I've been running games for a few years now. I have one glaring hole in my DM toolkit, and that is simply this: I have no real skill when it comes to making combats against a mostly-ranged party. This is unfortunate, since I keep ending up with ranged characters. At one point, I had a single melee tank, and four ranged characters. I am really having a lot of trouble figuring out how to make this work. My players are usually tactically smart, so they fan out to avoid AoE attacks, and they typically stay at the extreme edge of range so the monsters would have to take at least a double move to get near them. This has been killing me, because, no matter how I up the CR, combat is a joke this way and no one really has fun. Can anyone give me some good tips on managing ranged characters and making combat more challenging for my players?
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More close-quarters style combats (dungeons, buildings, cities with narrow streets) can prevent that, as well as more terrain. A flat featureless plain aids ranged characters. A forest with lots of trees not so much. Terrain enemies can use to get close by double moving and staying out of sight, or using it for cover.
Ambushes where the enemies get close right away also helps out. Don't drop your whole hand. A few enemies, your players scatter, suddenly one gets jumped by the two invisible guys. Playing that with terrain so the others don't have clear shots as well.
Monsters with grab attacks or grapple specialists where they just can't get away in the first place.
Ranged specialists of your own.
Strong winds if in terrain where that would have an effect could also provide a penalty.
Great Wyrm Red Dragon, maybe with his/her family.
I've been running games for a few years now. I have one glaring hole in my DM toolkit, and that is simply this: I have no real skill when it comes to making combats against a mostly-ranged party. This is unfortunate, since I keep ending up with ranged characters. At one point, I had a single melee tank, and four ranged characters. I am really having a lot of trouble figuring out how to make this work. My players are usually tactically smart, so they fan out to avoid AoE attacks, and they typically stay at the extreme edge of range so the monsters would have to take at least a double move to get near them. This has been killing me, because, no matter how I up the CR, combat is a joke this way and no one really has fun. Can anyone give me some good tips on managing ranged characters and making combat more challenging for my players?
General rule with creating a 'challenge' is to attempt to beat them at their own game, or put them out of their element. In this case, out of their element I would imagine means 'Get them in melee'
Without knowing party makeup it's hard to look at specifics... but a couple of thoughts.
1) Stealthy combatants. If they don't notice the rogue (or rogue-like) til they are 20 feet away, it's hard to shoot them at 120.
2) Highly mobile combatants. Anything that has a high speed that can close the gap quickly. Dimensional assault chain is also worthy of note here because it can pop in and still attack.
3) Range resistant opponents. Be it a horde of Monks with Snatch Arrows, or a tiny swarm (immune to weapon damage). Gauntlets of arrow snatching.
4) Disrupt their ability to use ranged combat. Cube of force on Face 2. Wind Wall. Weather control and crank it up to hurricane. Solid fog (can't use ranged) / obscuring mist (Can't target me). If they are predominantly outside, don't forget natural weather as well, both to affect perception and reduce range. If a combat occurs in a heavy forest, don't be afraid to apply cover at any shot taken beyond 30 feet (Trees and shrubs in the way) and a max range on it (though I'd also apply difficult terrain to movements if it's that heavy).
There is some ability to combine all of the above. A phase spider they aren't going to notice quickly (it's ethereal) and is mobile (It's ethereal). Monks with Dim door and dimensional assault tick the first 3.
I think everyone's pretty much given the general strategies:
* Surprise - Ambush, Stealth and Invisibilty
* Artillery style ranged attacks - spellcasters and spell-like abilities
* Terrain - cover, cramped room, thick forests, dungeons and alleyways
* High speed - high base speed, teleport/dimension door
* Damage Reduction and high hit points
* Visibility effects - Mists/fogs, blindness causing attacks
* Warp Wood on bows
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Take all of these ideas and combine them
You have a tank and several ranged support players.
A 5-foot hall way with the tank in the lead. The walls have secret doors. The tank fights another tank. This buys time for the ambushers to pop open doors and attack from the secret rooms.
