The Gaming Den

What's up with this? I can't think of any conceivable reason why they did this other than to protect fey, unthreatening monsters like golems and tarrasques from the aerial pincushion tactic. Or because it made skills like climb, balance, and jump useless.

Big deal. The paradigm of a monster that can only run up and attack is dumb and obsolete anyway. And those skills are crack-ass even without flight.

It can't be because it was giving PC archers an advantage, because archery battles overwhelmingly favors grounded targets. OTOH, they jacked up cover rules so badly in this edition that maybe they just didn't care.

Goddamn 3.5E.

Keep in mind, I think this change was dumb. But I'll try to defend it long enough to at least figure out the reasoning.

First of all, 3.5 Flight is not especially less effective in combat. There are few monsters that you can't kill in 50 rounds of archery that you can kill in 500 rounds of archery. Similarly, 3.5 Invisibility is exactly the same in combat. And that, I think, is the point. The idea is to make PCs suck more outside of combat.

The goal is to make chasms use up resources, because by the time you cross it and go on to fight the gnolls on the other side, your flight will have worn off. The goal is to make everyone be standing around like a dumbass with no protections up when monsters ambush the party.

The goal, therefore, seems to actually make Teleport Ambushes stronger. I can think of no other explanation.

-Username17

Frank wrote:The idea is to make PCs suck more outside of combat.

I'm afraid of the implications of this statement.

Yeah I tend to agree with Frank. Generally, I believe the intent is to make dungeon terrain mean more. Note they also moved spider climb up a level as well. So maybe when you come to a pit trap or some chasm in the dungeon its a bit more threatening.

Of course, it still doesn't work, because flight and spider climb are still really low level spells. I suppose it may prevent you somewhat from carrying a cheap wand of spider climb around, but that's about it.

IMO though, flight should actually be a higher level than it is. There are far too many CR 5 monsters that just can't deal with it, and the majority of fantasy heroes don't go flying around everywhere until they're high level. I personally like the ground based game a bit better than people flying everywhere. But I'm all for a reduction of magical power all across the board (except for evocations which need a boost).

I sort of agree with RandomCasualty. I could stand for flight being a level 4th or even 5th spell as long as it was applied evenly across the board and it didn't have the Teleport Ambush problem.

On the other hand, I also think that monsters that aren't essentially puzzle encounters (like golems and basiliks) shouldn't have such a one-sided attack mode in the first place. I mean, no one feels sorry for PCs when they get stomped by an invisible stalker because no one invested in ranged attacks.

Definitely when you get to high levels, the one sided attack modes have to go. Essentially this means that "high levels" is when PCs start attaining abilities like flying, invisibility, incorporeality, and other powers that make them immune to normal attacks.

And I really do consider flying to be the first major one of these high level immunity abilities, and thus the start of "high level". Unfortunately the designers don't see it this way, as many dire animals and other brute force dumb beasts have CRs around the mid levels and are supposed to be useable encounters at that level.

Even at epic levels, you'll certain poorly defined monsters, like the mithral golem, who can't even beat invisibility or flying. Once your at epic, the idea of the dumb nonflying beast shouldn't exist anymore. You can still have dumb beasts, they just hav eto be able to fly, detect invisibility, penetrate incorporeality and every other nasty counter to common stuff. Because they can't think to counter those, so they just have to have those counters as an innate part of them.

Flying is the point IMO where the game goes from Lord of the Rings style fantasy to high magic fantasy, and the game has to account for that, while still keeping the room to maintain LotR style fantasy as well. Having only 4 levels of LotR style fantasy is far too small. Pushing it up to a split between level 1-10 (LotR style) and 11-20 (high magic free-for-all), seems to be a better compromise IMO. That way people can still play an entire campaign of LotR style gaming and other groups can play entire campaigns of high magic gaming.