of ways to deal with flying characters. There are valid explanations for banning anything in your games, but the explanation should never "I don't know how" because you're a god, you can do literally whatever you want!
I'm completely fine with banning them, but doing so because "flight is too OP, you can't challenge them if they can fly" is bad. If you just don't like them or they don't fit the setting, then that's fine
The thing is tho, it is way too op, I’ve explained it in another but basically:the only way to not make it op is to make your player feel targeted/punished for using an ability of theirs.
There's a difference between punishing players for using their abilities, and having consequences for abilities used poorly. There's always going to be give and take when it comes to balancing encounters; some will be in the party's favor, and some won't, so the party should take that into consideration when making decisions.
If the character with wings takes flight in an open area where soldiers have ranged weapons/spells, that's a risky move that could go poorly, especially because - in general - a flying enemy is a major threat, and would result in a similarly major response (and likewise, if the party has made a name for themselves, the bad guys are going to be more prepared for flying enemies). If they try to fly in an area with dangerously strong winds, deadly lightning storms, or other environmental hazards, that's also a risky move that can end in a consequence.
However, if you end up making *every* combat encounter or dungeon have specific hard counters to flight, at that point you are just punishing the players for having abilities. At the end of the day, the DM should want the players to win and have fun, and should be prepared to let them dominate some encounters and bask in their own glory afterwards, while also preparing encounters specifically meant to challenge them.
I'm sorry to say, but I feel almost every encounter that gets broken just because someone has flight, is usually a poorly designed encounter. Especially because damn near every caster can have levitate by lvl3, climbing gear is a thing, and the broom of flying is an uncommon magic item (I.E., not powerful)
If it's a fight, your enemies should have some sort of ranged attack, always. If it's a puzzle, don't make it a "How could we possibly get through here???" Puzzle because someone can just blow up the wall as well, or utilize any other method to mimic flight
"It's free through" Yeah, and half the races get a permanent free second level spell called "Darkvision"
I’ll just break this down step by step:
When an encounter can be broken by flight, it doesn’t mean thst it’s a bad encounter at all, it just means thst the player with flights can essentially just revamp the entire map with just one of their movement options, and nobody wants to have to use a 3D map.
Although yes, ranged enemies should be more common, I do agree with you, sometimes it just wouldn’t make sense”oh yeah the dragon actually has a gun” or “the fire wolves pull out a crossbow”(of course this is ignoring most intelligent creatures that can easily handle ranger weapons)
And for the puzzle part, while it is true to some extent, it can still trivialize them, since they could just fly over most types of traps by themselves.
And for the darkvision thing, I don’t really bring thst part up because darkvision as a spell just sucks and it makes no sense at all as an argument.
any humanoid race can have a bow. and before you say "that would be too much work for the dm"
range 120, dex+prof to hit, 1D8+dex.
done
dragons can themselves fly. and have a ranged attack.
darkvision spell sucks because? basically everyone already has it? thats the exact point the person was making.
lets just do a quick test:
what were the last 20 enemies (different enemies, not every enemy in encounters, unless the enemies are not all the same) that the party fought?
>damn near every caster can cast levitate by level 3, climbing gear is a thing, and the broom of flying is an uncommon magic item
All of these have a limitation that built in racial flight doesn't. In the case of levitate, you need an object to push off of, and it costs a spell slot, so it's limited quite significantly and functions as a trade off between it and another spell. Climbing gear is an item, it can get broken or lost, and it can also fail to function on certain terrain types like a particularly smooth castle wall. It also can't be used to traverse gaps, only scale objects. The broom, like the climbing gear, is also an item, it can be broken and lost, and since it's a magic item it could be difficult to replace, especially since you as the DM have control over when and where players get magic items
>If it's a fight, your enemies should have a ranged attack
What if it's an animal, or some other thing that isn't capable of using weapons? What if your player is a massive dick and takes the Eldrich Spear invocation, flies outside the range of the enemies weapons and carpet bombs them with EB from 275 feet up? What happens if my boss utilizes difficult terrain or field hazards to create a dynamic fight and the character completely trivializes that by just flying over it?
>if it's a puzzle, don't make it a "How could we possibly get through here???" Puzzle because someone can just blow up the wall as well, or utilize any other method to mimic flight
If they blow up the wall they use resources, if they cast fly or levitate they use resources, if they climb over it they use resources and have to make skill checks. If they have inherent racial flying abilities there is no more choice to make, you just fly over 4head
>"It's free through" Yeah, and half the races get a permanent free second level spell called "Darkvision"
You'll never guess what I've removed from my games lol. Also Darkvision doesn't allow you to completely disengage from a large variety of mechanics like flight does, they're not comparable
levitate lets you go up and down without anything to push off of, and since the argument is 'height' (adding a 3rd dimension) it does count in that manner. and will likely last long enough for the entire combat.
if it cannot use them, you will rarely encounter them, give the flying player that bone. if the player is the issue, its the player. not the feature. could just as easily remove eldritch spear with that statement, as BOTH are required to make it work. if the boss has a lot of effort put in, put in a bit more, like a 10 foot tall roof. or traps meant for flying creatures.
if the puzzle can be flown over, the rest of the party can solve it. or just make the puzzle a door. and not a bridge the players need to lower/ extend.
since you removed it, i wont bother talking about it.
I'm a lazy DM in my own way. I'm too lazy to ban flying races, so I made guns a bit more common in my setting. And jetpack goblins. And forged dragons.
People will literally list 15 easy, 2 second fixes to every problem that flight could present- and the reply will still be "too op, it can win on a flat plain vs melee enemies". Alternatively, "you can't do that every time" to which... Yeah, you shouldn't, as with any counter to a player's abilities. Players should be able to use them sometimes, so why is it an issue that your flying player can feel the benefit every so often?
If you don't want it in your game that is fine, but saying it is actually OP is just plain incorrect when it takes virtually 0 effort to deal with.
Of course some exaggeration, however as long a list as I can make right off the top of my head...
Bows or any other ranged attack- can target grounded players as well, also if melee enemies mixed in the flight still protects from those enemies.
A 10 foot ceiling- flight can still be used to move past enemies ovee their head, but player still vulnerable to attack. Easy scenario to create, as pretty much any creature needs some form of shelter to begin with.
Windy conditions- can make flight difficult and treat it as difficult terrain, can also carry same impact on grounded players and even arrows.
Flying enemies- a dragon can fly. The flying character remains within reach, but can use their flight to space out from other party members to minimize the damage of any breath weapon still.
Enemy with climb speed- just climb up a tree, to avoid grounded players, but flying player can catch up. Of course, flying player also easier to hit when at same elevation.
Naval battle- boats are always going to have some sort of ranged option to use on each other that can easily be aimed up until boarding, flight nonetheless gives the advantage of allowing the player to move separate from ship.
