[3.PF] What should a "non-wuxia" high-level fighter look like? [Archive]

The Vagabond

2015-07-12, 07:54 PM

I'm basically re-phrasing a question from the Paizo forums. What should a "Non-Wuxia" fighter look like? Not what it does look like, but what it should. I'll put the example fight from the forums onto here;

A party of high level (17th level) martials is taking on a high-level caster (18th level caster, plus enough minions to make it a CR 20 encounter).
The encounter is taking place in the caster's stronghold. Think, if you like, of Conan encountering the evil wizard at the top of his tower. This gives the caster the home field advantage plus all the prep time in the world.
The party consists of a fighter, a rogue, gunslinger or a skirmisher ranger, and a brawler. No spells among them. More importantly, no magical items duplicating spells either. This is about martials themselves being cool, not martials pretending to be casters.
The caster is RAW legal; no nerfing him. Simulacra of wish-granting outsiders, bags of marbles with symbols on them, teleporting to private demiplanes, all legitimate.
* The party is not allowed to do anything "wuxia," "weeaboo," "anime," or similar derogatory words.

.... but other than that, the party is not restricted in any way by the Pathfinder rules. The whole point of this experiment is to figure out what an awesome martial character looks like, feels like, and plays like. So if jumping 50' in the air is "wuxia,"or shooting bolts of lightning from your hands is "anime," you don't get to do that.

And, most importantly:

The party has to win, and win awesomely, so that everyone has a good time.

I'd like people to tell me how a truly exemplary but non-wuxia martial would win this fight,

Mechanics doesn't matter, just describe the type of stuff you can see happen against a high level ranger.

As for the definition of what's non-wuxia, I'd define it as one of the following:

"If you'd believe Jackie Chan doing it."
Can be done without CGI or Wirework (Not that it would be practical, just that it can be done)
You could see Conan the Barbarian do it.
You'd believe Captain America (MCU, not comics) could do it.

Milo v3

2015-07-12, 08:07 PM

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the following things also count as "wuxia" for the purpose of this discussion, so people don't mention them to just argue against over the top super powerful things in fantasy can be celtic without being wuxia:

Mythic
Celtic
Anime
Wuxia

It's the feel that's important in this discussion, not the actual specific word wuxia.

ExLibrisMortis

2015-07-12, 08:15 PM

I'm of the opinion that magic is power, and not using it is like not using gunpowder and electricity in modern warfare. That said, there are several options here.

One, the high-level fighters all die, or become the magician's minions, or otherwise incapable of scratching the mage. It's not fun to play, it's not heroic, but that's what fighters who don't duplicate mind blank look like in a fight.

Two, the fighters are all dragons, demons, golems or similar. They are naturally resistant to magic, and they're naturally strong enough to bring down the room on top of the mage. The mage is in trouble, though of course, spells can do nasty things without ever touching anyone directly. In this fight, I'd expect the fighters to use their brute strength to crush the mage as soon as possible, possibly simply attacking the tower at night and collapsing it whole in the surprise round. If the mage ever gets a quiet moment to cast the right spell (teleport is one), the fighters are days behind again. Of course, contingency is still practically undefeatable.

Three, the fighters are all gishes - they know magic, even if it's nothing compared to the mage, and they can - to a certain extent - counter and avoid common spells. They're not wuxia, but they're definitely not mundane either. This is my preferred answer, but I don't think that's what you were asking for.

Extra Anchovies

2015-07-12, 08:21 PM

With the given information, I'm in total agreement with ExLibrisMortis. You can't be a high-level (15-20) combatant without having either some sort of magic or being a monster (likely one with piles of special attacks and defenses).

Mythic
Celtic

For clarity's sake, what are some defining traits of these two? I get anime and wuxia, and have a suspicion that Mythic refers to Greek and Roman epic heroes, but I'm not entirely sure and have no idea what is meant here by Celtic.

Milo v3

2015-07-12, 08:28 PM

For clarity's sake, what are some defining traits of these two? I get anime and wuxia, and have a suspicion that Mythic refers to Greek and Roman epic heroes, but I'm not entirely sure and have no idea what is meant here by Celtic.

Mythic refers to the over the top "anime-esque" according to some powers some demi-gods and gods have in various myths from Greek/Roman/Indian. This is because demi-gods and gods count as divine and magical in nature, so aren't allowed.

Celtic is because it is like... the most over the top ridiculous awesome myths. I mean, they use giant rainbow swords and slice mountains and when they're pissed off they get super hot like in a shonen anime so you have to pour water on them. :smallbiggrin:

Also, for the record, I agree with AMExLibrisMortis. I personally think all classes should have a non-mundane power source so they can do magical things at high level and remain relevant.

Rubik

2015-07-12, 08:32 PM

Fighters have one thing they can do at higher levels without magic, magic items, or magical support: hit stuff. That's pretty much it. It's the same thing they've been doing since level one; they've just gotten better at it. Unfortunately, most of what they go up against will be comparatively better than them than they were at level 1, so unless their builds are highly optimized, they'll actually be worse in proportion to their enemies, even if said enemies don't have magic of their own. Higher Str and Con, better special abilities, larger size, MUCH larger reach, and so on, which puts the kibosh on half of the tactics that actually worked at level 1.

In short, a wholly mundane party of unoptimized mundanes at level 20 without any magic probably didn't get to 20 without DM coddling, since most monsters at their level will curbstomp them.

Renen

2015-07-12, 08:39 PM

You allow simulacrum of wish granting outsiders. Yeh, the party isn't winning. Because if they come close to doing so, a number of contingencies go off, and wizard is back at full HP.

Also, the part of the quote that mentions derogatory words... I do think the only one that qualifies as such is weaboo

Red Rubber Band

2015-07-12, 08:49 PM

Considering we're trying to run it as a movie type explanation I'm thinking the wizard will be throwing around a lot of evocation and summons. I just don't see these guys winning, even cinematically, without some kind of magical power.

Most of this could be called out as feeling too anime, but that'll be the other ultimate problem with this. Subjectivity.

So based on the above:
I'd expect the gunslinger to go full Matrix. Hail of bullets, a cape (or trenchcoat :smalltongue:) which somehow protects them from most physical and magical attacks, and the crazy quick reloads.
The rogue. I've read plenty of books with shadow step style characters that did not feel anime, but again it's all based on opinion. I guess it could be the reflexes of a mongoose type rogue dodging, twisting, and evading everything. But... shadows :smallcool:
The fighter is cutting through summons and spells, carving a path through the hordes of minions, spells bouncing off their skin. Probably dipped Barbarian at some point so they Hulk out halfway through the battle.
Skirmisher ranger... obvious archetype is Legolas. Peppers the wizard with enough arrows to throw off their aim, while dodging behind pillars and point blank shooting things in the face. Looks for the higher ground and supports the fighter and brawler from above.
And lastly the brawler. Styled after MGS Big Boss? Using summons as shields and weapons the brawler is lost amidst the sea of mooks. The only way you can tell where they are is the odd generic baddie being tossed up in the air, and the sounds of crunches and breaks that inevitably surround them in battle.

Renen

2015-07-12, 08:54 PM

One specific example of a rogue type character from books I know, would be the protagonist of the Night Angel trilogy. He had an intelligent item that literally ate all the magic that was directed at him, and provided immortality. Maaaaaybe that could give a sliver of a chance.

The Vagabond

2015-07-12, 08:56 PM

squiggit

2015-07-12, 09:02 PM

The fundamental problem I think is that what's considered "wuxia" or "anime" is entirely arbitrary and all encompassing because they're such broad terms.

Like in threads on the paizo forums I've seen people legitimately argue that characters like Beowulf, Roland and Cu Chulainn are all "too anime". How do you even reconcile that?

Renen

2015-07-12, 09:02 PM

That's the thing- I'm not talking about what they can do, I'm talking about what they SHOULD be able to do. Abilities they should get to be able to fight that Wizard up there. Things that grant them narrative ability.

NOTHING short of full casting or a **** load of magic items will make their victory believable. You are saying they have no super special abilities, so a wizard can win as easily as casting one of many "force cage" type of effects. You know... Ones that need teleport action to escape

Red Fel

2015-07-12, 09:06 PM

Here's how I see it. If we're dealing with "non-wuxia" Fighters - that is, Fighters who are utterly mundane, just terribly good at it - then we should deal with non-wuxia combat results. In other words, in a wuxia setting, people swing blades at each other all the time, and get minor cuts or scrapes, or parry outrageously, rather than what really happens - namely, you get a blade in your gut and bleed out on the floor.

So here's what I see your utterly mundane high-level Fighter looking like in an encounter with a high-level enemy caster. I've put it in spoilers, because it's part answer, part rant.

Get somewhat thrashed. It's inevitable; you're a non-caster going up against a caster. Sit there and take the beating. Bluff. One of the uses of Bluff is "feign harmlessness." You just got your butt handed to you by the caster, it shouldn't be too hard to look pathetic. Catch the bastard monologuing. You're looking at a big bad caster with lots of minions who just owned a team of martials. You know he'll be on an ego trip, and with that many minions, you know he's going to want to show off. While he's monologuing, roll to cram a weapon down his throat. I don't mean roll to attack. I mean ask the DM the DC to ram your weapon down his throat. You are a high-level Fighter. If you can't straight-up murder somebody by forcibly introducing a piece of sharpened steel into their soft, meaty insides, you have no business in your chosen career; go home and sell horse-drawn carriages. You should be able, being utterly mundane, to simply take your weapon and rip a guy open with it. I'm not asking for attack rolls, or tricks, or maneuvers, or anything that can be countered; irrespective of spells, or mage armor, or shape changing, a mundane sword driven straight into a chatty BBEG's open mouth should be entirely lethal.
That's how I see a non-wuxia Fighter doing this. And if the DM has an issue with there being a roll to make someone swallow your non-metaphorical sword, maybe he should just lighten up on the "no weeaboo crap" nonsense and let the game be played as written.
Short version: I take issue with DMs who want to limit what martials can do on the basis of wanting to exclude "wuxia" or "anime" stuff. Performing over-the-top physical acts is the only refuge left to the pathetically normal martial in a world of wizards, demons, and dragons. Stop taking away their nice things.

Renen

2015-07-12, 09:12 PM

OldTrees1

2015-07-12, 09:16 PM

Question: Permission to nerf the caster back to Tier 3 first? Tier 1 combat is rather uninteresting TO in my opinion.

Presuming this is allowed then I see the high level generalist warrior (specialist warriors would be even better at some of these things but worse at others) as:

A being of remarkable resilience.
Through martial prowess and reflexes he is able to avoid or block most blows including rays and insubstantial threats. Even when hit the warrior knows how to diffuse most of the effect away from themselves. What is left affecting them they deal with through their iron will and fortitude(which would be more than mere saving throws of course). The minor bruising they sustain(by diffusing what would have been deadly wounds) is repaired relatively quickly by their great constitution.

A being of endless reach.
The warrior has not yet encountered an obstacle that they could not name at least 2 ways to traverse. Through a balanced application of their great strength and agility they can roam the battlefield quickly. Some might zip around the obstacle(say a Wall of Force), others would exploit its holes, still others would just break their way through. But mobility is not the limit of their reach. They are a master of both melee and ranged warfare. Just as obstacles are little trouble for them such are limited expedience for their weaponry. Through unerring accuracy, exploiting weakness, and sheer force their attacks are not easily blocked. (I don't have a general mundane solution to Planar Travel yet)

A being of perfect readiness.
While the mage and priest have been working on their careful craft that requires patience, the warrior has been honing their own craft. By pressing action into reflexes and developing great intuition the warrior reacts faster and faster than their companions. They start to progress towards the twin ideals of immediate reaction and constant action.

A being of knowledgeable destruction.
How many kinds of wounds can a sword inflict? A seemingly easy question with an equally easy apparent answer. However that is seeming and nothing more. A warrior has spent time pondering, and pondering, and pondering some more. As time goes on they notice the number they can count just keeps increasing. A slash to cause bleeding here, a thrust to immobilize a golem there, the twisting cut that terrifies a vampire, ... The list just keeps increasing and the warrior starts to wonder if they will still be adding new kinds the day they die.

So to give a general answer:
The warrior quickly runs through/around the obstacles thus clearing a path for the party to follow(not that the rest of the party would need it). As they do so they are resilient in the face of the harrying attacks and even have time to provide covering fire for the rest of the party(not that the rest of the party would need it either). The BBEG may retreat if they are quick enough(readied action can hinder casting otherwise) but their stronghold has fallen and the day is saved for now.

Red Fel

2015-07-12, 09:18 PM

But remember how he said there are no holding back for the wizard (aka Tippy wizard).
So if the fighter gets within 5ft, multiple contingencies go off. Oh, and he is also immune to all lethal and nonetheless damage. The sword won't even do anything, might make it hard to breathe, but he doesn't need to breathe either, he got a spell for that.

Oh, and thanks to divinations, he knew the fighter would do this a week in advance.

Oh, and this isn't the wizard, it's an astral projection of an aleax - ice assassin of him.

Sword down a throat.

This isn't somebody who's going to be stopped by having acid thrown in his face, or lasers fired at him, or fire. This isn't somebody who gives up just because the enemy is an alien, or a demigod, or a construct, or indestructible. This is Rambo. This is Conan. This is a guy who has decided to introduce steel to your inner workings.

And this guy is going to kill you with a sword down the throat.

No anime. No wire-fu or leaping through the air. No conjuring fire or vacuums with a swing of the weapon. No flashing lights or glowing spirits or organs playing in the background.

Just a sword. And a throat. And maybe a primal roar for good measure.

And then the credits.

Extra Anchovies

2015-07-12, 09:19 PM

That's the thing- I'm not talking about what they can do, I'm talking about what they SHOULD be able to do. Abilities they should get to be able to fight that Wizard up there. Things that grant them narrative ability.

Well. The things that high-level martial characters should be able to do is, well, everything you've told us to not mention. Wuxia, anime, Celtic/Greek/Indian mythology. A 20th-level fighter should be able to break rainbows in half with their bare hands and then dual-wield the parts of the rainbow.

ETA: Dual-wield the rainbow. Taste the rainbow.

Do they need to be magical to do so? No, they don't. A 20th-level fighter should just have a bunch of extraordinary abilities that are, truly, extraordinary. They should be able to fly because they're just that strong (think the Hulk, and early Thor/Superman), or because they're agile enough to literally walk on air. They should be able to take their sword and cut a hole in the world that leads to another plane because they're just that good with a blade. That sort of thing.

Renen

2015-07-12, 09:22 PM

What should a "non-wuxia" high-level fighter look like?

Something like this
http://altemagames.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/never-dead-death-battle-knights-fantasy-art-810546-e1400033817214.jpg

Rubik

2015-07-12, 09:25 PM

That's the thing- I'm not talking about what they can do, I'm talking about what they SHOULD be able to do. Abilities they should get to be able to fight that Wizard up there. Things that grant them narrative ability.Problem is, wuxia is exactly the kind of thing that mundanes will need to be able to do in order to keep up with even a low-optimization wizard. It's the kind of thing that legendary epic mythological heroes throughout the world have done since people started telling stories.

So you cannot say "no wuxia," because without that, all you've got is "I hit it," and that will lead to a very messy death, if you're lucky. If you aren't, enjoy eternity as a wizard's mind-slave.

Milo v3

2015-07-12, 09:27 PM

Sword down a throat.

This isn't somebody who's going to be stopped by having acid thrown in his face, or lasers fired at him, or fire. This isn't somebody who gives up just because the enemy is an alien, or a demigod, or a construct, or indestructible. This is Rambo. This is Conan. This is a guy who has decided to introduce steel to your inner workings.

And this guy is going to kill you with a sword down the throat.

No anime. No wire-fu or leaping through the air. No conjuring fire or vacuums with a swing of the weapon. No flashing lights or glowing spirits or organs playing in the background.

Just a sword. And a throat. And maybe a primal roar for good measure.

And then the credits.

But you didn't kill him. You just killed a minion who looked like him made of ice. He's on his own plane of existance, and the rules say you can't use magic.... it's... not exactly fair.

Karnith

2015-07-12, 09:29 PM

Like in threads on the paizo forums I've seen people legitimately argue that characters like Beowulf, Roland and Cu Chulainn are all "too anime". How do you even reconcile that?
Well, on that last one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGz42vpeGKk&t=4m41s)... (http://typemoon.wikia.com/wiki/Lancer_%28Fate/stay_night%29)
Cu Chulainn is the one in blue
But, more seriously, with the restrictions present in the OP, I don't believe there is a credible way that martial characters could pose a threat to high-level/high-op D&D/PF casters (at least, not through their martial abilities alone - as noted above, subterfuge could conceivably work). You'd need the ability to do more than what actual human beings are capable of - to move at superhuman speeds, to dodge or block (the magical equivalents of) bullets, to shrug off Hails of Stone and Orbs to the face, to cut through Mage Armor and Prismatic Spheres, to reach through the planes and grab the Wizard out of his demiplane, and so on.

Extra Anchovies

2015-07-12, 09:31 PM

But you didn't kill him. You just killed a minion who looked like him made of ice. He's on his own plane of existance, and the rules say you can't use magic.... it's... not exactly fair.

Alright then. Non-wuxia fighters will all have died by the high levels, because they can't cast Ice Assassin etc.

Happy? Probably not, because that doesn't contribute to a fun and balanced game. Fighters need to casually break laws of reality (and of magic) to at least somewhat keep up at high levels of play.

Renen

2015-07-12, 09:32 PM

Well, on that last one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGz42vpeGKk&t=4m41s)... (http://typemoon.wikia.com/wiki/Lancer_%28Fate/stay_night%29)
Cu Chulainn is the one in blue

And Beowulfs sword, when used by the other guy in the video (though at a different point in time) and turned into a projectile created an explosion similar to a tactical missile.

Red Fel

2015-07-12, 09:33 PM

Oh, and this isn't the wizard, it's an astral projection of an aleax - ice assassin of him.

But you didn't kill him. You just killed a minion who looked like him made of ice. He's on his own plane of existance, and the rules say you can't use magic.... it's... not exactly fair.

Hold on a second, because this is a case of goalpost-moving.

I'm willing to accept that the Wizard has a dozen contingencies, is buffed to the dentures, and probably has an extra life stuffed somewhere in his robes. But the prompt explicitly says that the PCs are taking on a high-level caster. And his minions, true, but the caster himself. Sure, they could be taking on the caster and several omnipotent copies of him. But ultimately, according to the prompt, the caster is present. Otherwise this entire scenario is rendered moot by the statement "Sorry, hero, but your caster is in another fortified keep." If he was never even present to begin with, then it becomes literally impossible for the PCs there to defeat him, because he's not there to be defeated.

So we must assume that the caster is there, in person, in order for the scenario to even mean anything. And if he's there, he can be killed.

With a sword.

You know where I'm going with that.

Milo v3

2015-07-12, 09:35 PM

Hold on a second, because this is a case of goalpost-moving.
Actually the OP says: "The caster is RAW legal; no nerfing him. Simulacra of wish-granting outsiders, bags of marbles with symbols on them, teleporting to private demiplanes, all legitimate." The goalposts are intentionally unfair.

Renen

2015-07-12, 09:40 PM

Hold on a second, because this is a case of goalpost-moving.

I'm willing to accept that the Wizard has a dozen contingencies, is buffed to the dentures, and probably has an extra life stuffed somewhere in his robes. But the prompt explicitly says that the PCs are taking on a high-level caster. And his minions, true, but the caster himself. Sure, they could be taking on the caster and several omnipotent copies of him. But ultimately, according to the prompt, the caster is present. Otherwise this entire scenario is rendered moot by the statement "Sorry, hero, but your caster is in another fortified keep." If he was never even present to begin with, then it becomes literally impossible for the PCs there to defeat him, because he's not there to be defeated.

So we must assume that the caster is there, in person, in order for the scenario to even mean anything. And if he's there, he can be killed.

With a sword.

You know where I'm going with that.

OK. Without wuxia all u got is hp damage.
The wizards buffs make him immune to all hp damage. He also cant be strangled,drowned, grappled, etc.

Oh hey I know! The wizard only has 1 buff: he is ethereal.
There! Try and touch him without any thing that's magical.

OldTrees1

2015-07-12, 09:41 PM

So we must assume that the caster is there, in person, in order for the scenario to even mean anything. And if he's there, he can be killed.

With a sword.

You know where I'm going with that.

Yep the caster is there, in person.

A Tier 1 caster might be difficult to kill though due to certain TO tricks on the caster's body. The sword down the throat should(talking ought not is) bypass most/all of those.

I don't think you need to sneak in either. One of the readied actions of a high level fighter should be enough to disrupt an attempt to Teleport away(via a nice cut perhaps?).

Oh hey I know! The wizard only has 1 buff: he is ethereal.
There! Try and touch him without any thing that's magical.

