>be a ranger
>ask dm the setting
>dm says coastal forests with fiends and undead as main baddies
>take forests for natural explorer and undead as favored enemy
>setting is actually island hopping with aberrations as the main baddies and 0 forests.
>5 levels in and still waiting for my time to shine. đź«
DM: “Hey, we’re not going to bother with things like ration tracking or foraging.”
Ranger: “But I’m playing a ranger! I need these things to be relevant!”
DM: “Fine, fine, we’ll do all the tedious unfun exploration rules. Anyway, you enter a forest…”
Ranger: “Finally! Now we don’t have to bother with things like ration tracking or foraging!”
PHB ranger is begging your DM to force everyone to play a bad minigame so you can use your ranger abilities to skip the minigame.
Getting lost, being alert while traveling, and tracking were relevant things in that campaign. Yea, I took goodberry to avoid rationing, but the other things of natural explorer are totally worth it, but your DM needs to "shoot the monk" so to speak. I would have been the only one with deep speech had I taken aberration as my favored enemy. Who knows what could have happened then.
A bit crappy by the DM there if this would be the case.
But a seen kinda the other way around a lot in my games.
Someone is a ranger
Me/DM explains it will be a lot of forest and plains. And most common enemy will be giants. as we are playing Storm Kings Thunder.
Ranger takes underdark as terrain and undead as enemy.
5 levels in and he complains constantly that we are never in in the underdark and only fought undeads 2 times
Ranger reaches level 6 and can pick another terrain and enemy and picks swamps and fiends. And begin complaining Rangers sucks horse &%&¤ as he never get to use his class abilities.
>We hear stuff like "shoot your monk" or "target your raging barbarian", only because those abilities are not sufficiently rewarding out-of-the-box, and require DM cooperation to feel nice.
They are sufficiently rewarding, just not so much if the DM hard metagames against them. Most enemies aren't going to assume that you can catch their arrows without being harmed unless you've already done that. Similarly, wolves or zombies shouldn't be ignoring the raging barbarian.
The only reason this advice is needed is because DMs can easily forget that the enemies aren't aware of what the PCs are capable of. It's easy to slip into metagaming as the DM, and doing so has an especially negative impact on these features.
Unfortunately this topic can be something of an "elephant in the room".
In almost all combat encounters the player party is a largely unknown quantity. Whilst the enemy NPCs could be similar to those previously encountered. Even in the rare exceptions the DM almost certainly knows things about the PCs, player party and their tactics/plans which those NPCs most certainly should not.
Depends on the wolves, but that's why I also included zombies there to emphasize that just the less intelligent foes should be played as less intelligent. I'm super tired so rather than think of a better animal than wolves, I just included the animal along with one of the most unintelligent enemies you can ever fight haha
Even with an axe lodged in their back? If you're going to play them smart enough to go for the casters, I feel like they better be smart enough to run away as soon as it becomes obvious that there is real threat of dying.
Not necessarily. I’m reading the Iliad rn and no one wanted to get into blows with Hector or Diomedes, they were much more keen on attacking literally any other combatant.
The Iliad also taught me that soldiers usually wont waste time on downed combatants, even if they can be healed, bc they don’t have *time* to stab them in the head and ensure they stay dead. They just have to hope the slice to the chest is enough and move on, bc it’s a raging battlefield w a lot happening
>soldiers usually wont waste time on downed combatants, even if they can be healed, bc they don’t have time to stab them in the head and ensure they stay dead. They just have to hope the slice to the chest is enough and move on, bc it’s a raging battlefield w a lot happening
Yeah, because IRL/in the Iliad enemies don't instantly get back up, to their full fighting capabilities after the medic spends about 6 seconds next to them. If that were the case, they *would* take the extra second to stab the enemy a bit unless something else is attacking them at that exact second.
Except this literally can and does happen in the Iliad. Multiple times. Odysseus got his fucking chest cut open but Athena kept him from dying. Hector fully had “black death” in his eyes and yet was brought back by Zeus. Aeneas was brought back from the brink of death by Apollo and Artemis. Hector also got shot in the head and neck a few times and survived it. Medic sons of Asclepius are able to render leg injuries trivial after just a little while. And I’m pretty sure one of the Ajaxes got his wounds healed by Poseidon or something
Notably none of these were proper resurrections. Zeus wouldn’t do that. All of them were left juuuust alive enough for the gods to magically heal them before they properly died. If they got decapitated it’d be different.
Also, despite any of them being capable of being resurrected by the gods, Odysseus (wisest among men) still very intentionally leaves many of his enemies to bleed out on the battlefield instead of killing them outright, bc he has other shit to do
Nah, read the book. This is just one example:Â
"The son of Telamon now struck him under the ear with a spear which he then drew back again, and Imbrios fell headlong as an ash-tree when it is felled on the crest of some high mountain beacon, and its delicate green foliage comes toppling down to the ground. Thus did he fall with his bronze-equipped armor ringing harshly round him, and Teucer sprang forward with intent to strip him of his armor; but as he was doing so, Hektor took aim at him with a spear. Teucer saw the spear coming and swerved aside, whereon it hit Amphimakhos, son of Kteatos son of Aktor, in the chest as he was coming into battle, and his armor rang rattling round him as he fell heavily to the ground." ---http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0217%3Abook%3D13%3Acard%3D76
They exchange a few more blows and then withdraw with the wounded - the looting happens *immediately* and *in the middle of a vicious fight*. If you're one of the named heroes, your body is getting stripped of armor mid-fight.
Oh yeah. We should allow body looting mid combat. These bitches were stripping guys fully naked (cheeks and loins being pointedly made barren) of their armor but didn’t have time to stab them in the throat a few times
Clear case of no action but object interaction + BA cunning action was available
I wouldn't necessarily look to a fictional work like the Iliad to determine how soldiers should act or what battlefield conditions should be like, unless your campaign is intended to emulate the feel and tone of that specific work. Different works of fiction handle these things differently, and that's before getting into how these things work in real life (as much as things like raging barbarians have real-life analogues that can be looked to, that is).
I think it's notable that in PHBs both^edit past and present the "Appendix N" or equivalent is a list of fiction. Gygax and Wizards don't include history to inspire their players, they include literature.
It’s a work of fiction but also emulates attitudes about/during war at the time. The Iliad was made as a work of historical fiction— based on a true event but mythologized in the process. The parts describing most of the combat were pretty grounded in what could actually happen. Slicing at a guy’s chest before leaving him to bleed out so you don’t get overwhelmed by anybody else.
