Flight in D&D and How to Manage It
Flight is a hotly contested topic in forums and discussions, not for its existence, but its power level. Yes, early level flying seems to be something a lot of people have a lot of issues with, which is a thought process I’ve never been able to agree with. That said, I do understand the inclination. After all, flying can (and is) one of the strongest abilities in the game, especially if you have access to it before being able to cast the Fly spell. The Aarakocra race is generally the central catalyst of arguments, as they have the largest starting flight speed at 50 ft. That said, any fly speed, no matter how small or limited, really ruffles some feathers, if you will.
Now, talking about the power level of flying is fine enough, but it seems there is a lot of inclination to either straight up ban it from the game, or to nerf it so aggressively that it isn’t even worth the investment. This is where people lose me, because there are just so many ways to organically counter flight without straight up taking it away or nerfing it. That being said, while I’m on the side of “banning flight or nerfing it is very silly”, I do think plenty of people on my side of the camp do not give adequate ways to help.
While I’m not one to tell DMs what to do (since, ultimately, it’s your game) I do always encourage World Weavers to carefully consider when to smash down the ban hammer. It can be discouraging to players to be told they are horrible power gamers for just utilizing the basics of an ability, after all. The following article contains a discussion on the strengths of flying, how to counter them, and how to exploit existing weaknesses without making up new ones. There’s a way to make flying dangerous and challenging without mitigating the fun and thrill.
Range, Height, and Speed
Now, even novice players can understand the benefits of not just elevation but range. If you have a winged PC, that little rapscallion likely has a longbow or spells with ranges of over 100 ft and is pelting all your melee enemies and you’re just a bit sick of them, right? This is easily the most common complaint amongst detractors: they shouldn’t be able to fly that far out of range! They’re impossible to hit! They can never die!
And I bet you anything, in the same breath, DMs will brag about running a dragon fight where the dragon never lands and just waits for their breath weapon to recharge.
The thing about flight is that, while it has massive advantages, there’s also massive disadvantages - they’re just not immediately apparent. And these aren’t things that are made up to make it harder for someone to fly: they’re baked into the ability. For example:
Wingspan. Having wings means you have to spread them out and flap them. That requires a reasonable amount of space around you. Narrow tunnels, the indoors in general, and cramped nether dimensions aren’t always going to have the room necessary to allow flight, and it’s important to consider this. Strong winds can also influence flight if they’re ridiculous enough, along with storms and fog.
Fall Damage. Now most people take issue with speedy flight at lower levels, but you know what pretty much all players lack at low levels? A lot of hit points. Flying is dangerous when you can be taken out with a couple well placed arrows, and if you are dropped to zero, you immediately plummet. If you hit the ground, that’s two failed death saves right off the bat. On top of that, anything that reduces a creature’s movement to 0 also makes you drop. The paralysis, grappled, restrained, stunned, and incapacitated conditions, as well as multiple Cold spells, do this.
No Allied Assistance. Unless your player has a build where they’re weaving in and out of melee range (which is dangerous in itself without feats to prevent it) they’re also going to be well out of reach of a lot of support spells. Cure Wounds, for example, has a touch range, and many other ones only go out to 30 ft. It can often require a few extra turns of coordination to get proper support after a critical hit or botched strategy. Of course your flying PC may be a healer themselves, but that doesn’t fully mitigate the disadvantage of being far from your team.
You may have a PC that mitigates these disadvantages as much as possible, in which case - good for them! They are putting tons of effort into not dying, which is exactly what you want from PCs during combat. If you didn’t consider these disadvantages, then this is a great time to if you find your PC is getting away solely with the advantages of flight. And - I can’t emphasize this enough - it’s really not necessary to add a bunch of additional weaknesses when the ones that exist are already plentiful.
Countermeasures in Combat
The weaknesses also work as counters for flying enemies, but there are things you can do to address a flying PC without ganging up on them or nerfing their power. While it’s intimidating and can require a bit extra prep for encounters, it’s totally possible!
