5e massed NPC bowmen

In most editions wizards are stronger at low levels. Sleep was a free win other than in 4th and the ability to combine mage armor and shield makes them amongst the most armored characters. No clue if 5e fixed this.

Sleep is still a win button, but a large number of creatures are immune to it. Alot of the other win buttons like Color Spray got nerfed to near-uselessness.

It's once wizards start getting their level 5 and above spells that they shit all over 5e and start becoming walking collections of cheat-codes.

This is what happens when you remove bloated AC, and DR. Honestly DR is a fine mechanic, I never felt like it was a time consuming extra step. The real problem is that a Wizard can fabricate this problem for the DM by animating skeletons. Normally as a DM you can fudge around 100d6 arrows, but between animate dead, and summoning spells thinking 8 wolves is equivalent to any other CR 2 beast shows that 5e could have used another playtest.

idk op sounds cool to me
i would love to still feel threatened by regular soldiers at level 10

So they fixed low level wizards but left high level ones? Lame. Man I remember the first time I faced mirror image in 2e, that shit horrified me. Probably one of the reasons I didnt play much 2e, not that 3.5 fixed it.

This, you tried to resolve the conflict in a gamist way and "realism" bited you in the ass for it.

5e introduced a mechanic called "concentration". Basically any spell that gives a buff or disables enemies requires "concentration" to keep it up, and you can only concentrate on one thing at at a time.

Unfortunately at the higher levels, one thing at a time is basically all you need, and multiple casters in an encounter still fuck over everything before it can really fight back.

5e is typically a heavily gamist system that presents itself as heroic and cinematic. Expecting realism is unlikely.

You answered your own question. They're massed bowmen. They deal damage at a distance, and there's a lot of them.

But you see, this is the trap of D&D, realism suddenly rears its ugly head out of the blue because the designers are shit, so you must never drop your guard and never assume consistecy.

I hope that you did actually try to scramble for some kind cover instead of just standing in open and trying to tank it.

If the archers rolled individual initiative then a bunch of them just straight up shot before they even had a chance to even move.

It's one of my favourite features of this edition. It brings the game closer to the Sword and Sorcery baseline it was initially based on, which is something D&D had always been kind of shit at emulating.

Now if only it could do monsters in such a way as to encourage approaches other than just standing there and hitting them.

Also less fucking magic.

>heroic and cinematic means you should be completely untouchable

>Now if only it could do monsters in such a way as to encourage approaches other than just standing there and hitting them.

Just don't play a martial, lol. Wizards have dozens and dozens of way to bypass encounters and avoid actually having to roleplay without ever having to hit things!

You can't take cover when the archers have high initiative.

Why would a DM give some random bowmen a particularly high initiative?

That just turns them into a commando killsquad any lord would shower with gifts. Not just some rando's the party would run into on a normal day.

Of course not they shot the horses and then slit the knights' throats while the knights were stuck wriggling on the ground, struggling to stand up in their heavy plate armor

>DM rolls initiative for scouts separately

>oh look, some of them get higher initiative than the druid and lore bard

>bye bye, druid and lore bard

You'd think the dire piranha would be before the acid pit, so they'd be more likely to get fed.

Not what I meant. Also goes against the last hope.

I strongly dislike D&D spellcasters.

Some of the replies in this thread is a prime example of why some veteran groups refuse to give their characters backstories, refuse to progress unless everyone rolled at least a 20 on the stealth check (metagaming or no), and they build exclusively using feats like GWM, War Caster and (especially) sharpshooter. Even if the players had a chance to scout out the archers earlier, you can't just punish failure to do so with half a party wipe. Unless you enjoy running one encounter every few hours because the players know even the tiniest slip up will TPK them. I'm not saying that player failure shouldn't have consequences, but too many anons think DnD is competitive DvP and not a cooperative game.

That's not specific to archers, though.

