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PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-07, 03:12 PM
This grew out of the Worst House Rules thread, but I'm reposting the bulk of it here so discussion can continue in a more appropriate place.

Important note: I don't think it's possible to set hard boundaries here. Reality (level 0) is way too weird for that. But I think that there are substantial differences in fiction between those that are "powered" and those that are just merely at the top of their possible game (or still in that grey area), especially compared to us poor sods in the real world.

My belief is that most RPG characters (especially D&D-style heroic adventurers) are designed to be category 1 (category 2 for D&D) by the time they leave the lowest power levels. There is no "mundane" space available, not without doing damage to the world-building and verisimilitude.



Level 0: Normal Earth human capabilities, as a package. So Usain Bolt is a level 0 runner, but someone who was as fast as Usain Bolt but was also an olympic power-lifter and a super-genius would be pushing the boundaries.

Level 1: "Non-powered superheroes"/BA Normals. These do things that normal earth humans can't do--they're tougher, faster, smarter, etc. as a package. They survive things that it's unlikely a human can, but they're not special or using explicit powers in universe. It's just that normal people in the fiction can reach levels not found in earth humans. Most Action Heroes (Die Hard, Mission Impossible), for me are in this category.

Level 2: Explicit super powers. These are things that in-fiction people can't normally do. These break into a few major (overlapping) categories:

2a: Tech powers. Iron Man. Artificers. Their powers come from their gear, not their own selves. They wear "magic".

2b: Intrinsic powers. Superman. Most Marvel/DCU heroes, especially X-men. Their powers are innately part of them and manifest as packages of related abilities. They are "magic"/fantastic.
2b(i): "Built-in" super-powers. Those that turn on and then they're on. Like most X-men, most "superheroes".
2b(ii): Trained super-powers. These start out as category 1, but through training/dedication/gifts/etc slowly grow into legitimate in-universe violations of normal operating procedure.

2c: Spell-casting. Wizards, Dr. Strange. Harry Potter. They gain their power by actively casting spells or other direct magic. They do "magic".

I see low level "normal" characters in the 1 range mostly, although things like Rage or Evasion cross the line into 2b for me personally. They're things that normal people in fiction can't do, but the character can. By mid-levels, everyone in D&D is firmly into level 2, will-they-or-nil-they.

Frozen_Feet
2018-12-07, 03:20 PM
TV tropes already has a similar "super weight" scale.

Anyways, the idea that there's no room for "level 0" or lower doesn't hold once you move outside the action genre. Drama games centered on mundane people exist, even if they aren't as popular as fantasy action.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-07, 03:21 PM
TV tropes already has a similar "super weight" scale.

Anyways, the idea that there's no room for "level 0" or lower doesn't hold once you move outside the action genre. Drama games centered on mundane people exist, even if they aren't as popular as fantasy action.

True. I guess I don't play those (or find them that interesting) so I forgot about them.

Edit: And this isn't so much a weight scale as a set of partially-nested categories. You can have a super-weak category 2 ("spot on the wall" talent) vs a full action-hero (category 1) and the action hero will win 99 times out of a 100.

Unavenger
2018-12-07, 04:24 PM
Level 0 characters can absolutely make for a compelling story, so long as you cut the last line where polymathy isn't allowed. Referring to badass normals as being beyond real human capability when that's antithetical to the entire point seems a little silly too.

Segev
2018-12-07, 04:41 PM
Just to re-iterate my point from the prior thread, regardless of how you rate or weight it, the idea for balancing a fantastical setting like most D&D ones is to allow "mundane" things to scale up to levels of power that are just not feasible in the real world. Through training, yes, your fighter can gain the power to shatter castles with a swing of his warhammer. Your rogue can vanish into the shadow cast by a flagpole. No, neither is using magic; they're just that good.

You don't necessarily have to have a ranger who can create a demiplane, just one who can track the wizard's path through all his teleportations and follow him into it, using the astral tracks he left behind with his magic.

And that same ranger may well be able to keep an entire city well-fed on a years-long migration to a new homeland, based solely on his hunting, gathering, and survival skills. Especially with help from the peasants following his orders.

Cluedrew
2018-12-07, 05:38 PM
For anyone just joining us, I grabbed a couple of highlight posts from the old thread that might help with context. I don't have a proper measure for that so it is kind of random.


Sense motive, hide, spot/hide/MS, speak language, constitution checks, heal if heal actually let you heal people, craft, hide, heal, any skill that could be used for investigation. These all seem like reasonable stuff that you should be able to achieve mostly by being hard enough.

The point isn't necessarily that Aragorn can talk to the dead (he can't), it's that he can look around the area that the Rohirrim killed a bunch of orcs in and work out almost exactly what happened to Merry and Pippin without having to do so. Speak with Dead isn't usually a result, it's a method. Aragorn uses a different method (investigating the area around the battlefield) and gets the same result (finds out what happened to the hobbits). So, thank you for helping me prove my point!

EDIT: Also, the main reason that mundane characters in 3.5 suck is less that they don't get magic and more that they struggle to do things that I can do really easily. For example, in real life I'm trained (as in I have some actual instruction, not just ability), with a number of skill points that I'd say is my minimum listed in parentheses, in Appraise (1), Autohypnosis (2), Balance (2), Bluff (1), Climb (2), Concentration (2), Craft (Alchemy 3*, Drawing 1, Electronics 2, Mechanical 2), Handle Animal (1), Heal (5), Jump (2), Knowledge (Architecture and Engineering 4, Geography 2, History 3, Local 1, Nature 4, Religion 4), Perform (Act 2, Dance 1, Keyboard 2, Oratory 1, Strings 1, Sing 1), Profession (Various), Ride (1), Survival (2), Swim (3), Tumble (2) and Use Rope (1), and I'm not sure that this is unusual, but it's enough to mark me as at least a third-level rogue on its own. So I don't buy that "Mundane" is a fourth-level character concept when "Unavenger" is a third-level character (obviously I'm a feat rogue, and blew my combat feats on something trivial, because I don't think I do 2d6 extra points of damage when flanking). Maybe I took rapid shot, which is why I can fire a bow more than once every six freaking seconds, which always struck me as terrible for a half-decent archer.

*Incidentally non-casters not being able to mix up a standard solution of acid always annoyed me.


On the other side I think this is one of the three main roots of caster/martial. Which I have pegged as: Limiting martial|mundane characters to things on grounds of realism; Underestimating what someone can realistically do; Not limiting casters at all, just keep on piling things up because a wizard did it.