Ranged Attacks. This is one of the answers that commenters will often leave without any further explanation, and I think that’s unfair. It’s true that a lot of monsters don’t have the option for a ranged attack (like your typical low level wolves or beast baddies.) That said, pretty much any given humanoid enemy has a ranged weapon like a crossbow. If they don’t, you can certainly give them one without it breaking the game. Chances are a bird person flying around being a nuisance is going to be a prime target - enough where people will risk disadvantage on their long ranged attacks to snip some feathers. Cantrip level spells, such as fire bolt and eldritch blast have long enough ranges to hit flying creatures as well.
Finding Cover and Utilizing Terrain. This gets a bit into encounter building, but it’s important for any fight. Humanoid enemies, especially, are not going to stick around in a wide open field where a flying creature can easily pick them off, and chances are, you aren’t running every fight in an open field. If you are - consider this the reminder to utilize varied terrain! Even the dumbest of beasts know to find cover if there’s a screaming, flying enemy picking them off one by one. Tree canopies, buildings, caverns, and pretty much anything with a ceiling is going to make flying fail to give an advantage - it may even be a disadvantage. Even hiding behind a tree or big rock requires flying higher or maneuvering around it unless a creature wants disadvantage on their attacks.
Weather. I briefly mentioned this when discussing weaknesses, but stormy weather makes it pretty hard to reliably fly around. This may reduce a creature’s flying speed or make them the first target for lightning. Thick, obscuring weather like fog, mist, and snow makes visibility in the air just as bad if not worse than on the ground.
Spell Saves. While there’s a chance the PC who is flying also happens to have beefy defenses, never underestimate forcing them to make saves that, if they fail, makes flying even more dangerous. Spells that blind, reduce or stop movement, grant any of the statuses I mentioned earlier, can hamper the flying PC pretty quickly. If it doesn’t force them to land, it at least forces a turn to cure what ails them. Also spells like Earthbind and Gravity Sinkhole work for flailing flying creatures out of the air.
Flying Enemies. As the saying goes: if you can’t beat them, join them. Throw some flying enemies at the party to not only give them a taste of the strengths but also allow them to explore their own weaknesses. Enemies with a fly speed aren’t particularly rare, either, with dragons being the most famous and immediate example.
Innocuous Magic. I don’t advocate for this solution to be used frequently, as you should generally limit your ‘because I said so’ solutions to problems as a DM. However, if you’re setting up a particular encounter, you can always implement creative magic that causes flight to be either difficult or impossible. Maybe a mage has littered the arena with heavy gravity runes, or all movement in the area is slowed, or the entire battle gets plunged underwater. You don’t have to explain these phenomena and it’ll give you some breathing room. That said, again, do not use this all the time. There’s only so many magic miracles specifically targeting flight that you can utilize before your intentions become transparent.
Non-Combat Gripes
Now you might be thinking: but flying is annoying even out of combat! They can see stuff you shouldn’t be able to see! And to this I say: yes, that is one of the major advantages of flight and shouldn’t compromise your entire narrative. If you have plot points, locations, dungeons, and areas whose mystique and intrigue are completely compromised by someone getting up high, then it may be a good time to mix up your descriptions and defenses. Chances are your PC isn’t the only flying creature in the known world - not to mention there is magic that allows creatures to fly. Places are going to have measures against aerial assault, even if they aren’t the most robust in the world.
If the problem is you wanted x location to be much more mysterious, then I encourage you to turn a surface negative into a fantastic positive! Imagine yourself flying in the air and consider how something looks from up there - you can regale your PC with a whole new perspective of something they thought they knew. Everything is smaller, more difficult to see, but much grander from the sky. Take advantage of it and allow your PC to see things others can’t, but same the other way around. Plenty of things are only truly visible up close, and just as many places are difficult to really explore from the air, such as forests and swamps.
Plus, one of the PCs flying off on their own to scout for long periods of time can lead to solo-encounters they have to face without the party, or the party facing an encounter while they’re a member down. In summary: make something of the challenges you’re given instead of giving into the frustration of having to work around them.
Bad Solutions
Now, as I mentioned earlier in this article, I struggle to really label anything other DMs do as ‘bad’ since, ultimately, every DM runs games differently. It’s all pretty subjective, but speaking purely from the perspective of a player and my experience as one as well as a DM: going out of your way to target and prod at a PC is rarely a good solution to a perceived problem. It’s going to be really transparent that you’re only doing it because you really don’t want to deal with it, and that can make people feel bad, which is the exact opposite of what the game is about.