If you meant: The wizard is on another plane than the stronghold, then that is either the Wizard retreating(started without the buff) or the Wizard not being at the stronghold.

If you meant: The stronghold is on the ethereal plane, then the high level fighter must also be on the ethereal plane already.

So while planar barriers are a good means of retreat, the ethereal plane is not an insurmountable obstacle.

Extra Anchovies

2015-07-12, 09:42 PM

Actually the OP says: "The caster is RAW legal; no nerfing him. Simulacra of wish-granting outsiders, bags of marbles with symbols on them, teleporting to private demiplanes, all legitimate." The goalposts are intentionally unfair.

Then the fighter has to play unfairly too. The fighter pierces the heart of the Ice Assassin of the BBEG spellcaster, bypassing the clone's magical defenses, and his blow is so powerful that the BBEG spellcaster feels it too - and it hurts.

The only way for fighters to keep up with casters is to be able to ignore the caster's magic or turn it to their advantage. You're hiding in your demiplane? Fine. I'll strike the edge of the demiplane with my sword and shatter its boundaries, destroying the demiplane and shunting its contents to the Astral, where we'll fight on a more even footing.

Basically, high-level fighters need an ability that lets them do literally whatever they want as long as they can tie it back to being good at fighting. With a permissive and fair DM, that would work just fine.

Renen

2015-07-12, 09:42 PM

But how do you stick a sword there if he is ethereal?

Red Fel

2015-07-12, 09:43 PM

Actually the OP says: "The caster is RAW legal; no nerfing him. Simulacra of wish-granting outsiders, bags of marbles with symbols on them, teleporting to private demiplanes, all legitimate." The goalposts are intentionally unfair.

Unfair, but explicit. The caster is present. The scenario presumes that much. He can have every unfair advantage, but the scenario necessarily assumes that he is present, at least at some point. He can leave, he can summon minions, he can create an ice assassin in his image, but at some point, the scenario presumes that he is present.

But how do you stick a sword there if he is ethereal?

Easily. He's ethereal.

The better question is, How does the caster take it out if he's ethereal?

Extra Anchovies

2015-07-12, 09:44 PM

But how do you stick a sword there if he is ethereal?

Very forcefully, that's how. We can cut through planes with our sword, remember? When we swing our weapon, it hits everything on our own plane and on any other planes that occupy the same space.

Of course, the issue with a do-whatever-you-want ability is that it turns the game more towards free-form roleplaying, but high-level play can get sorta like that anyways when casters are involved.

Renen

2015-07-12, 09:47 PM

Unfair, but explicit. The caster is present. The scenario presumes that much. He can have every unfair advantage, but the scenario necessarily assumes that he is present, at least at some point. He can leave, he can summon minions, he can create an ice assassin in his image, but at some point, the scenario presumes that he is present.

Easily. He's ethereal.

The better question is, How does the caster take it out if he's ethereal?

But remember that the fighter has to not have any magic. So he can't be ethereal. His sword can't be brilliant energy either.

Sure, you can free Form the game, but that isn't a question for these boards, freeforming isn't something we can help with all that much...

Red Rubber Band

2015-07-12, 09:49 PM

The drill sword that pierces the heavens demiplanes sounds way too anime for me :smalltongue:

But it does seem to be the only way you'll touch the untouchable.

Edit: I accidently didn't English.

OldTrees1

2015-07-12, 09:50 PM

But remember that the fighter has to not have any magic. So he can't be ethereal. His sword can't be brilliant energy either.

Sure, you can free Form the game, but that isn't a question for these boards, freeforming isn't something we can help with all that much...

Question: What happens when the Fighter walks to the Ethereal plane? They can do that by RAW without any spells (and this thread isn't limiting Fighters to RAW).

Milo v3

2015-07-12, 09:51 PM

Question: What happens when the Fighter walks to the Ethereal plane? They can do that by RAW without any spells.

I'm honestly curious how this works.

Red Fel

2015-07-12, 09:51 PM

But remember that the fighter has to not have any magic. So he can't be ethereal. His sword can't be brilliant energy either.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. In your scenario, the caster is ethereal. So the sword simply phases right through him. That's fine. That means the Fighter can put his sword directly into the caster's insides without any resistance - no flesh, no muscle, no bone. Right in. Deals no damage, but it's there.

Caster can try to move, of course. But this is a Fighter. He's trained. He reacts well. And he's fast. He moves with him. Sword stays in place.

At some point, the caster will no longer be ethereal. Then, what happens is more or less exactly what you'd expect.

Milo v3

2015-07-12, 09:53 PM

Perhaps I wasn't clear. In your scenario, the caster is ethereal. So the sword simply phases right through him. That's fine. That means the Fighter can put his sword directly into the caster's insides without any resistance - no flesh, no muscle, no bone. Right in. Deals no damage, but it's there.

Caster can try to move, of course. But this is a Fighter. He's trained. He reacts well. And he's fast. He moves with him. Sword stays in place.

At some point, the caster will no longer be ethereal. Then, what happens is more or less exactly what you'd expect.

Planar binds outsiders with at-will planeshift and decent spellcasting while on ethereal, tells them to kill the fighter. Repeat until fighter is dead.

OldTrees1

2015-07-12, 09:58 PM

I'm honestly curious how this works.

Manuel of the Planes. There are natural portals (many different kinds) between planes. While the Fighter might have to climb a mountain, fall through the plane of Air, and wander the Astral plane before finding a color pool for the Ethereal plane, there is a way to walk.

However I think it would take divination magic to find the path to walk to a private demiplane (though by RAW there is at least 1 walkable path).

Still, all of that walking is done prior to the opening post as per the rules of the opening post(the fighter, BBEG, and BBEG's stronghold are all on the same plane at T=0)

Milo v3

2015-07-12, 10:01 PM

Manuel of the Planes. There are natural portals (many different kinds) between planes. While the Fighter might have to climb a mountain, fall through the plane of Air, and wander the Astral plane before finding a color pool for the Ethereal plane, there is a way to walk.

However I think it would take divination magic to find the path to walk to a private demiplane (though by RAW there is at least 1 walkable path).

I was going to say that doesn't apply to PF, but I just noticed this thread is 3.PF. Touché.

Renen

2015-07-12, 10:02 PM

Question: What happens when the Fighter walks to the Ethereal plane? They can do that by RAW without any spells (and this thread isn't limiting Fighters to RAW).

If you arent limiting fighters to raw, then the fighter takes out a big red button with "I WIN" written on it, and presses it. Seriously, if you arent going by the rules, why even bother, why not just free Form everything.

Manuel of the Planes. There are natural portals (many different kinds) between planes. While the Fighter might have to climb a mountain, fall through the plane of Air, and wander the Astral plane before finding a color pool for the Ethereal plane, there is a way to walk.

However I think it would take divination magic to find the path to walk to a private demiplane (though by RAW there is at least 1 walkable path).

Still, all of that walking is done prior to the opening post as per the rules of the opening post(the fighter, BBEG, and BBEG's stronghold are all on the same plane at T=0)

Wizard casts celerity, then plane shifts to the material. The fighter has to start walking again, while wizard follows his movements on material and pelts him with spells that work into the Ethereal plane.

Rubik

2015-07-12, 10:03 PM

Perhaps I wasn't clear. In your scenario, the caster is ethereal. So the sword simply phases right through him. That's fine. That means the Fighter can put his sword directly into the caster's insides without any resistance - no flesh, no muscle, no bone. Right in. Deals no damage, but it's there.

Caster can try to move, of course. But this is a Fighter. He's trained. He reacts well. And he's fast. He moves with him. Sword stays in place.

At some point, the caster will no longer be ethereal. Then, what happens is more or less exactly what you'd expect.*Peers at Red Fel suspiciously*

That sounds awwwfully anime, to me.

Endarire

2015-07-12, 10:04 PM

The Wizard tells reality to shut up and sit down. Nothing can stop that short of similarly breaking 'real world' limits.

At its heart, D&D (and derivative games) is a game about magic: Magic items, magic spells, magic creatures, and the ramifications of gaining, using, and losing magic.

RolkFlameraven

2015-07-12, 10:04 PM

Seeing as this seems to be more about what they 'should' be able to do, and not what the 'can' do by the rules...

Well doesn't that mean that the party is Batman/Caption America, Green Arrow/Hawkeye, Lady Shiva/Black Widow, Bane/Hulk VS a 20th level D&D wizard?

And those are only 'non-anime' because they are from western comics and the anime versions are ever crazier.

It would take 'mundanes' at the level of these to have a chance in hell and most of that chance is going to come out of Cap's shield being an artifact, Batman's belt, Green Arrow/Hawkeye's quiver having some crazy 'spell like' item in it, or Hulk being Hulk and damn close to being immune to magic.

It takes magic items of power, like Cap's shield, or being made of SU/EX like the Hulk to have a chance in this kind of fight, and that could well be getting a tad too close to this idea of 'Wuxia'.

OldTrees1

2015-07-12, 10:05 PM

If you arent limiting fighters to raw, then the fighter takes out a big red button with "I WIN" written on it, and presses it. Seriously, if you arent going by the rules, why even bother, why not just free Form everything.

I read the opening post and the post where the opening poster reiterated the topic. So why ask that question? You are on the wrong side of the Is/Ought divide, please rejoin the OP's conversation.

Wizard casts celerity, then plane shifts to the material. The fighter has to start walking again, while wizard follows his movements on material and pelts him with spells that work into the Ethereal plane.

Oh, I already conceded that Planar Travel is a valid way(for now) for the Wizard to retreat when the Fighter is confined to non-wuxia despite not being confined to current RAW.

Taelas

2015-07-12, 10:07 PM

Renen

2015-07-12, 10:07 PM

So... The OP wants help free forming, and creating plot armor for normal humans to beat what is basically a God? Really, if you are free forming, you would do much much better in the moment than discussing it here.

What a fighter SHOULD be is dead.
Because even being immune to every spell ever, will still make you unable to ("realistically") :
1) Follow a teleport
2) Survive after having a mudslide dropped on you, and then mud to rock being cast
3) Walk out of a force cage
4) Deal with Ice Assassins on yourself, that keep on coming at you.
5) etc.

OldTrees1

2015-07-12, 10:11 PM

So... The OP wants help free forming, and creating plot armor for normal humans to beat what is basically a God? Really, if you are free forming, you would do much much better in the moment than discussing it here.

Strawman: Not being bound to current RAW is not the same as free forming. For evidence please look at the homebrewed subforum.

What a fighter SHOULD be is dead.
Because even being immune to every spell ever, will still make you unable to ("realistically") :
1) Follow a teleport
2) Survive after having a mudslide dropped on you, and then mud to rock being cast
3) Walk out of a force cage
4) Deal with Ice Assassins on yourself, that keep on coming at you.
5) etc.
1) Fair point
2) High level non-wuxia
3) High level non-wuxia
4) Fair point about the Ice Assassin spell

Red Fel

2015-07-12, 10:14 PM

So... The OP wants help free forming, and creating plot armor for normal humans to beat what is basically a God? Really, if you are free forming, you would do much much better in the moment than discussing it here.

Not free-forming. Visualizing. (And stop using "free forming" like it's a four-letter word.) The OP is trying to visualize what, in a perfect world where martials could stand against casters without being "anime," a high-level Fighter would look like.

What a fighter SHOULD be is dead.
Because even being immune to every spell ever, will still make you unable to ("realistically") :
1) Follow a teleport
2) Survive after having a mudslide dropped on you, and then mud to rock being cast
3) Walk out of a force cage
4) Deal with Ice Assassins on yourself, that keep on coming at you.
5) etc.

Well, yeah. At that point, the scenario has become, "You're going to lose. Now, assuming that you will lose, tell me how you'll win." And the answer to that is, "I won't." That's not terribly productive, so let's avoid that an indulge in some whimsy, hm?

Oh, and before I forget:

*Peers at Red Fel suspiciously*

That sounds awwwfully anime, to me.

Really? Huh. I mean, I don't picture it as anime. I picture it as the equivalent of a guy holding a weapon in place. Except "in place" here means "inside of the incorporeal image of a person, until such time as he becomes corporeal." That strikes me as fairly mundane, except for the "incorporeal image of a person" part, but hey, the caster gets to be as anime as he wants, doesn't he?

ShaneMRoth

2015-07-12, 10:16 PM

While it is borderline wuxia, I would imagine it would look a lot like 300 or the Spartacus tv series.

Very cinematic... just a little bit of this side of wuxia...

Renen

2015-07-12, 10:17 PM

I'd agree with 3 maybe not being it, but breaking through a few feet of rock with no leverage is pretty mythical, you know, the whole "Hey look, the hero got buried in rock, a D then just walked out like it's no problem"

The ONE way I see a fighter winning, and wizard not being needed is if wizard nerds himself. Meaning g the fighter convinces the wizard to engage in some contest where they both have a roughly equal chance of winning. And wizard agrees because... U dunno... The McGuffin he has requires powering up and engaging in a fair contest allows for the power up to happen?

Taelas

2015-07-12, 10:17 PM

So... The OP wants help free forming, and creating plot armor for normal humans to beat what is basically a God? Really, if you are free forming, you would do much much better in the moment than discussing it here.

What a fighter SHOULD be is dead.
Because even being immune to every spell ever, will still make you unable to ("realistically") :
1) Follow a teleport
2) Survive after having a mudslide dropped on you, and then mud to rock being cast
3) Walk out of a force cage
4) Deal with Ice Assassins on yourself, that keep on coming at you.
5) etc.

That's not it. The OP wants to know what a ("non-wuxia") Fighter that is part of a team that takes out a RAW-compliant highly-optimized wizard should be. It is not free-forming -- there is no actual game situation. Rather, the OP is asking for input as to how the Fighter should be buffed to be able to do it, but without becoming too "wuxia".

Personally, I'd use Guts from Berserk as an example -- despite him being from a manga/anime. Guts is what I'd want my high-level Fighter to be like.

Rubik

2015-07-12, 10:21 PM

Really? Huh. I mean, I don't picture it as anime. I picture it as the equivalent of a guy holding a weapon in place. Except "in place" here means "inside of the incorporeal image of a person, until such time as he becomes corporeal." That strikes me as fairly mundane, except for the "incorporeal image of a person" part, but hey, the caster gets to be as anime as he wants, doesn't he?Ethereal creatures are invisible, intangible, and absolutely silent. So he can somehow sense something on an entirely different plane of existence and cut through the veil that separates reality from other realities?

This kind of thing is definitely anime. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lALszjsnsvI)

OldTrees1

2015-07-12, 10:22 PM

I'd agree with 3 maybe not being it, but breaking through a few feet of rock with no leverage is pretty mythical, you know, the whole "Hey look, the hero got buried in rock, a D then just walked out like it's no problem"

You presume the fighter would do nothing during that setup.
Step 1: Get closer to an edge to reduce the eventual wall.
Step 2: Make yourself larger so that you will have more space when it is rock(lessons like this are taught IRL for breaking ropes)
Step 3: Use your space to start breaking your way out. This is where the high level part would come in since strong real life individuals(low level) can begin but not finish breaking out of a coffin IIRC(Mythbusters).

Extra Anchovies

2015-07-12, 10:24 PM

I'd agree with 3 maybe not being it, but breaking through a few feet of rock with no leverage is pretty mythical, you know, the whole "Hey look, the hero got buried in rock, a D then just walked out like it's no problem"

So, um, you want the fighter to be able to stand up against the wizard but also want the fighter to be realistic? You want to make a realistic class that can stand up against the most non-realistic class of them all? That's not going to be possible. Fighters need to be able to bend reality through sheer will and muscle to be able to keep up with casters.

The fact of the matter is that the fighter can't go toe to toe with the Wizard and stand any sort of a chance without being anime, or mythic, or celtic, or wuxia, or whatever other name you want to give to a set of abilities that let the fighter go far above and beyond anything that's even remotely possible in a normal world.

Renen

2015-07-12, 10:24 PM

I always imagine the mud being very close to quicksand. So if you get buried in a mud spell (don't remember name) no matter how you try to make space, the mud just flows all around you, and perfectly hugs your body. It's not like a landslide where the earth might be in clumps which aren't more liquid.

Renen

2015-07-12, 10:27 PM

So, um, you want the fighter to be able to stand up against the wizard but also want the fighter to be realistic?

Yes. To atleast some degree. Because if it's not anime, wuxia or mythical, then damn, you don't really have all that many "extraordinary powers".

And I say yes because even though I agree with the whole" fighter gonna need to bend reality" thing, the OP said no wuxia anime or mythic. Which in my mind eliminates all the fancy "super" stuff.

OldTrees1

2015-07-12, 10:29 PM

So, um, you want the fighter to be able to stand up against the wizard but also want the fighter to be realistic? You want to make a realistic class that can stand up against the most non-realistic class of them all? That's not going to be possible. Fighters need to be able to bend reality through sheer will and muscle to be able to keep up with casters.

I was wondering what you thought of my attempt at a my attempt to detail a non-wuxia high level fighter (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=19525056&postcount=16) earlier in this thread. Sure it is not realistic(because IRL is low level) but I do think it does not break verisimilitude nor break out of non-wuxia. It might be a starting point for a high level fighter(which probably would have to be wuxia to cover the final gaps).

I always imagine the mud being very close to quicksand. So if you get buried in a mud spell (don't remember name) no matter how you try to make space, the mud just flows all around you, and perfectly hugs your body. It's not like a landslide where the earth might be in clumps which aren't more liquid.

Sorry for being too vague.
Constrict/Relax muscles.
Deep Breath/Breathe out.
Notice that the volume and shape of your body changes with these actions.

Extra Anchovies

2015-07-12, 10:32 PM

I was wondering what you thought of my attempt at a my attempt to detail a non-wuxia high level fighter (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=19525056&postcount=16) earlier in this thread. Sure it is not realistic(because IRL is low level) but I do think it does not break verisimilitude nor break out of non-wuxia. It might be a starting point for a high level fighter(which probably would have to be wuxia to cover the final gaps).

Yeah, that does look pretty good (I missed it the first time around because this is a fast-moving thread. Some people would think that it's "mythic", though, which is why listing off a bunch of general, ambiguous terms and then saying "give me a fighter who isn't any of these and who can beat casters" is not a good start to a reasonable discussion. It's going to devolve into a discussion of what is or is not "wuxia" or "celtic", and it's sort of doing that already.

Milo v3

2015-07-12, 10:34 PM

Dienekes

2015-07-12, 10:34 PM

Well here's the thing, if you take away all the high powered wuxia stuff, like jumping a mile or whatever other shenanigans you have. If you still want them to deal with godlike threats, what you're left with is characters like Captain America and Batman. They are super human, but not to the same extreme. And they have faced and beaten gods before.

But the thing is, they beat gods in a very specific way that does not really mesh well with D&D as it's written.

First off Cap and Batman are insanely strong willed. To the point they have a Will Save that is essentially: No. This unsurpassed will also lets them push their body to the point that when they should die, such as by being zapped by a plague virus they can still keep going long after a normal person would have died.

In addition they can live through explosions and the like because they know how to maneuver themselves to not take the full force of the blast.

So really we're looking at a bunch of saves far ahead of anything the wizard can dish to them.

But that's not it, of course. Because in the scenarios where our heroes face a god, they normally beat them through some sort of knowledge or trick. Batman could stare down Darkseid because he rigged the planet with an explosive that will destroy it if Darkseid didn't give up. Captain America could beat the devil by disrupting whatever spell was keeping him bound on this plane.

D&D isn't set up like that. They can't just turn off the wizard's spells by figuring out how they work and stopping it, because spells aren't written that way. It could, I suppose, be turned into some high level ability. But it is largely DM fiat. A D&D wizard can send his enemies to the plane of nightmares and that's the end of it. A hero would be sent to the plane of nightmares, fight his way out, find the one secret portal to get back to the wizard's throne room and bust out right when the wizard is giving his evil monologue about how he's going to rule the world.

Then we get into actual fighting. When fighting gods Batman seems to mostly go on defensive, moving around the enemy. Never being where the enemy is punching. Then when our heroes do finally hit the enemy, they know the exact spot to deal the most damage, and they hit it. I'm thinking automatic crits. Plus disabling abilities, attacks to make your enemies blind, knowing exactly where to hit to ignore DR, disarms. Our archer should behave like Bard from The Hobbit, if there's something in the air he'll bring it down in one shot, it doesn't matter how big it is. Either a shot through the wings to make it land, or a shot straight through the dragons chest to kill it. Just by looking they should be able to see that one weak spot in the enemies armor to hit it. Which again, of course means the DM left a weak spot for the archer to hit.

OldTrees1

2015-07-12, 10:34 PM

Yeah, that does look pretty good (I missed it the first time around because this is a fast-moving thread. Some people would think that it's "mythic", though, which is why listing off a bunch of general, ambiguous terms and then saying "give me a fighter who isn't any of these and who can beat casters" is not a good start to a reasonable discussion. It's going to devolve into a discussion of what is or is not "wuxia" or "celtic", and it's sort of doing that already.

