DMing All-Ranged Parties in Dungeons and Dragons 5E

3 Wise DMs

Has SEAL Team 6 rolled up on your D&D 5E dungeon yet? You know the party we mean: Archers, wizards, sorcerers, warlocks, ranged assassins … and not a single melee tank among them. Just hundreds of points of damage pouring into your helpless melee monsters from football fields away.

It was near impossible to make the all-ranged party work in earlier editions, but in Dungeons and Dragon 5E, it can work shockingly well. It can even “ruin” the campaign for DMs who don’t know how to handle it. On the other hand, if you make them spend all their time shut away in bare 10’ dungeon corridors, that ruins the fun for the party and likely ends in a level-1 TPK.

So how do you DM the all-ranged party so you and the players all have fun? In this episode of 3 Wise DMs, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about their experiences DMing and playing D&D 5E’s powerful ranged classes and how you can bring balance to the field, even when it’s raining death like the beaches of Normandy.

1:00 A listener question: What do you do when the party is built like a Navy SEAL Sniper Team?

2:00 D&D 5E party composition vs. old-school D&D

4:00 How our parties are built and the many flavors of ranged characters we’ve played

11:00 The tactical challenge of threatening ranged parties with D&D 5E monsters

14:00 What do we think of firearms in fantasy D&D 5E?

20:00 How do you build encounters that start more than 100 feet away?

28:00 The impact of long-range combat on non-ranged PCs

35:00 Should you pressure the party to add more front-line characters?

40:00 How often should you use encounters that totally nullify the range advantage?

45:00 Final thoughts