Martial - Caster Disparity: Revised Action Economy as "Solution"?

[Ignatius Flamel]

Pathfinder Unchained has introduced many (optional) rules.

Among them is the very far-reaching, quite ambitious Overhaul of the standard Action Economy, which is part of the reason why "martials" tend to be much weaker in combat than spellcasters.

("Move+a single attack" is typically much weaker than "move+ cast a spell", and "full-attack" basically forbids movement beyond a 5' step; this is why Pounce and/or free-action/swift-action movement is so sought after)


Well...with the Revised Action Economy, the mobility issues of martial combatants are suddenly gone!

Moreover, suddenly TWF is viable at level 1! (you can basically attack with BOTH weapons as a move action!)

Suddenly, swift-action abilities that were previously competing with each other can be performed several times per turn, and/or you can use several swift-action abilities in one turn.
However, these "swift actions" could also be used to move, or to attack...so you have to consider wether you "really" need to activate Arcane Strike or not.


Introducing the Revised Action Economy requires a large amount of rulings (the "Withdraw" action is missing, many class abilities/feats/spells may need rulings in order to work with this new paradigm, Spring Attack seems obsolete, Vital strike can be used 3 times per turn), but it grants martial characters the ability to "move and 'full-attack'" starting at level one!

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Could this be a way to reduce the "Martial-Caster Disparity"?

I'm not talking about narrative power here - Mages can turn invisible/divine the future/animate dead/change the weather/teleport/scry/shapechange => Mages can "break the rules", Martials can not (barring exceptions like the Spell Sunder rage power).

I'm talking about a system that significantly "buffs" the martials to the point casters need to be very sure of their defenses when mocking their non-magical brethren.

[AmberVael]

Could this be a way to reduce the "Martial-Caster Disparity"?
Not really. Better action economy doesn't make your fighter better at anything they weren't already decent at, and not being decent at many things, even in combat, is the core of the problem.

[Seppo87]

There is only one way to fix this kind of disparity and that would be to completely remove automatic win conditions.

Automatic win is an invisible flying spellcaster with wind wall.
(Cannot fly cannot shoot arrows cannot detect)
Or forcecage (cannot get out, at all)
Magic can counter magic but mundanes without magic will just auto lose

Mundanes need mundane ways to counter magic's tactical advantage.

IHS was a pretty cool attempt. Now if it wasn't written that bad...

[SedraxisXNG]

Okay, granted , I skimmed through it, but the way it's worded , it seems like the attack action, which takes one act, gives you a full attack. And while casters were broken before, in my group we play them more as blasters or controllers, and suddenly , with the choice of having 3 full attacks as a fighter, casters just became utility and buffbots. Am I missing something here? Does the attack action give you all your attacks no matter how many times it's used ?

[Serafina]

Yes, a bunch of unchained stuff helps martials more than it helps casters. Combat Stamina does, the revised action economy does, some of the magic item tweaks can.

However, the main issue with Martial-Caster Disparity is not solved by simply making martials better at fighting.
The issue with MCD was never that martials aren't good at taking out enemies. In fact, they're generally pretty good at that unless the enemy has certain defenses that only a caster can overcome (and there are enemies that have specific defenses against casters).
No, the issue is rather in two other things: Unconventional Combat, and Utility Abilities.

Unconventional Combat refers to any in-combat action that helps resolve the fight by means other than depleting the enemies hitpoints.
This means impairing or negating enemy actions or movements, but also boosting or enabling allied actions or movement.
Such a thing can be done in a great number of ways - and martial characters generally only have very few. Either they are relatively small, static abilities, or they are heavily specialized and require a good amount of investment. A good example for this are combat maneuvers - you need one feat to make them viable (negate attacks of opportunity), will need one more to scale with enemy defenses (greater "combat maneuver" feat) and likely a bunch of others to make them really usable. And then you have a single combat maneuver that you can "use all day long", but that will often not do that much or fail to work entirely on a lot of enemies.
Meanwhile, casters can pull of a great number of tricks that impair enemy actions (debuff spells), movement (wall spells, fog spells), make them waste actions (summons or illusions), protect allies (lots of abjuration-spells, summons) and so on. And their bag gets a lot larger as they gain more and higher-level spells, and is often highly customizable to their current needs. Not every caster has access to everything of course, but while martials are often stuck as one-trick ponies, almost all casters can pick up a bunch of "side-tricks" that can come in very handy.

Utility abilities refer to any ability that helps solving non-combat encounters, or avoid combat encounters entirely.
Martials basically get nothing that spellcasters don't get here.
Basically the only source of utility that martials have are skills (everyone gets those), some feats (everyone can take those, martials often need more feats for their combat abilities) or magic items (spellcasters are actually better at using spell-trigger items).+
A high-level martial is basically really good at a handful of skills that let him solve some mundane problems really well. A spellcaster gets that, but can also have tricks such as divination, transportation magic, disposable minions, supreme disguises or a large number of other abilities.