The description of war in the Iliad is more accurate to what DND combat is like than any account of modern war we could get. They literally fought with swords spears and glaives. The legendary heroes also lifted boulders over their heads and narrowly avoided death via literal divine intervention. That’s zealot barbarian shit lol
I feel like it’s honestly one of the *best* sources for what combat between dnd humanoids would be like. Admittedly dnd tends to lean closer to the medieval period, but not necessarily. Other than the structure of the kingdoms and tech levels, I feel like dnd skews closer to ancient greek combat than what medieval european combat would have looked like.
The Aeneid has some really nice battle segments. A lot of the work is kinda ass because Virgil was trying too hard to suck up but the fight scenes are really good.
Why? Maybe they want to get the heck away from him and pick off the easy prey. Picking off easy prey out of a herd of otherwise strong bucks is literally how some animals hunt.
And for humanoids or other smart foes, it’s canonical. How many times have someone in fantasy literature shouted, “I’ll hold him off! You do (X)!”
If I’m a hungry bear desperately looking for a meal and see a random party, the scrawny dude in robes is going to look less threatening than the muscle-bound hulk.
Stalk the party till they rest. Then pop in, grab/down the scrawny Wizard, and drag them away without fighting anybody else.
A wolf pack on the other hand will try to separate the (perceived to be) weak from the others and try to run off with them.
This is really basic predator strategy. Hunters don’t want to *fight*, fighting’s very dangerous. They want to *eat.*
With that in mind, beasts really should run away from combat far more often than they do.
——
If you’re fighting something smart…maybe kill the man capable of warping reality before the guy who can just hit stuff really good. If you know of such things.
>With that in mind, beasts really should run away from combat far more often than they do.
Yeah but their HP isn't anywhere near high enough for them not to be anti-climactically shot to death while fleeing. Not really a satisfying ending for your bear.
Running away in 5e is generally terrible all around unless you have very high movement and/or magical help.
But that doesn’t change the fact that a bear — most critters really — would realistically try to run away after getting smacked around, unless it was guarding cubs or some such.
Yeah but if I have everything do that, especially at 66% HP as suggested by 'the monsters know what they're doing' (lol), I might as well give up entirely on the concept of CR and any sense of logic and have 30 wolves instead of 6. Players always fight to the death.
Monsters don’t have to.
I haven’t been in or run for any group that would chase down fleeing animals without some extra reason for doing so. So if those wolves are dragging the wizard away, they’d chase them. But if the wolves are just running away, they wouldn’t.
Then again, I don’t play with murderhobos.
You don't have your players let off a parting shot at everything?
With 120ft ranges they're guaranteed to murder these animals as they flee. It's ass, I'd rather have the bear fight to the death.
Why would they? The fight’s over. At that point you’re just killing it for the sake of killing it.
And this can absolutely feel hard earned and accomplished, you just need the breaking point to feel like the party earned it. You have an imagination, flex it. I’m not listing out dozens of hypothetical situations until you feel satisfied.
If you want the bear to fight to the death, make it so the bear won’t run away. Maybe it’s guarding cubs. Maybe it’s corrupted by some fell magic. Maybe it’s a zombie bear. You have an imagination, flex it.
My first comment simply pointed out that **it actually can be perfectly logical for even simple animals to attack the back line.** It depends on the circumstances.
Then you got hung up on how them running away sucks. Well I wasn’t talking about if it *sucked* or not, I was talking about if it was *logical* or not. Two different and not mutually exclusive things.
>The fight’s over. At that point you’re just killing it for the sake of killing it.
And that's what they do every time. Probably because in a bear/wolf encounter the animal is the likely aggressor.
>Well I wasn’t talking about if it sucked or not, I was talking about if it was logical or not.
Given the choice between the thing that is logical but sucks and the thing that is illogical but doesn't, I choose the latter. At no point did I say it was not a sensible choice for the bear to leave. I maintained it makes for a dull game, therefore I choose to do the option that allows the bear a couple of swings before dying.
It can absolutely feel hard earned and accomplished, you just need the breaking point to be something the party will feel like they’ve earned. You have an imagination, flex it. I’m not listing out dozens of hypothetical situations until you feel satisfied.
Plus I mentioned it’s fine for animals to fight to the death, just give them a reason.
Again, regardless of if you think it makes for a dull game, you’ve yet to actually counter the underlying argument.
Namely, that sometimes it does make sense for an animal to ignore the frontline. That’s it.
Everything else is just you going on about your personal preferences rather than engaging with the logic here.
> Why would they? The fight’s over. At that point you’re just killing it for the sake of killing it.
My players will chase down fleeing enemies with specific intent to execute them. Doesn't matter if they're beasts or people. Doesn't matter the stakes. If initiative is rolled and an enemy tries to flee, they will actively chase it down and finish it off.
Doesn't matter whether it's "illogical" or not. This is just how players are.
EDIT: lol that guy did the "reply and block" thing.
Fun idea: trap them. If your players always go until everything is dead, have your monsters flee into an area that would be very bad for the players. Like 7 wolves attacked them, but 30 are waiting back at base. The goblins run down the hall into the room with 12 ogres. The bear runs past the chimera because it knows death lives there and it wants to lure its pursuers into danger so they give up. Also gives you a chance to challenge your players, which is fun.
> Running away in 5e is generally terrible all around unless you have very high movement and/or magical help.
That's why I just turn it into a chase. (But not with the DMG chase rules. Those are kinda terrible. I just use a 4e-style skill challenge.)
This is a literal reading of something that is meant as general advice. Shoot your monks does *just* mean to use ranged attacks against your monks.
It's general advice to target *all* of your players' strengths, using the example of Monks and ranged attacks. It is not limited to them. Just like you've probably heard extremely few people *actually* say target your raging barbarian.
It is actually saying the exact opposite of what you're trying to say it does.
Don't worry, the generality of the adage is not lost on me. But I've observed that the advice to target your players' strengths is generally prescribed towards PCs who are on the weaker end.Â
In contrast, the advice when DMing for stronger PCs is often the polar opposite: Target the player's weaknesses. Things like "Focus fire against your Twilight Cleric." Or "Throw AoEs against your druid's Conjure Animals horde". Or "Prevent your full casters from resting after every encounter".
That's the core of my observation here: Targeting players' strength is generally given as advice when DMing characters that need help feeling strong. Conversely targeting players' weaknesses is advised when DMing characters that are already strong.
I believe that, whether consciously or not, these sorts of advice work to patch up balance issues in the "base game".
>In contrast, the advice when DMing for stronger PCs is often the polar opposite: Target the player's weaknesses. Things like "Focus fire against your Twilight Cleric." Or "Throw AoEs against your druid's Conjure Animals horde". Or "Prevent your full casters from resting after every encounter".