Those are the core problems, I think the first is the most reasonable to have in certain contexts (not kitchen sink action fantasy) the second is a mistake* and the third... that sort of just because magic should generally be limited to background elements.

* Which I think might come from historical "combat focused" versions of the game. Plus the Mermaid Problem awa mention, which I think here might come from trying to apply spell design to normal human abilities... but I just thought of that part.


The "Air-breathing Mermaid Problem" refers specifically to a feat that allowed water-breathing creatures to breathe air, thereby making the mermaid, who did not have that feat, suddenly unable to breathe air, as it had at most tables before that feat was printed. More generally, it refers to any time an ability something should logically have being gated behind a requisite feat. I believe that includes things like feats to let you perform combat maneuvers competently or without an AoO.
I don't think I have anything to add at this time... Segev's post did make me think of a funny little line: "Just say 'because skill' instead of 'because magic' and everything works out."

Unavenger
2018-12-07, 05:46 PM
Just to re-iterate my point from the prior thread, regardless of how you rate or weight it, the idea for balancing a fantastical setting like most D&D ones is to allow "mundane" things to scale up to levels of power that are just not feasible in the real world. Through training, yes, your fighter can gain the power to shatter castles with a swing of his warhammer. Your rogue can vanish into the shadow cast by a flagpole. No, neither is using magic; they're just that good.

Ah yes because no-one's going to say that that isn't mundane.

No, you don't need to be able to hide in the shadow of a flagpole or smash a castle in one swing. You just need another way of achieving whatever you were trying to gain by hiding in the shadow of a flagpole, say by filling the person you were previously thinking of hiding from with sharp pieces of metal.

gkathellar
2018-12-07, 06:09 PM
Ah yes because no-one's going to say that that isn't mundane.

That rapidly becomes a matter of quibbling about terminology. Are the things Segev described impossible? Sure, and if you want to call them magic, that's not objectively unreasonable. But the word "mundane" has a particular meaning in this context - specifically, it refers to Stuff What Is Not Wizard Stuff. It's a pretty well-established definition in discussion of action-fantasy gaming.


No, you don't need to be able to hide in the shadow of a flagpole or smash a castle in one swing. You just need another way of achieving whatever you were trying to gain by hiding in the shadow of a flagpole, say by filling the person you were previously thinking of hiding from with sharp pieces of metal.

Combat balance, desirable as it frequently is, is not a substitute for narrative contribution balance.

Cluedrew
2018-12-07, 07:12 PM
Ah yes because no-one's going to say that that isn't mundane.First, see what gkathellar said about what we are trying to get at here. The issue is we don't have a word that means "fantastic abilities at the edge or beyond of human ability that draw on the imagery of technically gifted individuals and do not invoke mastery of occult arts as an explanation". And that is both abbreviated and going to change depending on who you ask. Because different people want different things and so want different solutions to this problem. For example:

Closing the martial* to real gap: On the whole action role-playing game characters do pass human limits. But there are areas they still fall short. The post of yours I quoted covers this better than I would.

Closing the martial to archetype gap: A lot of the archetypes or classic character quoted as being the inspiration for rule-sets are far more capable than the characters those rule-sets create. One common example is that Conan the Barbarian has a lot more lore skills than what is available to the D&D Barbarian. Gilgamesh swam to the bottom of the ocean (or at least a lake) without any equipment or particular strength

Closing the martial to caster gap: This is an important one, because I feel that in games about martials and casters fighting side by side, they should be able to fight side by side. And usually as equals. Ars Magica messes with this but most games carry the implicate premise that they will be equal. And they often are not, which is a problem. However it can also be achieved by bringing casters down.

Closing the martial to TO** caster gap: Yeah this one I don't get, but I have had solutions shot down because they claimed that casters are infinitely powerful and the solution would not make martials infinitely powerful. I'm not sure why a partial solution.

* Well we are talking about words, I used martial instead of mundane. It has its own problematic connotations (war***) but I find the ones around mundane (boring) even worse. I sometimes resort to just saying physical if I'm desperate.
** Theoretical optimization. Which I have seen associated with the colour green on occasion.
*** And yes I realize in some contexts that is the actual meaning of the word. But words mean different things in different places.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-07, 08:22 PM
That rapidly becomes a matter of quibbling about terminology. Are the things Segev described impossible? Sure, and if you want to call them magic, that's not objectively unreasonable. But the word "mundane" has a particular meaning in this context - specifically, it refers to Stuff What Is Not Wizard Stuff. It's a pretty well-established definition in discussion of action-fantasy gaming.


My problem with this definition is that it promotes Guy at the Gym thinking. People run the following mental routine:
a) he says it's not magic, so it's normal
b) normal things can't do that.
c) so he can't do that.

Yes, they're equivocating between two definitions of "normal" and "magic", and that's fallacious. But that's the common reasoning I see all the time from GMs, especially those that want "realistic" games...from everyone but the spell-casters.

I think a much better distinction is between being fantastic (or whatever other term you want to substitute for "not possible for Earth humans") and doing magic (casting spells). Fantasy worlds are suffused with the fantastic-ness by their very nature. Is that "magic"? No. But is it well beyond what a normal Earth person can do? Yes. So it's not "mundane" or "normal". By its very inherent nature.

"Mundane" as a term also evokes the same fallacious reasoning. Accepting that everyone in a fantasy-adventure world (or anyone worth paying attention to) is fantastic. They're outside the bounds of normal Earth people. Whether in small ways or in large ways, their potential is not bounded by the physics that we know--instead it's bound (as is magic) by its own internal rules.

Mechalich
2018-12-07, 11:27 PM
My problem with this definition is that it promotes Guy at the Gym thinking. People run the following mental routine:
a) he says it's not magic, so it's normal
b) normal things can't do that.
c) so he can't do that.

Yes, they're equivocating between two definitions of "normal" and "magic", and that's fallacious. But that's the common reasoning I see all the time from GMs, especially those that want "realistic" games...from everyone but the spell-casters.

I think a much better distinction is between being fantastic (or whatever other term you want to substitute for "not possible for Earth humans") and doing magic (casting spells). Fantasy worlds are suffused with the fantastic-ness by their very nature. Is that "magic"? No. But is it well beyond what a normal Earth person can do? Yes. So it's not "mundane" or "normal". By its very inherent nature.

"Mundane" as a term also evokes the same fallacious reasoning. Accepting that everyone in a fantasy-adventure world (or anyone worth paying attention to) is fantastic. They're outside the bounds of normal Earth people. Whether in small ways or in large ways, their potential is not bounded by the physics that we know--instead it's bound (as is magic) by its own internal rules.