If an enemy outnumbers you and steals initiative while you're in range, that's just pretty fucked overall. Either take it on the chin and move on or stop playing all games with a random number generator.

The OP said that they scouted but it wasn't good enough.

It's possible that the enemies had a good Stealth result, because, you know, Stealth proficiency.

To all the faggots saying "lel should've taken cover," do you know how initiative works?

>That's not specific to archers, though.

It kind of IS specific to ranged enemies.

Melee enemies have to close the distance, and they can't gang up on back row squishies as easily.

The CR 1/2 scouts who roll high on initiative can point and shoot to focus fire on back row squishies.

I believe we need to know how many archers we're talking about here. 10 ? 20 ? 50 ?

I mean if they managed to drop half of the group in less than a round we're probably looking at a lot of creatures.

If a bare bones backstory is good enough for Conan, it's good enough for you.

Also optimizing as a counter is foolish since the DM holds all the cards.

>It kind of IS specific to ranged enemies.
Well, sure, but what are you going to do about that? Remove them from the game entirely? Pussyfoot around and shelter your players from them until you're sure they have hard counters against ranged enemies?

If the encounter was something that made sense to be there, the OP should quit complaining and roll up a new character. If it didn't, the DM is being a jerk.

A mob of archers is something that should be dangerous, at all levels.

People will never learn.

According to Xanathar's, 40 enemies at CR 1/2 is in the "fair but challenging, and definitely not deadly" range, if the party's level 10.

So huh, you're expected to be able to fight 40 scouts at level 10? And that's not even a deadly fight? How can that be?

>A mob of archers is something that should be dangerous, at all levels.

I wish 5e was more of the high fantasy kind of game.

But this would have happened in most other games too. Massed enemies with ranged weapons are something that's inherently dangerous.

You mean high fantasy like Lord of the Rings, where the mob of archers would have been dangerous?

How about epic fantasy, like the Iliad, where Achilles dies due to an arrow to the heel (and don't give me that weak point crap, he wasn't invulnerable originally).

ACHTUALLY, it definitely wouldn't happen to a level 10 party in 3.X/Pathfinder because the party's AC would be so high that they could be hit only on a natural 20, and the party's Spot/Perception would be really high too.

It wouldn't happen in 4e either, because the party's Perception would blow away the minions', and 4e parties have waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more ability to shut down minions than 5e parties.

Are you kidding? A group of ranged foes taking down high threat targets with focused fire is something only a GOOD game would allow and would never happen in 3.PF. If anything this situation just confirms 5e is the best edition of D&D since WotC took it over.

>You mean high fantasy like Lord of the Rings, where the mob of archers would have been dangerous?
You mean high fantasy like Middle Earth and its superhero elves.

The Fellowship was level 5 at best.

>How about epic fantasy, like the Iliad, where Achilles dies due to an arrow to the heel
An arrow guided by a god and nocked by a great hero of Troy.

>his suggestion was to not play D&D
>point out that in most other games, it would still be threatening
>you counter by bringing up more D&D, the game he was suggesting not to play

What did he mean by this?

>A group of ranged foes taking down high threat targets with focused fire is something only a GOOD game would allow and would never happen in 3.PF.

What if I want to play a fantasy superhero game like 3.X or 4e but with good mechanics?

I don't like the 5e sword and sorcery feel.

According to Kobold Fight Club, the adjusted XP for 40 scout VS 4 level 10 players is 16 000, which is far beyond deadly. I'm not sure of the math used though.

Mutants and Masterminds has a Fantasy supplement. There's also that game about killing gods and taking their power that I forget the name of.

That's not the new and """improved" encounter building rules from Xanathar's.

Xanathar's says that 40 CR 1/2 enemies is a fair and non-deadly encounter for 4 level 10 PCs.

>Mutants and Masterminds
I said GOOD mechanics.

No, I meant high fantasy like the Lord of the Rings, which is the iconic work of the genre.