Wide open field... has trees for cover. The bad guys move from tree to tree, moving while defensive, to close the distance. They too have ranged weapons. Have them fire off magic arrows with an AoE spell, so the arrow gets close and gets the PC hiding behind the tree anyway (think grenades).
The PCs are hiding around the periphery of the map sniping at NPCs. The NPCs use teleport to pop in behind the PCs and get flank bonuses to hit.
The NPCs are being shot at. They close the door and wait. Either PCs HAVE to come in to close quarters to deal with them, or the NPCs wind up behind the PCs and attack from behind when the PCs engage the next encounter.
Burrowing or flying monsters. I LOVE burrowing monsters. The field is empty. Suddenly the monster moves and pops out of the ground and makes its attack. Next round it goes back under ground and no one knows where it is. Or even BETTER is burrowing with Spring Attack. Pops out of the ground, attacks, and goes back underground and the PCs never get an attack at all unless they have readied actions (prepared to attack a general area... I'd never let them just say I prepare to attack it when it appears because you cannot be looking and ready in 360 degrees-make them give you a front arc).
Put up standing stones, trees, bushes, hills and ditches, buildings with corners and rooms to hide in. Have the NPCs attack from inside the building shooting bows through windows. Try this out sometime :) Three NPCs in a room. First NPC opens the shutter and shoots at PC, 2nd NPC shoots at PC as a full attack, 3rd NPC shoots at PC and uses move to close shutter. The NPCs cannot be shot with ranged weapons nor spells (no line of effect). PCs must close into the building or destroy the building (meanwhile allowing NPCs to escape out the back or down the tunnel).
I ran the first encounter of Rise of the Runelords once with goblins hiding in barrels on a street popping out to snipe PCs. PCs could not use spells nor ranged weapons to any effect and had to go open the barrels and attack with melee to get the goblins.
Treachery is always good. They walk into the Town Hall to receive their accolades and rewards for ridding the town of evil critter "x" only to find to that the mayor of the town is really evil monster "y" and the towns folk are his minions and now that the party is no longer useful they are to be eaten.
Or whatever, you get the idea. Nothing new to the general strategies but seems fun
The solution to ranged combat is ranged combat encounters. Make it so the players don't want to stand toe to toe trading ranged shots on open plain. Ranged is going to happen but it gets more interesting when you have terrain to make interesting.
Something that become incorporal if attacked from more than 10 feet away
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Or a god.
I suggest reading through the Environment section of the Core Rule Book. You wil notice that the distances may not be as far as you are making them. Creatures that live in these environments tend to understand them well. Make sure you use Perception checks according to this section. There are some terrains where the penalty is -2 instead of -1 for every 10 feet.
Also, use ranged against them as well as melee. A mounted warrior on a manticore will do some damage.
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Set dressing. As others have mentioned, make good use of the Environment section in the back of your core rulebook. Weather effects and problematic terrain are natural enough that your players don't have much right complain to when the region they're in goes through a period of high precipitation or features dense foliage or loose boulders. Also, water encounters:
Attacks from Land: Characters swimming, floating, or treading water on the surface, or wading in water at least chest deep, have improved cover (+8 bonus to AC, +4 bonus on Reflex saves) from opponents on land. Land-bound opponents who have freedom of movement effects ignore this cover when making melee attacks against targets in the water. A completely submerged creature has total cover against opponents on land unless those opponents have freedom of movement effects. Magical effects are unaffected except for those that require attack rolls (which are treated like any other effects) and fire effects.
Obviously, you've got to be a little more judicious in your use of aquatic terrain (your players are going to wise up after their fifth encounter next to or within a lake or conveniently located river,) but underwater combat can wreck archers and spellcasters.
Here's something else thing to consider; bows are usually pretty easy to sunder, and because they aren't melee weapons, archers don't get an AoO against even untrained sunderers.
Don't sunder valuable objects; players hate that.
Terrain and conditions that limit range and render flanks vulnerable. Foes that are proof against their favorite attacks work well. I recently got hosed, when my arrows couldn't even hit a swarm of pesky bats!