Thanks. I am hoping we can get some good subthreads going before the fast pace of the thread get's out of hand.

Any ideas on the planar travel issue?

D&D isn't set up like that. They can't just turn off the wizard's spells by figuring out how they work and stopping it, because spells aren't written that way. It could, I suppose, be turned into some high level ability. But it is largely DM fiat. A D&D wizard can send his enemies to the plane of nightmares and that's the end of it. A hero would be sent to the plane of nightmares, fight his way out, find the one secret portal to get back to the wizard's throne room and bust out right when the wizard is giving his evil monologue about how he's going to rule the world.

Then we get into actual fighting. When fighting gods Batman seems to mostly go on defensive, moving around the enemy. Never being where the enemy is punching. Then when our heroes do finally hit the enemy, they know the exact spot to deal the most damage, and they hit it. I'm thinking automatic crits. Plus disabling abilities, attacks to make your enemies blind, knowing exactly where to hit to ignore DR, disarms. Our archer should behave like Bard from The Hobbit, if there's something in the air he'll bring it down in one shot, it doesn't matter how big it is. Either a shot through the wings to make it land, or a shot straight through the dragons chest to kill it. Just by looking they should be able to see that one weak spot in the enemies armor to hit it. Which again, of course means the DM left a weak spot for the archer to hit.

What if we put the mechanics for that on the martial side of the equation rather than needing them on the BBEG side of the equation?

MesiDoomstalker

2015-07-12, 10:36 PM

I have a very serious question. Why is there such an anthama to "wuxia"? Specifically, why must a massively leveled character be bounds by the limits of the real world? Why in Gygax's good name do we slavishly limit ourselves in a game of fantasy? I genuinely do not understand this. Additionally, where exactly does the line lay? I can easily point out what is "Anime-like" but what counts as "nearly superhuman" and "anime" I cannot seem to find a good answer to.

Extra Anchovies

2015-07-12, 10:39 PM

Any ideas on the planar travel issue?

Using your weapon to make portals, á la The Subtle Knife. Doesn't feel wuxia to me.
As much as I don't like acknowledging the existence of The Golden Compass's sequels, it's too relevant here for me to not mention it.

Renen

2015-07-12, 10:42 PM

Using your weapon to make portals, á la The Subtle Knife. Doesn't feel wuxia to me.
As much as I don't like acknowledging the existence of The Golden Compass's sequels, it's too relevant here for me to not mention it.

But even in the books, finding the proper place to go took atleast a few "rounds". And the wizard can always go somewhere to which he made HIMSELF immune to, but you arent. So you know where, but you also know you'd die.

OldTrees1

2015-07-12, 10:43 PM

Using your weapon to make portals, á la The Subtle Knife. Doesn't feel wuxia to me.
As much as I don't like acknowledging the existence of The Golden Compass's sequels, it's too relevant here for me to not mention it.

Hm. That feels just on the SU side of the borderline for me at high levels(not that I mind that myself) but it is a solid answer that keeps cropping up on this topic.

Arbane

2015-07-12, 10:50 PM

It isn't about RAW, it's about what a "non-wuxia" fighter SHOULD be at high-level play.

The answer to that is... they should basically be immune to magic. Even that isn't nowhere near enough, but it's a start.

Fun Fact: In 2nd Ed D&D, the Fighter has the best saves vs EVERYTHING at high-level (except spells, where the Magic-User was better by one point). And their saves were indeed pretty much "Nope".

But yeah. As has been said over and over and OVER again, either the spellcasters need nerfing (they do), or the non-spellcasters need Nice Things (they also do).

I have a very serious question. Why is there such an anthama to "wuxia"? Specifically, why must a massively leveled character be bounds by the limits of the real world? Why in Gygax's good name do we slavishly limit ourselves in a game of fantasy? I genuinely do not understand this. Additionally, where exactly does the line lay? I can easily point out what is "Anime-like" but what counts as "nearly superhuman" and "anime" I cannot seem to find a good answer to.

Part of it, I think, is a weird sort of Idée fixe that assumes that Fantasyland is exactly like the real world except where magic makes it different. So humans are squishy little bags of meat, aside from magic. (We're ignoring the part where high-level humans can survive being stepped on by a giant because SHUT UP.)

As for the rest, I dunno. backlash against the popularity of anime?

Extra Anchovies

2015-07-12, 10:51 PM

But even in the books, finding the proper place to go took atleast a few "rounds". And the wizard can always go somewhere to which he made HIMSELF immune to, but you arent. So you know where, but you also know you'd die.

Well then the fighter can do it faster than the characters in the books can. Because they have only a little experience with the knife, and the fighter has much, much more experience with his weapon.

Also I've decided to move on from the caster fight, because that's just going to be "but the wizard is stronger" and/or "that's capable of beating the wizard, therefore it's too wuxia" over and over again. I'm addressing planar travel in general.

Red Rubber Band

2015-07-12, 10:57 PM

These mentions of Batman... it reminds me of the time in the comics where he got a hold of one of the Green Lantern rings (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_N8rQRcs-DzM/S8eeCrVmD0I/AAAAAAAAALc/EsJUUoAEgM0/s1600/overpowered.jpg).

That should just about do it.

Renen

2015-07-12, 11:03 PM

Hmm... Now that I think about it, selling your soul in exchange for the Ex: Deus Ex Machina ability doesn't require magical powers :smallbiggrin:

squiggit

2015-07-12, 11:13 PM

Well, on that last one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGz42vpeGKk&t=4m41s)... (http://typemoon.wikia.com/wiki/Lancer_%28Fate/stay_night%29)
Cu Chulainn is the one in blue
I'm not quite sure what I'm looking at but... that's remarkably well animated. I'm used to my animes being dominated by still shots over dialog and blurry frames and looped images.

Anyways, larger point is that if heroes of European mythology are too anime to count despite having nothing to do with anime and predating anime by at least a thousand years then "too anime" is just an arbitrarily applied tag toward anything fantastical and therefore it's both useless to bring up and makes answering the OP's question nearly impossible because the premise is really "how do you defeat a wizard while being denied access to any tools that allow you to combat any of the wizard's tricks".

Actually it gets even worse than that, because even the baseline 3.5/PF fighter has tricks that'll seem pretty damn anime if extrapolated in the right way at their disposal, so you're really looking at a level 4 or so fighter facing off against that level 20 wizard.

RolkFlameraven

2015-07-12, 11:13 PM

Bat's works better with a Yellow Lantern Ring though, something that works of everything the green one does but is powered by FEAR in the hands of Batman. The writers knew it was such a bad idea that the ring itself ran away once it realized whom it was tying to recruit.

They covered it up with some BS about where that Pic you linked came from making him 'unsuited' because he had once used a Green ring, all the while blissfully ignoring the fact that the man the corps is named after was once a Green Lantern himself.

But that doesn't work in this argument, unless 'super weapons' somehow ISN'T too wuxia?

Rubik

2015-07-12, 11:28 PM

I'm not quite sure what I'm looking at but... that's remarkably well animated. I'm used to my animes being dominated by still shots over dialog and blurry frames and looped images.Yeah. I once shot someone down who was fanboying over Naruto by comparing a five minute stretch of an Avatar: The Last Airbender B-Plot to two hours of fighting between Naruto and Orochimaru -- supposedly this hugely awaited and pivotal turning point for the series. The 5 minutes of B-Plot had more action, more dialogue, and more plot than the two hours of "fighting," which was mostly the characters standing around doing nothing while Sakura kept mentally monologuing about how screwed they were. Seriously, NOTHING HAPPENED.

Naruto sucks.

And Avatar is effin' awesome.

And the rest of your post is practically perfect in every way. I approve.

icefractal

2015-07-12, 11:30 PM

Is this Pathfinder, or 3.5 + Pathfinder? In the latter case, then Simulacra of wish-granting creatures means literally as much power as the Wizard happens to feel like obtaining, no upper limit. In which case the party either does the same thing or fails. In Pathfinder, I think it "only" means an arbitrarily large amount of minions, since Wish can no longer produce items and Crafted Contingent spells aren't a thing.

So we can say that the first requirement is being able to defeat an arbitrarily large amount of minions, each of which could be half as strong as the strongest creature in existence. By the time you get through that, you can probably handle whatever the Wizard can do personally.

I feel like "be able to handle the results of NI power loops" is an unreasonable bar to expect from most classes though. A Wizard who wasn't using those loops would get stomped by a Commoner that did use them, so it's not really about how good the class is. If you can defeat an adventure's worth of CR 20 creatures, who aren't holding back on their tactics, I think you're in good territory.

On the other hand, the fact that the Wizard is sitting conveniently in a tower does help the party. If the adventure was "a Wizard is launching long-distance attacks on your kingdom, while never staying in the same spot more than a day and frequently jumping off-plane" then even reaching the point he can be stabbed is something you'll need to go beyond "action-movie capabilities" for.

That said, people have a pretty wide range of different things that they do/don't consider appropriate for "mundane" characters. Take mobility, for example. You could go several very different directions:
A) A high-level [class] can run at incredibly speeds and leap over most obstacles.
B) A high-level [class] knows the secret short-cuts that the faerie folk use, and can travel across the world in a couple hours journey.
C) A high-level [class] knows (automatically, as a class feature) an allied mage that will teleport them places when asked to.
D) A high-level [class] has (automatically, as a class feature) a pair of seven-league boots.
E) A high-level [class] is favored by fate and will always arrive in time, even if it would seem impossible.

Which of those is the most compatible with a 'mundane' image will vary from person to person.

DMVerdandi

2015-07-12, 11:39 PM

Personally, I don't think in greyhawk that there should be any Base Classes that are not supernatural. That should be a quality of NPC's, and it should not be seen as admirable or cool to play one of them AT ALL. Playing a mundane character is playing a special snowflake in DnD.

Not only is magic highly available, there are different flavors for everyone. Arcane, Divine, Psionics, Binding, shadow magic, Incarnum, the list is long.

Having mundane characters was a design flaw. Now, this doesn't mean eliminate the martial character, no not at all, but eliminate the muggle. Absolutely. It is a crying shame that there are so many people who are such "westaboos" that they can't even fathom there being a logically consistent reason for the martial characters to be able to do what they NEED to do in a high fantasy setting.

If we are talking about Pathfinder in particular, the rage mechanic of the Barbarian is somewhat a step in the right direction. Even though it is largely non-magical, there are still some supernatural elements to it, and we can say "rage" is what allows this guy to do what he does, and is long is there is some reason outside of "just cause" then it makes sense. We now understand that in this game, Intense emotion is something that can overcome the limits that a creature generally has.

Now, one problem is that there is no point system in which the fighter has analog to that, and because of his skills, there is nothing pointing to the fact that there should be. The fighter has not been mechanically designed, nor literarily designed to have anything that makes him more than a dude that is good with weapons. The natural limit to a weapon without any power ends at it's design. So no matter how good you are with a sword, if all you are is good with a sword, it ends at that, and there is nothing logical that says the sword should do anything that it is not capable of in your hands, unless you add some element that allows you to override the laws[or at least common guidelines] of reality.

What I hear many people ask for ends up being pure DM Fiat. There are no rules established and they don't want rules established, but they want to be superior to the caster classes, which are design, given far more rules. Rules are the true degrees of freedom in a ttrpg, as they don't require gm interference or intervention to work, and that is why they are powerful. Each spell is simply a new rule being activated.

Now personally, I am not against the "Wuxia" martial, or at least superhuman one. I think that there should be rules to express how powerful such a character is, and continuously improve that character's capabilities, and I think much of that would be achieved by changing many of the rules from the ground up, BUT, I am not for the idea that the rule of cool should be #1, and that the Martial character should in fact be the most magical character in the game, instead of the least.

So many people are saying "They should be able to cut through logic itself.", "Completely Immune to magic", "comparable to a god".
What makes them in that aspect non magical? That they don't use magical components? Then it's just Psionics.
And if that's the case, just make martials into psionic characters to oppose magical ones, and leave it at that.

The psychic rogue exists[and lurk], the psychic warrior exists. The ardent exists.

This anti-magic fetish is SUPER childish.
If magic is a car, and the lack of it is... a bicycle, Under no circumstances should that bicycle win, until the car runs out of gas. And even so, the bicycle can still break.

Now, if some other power source is present, that could very well be a super bike. Lets continue with psionics for brevity, familiarity and popularity.
It might not have the same design, usage, or features as the car, but it can still get you where you need to go just as fast, if not faster in some aspects, but it is still logically in the same realm.

Wanting the bike to win against them both at both times is like... ridiculous.

What does a completely mundane high level fighter look like? A man in perfect health, who uses mundane techniques to solve mundane problems. He beats up other fighters, and maybe a generally mundane creature here and there. Like an MMA guy.

What Should the fighter be? A character that uses maneuvers to defeat generally mundane threats. Perhaps he has a source of power that allows him to break that boundary as a skill. Call it Prana, Aura, qi, Aether, PSI, Vigor, Force, Vitae, whatever, but they can tap into energy normally unavailable to normal beings, and use it to enhance their senses, bolster their attacks, improve their defenses, and sharpen their other skills.

Maybe make it so that this energy interferes with the normal means of casting magic, and you can't have both in one body, making it a very martial power. Perhaps the addition of two new scores would be a good thing.
Mana for magical classes, and Spirit for Martial ones. Having points in one reduces the other to 0.
Having really low scores in one makes the character REALLY close to plain and mundane, while having a high score makes them able to casually pierce the veil of casual reality.

But a low Spirit kind of fellow should be fireball fodder.
I have never seen a story that logically and consistently allowed for a character that doesn't have supernatural powers at all realistically beat one that did in an actual fight that didn't scream of fiat or plot armor. And especially one at the level of a 3.x caster.
Would a level 1 fighter logically beat a level 20 one? No. Because the level 1 fighter does not have the capabilities, that the level 20 one has. Just as the fighter class does not have the capabilities that a caster class has.

AmberVael

2015-07-12, 11:41 PM

I'm not quite sure what I'm looking at but... that's remarkably well animated. I'm used to my animes being dominated by still shots over dialog and blurry frames and looped images.
Yeah, the group behind it does some really nice animation. Its worth watching the fight scenes, if not necessarily anything else. (Its Fate/Unlimited Blade Works, by the way).

Anyways, larger point is that if heroes of European mythology are too anime to count despite having nothing to do with anime and predating anime by at least a thousand years then "too anime" is just an arbitrarily applied tag toward anything fantastical and therefore it's both useless to bring up and makes answering the OP's question nearly impossible because the premise is really "how do you defeat a wizard while being denied access to any tools that allow you to combat any of the wizard's tricks".

Actually it gets even worse than that, because even the baseline 3.5/PF fighter has tricks that'll seem pretty damn anime if extrapolated in the right way at their disposal, so you're really looking at a level 4 or so fighter facing off against that level 20 wizard.

Given the list of tags at the start of the thread, its not so much about 'too anime' as it is 'superhuman.' But it does leave you in the same place.

The fact is, if you enter a high power fantasy world, you better be high power fantasy yourself. At minimum you better be able to monologue about your arrows before killing dragons with them, because your other option for what a fighter should look like is toast.

Dienekes

2015-07-12, 11:43 PM

What if we put the mechanics for that on the martial side of the equation rather than needing them on the BBEG side of the equation?

Well, the problem with that is either you give them the ability:

Interrupt Spell (Ex): Make an attack check opposed by the caster's Spellcrafting check, if your check surpasses theirs the spell is cancelled.

Which still leaves about a couple hundred other non-direct abilities it still needs to deal with. Most of which are so specific they would require their own ability. And fluffing the abilities would be fairly strange. I don't see how "You always can find your way back from a teleport spell after a small adventure" really works as an ability or how it can ever be (Ex).

Red Rubber Band

2015-07-12, 11:48 PM

But that doesn't work in this argument, unless 'super weapons' somehow ISN'T too wuxia?
And there's the problem. Because, as squiggut put it:

Anyways, larger point is that if heroes of European mythology are too anime to count despite having nothing to do with anime and predating anime by at least a thousand years then "too anime" is just an arbitrarily applied tag toward anything fantastical and therefore it's both useless to bring up and makes answering the OP's question nearly impossible because the premise is really "how do you defeat a wizard while being denied access to any tools that allow you to combat any of the wizard's tricks".

Not saying Batman is European mythology :smallbiggrin: Just that the premise is the same. Else, Marvel and DC got a lot to answer for, them and their weeabo fightin' mans being all anime and stuff.

Emperor Tippy

2015-07-13, 12:01 AM

I'm mostly ignoring the specific challenge of the OP because the answer is "You don't." Gods don't die to people with normal swords.

So what should a high level Fighter type be? Well for a start his durability is basically "yes". By that I mean that his skin is bullet proof by level 10 and by level 20 you are looking at Superman; physical durability to the point where the Hulk giving you a full on punch to the face is "that stings a bit". The same kind of durability applies to elemental attacks and the like. As in the Fighter is the guy who can have a level 20 Wizard drop a max damage fire ball right on top of him and have no response beyond "thanks for lighting my cigar".

In regards to other physical capabilities the high level Fighter should be just as exceptional. Sure he is durable enough to tank bullets but he never has to, he is fast enough to outright dodge them. A movement speed of 2000 ft. or more is the kind of thing I am talking about. Physical strength is just as great. The high level Fighter is the guy who can stand in for Atlas for a short period of time. He can punch through a foot thick adamantium door with no prep or crush diamond in his fist.

His senses are beyond exceptional; he can hear your heart beat from five rooms away and the like. In D&D terms, give him all of the special sense abilities. And then on top of that give him what amounts to Spider Sense (well at least always on Foresight).

The level 20 Fighter is the guy who can be faced with entire legions of enemies and between one eyeblink and the next have removed the heads of every single member of those legions; using nothing but his pinky finger.

---
Sure, he still can't beat the well prepared high level Wizard on his own but then that isn't the point. That Wizard will die faster than a thought if he isn't well prepared.

Anlashok

2015-07-13, 12:03 AM

As in the Fighter is the guy who can have a level 20 Wizard drop a max damage fire ball right on top of him and have no response beyond "thanks for lighting my cigar".

I love the mental image this thought provides.

Emperor Tippy

2015-07-13, 12:09 AM

Rubik

2015-07-13, 12:12 AM

Milo v3

2015-07-13, 12:12 AM

I was wondering how long it'd be till the guy who uses polymorphed immortal ice assassin angels for currency would come in.

Renen

2015-07-13, 12:17 AM

Ooh. That almost makes it worth a 2 level dip for a wizard.

Almost.

Almost but not even then.
Now, what do we say to losing caster levels?

Marlowe

2015-07-13, 12:19 AM

http://i.imgur.com/QZfIxAG.jpg

Rubik

2015-07-13, 12:20 AM

Almost but not even then.
Now, what do we say to losing caster levels?http://i1.wp.com/www.gatewaynextgen.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/JustSayNo1.jpeg

Red Rubber Band

2015-07-13, 12:20 AM

Lord Raziere

2015-07-13, 12:22 AM

My answer to the threads title question is:

complete and utter anti-magic. they're immune to magic, they cancel out all magic directed at them in any way whatsoever. If the wizard tries to fireball them, it fails, if they try to summon a big beastie to kill them while on another plane of existence, that fails, if they try to conjure up money to raise a mundane army to kill them while on the other side of existence, THAT fails. and so on and so forth, no matter how indirect the application of magic. they are not actually stronger or anything, they are just so mundane that any attempts at making them more magical automatically fail.

in short they have a Magic Save vs. all magic, and it is YES.

Renen

2015-07-13, 12:22 AM

http://i1.wp.com/www.gatewaynextgen.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/JustSayNo1.jpeg

I was going for:
Not today in this build

But that's good too

icefractal

2015-07-13, 12:24 AM

Ooh. That almost makes it worth a 2 level dip for a wizard.

Almost.Oh come on, Wizard isn't great, spells are great. I think a Wizard 17/Fighter 3 with Practiced Spellcaster is going to be enjoying those six spells a round more than he would a few more slots. :smalltongue:

Ok, so he's actually something like a Wizard 1/Fighter 3/Master Specialist 3/Incantrix 3/IotSFV 7/Archmage 3, but you get the idea.

Renen

2015-07-13, 12:27 AM

Emperor Tippy

2015-07-13, 12:27 AM

Quoted for truth.

Serious talk though, a 2 level fighter dip would be now be pretty amazeballs.

Swashbuckler 3/ Decisive Strike Martial Monk 2/ Rogue 1/ Factotum 3/ Fighter 10/ Warblade 1. Drop the Rogue, Factotum, and Swashbuckler for more Warblade if you want straight up melee combat.