>An arrow guided by a god and nocked by a great hero of Troy.

None the less, the point being that even an epic with gods playing a regular role still had some level of grounding.

Then play Mutants and Masterminds.

Nothing, because that's what you want to hear.

They don't take monster number into account anymore ?

Anyway, I doubt every single one of those 40 scouts have passed their Stealth check to surprise the group. I think this is mostly a dick move from the DM honestly.

That's insane. Any CR system that doesn't somehow compensate for action economy will always fail to give a proper indication of the genuine difficulty of an encounter. 40 enemies will always be able to take several turns before a party can even deal with half of them unless they are in one giant convenient group for a wizard to AoE. Every member of the party could nab 5 a turn and that would still leave half of the archers alive to take their next round.

I think surprise did play a big role in that fight. And the fact that they were caught in open terrain as well.

I wouldn't spam ranged enemies that focus fire onto casters myself.

I usually have dedicated melee enemies despite almost all humanoids in the monster manual having a ranged attack option. Also Scouts are more dangerous than their CR implies, they're probably the weakest enemy with multiattack.

I'm pretty sure all of the scouts can just aid one of themselves. Even if the aid is redundant, then one dude can basically roll Stealth for all of them, with advantage.

>people actually care about supplement rules

Why?

>It wouldn't happen in 4e either, because the party's Perception would blow away the minions'
wtf i thought 4e had no skills

Because 5e's got a fucking dearth of supplements.

Can you roll stealth for a whole group just by yourself ?

Sword and Sorcery/ Conan parallels are shit. Just bring the game towards Lord of the Rings and focus on religion and race and alignment.

What are you talking about? Crossbowmen were shit and trained soldiers still infinitely better. They were only used for peasants who had no idea how to fight, any actual soldier would resort to about any other weapon then a fucking crossbow.

You are one of those pissants who has no idea how warfare works, much less the medieval kind, and forget that Knights were just a martial class, that evolved into soldiery. Soldiery aren't regular bumfuck peasants, you plebe. Get the fuck out of here.

If they're aiding you, sure.

Play 4e

Go look at 4e official character sheet

Doesn't the DMG state that for group checks, every member of the group has to take the checks, and if at least half the members succeed, the whole group succeeds.

Sure Scouts have a +6 so they'd pass (on average) if no party member has more than 17 passive perception.

The scouts probably have advantage.

>any actual soldier would resort to about any other weapon then a fucking crossbow.
And they still got invalidated by masses of farmboys with piss-east point-and-click weapons.

Without more context from OP we can hardly tell. Still feels like the DM is stacking the odds against the players.

I'd need to look at the maths of 40 multiattack against level 10 PCs to see how unlucky OP's party was.

For all the "lelelelel Lore bards strongest archetype ever!" memes, they're still fragile as shit.

>We scouted. It wasn't good enough.
Terrible scout leads you into a 10 to 1 ambush, what did you expect? If you can't do recon at 10th level, you'll get your ass handed to you even with easier encounters.

Bounded accuracy for skills is a hell of a drug.

Your skills hardly ever grow in 5e.

To be fair, anyone relying on skills to scout instead of sending in the familiar (which is either an unassuming animal or an invisible unassuming animal).

A familiar that might be an out of place animal in the local area.

Then you summon one that isn't. It costs 10 gold and 10 minutes, don't be a lazy ass.

>Animal is ignored - it gets to check every corner at leisure and spots the ambush
>Animal is fired at - fireball at where the shot came from
Or a scouting focused rogue could have at least +13 to his stealth/perception at 10th level.

>I came out of an ambush against a bunch of them and half of our party (RIP druid and lore bard) got killed because the shooters focused fire on them one at a time. Me and the other player surrendered. We're level 10 for fuck's sake.

>wahh I got attacked by 40 peasants who snuck up on me and it's the system's fault we got no warning

The archer's all targeting one guy at a time sounds pretty bs.

