Is Treantmonk right or wrong about Mounted Combat?

[strangebloke]

"Featureless plain" is just a nasty way of saying "open field," which is most of the world outside of dungeons. For example, ten Ettins moving in formation towards a planned rendezvous with other monsters may not LITERALLY be in a featureless plain, but they're not near anything that makes the situation DIFFERENT from an open field either. Notably, they're not in a labyrinth that makes a melee opponent uncertain of their positioning and afraid of being encircled. There may be some cottages nearby, maybe a grove of trees, some fields of crops, some areas of difficult terrain (loose soil), maybe even a low stone wall between one field and a neighbor's field, but tactics that work in an open field will still work essentially unchanged in this scenario--describing them in detail is just irrelevant detail.

"Open field" is an Internet simplification, but if you want to show that it's an unfair simplification you need to prove that the Ettins will destroy Bob the mounted paladin in, say, a Wal-Mart parking lot if Wal-Mart was a solid rock instead of a hollow building.

If the Ettins can never emerge from their fortress without getting massacred, their influence on the surrounding area is basically null. You have to be able to fight without relying on fixed fortifications if you want to project power.

A hilly forest will make no difference to Bob on his Pegasus. It's tactically indistinguishable from an open field.

First of all, its perfectly possible for a monster to be relevant without leaving their lair (much) and I expressed two examples of this: An orc tribe that uses an Ettin as a guard beast inside their fortress and an Ettin who rolled up to a goblin camp and intimidated the chiefs into keeping him fed. Even in circumstances where they are solo monsters and they do need to travel, they're usually going to be doing so at night where their darkvision gives them an advantage over humans and they can't easily be attacked from great distances.

Secondly, good encounter design means using monsters in ways that are interesting and nontrivial to solve. Ettins might be trivial opponents if you come across them migrating to some rendezvous point, but that's never an encounter I'd intentionally design because bluntly that's an incredibly boring encounter. The players can either kite them to death trivially or they can't and its suddenly an awful adjusted CR 21 encounter. The players might create such an encounter for themselves as the result of careful planning, but that's something else entirely. Encounters should be designed to an extent with the abilities of the characters in mind.

I don't think that the ettins beat a guy on a pegasus, I just think that really min-maxed encounters like this aren't very persuasive.

Uh anyway, I don't disagree with anything substantive you've said about the rest of the thread. Ranged damage is comparable to melee damage but the former both allows for kiting and counters kiting. Giving characters access to really powerful movement options like free 120 foot movement centralizes the game around kiting to an even greater degree than it already, and mandating 3e-style atomic movement (move-then-attack or attack-then-move but never move-attack-move without tons of feat support) widens this divide even further.