Rogue 1/ Decisive Strike Martial Monk 2/ Fighter 10/ Warblade 7. "I use all of my maneuvers and regain them every round." So very fun.

Red Rubber Band

2015-07-13, 12:28 AM

Oh come on, Wizard isn't great, spells are great. I think a Wizard 17/Fighter 3 with Practiced Spellcaster is going to be enjoying those six spells a round more than he would a few more slots. :smalltongue:

But no one takes an odd number of Fighter lev- ohhhh :smalltongue:

Swashbuckler 3/ Decisive Strike Martial Monk 2/ Rogue 1/ Factotum 3/ Fighter 10/ Warblade 1. Drop the Rogue, Factotum, and Swashbuckler for more Warblade if you want straight up melee combat.

Rogue 1/ Decisive Strike Martial Monk 2/ Fighter 10/ Warblade 7. "I use all of my maneuvers and regain them every round." So very fun.

I don't think I can fully appreciate this. I know, vaguely, what everything does. But without a dozen books open in front of me with red string blu-tacked to combos I'm pretty much just sitting here like a spodermanz (http://cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/57681345.jpg).

Renen

2015-07-13, 12:30 AM

Rubik

2015-07-13, 12:31 AM

Oh come on, Wizard isn't great, spells are great. I think a Wizard 17/Fighter 3 with Practiced Spellcaster is going to be enjoying those six spells a round more than he would a few more slots. :smalltongue:

Ok, so he's actually something like a Wizard 1/Fighter 3/Master Specialist 1/Incantrix 3/IotSFV 7/Archmage 5, but you get the idea.Problem is, those fighter levels aren't giving the wizard anything he doesn't already have.

Celerity is a Thing, after all.

At least a level in monk allows for some unarmed strike shenanigans, if it comes to that. Fighter (even the new and improved version) doesn't even give that.

Emperor Tippy

2015-07-13, 12:33 AM

Seeing that factotum levels I had the following thought about Tippys homebrew fighter:

Tippy was one day thinking about how cool Factotum and infinite feats (via DCS) are. But then he thought for a bit and said "Why! This should be a class!"

Pretty much actually. Well that combined with "What is a really easy way to make Fighter suddenly competitive in terms of both power and fun without having to write more than a paragraph of rules."

icefractal

2015-07-13, 12:34 AM

Problem is, those fighter levels aren't giving the wizard anything he doesn't already have.

Celerity is a Thing, after all.If nothing else, they're giving him the ability to negate anything bad 3x an encounter. Including unstoppable stuff like Wish-transportation, so that seems pretty worthwhile.

And if you're not doing some form of infinite-spells loop, then getting those extra actions for free every round is a pretty big deal. Or if you are doing infinite spell loops, then the couple slots you lost don't matter either.

Red Rubber Band

2015-07-13, 12:48 AM

The Insanity

2015-07-13, 12:55 AM

This thread reads to me "How do we make the Fighter fantastical without the fantastical part". That's kinda inpossible.

Emperor Tippy

2015-07-13, 12:58 AM

If nothing else, they're giving him the ability to negate anything bad 3x an encounter. Including unstoppable stuff like Wish-transportation, so that seems pretty worthwhile.

And if you're not doing some form of infinite-spells loop, then getting those extra actions for free every round is a pretty big deal. Or if you are doing infinite spell loops, then the couple slots you lost don't matter either.

Actually it's additional actions equal to Fighter level -1 (so at level 20 it is 20 total sets of actions, 1 base and 19 from Fighter). Negation is Fighter level divided by 2 rounded down (so the first negation comes at level 2 while the second comes at level 4 and so on). So you need 6 Fighter levels for 3 negations per encounter.

Arbane

2015-07-13, 01:29 AM

This thread reads to me "How do we make the Fighter fantastical without the fantastical part". That's kinda inpossible.

Yeah, and therein lies the problem.

I have a very serious question. Why is there such an anthama to "wuxia"? Specifically, why must a massively leveled character be bounds by the limits of the real world? Why in Gygax's good name do we slavishly limit ourselves in a game of fantasy? I genuinely do not understand this. Additionally, where exactly does the line lay? I can easily point out what is "Anime-like" but what counts as "nearly superhuman" and "anime" I cannot seem to find a good answer to.

Anyways, larger point is that if heroes of European mythology are too anime to count despite having nothing to do with anime and predating anime by at least a thousand years then "too anime" is just an arbitrarily applied tag toward anything fantastical and therefore it's both useless to bring up and makes answering the OP's question nearly impossible because the premise is really "how do you defeat a wizard while being denied access to any tools that allow you to combat any of the wizard's tricks".

Actually it gets even worse than that, because even the baseline 3.5/PF fighter has tricks that'll seem pretty damn anime if extrapolated in the right way at their disposal, so you're really looking at a level 4 or so fighter facing off against that level 20 wizard.

There's a rather amusing rant I read a while back (which I can't seem to find to quote, drat it) which points out that in the OLD stories, the Knights of the Round Table included a guy with solar-powered strength, a sorcerer (not Merlin - one of the knights knew magic as well), and a WEREWOLF. And one of their enemies could re-attach his own severed head. The writer then quote some story of a duel where the knight and his foe were pounding each other so hard that despite their armor, they were spraying blood everywhere but REFUSING TO FALL - that's straight out of any random issue of Shonen Jump.
European mythology isn't usually presented as 'anime' ENOUGH to be accurate. :smallbiggrin:

Naruto sucks.

And Avatar is effin' awesome.

Well, I would've thought those went without saying. :smallcool: (Amusingly, Naruto is a world of Caster Supremacy - they just CALL them 'ninjas' and occasionally have them punch people in between spells.)

Edit to add: Here is your fixed fighter class. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?336731-quot-Today-is-victory-over-yourself-Tomorrow-is-your-victory-over-lesser-men-quot)

MesiDoomstalker

2015-07-13, 03:26 AM

Svata

2015-07-13, 05:52 AM

A 20th-level fighter should be able to break rainbows in half with their bare hands and then dual-wield the parts of the rainbow.

ETA: Dual-wield the rainbow. Taste the rainbow.

Can I sig that? I need an update.

Eldan

2015-07-13, 06:25 AM

I'm mostly ignoring the specific challenge of the OP because the answer is "You don't." Gods don't die to people with normal swords.

So what should a high level Fighter type be? Well for a start his durability is basically "yes". By that I mean that his skin is bullet proof by level 10 and by level 20 you are looking at Superman; physical durability to the point where the Hulk giving you a full on punch to the face is "that stings a bit". The same kind of durability applies to elemental attacks and the like. As in the Fighter is the guy who can have a level 20 Wizard drop a max damage fire ball right on top of him and have no response beyond "thanks for lighting my cigar".

Isn't that just "hit points: yes"? The rest is the interesting part, but this part, at least doesn't seem to require much innovation. With 30+ constitution and 20d10 HP on top of that, we're looking at 300+ HP already. That's enough for several 20d6 attacks.
Now, I know that of course even slightly optimized casters go far, far beyond that. But we're just looking at bigger numbers here. Give the fighter a thousand hit points, if necessary, it's just numbers.

Not really all that interesting ingame.

As for the 20 rounds a round fighter, how do you keep that remotely interesting at the table? D&D combat is already mostly dull and slow. If I sat next to someone who went on to make a hundred or more melee attacks with bonus damage dice, I'd use that time to get lunch.

RolkFlameraven

2015-07-13, 09:27 AM

There's a rather amusing rant I read a while back (which I can't seem to find to quote, drat it) which points out that in the OLD stories, the Knights of the Round Table included a guy with solar-powered strength, a sorcerer (not Merlin - one of the knights knew magic as well), and a WEREWOLF. And one of their enemies could re-attach his own severed head. The writer then quote some story of a duel where the knight and his foe were pounding each other so hard that despite their armor, they were spraying blood everywhere but REFUSING TO FALL - that's straight out of any random issue of Shonen Jump.
European mythology isn't usually presented as 'anime' ENOUGH to be accurate. :smallbiggrin:

This is the big problem really. People get up in arms over 'too anime' when Cap has a shield that gives him AC = NOPE, Reflex = nope + evasion and is 'indestructible'. Plus cap has a magic spell that pretty much gave him all 18's or better but give a fighter a 'rainbow sword' and its too much, how odd.

Comic book writers know that a fighter is boring as heck by themselves anyway. Cap has his shield and super stats, Batman has WBL = yes and all 18's as his base stats too, Black Panther is Batman with the added plus of 'magic ore no one else has' Deathstroke is evil Cap and Deadpool can't die, Green Arrow shoots boxing gloves on a stick!

This is because a 'non-wuxia' is boring to read, boring to write and boring to talk about, so I've never really understood why someone would want to PLAY it in an RPG

Dienekes

2015-07-13, 09:48 AM

This is the big problem really. People get up in arms over 'too anime' when Cap has a shield that gives him AC = NOPE, Reflex = nope + evasion and is 'indestructible'. Plus cap has a magic spell that pretty much gave him all 18's or better but give a fighter a 'rainbow sword' and its too much, how odd.

Comic book writers know that a fighter is boring as heck by themselves anyway. Cap has his shield and super stats, Batman has WBL = yes and all 18's as his base stats too, Black Panther is Batman with the added plus of 'magic ore no one else has' Deathstroke is evil Cap and Deadpool can't die, Green Arrow shoots boxing gloves on a stick!

This is because a 'non-wuxia' is boring to read, boring to write and boring to talk about, so I've never really understood why someone would want to PLAY it in an RPG

I disagree with just about everything in that last sentence. Realistic fiction can be great fun, very entertaining, and fun to play.

However, having half the players stuck in realistic fiction while the other half get to act unrealistic beyond the feats of most mythological gods are capable of is what leads to this nonsense.

Brova

2015-07-13, 09:49 AM

The big problem with high level martials is a conceptual one, and it's strongest with the Fighter. Bluntly, "good at swording" is not a high level concept, while "good at magic" is. The martial classes need to stop being "Fighter" and "Ranger". A martial character might be a Beastmaster, who controls beasts and gains some beast traits or shape-shifting. So at low levels you'd have a pet wolf and a lion aspect that gave you charge and an inspiring roar. At mid levels you'd have a pet dire bear and a wyvern aspect that gave you flight and poison attacks. At high levels you'd have a pet torrasque and a astral marauder aspect that gave you plane shift and force beams.

I also think there's a lot to be said for 4e's paragon paths and epic destinies. Forcing people to stop being a Fighter and start being a Death Knight (and eventually a Hero of Ragnarok) is a pretty effective way to avoid low level concepts in high level games.

Grod_The_Giant

2015-07-13, 10:24 AM

Forget optimized magic use. Forget buff-stacking and contingent actions and ice assassins and all that. D&D has a fundamental design flaw: casters and non-casters are designed according to fundamentally different goals. Casters, using only spells from the player's handbook, used as intended, turn into demigods. They control the weather, stop time, grant life or death with a word. Non-casters turn into... better non-casters. They start off swinging swords and end the same way. Without magic, they'll get worn down by an army (crits), will still lose the odd arm wrestling contest against random dudes, and are otherwise still operating by the rules of reality.

Casters were written to become demigods. Non-casters were written to become Conan. THOSE ARE NOT EQUAL. THOSE WILL NEVER BE EQUAL. The best you can hope for is to nerf magic to the point where every spell has a mundane counter, and non-casters have similar options-- and even then, both strategic and apparent power is ceded to magicians.

The other option is to adjust your design goals to match. If casters become demigods, so too must noncasters. Your 20th level fighter should look like Hercules, not Conan.

Eldan

2015-07-13, 10:34 AM

I also think there's a lot to be said for 4e's paragon paths and epic destinies. Forcing people to stop being a Fighter and start being a Death Knight (and eventually a Hero of Ragnarok) is a pretty effective way to avoid low level concepts in high level games.

That's something I've thought about for a long time, yeah. Some concepts are just sort of inherently low-level and I think "fighter" is one. Others are quite high level, like the D&D wizard.

I think, in a d20 game, one could rewrite the classes in such a way that there are tiers like in 4E. So, say, levels 1-6 (as in E6) are for more mundane ideas, like ranger, monk, rogue. No full casters here, but perhaps a low-magic sage class with more skill points, lore, healing and some kind of magic sense and a few rituals like area wards or weapon blessings. Levels 7 to about 16 would be the higher magic levels, where fighters have magic armour and divine blessings and casters come in. Levels 17+, one would just go cosmic, travelling around the planes slaying gods and moving mountains as demigods and avatars. That's already pretty much what happens anyway.

Edit: not heracles, Grod. He's too mundane. He just wrestles a few monsters and such. Apart from holding up the sky in Atlas' place, that's mostly midlevel stuff. We need Indian avatars and Chinese heroes and Celtic kings for our inspiration.

Flickerdart

2015-07-13, 10:36 AM

The other option is to adjust your design goals to match. If casters become demigods, so too must noncasters. Your 20th level fighter should look like Hercules, not Conan.
Hercules is not enough. Aside from two acts (turning away a river, and holding up the sky for a while) Hercules mostly wrestles creatures that can be modeled effortlessly in the CR6-8 range.

Interestingly enough, a lot (if not indeed most) of legendary heroes are essentially clerics - they pray to their gods before embarking on their quest, and the gods provide supernatural intervention that, combined with the hero's courage, allows him to triumph. It could be interesting to model high-level melee on the path to godhood as standing shoulder to shoulder with these gods, and receiving mystic boons not as a gift to a supplicant, but as a favor to an equal.

I think, in a d20 game, one could rewrite the classes in such a way that there are tiers like in 4E. So, say, levels 1-6 (as in E6) are for more mundane ideas, like ranger, monk, rogue. No full casters here, but perhaps a low-magic sage class with more skill points, lore, healing and some kind of magic sense and a few rituals like area wards or weapon blessings. Levels 7 to about 16 would be the higher magic levels, where fighters have magic armour and divine blessings and casters come in. Levels 17+, one would just go cosmic, travelling around the planes slaying gods and moving mountains as demigods and avatars. That's already pretty much what happens anyway.
I've always liked the idea of using starting ages to represent this concept. Yes, even the lowest level spells are mighty - but in twenty years, a caster might only just become a journeyman while the fighter will have travelled far and wide. So 1-6 represents a hardened combat veteran side by side with a bookworm who has mastered but a few spells. By the time he has learned more, the fighter has already gone from combat veteran to literally Superman.

Eldan

2015-07-13, 10:44 AM

Flickerdart

2015-07-13, 10:46 AM

Starting age isn't enough, though. The game doesn't use age as a balancing point, it uses levels. The game, from Party composition over WBL to CR, is built on the assumption that equal levels should be equal in power. At least since different XP tables were abandoned.

No DM I'm aware of ever said "right, in this campaign, you are all 25 years old. Wizard, you are level 1 at this point, barbarian you get 10'000 XP for your decade of fighting experience."
I don't mean literally using starting age as it is. I mean using that to inform the game world, and then deriving an acceptable class system from that.

You'd be surprised how many people think "well of course the wizard should be more powerful" and this approach puts an end to that line of thought.

Eldan

2015-07-13, 10:51 AM

I do think a wizard should be more powerful than a fighter. Only one of them bends the forces of creation to his iron will, after all. I just also think that the consequence of that is that one shouldn't put a full wizard in the same party as a fighter.

Grod_The_Giant

2015-07-13, 10:53 AM

Hercules is not enough. Aside from two acts (turning away a river, and holding up the sky for a while) Hercules mostly wrestles creatures that can be modeled effortlessly in the CR6-8 range.
The iconic monsters are all in that range because that's where most games play. Ignore the mechanics for a moment: the dude was strong enough to hold up the sky and fight the most powerful monsters in the world with his bare hands. He could walk into the underworld and punch things until Hades gave him what he wanted.

Segev

2015-07-13, 11:04 AM

The thing I'm still unclear on, having skimmed (sorry, haven't in-depth read every post) this thread is: does "wuxia" refer to "anything supernatural the fighter might do," or just to the "wire-fu" style supernatural endemic to the named genre?

Because fighters using a more "western" style of "supernatural fighter power" would be Hercules, with his godly toughness and strength and commensurate ability to hurl small buildings at foes who dare fly away. They would have the power to flat-out ignore "invulnerability" from things like "must have a blessed silver dagger to hurt me" or "being incorporeal/ethereal." The high-level fighter should sneer at that and say, "Yeah, and I stabbed your ethereal body so hard that it doesn't matter that my great sword is neither silver, blessed, nor a dagger." Or, alternatively, outright saying, "I blessed this myself just by wielding it."

He should power through spells that incapacitate lesser beings. If he can be turned to stone, it should happen slowly, and he should be fighting it off. Or he just keeps moving anyway. If he's turned into a newt, that newt should be picking up a greatsword and impaling the wizard on it (or should use a greatsword to cut the fighter's true form out from inside the tiny newt from within). If his foe teleports away, he should snap-grab his arm/neck/shoulder and go with him. He shoudl be able to grapple with a spellcaster and crush by brute physical (and metaphysical) force all the magics off of him ("dispelling" a freedom of movement by crushing it before it allows the caster to even try to elude his grip, for instance).

Despite being an anime character, Hollow Ichigo is a decent example. As is Zaraki Kempachi. He-Man, too, is a good inspiration; he could do things with brute strength that are impossibly magical. Certainly, bouncing ray spells off of his sword (and possibly into others on the enemy caster's own side) should be a thing.

RolkFlameraven

2015-07-13, 11:09 AM

I disagree with just about everything in that last sentence. Realistic fiction can be great fun, very entertaining, and fun to play.

However, having half the players stuck in realistic fiction while the other half get to act unrealistic beyond the feats of most mythological gods are capable of is what leads to this nonsense.

This is what I meant, I just expressed it poorly.

Edit:
He-Man, too, is a good inspiration; he could do things with brute strength that are impossibly magical. Certainly, bouncing ray spells off of his sword (and possibly into others on the enemy caster's own side) should be a thing.

He-Man is probably the best thing to think about with this kind of fight as his foe IS a Wiz/Sor. Still that give us stuff like this (http://www.toplessrobot.com/2010/03/the_10_most_impossible_feats_of_he-man.php) for what a fighter/barb can do. Though He-Man IS magically empowered so he might not fit into what the OP is looking for.

Sith_Happens

2015-07-13, 11:31 AM

What shoulda "Non-Wuxia" fighter look like?

Like this:

http://24.media.tumblr.com/21ab9d79feb62c3d7373402fa4a58c5b/tumblr_mg31mvQyqP1rvw0t5o8_400.gif
And this:

http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view/75960/rock-lee-nunchaku-o.gif
And this:

http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view3/4803753/asakujaku-o.gif

Not magic, he's just punching so fast his fists catch on fire.
And this:

http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view8/20140406/5013400/hirudora-o.gif

Not magic, just an air pressure blast that happens to look like a giant bear. Why does it look like a bear, you ask? What kind of question is that?
You call that "blatantly ignoring the key restriction in the premise of the thread," I call it "what the game already assumes 'high-level' looks like." You don't beat a Balrog to death by being Captain America. You just don't.

Karnith

2015-07-13, 11:33 AM

The thing I'm still unclear on, having skimmed (sorry, haven't in-depth read every post) this thread is: does "wuxia" refer to "anything supernatural the fighter might do," or just to the "wire-fu" style supernatural endemic to the named genre?
Per the OP, the former:

As for the definition of what's non-wuxia, I'd define it as one of the following:

"If you'd believe Jackie Chan doing it."
Can be done without CGI or Wirework (Not that it would be practical, just that it can be done)
You could see Conan the Barbarian do it.
You'd believe Captain America (MCU, not comics) could do it.

So even comparisons to mythical characters from Western traditions, like Hercules, Cu Chulainn, or Beowulf (or, going farther East but still avoiding "wuxia," like Gilgamesh, Samson, or Arjuna), are out. Heck, even matching Pippi Longstocking is out.

Though I suppose the Captain America restriction would let you use technology as essentially magic, given how ridiculous his shield is.

RolkFlameraven

2015-07-13, 11:33 AM

Lee and Gai would be higher level MONKS though wouldn't they?

Sith_Happens

2015-07-13, 11:43 AM

Lee and Gai would be higher level MONKS though wouldn't they?

Probably, I couldn't remember off the top of my head who from what show does similar things with a sword though.:smallwink:

Eldan

2015-07-13, 11:44 AM

I wouldn't say so. Monks get supernatural feats like teleporting. Fighters don't. That seems to be the main difference to me.

Segev

2015-07-13, 11:47 AM

Most of what I described, I could see Conan doing. Especially the "determinator" stuff. It may or may not be related to the fact that the same actor plays the Terminator, and thus the implacable unstoppable killing machine seems almost built-in.