Here’s a few ‘solutions’ that I’ve seen presented to the perceived flight problem that I’ve seen, as well as my reasoning why these solutions don’t work.
“Flying takes concentration. Treat it like a concentration spell!” Yes, the literal spell fly requires concentration just like many other spells like it. But that’s magic - something that takes a lot of effort to learn and harness and is entirely foreign energy. If a creature has been born with wings and the natural ability to fly, telling them flying requires concentration is like telling a human using their arms and legs requires concentration. If your brain and nervous system is functioning properly, you can move your limbs normally, and that includes wings. There’s a reason baby birds are shoved out of trees as soon as their wings form.
“Birds have hollow, brittle bones that are easy to break!” This is a super common misconception related to the anatomy of birds that simply needs to be addressed. Yes, most birds have hollow bones, but it’s not to make them lighter or more fragile. In fact, while they are hollow, the solid parts are actually just as if not more dense than other mammals of similar sizes. A bird’s bones are actually stronger than a humanoid, which are full of marrow. The hollow insides means the bones are much more flexible without being heavier, which means they can take much more of a beating without snapping. Additionally, the hollowness allows oxygen to flow through the bones, allowing them to lift up with the muscles and feathers of birds to make them fly. Sure, a good smack will kill a songbird, but a big, humanoid one? Not so much. This is just scientifically inaccurate - and on top of that, none of it should matter in the first place since this is a magic world where you can blow fire directly out of your mouth and survive fatal blows with a lump of condensed carbon and belief in the gods. If you want more discussion on how introducing ‘realism’ affects storytelling, check out this article.
“Flying creatures have lower constitution and hit die because they’re little baby birds that can’t survive!” No. Being a bird does not affect your health. Birds are not sickly creatures that can’t survive illness and plague. This falls into the same argument with the bones thing where it feels like such a major stretch, because there’s this idea that being able to fly should have extremely detrimental disadvantages to be balanced when it really doesn’t. On top of that, your hit dice aren’t determined by your race - they’re determined by your class, and you don’t see dragons and harpies keeling over because they can fly.
“Immediately take away the PC’s ability to fly until later level / cripple them!” This one is only bad if you don’t discuss it with the PC beforehand. Plenty of players may find it a very compelling part of their story that their flight needs to be sought out and restored in some way. That said, if you have no intention of giving it back to them or give some sort of line like ‘you are only allowed to play this race if your wings are unusable’, then it may be better to ban the race entirely instead of taking away it’s defining feature.
“Fine! I’ll just never let the PC take advantage of flying in game!” While it’s good to introduce a healthy amount of scenarios that can’t be solved with flight, shutting it down every single time can be majorly disappointing. Chances are your PC picked a flying race because they want to, you know, fly. Never giving them the chance or making it the biggest pain every encounter is jarringly transparent, and you should always give your PCs the chance to feel strong as much as you remind them of their fragility.
All the solutions above have the unifying factor of being overly controlling and, honestly, just plain removing a very fun element from the game. Sure, you always have to consider balance in the game, but considering how many disadvantages flying has on it’s own, introducing more over balances.
Don’t Give In to Frustration
When presented with a problem that requires a bit more work to get around, we, as DMs, can easily get overwhelmed and frustrated. We have so much we have to do to make the world fun and exciting for both us and our players that when something gives us more work, we can be inclined to strike it from the record or force it into a mold it doesn’t fit. This can cause us to lash out at players for just using an ability as intended, and while styles and interpretations differ, treating everyone with respect is universal.
Try not to treat the players succeeding as a personal attack. Allow players to enjoy power and find the happy medium between challenging them and letting them revel. Flight, in my opinion, is one of those topics so hotly debated not because it’s too powerful, but because it’s just another thing to worry about and that brings out the worst in people.
After reading all this, if you’re still convinced early flight is the bane of the game, then I would be open with your players and just remove the option entirely. I personally don’t like doing it myself, but that’s way better than giving them a crippled version. Additionally, plenty of DMs will simply be running settings where a flying character doesn’t make sense, and that is perfectly fine. Maintain open communication with your players, and don’t talk down to each other, and you’re on your way to a great play group.
