Can Kites Be Kept Under Control?

[Username17]

That's pretty wrong. Melee combat has positioning, which is interesting because it is always changing and greatly affects combat.

Ranged Combat has positioning. It has more positioning than Melee Combat, because there's space between the combatants. In Melee Combat, once you've gotten to point blank range there's nothing left to do except disengage or continue hammering away at each other. In ranged combat, there's cover and high ground and shit. Characters are incentivized to care about the terrain after and during periods when they are casting spells or shooting arrows at each other. In ranged combat, people even create terrain, making fogs and webs and woods and walls to limit the opponents' ability to engage, disengage, or fire back.

There's just a lot more stuff in between two characters when they are 100 meters apart than when they are 1 meter apart. That's not negotiable. That's just factually true. Line of Sight and terrain and shit is just a lot more interesting and tactically relevant in ranged combat than in melee combat in, for example, Necromunda. Or just about any tabletop game for that matter.

Long ranged terrain often gets abstracted away in D&D because long range is bigger than most battle mats. But the fact that it isn't at all obvious how you'd represent 500+ meters worth of light woods doesn't mean such a thing wouldn't be interesting and important.

In melee combat, preventing others from getting full attacks by forcing them to make a move and an attack instead of a full is a big deal.

This is an example extremely specific to a short level range in 3rd edition D&D. That shit doesn't make any difference at 2nd level or in 2nd edition. Nor does it make any difference in 1st, 4th, or 5th edition. Nor do you particularly care at 13th level, when everyone in 3rd edition either has some form of Pounce or you stopped caring about their melee damage output a long ass time ago.

...and avoiding that moves you through environmental effects like flanking, environment like traps and walls and rough ground and line of sight effects, AoOs and reach, and AoEs from buffs that you want to cluster into and AoE attacks that you want to avoid as a group.

Those are obviously things that matter - and matter more - in Ranged Combat. Indeed, with the exception of fringe counterexamples like body of sun, AoEs don't exist in melee combat at all and are the exclusive province of Ranged Combat by definition.

Melee also has a number of unique tactics like disarm, trip, grapple, charge, bull rush, and overrun which don't get a lot of use, but they do get some.

Ranged combat also has a number of unique tactics like fireball, disintegration, and cloud kill that get used all the time and are totally awesome.

Bow ranged combat takes place at ranges where almost no spells are used.

Mostly it does not. People normally have combats in cities, forests, swamps, or dungeons. Even deserts have dunes to hide behind. Combats in literally featureless plains are not particularly normal. And even if they were, bows are mostly useless at points where you are out of fireball range. It's -2 to-hit per range increment, long bows at 1000 feet are hardly even a nuisance.

Could you write up a version of ranged bow combat where these things matter?

Yes. Further, I would submit that failing to do so is unacceptable. If "Ranger with a Bow" isn't an interesting character to play, you've failed your Craft D&D Edition roll. Because that's literally two of the characters in the Fellowship of the Ring. It's one of the four characters in Gauntlet. It's one of the original character archetypes in Diablo II. It is not acceptable to have a character concept that obvious and that popular be unsupported.

-Username17

[K]

Ranged combat also has a number of unique tactics like fireball, disintegration, and cloud kill that get used all the time and are totally awesome.

You've classified a huge number of things as ranged incorrectly and that's unworkable for any coherent conversation.

For example, Disintegration is a melee spell. In 3.X, its a Medium spell so it has a range of 100 ft +10/level, so at the levels it shows up an archer can kite a Disintegrate caster at a mere three range increments. Cloudkill is Medium range. Web is Medium range, and at the levels it appears at only two bow range increments you can kite it.

The effects that you are talking about take place at ranges that you'd expect a single PC to be able to advance to in a round or two with the Run action. The established melee systems work for that.

The problem areas of ranged combats happen in unchanging arenas like the sky or any range farther than Medium. The harpy with a bow or the flying mage with a Wand of Fireballs is the problem that people are trying to solve here, because that guy can rain death on PCs and only bows or Fireballs are a viable counter. The PC who picked Magic Missile or Charm Monster or Evard's Black Tentacles is shit out of luck because that stuff is all Medium, and that is a very boring design.

The solution to an RPG problem should never be "well, I guess every character should choose the exact same abilities." That's failure.

[Username17]

You've classified a huge number of things as ranged incorrectly and that's unworkable for any coherent conversation.

For example, Disintegration is a melee spell. In 3.X, its a Medium spell so it has a range of 100 ft +10/level, so at the levels it shows up an archer can kite a Disintegrate caster at a mere three range increments.

Your definition of melee range was the length of a charge. In 3.x, that is typically 60 feet. Even at first level, Medium range spells go 110 feet, which is considerably longer than the length of a charge.

I mean, I'm already being very generous with the definition of "ranged" since by most typical definitions of the term, "Short Ranged" has the word "Ranged" right in the fucking name. You said that things outside the range of a charge were Ranged Combat. Medium Ranged effects take effect outside the range of a charge and are Ranged Combat even by your own definitions.

Stop moving the fucking goal posts.

-Username17

[maglag]

A move-equivalent Dodge or Hunker Down action that made someone immune to non-melee ranged attacks would also solve kiting completely.

It would solve long range kiting, but it wouldn't solve invisibility kiting, hover kiting, or root kiting. Nor would it make characters immune to being outnumbered by kiters.

In the broader sense, in the meeting of any particular characters and monsters, there is going to be an optimal range of engagement for each team. And further, characters and monsters are going to have means of keeping conflict at their desired range. Sometimes it's going to be excessively stark, like how the Dire Bear has absolutely fuckall it can do at medium range so the relative advantage of holding things at that range is functionally infinity. Or how getting to close range with a Tyrannosaurus Rex is probably an extremely bad idea.