The d20 differentiation between Extraordinary and Supernatural abilities is actually a decent (though in D&D very inconsistent) framework for looking at this sort of thing. Extraordinary abilities are some inherent aspect of the character involving fantastical biology or training that enhances biology to the point of allowing fantastical feats, while Supernatural abilities are those that rely on manipulating some sort of external 'magical' energy (even if this may be inherent to the creature) for effect. This is similar to how Exalted had Charms, which in theory simply enhanced or channeled personal power in some way, and Sorcery, which involved re-writing the laws of the universe to produce dramatic effects.

You can certainly do this, and if you're good at design math you can even potentially produce something that's balanced, most commonly by using point-based systems, but it doesn't really hit on the core issue of the Martial versus Caster divide in D&D.

The thing about D&D is that you're supposed to have characters who have no fantastical powers at all (ex. Fighters, Rogues) or characters who have extremely limited fantastical powers (ex. Rangers) who remain relevant all the way up the level scale. More importantly, D&D worlds are not supposed to be explicitly superhero worlds where a 1st-level Peasant with a spear is totally powerless. There is really no way to bridge this gap without redefining certain aspects of what D&D is in a way that violates long-established fluff. After all the most famous D&D character is a dude with two scimitars who has extremely limited fantastical powers. I mean, I don't think I can remember any situation where Drizzt uses a ranger spell in any of the books. You can give martials more skills and make them more well rounded, and you should, but you can't reach the upper levels of d20 capability, even as moderate optimization.

And honestly, you probably shouldn't even want too. Even moderately optimized level 15+ casters are stupidly powerful, to the point that you're no longer playing a game that even remotely resembles what D&D is intended to provide or what the narrative fluff looks like and you're somewhere in the Fate/Stay Night zone at least, if not the DBZ zone.

Arbane
2018-12-08, 03:53 AM
In the middle of a chat about this exact thing on Something Awful:



Fionn Mac Cumhaill lived for more than 200 years, could suck his thumb to see the future (because his thumb had been burned when he was cooking the salmon of wisdom), and like every single Fenian he could run through the woods chased by dogs and remove a thorn from his foot without slowing down, could leap over a branch higher than his own head, could recite ****loads of poetry and declaim philosophy, and could speak the secret language of the Druids and the Bards. He was also a giant who could cross the sea to Wales and the water only came up to his breast. If he brought a wounded man water with his own two hands the wounded man would be healed. Most of the places in Ireland are named after stuff he did.

Achilleus is an obvious one, dipped in the river Styx so that only his heel was vulnerable. Actually all the Greek warriors who sacked Troy, Ajax, Agamemnon, Odysseus, they all could do impossible stuff.

Fergus Mac Roy had a sword that extended into a rainbow and allowed him to cut the heads off multiple enemies at once. He made a deal with Cu Chulain that if Cu Chulain retreated from him in a duel, the next time they met Fergus would be the one to fall back. When fighting Cu Chulain in a big battle, he remembered his promise, and instead of striking Cu Chulain he lopped the tops off of three mountains. A lot of **** in Ulster is named after stuff that Cu Chulain or Fergus or one of their bros did.

Sigurd ate a dragon's heart and could understand the speech of men and beasts. So that's cool. Sir Cei, King Arthur's Seneschal, could hold something in his hands and his hands were so hot that it would eventually catch on fire if he wanted it to. Cu Roi, whose name means The Hound of the Battlefield which totally owns, gets his head chopped off, picks it up, and just keeps on trucking

Pretty much everywhere you look warriors are doing crazy awesome ****, and anyone who says different is a worthless sack of **** who totally deserved all the times he got stuffed in a locker.

Mechalich
2018-12-08, 06:11 AM
The thing is, D&D 'martials' are explicitly not mythic individuals. When the first truly mythic martial types were introduced into AD&D 1e they showed in Deities and Demigods, not the Player's Handbook. The Knights of the Round Table, several of whom are in that book with stats, are built on a martial chassis, but they also get powers no PC is allowed to have. Mythic warriors with divine blood like Achilles were explicitly labelled as Demigods and got even more fiat powers not attached to their classes by the rules.

The extremely limited mystic powers demonstrated by a character like Aragorn - minor healing, animal empathy, a few wilderness utility tricks - were intended to represent the peak of the mystic abilities given to a D&D ranger. D&D martials were built around inspiration from characters who were very much mortal and non-mythic and pulled from a Sword & Sorcery background. Conan was absolutely supposed to represent a very high level D&D martial (and in 1e and 2e you could totally build Conan, he just has unusually good stats and a giant pile of non-weapon proficiencies). Thing is, Cu Chulain rips Conan in half in one hit.

In earlier editions of D&D it was completely accepted that high-level casters (especially wizards) would be more powerful than high-level martials, and the XP tables were written accordingly - fighters and thieves just flat out leveled up faster than wizards. At the same time, the margin was actually less extreme not because martials were more powerful, but because wizards were weaker. They had fewer spells, fewer ways to stack buffs, and the combination of flat saving throw values and magic resistance (which was massively superior to spell resistance, as anyone who's ever parked a Skeleton Warrior next to Jon Irenicus at the end of Baldur's Gate II knows), meant that a save or die had a very good chance of doing absolutely nothing most of the time.

So yes, you can totally have martially oriented superheroes who are just as powerful as the magic user superheroes. Thor can be just as powerful as Dr. Strange. The problem is, D&D can't handle the players being Thor. Honestly, it can't handle the players being Dr. Strange either, but for various reasons people complain about this less.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-08, 07:46 AM
But Thor is fantastical. Quite literally. I'm saying that the idea of "no fantastical powers" limits you to category 0. Which doesn't fit any D&D character since 1e. And even then--magic resistance and their durability alone make them at least category 1.

You can't have it both ways. Either they do nothing that a normal human on Earth can't do (so bye bye evasion, magic items, iterative attacks, higher than 4 HP, etc) or they're fantastic. Casting spells is not a measure of fantastic-ness. Only category 2c supers do that, and only some of them.

Once you accept that there is no such thing as a "non fantastic" PC, the world makes a lot more sense and you can begin to deal with the disparity between the classes. Until that point, no progress can be made without destroying any sense of verisimilitude and resorting to pure fiat.

gkathellar
2018-12-08, 07:56 AM
The thing about D&D is that you're supposed to have characters who have no fantastical powers at all (ex. Fighters, Rogues) or characters who have extremely limited fantastical powers (ex. Rangers) who remain relevant all the way up the level scale.