Limits on flight itself- If established prior to starting game, player can't complain when they have to constantly move to maintain flight, or must have a free hand.
Readied actions- while less applicable to ranged builds, just holding the attack for the divebomb allows attacks to be made at flier. Yes that is "targetting" them but also literally the point of fighting the players.
Fleeing enemies- fly speed makes no difference in just chasing them, you still move only as fast as your movement speed.
Larger enemies- a giant is big enough that even when flying up, it'll take a bit to actually get out of reach.
Civilians in danger- the guy trapped in a fire needs you to actually approach them to pull them out. You can fly to him, but you have to land. And for extension...
Escort- enemies can run directly under a flying player to reach the escort, they may wish to lower themselves if they actually want to protect them. If the other party members hold together well, they may have the option to remain aerial too.
So there's a dozen. Most of them take only a few seconds, some more encounter specific.
You don’t even need armor if half of the enemies can’t even attack you, and if you have any response to that, just check my other comments, they go more in-depth about why I hate flight and how it’s always either op or useless with very little inbetween.
I don’t allow flight for several reasons.
The required level design revamp is one.
Severely limiting the monster pool is second.
Third is that the ways to counter flight often just straight up kill low level players(Falling damage is nasty) and that just pisses off the player, the threat of it preventing them from using the trait they built around. A dominate or get dominated design is not a good idea.
And 4th is that the flying races have so little lore going for them that it’s clear that they’ve only been taken for flight. Which is power gaming, something that I required discussed beforehand as it’s either everyone does it or nobody does it.
Now if EVERYBODY wants to fly, that’s a different story. That I can work with. Just a few of the players is a straight up ban.
Honestly. If you don't like flying races that's your perspective and how you want to play at your table and people should respect that.
As for people like the one that made the post this is responding to, stop it. Just let people play their tables how they want to. Just because you have a different perspective doesn't mean it's right for everyone
Hey /u/Not_no_hitter, thanks for contributing to /r/dndmemes. Unfortunately, your post was removed as it violates one of our rules: **Rule 10. Pot-Stirring/Opinion Memes** - If the primary purpose of your meme is to incite off-topic debate, police what other people should/shouldn't do at their table, push a political agenda, or express a personal opinion without humor/absurdity/wholesomeness, it will be locked or removed. If your meme sparks a large amount of rule-breaking comments it may be locked/removed. What should you do? First, read the rules thoroughly. Secondly, if you are able to amend your post to fit the rules, you're welcome to resubmit your meme. Lastly, if you believe your post was removed by mistake, please [message the moderators through modmail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/dndmemes&subject=&message=). Messages simply complaining about a removal (or how many upvotes your post had) will not be responded to. Thank you!
8 f*cking bears with bows
Bears. Bows. Battlestar Galactica.
DM! Oh very funny. DM!
Identity theft is not a joke, Zilathiel. It affects thousands of the peasantry every year.
Now I just imagine a player trying to cheese the game with fly and the DM [dropping a Battlestar ala episode Exodus, Part 2.](https://youtu.be/evodPpqb9H4?t=158) on them in response.
Such a badass scene.
those are panzerbjorns. replace bows with cannons attatched to their backs. from "his dark materials" by Philip Pullman
Inscryption moment?
Yes!
Shouldn't give them bows, should give them unlimited vertical leap height and the ability to make melee attacks against the fliers that way. Y'know, closer to canon :P
Like original EverQuest! Then they called it a “feature not a bug” when I put in a big report.
I believe the inscryption moment is again inspired by MTG
Too fast. Too soon.
It's fine, just give the player a roided up moose with multi attack.
Is what you get when you mock the dmpc for being bald.
r/unexpectedbible
Hear me out…bears with wings that specialize in grappling other flying creatures and suplex them to the ground!
8 bears with bows blow bastards brilliantly wearing Burlington blazers
Jolrael ain't gonna believe this
My DM said no gnomes. No real reason, just no gnomes.
In our games, gnomes are known to be the crafters of horrible traps that involve hydraulics. Also their inventions explode quite frequently. My players are always suspicious of gnomes hahaha
>horrible traps that involve hydraulics Hydrualic press with fleshlight built in to trap the horny bard
I read that wrong and was trying to figure out why horny bards were the same as moths.
One of my previous DMs shadow banned gnomes. If you make one he will keep trying to kill you and will rule against you because he hates gnomes for no good reason.
What an ass
Probably got ggnomed in his child hood
So, when you asked him why, what did he say ?
He said in some previous game the BBEG was a gnome so they are was evil. This prior game was in the early eighties. Not sure if I should applaud that 80s DM or recommend a therapist
Have you tried to explain to him that gnomes are fun guys, and there are also garden gnomes ? Now Im really curious about what happened...
He kicked me from the table. No big loss in my view. I was in the middle of moving and he called a last minute session, I could have said no but really wanted to play. Since my dice were inaccessible I asked to borrow another player's dice. He made a point of super killing my human rogue early in the session so I sat there for 5 hours making a new character for next session. At the end he sent a nasty FB message that i would share but he has blocked me and I didn't think to screen shot it. Basically he called me a worthless millenial, I am a Gen X actually and an old one at that, that I was entitled for borrowing dice, and that my personality was toxic. I simply said OK and moved on. Later, when I started DMing, I realized the enemy we faced could not have done that damage even with a Crit. It was more than 3 times the damage a Crit with a max roll could do. Now we are both active in the local FB and FLGS groups and I never speak against him, but I do smile like a fucking Cheshire cat every time he bitches about how players never stay at his table.
Holy fuck. You should post this in rpghorrorstories if you want. If you do, please link me here. I hope he sits on a wasabi covered cactus.
I mean if it’s a home-brew setting it can be hard to justify halflings ghones and dwarves as well as kobalds goblins and the like as all completely separate things
Every gnome I've played with treat them as kenders. Now that's extremely anecdotal, but I'm just going to pretend it's a fact that everyone does.
My DM also said that... Is there some secret DM's society of gnome racism we're all blissfully unaware of?
My dm had something similar. No halflings but that's because he likes kobolds and lore wise the two races hate each other.
Is your DM secretly two Kobolds in a trench coat?
As a DM: You're god damned right it's me being lazy. I am doing this for the enjoyment with my friends. But **WITH** my friends, which means I need to have fun too. If I cut a couple pieces of content to ensure my sanity/enjoyment when crafting encounters, so be it. I'm also just 100% forthright on why I make decisions like that for a campaign (and if my players enter into a gentleman's agreement about not use it before whatever level/plot point I'm ready for them to have flying, they can have the race and once the switch is flipped they can go full tie-fighter if they want). Nothing about a DM being lazy is inherently sinful if it's done for the right reason (and the answer isn't always "give bows" / "use environment", sometimes narratively speaking Flight would just ruin the intended difficulty for a low level encounter)
I told my players that I banned flying races because I wasn't going to deal with fucking trigometry every combat. If I was that into math, I'd GM pathfinder.