Emperor Tippy

2015-07-13, 11:52 AM

Isn't that just "hit points: yes"? The rest is the interesting part, but this part, at least doesn't seem to require much innovation. With 30+ constitution and 20d10 HP on top of that, we're looking at 300+ HP already. That's enough for several 20d6 attacks.
Now, I know that of course even slightly optimized casters go far, far beyond that. But we're just looking at bigger numbers here. Give the fighter a thousand hit points, if necessary, it's just numbers.

Not really all that interesting ingame.
It's HP, its auto making saves, its negating no save just loose, etc. all out of the same mechanic. And yeah, the point of Negation isn't to make the class more fun really; its to make it more competitive.

As for the 20 rounds a round fighter, how do you keep that remotely interesting at the table? D&D combat is already mostly dull and slow. If I sat next to someone who went on to make a hundred or more melee attacks with bonus damage dice, I'd use that time to get lunch.
Personally I have most combat mechanics fully automated so its pretty much just "pick the target" for me.

But honestly, it really shouldn't take that long. Especially if you use an electronic dice roller. On your character sheet already have what you roll for your various common attack routines written out so that you don't have to add things up/figure out what you are rolling every time.

Besides, it is still faster than most full casters turns in high level play.

RolkFlameraven

2015-07-13, 12:01 PM

Probably, I couldn't remember off the top of my head who from what show does similar things with a sword though.:smallwink:

Meh, every dude with a sword is Gish in Naruto except maybe Hayate as I could see a Warblade or Swordsage pull of his attacks with little issue. As they could be fluffed as 'speed leaving after images' instead of clones.

The other ones we see all 'cast' magic without the sword or in one case use the swords themselves to make/cast lightning.

And then there is Bee who might be who you are thinking of.

Renen

2015-07-13, 12:13 PM

Owing to some pictures above, here's how the ranged fighter of the group should look like:

http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_small/2/22021/555385-vash00.jpg

Eldan

2015-07-13, 12:24 PM

To be fair, most of his power seems to come from what D&D would label magical items.

OldTrees1

2015-07-13, 12:35 PM

Owing to some pictures above, here's how the ranged fighter of the group should look like:

Vash the Stampede is probably mid level but stopping a flying "boulder" with some well placed shots and being able to obliviously walk though a gun fight is a good start. The rest is his gun's claim.

RolkFlameraven

2015-07-13, 12:43 PM

Its been a while, but didn't he manage to change where a gun was aiming and/or the trajectory of bullets in mid flight so no one died in a tournament once? And he did all of this by flicking pebbles at them. Those kind of reflexes fit well I would think.

Renen

2015-07-13, 12:49 PM

Svata

2015-07-13, 12:50 PM

Image doesn't work.

Renen

2015-07-13, 12:52 PM

Fixd:smallyuk:

Extra Anchovies

2015-07-13, 12:54 PM

Incidentally I've messed around with a homebrew Fighter that is pretty much the core Fighter except with two extra abilities. The first is that he gets an extra complete set of actions for every Fighter level beyond first (so at level 20 he gets to act 20 times per round) and the second is that at every even level he gets to negate one negative consequence per encounter (i.e. he gets to say "that attack didn't hit" or "I made that save").

That change alone makes Fighter massively more fun to play and far more competitive; it can easily hang with any of the Tier 3 classes and can throw down with unprepared and/or otherwise less than optimal Tier 1 and 2 classes.

That sounds awesome. Bookmarking this.

There's a rather amusing rant I read a while back (which I can't seem to find to quote, drat it) which points out that in the OLD stories, the Knights of the Round Table included a guy with solar-powered strength, a sorcerer (not Merlin - one of the knights knew magic as well), and a WEREWOLF. And one of their enemies could re-attach his own severed head. The writer then quote some story of a duel where the knight and his foe were pounding each other so hard that despite their armor, they were spraying blood everywhere but REFUSING TO FALL - that's straight out of any random issue of Shonen Jump.
European mythology isn't usually presented as 'anime' ENOUGH to be accurate. :smallbiggrin:

I need to read more European mythology.

Can I sig that? I need an update.

Go right ahead.

Lurkmoar

2015-07-13, 01:45 PM

To be fair, most of his power seems to come from what D&D would label magical items.

I was under the impression that his specialized revovler was an extension of himself... especially when it gets all glowly and gains angel wings. It can be a bit of a chore to port something fictional over to D&D and have it be just right.

Vash's aim is pretty uncanny, as well as his abilities to dodge bullets and calculate ricochets on the fly.

Sith_Happens

2015-07-13, 02:11 PM

I was under the impression that his specialized revovler was an extension of himself... especially when it gets all glowly and gains angel wings.

Most of the time he just uses it as a normal gun though.

Segev

2015-07-13, 02:18 PM

Most of the time he just uses it as a normal gun though.

And most of the time, it's just a masterwork gun.

Andreaz

2015-07-13, 02:20 PM

Mythic refers to the over the top "anime-esque" according to some powers some demi-gods and gods have in various myths from Greek/Roman/Indian. This is because demi-gods and gods count as divine and magical in nature, so aren't allowed.I do hope you realize this more or less leave fighter types with merely "Tadakatsu Honda" and "Leo Major" levels of hax, right? These dudes are indeed powerful, but paltry compared to any kind of god (casters) and divine warriors by definition.

So why don't we remember that Extraordinary abilities are blatantly impossible anyway? At the very definition, Ex abilities break reality just as hard as supernatural and spell-like abilities do.

Let the fighters be Thor, Achilles, Arthur and their ilk >.>

Renen

2015-07-13, 02:34 PM

Arthur

That better be the version of Arthur that has breasts!
http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/thejusticeworld/images/8/8c/Fsn_saber.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110801164151

LokeyITP

2015-07-13, 02:44 PM

Svata

2015-07-13, 02:49 PM

I think they could handle a low-level Healer. Maybe a warmage.

Karnith

2015-07-13, 02:54 PM

That better be the version of Arthur that has breasts!
http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/thejusticeworld/images/8/8c/Fsn_saber.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110801164151
Or better yet, that Arthur's clone.
http://i1304.photobucket.com/albums/s533/Karnith/Saber%20of%20Red_zpsiq82gfkw.jpg
You know, now that I've been thinking about it, I quite like F/SN as a model for high-level martials. Super-human strength and speed, vast knowledge of the legends and fighting techniques of similarly-powered creatures, and Noble Phantasms to give them high-power tricks on the offense and defense.

Brova

2015-07-13, 02:54 PM

What would be a fair spellcaster to throw at a party of level 20 mundanes + no magic items then? Even level 4 spells + no prep time would probably do them in anyway (allips or grabbing something like arrow demons with the binding line of spells and CL shenanigans...)

There's probably a level 3 caster that can 100% kill a few of them without much optimization :)

It's easy enough at 7th. Improved familiar for a mirror mephit, instruct it to make a simulacrum of an efreet, chain bind your way to omnipotence. Doing it earlier than that is a bit annoying, but possible. Notably, you can charm person a careless 7th level caster from 1st level (though that's a bit sticky). summon mirror mephit is almost there, but IIRC summons won't use abilities that would cost XP. alter self might get you there, depending on how things are ruled. I think the lowest you can do is a Warlock that is some how permanently incorporeal. Mundane weapons can't hurt him, and he does 1d6 a round every round forever.

OldTrees1

2015-07-13, 03:03 PM

Flickerdart

2015-07-13, 03:13 PM

The iconic monsters are all in that range because that's where most games play. Ignore the mechanics for a moment: the dude was strong enough to hold up the sky and fight the most powerful monsters in the world with his bare hands. He could walk into the underworld and punch things until Hades gave him what he wanted.
Most powerful monsters in the world? Please. Put Hercules up against a Titan and watch him get squished. As for the underworld, Hades basically had an open-door policy for plucky heroes, so that wasn't really a demigodly feat at all...

Renen

2015-07-13, 03:15 PM

Most powerful monsters in the world? Please. Put Hercules up against a Titan and watch him get squished. As for the underworld, Hades basically had an open-door policy for plucky heroes, so that wasn't really a demigodly feat at all...

Yeh. Orpheus just walked in. I THINK he only really diplomancy'd/performance check'd the cerberus, but thats it. And he was so human that later he got killed by a buncha commoners.

A Tad Insane

2015-07-13, 03:18 PM

I've always thought arena net's warriors (both in gw and gw2) are good representations of fighters in fantasy

Evil wizard:"Eat fireball!"
Warrior: "tasty"
Evil wizard: "Let's see how you like being turned into a sheep!"
Warrior: "I really don't want to"
Evil wizard: "Whuu? Die!"
Warrior: "Ow!" *stretches* "all better"
Evil wizard: "H-how?"
Warrior: "are you done?"
Evil wizard: "what?"
*the warrior then rushes the wizard, salvaging him like a feral kitten with string*

If a man with a dress and a handful of poop can make a fireball, then a man in full plate with a handful of sword can take it

If a wizard can turn someone to stone with their hands, a barbarian can block it with there chest hair

If a sorcerer can figure out how to make a shield off pure arcane energy, a rogue can figure out its weak points

It just comes down to who has the most exp

Flickerdart

2015-07-13, 03:20 PM

Renen

2015-07-13, 03:29 PM

But dont forget that the wizards they fight dont have the ability to create an exact copy of the warrior every 6 seconds, and have said copy fight the warrior

Tuvarkz

2015-07-13, 03:33 PM

Any high level martial that can match up a wizard is going to be wuxia.

OldTrees1

2015-07-13, 03:35 PM

But dont forget that the wizards they fight dont have the ability to create an exact copy of the warrior every 6 seconds, and have said copy fight the warrior

Sounds like a dysfunctional mechanic. Should overwhelming that really be our goal?

Dienekes

2015-07-13, 04:02 PM

Most powerful monsters in the world? Please. Put Hercules up against a Titan and watch him get squished. As for the underworld, Hades basically had an open-door policy for plucky heroes, so that wasn't really a demigodly feat at all...

Actually, one of the less well known legends of Herakles is that a group of giants with snake legs as powerful as the titans came to dethrone Zeus. Herakles was the warrior that changed the tides for the gods.

Though I don't remember if this was before or after his mortal body died and he became the god of the gymnasium.

He did a bunch of other cool stuff. One of the more amusing ones was where he conquered Troy, alone. Something that the rest of the Greek warriors required 10 years to do together.

That and the Hydra and Cerebus were children of a monster that was far more powerful than the titans. However, we don't know what that means in terms of their strength as all we know about them is that they were apparently less strong than Herakles. Though, the Hydra made Herakles get assistance, which all of Troy didn't make him do.

Andreaz

2015-07-13, 04:08 PM

Tuvarkz

2015-07-13, 04:12 PM

Except F/SN Lancer. He's clearly a gish. Damn irish :p
Nah, PoW Warlord with Polearm Dancer+Weapon Finesse+Deadly Agility with Elemental Flux into the mix, probably some Animus Adept levels, refluffing the glyphs as runes.

Andreaz

2015-07-13, 04:18 PM

Nah, PoW Warlord with Polearm Dancer+Weapon Finesse+Deadly Agility with Elemental Flux into the mix, probably some Animus Adept levels, refluffing the glyphs as runes.He quite legitimately casts spells, not just bending. Since most of it is martial you can indeed do that very port, but he has things like spells for searching, immunizing against gaze attacks, counterspelling, creating mini-demiplanes, laying curses, compel people to fight, even buff his spear...

Tuvarkz

2015-07-13, 04:19 PM

Immunity against gaze attacks and counterspelling is easily the level 4 counters from Scarlet Throne and Elemental Flux.

Terazul

2015-07-13, 04:29 PM

Or better yet, that Arthur's clone.
http://i1304.photobucket.com/albums/s533/Karnith/Saber%20of%20Red_zpsiq82gfkw.jpg
You know, now that I've been thinking about it, I quite like F/SN as a model for high-level martials. Super-human strength and speed, vast knowledge of the legends and fighting techniques of similarly-powered creatures, and Noble Phantasms to give them high-power tricks on the offense and defense.

The type-moon universe really does handle it well. Beyond just the knowledge of legends and fighting techniques, most of them have many passive skills (http://typemoon.wikia.com/wiki/Skill) (with rankings from E~A to EX) that just relate to how superhumanly talented they are. Some examples:

Riding: At B they can handle nearly any vehicle with above average skill, A and A+ can also use Phantasmal and Divine beasts, and at EX can ride anything.
Magic Resistance: At E, reduces magic damage somewhat, at D cancels short magic spells, C spells with two verses or less, and by EX just cannot be harmed at all.
Eternal Arms Mastership: Mastery of combat to the point of being unrivaled, skills remain undiminished by any sort of outside mental influence.
Knowledge of Respect and Harmony: No matter how many times the same attack is used against an opponent, they always retains the same effectiveness as though they didn't see it coming.

It keeps going with some hyperspecialized ones to relate to their legends (either beneficially or negatively), and beyond that just their class abilities. Archer (F/SN) for example could memorize the layout of an entire city just from a glance off the tallest building (using the Clairvoyance skill), and could fire volleys of arrows in an instant with pinpoint accuracy from four kilometers away. That kind of stuff is honestly what you should expect from big-name high powered martial characters, and even then there's magical stuff thrown in, whether it's an invisible sword, some magical runes, supernatural charm, etc. As many individuals have said in the thread, a non-wuxia/mythical/superhuman fighter just doesn't cut it versus... well just about anything past level 4 or so.

*Edit:* Yeah, F/SN Lancer straight up has Rune Magic as a skill at Rank B, and he takes great pride in it. It's actually been pointed out explicitly that he's good enough at magic he could've been summoned as a Caster servant, and in fact he does just that in an upcoming game.

Flickerdart

2015-07-13, 04:30 PM

Actually, one of the less well known legends of Herakles is that a group of giants with snake legs as powerful as the titans came to dethrone Zeus. Herakles was the warrior that changed the tides for the gods.
Were they as powerful as titans?

That and the Hydra and Cerebus
Poor Cerebus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebus_the_Aardvark)...

OldTrees1

2015-07-13, 04:58 PM

Actually, one of the less well known legends of Herakles is that a group of giants with snake legs as powerful as the titans came to dethrone Zeus. Herakles was the warrior that changed the tides for the gods.

Though I don't remember if this was before or after his mortal body died and he became the god of the gymnasium.

This was before Herakles died. He would not satisfy the prophesy if he was already a god and thus Olympus would have fallen.

Were they as powerful as titans?

Poor Cerebus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebus_the_Aardvark)...

1) Zeus and his brothers(subset of the gods) defeated the Titans
2) The gods would lose if they fought the Giants alone
So no, the giants were more powerful than the titans in some manners of speaking.

Dienekes

2015-07-13, 04:59 PM

Were they as powerful as titans?

Well, they nearly ousted Zeus, a feat that only the Titans and Typhon ever got close to achieving.* So, yeah. As far as we can say anything about the strength of mythical characters from a culture that didn't really record various power levels of their monsters.

Poor Cerebus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebus_the_Aardvark)...

Heh, Cerberus. My bad.

*Edit: I guess you could also make a case for the Aloadae, but if they were ever close to being successful is up for debate. They were certainly strong. But in any case, the Aloadae were the children of titans and gods. So they probably count.

Milo v3

2015-07-13, 08:16 PM

I do hope you realize this more or less leave fighter types with merely "Tadakatsu Honda" and "Leo Major" levels of hax, right? These dudes are indeed powerful, but paltry compared to any kind of god (casters) and divine warriors by definition.

So why don't we remember that Extraordinary abilities are blatantly impossible anyway? At the very definition, Ex abilities break reality just as hard as supernatural and spell-like abilities do.

Let the fighters be Thor, Achilles, Arthur and their ilk >.>

Yeah, it makes things very hard. I don't agree with it, but from the paizo thread, these things were deemed as wuxia.

As for the underworld, Hades basically had an open-door policy for plucky heroes, so that wasn't really a demigodly feat at all...
Not even just plucky heroes, anyone that wants in is welcome... just don't try to leave.

Brova

2015-07-13, 08:21 PM

@Underworld/Greek Myths:

Greek mythology is kinda weird. Basically, heroes do all the stuff high level D&D characters are supposed to do (collect magic items, fight mythic monsters, perform impossible feats), except that they can't generally kill large numbers of mortals*. The best system to model it is actually Age of Mythology. Heroes beat monsters, because they are immune to monsters GTFO abilities and get special bonuses against them. Monsters beat mortals, because they have GTFO abilities and better stats. Mortals beat heroes, because they have numbers and are cheap.

*: There are exceptions. Notably, Achilles is immune to damage.

A Tad Insane

2015-07-13, 08:47 PM

That's well and all, but it puts mundanes in a very reactive position, where instead of doing cool stuff they are simply stuck undoing cool stuff other people do. Meanwhile, ANet's warriors and rogues (well, assassins) are more than capable of sweet aggressive techniques that make things happen.

Then allow me to expand on the "savaging"
The fighter charges faster than any man the wizard has seen before, because ~30 strength and stamina. The wizard tries to cast a spell, but an expected placed knee to the gut stops that nonsense as the fighter gets his first attack in.

The wizard's time stop contingency starts to kick in, but the fighter uses his second attack to stab his sword into the wizard before it happens, causing the magic to fizzle as the wizard got physically pinned to the present.

As the fighter gets ready to deliver the final blow (which was .2 seconds after his first) a clone of the fighter materializes, trying to block the blow to the wizard. Fortunately for the fighter, no clone conjured by a wizard who can't even hold a sword, never mind use one, can't match the cunning of the fighter, who stops his strike in favor of crushing the wizard, who has at this point fallen to the floor because he cant take a little pain, with his massive girth and equally massive armor.

The last words out of the wizard's mouth were "but I had damage reduction and a deflection bonus..."
To which the fighter responds "I know, I just ignored it"
So a really awesome charge with pounce, followed by something to stop casting, then something to stop magic, and then the ability to say "nope" to the enemy's ac and dr for massive damage.

QuickLyRaiNbow

2015-07-13, 08:51 PM

*: There are exceptions. Notably, Achilles is immune to damage.

Achilles is a boss in a Sony game, based on Japanese history (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g1fr5vk72M).

OldTrees1

2015-07-13, 08:53 PM

Then allow me to expand on the "savaging"
The fighter charges faster than any man the wizard has seen before, because ~30 strength and stamina. The wizard tries to cast a spell, but an expected placed knee to the gut stops that nonsense as the fighter gets his first attack in.

The wizard's time stop contingency starts to kick in, but the fighter uses his second attack to stab his sword into the wizard before it happens, causing the magic to fizzle as the wizard got physically pinned to the present.

As the fighter gets ready to deliver the final blow (which was .2 seconds after his first) a clone of the fighter materializes, trying to block the blow to the wizard. Fortunately for the fighter, no clone conjured by a wizard who can't even hold a sword, never mind use one, can't match the cunning of the fighter, who stops his strike in favor of crushing the wizard, who has at this point fallen to the floor because he cant take a little pain, with his massive girth and equally massive armor.

The last words out of the wizard's mouth were "but I had damage reduction and a deflection bonus..."
To which the fighter responds "I know, I just ignored it"
So a really awesome charge with pounce, followed by something to stop casting, then something to stop magic, and then the ability to say "nope" to the enemy's ac and dr for massive damage.

I know you were being concise, but did you have to leave out the Fighter overcoming the Wall of Force/Forcecage the Wizard was hiding behind/in?

Rubik

2015-07-13, 09:02 PM

I know you were being concise, but did you have to leave out the Fighter overcoming the Wall of Force/Forcecage the Wizard was hiding behind/in?Or his Clones? Or his Astral Projection? Or his ability to phase through walls? Or his ability to teleport away via Contingency well before he's within melee range (because any wizard that allows himself to get into melee isn't a very good wizard)? Or the hundreds of Crafted Contingent summons on all the angels and demons he's already Planar Bound?

Ignoring those is a Bad IdeaTM

Red Rubber Band

2015-07-13, 09:12 PM

Also, I present the "barbarian" of the group:

http://wallpaperest.com/wallpapers/elfen-lied_163322.jpg

Her threat range is: Yes
Her number of attacks is: Alot
Her ability to take away the line of effect is: Definitely

Would that not be more Nana's thing? Though, on that note, Mariko is kinda the poster child for crazy diclonius abilities.

OldTrees1

2015-07-13, 09:15 PM

Or his Clones? Or his Astral Projection? Or his ability to phase through walls? Or his ability to teleport away via Contingency well before he's within melee range (because any wizard that allows himself to get into melee isn't a very good wizard)? Or the hundred Crafted Contingent summons on all the angels and demons he's already Planar Bound?

Ignoring those is a Bad IdeaTM

Based on the description thus far, I would guess at the same power level as the Wizard the answer would be:
Tempo, Find the Wizard before the scene, Crashing Charge, Ranged Disrupt, Tempo

Sith_Happens

2015-07-13, 09:18 PM

Flickerdart

2015-07-13, 10:17 PM

Then allow me to expand on the "savaging"
No, thanks, I got all that.

