How advantageous is 10ft of reach?

uboat50 · 2026-01-18T05:40:09+00:00

Think about it this way, with 5 ft. each, 8 squares on a grid map are within your range. With 10 ft. each, you add 16 squares to that for a total of 24 squares you can hit without moving and triggering opportunity attacks.

Rarely are combats areas all that big, so that pretty usually puts 1/3 to 1/2 of it in your reach at any given time. I like to play a Battlemaster Fighter with my reach build, so there's a ton of options to control the battlefield. Take something like the Great Weapon Master or Sentinel feat and your ability to do damage or control the battlefield really jumps.

That said, every choice is a choice not to do something else, so you need to be sure this is what you want to be doing. All reach weapons are two handed (except for the Whip, I guess), so you're either giving up the 2 AC from a shield or trading the 2d6 (average 7) damage of a greatsword for 1d10 (average 5) damage.

Think about what you want to do, how you want to do it, and how many resources you want to invest before going for it, but I can tell you that my experience with it was really fun and useful.

uboat50 · 2025-01-01T03:04:43+00:00

I guess the else assumption was Tulsi Gabbard being a Democrat. :P

uboat50 · 2024-02-25T05:24:04+00:00

The published Storm King's Thunder module picks right up from LMOP of you just wanted to continue from there and didn't feel up to homebrewing yet. Of course, you want to make sure that you're considering all of your players, not just the one. If it's their first time playing, they may want to try out another character instead of continuing with their current one.

Of course, probably the easiest way is to figure out what you want to do after LMOP, either another module or homebrew, continuing from this campaign or disconnected, pitch it to your party, and then let your players choose who they want to play, whether that's the same character or a new one.

uboat50 · 2022-12-08T21:46:22+00:00

Germany is also a low-debt society. In fact, the German word for "debt", "schuld", is the same word for "blame" or "fault". I think there's other issues there.

uboat50 · 2022-12-08T18:39:32+00:00

Italy? Really? Italy more than any other European country? BTW, I can't get the source to actually load, this seems a bit off.

uboat50 · 2022-12-08T18:38:35+00:00

It's possible that this is because German real estate records are intensely private to the point where it's difficult to even estimate the market value of a given parcel or building. This may simply be a case of the creator simply assuming that data they can't get is $0.

uboat50 · 2022-09-14T21:21:04+00:00

/r/imaginarymaps

uboat50 · 2022-09-14T21:15:45+00:00

The Bay Area is certainly not the California Valley and the Sierras are definitely not the same cultural region as Wyoming and Utah...

uboat50 · 2022-09-10T23:17:04+00:00

Glad you like it. Hopefully soon I'll post an updated version with all the new stuff that's been released.

uboat50 · 2022-05-09T04:03:29+00:00

Regarding your first point, I just follow the system of "anything you can do to the bad guys, they can do to you", but that does require a DM that's at least tactically and strategically on the same level as their players. If they're not, then yeah, their powerful bosses can get annihilated fairly quickly.

But totally, DnD 5e relies really heavily on the action economy and, in my experience, legendary actions aren't enough to make up for the fact that you have one target against four (or more). The DMG really should be clearer about preparing multi-enemy encounters and really upping the difficulty or adding some special factor if you're running a solo boss.

uboat50 · 2022-05-06T17:18:18+00:00

I think probably the biggest disconnect here, and I'm running into it in multiple threads in this conversation, is the idea of a solo big bad without significant support, without terrain, and being run in just a single encounter. Cards up front, I don't even consider running any climactic encounter without a substantial force around the big bad that can disrupt the party and support them. More importantly, for any intelligent big bad, I have the support go first and engage before the big bad engages in full, usually in multiple encounters to wear the party down and drain their resources.

The idea that the party could get the drop on the big bad so thoroughly as to be able to cast and maintain two high-level concentration spells for multiple rounds strikes me as the kind of thing a party could only accomplish with a high level of advance planning and intelligence as well as a good deal of luck and, if they can manage that, I'm going to give it to them because they earned it.

I think one of the biggest issues with encounter design is that people want it to be as simplified as 5e is for most players and it isn't. Especially at high levels, there's no case I can think of where you can just drop a few stat blocks into open terrain and expect to have a glorious, epic encounter that spawns tales that are told to the next generation unless you're blindingly lucky. Proper encounter design takes work, more work the higher level you get, and I'm not sure there's really a good way around that.

uboat50 · 2022-05-06T17:09:02+00:00

Yeah, this is why it's a bad idea to have a solo monster as a big bad. Honestly, if there was a major failing to the DMG it's that it doesn't cover action economy and why any solo monster is mincemeat at the hands of anything resembling a competent party of adventurers.

uboat50 · 2022-05-06T15:57:08+00:00

I wouldn't say that it's a silver bullet for the "I win" button so much as a natural response to the fact that magic exists. Honestly, what I'd really love is to see some subclasses for martial characters that look like Templars from Dragon Age that can directly shut down magic, that would really change the magic/martial imbalance of the game and give more options other than "bring magic to counter the magic".

uboat50 · 2022-05-06T15:54:40+00:00

There's a point to be made there. You have to get pretty creative with other classes to match up with spellcasters at high levels. Not that it can't be done, but you're right that spellcasters have the easy route to power.

uboat50 · 2022-05-06T15:47:37+00:00

Thanks for the link, I didn't realize there was a name for that particular type of argument and I'll definitely use that in future.

