5 Ways to Bring Down Flying Characters
Many Game Masters have outright banned characters that start with flight. There is some good reason behind that thinking, like a character having access to a permanent, unlimited 3rd-level spell can be pretty powerful, but I don’t think that GMs need to outright ban such characters.
Monster Manual, 2014 Wizards of the Coast
Flying characters have plenty of obstacles they can’t just flap their wings over and avoid. There are challenges and trickery situations that can, metaphorically, clip their wings and keep their boots on the ground for a portion of your adventure.
With that said, don’t always use these challenges. If your flying characters are always facing obstacles to their flight, you are punishing their character choices and you should just ban the ability. Instead, use these 5 challenges to spice up your dungeons, keep the game interesting, and as a unique challenge.
1) Tight Corridors and Rooms
The greatest boon a flying character has is that they can fly far out of reach of their enemies and rain arrows down on them like a torrential rainstorm. But the simplest and easiest counter is to simply have tight corridors and rooms that keep them close to the ground.
Look around at the rooms you are in. If you’ve toured castles, think how tight the corridors and rooms are. While there are large rooms, like feast halls with towering ceilings, they are few and far between.
When setting up your adventure, think about the height of your ceilings for your corridors and rooms. You can have 7 foot tall ceilings in your corridors, forcing them to walk along the ground, and rooms with ceilings that aren’t much taller.
This keep the player on the ground, but make sure that not every room and encounter location won’t let them use their abilities. Include feast halls with 15 or 20 foot ceilings so they can still use their flight and show that you aren’t punishing them for their character choices, just challenging them with low ceilings and tight corridors.
And don’t just think that you are restricted to stone tunnels and constructed rooms. If your party is wandering through a forest, you could make it so that the treetops are so thickly woven together that they are effectively impenetrable, or say that it is difficult terrain to move through, or if creatures fire arrows through the branches, that creatures below it have some cover and protection from enemies above.
Think of the terrain and how you might use it to provide challenges to not just the creatures on the ground, but also above.
2) Ranged Weapons or Spells
Another simple solution to flying characters is to give your monsters and enemies ranged attacks. Many enemies are designed with no range option, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have ranged abilities.
For humanoids, it’s as simple as giving a shortbow or crossbow, and a quiver of arrows or bolts, or maybe a few bits of magic like firebolt. You could even just stick with thrown daggers, handaxes, javelins, and vials of acid or alchemist’s fire for more melee-focused creatures or those who like esoteric material.
For non-humanoids, while they rarely can use weapons, you can still come up with clever ranged options. While an ankheg doesn’t come written with a ranged ability, they do have an acid ability and it would make sense if they could shoot a glob of acid at a flying creature.
Or while an owlbear lacks a ranged attack, you could give it a unique action that allows it jump great distances and make a single attack at any point in its jump to highlight its part-owl abilities.
If all else fails, look at the list of spells and reflavor them for your monsters and NPCs and just don’t call them spells if you don’t want that creature to be a caster. Even a lightning bolt spell can be reflavored to be a sudden burst of martial might, a humanoid shooting forward in a straight line with a powerful axe, chopping through its enemies. Or describe the barbarian hacking down a massive tree with a special ability that crushes enemies in a line. Just be smart when reflavoring and understand that your players may want to unlock the secrets that your NPCs have (and how you might make such abilities into feats they could potentially learn).
When giving a monster a new ranged attack, do be aware that ranged attacks are typically a bit weaker than melee attacks. This is because ranged attacks have the bonus of being made from a distance, while melee attacks will carry more risk. When deciding how much damage to do on a new ranged attack you came up with, you could use one fewer damage dice than their melee attacks, remove any bonuses to damage, or decrease the size of the dice, like from a d10 to a d8.
3) Flying Enemies
Sometimes, you have to fight fire with fire and birds with even more, bigger birds. Not only your players can fly, but so can your enemies fly around and be a challenge.
In fact, to spice up an encounter, you could have a lot of flying enemies, like harpies and encourage your players to come up with ways to bring them down (and give your flying player a chance for aerial combat).
This doesn’t even have to be limited to monsters with a natural flying speed. A wizard who casts fly on themselves or a barbarian can be quite the challenge as the land-locked adventurers can’t chase after them and the flying adventurer has to figure out how to fight their flying enemy.
Or you can give your monsters a potion of flight, provide a magic item that grants limited flight once a day, or add a ‘mutation’ to the monster and give them wings, like a winged goblin or winged.
4) Attack of Opportunity and Reach Weapons
If you are dealing with flying enemies, you can combine close quarters with attacks of opportunity and reach weapons.
Longspears, glaives, and others provide reach, so even if the character is flying 15 feet overhead, you can still poke at them from far below. In addition, this increases your range for attacks of opportunity, so when they do try to fly out of reach, you can give them a parting blow.
Lastly, remember that feats, like Sentinel, exist that you can use to augment your monsters and take inspiration from. You don’t need to give the monster every part of the feat (bonus action attack, attacking when a creature enters your reach, and reducing their speed to 0), but you can give one part or the other, granting your monsters unique abilities to help bring down flying characters that like to move back and forth, like when moving in and out of reach for melee attacks.
5) Elevated Ground
Too often are battlefields simply flat. There are no raised points, no balconies or cliffs for combatants to suddenly appear and harry from above (or if you are flying, right next to you). Instead, everyone is fighting on the same flat plane, granting a big bonus to flying creatures who drift lazily overhead.
By combining different elevations to fight upon your battlefield, you grant even more opportunities to your players and your monsters. All of a sudden, barbarians are left dealing with the monsters on the bottom floor, and your flying character is being harried by creatures higher up that the ground-locked creatures can’t reach without climbing up columns or cliffs, finding a way to higher floors, or pulling out ranged weapons and trying to get lucky shots in.
Bring Them Down!
Now that you have unlocked this newfound knowledge of how to deal with those pesky flying creatures, use this knowledge with great care. While it can be useful to provide a challenge to your players, you shouldn’t keep hitting them with these in every encounter, over and over. At that point you are punishing the player for their character choice.
Did I miss a tactic you use to clip a player’s wings? Share your tactics below!
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