My point is that "charge and do damage" is what you do at level one.

OldTrees1

2015-07-13, 10:28 PM

No, thanks, I got all that.

My point is that "charge and do damage" is what you do at level one.

If Fighters ought to do Damage at 1st, Combat Maneuvers at 6th, and Crippling Effects(save or lose) and AoE weapon attacks at 11th, what ought they be doing at 16th(no save, just die?)?

Brova

2015-07-13, 10:35 PM

If Fighters ought to do Damage at 1st, Combat Maneuvers at 6th, and Crippling Effects(save or lose) at 11th, what ought they be doing at 16th(no save, just die?)?

I'm of the opinion that combat in general aught to start out with people killing each-other relatively quickly with damage at low levels, then scale to longer fights that end on save or dies (which can only target bloodied enemies) at higher levels. Further, the big thrust of high level adventures shouldn't be changing tactics, it should be changing strategy. You should stop just charging in and start having to deal with contingencies and defenses before you can attack. Take Lord of Light or Creatures of Light and Darkness. In Lord of Light, Sam spreads a religion that weakens the gods, releases caged demons, steals an ancient relic, sows discord with assassinations, and then finally fights the gods. In Creatures of Light and Darkness, Thoth has to restore Set's memory by recovering or recreating the three artifacts that gave him power, then he has to fight the Thing That Cries In The Night, then Typhon has to deliver the finishing blow by throwing it into a black hole.

Red Rubber Band

2015-07-13, 10:41 PM

If Fighters ought to do Damage at 1st, Combat Maneuvers at 6th, and Crippling Effects(save or lose) and AoE weapon attacks at 11th, what ought they be doing at 16th(no save, just die?)?

Literally be able to grasp the fabric of space and time?

Get superhero powers that you could pseudo-scientifically explain away? Concentrating on their inner fire the warrior bursts into flame, conflagrating nearby opponents, setting ablaze everything around them, and scorching the very earth upon which they tread.

The chill of death surrounds the hero of a thousand battles. Ice forms where they tread, and nigh indestructible verglas covers them from head to toe. Only those of indeterminable wills can get close enough to this courier of the last gasp, lesser beings will fall dead from fright as a swift frost pervades their being.

Milo v3

2015-07-13, 10:57 PM

If a fighter had the power to do supernatural stuff by using special weapon materials, does that count as too wuxia? Like... the fighter can't planeshift, but he might master adamantine, and then with an adamantine scythe and cut his way through the planes to reach heaven. Or use adamantine to cut silver threads... or the threads of time....

Give them supernatural powers, but they need a fantastical material to do them.

OldTrees1

2015-07-13, 10:58 PM

Literally be able to grasp the fabric of space and time?

Get superhero powers that you could pseudo-scientifically explain away? Concentrating on their inner fire the warrior bursts into flame, conflagrating nearby opponents, setting ablaze everything around them, and scorching the very earth upon which they tread.

The chill of death surrounds the hero of a thousand battles. Ice forms where they tread, and nigh indestructible verglas covers them from head to toe. Only those of indeterminable wills can get close enough to this courier of the last gasp, lesser beings will fall dead from fright as a swift frost pervades their being.

What would grasping the fabric do? You are quite vague here.

Isn't setting all targets within an area on fire an example of what I listed as 11th level(AoE + Crippling effects)?

That is a lot of passive ice effects. But what does the hero of a thousand battles do that is not in the list I provided?

Sith_Happens

2015-07-13, 11:14 PM

No, thanks, I got all that.

My point is that "charge and do damage" is what you do at level one.

From the sound of it this is "charge and do damage as an immediate action," which is all kinds of more useful and versatile. Mmmm, immediate actions.:smallbiggrin:

Flickerdart

2015-07-13, 11:26 PM

From the sound of it this is "charge and do damage as an immediate action," which is all kinds of more useful and versatile. Mmmm, immediate actions.:smallbiggrin:
The action with which you charge and do damage doesn't change the fact that you are still charging and doing damage. It is only meaningful when faced with an extremely narrow set of obstacles that fit the description of "there is a guy over there who can be swordmurdered and it is my interest to swordmurder him."

Meanwhile, spellcasters can travel to a plane made entirely of cats, give all those cats human-like intelligence, turn them all into dragons, force the dragons to shag each other to breed designer dragonskin patterns, then use that dragonskin to craft dragon effigies that they use to take over the kingdom.

Red Rubber Band

2015-07-13, 11:39 PM

What would grasping the fabric do? You are quite vague here.

Isn't setting all targets within an area on fire an example of what I listed as 11th level(AoE + Crippling effects)?

That is a lot of passive ice effects. But what does the hero of a thousand battles do that is not in the list I provided?

I was just throwing out ideas in themes for you and others to mull over and elaborate on once your/their imaginations went wild.

Ice forming where they walk could mean water walk, or perhaps even a "fly" of sorts. You've got extra armour there (or DR). Auras that are save or die. Immunity to Cold/Fire. Protection from Arrows. "A lot of passive ice effects" doesn't cover half the protective spells a Wizard would have on themselves, so not sure what you mean.

It's not all about doing damage. You need the utility. Tier 1s are there in part due to their utility. As are Tier 3s as well, I guess. (Hazy on actual definitions of Tiers, it's been a while)

The literal grasping of space and time is in the same vein as others have been saying. The mundanes need a way to tell reality to sit down.
Rip open a hole in reality, step through and end up half a mile down the road at the crossroads you were just looking at. Walk where the rain isn't*. See with another's eyes. Something too far away? Pull it towards you with the strength of your arm and will. Tell someone to STOP.

* From Dean Koontz's book From the Corner of His Eye. Has a few things like this in it.

Renen

2015-07-14, 12:33 AM

The action with which you charge and do damage doesn't change the fact that you are still charging and doing damage. It is only meaningful when faced with an extremely narrow set of obstacles that fit the description of "there is a guy over there who can be swordmurdered and it is my interest to swordmurder him."

Meanwhile, spellcasters can travel to a plane made entirely of cats, give all those cats human-like intelligence, turn them all into dragons, force the dragons to shag each other to breed designer dragonskin patterns, then use that dragonskin to craft dragon effigies that they use to take over the kingdom.

You are a sick sick person! I like it!

Sith_Happens

2015-07-14, 01:17 AM

The action with which you charge and do damage doesn't change the fact that you are still charging and doing damage. It is only meaningful when faced with an extremely narrow set of obstacles that fit the description of "there is a guy over there who can be swordmurdered and it is my interest to swordmurder him."

I at least was not implying for that to be the only neat trick that a hypothetical Awesome Fighter would get. The obvious next step, for instance, is to greatly expand the set of "things that can be swordmurdered.":smallwink:

OldTrees1

2015-07-14, 06:24 AM

I was just throwing out ideas in themes for you and others to mull over and elaborate on once your/their imaginations went wild.

Ice forming where they walk could mean water walk, or perhaps even a "fly" of sorts. You've got extra armour there (or DR). Auras that are save or die. Immunity to Cold/Fire. Protection from Arrows. "A lot of passive ice effects" doesn't cover half the protective spells a Wizard would have on themselves, so not sure what you mean.

It's not all about doing damage. You need the utility. Tier 1s are there in part due to their utility. As are Tier 3s as well, I guess. (Hazy on actual definitions of Tiers, it's been a while)

The literal grasping of space and time is in the same vein as others have been saying. The mundanes need a way to tell reality to sit down.
Rip open a hole in reality, step through and end up half a mile down the road at the crossroads you were just looking at. Walk where the rain isn't*. See with another's eyes. Something too far away? Pull it towards you with the strength of your arm and will. Tell someone to STOP.

* From Dean Koontz's book From the Corner of His Eye. Has a few things like this in it.

"A lot of passive effects" was a reference to one of the frequent fallacious arguments used against Fighters on a thread like this, that argument being that all they do is attack and roll damage. Usually the people making this fallacious argument will only accept counter examples of Actions done in combat that are not just attack and roll damage so they usually discount passive effects (and sometimes even triggered effects for some odd reason).

The more nuanced version of this argument expects the Fighter to come up with alternatives to "attack and damage" as they gain levels but demands level appropriate alternatives that are different in kind from the alternatives a lower levels. This is why I asked for alternatives that did not fall into "combat maneuvers", "crippling effects", or "AoE weapon attacks".

So far actions you have listed are:
Waterwalk/Fly (6th-11th level)
Far Travel(In combat application?)
See with another's eyes(In combat application?)
Pull someone towards you(high level magnitude and fluff version of an unwritten combat maneuver so 6th)
Tell someone to STOP(Crippling Effect, 11th)

So while you sound like you have a good grasp of a better Fighter, your suggestions thus far are not very useful against the argument in question.

PS: Quick Tier summary
Tier 3s are the Skilled + Utility tier. They are good at what they do and can always find a way to contribute. Tier 1-2s add the ability to break a campaign is a few ways(Tier 2) or as many ways as they wish(Tier 1). The references to Simulacrum/Ice Assassin in this thread are good examples of Tier 1-2. This is why I don't think Tier 1-2 is a good design goal.

Flickerdart

2015-07-14, 07:13 AM

I at least was not implying for that to be the only neat trick that a hypothetical Awesome Fighter would get. The obvious next step, for instance, is to greatly expand the set of "things that can be swordmurdered.":smallwink:
Dispelling? No sir, I just swordmurdered time for 25 rounds.

Ashtagon

2015-07-14, 07:20 AM

Does wuxia include Indian epic-style archers who can literally blot out the sun with a hail of arrows, and loose an arrow that lands with the force of a tactical nuke?

Reprimand

2015-07-14, 08:05 AM

What does "Wuxia" mean?

Ashtagon

2015-07-14, 08:17 AM

What does "Wuxia" mean?

I believe it is a reference to Hong Kong cinema style martial arts movies.

SinsI

2015-07-14, 08:49 AM

A specialist at controlling his Magical Power Armor with finesse enough to dance on a fully prepared dinner table without breaking a single dish(no Dex limit or Armor check penalty on heavy armor), a sniper that can put a nonmagic bullet from a dozen kilometers away into the eye of a newt (completely ignores ranged penalties). If he uses a weapon, its damage is always maximized and all his hits are critical (and if with a blade - they are probably Vorpal, too). Has extremely high Spot and Listen check (can notice the flicker in the air from a flying invisible silenced enemy), can deduce geography and location of all troops and enemies in battle, even at night, and has a high chance to predict enemy battle plan. Can recognize all spells, and, as an immediate action, activate a number of protective magic abilities of his Magic Power Armor - i.e. activate Shield when someone casts a Magic Missile targeting him, or Silence if someone casts Unholy Word. Can act faster than anyone else, doing two Standard Actions in a round. Can attack in the middle of a Run Action. Of course, he has Improved Evasion and Improved Uncanny Dodge. If he moves through a terrain that has anything withing his reach that can provide even minimal cover, he always has partial cover or better.

Red Fel

2015-07-14, 08:50 AM

I believe it is a reference to Hong Kong cinema style martial arts movies.

Technically, it's a form of literature which has since become a source of cinema and theatrical plays. The name itself refers to martial arts heroes; in many ways, the concept is an early literary superhero, with protagonists whose mastery of the martial arts takes on superhuman qualities. It's also quite common for things in the genre to have over-the-top names, such as "Ten Thousand Ordering Palms" and "Sword That Overcomes the Restless Spirit" and so forth. If you have any confusion as to what wuxia looks like, go watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. That's basically what it means; over-the-top martial arts action, larger-than-life heroes, and Greek tragedy.

eggynack

2015-07-14, 09:16 AM

By my way of thinking, and by the way of thinking of a lot of people here, there are a couple of conflicting ideas at work here. Those are, to state it simply, a fighter with no magic, and a wizard that is exactly as powerful as it is now. The idea is that you can't make the fighter more magical, or the wizard less magical, and the result is a brutal fighter crushing. However, there might be a false premise there that can be exploited, and it's been explored a bit with the idea of an anti-magic fighter. It just might have not gone far enough though.

That idea is, the wizard is less magical. Don't get me wrong, the wizard is still doing the same crazy crap as he was doing before, so the power is all technically there, but it is, perhaps, less magical than it once was. For example, because I think this needs examples, let's consider the ethereal wizard, untouchable by the fighter with his mundane sword. Well, what if the wizard just weren't quite as untouchable as he thinks? In mechanical terms, this would be the fighter breaking through the etherealness, but that connotes the idea of the fighter using magic. So, you instead flavor it as the fighter just kinda... hitting him. Because, why can't he? Sure, the wizard is hard to hit. He cast a spell to be hard to hit. But the fighter is really good at hitting folk.

Other classes, they'd still be dealing with an ethereal wizard, probably with magical solutions, but the fighter just asks why everyone's making such a big deal about this. Sure, the wizard is hard to see and hear, but it's not impossible. The other classes are the ones that are wrong. Similarly, for astral projection, there's a cord right there. Most folk say that you need a silver sword of some kind, but the fighter has proved otherwise, because he doesn't have one of those, and somehow he managed.

The fighter, in his pursuit of the mundane, has transcended the myth of the all powerful wizard. Others can't break through the powerful magic, because they're just not tough enough, but it turns out, if you hit a wall of force hard enough, then it'll break like any other wall. Not because the fighter used magic on it, and not because he had the sheer force of will to do so, but because it's a frigging wall. What's the big deal? The wizards hang out in their fancy mage towers all day, acting like their magic is this perfection that can't be harmed or breached by any mortal being, and the fighter doesn't know if the wizards are lying more to themselves or to the world, because he can breach that magic just fine. Or, maybe he can't, but maybe when he gets stronger. And then, as Red Fel says, he can stick a sword down their throats.

illyahr

2015-07-14, 09:21 AM

Flickerdart

2015-07-14, 09:27 AM

**antimagic fighter**
That's not a bad idea, but it still doesn't get past the fundamental problem with mundanes - lack of strategic-level agency. A fighter than can hit an ethereal wizard still can't travel through the ethereal plane himself. A fighter that can block a teleport with his shield still can't teleport himself. Unless mundanes get that kind of capability, they will still be "full attack every round forever."

Segev

2015-07-14, 09:42 AM

To a degree, there's nothing wrong with the fighter being "the reactive class." Don't get me wrong: giving them more agency to proactively perform is a good idea. But holding it up as a necessary requirement may not be.

The reason why fighters "just lose" has more to do with lacking answers to mage tricks than it does with being unable to do everything a mage can.

Give the Ranger the ability to track people across the planes and through teleportations, making him the implaccable, inescapable hunter. Give the Fighter the power to thwart the "na-na-you-can't-hit-me" capabilities of mages. Make the rogue able to steal and sneak past every defense and charm.

The wizard is powerful. He is, overtly and on a grand scale, a mover and shaker. But the "mundane" classes are implacable, uncatchable, and unstoppable, too. The mage can crush a kingdom; the fighter can lead an army that can survive the mage's wrath and prevent his escape. The mage can retreat from bad encounters and strike only when advantageous thanks to scry-and-die; the ranger can track him down across time and space and force him to expend more and more resources just to stay ahead and less and less on being a 'god.' The mage can build an unassailable, untouchable redoubt in which to take sanctuary and store his most precious of goods. The rogue can burgle it, despite its mystical and dimensional defenses and impossibly remote location.

I'll be honest: I don't think people who are playing fighters, rangers, paladins, rogues, and bards are looking to be reality-shaking powerhouses of mystical might. I think they're looking for a more personal-scale level of potency. This doesn't mean they're "less" than mages; it's a different focus. King Jimbo IV should be just as terrified if he hears that Carmen Sandiego is coming to rob his kingdom as he would be if he heard Xena the Warrior Princess was leading her army to loot it or that Merlin the Magician has decided he wants Jimbo's crown for a ritual. Each is an unstoppable force, from his perspective. One will rob him blind and he may not even realize it's happened until his kingdom is bankrupt. Another will devastate him with a war that he cannot win. The third could curse his lands for a thousand years or simply level his castle with a word, so he hopes he just shows up by teleporting in and asking nicely.

Even if Xena's not leading an army, she's a one-woman army and no amount of soldiers will stop her. So in a "personal" scale, Merlin scries and teleports in to make his demands. Xena fights her way through any opposition to make her demands. Carmen has already left a note in place of whatever she wanted.

I do think all of them need to be ABLE to access rapid transport and dimensional travel. But that's doable without overt spellcasting. And the scale on which they do so need not be identical. Sure, the mage just plane shifts while the others need to find natural portals. But for personal travel, that's manageable. And if it's a chase or a race, then other means can be enacted. (I do think "follow that mage" effects need to be accessible, so teleports and the like are not auto-escapes from high-end 'mundane' characters, for instance.)

In short, don't try to fix it by giving all the mage capabilities to everyone else. Mages should have things they're not as good at as others; beef others up where this is not the case but it should be. And if, in the end, the scope of their reach seems different, don't assume that makes one "less" than the other. Each has their strengths, and past a certain point, their weaknesses are few and far between.

eggynack

2015-07-14, 09:52 AM

That's not a bad idea, but it still doesn't get past the fundamental problem with mundanes - lack of strategic-level agency. A fighter than can hit an ethereal wizard still can't travel through the ethereal plane himself. A fighter that can block a teleport with his shield still can't teleport himself. Unless mundanes get that kind of capability, they will still be "full attack every round forever."
That's fair. With some serious magic defeating power, however, you don't have to go as far in pushing the power level of the cool moves they'd get, which would mean that those powers wouldn't face as much accusation. They'd be the things that get used in combat, and they'd be versatile, but they wouldn't necessarily be the core of fighter power. That'd just be tactical instead of strategic agency, but as Segev points out, that's not necessarily a problem. As long as the fighter can actually do their fighting shtick in a way that's actually meaningful, a way that maybe impacts combat even more than casters do, the person playing the character will still be getting about what they want out of the class. I don't think the current problem is so much that fighters lack strategic agency, but that they lack all agency. Also, that they're super boring. If you give fighters a domain where they are the best, and make them interesting to use in that domain, then you're pretty close to solving the fundamental problems with the class.

Ashtagon

2015-07-14, 09:53 AM

I think a fundamental problem with this approach is that a non-wuxia anything up against a wuxia anything is pretty much destined for failure. And the wizard, especially at high levels, *is* playing up to wuxia-grade tropes.

Personally, I am quite happy for a high level fighter to...

Crack the earth by striking the ground with his greatclub.
Blot out the sun with a hail of arrows (okay, not *literally*)
Climb walls with the speed at which a normal man walks on level ground.
Dodge arrows and bullets
Shake off a magic spell (2e fighters actually had the best saves vs. spells)
Strike enemies who are immune to mundane spells
Detect invisible/silent/ethereal beings and strike them with his sword
Smash down a wall of force by hitting it really hard
Shield their compatriots with their shield. Even if they are using a buckler
Lunge with their melee weapons far farther than the weapon's reach might imply

Some of these might properly be traits of a high-level monk class (but today is not monkday), and wire-fu leaps certainly belong exclusively to monks.

And yes, this fighter still lacks an adequate response to plane shifting teleporting wizards.

Hecuba

2015-07-14, 10:09 AM

Shake off a magic spell (2e fighters actually had the best saves vs. spells)

Expounding on this a bit:
Earlier editions were actually much better about recognizing and managing this issue.
In addition to the fact that 3.5 magic has far more flexibility with far fewer drawbacks than prior edition magic, there were several items that addressed this on the martial side as well.

The Paladin and Ranger were not originally independent classes: they were specializations available to high level fighters. Alternately, the fighter could instead become a "lord" (if I'm remembering the terminology correctly), effectively giving them leadership-- which wasn't otherwise available.

Additionally, until 3.5 different classes progressed at different rates. As such, unless the game went long enough for people other than fighters and rogues to reach 20, the casters would always be lower level.

Brookshw

2015-07-14, 10:21 AM

This (http://www.nuklearpower.com/2009/09/08/episode-1170-happy-landings/) is what a high-level fighter should be able to do, along with appropriate reaction from party members. We should all try to think like Fighter in that we are probably thinking about it too hard. :smalltongue:

Kinda reminds me of Pratchett's Interesting Times, specifically the barbarians explaining the secret was to not be there for the bad thing (aka, dodge everything). Wish I had the book handy for the actual quote.

illyahr

2015-07-14, 10:37 AM

Optimator

2015-07-14, 10:42 AM

What would it look like? Undefined. It's 0/0. You cannot be "high-level" (12+? 14+?) without invoking cartoonish-levels of competence. I actually like high-level games for this very reason. Hyper-competence is indivisible from being high-level.

Brookshw

2015-07-14, 11:20 AM

So the Piccollo school of martial arts?

Pretty much.

Edit: heck, give the fighter mettle and evasion, maybe an ability permits a save vs any spell that's not a touch attack of some kind.

illyahr

2015-07-14, 11:25 AM

Pretty much.