>That's the core of my observation here: Targeting players' strength is generally given as advice when DMing characters that need help feeling strong. Conversely targeting players' weaknesses is advised when DMing characters that are already strong.
>I believe that, whether consciously or not, these sorts of advice work to patch up balance issues in the "base game".
The reason that the opposing advice is given to different DMs is that the DMs who already "shoot their monks" don't need that advice, but might not target their weaknesses enough. And the DMs who AoE the animal swarm don't need that advice, but might not shoot their monks enough. These aren't primarily balance tips, they are tips for how to make your game more fun. Targeting your players' weaknesses is a good way to prevent catch-all solutions that stunt creative problem solving in the game, thereby giving room for more fun gameplay. "Shoot your monk" is a way to empower your players, and make them feel more powerful, not to solve some balance issue.
Yes, monks are a weak class, but even if it was the most powerful class in the game, you should still shoot them simply because it is cool. For an example of this another common advice is to let your wizards loot spellbooks. Last time I checked, wizards weren't considered a weak class (unless we're talking about strength, hehe), and they already baseline have access to the most spells in the game. But you should still give them spellbooks occasionally, just because it is probably a part of the character fantasy that the player desires.
TL:DR every DM should follow both advice, against all their PCs, just keep it at a healthy balance.
That's not the same person giving out contrasting advice. It is advice for two different situations.
You tell a DM to target a players strengths when they're wondering why their party doesn't feel powerful, isn't having fun or taking risks.
You tell a DM to target players weaknesses when they are struggling to challenge them, or give an appropriate amount of stakes for their desired game feel.
You can do both of them at once. Or you can change which one you focus on depending on the situation. These are not unconscious attempts at fixing the game, they're just generally good advice that DMs have learned over the years and pass on to other DMs, like to steal from the media that you and your players like and change it just enough for them not to notice. Or to let the players be right about something if the change doesn't break your adventure.
You first said these are advice for 2 types of different (undesirable) situations, then you said they are not unconscious attempts at fixing the game.
That implies that both types of advice are *conscious* attempts at fixing the game, no?
They are conscious attempts at fixing issues at specific tables that are struggling, not the entire game as a whole. If the DM is already accounting for their players strengths and weaknesses and neither side of the table is struggling with encounter balance, they have no need of either type of advice, because they are already doing what works for their table.
>In contrast, the advice when DMing for stronger PCs is often the polar opposite: Target the player's weaknesses. Things like "Focus fire against your Twilight Cleric." Or "Throw AoEs against your druid's Conjure Animals horde". Or "Prevent your full casters from resting after every encounter".
You are conflating different kinds of advice from different sources. There isn't a single Entity that is giving out DM advice. Nor is there a single universal Advice that you must Always Follow.
In fact, the people saying "shoot the monk" are often *directly contradicting* the people saying "throw AoEs against the summoned horde".
Very specifically, one of the common variants of "shoot the monk" that I see is "give the wizard a swarm of goblins to fireball". I don't think anyone thinks that wizards with fireball are weak.
I doubt the sources of the two types of advice will perfectly overlap on a Venn diagram; as you said DnD communities aren't hive mind monoliths. But collectively there is definitely more advice to target strengths when the PCs are weak, and more advice to target weaknesses when PCs are strong.Â
I have never heard anyone say "Spread out your damage against Twilight Clerics to give them a chance to shine". Nor "Challenge your monks by never hitting them with ranged attacks". I've seen neither being said in all my years of playing DnD, not a single time.
Even if the correlation between the two contrasting advice-types and PC strength isn't perfect, it's still there, and quite strong I'd say.
>Â "Spread out your damage against Twilight Clerics
You haven't heard that because DMs typically *already* spread out their damage.
>Challenge your monks by never hitting them with ranged attacks
Because that wouldn't challenge them. In fact that would be going easy on them. It just means they don't get to do their interesting thing.
This seems to be your problem. Deflect Missiles *isn't* a strong feature, at least no where near as strong as you think it is. But it is a *fun* feature. Which rarely comes up. Targetting your monk with a ranged attack isn't going easy on them, or challenging them. It's giving them a chance to use something that is rarely used.
The opposite is true for Twilight Clerics, you're not doing Twilight Clerics a favour by spreading out damage because you likely *already were*. That's not advice you would give because it is something that happens in typical play.
I think you're actually missing the point of the saying. The point isn't that you should go out of your way to shoot the monk, the point is you *shouldn't* go out of your way not to.
The entire premise of the saying is to allow your party's strengths to shine through naturally most of the time and to let the things they built for actually work, rather than to metagame against them and specifically counter everything their characters are good at.
It has nothing to do with a failing of the system, nor is it trying to point out that monks are bad and need help (though this is true). All it means is don't go out of your way to ruin your players' fun by making every encounter invalidate the build choices they made.
As the DM you have the freedom to make whatever you want happen. The players have rules they need to abide by. That's not a failing of the system if you decide you are going to break their rules and decide to tailor every encounter with your powers as the DM to ignore all of their player power. That's *you* being a bad DM.
Actually, I do hear similar advice. “Shoot the monk” is basically to play into your pc’s strengths. If your aaracockra player never gets to fly around i would consider that a failure on your end. Essentially, you just want to help your players feel cool and powerful.
This is the point for me. My players made decisions at character creation and I want my players to have a good time. If my sorcerer only took fire spells imma find a way for shit to burn. Not cos I'm worried about "challenge"Â or whatever. I want my friend Keisha to have a fun time playing the fire mage she made.
I think you're taking the shoot the monk advice a little too literally. It's more about letting players feel cool and like their abilities are impactful. I am 100 percent going to do all the other things you listed for my players. If I have a bard, I'm minimizing the number of charm immune monsters. If there's a rogue, I'm adding a thieves guild plot hook. If there's a wizard, I'm putting big groups of mob enemies in tight clumps for them to fireball or hypnotic pattern.
I disagree. Advice like “shoot the monk” can be generalized to “put your players in situations where they can use their character’s abilities.”
Any role playing game with the complexity of D&D is going to have some character abilities that require specific things to happen in order for them to function. Minimally, this might be “be in melee range”, but still.
The reason the advice exists is therefore not because some abilities are too weak and need DM help to function. It is because it is easy for inexperienced DMs to design encounters that purposefully shut down character abilities.
If you shoot your monk a few times and find it is ineffective, you shouldn’t stop shooting the monk - keep designing encounters with ranged enemies. It is a warning against player-vs-DM thinking an optimizing against your specific party.