That hasn’t always been the case by any means. BECMI belies it right in the name. 1E and 2E were never consistent with that approach. 3E set the benchmarks absurdly high, but does allow epic skill checks for things like using Balance to walk on clouds. 4E discarded the notion entirely.

Beyond that, there’s the simple question of the opposition. Many of D&D’s monsters are major antagonists from mythology, and the heroes are expected to kill them on a regular basis. Demon lords, building-sized dragons and gods have always been readily punchable. Hell, in 2E we have monster stats for intelligent asteroids.

D&D being gonzo as hell is nothing new.


More importantly, D&D worlds are not supposed to be explicitly superhero worlds where a 1st-level Peasant with a spear is totally powerless. There is really no way to bridge this gap without redefining certain aspects of what D&D is in a way that violates long-established fluff.

There are a number of D&D settings that dip into comic book shenanigans quite readily. In Eberron and Nentir Vale they shows up as part of the basic pulp premise. For Dark Sun, it’s on account of Athas having a sign that reads You Must Be This Tall To Ride. Planescape and Spelljammer invoke it implicitly, given some of the things players get involved in. You can make arguable cases for Ravenloft, Greyhawk, and FR, too. Oh, and Mystara, where this is explicitly built into the fabric of the setting and a player’s expected leveling arc.


After all the most famous D&D character is a dude with two scimitars who has extremely limited fantastical powers. I mean, I don't think I can remember any situation where Drizzt uses a ranger spell in any of the books.

Wait, you mean the guy who demonstrated Bruce Lee-esque agility when he was ten, was taught to fight by perhaps the greatest weapons master who ever lived, carves his way through armies, routinely outfights people covered in buffs, and is at one point described as walking on snow without breaking its surface? The righteous outcast of an evil society, trained in woodsmanship under a blind archer, who willingly protects a world that hates and fears him?

The Drizzt books could be more anime mythic, but not by much. If he’s your iconic martial, you’re setting a pretty fantastic bar for that sort of thing.


You can give martials more skills and make them more well rounded, and you should, but you can't reach the upper levels of d20 capability, even as moderate optimization.

Yes, in most editions of the game that’s been something of a truism, for fairly straightforward reasons. That doesn’t mean it’s how things ought to be or how they were intended to be.


And honestly, you probably shouldn't even want too. Even moderately optimized level 15+ casters are stupidly powerful, to the point that you're no longer playing a game that even remotely resembles what D&D is intended to provide or what the narrative fluff looks like and you're somewhere in the Fate/Stay Night zone at least, if not the DBZ zone.

You’re making a lot of assumptions about (a) the intentions of hundreds of individual writers over the course of a 40+ year period, and (b) how people in general should play the game. Suffice it to say that D&D is and has been many different things to many different people, and while it has tended to have some consistent features, power scale is not one of them.

Cluedrew
2018-12-08, 08:50 AM
How D&D martials are suppose to compare with casters has changed over the editions. I speak mostly of the more recent editions because I know those better and that is close to the design of games I am trying to make. And recently the expectation has been that the would be comparable. If the quadratic wizard needed quadratic XP maybe. And where there is a difference between what something promises to be and what it is, one of those things should change.

Ars Magica changed the promise and good for it. But I don't think D&D wants to do that. So it should change what it is. So really the issue of whether or not martials were supposed to be fantastic is mute (not moot), they kind of have to be.

Unavenger
2018-12-08, 12:06 PM
But the word "mundane" has a particular meaning in this context - specifically, it refers to Stuff What Is Not Wizard Stuff. It's a pretty well-established definition in discussion of action-fantasy gaming.

See, I've always heard it used to mean what it means, which is "Of the world" ie nonmagical irrespective of whether the magic is coming from a wizard or a swordmage, I mean swordsage.

But it's irrelevant because I don't want to play a character who can cut the tops off mountains with a rainbow sword. You don't need to be able to do that in order to change the fate of the world multiple times (keeping Aragorn as an example because, weirdly, none of the mundane-means-blade-magic people have wanted to interface with him, like how many times did he save the ringbearer or one of the bastions of humanity just by being a badass? I'm seeing more than a few times that the dude with a greatsword literally saved the world while the wizard was busy doing things he could largely have done without magic anyway).

Fantasy is full of examples of magic swordsmen, sure. But it's also full of examples of non-magical people changing the fate of the world.

gkathellar
2018-12-08, 02:42 PM
But it's irrelevant because I don't want to play a character who can cut the tops off mountains with a rainbow sword.

Okay.


You don't need to be able to do that in order to change the fate of the world multiple times (keeping Aragorn as an example because, weirdly, none of the mundane-means-blade-magic people have wanted to interface with him, like how many times did he save the ringbearer or one of the bastions of humanity just by being a badass? I'm seeing more than a few times that the dude with a greatsword literally saved the world while the wizard was busy doing things he could largely have done without magic anyway).

Fantasy is full of examples of magic swordsmen, sure. But it's also full of examples of non-magical people changing the fate of the world.

Sure. But a character like Aragorn is a function of his milieu, which was specifically created with him saving the ringbearer and being a bastion of humanity in mind. At the scale on which LotR operates, characters like Aragorn are perfectly reasonable. It's not the same scale at which "skills checks should let you perform impossible feats" is operating, and the comparison isn't really fair to either. Just as Aragorn is an appropriate protagonist for an LotR-scale story, he would be inappropriate and ineffectual in a larger-scale one.

As it happens, action-fantasy gaming tends to (a) veer towards the larger-scale option in terms of general style, while (b) still insisting that people play mundanes in the mold of Aragorn. The problem is not in either (a) nor (b), or even in trying to combine them, but specifically in trying to combine them in a game with a specific focus on being victorious heroes.

Fantasy novels =/= fantasy gaming. The latter borrow imagery and ideas from the former, but the actual structure of a game is very different from that of a novel. And whereas novels can and frequently do get by without empowering their protagonists in any way, depending on powerlessness and character interaction to create drama, a significant portion of any game lies in the presentation of challenges which players can take actions in reference to. Consider Gandalf's fight with the balrog: in the book, it's a cool moment that alludes to larger conflicts and forces in the world. But if it occurred at the table, we'd generally consider the whole episode bad form: throwing a balrog at a party completely incapable of confronting it so that you can depict a dramatic DMPC showdown is pretty much the archetypal Novice DM Mistake.