Edit: heck, give the fighter mettle and evasion, maybe an ability permits a save vs any spell that's not a touch attack of some kind.

Better idea, a fighter can make an attack roll instead of a saving throw as long as they can see it coming. :smalltongue:

Brookshw

2015-07-14, 11:30 AM

Better idea, a fighter can make an attack roll instead of a saving throw as long as they can see it coming. :smalltongue:

Yeah you could do that, maybe have it use up an attack of opportunity or something.

Flickerdart

2015-07-14, 11:55 AM

If you give fighters a domain where they are the best, and make them interesting to use in that domain, then you're pretty close to solving the fundamental problems with the class.

"Ignore/dispel all the magic" is less "make them interesting" and more "make the enemy equally boring."

illyahr

2015-07-14, 12:19 PM

Yeah you could do that, maybe have it use up an attack of opportunity or something.

Oooh, I like that. Would you mind if I put it in with my Fighter fix (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?420122-Fighter-Variant-Vanguard-PEACH)?

OldTrees1

2015-07-14, 12:27 PM

Oooh, I like that. Would you mind if I put it in with my Fighter fix (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?420122-Fighter-Variant-Vanguard-PEACH)?

I too would suggest a limited number per turn, but I do not think expending the 1+Dex mod AoOs from Combat Reflexes would be a good choice. You might want to give the Fighter additional immediate actions per round and then expend those.

illyahr

2015-07-14, 12:30 PM

I too would suggest a limited number per turn, but I do not think expending the 1+Dex mod AoOs from Combat Reflexes would be a good choice. You might want to give the Fighter additional immediate actions per round and then expend those.

Maybe 1+Con modifier? You can deflect spells with a swing of your sword but it's kind of draining so a sturdier hero can do it more sort of thing?

Brookshw

2015-07-14, 12:37 PM

Oooh, I like that. Would you mind if I put it in with my Fighter fix (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?420122-Fighter-Variant-Vanguard-PEACH)?

By all means!

Red Fel

2015-07-14, 12:40 PM

Maybe 1+Con modifier? You can deflect spells with a swing of your sword but it's kind of draining so a sturdier hero can do it more sort of thing?

Block it with your chest? (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?105525-3-5e-Being-Bane-Eldariel-s-Guide-to-Barbarians)

OldTrees1

2015-07-14, 12:43 PM

Maybe 1+Con modifier? You can deflect spells with a swing of your sword but it's kind of draining so a sturdier hero can do it more sort of thing?

I was thinking more like a class feature that goes something like 1+Level/3. This way it is balanced across the 3 styles (Str, Dex, & Con). Think of this as a milder form of Tippy's suggestion earlier(+1 turn per class level beyond 1st).

Segev

2015-07-14, 12:44 PM

Extra Anchovies

2015-07-14, 12:46 PM

I'd be inclined to make a fighter-specific feat which allowed them to sacrifice iterative attacks in place of the swift action for immediate actions.

Why does everything need to cost a feat? The fighter gets a lot of feats, but fighters should be able to spend a lot of those feats on interesting stuff, not necessary stuff. Also other classes can get fighter-only feats (e.g. Warblade), so it's best as a fighter class feature.

Why would you force them to sacrifice iterative attacks for this?

Also, what does "sacrifice iterative attacks in place of the swift action for immediate actions" even mean?

Segev

2015-07-14, 12:51 PM

A Tad Insane

2015-07-14, 12:56 PM

No, thanks, I got all that.

My point is that "charge and do damage" is what you do at level one.

And summon minions, make difficult terrain, and disable an enemy is something a wizard can do at level one too. The difference between summon monster I and ice assassin (when it's not a god of cheese) is how tough they are. The difference between grease and prismic wall is the area and penalty for a failed save. Flesh to stone and sleep both will shut down those who fail the save hard.

I know I'm generalizing, but I don't have the system mastery of a veteran. I'm just throwing in my two cent on what would sound cool to say to a dm during a fight

Edit: The main problem with trying to hold up a hypothetical fighter up to a high-op wizard is that the wizard has more opinions than a human factotum has skill points. Even a sorcerer, who has access to everything a wizard has and then some, can't compete because it can't use ALL of them at once like a wizard.

Extra Anchovies

2015-07-14, 12:59 PM

I don't consider "gets more immediate actions than everybody else's one (1)" to be "necessary."

Not everything needs to be a feat, but that doesn't mean nothing should be, either. The fighter-only feats ARE ways to customize your fighter. Not every fighter build should require multiple immediate actions per round.

Okay, so I think I know what "sacrifice iterative attacks in place of the swift action for immediate actions" means now. They can take one or more extra immediate actions per round, and for each immediate action taken they can give up either a swift action or iterative attack (for the current turn, or for the next turn if the immediate actions are taken out-of-turn).

But how does granting more immediate actions help the fighter? They don't have anything to do with those immediate actions. Seriously, outside of Martial Study I know of exactly zero fighter feats that give you something to do with your immediate action.

My point stands that multiple other classes can access "fighter-only" feats, so making it a "fighter-only" feat doesn't restrict it to fighters.

OldTrees1

2015-07-14, 01:00 PM

Why does everything need to cost a feat? The fighter gets a lot of feats, but fighters should be able to spend a lot of those feats on interesting stuff, not necessary stuff. Also other classes can get fighter-only feats (e.g. Warblade), so it's best as a fighter class feature.

Why would you force them to sacrifice iterative attacks for this?

Also, what does "sacrifice iterative attacks in place of the swift action for immediate actions" even mean?

Most of this is spot on. However there are 2 minor addendum to the underlined part:
1) Feats are a useful way of customizing a character if we can presume there will be decent feats to choose from.
2) Just like other classes use some of their class features to increase/remain in relevance, so to is it the role of the Fighter's class features (feats or otherwise) to partially contribute towards this end.

So I would make it a feat if I wanted it available to any arbitrary warrior of sufficient level but I would make it a class feature if I wanted it to be class specific.

Okay, so I think I know what "sacrifice iterative attacks in place of the swift action for immediate actions" means now. They can take one or more extra immediate actions per round, and for each immediate action taken they can give up either a swift action or iterative attack (for the current turn, or for the next turn if the immediate actions are taken out-of-turn).

But how does granting more immediate actions help the fighter? They don't have anything to do with those immediate actions. Seriously, outside of Martial Study I know of exactly zero fighter feats that give you something to do with your immediate action.

I kinda assumed that implicit in my suggestion of it costing some of some additional immediate actions was the suggestion to have some Fighter class features(plural, has to be plural) that could use immediate actions. Like move, attack, or something else. I realize now that I was being too subtle.

Sith_Happens

2015-07-14, 01:10 PM

Flickerdart

2015-07-14, 01:19 PM

And summon minions, make difficult terrain, and disable an enemy is something a wizard can do at level one too. The difference between summon monster I and ice assassin (when it's not a god of cheese) is how tough they are. The difference between grease and prismic wall is the area and penalty for a failed save. Flesh to stone and sleep both will shut down those who fail the save hard.
Yes, wizards have summons, BFC, and SoL at level 1. But Polymorph, Teleport, Magnificent Mansion, Wish? That's all new and exciting.

As Segev said, that's pretty forgivable as long as you're upfront about it. There are certain (and in fact many) things that, from the perspective of typical fantasy archetypes, are purely within the realm of magic to accomplish. The most important thing is that whatever nonmagical characters can do they can do at a similar scale.
That's exactly my problem with this - full attacks are not on the same scale.

Sith_Happens

2015-07-14, 01:22 PM

That's exactly my problem with this - full attacks are not on the same scale.

Um... duh? I was implying a middle-ground somewhere between "full-attack all day, every day" and "long-range (Ex) teleportation."

Hecuba

2015-07-14, 01:24 PM

Insofar as such a fighter has to interact with magic to exits in a magic-sufficed world, I generally would prefer them to interact with it actively.
Rather than simply having Save=yes and HP=more, I would prefer something like the following:

Rays can be deflected with a weapon or shield. At higher levels, the deflected ray can be deliberately aimed at a different target.
If an orb passes through a square within your reach, you can use an AoO to attack it. If you do, it the orb is destroyed and the weapon used gains additional elemental damage for a time (ex-- kill an orb of fire, get the effects of fiery weapon).
When magic acts indirectly by altering the physical environment, the fighter needs to have some method of physically interceding: if there is a avalanche coming at you, you should be able to cut out a slab of the mountain to divert it. (Actually, this applies to even when the issue with the physical environment is not generated by magic.

This, however, does not even come close to reaching the required levels: there is simply too much indirect magic available in 3.5 to enumerate potential counteractions. To accomplish things like this, there needs to be a limited number of discrete ways for magic to be delivered (even if large numbers of effects remain): 3.5 magic is too kitchen sink for that.

illyahr

2015-07-14, 01:28 PM

Segev

2015-07-14, 01:30 PM

Okay, so I think I know what "sacrifice iterative attacks in place of the swift action for immediate actions" means now. They can take one or more extra immediate actions per round, and for each immediate action taken they can give up either a swift action or iterative attack (for the current turn, or for the next turn if the immediate actions are taken out-of-turn).

But how does granting more immediate actions help the fighter? They don't have anything to do with those immediate actions. Seriously, outside of Martial Study I know of exactly zero fighter feats that give you something to do with your immediate action.By itself, it doesn't do much, you're right. This isn't a one-feat fix. I only even raised the suggestion here in response to an instance of needing some sort of action to "spend" for a power being suggested for fighters: I posite immediate actions are appropriate, and giving them the ability to sacrifice iterative attacks for extra immediate actions would help. Add more things fighters can do with immediate actions, by all means! (I'm fond of some sort of ability which would let them spend an immediate action for an attack, too.)

My point stands that multiple other classes can access "fighter-only" feats, so making it a "fighter-only" feat doesn't restrict it to fighters.It doesn't. I don't think this is iconic enough that fighters should be truly all that get it. Warblades certainly could use such a thing, too. (And by making it "Fighter X" to get it, heroics isn't going to let a non-fighter get ahold of it.) Making it "fighter X" to get in, hwoever, does mean that you have to be something close enough to a fighter to get fighter feats, thus keeping it out of the hands of, say, most wizards.

Yes, wizards have summons, BFC, and SoL at level 1. But Polymorph, Teleport, Magnificent Mansion, Wish? That's all new and exciting.

That's exactly my problem with this - full attacks are not on the same scale.
They're not, and they're not the be-all and end-all of what "mundanes" should be doing. Expanded movement options should be very near the top of the list of things high-end fighters and rogues should get. As much as it's "wuxia," the anime-style "flash step" is an excellent thing for them to be allowed to pick up.

My point is less that "it's okay because people who play fighters just want to full attack" - because that's probably not true - and more that "people who play fighters aren't playing wizards; they probably want more of the sword-and-armor, physical powerhouse fantasy feel than the 'can use magic to create armies of minions' feel."

The high-end rogue doesn't need to be doing everything on every scale the wizard is; he just needs to be good enough at the scope within which he works that what the wizard does cannot make the wizard immune to the rogue's potential mischief.

QuickLyRaiNbow

2015-07-14, 02:00 PM

A high-level non-wuxia fighter ought to look something like Garet Jax from Terry Brooks' Shannara books.

Brookshw

2015-07-14, 02:03 PM

How about something like these:

Spell Parry
Prereq: BAB +X, Know (arcane) X ranks
As an immediate action, you may make an attack roll instead of a saving throw against spells, spell-like abilities, or supernatural abilities that target you or include you in its area. If you succeed on the DC of the spell, it has no effect. If you confirm a critical roll, the spell is instead reflected back at the caster/initiator/manifester/whatever. This counts against your Attack of Opportunity uses in a round.

Spellward Bulwark
Prereq: BAB +X, Great Fortitude
As an immediate action, you may add your armor and shield AC bonuses to a Fortitude or Reflex save against, spell-like abilities, or supernatural abilities that targets you or include you in its area. If the ability applies any type of damage, the damage is negated on a successful save and halved on an unsuccessful save. This counts against your Attack of Opportunity uses in a round.

These are just rough ideas. What do you think?

I like spell bulwark though is it just triggering off the standard 1 immediate or were you considering rolling in Segev's iterative for immediate trade off (which I kinda like, sort of a martial celerity in a sense).

Parry might have an issue due to no save just suck spells, something would need to tip that balance if you want a level playing field. Kinda feeling opposed to bouncing it back at the caster if for no other reason than there's an epic feat that sorta does that. Maybe a second epic feat in the chain would be more suitable?

Edit: maybe spell turning and other such spells could provide some inspiration.

atemu1234

2015-07-14, 02:15 PM

Something like this
http://altemagames.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/never-dead-death-battle-knights-fantasy-art-810546-e1400033817214.jpg

It's the guy on the right.

Dienekes

2015-07-14, 02:22 PM

A high-level non-wuxia fighter ought to look something like Garet Jax from Terry Brooks' Shannara books.

Interesting, but I'm not sure Garet is anything above mid-level. For his setting, his feats at arms are awe-inspiring, no doubt, but he died fighting the setting equivalent of a Balrog (admittedly killing the thing in turn). Which is a few levels of power below what a D&D wizard is capable of.

ExLibrisMortis

2015-07-14, 02:22 PM

How about something like these:

Spell Parry
Prereq: BAB +X, Know (arcane) X ranks
As an immediate action, you may make an attack roll instead of a saving throw against spells, spell-like abilities, or supernatural abilities that target you or include you in its area. If you succeed on the DC of the spell, it has no effect. If you confirm a critical roll, the spell is instead reflected back at the caster/initiator/manifester/whatever. This counts against your Attack of Opportunity uses in a round.

Spellward Bulwark
Prereq: BAB +X, Great Fortitude
As an immediate action, you may add your armor and shield AC bonuses to a Fortitude or Reflex save against, spell-like abilities, or supernatural abilities that targets you or include you in its area. If the ability applies any type of damage, the damage is negated on a successful save and halved on an unsuccessful save. This counts against your Attack of Opportunity uses in a round.

These are just rough ideas. What do you think?
I think the part where you negate damage (as Improved Evasion) should just be a regular fighter ability. Give fighters uncanny dodge, mettle, evasion and their improved versions at level 1, 3, 7, 9, 11, and 13 respectively. Give them an extra good save of their choice, and the knight's armour mastery at level 5 and scaling up, and expand it so that fighters can use evasion and uncanny dodge in heavy armour. Then add those abilities you listed (which are nice, by the way), at levels 4-8 or thereabouts. I'd give fighters some bonus AoOs, too, just to use with that ability.

Since the ability uses full base attack, which scales much faster than spell DCs, you can essentially block one spell per round. After that, you're out of immediates. It may be nice to allow a second use, at a -5 penalty, and a third, at a -10 penalty, and a fourth, at -15, depending on base attack. Essentially, by spending an immediate action, you can make iterative Spell Parries, which are carried over between turns (but another use of the ability replaces any SPs you had remaining). That way, you have a choice between burning an immediate every round, for maximum defence, or every couple of rounds, for less protection.

MrConsideration

2015-07-14, 02:31 PM

atemu1234

2015-07-14, 02:35 PM

ExLibrisMortis

2015-07-14, 02:46 PM

I didn't finish reading this thread - but how many spell-slots and learnt spells had this Wizard actually got to cast on that day?.
A first-level generalist wizard gets: 3 cantrips per day, 1 first-level spell per day, and 1 bonus first-level spell per day from having 12+ intelligence. They know all cantrips, 3 first-level spells, and one extra first-level spell per point of intelligence (4-7 for 12-18 int).

A first-level specialist gets an extra first-level spell per day, which must be of their chosen school. They don't know the cantrips of their banned schools, but otherwise know all cantrips.
A focused specialist gets another extra first-level spell per day, which must of their chosen school, and converts a general spell slot into a specialist spell slot.

An elf generalist gets another first-level spell per day, and knows an extra first-level spell.

Any race with a +2 int boost, or any old-age wizard, can get another first-level spell per day by having 18 base INT, for 20 after modifiers.

In short:
A generalist gets: 3 cantrips/day, all known, 2 first-level spells/day, 4-7 known.
A specialist gets: 4 cantrips/day, one specialized, all non-banned known, 3 first-level spells/day, one specialized, 4-7 known.
A focused specialist gets: 5 cantrips/day, three specialized, all non-banned known, 4 first-level spells/day, three specialized, 4-7 known.
An elf generalist gets: 3 cantrips/day, all known, 3 first-level spells/day, 5-8 known.
Any of these can get +1 spell known and +1 first-level spell/day by having 20-27 int, rather than 12-19.

Edit: I feel the need to mention mount, possibly the best summoning spell at level 1. Two hours of having a 3 HD, large-sized, 60' speed ally, and you can summon it 25' away. All the more reason to be a focused specialist conjurer with abrupt jaunt.

Brookshw

2015-07-14, 03:08 PM

I didn't finish reading this thread - but how many spell-slots and learnt spells had this Wizard actually got to cast on that day?

People are arguing for some kind of quantum wizard who has every spell he could ever need prepared just in case the situation comes up.

Depends on the game and optimization level. In most games, not nearly as many as this thread makes it out to be. For the purpose of this thread though the OP specified a high level of optimization for the caster so that's the expectation worked off of.

QuickLyRaiNbow

2015-07-14, 03:16 PM

Interesting, but I'm not sure Garet is anything above mid-level. For his setting, his feats at arms are awe-inspiring, no doubt, but he died fighting the setting equivalent of a Balrog (admittedly killing the thing in turn). Which is a few levels of power below what a D&D wizard is capable of.

Context, though. Allanon is inarguably the most powerful person in the setting at the time, and he's killed by an identical creature. Your mid-level fighters are going to look more like the various Leahs, the various Creels and all the other friendly friends in the series, with maybe one or two exceptions.

Another option for a high-level fighter from the same series might be Stee Jans of the Legion Free Corps. He's just optimized a little differently, is all.

illyahr

2015-07-14, 03:17 PM

I think the part where you negate damage (as Improved Evasion) should just be a regular fighter ability. Give fighters uncanny dodge, mettle, evasion and their improved versions at level 1, 3, 7, 9, 11, and 13 respectively. Give them an extra good save of their choice, and the knight's armour mastery at level 5 and scaling up, and expand it so that fighters can use evasion and uncanny dodge in heavy armour. Then add those abilities you listed (which are nice, by the way), at levels 4-8 or thereabouts. I'd give fighters some bonus AoOs, too, just to use with that ability.

Since the ability uses full base attack, which scales much faster than spell DCs, you can essentially block one spell per round. After that, you're out of immediates. It may be nice to allow a second use, at a -5 penalty, and a third, at a -10 penalty, and a fourth, at -15, depending on base attack. Essentially, by spending an immediate action, you can make iterative Spell Parries, which are carried over between turns (but another use of the ability replaces any SPs you had remaining). That way, you have a choice between burning an immediate every round, for maximum defence, or every couple of rounds, for less protection.

I really like to avoid giving other classes' abilities. Copying class abilities feels like multiclassing to me. I try to make entirely new abilities for classes so they have their own unique feel.

How about this:

Spell Parry (Su)
Fighter level 6 (or 5, if using my fighter fix)
Starting at 6th level, a Fighter can deflect or even return a spell targeting him. You may use an attack roll in place of a saving throw or your regular/touch AC. If you confirm a critical roll on your spell parry, you may deflect the spell back at the caster, as the spell turning spell.

Each time you use this ability, you forgo the use of one of your attacks in your next turn. You may not use this ability if you have used up all attack available.

Flickerdart

2015-07-14, 03:22 PM

Context, though. Allanon is inarguably the most powerful person in the setting at the time, and he's killed by an identical creature. Your mid-level fighters are going to look more like the various Leahs, the various Creels and all the other friendly friends in the series, with maybe one or two exceptions.

Another option for a high-level fighter from the same series might be Stee Jans of the Legion Free Corps. He's just optimized a little differently, is all.
What does being the most powerful person in the setting have to do with your level? There's no rule that says 'the most powerful guy around is level 20.'

Brookshw

2015-07-14, 03:28 PM

I really like to avoid giving other classes' abilities. Copying class abilities feels like multiclassing to me. I try to make entirely new abilities for classes so they have their own unique feel.

How about this:

Spell Parry (Su)
Fighter level 6 (or 5, if using my fighter fix)
Starting at 6th level, a Fighter can deflect or even return a spell targeting him. You may use an attack roll in place of a saving throw or your regular/touch AC. If you confirm a critical roll on your spell parry, you may deflect the spell back at the caster, as the spell turning spell.

Each time you use this ability, you forgo the use of one of your attacks in your next turn. You may not use this ability if you have used up all attack available.

Interesting. Might want to specify what attack to give up, highest bab? Lowest? What about twf? Need to work the kink out.

Also, if you want to keep it restricted to the fighter maybe make a prerequisite to have weapon specialization with the weapon used?