Familiar scouting can be ass at times because you're relying on your familiar's crappy Perception.

Its not particularly realistic for a group of archers to determinedly focus on one target at a time when they have multiple threats against them.

It's not particularly unrealistic to focus fire on the two who are clearly casters, in a world where people are familiar with magic.

I don't know, I like to have a proper vanguard (just some hired followers), also for other benefits like arriving at a ready campsite or already booked rooms. The party obviously expected trouble, else they wouldn't have tried to scout in the first place.

>It's not particularly unrealistic to focus fire on the two who are clearly casters, in
If its obvious they're casters and not just a bunch of guys going for a hike. Dirt ignorant peasants couldn't be expected to know what an arch-mage looks like.

> in a world where people are familiar with magic
That's a huge assumption to make about OPs setting and the scenario.

I think the gamist here is you.

Shoot the fanciest guys without weapons first, they are probably wizards, not a fucking hard concept.

>huge assumption
>d&d
Pick one and only one

focus fire in an army vs army battle is wrong.
focus fire in an 4 vs 10 skirmish is not

How does it matter if the scouts rolled initiative individually so that some of them could act first and gun down one caster at a time?

Killing the fancy guys you could take hostage and demand a ransom from? Better to just kill the goons with swords since they're clearly the noblemen's bodyguards.

Assuming everyone who isn't in full plate is some kind of wizard is stupid from an in-universe perspective.

Its gamist and meta as hell. The DM was being a dick.

If you have a vanguard? They would have ran into the ambush an hour or more before you arrived and checked all obvious hiding places before either retreating to warn you, scaring the would-be ambushers out of their positions, or leaving clear signs of battle and pretty corpses as a warning to the PCs.

That's what a vanguard is supposed to be doing when moving through hostile territory.

>Dirt ignorant peasants
>2 attacks, at level 5
>pick one

Unless I'm making a mistake? Do basic level 1 archers get to double attack now?
Really, the only thing stopping them from mass firing is that all of them would need to be spread out to not shoot through each other.

It wasn't weight that got the knights stuck at agincourt: it was the way mud interacts with armor like it does when you get a boot stuck in it. Under most conditions armor isn't as hindering as idiots believe. It just so happens that a shit load of factors went into the early proclaimed superiority of ranged spam. The hussite wars was were all the real pioneering into commoners with ranged weapons kicking ass and nobody learned those lessons for hundreds of years after that. The Crossbow and Longbow can go suck a dick like most of their prissy fanboys (your pic is really fitting for that reason).

>In most editions wizards are stronger at low levels. Sleep was a free win other than in 4th and the ability to combine mage armor and shield makes them amongst the most armored characters.
Sleep was a broken spell and shouldn't be the standard by which 1st level spells are judged, at least not if you don't have the ability to freely choose your spells. And if you're a first level Magic-user, you've got a grand total of 1 spell and you're done, so even if you've got Sleep, that only helps in one battle. And with 1d4 hit points and likely no Constitution bonus, you're pretty much dead if you so much as stub your toe. Combine that with crappy weapon damage and even if you can get your AC to a really nice place by casting several spells, you still aren't going to be very impressive next to a fighter. Once you get to 3e, things begin to shift, but you were talking about most editions, and TSR has the majority on those.

If they're CR 1/2 scouts, they get to double attack.

+4 attack bonus, 1d8+2 damage per hit.

Why are the heroes relying on sending cannon fodder to get their asses killed.

>Take the wizard/cleric/druid hostage
>Take the dude hostage that bends reality or has aid from the gods and doesn't need weapons or a lot of opportunity
m8

>Killing the fancy guys you could take hostage and demand a ransom from?
Killing the guys who are going to have a whole load of magic stuff that can be sold for a kingdom's ransom? Yeah, sounds great.

You need to use whatever means you have to neutralise magical abilities, if possible permanently. If you have some way to do so without killing the person, great. If not, they die first.