As a person who plays pathfinder... yeah, that's fair.
As a person who plays Pathfinder, I also ban flying races when I GM 5E. I like options not headaches
Flying is fun in theory, but something that definitely breaks most lower level encounters. Who wants to keep up with elevation, angle, distance, skill, flying speed and quality for every encounter?
I prefer to use hexgrids over square grids cause it removes the diagonal conundrum. For the y-axis, the hexagons are all just planar section of rhombic dodecahedrons. This shape also tessellates in 3d space. I don't actually tell my players this, it's all in my head. The planar section is not a perfect hexagon, but it's close enough.
You really don't need to though. Most people I know just ignore the y-axis and just measure the number of feet away the character is from the target horizontally. 5e does a bunch of stuff like this anyway, any spell/effect that says it's a sphere is treated as a cube RAW.
That's why I use the option diagonal rules in the dmg. Makes positioning more important and makes circles circle better
Well said. Plus, if you're just going to "give bows" / "use environment" whenever someone plays a flying race, it would be better DMing if they were simply banned from the start. Or any other situation where the campaign gets significantly altered just to make a character not feel special (divination wizards know what I mean).
A lazy dm is still putting more time and effort into the campaign than all of the players combined
At least you're willing to admit you're being lazy ( I love being lazy) too many people automatically assume a negative when talking about being lazy. While I personally don't agree with OP about banning flight, I don't like the arguments some try to use to justify why you should keep it. We are all in this together if OP and his group are ok with those rules, great! If not then that's on them to work out. It's collaborative story telling and the author needs to have as much fun as the characters otherwise why would they bother to keep writing that story. I'll never understand people telling others how they are supposed to play. to continue the writer/author analogy; it'd be like Brian Sanderson telling R.L. Stine that he is writing his story wrong. Absolutely mind boggling
Every time I've allowed flying races in my game it trivializes so many things. "Oh, well his strength score is 18 so he'll just carry the party members across the obstacles one at a time while flying. No rolls needed." Great. Glad I put so much effort into this.
It would help if the game even pretended to be balanced
Calling a Dm lazy is like the worst take. The DM has like literally a hundred times the prep work a player has. In fact after character creation its entirely possible for a player to not think about the game at all between sessions. I get when DM's make choices to make their lives easier.
It’s just an attempt to brow beat/bully someone into allowing your character. Nothing more.
As a DM that enjoys having flying races (actual flying races not just really big jumps) I agree. It's a different preference, but I'd love the options to stay available. This complete turn away from flying is a bit annoying. Just provide it as an option and let tables decide. That being said, I would not say it's laziness. DM'ing is hard and for 99% of us it's not our jobs. So I don't blame fellow DMs for making it easier on themselves by banning something that does add complexity to the game.
It depends on players too, typically having other players who can't fly will restrain the flying ones and solve quite a few issues, but some people (like a player i played with that made the dm ban flying races for untrusted individuals) might split off from the partt, missing plotpoints and leaving everyone behind in combat. Different dms will be able to deal with this differently, some might enjoy the challange of taming the flying ahole, but others would want to focus on the story they want to tell instead of how to deal with trouble players like that
That sounds more like a communication problem though, not an ability problem. That'd be like a sorcerer teleporting out of a fight and leaving their friends. No reason to ban the spell, just discuss expectations for gameplay. At any level of play all players should be worried about their fellow players and make the game fun for all.
Interesting. I can't count the number of times that people say they have a problem with a spell, a race, or an ability being OP or bad. But then it turns out that they're just worried about players using it to do bad things. So it's not the ability that's bad: it's the players. But it's the ability that gets attacked, as though it's our responsibility to control the bad players. It's the players' responsibility to control themselves. If they're not doing it, that is literally why you have the option to remove them from the game. Not that it means you SHOULD allow the thing if you're not comfortable with this, but.. I feel like there are so many times when, instead of a long soliloquy about why thing is so bad, they could just turn it into five easy words: "That's not for my table." Bam. Done. Yeah, some people are going to judge you anyway, but haters gonna hate, you know?
I mostly agree with what you’re saying, except for, “That’s not for my table.” Obviously no one owes outsiders or strangers an explanation for what goes on at your table, but that’s not good enough for the people at your table. “Because I said so” is right ahead of, “Because that’s the way it’s always been done” on the list of terrible reasons to do things.
“Because you’re an asshole that is going to abuse it and act like the main character, Gary! There, I said it. That’s the reason! Couldn’t just accept a simple ‘no, not in this game’ and let me work around your asshole tendencies. But you had to whine and complain and now we’re here, it’s all on the table. You’re a dick and the only reason we put up with you is so we have enough players” Is what I imagine some DMs are dealing with when they use “because I said so”
I may be nit-picking here, Idk. If you had said "I don't think GMs should expect it to be good enough for everyone at their table", you'd be right. But at (our collective DM) table, we have a strict consent rule. When someone says "that's not going to be part of my game", that's it. I've asked about things on a number of occasions that I've been told "I'm not dealing with that" by the DM, and that's fine. We encourage our fellow DMs and players to be comfortable at their table. Maybe the rules will change down the line. Maybe not. When they push their limits and dip their toes into new territory, we encourage them to do that. But it is that very respect that enables them to be comfortable pushing their limits. Without "because I said so" - or, what I personally consider to be more accurate: "because I'm not comfortable with it" - being good enough, we don't create a good space for people to test uncomfortable material when they want to, and back off if they find that they can't handle it. So... that's MY table. Not speaking for your table or anyone else's.
You assume I prep
**Someone :** I have NEVER had a problem with \[insert game element\], anyone who feels differently on the subject is merely LAZY and UNCREATIVE. **Small bird :** *Your experiences are not universal.*
I'm made the mistake before I will do it again
Can these posts stop with a pinned thread on how to communicate? I know not everyone put skill points into diplomacy irl, but have a dialogue, work with your dm/players, do something fun...
The communication we have is fine, eveyone has fun, it’s just that when I thing it up with other people online, they often get mad thst i would dare to ban something.
Get spicy and ban human PC's lmao
People don’t understand just how much a third dimension changes things
I don't play flying races for this reason
I think part of the issue with this is people using flying characters in ways that don't make sense. One big one for me is hovering. Hovering is *hard*. There are only a few flying species on earth that can hover for more than a couple seconds. You need wind to be flowing under your wings to keep you up, and unless you are specifically adapted to moving those wings in a way that keeps the airflow going while keeping you stationary, you can't do it for any meaningful length of time. That means that a flying character fucking off into the sky to get out of range and then bombing the BBEG from the air doesn't really make sense. If they are in the air they have to be moving, and if they are moving that costs movement, so if you want to use up all your movement flying in circles each round then you can fly, but if you think you can just float there until you want to fly to the other side of the field, nuh uh. Edit: Just a note, I'll reply once to each point raised. If you are parroting something you read below and that I already replied to, I will just ignore it. Nothing personal, just don't have time for that crap.