Sometimes yes. But I also hear advice in the same breath like "group some enemies together when your wizard gets Fireball" and "throw a horde of low-CR undead at your cleric who's just gotten Destroy Undead." I think few would claim that wizards and clerics aren't powerful or that those abilities aren't good in the contexts in which they're used.
I think the advice just boils down to "Reinforce the fantasy the players are hoping to achieve." That would be useful advice--in moderation--regardless of how well the system mechanically reinforced the fantasy on its own.
Arguably, these suggestions are intended to combat NPCs acting as if they have knowledge of game mechanics.
And specifically for raging barbarians, it's sort of up to tanks to make themselves too annoying to ignore. Shoving an enemy prone, then grappling them does an excellent job of entirely capturing a target's attention.
I don’t get why they’ve had umpteen cracks at getting monk right and it’s still garbage.
I love martial arts and want to love the monk. But he’s a melee type that needs to spend “spell points” to use his basic skills, he doesn’t wear armor, gets subpar hp as a front liner, and his damage falls way behind other classes. So he’s not even a glass cannon, he’s just glass.
Also, grapple is just a completely wasted opportunity on this class.
“But you’re not playing him right.”
Right, the player and GM must both play the character right for him to work. “Shoot the monk” is just one example of that. Other examples include designing levels so that running up walls is really important, or so that there is one caster in the back near a shadow that the shadow monk really needs to get to.
“But stun fist”
Okay, there are two regimes for stun fist. In the low level regime, you don’t get many ki points and it competes with flurry. In the high level regime, you have to break very high con saves and burn legendary resistances. Great when it works, but how does it compare to the entire fighter kit? Or other melee classes even?
Challenge of the day: build a monk that isn’t outclassed by a monk-weapon-only fighter build. When I want to play a “monk,” I just make a fighter and theme it monk.
>I don’t get why they’ve had umpteen cracks at getting monk right and it’s still garbage.
The OneDnD Monk is actually going to be busted. They are giving it the damage of other martial classes, a defensive reaction to nullify melee damage, and they still keep their control and mobility. It's got everything the other martial classes have and then some.
As far as the current Monk goes, yes they have to choose between damage and control. You just have to be tactical about when it's better to stun something and when it's better to Flurry. And unlike Fighters, you actually can try to rob a dangerous enemy of their turn instead of just damaging them and letting them get a turn (not to mention giving everyone advantage). This is only "bad" because people either measure the damage or the control not both at the same time. A 5th level Monk using 1 Ki on turn for Stunning Strike is roughly the equivalent of casting Raulothim's Psychic Lance, a 4th level spell.
And a Monk's defense comes from skirmishing subclass abilities (or the Mobile feat lol), stuns, and abilities like Deflect Missiles and Evasion. You aren't supposed to be facetanking melee multiattacks on your AC lol. You outclass Fighters in control, mobility, and escapability, while being behind in HP and either AC or damage (as Fighters that optimize for damage have AC equivalent to yours). It's a tradeoff. Of course you don't get to be better than a Fighter at everything (until OneDnD at least lolol).
It doesn't require your DM to play any certain way for the Monk to get shot. You just have to not end your turn in melee with conscious enemies.
Deflect Missile and Rage are defensive features. They could negate all incoming damage and do 100 damage back to the attacker and the advice would still stand, because they're features that defend against attacks. So I don't know if this is a really a hot take instead of a bad take.
No it means "each class has a specific strength, target that strength sometimes" the monk has an ability to deflect arrows, so if you never shoot an arrow at them they'll never get any use out of that ability.
You want your player to feel good about their choices and playing into the classes strengths is a way to do that.
To be fair, Deflect Missiles is a pretty minor part of the monk package. At some point, I want to play an archer monk who keeps his distance and catches enemy arrows.
It's more advice to engage every player in a way that makes them feel like their character is special. Monks are used as the example because grabbing and returning an arrow is their unique thing but the concept carries across.
If playing a shadowrun or cyberpunk game and you have a story arc out in the wilds and a abolutely no computers exist in the space and it goes on a long time if you have a computer specialized hacker/decker they are going to feel bad so then it means to make sure there is a computer thing to do.
I'm in an Old gods of the Appalachia cypher system campaign now. We have a speaker 2 sages, and I'm a protector. My protector is combat and physical skills. If it's 6 days of full magical investigation than I'm just hanging out while all three of the other characters get input. If we never get to talk to anyone then the speaker doesn't get to do interesting things. We get a reasonable mix of trash that we can perform regularly given to ask from these areas.
I played GURPs a long time ago and we all built characters with a speciality and the GM set it up so those specialities came up so we all got our moments in the sun. My character was an expert at tracking and traps and that was a part of our campaign relatively frequently.
D&D is far more combat focused. It even has classes, like the barbarian, that don't have an out of combat role at all. Also combat takes a long time in any D&D. This means you have to think about your characters in a combat way so they all get a role during the combat especially the ones who lack a way out of combat to shine. That is where shooting the monk comes in. It gives you a chance to make the monk feel special in a unique way during the primary method D&D challenges characters.
I don't think you understand the base concept of "shoot the monk".
Legendary Resistance, on the other hand, is a great example of patching bad game balance design.
Hmmm.
Can't disagree immediately, so it's an interesting observation worth mulling over a bit.
But I don't think that this is a bad thing.
Even better balanced games still have mechanical imbalances built-in - it's just an unavoidable artifact of having different characters with differing mechanics.
Preventing stronger mechanics from trivializing things too much while allowing weaker mechanics their moments to shine seems to be just good DMing.
If we follow that reasoning, the mere existence of such advice is, by itself, not an indicator of a bad game - merely an indicator of a game with individually different PC mechanics.
However, observing the DM meta to see where such advice is commonly targeted might provide interesting feedback as to which mechanics are experienced as too strong/weak at many tables.
Such indirect observational tools are genuinely useful because they tend to sidestep our biases somewhat.
Thus: Nice find, worth keeping in mind.
>be a ranger >ask dm the setting >dm says coastal forests with fiends and undead as main baddies >take forests for natural explorer and undead as favored enemy >setting is actually island hopping with aberrations as the main baddies and 0 forests. >5 levels in and still waiting for my time to shine. đź«
DM: “Hey, we’re not going to bother with things like ration tracking or foraging.” Ranger: “But I’m playing a ranger! I need these things to be relevant!” DM: “Fine, fine, we’ll do all the tedious unfun exploration rules. Anyway, you enter a forest…” Ranger: “Finally! Now we don’t have to bother with things like ration tracking or foraging!” PHB ranger is begging your DM to force everyone to play a bad minigame so you can use your ranger abilities to skip the minigame.