Cluedrew
2018-12-08, 03:09 PM
See, I've always heard it used to mean what it means, which is "Of the world" ie nonmagical irrespective of whether the magic is coming from a wizard or a swordmage, I mean swordsage.I've heard it to mean that. I've also heard to mean boring and I just found a definition that defines mundane as "characterized by the practical, transitory, ordinary and commonplace (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mundane)". Those don't describe Aragorn very well. ... I mean you clarified what version you were talking about so we should be good but I guess I'm just trying to provide context as for why there is contention over the words. Some people have been aghast at my use of martial.


But it's irrelevant because I don't want to play a character who can cut the tops off mountains with a rainbow sword. [...] Fantasy is full of examples of magic swordsmen, sure. But it's also full of examples of non-magical people changing the fate of the world.So the important bit: Why not both?

Unavenger
2018-12-08, 03:13 PM
Sure. But a character like Aragorn is a function of his milieu, which was specifically created with him saving the ringbearer and being a bastion of humanity in mind. At the scale on which LotR operates, characters like Aragorn are perfectly reasonable. It's not the same scale at which "skills checks should let you perform impossible feats" is operating, and the comparison isn't really fair to either. Just as Aragorn is an appropriate protagonist for an LotR-scale story, he would be inappropriate and ineffectual in a larger-scale one.

I've already compared Aragorn - who isn't even at the top of the mundane game - to mid-level D&D wizards and decided that I'd rather have him on my side than the wizard until at least mid-to-high levels (no surprise, because one of the antagonists is a wizard of at least 13th level (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/controlWeather.htm) and he still doesn't manage more than convince the fellowship to take a different route), and I'd definitely take him over a high-level swordsage. There is no level on which bringing people back from the brink of death, fighting off the nine near-immortal servants of the dark lord of the universe and inspiring an entire army to feats of heroism are boring abilities, and few levels at which they don't compare to T1 characters.

Plus, if Aragorn were the king of all mundane fantasy characters, he'd have stabbed the Balrog right through its face, cut eight of the ringwraiths to pieces and beaten the witch-king of Angmar into enough of a pulp that the hobbits could have killed him (or just thrown him off the summit of Amon Hen and let Eowyn have her own badass normal moment later), thrown something at Lurtz before he could have killed Boromir, shot the berseker with the torch (or one of the people carrying the mine) dead before casually flipping Legolas off, shown up earlier with the army of the dead and overall saved a lot of characters a lot of trouble and occasional death. Aragorn reads as mid-level in a T1 context because he could be a lot stronger without even scratching the mundanity ceiling.


So the important bit: Why not both?

Good question. Why not have Aragorn and, I dunno, Arwen in the same campaign setti...

...oh, wait.

(Arwen isn't my favourite example, I'll admit, but LotR doesn't really do magic swordsperson characters in the ToB sense. There's probably better ones, but I'm betting it's one of the elves).

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-08, 03:35 PM
Things that work in fantasy books don't necessarily work in fantasy RPGs. Very few games are trying to emulate LotR. For one, it's a setting that specifically tries to push "magic" (speaking broadly) into the background. All the heros are designed to represent the common man. This is not representative of most fantasy RPGs, let alone D&D. Comparing LotR characters to D&D ones is apples to space cruisers.

Unavenger
2018-12-08, 04:14 PM
Things that work in fantasy books don't necessarily work in fantasy RPGs. Very few games are trying to emulate LotR. For one, it's a setting that specifically tries to push "magic" (speaking broadly) into the background. All the heros are designed to represent the common man. This is not representative of most fantasy RPGs, let alone D&D. Comparing LotR characters to D&D ones is apples to space cruisers.

But Cu Chulain to D&D is even further out - there's a class in D&D based at least loosely on Aragorn. There's no rainbow swordsman class who cuts the tops off mountains in a single swing. And I would argue that you need to be able to explain why defeating high-level encounters with a torch, partially-healing wounds that almost no-one else in the setting can even begin to help with, and using diplomacy to get an undead army on your side "Don't work" in RPGs.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-08, 04:23 PM
But Cu Chulain to D&D is even further out - there's a class in D&D based at least loosely on Aragorn. There's no rainbow swordsman class who cuts the tops off mountains in a single swing. And I would argue that you need to be able to explain why defeating high-level encounters with a torch, partially-healing wounds that almost no-one else in the setting can even begin to help with, and using diplomacy to get an undead army on your side "Don't work" in RPGs.

He didn't use diplomacy. He used his legendary status as the inheritor of an oath. He healed, not by knowing herbs, but by being the rightful King and all that entails. Aragorn was not mundane. Aragon was fantastic. The scale of the setting is low compared to most D&D, but he was at the top end of that scale as far as mortals go. In part because he was descended from immortals. Basically, he was part of a party that only worked by fiat. And that's fine, in single author fiction.

And while rangers might have been inspired by Aragorn, they're not an attempt to reproduce him in game. Nor should they be bound to that single, partial inspiration. Same with other classes. Gandalf was a LotR wizard, not a D&D one. Bilbo was not a rogue.

Unavenger
2018-12-08, 05:59 PM
He healed, not by knowing herbs, but by being the rightful King.

You've officially jumped the shark with this one. Even if you're right, what he did wouldn't have been impossible were he not king.

Son of A Lich!
2018-12-08, 06:16 PM
Actually, I have a bit of a problem with this in reverse.

I think Martials are generally Okay in terms of what they can do, but as soon as you have someone with 9 levels of spell casting in the mix, they get left behind quickly.

There is this general idea that Magic ought to scale from Magic Missile to Wish. Magic Missile is an attack option that doesn't miss and avoids damage reduction abilities. It is truly magical. Cool. Wizards can only use this magic potential a short number of times per day, that is the trade off.

By level 19, however, they can cast Wish. A spell that can do Almost Anything. The Magic Missile trade off of only being able to do it once or twice a day is meaningless with what it can do when used daily, because it's not a thing that normal people can do but better, like Magic Missile, it's objectively the most powerful effect in D&D. When we are given things that are meant to be difficult to near impossible to do within the confines of D&D itself, Wish is used as the bar of impossibility. To kill a Tarrasque, you have to bring to 0 hit points, stop it's regeneration and cast wish.

So, why in the 9 hells is it a player ability? Why isn't this harder to pull off? I don't mind that a Monk can't chop off the head of a dragon with a round house kick, but if the Mundanes are to be compareable to Magickers, why can't Ember Fly at will at higher levels?