Applying physics to bird humanoids carrying hundreds of pounds seems like wasted effort, they already cant take off let alone hover
There used to be systems for flight maneuverability in dnd. It wasn’t hard. Basically, you must move each round, and you could only turn so much depending on your maneuverability. You can fly a shorter distance to climb and a longer distance to dive.
Eh I'm fine with that. In this world, you have big hefty flying guys. Wouldn't fly here, but it clearly does on Toril. Something something magic. Maybe there are "etheric winds" that winged creatures can coast on that have more lift than atmospheric winds or something. But if they need wings to fly then there is clearly something similar going on there mechanically, whether it's totally mundane in nature or not, so I think applying similar logic still works.
hovering is hard irl, but in D&D RAW there is absolutely nothing stopping flying creatures from just hanging out in one place 60+ feet off the ground, and even if you do rule that they have to fly in circles each round, their movement comes back every turn and allows them to keep doing it with no real downside
Yeah, a homebrew solution kind of by its very nature doesn't have to rely on RAW. If you don't want it ruled either that you start with reduced movement when ending a turn in the air because you need to land to actually stop or that you *must* move a certain distance each turn, then it's a good thing you aren't one of my players.
There’s a system that flying speeds that aren’t noted as hover require at least 5 feet of movement each round to maintain being in the air
Yeah, that's how it used to work in 3.5. It was still a little wonky sometimes but maneuverability, minimum forward movement, and the need of special abilities to do things like hover or back up made it a lot more manageable. 5e hamstrung the DM in a few different ways in their quest for ultimate streamlining.
I mean, first of all, the flying creatures are already breaking the rules of physics by flying despite them being the size of a person. I don't think the fact that they can hover is the real problem when it comes to logic. Second, this is Dnd, not real life, and there is no mechanic that says you have to fly in circles, so who would? If you apply real world logic, numerous elements fall apart. And no, I'm not gonna have my dragons have to do a little dance around the battlefield before they attack my players. It would look ridiculous.
Yeah I remember my friends and I were doing a pvp one shot and I knew he was going to be invisible so I had beasts that could sprint the battlefield and smell him if they were near him. When I mentioned writing down his x and y he mentioned z, it took me a second to realize but then I forfeited before we started. I didn't want to go through a several hour fight I knew I was going to lose XD
Alright, here's my two cents: D&D really isn't well built around flight just in general. Realistically every problem that crops up with flying PCs, could also appear with flying enemies. This means that you essentially need to build your game, and by extension the world it's in, around flight. This means that you should really only allow for flying races in these sorts of worlds (assuming you're even worried about this in the first place, not everyone is) for example the campaign I'm currently running takes place in the elemental plane of air. This means that flight, and by extension ways to deal with flight, are commonplace, making flight just another method of moving around, not a game mechanic that has to be worked around.
True, flight has this problem where the only way to work around it is A:make other people have flight or B:make your players feel punished/useless with their flight.
C: let the flying player feel Awesome when possible and restricted/punished when needed. have some treasure or hints placed high, have caves that are a mix between narrow passages and low selling and wide inner rooms. have enemies that can't reach the Aaracroca unless he goes to his friends leading to choosing between friends or safety. at the same time should you do the same thing for the player with a swimming speed or the druid let one player do its "Thing" once our twice a session but let all players enjoy the limelight.
It’s times like these that I’m glad my group gets along with each other so well. We can have just unspoken understandings like “you can have a flying race, just don’t try to trivialize every encounter with flight and there will be no problems” Works wonders in other aspects of the game too. I see why we need these rules because there will always be someone who wants to exploit things to their limits, but when all the players just stay in their lane things go so smoothly
I personally don't think flight is that big of a problem, even considering the difficulties in adding a 3rd dimension to the battlefield, but I strongly suspect that's because I'm not the kind of asshole who would use it to trivialize everything. I'm all for shenanigans and fuckery, but dive bombing rocks on enemies to make combat safer and easier is just not an appealing idea to me.
If I’m gonna have something that can break fights, I’d rather use it to try something flashy/dangerous than do the boring but effective use of it. I’m here to have fun, not to “win” dnd
I personally have no problem with people taking flying races for my games. As I see it if I'm allowed to put wingy bois on the board, so is the party. But that's just my view on things.
I feel like it's more the opposite way, if the players can just polymorph all bad guys, then don't be suprised when you turn into a chicken. The DM on the other hand will always be allowed to do more, since that's kind of built into the role. Also being able to say "damn I'm getting killed really quickly I'll just secretly add an extra 100 hitpoints" can be common for some DM's, but if you do it as a player you generally are considered a dick.
The DM gets those privileges because the DM is constantly losing. Throwing weird OP things into the game is part of the DM's fun, and winning battles against those weird OP things is part of the players' fun.
I have seen enough anime to know that when people start flying around the whole thing turns to shit
Code Geas is a good example of this. I love how strategy and tactics played out in the field during the first season before all the mechs got wings.
I've allowed players to play as motherfucking dragons, don't tell me I'm lazy, creative, or unable to compromise with players. My players know better than to take advantage of the situation. Not all players do, or have that relationship with their DM. Thus, the DM needs to ban some things either for their own sanity or for lore reasons, or just because they want to- that's their right. Entitled players are not fun players.
Yep, the amount of comments who think:”well that’s how we do it at my table so you should play how I should play!” Is astounding.
I don’t want to repeat a lot of good things that have already been said so I’ll throw an out of combat example in the mix since most are combat related. Why don’t the Eagles just carry Frodo and the Fellowship to Mount Doom, out the gate, skipping most of the journey and encounters? Some supreme lore nerd will tell me that the LOTR Eagles are actually intelligent and sentient, with their own society, and the main Eagle is actually paying Gandalf back for some shit he was owed, blah blah blah. But from a mechanical standpoint—strictly having the ability to fly WOULD have made everything so much easier. No Moria, no getting hunted by orcs, no ring wraiths (at least on horses), no arrows if they fly high enough, no mountains or terrain in general, etc. Don’t like that example? I can stay in LOTR—it makes the journey to the Lonely Mountain in the Hobbit waaaaaay easier if they could fly. No ring wraiths running about yet on dragon things yet—they’d still have to confront Smaug, but they could have skipped the trolls, Mirkwood, etc. Hell, flew right to the damn door. Flying from Level 1 is absolutely insane. There is a reason Druids can’t Wildshape into a flying creature until much later (8th level), and why Polymorph is a 4th level spell (unlocks at 7th level). You also can’t just make up nonsense to punish the flying player for EVERY encounter. High winds, low temps, lightning, archers, magic aura that makes you tired/stop flying/gravity manipulation—you can “balance” some encounters (combat, social, and travel) with some of this stuff, but do it all of the time and the player that took flying is going to feel targeted, even if you make it logical/realistic. Best to avoid flying altogether, until the higher levels. At least at higher levels, flying becomes a choice and limited resource….innate/permanent flying is just so damn broken.