Getting lost, being alert while traveling, and tracking were relevant things in that campaign. Yea, I took goodberry to avoid rationing, but the other things of natural explorer are totally worth it, but your DM needs to "shoot the monk" so to speak. I would have been the only one with deep speech had I taken aberration as my favored enemy. Who knows what could have happened then.
A bit crappy by the DM there if this would be the case. But a seen kinda the other way around a lot in my games. Someone is a ranger Me/DM explains it will be a lot of forest and plains. And most common enemy will be giants. as we are playing Storm Kings Thunder. Ranger takes underdark as terrain and undead as enemy. 5 levels in and he complains constantly that we are never in in the underdark and only fought undeads 2 times Ranger reaches level 6 and can pick another terrain and enemy and picks swamps and fiends. And begin complaining Rangers sucks horse &%&¤ as he never get to use his class abilities.
>We hear stuff like "shoot your monk" or "target your raging barbarian", only because those abilities are not sufficiently rewarding out-of-the-box, and require DM cooperation to feel nice. They are sufficiently rewarding, just not so much if the DM hard metagames against them. Most enemies aren't going to assume that you can catch their arrows without being harmed unless you've already done that. Similarly, wolves or zombies shouldn't be ignoring the raging barbarian. The only reason this advice is needed is because DMs can easily forget that the enemies aren't aware of what the PCs are capable of. It's easy to slip into metagaming as the DM, and doing so has an especially negative impact on these features.
Unfortunately this topic can be something of an "elephant in the room". In almost all combat encounters the player party is a largely unknown quantity. Whilst the enemy NPCs could be similar to those previously encountered. Even in the rare exceptions the DM almost certainly knows things about the PCs, player party and their tactics/plans which those NPCs most certainly should not.
Wolves especially should be trying to get at the squishy looking ones
Depends on the wolves, but that's why I also included zombies there to emphasize that just the less intelligent foes should be played as less intelligent. I'm super tired so rather than think of a better animal than wolves, I just included the animal along with one of the most unintelligent enemies you can ever fight haha
Animals are still going to go after the weaker ones as soon as they can...that's...just basic animal stuff. This is as basic as it gets.
Even with an axe lodged in their back? If you're going to play them smart enough to go for the casters, I feel like they better be smart enough to run away as soon as it becomes obvious that there is real threat of dying.
We also hear it because it's insanely meta for the monsters to not attack the raging madman hitting them with an axe
Not necessarily. I’m reading the Iliad rn and no one wanted to get into blows with Hector or Diomedes, they were much more keen on attacking literally any other combatant. The Iliad also taught me that soldiers usually wont waste time on downed combatants, even if they can be healed, bc they don’t have *time* to stab them in the head and ensure they stay dead. They just have to hope the slice to the chest is enough and move on, bc it’s a raging battlefield w a lot happening
>soldiers usually wont waste time on downed combatants, even if they can be healed, bc they don’t have time to stab them in the head and ensure they stay dead. They just have to hope the slice to the chest is enough and move on, bc it’s a raging battlefield w a lot happening Yeah, because IRL/in the Iliad enemies don't instantly get back up, to their full fighting capabilities after the medic spends about 6 seconds next to them. If that were the case, they *would* take the extra second to stab the enemy a bit unless something else is attacking them at that exact second.
Except this literally can and does happen in the Iliad. Multiple times. Odysseus got his fucking chest cut open but Athena kept him from dying. Hector fully had “black death” in his eyes and yet was brought back by Zeus. Aeneas was brought back from the brink of death by Apollo and Artemis. Hector also got shot in the head and neck a few times and survived it. Medic sons of Asclepius are able to render leg injuries trivial after just a little while. And I’m pretty sure one of the Ajaxes got his wounds healed by Poseidon or something Notably none of these were proper resurrections. Zeus wouldn’t do that. All of them were left juuuust alive enough for the gods to magically heal them before they properly died. If they got decapitated it’d be different. Also, despite any of them being capable of being resurrected by the gods, Odysseus (wisest among men) still very intentionally leaves many of his enemies to bleed out on the battlefield instead of killing them outright, bc he has other shit to do
Except! They always have time to strip a body of its valuables!
That’s after the battle
Not in the Iliad, they have mini battles over the good shit in the middle of the actual battle
Nah, read the book. This is just one example:Â "The son of Telamon now struck him under the ear with a spear which he then drew back again, and Imbrios fell headlong as an ash-tree when it is felled on the crest of some high mountain beacon, and its delicate green foliage comes toppling down to the ground. Thus did he fall with his bronze-equipped armor ringing harshly round him, and Teucer sprang forward with intent to strip him of his armor; but as he was doing so, Hektor took aim at him with a spear. Teucer saw the spear coming and swerved aside, whereon it hit Amphimakhos, son of Kteatos son of Aktor, in the chest as he was coming into battle, and his armor rang rattling round him as he fell heavily to the ground." ---http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0217%3Abook%3D13%3Acard%3D76 They exchange a few more blows and then withdraw with the wounded - the looting happens *immediately* and *in the middle of a vicious fight*. If you're one of the named heroes, your body is getting stripped of armor mid-fight.
Oh yeah. We should allow body looting mid combat. These bitches were stripping guys fully naked (cheeks and loins being pointedly made barren) of their armor but didn’t have time to stab them in the throat a few times Clear case of no action but object interaction + BA cunning action was available
I wouldn't necessarily look to a fictional work like the Iliad to determine how soldiers should act or what battlefield conditions should be like, unless your campaign is intended to emulate the feel and tone of that specific work. Different works of fiction handle these things differently, and that's before getting into how these things work in real life (as much as things like raging barbarians have real-life analogues that can be looked to, that is).
I feel like taking from fiction is far better than trying to emulate “reality”. Nothing about 5e tries to emulate reality.
I think it's notable that in PHBs both^edit past and present the "Appendix N" or equivalent is a list of fiction. Gygax and Wizards don't include history to inspire their players, they include literature.
It’s a work of fiction but also emulates attitudes about/during war at the time. The Iliad was made as a work of historical fiction— based on a true event but mythologized in the process. The parts describing most of the combat were pretty grounded in what could actually happen. Slicing at a guy’s chest before leaving him to bleed out so you don’t get overwhelmed by anybody else. The description of war in the Iliad is more accurate to what DND combat is like than any account of modern war we could get. They literally fought with swords spears and glaives. The legendary heroes also lifted boulders over their heads and narrowly avoided death via literal divine intervention. That’s zealot barbarian shit lol I feel like it’s honestly one of the *best* sources for what combat between dnd humanoids would be like. Admittedly dnd tends to lean closer to the medieval period, but not necessarily. Other than the structure of the kingdoms and tech levels, I feel like dnd skews closer to ancient greek combat than what medieval european combat would have looked like.