Player Characters should never be in the situation where they are literally powerless at short, medium, or long range. But regardless, you're going to have some characters be better or worse at different ranges. We know that Berserkers and Monks have cool shit they can do at short range, we know that Rangers and Warlocks have cool shit they can do at long range. And some foes from team monster are going to be very range dependent - up to an including various beasts who are literally powerless as long as things stay at long range and chanting sorcerers that are almost as worthless once cornered into short range stab-fests.

The answer to a Manticore isn't that everyone has to be equal at every range, it's that the Crossbow Sniper in your party has to be good enough that the Manticore can't beat the party by just holding back in the air throwing spikes. But yes, the Berserker also needs a damn bow, because while it's OK for the character to lose an archery duel to a Manticore, it's unacceptable for the Berserker player to have nothing to do if the rest of the battle settles into an archery duel with the Manticore.

-Username17

Well, the 3rd edition manticore already has a built-in mechanism for that-limited ammo. So if the berseker can just tank the spikes until the manticore runs dry, the manticore will be forced into melee and the berseker gets to go all choppa.

So I would say a simple solution against kiting is to make sure all ranged attacks have limited ammo of some sort to make sure you can't spam them. Even Legolas runs out of arrows in the LoTR books before team monster runs out of orcs/goblins to throw at him. Dominions dragons have limited breaths and dominions not-mind flayers have limited mind blasts, meaning eventually they're forced into melee. Arrows and bolts and javelins are all heavy and take up space so there's a limit to how many you can reliably carry around without crippling your combat ability.

This also creates an interesting dynamic where both sides may start flinging stuff at each other but if the battle drags on they're forced to come closer and closer or just abandon the fight because they run out of stuff to fling at the other side.

Of course, make sure that crossbow sniper can spend 5 minutes or so after battle ends recovering his magic bolts.

[K]

You've classified a huge number of things as ranged incorrectly and that's unworkable for any coherent conversation.

For example, Disintegration is a melee spell. In 3.X, its a Medium spell so it has a range of 100 ft +10/level, so at the levels it shows up an archer can kite a Disintegrate caster at a mere three range increments.

Your definition of melee range was the length of a charge. In 3.x, that is typically 60 feet. Even at first level, Medium range spells go 110 feet, which is considerably longer than the length of a charge.

I mean, I'm already being very generous with the definition of "ranged" since by most typical definitions of the term, "Short Ranged" has the word "Ranged" right in the fucking name. You said that things outside the range of a charge were Ranged Combat. Medium Ranged effects take effect outside the range of a charge and are Ranged Combat even by your own definitions.

Stop moving the fucking goal posts.

-Username17

Stop strawmanning. My definition was "generally the length of a charge," a very loose definition in a game with a very loose set of parameters on what any particular charge might be.

You have to make a long series of assumptions to come up with 60ft, especially in a game like DnD where you might be on a light horse (charge 120 ft) or might have have cast Expeditious Retreat (also 120 ft. charge), both things that commonly happen as early as 1st level.

Do we even have to talk about things that commonly happen at mid-levels like boots of speed or polymorph or literally any of the dozens of things that affect movement speed and charge distance?

Consider that you could stop making assumptions and start asking more questions. For example, you could have started any of your rants with "if you mean 60' when you said 'generally the length of a charge,' then here are the problems with that." That would have prevented the unnecessarily hostile arguing that killed my enthusiasm for this topic.

[hyzmarca]

This is easy.

Start with a simple setting premise: The gods outlawed ranged combat.

Now you have to figure out how they enforce this edict. Are their priests who hunt down and kill everyone who throws a rock? Are will the Gods themselves instantly smite you for throwing a rock? Or have the laws of physics changed such that the rock will loose all velocity and momentum the instant it leaves your hand? Because these three options produce very different worlds, but all three are interesting in their own way. '


If you want to shut down kiting without shutting down ranged, congratulations, you've missed the entire point of ranged weapons.

[merxa]

Doesn't the premise of kiting require the kiter to shoot and move away faster than the kited can just move? If you're in a situation where someone else is essentially more then twice your speed and they're intent on harassing you with ranged fire, wouldn't you just retreat into cover, go in a cave etc and if you're in a featureless void like the astral plane then maybe you're just boned and that's okay because if you ended up in the astral plane or the realm of limitless sky without a way of handling being kited you probably deserve to die.

[Pariah Dog]

This is easy.

Start with a simple setting premise: The gods outlawed ranged combat.

Now you have to figure out how they enforce this edict. Are their priests who hunt down and kill everyone who throws a rock? Are will the Gods themselves instantly smite you for throwing a rock? Or have the laws of physics changed such that the rock will loose all velocity and momentum the instant it leaves your hand? Because these three options produce very different worlds, but all three are interesting in their own way. '


If you want to shut down kiting without shutting down ranged, congratulations, you've missed the entire point of ranged weapons.

World #3 leads me to try and find a way to weaponize birds.

[Username17]

Consider that you could stop making assumptions and start asking more questions. For example, you could have started any of your rants with "if you mean 60' when you said 'generally the length of a charge,' then here are the problems with that." That would have prevented the unnecessarily hostile arguing that killed my enthusiasm for this topic.

I think we're done here. You are not arguing in good faith.

A medium range spell goes 25 squares at 5th level, which is more than the length of many peoples' entire battle mats. It's also more than the encounter distance of most common adventure areas (ex.: Urban, Dungeon, Forest, Swamp, etc.). Any definition of "ranged combat" that excludes that is fundamentally absurd and I instantly and categorically reject it.

If you want to have some weird definition wherein move distances of flying cheetahs count as melee range so that "ranged combat" only includes things that don't fit on the table at all, we aren't going to have a respectful conversation. Because I do not respect that definition.

-Username17