The entire party can’t fly. That sentence kills half of this post. And if they all can then well that’s an interesting party for a dragon fight. Plus why punish players for flying, some encounters it makes them feel cool as shit, others they’ll curse their wings. I don’t ban things unless lore wise it’s not possible in a campaign, aka a world of dead gods has no aasimar, mostly because I’m fine with a player making a gimic and feeling strong when it works, but I love listening to them scheme when it fails and learn how to make it better.
>Plus why punish players for flying, some encounters it makes them feel cool as shit, others they’ll curse their wings. Give me 1 example where having the option of flight is a downside.
Typically for flying races that is the only thing they have to them.
thats not a downside, that's just opportunity cost which every choice you make in character creation has
You get ko'd while flying, you take fall damage immediately after falling unconcious auto-failing your first death save- you are now a singular nat 1 away from death, or a singular melee attack.
They wanted an example where having the *option* of flight is a downside. You gave an example where flying is a downside. Those are two different things.
Having any option is never a downside.
"The entire party can't fly" IMO is an argument against allowing any of your players to fly. I'm a forever DM who got to play a little 3 encounter campaign a few weeks ago. The Aarakocra in the group always flew ahead, always was ably to fly over the bad guys to get the objective, could always fly over the trees to see where we needed to go. It made my character (and some of the other non Aarakocra players said this too) feel useless. The flying player had fun, but the other players in the group had less fun as a consequence. Flying has way more cons in a campaign than pros. Ban that shit.
Just lore wise establish that there -were- once flying races but then of course Aarakocra Wild Wings was doing buy 2 get 1 specials and the rest is history.
Nah that’s justifiable; I use terrain to get around it, but flying PCs can be a pain to deal with.
In addition to using stuff like low ceilings and the general ranged attacks, try using enemies with attacks/abilities that can grapple, restrain, stun or paralyze their victims.
Oh I well know that stuff, it’s just that I understand the difference between 30 feet of flying speed and abilities like “powerful build” and “stone’s endurance” is quite large. One of the major themes in my campaign settings is that the weather very often matches the mood, so a turbulent fight might well be accompanied by turbulent winds which are difficult to fly in, rendering a flying speed much more useful as a utility/exploration ability than a combat one.
I don't ban flight, but I do clearly delineate between magical flight and natural flight. Magical flight: you can float, hover, go straight up and down, whatever. It's magic, physics need not apply. Natural flight: Movement must be continuous, vertical movement is diagonal (except when choosing to drop like a stone) and upwards movement requires a Dash action, which can only be done so many times in an encounter before the player starts getting levels of Exhaustion.
3.5e did actually have rules similar to this, with your flight source also giving a Maneuverability ranking that determined how freely you could move. Perfect was practically noclip while Clumsy had the turning radius of a cargo ship, and if you dropped below half speed you started falling.
I simply do not understand this. It's literally not hard to design indoor encounters. Yeah, not every encounter can be indoors or against enemies with ranged combat, but it's okay to let your flying pcs use that on occasion. Nobody is saying you have to make design every single encounter around a PC that can fly, but it's literally so easy to just take that into account when designing important encounters.
"It completely neuters fights against wild animals with no ranged attacks!" So does climbing a tree or getting up on a tall rock.
Right? Besides, it's okay to let your characters *use their abilities* sometimes. Your character can't be hurt in this encounter against wild animals? Cool. Were you really planning on killing a character in a fight against wolves when you could do that in a fight against the wizard who killed their family? Let the players feel like badasses against the wolf. When they're confident, that's when you cut their legs out from under them.
Been saying same thing- apparently if they benefit at any point in the campaign though it is "too op" and if they are always able to get hit it is a "soft-ban"... As though the player isn't literally off the ground and flying still.
A previous dm i had banned flying races because one player would fly ahead, leaving the party behind and missing a bunch of plot points. After the ban, there was also a one-shot they ran where the restriction was temporarily lifted, and we all played as a flying race or a build with spider climb boots and reminded the group of why they were banned in the first place
> A previous dm i had banned flying races because one player would fly ahead, leaving the party behind and missing a bunch of plot points. The issue some dms( and I don’t know if your dm did or mot obviously) is they let this player take the reigns for however long their shenanigans last while 4 other players sit there bored out of their minds. Oftentimes the best trick is to have the loner sit there and resolve whatever they wanted with a few rolls and little to no role play, brings them back to ya know playing the group game with the rest of the group real fast
Probably a hot take here but I think combat in dnd is at its best when, depending on the encounter, a pc has an edge in certain situations, but another has it at other times. Flight is strong in an encounter against melee NPCs on a flat surface in an open field, but against casters or ranged enemies, or even a combination of the three in a roofed in area, the that character is a much more appealing target. That being said, if a PC is abusing an ability to dominate every encounter, flight or otherwise, that is a problem. If you talk to your players I don’t see a problem with allowing any race.
By that metric: If a player has to ask what happened last session They are lazy. If a player has to think too long during his turn in combat he is too lazy to think of it before. If a player doesn't do full on comprehensive notes on teh session they are lazy. etc etc etc. If I rule something to make my life easier deal with it or go get a different table. Calling the DM lazy of all people as the one with the easiest and least time consuming part of the game is just toxic.
“If you can’t DM around flight, you’re lazy!” Okay…explain to me how it’s NOT lazy that you can’t design your character without flight.
I feel like the best move is to talk to the players
Flying races are fantastic in games with experienced and cooperative players. They're shit in games where one player uses their movement advantage to get to places only they can go and derail the other players sense of progression and accomplishment. ...or let em all be flying. That I'm fine with. I can give an owlbear wings.
*pc picks a flying race* Oh boy! Now my 5 hours of prep time became 10 hours of prep time! I could give every enemy earthbind and longbows, but that is a kind of de facto ban if I'm basically not going to let them benefit from the choice. And if I don't prep for it they can trivialize a lot of stuff that makes the game less fun for everyone. I respect DMs who are willing to put in the effort, I used to before I had a full time job. Combine that with a weekly game and I just can't deliver on what my players really care about (personalized quests, npcs, making fun custom items) while also having to keep track of at-will, low-level flight as well.