This is why fundamentally, casters sooner (and only sometimes later) play on a completely different field than non-casters.
If you really want a game where non-casters contribute as much as casters, you'll need to give martials both more unconventional combat abilities and utility abilities that casters simply can not provide as well.

[AvatarVecna]

There's lots of ways to abuse the action economy with existing methods, and this is another method. Does it help martials get more powerful? Yes, in a sense, but it doesn't solve the Tier issue. The disparity between casters and non-casters is three-fold: casters have access to a wide variety of problem-solving tools, they can switch out these tools for other tools more easily than non-casters can, and their tools tend to be more powerful, particularly late-game.

Let's give an example...

Imagine a 20th level character who focuses absolutely every last resource available to them on being the best jumper in existence (because their player is fond of kung fu films where martials artists leap high into the sky and fight on the way down). Without getting into Mythic content (where balance gets thrown out the window for everybody), what I saw on Reddit indicates that the best you can get is a super-convoluted build that gives you a high jump of ~2500 ft. Not to shabby, right? There's no way mages could get higher than that, right?

A 5th level caster can get to 3000 ft with a couple fly spells. A 7th level caster can get to 4200 ft with a single Extended Fly.

Yeah, well they take forever! Besides, once you get into Mythic, you have the Seven League Step thing, and the same Acrobatics optimization, you can look forward to an 8.5 hour trip to a location up to a bit of 5000 miles away. Let's see mages beat that so early!

Well, not quite as early; a 9th level mage can spend a single round to travel up to 900 miles with a Teleport spell (taking their buddies along with them), but that's not quite the same distance as that jump (although it's still much quicker). No, to beat that 5000 mile jump on both time taken and distance covered, you need to be a 13th level mage using Greater Teleport, which has no range limit, beyond you needing at least a decent description. Of course, Interplanetary Teleport, which comes online at 17th level (well before Mythic) allows you to travel to literally anywhere in the universe.

[StreamOfTheSky]

I find martials plenty capable of killing things if built decently and not saddled with awful DM rules/houserules (required stat and/or hp rolling or using low fixed numbers for these; low wealth / "low magic" (items; the term always really means "low magic items" and nothing more); crit fumble houserules...). They can't do much else and the casters can do everything better than them, even killing stuff. But 3E / PF is rocket taggy enough already.

The solution is and always will be...nerf the casters. Nerf the spells. You could give martials more skill points and class skills and be more open about letting them use skills and combat maneuvers to creatively solve problems. But that's about it.

[Ssalarn]

Okay, granted , I skimmed through it, but the way it's worded , it seems like the attack action, which takes one act, gives you a full attack. And while casters were broken before, in my group we play them more as blasters or controllers, and suddenly , with the choice of having 3 full attacks as a fighter, casters just became utility and buffbots. Am I missing something here? Does the attack action give you all your attacks no matter how many times it's used ?

The attack simple action allows you to take one attack, or two attacks if you're two weapon fighting. There's a sidebar in the book that spells this out a little more clearly than the raw rules text does. The bit about "1 or more attacks" is referring to double weapons and/or two-weapon fighting. A classic 16th level Fighter "Full attack" would actually be 4 separate attack simple actions. While the revised action economy is particularly favorable to two-weapon fighters early on, martial characters in general will actually lose out later in the game, especially those who make use of swift actions. The rules also don't do a terribly good job of breaking down all the little rules interactions, but presumably the strongest fighting actions, like archery full attacks and pounce, are always 3 action advanced actions (per the sidebar on page 107) so all that really happens for them is that they lose access to their swift action economy, assuming they had it before.

So, it's a low level buff for some martial characters, with exactly how low dependent on your combat style; archers who start with Rapid Shot may find that it's not a buff at all, whereas two-weapon fighters will love the switch, likely for quite a bit of the game. Casters main "nerf" is that they will now need to choose between moving or using their swift action; given the range of many spells, this is again likely to have no impact, or slight impact, perhaps moderate impact under a narrow set of circumstances, or for specific types of casters (revised action economy plays hell with the already complex Magus rules and jacks their nova potential up by allowing them to cast two spells and make two attacks when using all 3 actions). Classes like the Cavalier, Bard, and Paladin, who have access to their swift action, typically want to use every bit of action economy they can squeeze out, and rely on martial attacks for delivering damage, will lose out at more levels than they benefit.

Some people like it, some people don't, either way it generally won't change much about the underpinnings of the game. It will depend on the types of characters your group plays and their general level of system mastery as to exactly how much impact it has on an individual game.