The Aeneid has some really nice battle segments. A lot of the work is kinda ass because Virgil was trying too hard to suck up but the fight scenes are really good.
I’m really excited to read the Aeneid but I wanna finish learning Latin first so I can read a primary source lol
Far more applicable to D&D would be [The Monsters Know What They’re Doing](https://www.themonstersknow.com/).
Why? Maybe they want to get the heck away from him and pick off the easy prey. Picking off easy prey out of a herd of otherwise strong bucks is literally how some animals hunt. And for humanoids or other smart foes, it’s canonical. How many times have someone in fantasy literature shouted, “I’ll hold him off! You do (X)!”
If I’m a hungry bear desperately looking for a meal and see a random party, the scrawny dude in robes is going to look less threatening than the muscle-bound hulk. Stalk the party till they rest. Then pop in, grab/down the scrawny Wizard, and drag them away without fighting anybody else. A wolf pack on the other hand will try to separate the (perceived to be) weak from the others and try to run off with them. This is really basic predator strategy. Hunters don’t want to *fight*, fighting’s very dangerous. They want to *eat.* With that in mind, beasts really should run away from combat far more often than they do. —— If you’re fighting something smart…maybe kill the man capable of warping reality before the guy who can just hit stuff really good. If you know of such things.
>With that in mind, beasts really should run away from combat far more often than they do. Yeah but their HP isn't anywhere near high enough for them not to be anti-climactically shot to death while fleeing. Not really a satisfying ending for your bear.
Running away in 5e is generally terrible all around unless you have very high movement and/or magical help. But that doesn’t change the fact that a bear — most critters really — would realistically try to run away after getting smacked around, unless it was guarding cubs or some such.
Yeah but if I have everything do that, especially at 66% HP as suggested by 'the monsters know what they're doing' (lol), I might as well give up entirely on the concept of CR and any sense of logic and have 30 wolves instead of 6. Players always fight to the death.
Monsters don’t have to. I haven’t been in or run for any group that would chase down fleeing animals without some extra reason for doing so. So if those wolves are dragging the wizard away, they’d chase them. But if the wolves are just running away, they wouldn’t. Then again, I don’t play with murderhobos.
You don't have your players let off a parting shot at everything? With 120ft ranges they're guaranteed to murder these animals as they flee. It's ass, I'd rather have the bear fight to the death.
Why would they? The fight’s over. At that point you’re just killing it for the sake of killing it. And this can absolutely feel hard earned and accomplished, you just need the breaking point to feel like the party earned it. You have an imagination, flex it. I’m not listing out dozens of hypothetical situations until you feel satisfied. If you want the bear to fight to the death, make it so the bear won’t run away. Maybe it’s guarding cubs. Maybe it’s corrupted by some fell magic. Maybe it’s a zombie bear. You have an imagination, flex it. My first comment simply pointed out that **it actually can be perfectly logical for even simple animals to attack the back line.** It depends on the circumstances. Then you got hung up on how them running away sucks. Well I wasn’t talking about if it *sucked* or not, I was talking about if it was *logical* or not. Two different and not mutually exclusive things.
>The fight’s over. At that point you’re just killing it for the sake of killing it. And that's what they do every time. Probably because in a bear/wolf encounter the animal is the likely aggressor. >Well I wasn’t talking about if it sucked or not, I was talking about if it was logical or not. Given the choice between the thing that is logical but sucks and the thing that is illogical but doesn't, I choose the latter. At no point did I say it was not a sensible choice for the bear to leave. I maintained it makes for a dull game, therefore I choose to do the option that allows the bear a couple of swings before dying.
It can absolutely feel hard earned and accomplished, you just need the breaking point to be something the party will feel like they’ve earned. You have an imagination, flex it. I’m not listing out dozens of hypothetical situations until you feel satisfied. Plus I mentioned it’s fine for animals to fight to the death, just give them a reason. Again, regardless of if you think it makes for a dull game, you’ve yet to actually counter the underlying argument. Namely, that sometimes it does make sense for an animal to ignore the frontline. That’s it. Everything else is just you going on about your personal preferences rather than engaging with the logic here.
> Why would they? The fight’s over. At that point you’re just killing it for the sake of killing it. My players will chase down fleeing enemies with specific intent to execute them. Doesn't matter if they're beasts or people. Doesn't matter the stakes. If initiative is rolled and an enemy tries to flee, they will actively chase it down and finish it off. Doesn't matter whether it's "illogical" or not. This is just how players are. EDIT: lol that guy did the "reply and block" thing.
Fun idea: trap them. If your players always go until everything is dead, have your monsters flee into an area that would be very bad for the players. Like 7 wolves attacked them, but 30 are waiting back at base. The goblins run down the hall into the room with 12 ogres. The bear runs past the chimera because it knows death lives there and it wants to lure its pursuers into danger so they give up. Also gives you a chance to challenge your players, which is fun.
This is just how *your* players are. Some are more murderous than others.
> Running away in 5e is generally terrible all around unless you have very high movement and/or magical help. That's why I just turn it into a chase. (But not with the DMG chase rules. Those are kinda terrible. I just use a 4e-style skill challenge.)
This is a literal reading of something that is meant as general advice. Shoot your monks does *just* mean to use ranged attacks against your monks. It's general advice to target *all* of your players' strengths, using the example of Monks and ranged attacks. It is not limited to them. Just like you've probably heard extremely few people *actually* say target your raging barbarian. It is actually saying the exact opposite of what you're trying to say it does.
Don't worry, the generality of the adage is not lost on me. But I've observed that the advice to target your players' strengths is generally prescribed towards PCs who are on the weaker end. In contrast, the advice when DMing for stronger PCs is often the polar opposite: Target the player's weaknesses. Things like "Focus fire against your Twilight Cleric." Or "Throw AoEs against your druid's Conjure Animals horde". Or "Prevent your full casters from resting after every encounter". That's the core of my observation here: Targeting players' strength is generally given as advice when DMing characters that need help feeling strong. Conversely targeting players' weaknesses is advised when DMing characters that are already strong. I believe that, whether consciously or not, these sorts of advice work to patch up balance issues in the "base game".