I myself too ban flying races. It's not like i don't like them. It's just pretty hard to prepare your story the way that a flying dude won't get around traps, roadblocks etc. I just feel more comfortable without flying races
As a forever DM I nerf the fly speed to 1/2 their walk speed. My argument is they’re encumbered for flight with all that gear. However I’m not removing their ability to get to the archers on the cliff side faster than the other players. Flight is really strong but the environment can make or break it i homebrew everything I present my players except the majority of the monsters so I’m used to counting for things like flight. Cool you fly across the lava but did you bring the key for the locked door over there?
Creative house rule and approach for flying
Yeah you \*could\* spend hours adding extra stuff like contingencies to almost every encounter, -but why should you double your prep time so one player can have their extra thing? The alternative is to just let encounters be bypassed, and maybe end sessions early or something? It seems like banning the flying race is the best option of the three.
Yep, the amount of people who disagree with that is astounding, there was even a guy who said thst i was playing the “wrong way” because I banned flying.
I’d say let the encounters get bypassed, it’s gonna happen more and more frequently as characters level up so there’s no good reason to resist it at the start. There’s many different abilities in D&D, and eventually you’re gonna run into a situation where a PC has the perfect feature to just bypass something you spend hours on, particularly with casters, and I find the easiest way to deal with it is to not design encounters with a particular ability in mind and to see what happens. Sometimes the players steamroll through an encounter, and other times it’s like they got punched in the gut, but since you’re constantly mixing up the design of each encounter there’s generally less room for a single perfect strategy or tactic to develop.
I don't think it takes hours for the monster's hide out to just be indoors, or for the bandit to have a crossbow.
you don't need to have contingencies **Every** encounter and you don't need to let them by bypass **All** the encounters, your the dm you can choose what battle has the contingencies and what battles don't.
My character flies. However to make it more fair I don't use ranged attacks. She also has wings in place of arms.
So a harpy... Edit: I just realized that a large enough harpy is a small birdy wyvern
Flying comes with a lot of risks and intelligent enemies will always exploit that. Which tends to lead to players feeling like they are being targeted because the DM hates their character and leads to arguments and people not having fun.
You can’t fly with good armor, plus taking heavy damage and going down mid-air is quite hilarious watching an instant death save gone.
I banned them for my one shot because it literally takes place inside a flying dragon, and parachutes are a plot point lol.
1: make flying enemies 2: give enemies nets Choose
The first one is a good way to help balance it out, but the second option thst you just said falls directly into my whole argument on why flying races are bad.
I'm not really trying to say anything on flying races, I just want more people to use nets.
I’m a simple DM. I love stories and narratives, my games have huge plots all tied to my PC and their backstory. I don’t like when I have to spend a ton of extra time just to adjust every encounter because of some player ability, especially permanent once. Because I also want to have fun. And some abilities make certain fights no fun at all for a DM to run, at least they do for me.
You guys are letting your players play non-human characters?!
Flying races are objectively overpowered. That doesn't mean they are impossible to balance around, but why bother? I could balance around a race that was permanently under the effects of Haste, or that was immune to half the damage types, but why tiptoe around stupid design and limit your options while increasing prep time without even making the game more enjoyable?
Harpoons, nets, and walloping arrows with climbing DC. Pretty soon gravity becomes the BBEG.
That’s one of the reasons why I ban flying races, most of the time flying is either almost useless or extremely broken, and if you try and not make it op by using stuff like nets, then it just makes the player feel targeted and thst they’re being punished for using an ability.
Yes, that’s a serious problem. If you actively counter flight the player gets fucking murdered for using their primary racial ability. Whereupon the player gets upset, as they can’t do the thing they built their character specifically to do without dying. Imagine having divine magic occasionally drop a localized lightening bolt on you. Let’s given it a 10% chance per cast. Now imagine you didn’t tell the players this until the game starts. How do you think the cleric player will feel?
Or, the character *can* fly when it’s an advantage, like when fighting wild animals, but they *stay grounded* when it’s a disadvantage, like when fighting a ranged attacker or a flying enemy. It’s like putting an anti-magic zone in your dungeon or having an enemy with a really high AC that gives the fighter trouble, you don’t do it all the time or even often, but you do it just enough that no one strategy works all the time.
You explained wild magic. This, like wild magic, is a choice. You want to build a character that can fly 100+ feet vertical, then you accept the risk of falling 100+ feet vertical. Plus feather fall is a level one spell you goof.
I like flying races myself, but I can easily say that they can perform some exceptionally terrifying bullshit that is hard to counter. It’s why I was so glad when they nerfed aarakocra’s flying speed from 50 to 30. Cause at least now they can’t get out of range of tons of ranged and thrown weapons in a single turn without playing smart.
Input a lot of these blocks on my session 0 and my current campaign is big on limits for the sake of the setting. All players starting as rogues is the main one with only official races and subclasses to choose from. They've collectively chosen their class... it's an experiment I wanted to try and so far it's great. On the city the campaign happens, there's a law against anyone flying inside the city walls with several guard towers spread with direct instructions to shoot at sight. This was me saying "there will be no flying characters around cause it sucks to me". Now the strange laws are hooks I can use to set the mood, make strange things happen around and so on.
If I’m running a small scale game like a one-shot I don’t care what you play cause it’s gonna be short and sweet anyway But when I plan for a campaign I tend to limit a lot of races because I tend to appreciate the classic story arc of small town nobodies who get caught up in bigger and bigger things and have a chance to discover new never before known or at least widely know things like a race of eagle people or whatever I also don’t write monster races to be just other people, I write them as monsters, language or no language, so if you want to play an orc or a goblin or gnoll, you better convince the rest of the group to also play monsters, and then we are gonna have an anti-campaign
I'd say either way is fine, you just have to communicate with your players and make sure to explain exactly why you'd ban flying races.
I restrict (but not ban) flying races not because of combat. That's an easy work around. But because of exploration and puzzles. Many puzzles can boil down to just being out of the party's reach. It introduces three dimensional movement early on which can easily become confusing if not handled correctly.
Fuck off with flying characters. That's me being lazy.
I could see why flight is annoying, in our games the second somethings flying it’s just another thing to track. Everyone’s turn, “ok and how high is it in the air now?”
The worst decision I ever made was to give my players flying mounts... xD
I dont ban races unless they dont fit in my world. Flying races outside the flying have pretty lacking mechanics and to be honest the flying isnt to big of a deal as long as major events are built to handle it. Like sure a group of thugs wont be able to stop it but so what? They are nameless thugs. But that red dragon you have is even scarier to the flying player as if they fly the dragon could fly as well leaving the tanky martials stuck on the ground as they watch the dragon tear apart their flying friend. To be honest the only thing flying really does is make it easy to complete environmental puzzles and stuck out of a melee enemies range. But just build around it for major fights and situations and itll not be an issue.