QuickLyRaiNbow

2015-07-14, 03:29 PM

What does being the most powerful person in the setting have to do with your level? There's no rule that says 'the most powerful guy around is level 20.'

No, there isn't. This is one of the difficulties with translating across settings. Given the things Allanon does, though, it's pretty reasonable to assume he's quite powerful.

illyahr

2015-07-14, 03:33 PM

Interesting. Might want to specify what attack to give up, highest bab? Lowest? What about twf? Need to work the kink out.

Also, if you want to keep it restricted to the fighter maybe make a prerequisite to have weapon specialization with the weapon used?

How about you pick which attack bonus to use and lose that attack? So a fighter with +11/+6 could roll +11 to reflect and only have the +6 the following round.

I really don't think fighters need any more prerequisites. They get shafted with enough feat tax. Plus, my fighter fix gets it automatically at level 4. :smallbiggrin:

Arbane

2015-07-14, 04:06 PM

Some of these might properly be traits of a high-level monk class (but today is not monkday), and wire-fu leaps certainly belong exclusively to monks.

Cu Chullainn was a lot of things, but a monk is not one of them...

Edit: heck, give the fighter mettle and evasion, maybe an ability permits a save vs any spell that's not a touch attack of some kind.

Some way to increase touch AC would be nice. Like blocking with one of those 'shield' thingies I hear are useful.

Why does everything need to cost a feat? The fighter gets a lot of feats, but fighters should be able to spend a lot of those feats on interesting stuff, not necessary stuff. Also other classes can get fighter-only feats (e.g. Warblade), so it's best as a fighter class feature.

Spells are balanced around Fireball, Feats are balanced around Weapon Specialization. BALANCE!

Interesting, but I'm not sure Garet is anything above mid-level. For his setting, his feats at arms are awe-inspiring, no doubt, but he died fighting the setting equivalent of a Balrog (admittedly killing the thing in turn). Which is a few levels of power below what a D&D wizard is capable of.

I can think of very few non-divine spellcasters in ANY fantasy story or myth published pre-D&D who are as powerful as D&D wizards can be.

The Paladin and Ranger were not originally independent classes: they were specializations available to high level fighters. Alternately, the fighter could instead become a "lord" (if I'm remembering the terminology correctly), effectively giving them leadership-- which wasn't otherwise available.

I don't know about OD&D, but in AD&D at least, that's not quite right - you could play a Paladin or Ranger from level 1, they just needed good stats and had some behavioral restrictions.
Yes, at level 9 ("Name" level,) the Fighter could build a fortress and got an army of followers as a class feature. AD&D doesn't seem to have expected the game to go to ultra-high level. (Level 10-15 was considered high enough to go kill Lolth in her hideout in the Abyss...)

Additionally, until 3.5 different classes progressed at different rates. As such, unless the game went long enough for people other than fighters and rogues to reach 20, the casters would always be lower level.

If you were playing a human, even reading level 20 wasn't a stopping point - AD&D only had (weird, arbitrary) level caps for non-humans. (And I don't think anyone had a cap on thief levels, oddly.)

illyahr

2015-07-14, 04:13 PM

Some way to increase touch AC would be nice. Like blocking with one of those 'shield' thingies I hear are useful.

I did this with the fighter fix I'm working on. Fighters, starting at 2nd level, get a +1 Dodge bonus to AC every third level. Starting at 3rd level, they get a +1 bonus to their BAB every third level so they end up with a BAB of +26 by level 20. They get the entire Weapon Focus chain for free, they ignore rough terrain and eventually have a constant freedom of movement, and at level 16, all weapons they wield functionally have the Speed enhancement.

They also get more skills and skill points, but that's a given. :smallsmile:

QuickLyRaiNbow

2015-07-14, 05:11 PM

Kinda reminds me of Pratchett's Interesting Times, specifically the barbarians explaining the secret was to not be there for the bad thing (aka, dodge everything). Wish I had the book handy for the actual quote.

The taxman continued to stare. The fighting was a fast and furious affair but, somehow, only one one side. The Horde fought like you'd expect old men to fight - slowly, and with care. All the activity was on the part of the ninjas, but no matter how well flung the throwing star or speedy the kick, the target was always, without any obvious effort, not there.
...
Six Beneficent Winds suddenly remembered, as a child, playing Shibo Yangcong-san with his grandfather. The old man always won. No matter how carefully he'd assembled his strategy, he'd find Grandfather would place a tile quite innocently right in the crucial place just before he could make his big move. The ancestor had spent his whole life playing shibo. The fight was just like that.

"Oh, my," he said.
"That's right," said Mr. Saveloy. "They've had a lifetime's experience of not dying. They've become very good at it."

Just so happens I have that book next to my desk.

Dienekes

2015-07-14, 05:22 PM

That actually reminds me a bit of Whirrun of Bigh, in the book Heroes. Who said of his lack of armour: Armor is part of a state of mind in which you admit the possibility of being hit.

The sentiment didn't work out for him.

Brookshw

2015-07-14, 06:13 PM

How about you pick which attack bonus to use and lose that attack? So a fighter with +11/+6 could roll +11 to reflect and only have the +6 the following round. Could be an option certainly, I kinda like it though for my two cents I feel it would be a bit more elegant to go with the AOO option discussed, via whatever pool you'd care to use. Neither's really a bad call.

I really don't think fighters need any more prerequisites. They get shafted with enough feat tax. Plus, my fighter fix gets it automatically at level 4. :smallbiggrin: I get what you're saying certainly though I'm thinking about it in a "how do we make this primarily a fighter ability" and weapon specialization seemed to fit the bill best (and if you're already giving it to them for free then it's not much of a tax, for them). I suppose there's not really any reason Paladin's or Ranger's, or anyone with a high enough BAB shouldn't be able to do it. One potential complication though comes to mind, what happens when the wizard takes the feat, sacrifices the attack next round, and just goes on to use a spell instead? I'm thinking on that and while the feats still geared to the Fighter, or primarily martial, it's still open to the other side of the field. More of a general consideration I suppose since why would the fighter be casting a spell in the first place to make the wizard want to use the feat.

Some way to increase touch AC would be nice. Like blocking with one of those 'shield' thingies I hear are useful. Always been a fan of Shield Ward myself.

Just so happens I have that book next to my desk.
Oh, good one! Actually hadn't recalled that particular. Pulled out the book now that I'm home and the one I was thinking of was
"But you're all alive?" said Twoflower. "I saw it bark straight at you!"
"We got out of the way," said Boy Willie. "We're good at getting out of the way."
Think I like yours better actually :smallbiggrin: Now I'm trying to recall if there was one in The Last Hero.

Talakeal

2015-07-14, 08:38 PM

That should be a quality of NPC's, and it should not be seen as admirable or cool to play one of them AT ALL. Playing a mundane character is playing a special snowflake in DnD.
.

Might I ask how you would go about implementing or enforcing how the players feel about something?

Red Rubber Band

2015-07-14, 08:53 PM

"A lot of passive effects" was a reference to one of the frequent fallacious arguments used against Fighters on a thread like this, that argument being that all they do is attack and roll damage. Usually the people making this fallacious argument will only accept counter examples of Actions done in combat that are not just attack and roll damage so they usually discount passive effects (and sometimes even triggered effects for some odd reason).

The more nuanced version of this argument expects the Fighter to come up with alternatives to "attack and damage" as they gain levels but demands level appropriate alternatives that are different in kind from the alternatives a lower levels. This is why I asked for alternatives that did not fall into "combat maneuvers", "crippling effects", or "AoE weapon attacks".

So far actions you have listed are:
Waterwalk/Fly (6th-11th level)
Far Travel(In combat application?)
See with another's eyes(In combat application?)
Pull someone towards you(high level magnitude and fluff version of an unwritten combat maneuver so 6th)
Tell someone to STOP(Crippling Effect, 11th)

So while you sound like you have a good grasp of a better Fighter, your suggestions thus far are not very useful against the argument in question.

PS: Quick Tier summary
Tier 3s are the Skilled + Utility tier. They are good at what they do and can always find a way to contribute. Tier 1-2s add the ability to break a campaign is a few ways(Tier 2) or as many ways as they wish(Tier 1). The references to Simulacrum/Ice Assassin in this thread are good examples of Tier 1-2. This is why I don't think Tier 1-2 is a good design goal.
I am rather confused as to whether I'm supposed to be arguing against a fallacious argument, yourself, or something else.
You've mentioned a fallacious argument that dismisses the passive effects I mentioned because they don't have combat application. I wasn't aware I was part of this argument, but some suggestions I gave had in combat applications that weren't just "roll to hit".
You mentioned that you asked for alternatives that did not fall into a set of categories. I gave you several.
And then you say that my suggestions aren't useful against the argument in question. Which argument? One of the above two?

As has been shown multiple times before, you effectively need to give spells to fighters but fluff them in line with their theme to make them even halfway comparable to full casters. The only difference this time is a subjective view of whether the abilities become too wuxia/anime/magical.

Edit: After catching up on replies I think we should try to get back to the OP.

OldTrees1

2015-07-14, 09:21 PM

I am rather confused as to whether I'm supposed to be arguing against a fallacious argument, yourself, or something else.
You've mentioned a fallacious argument that dismisses the passive effects I mentioned because they don't have combat application. I wasn't aware I was part of this argument, but some suggestions I gave had in combat applications that weren't just "roll to hit".
You mentioned that you asked for alternatives that did not fall into a set of categories. I gave you several.
And then you say that my suggestions aren't useful against the argument in question. Which argument? One of the above two?

I believe the nuanced discussion I wanted to have does not fit the fast pace of this thread.

There is a common fallacious argument that was alluded to at one point in this thread. I responded to the allusion by asking them to give the final piece in a counter argument to the argument they alluded to. You responded to me by offering potential pieces but from prior experience I knew those particular examples would not refute the fallacious argument for one reason(passive) or another(despite not being
"just damage", they were part of the listed first 3/4ths and not the final piece).

Since it takes a paragraph to describe the conversation without really even touching upon the topic of the conversation, I am convinced it is too nuanced for this thread. I hope this explanation helps clarify, if not then the previous posts remain there.

Red Rubber Band

2015-07-14, 09:50 PM

I believe the nuanced discussion I wanted to have does not fit the fast pace of this thread.

There is a common fallacious argument that was alluded to at one point in this thread. I responded to the allusion by asking them to give the final piece in a counter argument to the argument they alluded to. You responded to me by offering potential pieces but from prior experience I knew those particular examples would not refute the fallacious argument for one reason(passive) or another(despite not being "just damage", they were part of the listed first 3/4ths and not the final piece).

Since it takes a paragraph to describe the conversation without really even touching upon the topic of the conversation, I am convinced it is too nuanced for this thread. I hope this explanation helps clarify, if not then the previous posts remain there.

I'm cool with dropping it :smalltongue:

My answer wasn't meant to be a "be all end all" answer, but a way of thinking that may spur on other thoughts by those who are more experienced in the system than I. I can see how your previous discussion, and me popping in at the end of it, could have just muddied the water.

OldTrees1

2015-07-14, 10:39 PM

I'm cool with dropping it :smalltongue:

My answer wasn't meant to be a "be all end all" answer, but a way of thinking that may spur on other thoughts by those who are more experienced in the system than I. I can see how your previous discussion, and me popping in at the end of it, could have just muddied the water.

Don't sell yourself short. If this was a slower thread then your brainstorming + a clarified question would have produced some gems.

I'm heading off to bed, have a good night! :smallsmile:

Hecuba

2015-07-15, 12:13 AM

I don't know about OD&D, but in AD&D at least, that's not quite right - you could play a Paladin or Ranger from level 1, they just needed good stats and had some behavioral restrictions.
Yes, at level 9 ("Name" level,) the Fighter could build a fortress and got an army of followers as a class feature. AD&D doesn't seem to have expected the game to go to ultra-high level. (Level 10-15 was considered high enough to go kill Lolth in her hideout in the Abyss...)
You are correct: I was specifically referring to how it was handled in OD&D. Paladin was added as the first subclass of fighting man in the original Greyhawk supplement.

If you were playing a human, even reading level 20 wasn't a stopping point - AD&D only had (weird, arbitrary) level caps for non-humans. (And I don't think anyone had a cap on thief levels, oddly.)

True, though there was a level where non-hp progression capped. I misremembered though- it varried by class and was generally sround 30, not 20. It's worth noting that some settings had significant changed to the caps (Dragonlance and Birthright come to mind).

The Insanity

2015-07-15, 12:27 AM

Anyone read the manga History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi? Masters in that comic is what I expect martials being able to do at a minimum, from mid levels. I say at a minimum, because although in the comic the masters do incredible, sometimes unrealistic, feats of martial arts, they're still mostly nothing in comparison to a fantasy martial's abilities.

Qwertystop

2015-07-15, 12:36 AM

Dispelling? No sir, I just swordmurdered time for 25 rounds.
Never liked powers like this... It feels like your abilities revolve around odd phrasings and linguistic tricks rather than any actual similarities between the things (in this case, effectively "kill things" becoming "stop time" by way of a metaphorical use of the word "kill" that has nothing to do with actual killing)

To a degree, there's nothing wrong with the fighter being "the reactive class." Don't get me wrong: giving them more agency to proactively perform is a good idea. But holding it up as a necessary requirement may not be.

The reason why fighters "just lose" has more to do with lacking answers to mage tricks than it does with being unable to do everything a mage can.

Give the Ranger the ability to track people across the planes and through teleportations, making him the implaccable, inescapable hunter. Give the Fighter the power to thwart the "na-na-you-can't-hit-me" capabilities of mages. Make the rogue able to steal and sneak past every defense and charm.

The wizard is powerful. He is, overtly and on a grand scale, a mover and shaker. But the "mundane" classes are implacable, uncatchable, and unstoppable, too. The mage can crush a kingdom; the fighter can lead an army that can survive the mage's wrath and prevent his escape. The mage can retreat from bad encounters and strike only when advantageous thanks to scry-and-die; the ranger can track him down across time and space and force him to expend more and more resources just to stay ahead and less and less on being a 'god.' The mage can build an unassailable, untouchable redoubt in which to take sanctuary and store his most precious of goods. The rogue can burgle it, despite its mystical and dimensional defenses and impossibly remote location.

I'll be honest: I don't think people who are playing fighters, rangers, paladins, rogues, and bards are looking to be reality-shaking powerhouses of mystical might. I think they're looking for a more personal-scale level of potency. This doesn't mean they're "less" than mages; it's a different focus. King Jimbo IV should be just as terrified if he hears that Carmen Sandiego is coming to rob his kingdom as he would be if he heard Xena the Warrior Princess was leading her army to loot it or that Merlin the Magician has decided he wants Jimbo's crown for a ritual. Each is an unstoppable force, from his perspective. One will rob him blind and he may not even realize it's happened until his kingdom is bankrupt. Another will devastate him with a war that he cannot win. The third could curse his lands for a thousand years or simply level his castle with a word, so he hopes he just shows up by teleporting in and asking nicely.

Even if Xena's not leading an army, she's a one-woman army and no amount of soldiers will stop her. So in a "personal" scale, Merlin scries and teleports in to make his demands. Xena fights her way through any opposition to make her demands. Carmen has already left a note in place of whatever she wanted.

I do think all of them need to be ABLE to access rapid transport and dimensional travel. But that's doable without overt spellcasting. And the scale on which they do so need not be identical. Sure, the mage just plane shifts while the others need to find natural portals. But for personal travel, that's manageable. And if it's a chase or a race, then other means can be enacted. (I do think "follow that mage" effects need to be accessible, so teleports and the like are not auto-escapes from high-end 'mundane' characters, for instance.)

In short, don't try to fix it by giving all the mage capabilities to everyone else. Mages should have things they're not as good at as others; beef others up where this is not the case but it should be. And if, in the end, the scope of their reach seems different, don't assume that makes one "less" than the other. Each has their strengths, and past a certain point, their weaknesses are few and far between.

Sounds pretty good, actually - the whole "personal power" thing.

Segev

2015-07-15, 12:57 AM

For the last week or so, I've been slowly working on a new approach to helping "mundane" classes (particularly the fighter) out. I call it "weapon techniques." It's a very involved project, and conceptually simple but practically difficult to execute. It involves one base change to the rules: there is no longer a nonproficiency penalty to hit. Proficiency is, instead, a reward. There are 6 "tiers" of proficiency:

1) Proficient: you have proficiency with the weapon
2) Focus: you have the Weapon Focus feat for the weapon
3) Specialization: you have the Weapon Specialization feat for the weapon
4) Greater Focus: you have the Greater Weapon Focus feat for the weapon
5) Greater Specialization: you have the Greater Weapon Specialization feat for the weapon
5) Supremacy: You have the Weapon Supremacy feat for the weapon

I'll probably try to clean up the nomenclature a bit later, but that gets the concept across.

When you attain a given "level" of proficiency with a particular weapon, you may select, for free, a weapon technique associated with that weapon at that level of proficiency. Weapon techniques are similar to highly focused feats (and, in some cases, directly crib feats' rules narrowed down to that particular weapon). There are intended to be multiple techniques available at every level of proficiency for every weapon in the game. Learning additional techniques costs time and possibly money and/or EXP, depending on how fast you want to learn it. In this, they're meant to be more akin to a wizard expanding his spellbook. Because you get a free technique just for being proficient, proficiency is its own reward, without needing a punishment for not being proficient.

This started as, primarily, a means of trying to further differentiate the various weapons in the game; a lot of weapons are so close to each other mechanically that the more expensive one is just never taken. It's expanded to this "spellbook-like" design in an effort to help fighter-types get stronger.

Obviously, only those who take Fighter levels or a means of equating them (like Warblade) can get beyond Focus in a weapon; this is intentional, though ability to expand access is also probably in the cards.

In designing the techniques, I'm using spell levels as very rough ballparks of power and effect, since trying to "catch up" to casters is part of the design goal. The rough guide I'm using is:

Weapon Proficiency: Some iconic "mundane" power/use that highlights the weapon's purpose, role, or function vs. other weapons
Weapon Focus (BAB +1): 1st level spell equivalent
Weapon Specialization (Fighter 4): 2nd-3rd level spell equivalent
Greater Weapon Focus (Fighter 8): 4th-5th level spell equivalent
Greater Weapon Specialization (Fighter 12): 6th-8th level spell equivalent
Weapon Supremacy (Fighter 18): 9th level spell equivalent

One I don't feel creative for, but which is nicely illustrative, is Spiked Chain's Greater Weapon Specialization technique: Dancing Chains. It's a (Su) ability that's a direct lift of the Kyton's ability.
Another neat set is for quarterstaves, which lets fighter-types who specialize in this set of techniques use magic staves and get special perks from them, from being able to UMD them with their BAB as their ranks in the skill to being able to unleash the spells within with every strike.

I should emphasize that there is meant to be more than one technique for each weapon at each level of proficiency. Were this an official product and I on the design and development staff, I'd want this to be expanded in every supplement the way spells and feats were. These both make each new weapon unique and serve as catalysts for an expansive set of options being made available to non-casters who specialize in weapons.

bekeleven

2015-07-15, 05:07 AM

So, if you're looking for a non-wuxia high-tiered mundane, I recommend my homebrew class The Professional (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?332829-The-Professional-Generic-Mundane-Base-Class-3-5).

If you're looking for the exact opposite, I just spent the last several hours watching Crouching Tiger and Journey To The West and writing The Wuxia Fighter (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?428004-The-Wuxia-Fighter).

Talakeal

2015-07-15, 04:42 PM

The problem is that D&D tries to be all things to all people.

No, normal characters can't deal with a tier 1 character who is allowed to use all the TO and rules exploits they can find. But then again, almost nothing can. No published NPC or monster can work at this power level without using the same shenanigans (as a low level commoner iirc). Few characters in all of human fiction can, including comic books superheroes, shonen anime protaganists, Sci Fi "sufficiently advanced aliens", or even most mythological gods.

Frankly that isn't a power level most people are comfortable playing at, and it isn't really a fair comparison.

If you want to make larger than life but still bounded by realism character like Rambo / Conan / Batman / Captain America / Aragorn / King Arthur / James Bond / Indiana Jones / Tarzan / movie version Achilles or Hercules / John Carter / etc. D&D is still a pretty bad fit, but its an easy fix:

Give "mundane" characters more Skills, Attribute Boosts, Feats, and Saves.
Make sure every spell allows a save of some sort.
Make spells with a few more mundane possible weaknesses like Cold Iron, Holy Water, The Sign of the Evil Eye, or simply allow magical constructs to be damaged by mundane means with extreme strength or precision.
Find a better way to deal with resource recovery than the standard 15MAD.
Then fix several of the truly broken spells, magic items, and rules exploits.

The game will be fun for everyone and everyone can contribute to most situations even if everyone isn't exactly equal.