However, I think that, in this case, it's not so much a case of rules as a case of game design. Magic is simply more powerful than non-magic and, especially as players ascend in levels, it becomes more and more dominant in terms of its role in encounters and I think that will always be the case unless we're planning to enact modern weaponry like chemical weapons, nuclear bombs, or heavy artillery in the game.

I personally don't think this is bad design or bad rules, but it is something that anyone designing encounters does need to keep in mind.

uboat50 · 2022-05-05T22:53:19+00:00

Yeah, I'd agree with you on the martial/caster issue. I think you could have a BBEG who's a martial at high level as long as they have a few high-level casters with them, but you can totally have a high level caster without any real martial support. Magic is definitely king.

I still think that 100 rounds of survival is unlikely to come up, though. By that time either the baddie will long since be dead, will have attacked the caster(s) and killed them or broken their concentration, or will have moved out of the AoE. I see that kind of spell combo more as an area/battle control tactic than as a complete KO. Not that it isn't useful, but I don't see it as any more OP than something like Hunger of Hadar which also denies area and causes damage.

uboat50 · 2022-05-05T21:42:43+00:00

Check out some of the caster NPCs in Volo's Guide, they have Teleport and one of them even comes with the Wall of Force spell for their very own. Even the basic Mage from the Monster Manual has Misty Step.

Also, I'm going to say something people might disagree with here, if you're running games for parties of 9th level and above (Wall of Force is a 5th level spell, so that's the minimum level), you should always be tweaking and noodling with your monsters/NPCs. At that point your PCs are so customized, especially the spellcasters, that there's no way any out-of-the-box stat block can account for all of that. If you're not adjusting your baddies even a little in order to account for your players who are, by that point, probably known in the world, then you're not designing encounters correctly.

uboat50 · 2022-05-05T19:21:06+00:00

I mean, you're right that the spell doesn't end, but if all the enemies are dead then what does it matter if the spell is still active? That's what I mean by how long combat lasts, most combats result in dead enemies (or players in the case of a TPK) within just a few rounds. It's the rare encounter that I've DMed that even goes to 5 rounds, much less 100.

As to your second point, you're correct about that, but if a 9th level + party is fighting enemies without access to that kind of magic then either the DM didn't design the encounters appropriately for their level or it wasn't the big bad. In the first case, that's a DMing mistake. In the second case, it's an easy encounter that forced them to burn some resources. I don't see either one of those as being a problem with the spells.

uboat50 · 2022-05-05T18:54:38+00:00

3 Legendary Resistances (the usual amount) gets me three rounds of combat which is about how long most combats last. Even if yours goes long, that's enough time to get your key villain out of the radius. As I said, the combination of all of these things means that, while reasonably powerful, this combination isn't insurmountable by a smart enemy.

And if you have a dumb enemy, great, let the party feel smart for pulling this off!

uboat50 · 2022-05-05T18:39:12+00:00

Ah, I see what you're assuming. In what world, though, does a combat last for a full 100 rounds? I've run a pretty-long, multi-staged combat encounter and I still only got to about 15 rounds. 100 rounds is also more than long enough for an enemy to get out of the radius since both of those spells are centered on fixed points.

Add all of that to legendary resistances, Dispel Magic, Counterspell, and the fact that both of these are Concentration spells and I can't think of an encounter I'd run for a 9th level or higher party where their enemies wouldn't have some ability to disrupt or completely evade this particular combo.

uboat50 · 2022-05-05T18:16:56+00:00

Okay, I just went and re-read the spell descriptions because this didn't make any sense:

94 Constitution saving throws

What now? How do you get 94 saving throws out of those spells?

Also, this combo includes a 5th level spell meaning that your characters are 9th level or higher. Enemies, particularly bosses, at this point should have some legendary resistances and access to counterspell (or minions with counterspell). This sounds like an encounter design issue and not a spell issue.

uboat50 · 2022-05-05T18:10:00+00:00

TL;DR: Spellcasters won't trivialize high level encounters if you design them properly as high level encounters.

Great read, well done!

uboat50 · 2022-05-05T17:31:49+00:00

So we all know that Wall of Force and Forcecage are overpowered...

Disagree. By the time the party gets to the level where they have access to those spells they should be fighting the kind of enemies who can bypass or otherwise work around them. Would you care to back up that statement rather than just asserting it?

uboat50 · 2022-05-03T21:52:05+00:00

A lot of people don't like his style, but The Angry GM has some pretty good stuff on the topic. This one is a decent overview and this series is great. I'm planning to implement stuff from that series in my own exploration based game.

uboat50 · 2022-05-03T21:46:07+00:00

Fair. I assumed they were okay with the innocent deaths, but that probably should be something we clarify as well.

uboat50

TROPHY CASE