lighttigersoul wrote:
I like how 'it's in all the fiction' is your guys' primary defense for it, totally ignoring that in fiction, movie, book, or otherwise, that the flying enemies were used to push the characters along OR the characters had a means of dealing with them.
I'd hate for someone to think I was ignoring that.
There's basically two options for dealing with flying enemies. (Actually, let's back up - "flying enemies" is a specific instance of a problem that occurs in multiple situations. There's something similar going on when, for example, the PCs and a band of giants get stuck on opposite sides of a chasm and are both racing to get to the maguffin at the end of it. But "flying enemies" is useful shorthand, so we'll go with that.)
Option 1 is that they are basically plot devices. PCs don't require, and indeed probably shouldn't have, abilities that meaningfully interact with them on a mechanical level, because otherwise the PCs are going to fucking kill them, and then they're no longer a plot device but an instance of Option 2.
Option 2 is that they are opponents (or allies, whichever), rather than plot devices, and, just like other monsters, can be attacked, killed, captured, looted, interrogated as to where their secret base is, and so forth. PCs in this instance
do need abilities that deal with them, because that's what they're expected to do.
Unfortunately for Option 1, D&D takes place in a genre where character concepts like "fire wizard" and "archer" and "dude who summons holy lightning from God" and "knife-thrower" exist. If we're going to accommodate those concepts, then flying monsters are Option 2. If we aren't going to accommodate those concepts, then they can be Option 1, but the resulting game is going to look strikingly un-D&D-ish.
What I think is that if they're going to be Option 2, characters should not have the possibility of being unable to deal with them. It's problematic if/when the game
requires that you advance your character in order to counter flying enemies, while permitting you to
not do that. If you can pick "counter flight" or "be more badass in melee", and the game lets you pick either one, then eventually someone is going to pick "be more badass in melee" and
not have a counter for flight.
But the way to handle this is not by treating flying enemies as prima facie evidence of ass piracy; the way to handle it is for the game to offer "be more badass at countering flight" or "be more badass in melee", because everyone just gets a counter for flight, and can deal meaningfully with it. Whether that looks like a bow or a chakram or the ability to leap to great heights or whatever, they can do something level-appropriate against the Harpy Air Force, and then everybody's happy.