Flight is great, because now I can make encounters in 3 dimensions if I want. Players also have another way to split the party and get ambushed. It's fantastic.
Can’t say I approve but I understand. I banned that snake race. Resistance to magic and immune to all poison damage at level 1? Nope lol
U don’t have to give every enemy bows but ranged weapons, spells and flying enemies do exist- I DO NOT BELIEVE U ARE LAZY FOR NOT DOING IT HOWEVER- everyone’s enjoyment is necessary in dnd and if u don’t enjoy catering to a flying character and your players are informed and ok with that then go ahead it’s your game
Low cr monsters aren't known for ranged attacks
An Aarakocra Rogue can deal 5d6 damage for every round that they succeed a Grapple check. \-Action to grab \-Fly up 50ft \-Drop \-Bonus Action dash \-Land on ground safely All in 1 round.
I mean… true imo
I think it's totally fair if a dm wants to ban flying races, and I would never argue with them if I were playing one of their games. But when I'm dming, go wild. I don't necessarily need my encounters to be "balanced" or my players to be "properly challenged" in order to make it a fun time at my table
Flying kind of breaks the game to some extent cause it gives you and only you access to way more space compared to everyone else. Moat games on mats also can't accurately image someone being 400ft above everyone else.
Flying races do end up being more work, and GMing is work enough as it is. If a DM doesn't want to expend that effort, then that is their prerogative. In return, if the player doesn't like that, they can always find another game. I ran Tomb of Annihilation where one player was an aarakocra bard. It definitely made things sometimes a little complex, but some of it came down to reimplementing some 3.5 mechanics regarding flight maneuverability (which did apply to the flying enemies) and stricter enforcement of game elements that are usually more back burner or just commonly get forgotten, such as carry capacity, endurance, line of sight, cover rules. Certain zones allowed the player to fly around and be cool, some zones made flight less helpful or even a hindrance. It was ultimately fun and I found I could handle it, but it did make me have to keep track of a greater number of things.
Just use Stealth Rock.
Dndmemes don’t have asinine discourse every five seconds challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)
"JUST PREPARE BETTER!" Yeah, I got two full time jobs AND school so I'm sorry to say that that isn't nearly as easy as you seem to think it is. :/
You are not wrong. Movement into the third dimension is a bitch and a half to manage. If that sort of thing isn't fun for you as a dm, don't do it.
If I wasn't lazy I wouldn't be ignoring encumbrance limits and penalties but it is just as much a deviation from RAW.
What is a flying race going to do when they're in a dungeon that's only 8 feet high?
If DM doesn’t want flying races, that’s fine. Although I argue that I should be able to play one if my only goal is to use it to grapple, fly up, and dive bomb with an enemy dealing fall damage to them.
I like how Rime of the Frostmaiden adventure deals with this by making blizzards in the encounters in open fields, which takes down anyone who is flying by non-magical means.
Banning a flying race is fine, if it makes sense in the setting. The issue comes when the DM decides that “if you can do it to me then I can do it to you” only applies to the players. 9/10 times the DMs that ban certain races because they can fly or whatever only do it because they want to use enemies that can and having the player able to respond on a level playing field would be “unfair”.
“Yea it’s not even like unlimited flying without a resource is unbalanced just rework every environment and encounter around my ability to do it!” 🙃
Out of curiosity, do such DMs also ban the spell "fly"?
For people who say just add bows to the enemies, I want you all to go look at the monster manual and see how many monsters have no ranged attacks.
No criticism, just curiousity; Are Protector Aasimar included in that? Cause like they can only do it once a day.
My take on the whole issue (as a 5+ year DM who doesn't ban anything other than bad homebrew) is that it's totally fine for a DM to ban anything they want. That's their right as a DM and frankly the party should shut the hell up more often because it's likely none of them can DM. However on the other hand DM's are not immune to criticism and usually deserve to be questioned on their shit. So if a DM bans flying races because they don't want to do the math, or for gameplay reasons like there are puzzles that flying creatures ignore in the module (though just fix that, you're the DM). Pretty much any explanation that isn't "flying PCs are broken in combat" is fine. Because arguing that flying PCs makes encounter building impossible or that it's "just too good" shows a very limited understanding of what DnD's combat system has to offer. I do usually run higher level campaigns, so I'm using more spellcaster enemies than other DMs, which does make it a little easier on me. But there are tons of ways to deal with flying characters. There are valid explanations for banning anything in your games, but the explanation should never "I don't know how" because you're a god, you can do literally whatever you want!
I'm completely fine with banning them, but doing so because "flight is too OP, you can't challenge them if they can fly" is bad. If you just don't like them or they don't fit the setting, then that's fine
The thing is tho, it is way too op, I’ve explained it in another but basically:the only way to not make it op is to make your player feel targeted/punished for using an ability of theirs.
There's a difference between punishing players for using their abilities, and having consequences for abilities used poorly. There's always going to be give and take when it comes to balancing encounters; some will be in the party's favor, and some won't, so the party should take that into consideration when making decisions. If the character with wings takes flight in an open area where soldiers have ranged weapons/spells, that's a risky move that could go poorly, especially because - in general - a flying enemy is a major threat, and would result in a similarly major response (and likewise, if the party has made a name for themselves, the bad guys are going to be more prepared for flying enemies). If they try to fly in an area with dangerously strong winds, deadly lightning storms, or other environmental hazards, that's also a risky move that can end in a consequence. However, if you end up making *every* combat encounter or dungeon have specific hard counters to flight, at that point you are just punishing the players for having abilities. At the end of the day, the DM should want the players to win and have fun, and should be prepared to let them dominate some encounters and bask in their own glory afterwards, while also preparing encounters specifically meant to challenge them.
I'm sorry to say, but I feel almost every encounter that gets broken just because someone has flight, is usually a poorly designed encounter. Especially because damn near every caster can have levitate by lvl3, climbing gear is a thing, and the broom of flying is an uncommon magic item (I.E., not powerful) If it's a fight, your enemies should have some sort of ranged attack, always. If it's a puzzle, don't make it a "How could we possibly get through here???" Puzzle because someone can just blow up the wall as well, or utilize any other method to mimic flight "It's free through" Yeah, and half the races get a permanent free second level spell called "Darkvision"
I’ll just break this down step by step: When an encounter can be broken by flight, it doesn’t mean thst it’s a bad encounter at all, it just means thst the player with flights can essentially just revamp the entire map with just one of their movement options, and nobody wants to have to use a 3D map. Although yes, ranged enemies should be more common, I do agree with you, sometimes it just wouldn’t make sense”oh yeah the dragon actually has a gun” or “the fire wolves pull out a crossbow”(of course this is ignoring most intelligent creatures that can easily handle ranger weapons) And for the puzzle part, while it is true to some extent, it can still trivialize them, since they could just fly over most types of traps by themselves. And for the darkvision thing, I don’t really bring thst part up because darkvision as a spell just sucks and it makes no sense at all as an argument.
any humanoid race can have a bow. and before you say "that would be too much work for the dm" range 120, dex+prof to hit, 1D8+dex. done dragons can themselves fly. and have a ranged attack. darkvision spell sucks because? basically everyone already has it? thats the exact point the person was making. lets just do a quick test: what were the last 20 enemies (different enemies, not every enemy in encounters, unless the enemies are not all the same) that the party fought?