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Don't sunder valuable objects; players hate that.
Awww, you're no fun.
That's like saying rust monsters and black puddings don't exist in your campaign world (both of which are far more unforgiving than a simple sunder.) Nowadays, sundering is a temporary setback. Even Mending can repair a broken magical weapon and an appropriate-level cleric or scroll can restore its abilities with a Make Whole.
I'm just saying it's an option. If I'm a big, mean minotaur and I get close enough to the guy who's been tattooing his name into the butts of me and my mates with his arrows, you can rest assured I'm going to turn that twig-launcher into kindling. Don't make it an every-battle occurrence, but don't pass on a perfectly logical tactic just because your players might cry "foul." The added challenge of having to switch up their game can turn that battle into a fight your players are going to talk about for weeks to come.
... And sudendly, NINJA, thousands of them!
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Maybe I should stop with the TPK...
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These are all really great ideas. Thank you so much to everyone for the help. I am definitely going to start implementing these ideas into my games. Obscuring mist looks great, and now that I think about it, I do tend to set conflicts in open plains. I guess that should have been a no-brainer. This thread definitely saved my game. Thanks everyone!
The times I have sundered, or attempted to sunder, I saw fear in the players' eyes. When the fighter had his lonsword splintered, he was limited to using his shield as his primary weapon until he could get a sword from a downed foe. I have seen a character have a weapon sundered only to have to rely on one he wasn't familiar with. When he realized that the flail had some options available he hadn't considered, he began retraining his feats (this was 3.5). The archer that had his bow sundered was not nearly as lucky. He had to make do with other options for a while. Fortunately his feats were the main source of his abilitiy instead of a single weapon.
I saw to sunder if you think it's a viable tactic. If the players don't learn to adapt (extra weapons, adamantine, etc) they will have problems. If your players are adapting already to your tactics, I think they will learn to adapt to this as well.
Don't forget that there is often a lot of cover and/or concealment in the wilderness. A simple tree provides a +4 bonus to AC. Early morning fog can provide a 20% miss chance.
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Don't be so quick to force them into melee. If they're playing ranged it's because they like range, and few things are as bad to do to a player then to make what his character does best pointless.
My advice? Give them what they want only better. A rival NPC sniper who almost never misses and uses terrain, hiding and sneak attacks to kill. That way the party has to fight him at range to pin him down while the melee tank tries to sneak in close.
Teleporting wizards with either illusions, enchantments or wall effects. The have to fight them at range since they're always teleporting around, but it takes lots of tactical use of terrain to find a way to get the jump on such mobile and dangerous enemies.
Look at encounters in first person shooters for ideas, as they're full of mazes, maps and encounters between ranged enemies. I personally love the Metal Gear Solid approach as it's more about using terrain, blockades and sneaking to fight at range, plus if you can get in close you can do frightful things to the enemy, especially as its designed so you don't last long against so many ranged enemies if you engage them in open territory.
When I'm facing a group of PCs that are always winning combats, I make sure that their main tactic becomes a MEANS to solving the problem rather than a way to GET AROUND the problem. Instead of punishing them for being good at ranged combat by forcing melee, give them something that makes them stretch their creativity and find even more ways to use their specialization.
First of all know the cover rules really well and read that spell.
Sunder could just as easily be seen as cruelty by an NPC. Consider that the NPC is trying to actively kill the PCs, not just minorly disrupt them. Rather than trying to sunder their weapons (which only hampers the martial classes, before they are smashed to bits by the casters), they would do their best to actually defeat the party.
I think enemies have much better tactics that would be more challenging and less annoying. For example, a disarm followed by a mob of low level creatures to prevent them from getting the weapon (which deprives them of their weapon, for either the battle or even a set of battles, without actually damaging it).
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I'll also second providing ranged opponents. I don't know what level your PCs are, but I once scared the crap out of a party of 5th level characters with 50 goblin archers. With that many shots, you will likely see at least 1 crit per round, and at lower levels 3d6 damage is nothing to sneeze at.