One of the two extremes needs to be corrected. Either Spell casters need to have heavier caps or mundanes need to be able to well exceed mortal expectations. I would be a lot more willing to DM higher level play if wizards had more restirictions on their higher level spell casting.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-08, 07:04 PM
Actually, I have a bit of a problem with this in reverse.

I think Martials are generally Okay in terms of what they can do, but as soon as you have someone with 9 levels of spell casting in the mix, they get left behind quickly.

There is this general idea that Magic ought to scale from Magic Missile to Wish. Magic Missile is an attack option that doesn't miss and avoids damage reduction abilities. It is truly magical. Cool. Wizards can only use this magic potential a short number of times per day, that is the trade off.

By level 19, however, they can cast Wish. A spell that can do Almost Anything. The Magic Missile trade off of only being able to do it once or twice a day is meaningless with what it can do when used daily, because it's not a thing that normal people can do but better, like Magic Missile, it's objectively the most powerful effect in D&D. When we are given things that are meant to be difficult to near impossible to do within the confines of D&D itself, Wish is used as the bar of impossibility. To kill a Tarrasque, you have to bring to 0 hit points, stop it's regeneration and cast wish.

So, why in the 9 hells is it a player ability? Why isn't this harder to pull off? I don't mind that a Monk can't chop off the head of a dragon with a round house kick, but if the Mundanes are to be compareable to Magickers, why can't Ember Fly at will at higher levels?

One of the two extremes needs to be corrected. Either Spell casters need to have heavier caps or mundanes need to be able to well exceed mortal expectations. I would be a lot more willing to DM higher level play if wizards had more restirictions on their higher level spell casting.

I should be clear. I'm not concerned with magnitude of power here. A weak category 2c (the Spotmaker, whose only power is to change the color of a single spot on a single wall from red to slightly less-red) will absolutely be defeated in any reasonable contest even by a category 0.

I'd say that you've presented a false dichotomy. If spell-casters are allowed to transcend the humanly possible, so should non-spell-casters. And to the same degree. Possibly not the same effects, but the same general level of power. Heroes of Irish Legend can play nicely with full-power (although not TO) 9th-level casters. But if non-casters are limited to merely slight extrapolations of human ability, then so should spell-casters. No free pass from reality for anyone. Either everyone is super-powered or no one is.

And yes, Unavenger, the healing in the Return of the King is explicitly called out as the healing hands of the King. It's used as a proof of his claim to the throne. And no other mortal could have negotiated with the spirits of the dead--only he could, by virtue of his ancestry and the (supernatural) oath sworn and broken. Aragorn (as with all the main characters of LotR) is best categorized as on the border between category 1 (larger-than-life but still mostly bound to mortal limits) and category 2b (those empowered by their ancestry/birth/innate power). None of them were category 0. Not even close. Hobbits have their stealth and their courage beyond that of men (although they're mostly category 1, merely having more resilience than most and heaps of plot armor). Elves are...well...elves. Etc.

Cluedrew
2018-12-08, 09:02 PM
Good question. Why not have Aragorn and, I dunno, Arwen in the same campaign setti...Oh, I had a moment where I thought you were completely crazy until I realized you were talking about the movie version. Anyways I would not describe either of version as a "fantastic swordsmaster". The move version is roughly Aragorn plus spell casting ability. Gilgamesh definitely is (although he is 1/3 god, so he isn't a normal, but his abilities and feats line up with the archetype). Some of the stuff I have heard about Conan lines up but I've never read that. Do you have any other "fantastic but not magic" characters? I think there is a mismatch in what we are talking about.

On Wish: I despise wish. Wish is something the spell caster grants using the sum total of all other spells you know. Making it a spell is... stupid.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-08, 09:18 PM
Oh, I had a moment where I thought you were completely crazy until I realized you were talking about the movie version. Anyways I would not describe either of version as a "fantastic swordsmaster". The move version is roughly Aragorn plus spell casting ability. Gilgamesh definitely is (although he is 1/3 god, so he isn't a normal, but his abilities and feats line up with the archetype). Some of the stuff I have heard about Conan lines up but I've never read that. Do you have any other "fantastic but not magic" characters? I think there is a mismatch in what we are talking about.

On Wish: I despise wish. Wish is something the spell caster grants using the sum total of all other spells you know. Making it a spell is... stupid.

For the record, I agree about wish.

Mechalich
2018-12-08, 09:34 PM
I should be clear. I'm not concerned with magnitude of power here. A weak category 2c (the Spotmaker, whose only power is to change the color of a single spot on a single wall from red to slightly less-red) will absolutely be defeated in any reasonable contest even by a category 0.

I'd say that you've presented a false dichotomy. If spell-casters are allowed to transcend the humanly possible, so should non-spell-casters. And to the same degree. Possibly not the same effects, but the same general level of power. Heroes of Irish Legend can play nicely with full-power (although not TO) 9th-level casters. But if non-casters are limited to merely slight extrapolations of human ability, then so should spell-casters. No free pass from reality for anyone. Either everyone is super-powered or no one is.

I fundamentally disagree. The magnitude of power is far more important than the nature of power, in large part because it changes depending on context. There are magical powers that are awesome in a stone age context but fundamentally pointless in a modern world. For example, the ability to have owls carry messages from place to place in Harry Potter. That takes several days depending on distance, has high upkeep costs, and is vulnerable to interception. It is a fundamentally inferior communication method to having a cell phone in almost every way. But you could totally make that power available in an urban fantasy game (and in fact many urban fantasy settings do allow familiars to carry messages) and people will even pay points for it.

What you want, for game purposes, is that powers should present the same level of output for the same amount of investment (in dots, XP, or whatever) regardless of how they work. So investing in 'sword training' should produce roughly the same benefits as investing in 'alchemy training' or 'curses training' or any other form of magic.

You could certainly build a 'magic-user' type character in a game whose powers scale equally with that of 'sword-user' character. In fact your average jRPG does this all the time (in Disgaea, both types can reach level 9999 and do billions of damage per attack). You could even build it such that the growth scale for both types remains entirely within human levels of capability - ie. a fire bolt is functionally an arrow and you become better at throwing bolts of fire the way an archer becomes better at firing arrows. This is actually quite easy to do within the boundaries of a combat system (and pseudo-caster classes like the Warlock kind of manage it). It becomes much harder when you move to the much larger play-space of all non-combat actions.