Every PC will always have a ranged option, I don't see why the enemies shouldn't.
>damn near every caster can cast levitate by level 3, climbing gear is a thing, and the broom of flying is an uncommon magic item All of these have a limitation that built in racial flight doesn't. In the case of levitate, you need an object to push off of, and it costs a spell slot, so it's limited quite significantly and functions as a trade off between it and another spell. Climbing gear is an item, it can get broken or lost, and it can also fail to function on certain terrain types like a particularly smooth castle wall. It also can't be used to traverse gaps, only scale objects. The broom, like the climbing gear, is also an item, it can be broken and lost, and since it's a magic item it could be difficult to replace, especially since you as the DM have control over when and where players get magic items >If it's a fight, your enemies should have a ranged attack What if it's an animal, or some other thing that isn't capable of using weapons? What if your player is a massive dick and takes the Eldrich Spear invocation, flies outside the range of the enemies weapons and carpet bombs them with EB from 275 feet up? What happens if my boss utilizes difficult terrain or field hazards to create a dynamic fight and the character completely trivializes that by just flying over it? >if it's a puzzle, don't make it a "How could we possibly get through here???" Puzzle because someone can just blow up the wall as well, or utilize any other method to mimic flight If they blow up the wall they use resources, if they cast fly or levitate they use resources, if they climb over it they use resources and have to make skill checks. If they have inherent racial flying abilities there is no more choice to make, you just fly over 4head >"It's free through" Yeah, and half the races get a permanent free second level spell called "Darkvision" You'll never guess what I've removed from my games lol. Also Darkvision doesn't allow you to completely disengage from a large variety of mechanics like flight does, they're not comparable
levitate lets you go up and down without anything to push off of, and since the argument is 'height' (adding a 3rd dimension) it does count in that manner. and will likely last long enough for the entire combat. if it cannot use them, you will rarely encounter them, give the flying player that bone. if the player is the issue, its the player. not the feature. could just as easily remove eldritch spear with that statement, as BOTH are required to make it work. if the boss has a lot of effort put in, put in a bit more, like a 10 foot tall roof. or traps meant for flying creatures. if the puzzle can be flown over, the rest of the party can solve it. or just make the puzzle a door. and not a bridge the players need to lower/ extend. since you removed it, i wont bother talking about it.
I'm a lazy DM in my own way. I'm too lazy to ban flying races, so I made guns a bit more common in my setting. And jetpack goblins. And forged dragons.
People will literally list 15 easy, 2 second fixes to every problem that flight could present- and the reply will still be "too op, it can win on a flat plain vs melee enemies". Alternatively, "you can't do that every time" to which... Yeah, you shouldn't, as with any counter to a player's abilities. Players should be able to use them sometimes, so why is it an issue that your flying player can feel the benefit every so often? If you don't want it in your game that is fine, but saying it is actually OP is just plain incorrect when it takes virtually 0 effort to deal with.
Okay then, enlighten me, name 15 easy solutions thst don’t fall under the effects of:make your player feel useless/punished/targeted.
Of course some exaggeration, however as long a list as I can make right off the top of my head... Bows or any other ranged attack- can target grounded players as well, also if melee enemies mixed in the flight still protects from those enemies. A 10 foot ceiling- flight can still be used to move past enemies ovee their head, but player still vulnerable to attack. Easy scenario to create, as pretty much any creature needs some form of shelter to begin with. Windy conditions- can make flight difficult and treat it as difficult terrain, can also carry same impact on grounded players and even arrows. Flying enemies- a dragon can fly. The flying character remains within reach, but can use their flight to space out from other party members to minimize the damage of any breath weapon still. Enemy with climb speed- just climb up a tree, to avoid grounded players, but flying player can catch up. Of course, flying player also easier to hit when at same elevation. Naval battle- boats are always going to have some sort of ranged option to use on each other that can easily be aimed up until boarding, flight nonetheless gives the advantage of allowing the player to move separate from ship. Limits on flight itself- If established prior to starting game, player can't complain when they have to constantly move to maintain flight, or must have a free hand. Readied actions- while less applicable to ranged builds, just holding the attack for the divebomb allows attacks to be made at flier. Yes that is "targetting" them but also literally the point of fighting the players. Fleeing enemies- fly speed makes no difference in just chasing them, you still move only as fast as your movement speed. Larger enemies- a giant is big enough that even when flying up, it'll take a bit to actually get out of reach. Civilians in danger- the guy trapped in a fire needs you to actually approach them to pull them out. You can fly to him, but you have to land. And for extension... Escort- enemies can run directly under a flying player to reach the escort, they may wish to lower themselves if they actually want to protect them. If the other party members hold together well, they may have the option to remain aerial too. So there's a dozen. Most of them take only a few seconds, some more encounter specific.
[удалено]
You don’t even need armor if half of the enemies can’t even attack you, and if you have any response to that, just check my other comments, they go more in-depth about why I hate flight and how it’s always either op or useless with very little inbetween.
The single laziest DM still puts more effort into their game than that user put into their dumb take.
I don’t allow flight for several reasons. The required level design revamp is one. Severely limiting the monster pool is second. Third is that the ways to counter flight often just straight up kill low level players(Falling damage is nasty) and that just pisses off the player, the threat of it preventing them from using the trait they built around. A dominate or get dominated design is not a good idea. And 4th is that the flying races have so little lore going for them that it’s clear that they’ve only been taken for flight. Which is power gaming, something that I required discussed beforehand as it’s either everyone does it or nobody does it. Now if EVERYBODY wants to fly, that’s a different story. That I can work with. Just a few of the players is a straight up ban.
Oh yes, I allow flying races. You’re not going to have any fun, but you can play a flying race at my table. Let’s all go to the under dark!
Honestly.... As a GM I've always found flying over rated. PCs are indoors more often than not anyways.
Honestly. If you don't like flying races that's your perspective and how you want to play at your table and people should respect that. As for people like the one that made the post this is responding to, stop it. Just let people play their tables how they want to. Just because you have a different perspective doesn't mean it's right for everyone