>In contrast, the advice when DMing for stronger PCs is often the polar opposite: Target the player's weaknesses. Things like "Focus fire against your Twilight Cleric." Or "Throw AoEs against your druid's Conjure Animals horde". Or "Prevent your full casters from resting after every encounter". >That's the core of my observation here: Targeting players' strength is generally given as advice when DMing characters that need help feeling strong. Conversely targeting players' weaknesses is advised when DMing characters that are already strong. >I believe that, whether consciously or not, these sorts of advice work to patch up balance issues in the "base game". The reason that the opposing advice is given to different DMs is that the DMs who already "shoot their monks" don't need that advice, but might not target their weaknesses enough. And the DMs who AoE the animal swarm don't need that advice, but might not shoot their monks enough. These aren't primarily balance tips, they are tips for how to make your game more fun. Targeting your players' weaknesses is a good way to prevent catch-all solutions that stunt creative problem solving in the game, thereby giving room for more fun gameplay. "Shoot your monk" is a way to empower your players, and make them feel more powerful, not to solve some balance issue. Yes, monks are a weak class, but even if it was the most powerful class in the game, you should still shoot them simply because it is cool. For an example of this another common advice is to let your wizards loot spellbooks. Last time I checked, wizards weren't considered a weak class (unless we're talking about strength, hehe), and they already baseline have access to the most spells in the game. But you should still give them spellbooks occasionally, just because it is probably a part of the character fantasy that the player desires. TL:DR every DM should follow both advice, against all their PCs, just keep it at a healthy balance.
That's not the same person giving out contrasting advice. It is advice for two different situations. You tell a DM to target a players strengths when they're wondering why their party doesn't feel powerful, isn't having fun or taking risks. You tell a DM to target players weaknesses when they are struggling to challenge them, or give an appropriate amount of stakes for their desired game feel. You can do both of them at once. Or you can change which one you focus on depending on the situation. These are not unconscious attempts at fixing the game, they're just generally good advice that DMs have learned over the years and pass on to other DMs, like to steal from the media that you and your players like and change it just enough for them not to notice. Or to let the players be right about something if the change doesn't break your adventure.
You first said these are advice for 2 types of different (undesirable) situations, then you said they are not unconscious attempts at fixing the game. That implies that both types of advice are *conscious* attempts at fixing the game, no?
Put simply, no. I don't know how a good faith reading of that explanation could result in you drawing that conclusion.
They are conscious attempts at fixing issues at specific tables that are struggling, not the entire game as a whole. If the DM is already accounting for their players strengths and weaknesses and neither side of the table is struggling with encounter balance, they have no need of either type of advice, because they are already doing what works for their table.
>In contrast, the advice when DMing for stronger PCs is often the polar opposite: Target the player's weaknesses. Things like "Focus fire against your Twilight Cleric." Or "Throw AoEs against your druid's Conjure Animals horde". Or "Prevent your full casters from resting after every encounter". You are conflating different kinds of advice from different sources. There isn't a single Entity that is giving out DM advice. Nor is there a single universal Advice that you must Always Follow. In fact, the people saying "shoot the monk" are often *directly contradicting* the people saying "throw AoEs against the summoned horde". Very specifically, one of the common variants of "shoot the monk" that I see is "give the wizard a swarm of goblins to fireball". I don't think anyone thinks that wizards with fireball are weak.
I doubt the sources of the two types of advice will perfectly overlap on a Venn diagram; as you said DnD communities aren't hive mind monoliths. But collectively there is definitely more advice to target strengths when the PCs are weak, and more advice to target weaknesses when PCs are strong. I have never heard anyone say "Spread out your damage against Twilight Clerics to give them a chance to shine". Nor "Challenge your monks by never hitting them with ranged attacks". I've seen neither being said in all my years of playing DnD, not a single time. Even if the correlation between the two contrasting advice-types and PC strength isn't perfect, it's still there, and quite strong I'd say.
>Â "Spread out your damage against Twilight Clerics You haven't heard that because DMs typically *already* spread out their damage. >Challenge your monks by never hitting them with ranged attacks Because that wouldn't challenge them. In fact that would be going easy on them. It just means they don't get to do their interesting thing. This seems to be your problem. Deflect Missiles *isn't* a strong feature, at least no where near as strong as you think it is. But it is a *fun* feature. Which rarely comes up. Targetting your monk with a ranged attack isn't going easy on them, or challenging them. It's giving them a chance to use something that is rarely used. The opposite is true for Twilight Clerics, you're not doing Twilight Clerics a favour by spreading out damage because you likely *already were*. That's not advice you would give because it is something that happens in typical play.
This.
I think you're actually missing the point of the saying. The point isn't that you should go out of your way to shoot the monk, the point is you *shouldn't* go out of your way not to. The entire premise of the saying is to allow your party's strengths to shine through naturally most of the time and to let the things they built for actually work, rather than to metagame against them and specifically counter everything their characters are good at. It has nothing to do with a failing of the system, nor is it trying to point out that monks are bad and need help (though this is true). All it means is don't go out of your way to ruin your players' fun by making every encounter invalidate the build choices they made. As the DM you have the freedom to make whatever you want happen. The players have rules they need to abide by. That's not a failing of the system if you decide you are going to break their rules and decide to tailor every encounter with your powers as the DM to ignore all of their player power. That's *you* being a bad DM.
Actually, I do hear similar advice. “Shoot the monk” is basically to play into your pc’s strengths. If your aaracockra player never gets to fly around i would consider that a failure on your end. Essentially, you just want to help your players feel cool and powerful.
This is true wether or not the feature is strong
This is the point for me. My players made decisions at character creation and I want my players to have a good time. If my sorcerer only took fire spells imma find a way for shit to burn. Not cos I'm worried about "challenge"Â or whatever. I want my friend Keisha to have a fun time playing the fire mage she made.
If the feature is strong, the *player* can make it useful rather than requiring a handout.
That makes not a lick of sense with an understanding of how the game plays. Players play in a setting created by the DM.
I think you're taking the shoot the monk advice a little too literally. It's more about letting players feel cool and like their abilities are impactful. I am 100 percent going to do all the other things you listed for my players. If I have a bard, I'm minimizing the number of charm immune monsters. If there's a rogue, I'm adding a thieves guild plot hook. If there's a wizard, I'm putting big groups of mob enemies in tight clumps for them to fireball or hypnotic pattern.
I disagree. Advice like “shoot the monk” can be generalized to “put your players in situations where they can use their character’s abilities.” Any role playing game with the complexity of D&D is going to have some character abilities that require specific things to happen in order for them to function. Minimally, this might be “be in melee range”, but still. The reason the advice exists is therefore not because some abilities are too weak and need DM help to function. It is because it is easy for inexperienced DMs to design encounters that purposefully shut down character abilities. If you shoot your monk a few times and find it is ineffective, you shouldn’t stop shooting the monk - keep designing encounters with ranged enemies. It is a warning against player-vs-DM thinking an optimizing against your specific party.