They had originally decided to take the little buggers on at range, but after the first round of return fire, THEY were the ones who cast Obscuring Mist. :P
I've been running games for a few years now. I have one glaring hole in my DM toolkit, and that is simply this: I have no real skill when it comes to making combats against a mostly-ranged party. This is unfortunate, since I keep ending up with ranged characters. At one point, I had a single melee tank, and four ranged characters. I am really having a lot of trouble figuring out how to make this work. My players are usually tactically smart, so they fan out to avoid AoE attacks, and they typically stay at the extreme edge of range so the monsters would have to take at least a double move to get near them. This has been killing me, because, no matter how I up the CR, combat is a joke this way and no one really has fun. Can anyone give me some good tips on managing ranged characters and making combat more challenging for my players?
You can try a wizard with monster and use ranged touch attacks in one encounter. The way i see it use their tatics on them.
From beneath it devours.
Some think ranged is brilliant, without flaws and fantastic. In mp games online, strategy games, a lot of people love the range.
Some counters:
Ankhegs, Oozes, skeletons, terrible visibility with only some chances for really good long shots (don't want to make them hate who they are playing), charging grapplers, weapon locking mummies, spells that shape wood, really heavy mounted knights, catch arrow monks, beholder ambush (eep, want to play the ranged game), ranged sunder ranged disarm counter-archers, monk scouts or barbs with improved speed (fleet of foot or dash).
Or if all else fails, ninjas or samurai come out of the fog and chop someone badly. Now the fight is on!
Good luck!
@3.5 Loyalist
Why skeletons?
Iirc the only ones that can use combat maneuvers at range are the fighters who have the archer archetype.
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@3.5 Loyalist
Why skeletons?
Iirc the only ones that can use combat maneuvers at range are the fighters who have the archer archetype.
Possibly the DR. Archers are not as effective against skeletons.
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Possibly the DR. Archers are not as effective against skeletons.@3.5 Loyalist
Why skeletons?
Iirc the only ones that can use combat maneuvers at range are the fighters who have the archer archetype.
That would be my guess. DR from skeletons can shut down lower level characters' ranged attacks.
A little higher level specific critter is a cloaker or mimic. They will be on the characters up close and personal. The characters will be investigating the 'objects' when the critters spring on them.
A little more tough would be a will-o'-wisp. Wisps can cause problems for an unprepared party. High initiative and AC and invisible.
Aberrations look cool for this purpose.
@3.5 Loyalist
Why skeletons?
Iirc the only ones that can use combat maneuvers at range are the fighters who have the archer archetype.
Dr 5 bludgeoning, and since I play and run 3.5 don't have to deal with archetypes. Ranged trip, disarm, sunder are just feats.
Cheers
Don't sunder valuable objects; players hate that.
sunder the bow string. IF they have a spare on their sheet, move to retrieve it and move to restring it.
monks and dervish dancers with deflect arrows, concealment tends to be more effective since blind-fight wont help ranged attacks, quilted cloth gives a small ammount of DR vs most common ranged weapons add a mage armor potion or wand and you have cheap DR 3 for your mooks.
Creatures with DR/slashing and bludgeoning work nicely too, lots of terrain and spring attacking, shot on the run foes, tower shields,
Fickle winds spell, a potion is not cheap but for 1,050 gold you can give it to a creature, give that creature a shield of arrow attraction and you can protect multiple adjacent creatures with it.
Feel free to create new creatures by altering spell like abilities that better challenge your party, create new spells like a mass version of entropic shield lvl 3 cleric, turning 1 in 5 hits in a miss instead.
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Don't sunder valuable objects; players hate that.
Sundering isn't too bad, even on valuable items, as long as the GM stops at simply breaking the item, not destroying it.
In a way I think it is a great way to remind PCs how dependent they sometimes are on their gear rather than on themselves. I certainly don't mind destroying secondary items, but the fear in their eyes when you say "He attempts to Sunder your +3 flaming long sword is priceless."
Gee I think I have to do some sundering now... done got the itch! hehehe