Games like D&D run into a problem based on differences in magnitude. After all, the Fighter and Wizard are fairly close to balanced for the first few levels, it's only as their powers grow stronger that the differences become a problem, because the design was never for them to scale to the same magnitude. The D&D warrior is intended to scale from 'dumb peasant with sharp stick' to 'Fafhrd' and the rogue from 'orphan cutpurse' to 'Gray Mouser,' but neither of those guys have any magical powers worth talking about. Meanwhile while the wizard is intended to scale from 'academic with parlor trick' to 'Ningauble of the Seven Eyes' who has the power to bend time and space and could extinguish Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser with a wave of a hand. The source material - and Nehwon is explicitly source material for D&D to the point of blatant copyright violations - had fundamental inequalities that Gygax and co. preserved during the initial design of D&D and that have never been properly addressed (and probably never will be, too many sacred cows to slay).

Son of A Lich!
2018-12-08, 09:36 PM
I hear you when you call it a false dichotomy, but I think the direction is wrong

I'm not applying the false dichotomy; The Player's Handbook is.

If I take 2 level 20 characters and put them side-by-side, I should be looking at two characters that are roughly equal in capacity to affect the story they are in. A Wizard may be above the power curve, but he can only do things out of the norm Occasionally. A wizard with a 9th level spell that allows him to change the color of a dot is able to do something literally fantastic, but isn't surpassing his teammates.

I hate having Monsters in mind for a combat encounter and having to account for the Mundanes who don't have native things like Flight. Why does a wizard get to cast flight when he doesn't intend to be in Melee and need it, but a fighter can't when he will be in melee but he can't cast it natively? Now, I don't want a fighter to pull out a spell book and fly up to a dragon, but I also don't want my dragon to decide against it's better judgement that it will engage with the party indoors only allowing it to fly 10 feet above the ground. Flight is a [i]Basic[i] mechanic that a fighter would have to build around to contribute in a fight, taking up things like Bows and eschewing Boots of Elvenkind for Boots of flight. Wizards and Fighters are not on an equal level here. At 20th level, most of the big monsters that players are facing have some kind of abilities that make them challenging to fight, but Fighters have no native means to over come these common issues (Water breathing, Flame Auras, Necrotic Touch, etc) and have to rely on spell casters to use their abilities on the fighter.

I'm glad that 5e changed the number of concentration spells you have up, that was really nice of them; but it doesn't change the fact that now the Wizard has to choose between giving his meatshield an ability he needs to compete or dropping it in lieu of a more important spell. When a player has to decide whether to let a friend help in the combat or not, the game is suffering. Again, I don't want to be the bad guy, and I don't want to have to give my players abilities that let them stand up to basic issues they are going to face down the line.

I would rather my Fighter be able to "Combat Fly" by "jumping good" and using the impact of his blows to help him stay aloft rather then tell him 'Ah, no... see, you can only jump 15 feet up in the air with this skill so you don't get to fight this time. Don't worry, a bunch of Flail Snails will be joining the fight later for you to take care of like the big boy adventurer you are".

The Fighter feels like he made a bad character, the rogue wishes they had found a bow that cast magic arrows, the Ranger wishes he had water breathing prepared today, etc.

If you look at builds in 5e today, you will notice that a lot of people will gravitate towards classes that have spell casting simply because it lets them work around whatever problem they may face and gives them capacity to get by without a wizards help. From Arcane Tricksters to Eldritch Knights, Sorcadins and others. Why gimp yourself on a fight when you can take care of it yourself?

The two level 20 characters are NOT approximately equal. And this is despite going through the same dungeons, getting the same loot, having the same experience point levels and being called peers on the whole point of a "Level" in the first place. They are not on the same level. A Monk can't even kill himself as cool as a sorcerer can, A monk could find the highest point in a castle and jump to his death (And realize he had slow fall), where a sorcerer can literally planeshift himself into the Nine Hells. There should be some semblance of balance between the two characters though, starting with being competent in most scenarios adventurers would face on in day to day activity.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-08, 09:40 PM
I fundamentally disagree. The magnitude of power is far more important than the nature of power, in large part because it changes depending on context. There are magical powers that are awesome in a stone age context but fundamentally pointless in a modern world. For example, the ability to have owls carry messages from place to place in Harry Potter. That takes several days depending on distance, has high upkeep costs, and is vulnerable to interception. It is a fundamentally inferior communication method to having a cell phone in almost every way. But you could totally make that power available in an urban fantasy game (and in fact many urban fantasy settings do allow familiars to carry messages) and people will even pay points for it.

What you want, for game purposes, is that powers should present the same level of output for the same amount of investment (in dots, XP, or whatever) regardless of how they work. So investing in 'sword training' should produce roughly the same benefits as investing in 'alchemy training' or 'curses training' or any other form of magic.

You could certainly build a 'magic-user' type character in a game whose powers scale equally with that of 'sword-user' character. In fact your average jRPG does this all the time (in Disgaea, both types can reach level 9999 and do billions of damage per attack). You could even build it such that the growth scale for both types remains entirely within human levels of capability - ie. a fire bolt is functionally an arrow and you become better at throwing bolts of fire the way an archer becomes better at firing arrows. This is actually quite easy to do within the boundaries of a combat system (and pseudo-caster classes like the Warlock kind of manage it). It becomes much harder when you move to the much larger play-space of all non-combat actions.

Games like D&D run into a problem based on differences in magnitude. After all, the Fighter and Wizard are fairly close to balanced for the first few levels, it's only as their powers grow stronger that the differences become a problem, because the design was never for them to scale to the same magnitude. The D&D warrior is intended to scale from 'dumb peasant with sharp stick' to 'Fafhrd' and the rogue from 'orphan cutpurse' to 'Gray Mouser,' but neither of those guys have any magical powers worth talking about. Meanwhile while the wizard is intended to scale from 'academic with parlor trick' to 'Ningauble of the Seven Eyes' who has the power to bend time and space and could extinguish Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser with a wave of a hand. The source material - and Nehwon is explicitly source material for D&D to the point of blatant copyright violations - had fundamental inequalities that Gygax and co. preserved during the initial design of D&D and that have never been properly addressed (and probably never will be, too many sacred cows to slay).

I'm not really worried about mechanics in this at all. Those are separate to me. I'm worried about thematics and world-building more than anything. Although a world in which just simply training hard lets you casually disregard natural law would be an interesting world...but that's neither here nor now. D&D's setting is not such a world, at least by construction.

When people try to require that some characters be entirely stuck with nothing but things acceptable to normal people on Earth while others are entirely unbounded yet still keep up where their skill-sets overlap, you've got a problem. Especially when they're all for the PHENOMINAL COSMIC POWER of D&D spell-casters.