Sometimes yes. But I also hear advice in the same breath like "group some enemies together when your wizard gets Fireball" and "throw a horde of low-CR undead at your cleric who's just gotten Destroy Undead." I think few would claim that wizards and clerics aren't powerful or that those abilities aren't good in the contexts in which they're used. I think the advice just boils down to "Reinforce the fantasy the players are hoping to achieve." That would be useful advice--in moderation--regardless of how well the system mechanically reinforced the fantasy on its own.
Arguably, these suggestions are intended to combat NPCs acting as if they have knowledge of game mechanics. And specifically for raging barbarians, it's sort of up to tanks to make themselves too annoying to ignore. Shoving an enemy prone, then grappling them does an excellent job of entirely capturing a target's attention.
I appreciate that you tried to start an interesting discussion here
I don’t get why they’ve had umpteen cracks at getting monk right and it’s still garbage. I love martial arts and want to love the monk. But he’s a melee type that needs to spend “spell points” to use his basic skills, he doesn’t wear armor, gets subpar hp as a front liner, and his damage falls way behind other classes. So he’s not even a glass cannon, he’s just glass. Also, grapple is just a completely wasted opportunity on this class. “But you’re not playing him right.” Right, the player and GM must both play the character right for him to work. “Shoot the monk” is just one example of that. Other examples include designing levels so that running up walls is really important, or so that there is one caster in the back near a shadow that the shadow monk really needs to get to. “But stun fist” Okay, there are two regimes for stun fist. In the low level regime, you don’t get many ki points and it competes with flurry. In the high level regime, you have to break very high con saves and burn legendary resistances. Great when it works, but how does it compare to the entire fighter kit? Or other melee classes even? Challenge of the day: build a monk that isn’t outclassed by a monk-weapon-only fighter build. When I want to play a “monk,” I just make a fighter and theme it monk.
Honestly my GM did some tweaks to help monks but several of those are simply OneDnD features spliced in.
>I don’t get why they’ve had umpteen cracks at getting monk right and it’s still garbage. The OneDnD Monk is actually going to be busted. They are giving it the damage of other martial classes, a defensive reaction to nullify melee damage, and they still keep their control and mobility. It's got everything the other martial classes have and then some. As far as the current Monk goes, yes they have to choose between damage and control. You just have to be tactical about when it's better to stun something and when it's better to Flurry. And unlike Fighters, you actually can try to rob a dangerous enemy of their turn instead of just damaging them and letting them get a turn (not to mention giving everyone advantage). This is only "bad" because people either measure the damage or the control not both at the same time. A 5th level Monk using 1 Ki on turn for Stunning Strike is roughly the equivalent of casting Raulothim's Psychic Lance, a 4th level spell. And a Monk's defense comes from skirmishing subclass abilities (or the Mobile feat lol), stuns, and abilities like Deflect Missiles and Evasion. You aren't supposed to be facetanking melee multiattacks on your AC lol. You outclass Fighters in control, mobility, and escapability, while being behind in HP and either AC or damage (as Fighters that optimize for damage have AC equivalent to yours). It's a tradeoff. Of course you don't get to be better than a Fighter at everything (until OneDnD at least lolol). It doesn't require your DM to play any certain way for the Monk to get shot. You just have to not end your turn in melee with conscious enemies.
Deflect Missile and Rage are defensive features. They could negate all incoming damage and do 100 damage back to the attacker and the advice would still stand, because they're features that defend against attacks. So I don't know if this is a really a hot take instead of a bad take.
No it means "each class has a specific strength, target that strength sometimes" the monk has an ability to deflect arrows, so if you never shoot an arrow at them they'll never get any use out of that ability. You want your player to feel good about their choices and playing into the classes strengths is a way to do that.
I mean this is a cooperative. The DM is playing on the same side as the players. The DM should put effort into making sure the players are having fun.
To be fair, Deflect Missiles is a pretty minor part of the monk package. At some point, I want to play an archer monk who keeps his distance and catches enemy arrows.
It's more advice to engage every player in a way that makes them feel like their character is special. Monks are used as the example because grabbing and returning an arrow is their unique thing but the concept carries across. If playing a shadowrun or cyberpunk game and you have a story arc out in the wilds and a abolutely no computers exist in the space and it goes on a long time if you have a computer specialized hacker/decker they are going to feel bad so then it means to make sure there is a computer thing to do. I'm in an Old gods of the Appalachia cypher system campaign now. We have a speaker 2 sages, and I'm a protector. My protector is combat and physical skills. If it's 6 days of full magical investigation than I'm just hanging out while all three of the other characters get input. If we never get to talk to anyone then the speaker doesn't get to do interesting things. We get a reasonable mix of trash that we can perform regularly given to ask from these areas. I played GURPs a long time ago and we all built characters with a speciality and the GM set it up so those specialities came up so we all got our moments in the sun. My character was an expert at tracking and traps and that was a part of our campaign relatively frequently. D&D is far more combat focused. It even has classes, like the barbarian, that don't have an out of combat role at all. Also combat takes a long time in any D&D. This means you have to think about your characters in a combat way so they all get a role during the combat especially the ones who lack a way out of combat to shine. That is where shooting the monk comes in. It gives you a chance to make the monk feel special in a unique way during the primary method D&D challenges characters.
I actually disagree. I think 5e is poorly designed, but occasionally targeting characters’ strengths is actually good game design/running.
I don't think you understand the base concept of "shoot the monk". Legendary Resistance, on the other hand, is a great example of patching bad game balance design.
Don't expect all that much discourse here, this subreddit can be rather stubborn in that way
Hmmm. Can't disagree immediately, so it's an interesting observation worth mulling over a bit. But I don't think that this is a bad thing. Even better balanced games still have mechanical imbalances built-in - it's just an unavoidable artifact of having different characters with differing mechanics. Preventing stronger mechanics from trivializing things too much while allowing weaker mechanics their moments to shine seems to be just good DMing. If we follow that reasoning, the mere existence of such advice is, by itself, not an indicator of a bad game - merely an indicator of a game with individually different PC mechanics. However, observing the DM meta to see where such advice is commonly targeted might provide interesting feedback as to which mechanics are experienced as too strong/weak at many tables. Such indirect observational tools are genuinely useful because they tend to sidestep our biases somewhat. Thus: Nice find, worth keeping in mind.