And at this point, what inspired GG originally is rather a moot point. The game has taken on a different focus--it looks much more to popular depictions of archetypes than to any specific source material and has become somewhat sui generis. It's not any other specific type of fantasy, it's D&D fantasy. A separate sub-genre. Is that a good thing? No opinion here.

Edit: My entire point with all of this is to say that I hate the Guy at the Gym and the related "wizards can do anything because magic" paradigm. And that paradigm is fueled inherently by assuming that only spell-casters are "magic" (what I've been calling "fantastic"). I think that an under-regarded part of 4e was the full-on acceptance that this isn't true. That everyone of any note is fantastic. It allows for much more internally-consistent worldbuilding and story-telling. It lets people be that big hero who's just that good while not raising huge flags as to why others aren't that good, despite training equally hard. Or lets you deal with people who didn't train that hard but are that good by channeling primal forces, etc.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-08, 09:50 PM
I hear you when you call it a false dichotomy, but I think the direction is wrong

I'm not applying the false dichotomy; The Player's Handbook is.

If I take 2 level 20 characters and put them side-by-side, I should be looking at two characters that are roughly equal in capacity to affect the story they are in. A Wizard may be above the power curve, but he can only do things out of the norm Occasionally. A wizard with a 9th level spell that allows him to change the color of a dot is able to do something literally fantastic, but isn't surpassing his teammates.

I hate having Monsters in mind for a combat encounter and having to account for the Mundanes who don't have native things like Flight. Why does a wizard get to cast flight when he doesn't intend to be in Melee and need it, but a fighter can't when he will be in melee but he can't cast it natively? Now, I don't want a fighter to pull out a spell book and fly up to a dragon, but I also don't want my dragon to decide against it's better judgement that it will engage with the party indoors only allowing it to fly 10 feet above the ground. Flight is a [i]Basic[i] mechanic that a fighter would have to build around to contribute in a fight, taking up things like Bows and eschewing Boots of Elvenkind for Boots of flight. Wizards and Fighters are not on an equal level here. At 20th level, most of the big monsters that players are facing have some kind of abilities that make them challenging to fight, but Fighters have no native means to over come these common issues (Water breathing, Flame Auras, Necrotic Touch, etc) and have to rely on spell casters to use their abilities on the fighter.

I'm glad that 5e changed the number of concentration spells you have up, that was really nice of them; but it doesn't change the fact that now the Wizard has to choose between giving his meatshield an ability he needs to compete or dropping it in lieu of a more important spell. When a player has to decide whether to let a friend help in the combat or not, the game is suffering. Again, I don't want to be the bad guy, and I don't want to have to give my players abilities that let them stand up to basic issues they are going to face down the line.

I would rather my Fighter be able to "Combat Fly" by "jumping good" and using the impact of his blows to help him stay aloft rather then tell him 'Ah, no... see, you can only jump 15 feet up in the air with this skill so you don't get to fight this time. Don't worry, a bunch of Flail Snails will be joining the fight later for you to take care of like the big boy adventurer you are".

The Fighter feels like he made a bad character, the rogue wishes they had found a bow that cast magic arrows, the Ranger wishes he had water breathing prepared today, etc.

If you look at builds in 5e today, you will notice that a lot of people will gravitate towards classes that have spell casting simply because it lets them work around whatever problem they may face and gives them capacity to get by without a wizards help. From Arcane Tricksters to Eldritch Knights, Sorcadins and others. Why gimp yourself on a fight when you can take care of it yourself?

The two level 20 characters are NOT approximately equal. And this is despite going through the same dungeons, getting the same loot, having the same experience point levels and being called peers on the whole point of a "Level" in the first place. They are not on the same level. A Monk can't even kill himself as cool as a sorcerer can, A monk could find the highest point in a castle and jump to his death (And realize he had slow fall), where a sorcerer can literally planeshift himself into the Nine Hells. There should be some semblance of balance between the two characters though, starting with being competent in most scenarios adventurers would face on in day to day activity.

I've now run lots of 5e adventures, including up to level 20. And this just literally didn't come up. Even with a druid, a warlock, a monk, and a rogue. They all contributed--in fact the druid was one of the less effective characters because the player wasn't that great. The rogue was amazing, and the monk...well...it depended on if she remembered she had stunning strike that day or not.

But again, I'm not really worried about power differences in this set of posts. I'm trying to focus on the threshold question--can "mundanes" (I hate that term) break free of the Guy at the Gym and actually have cool abilities, even if by doing so they're obviously fantastic? I'm not claiming that any particular game system has the right balance of such things. Merely that the solution does not involve chaining certain character builds down to the mundane level while letting others casually violate laws of nature. Either everyone is fantastic or no one is. Splitting things down the middle is only contributing to this problem and preventing a solution.

Mechalich
2018-12-08, 10:37 PM
I'm not really worried about mechanics in this at all. Those are separate to me. I'm worried about thematics and world-building more than anything. Although a world in which just simply training hard lets you casually disregard natural law would be an interesting world...but that's neither here nor now. D&D's setting is not such a world, at least by construction.

When people try to require that some characters be entirely stuck with nothing but things acceptable to normal people on Earth while others are entirely unbounded yet still keep up where their skill-sets overlap, you've got a problem. Especially when they're all for the PHENOMINAL COSMIC POWER of D&D spell-casters.

And at this point, what inspired GG originally is rather a moot point. The game has taken on a different focus--it looks much more to popular depictions of archetypes than to any specific source material and has become somewhat sui generis. It's not any other specific type of fantasy, it's D&D fantasy. A separate sub-genre. Is that a good thing? No opinion here.

Except, the fundamental paradox you are describing - that certain character types are limited to the 'non-fantastical' scale of development while others have access to the limitless 'fantastical' scale is drawn directly from the source material. It's an issue that developed from making both the 'heroic' warriors and rogues of Sword & Sorcery playable alongside the 'villainous' wizards even though the original point was that the warriors would triumph over the schemes of the much more powerful wizards through a combination of grit and gumption (roughly the entirety of Conan's career consists of him tricking and murdering wizards who underestimate him).

Stories where 'everyone has powers' already have a genre: superheroes. There are games for that, there are even fantasy settings for that (like Naruto), but the overwhelming majority of high and low fantasy settings, even ones being written today, have some kind of mundane/fantastical divide, and yet still allow the 'mundanes' to contribute in various ways. In the Wheel of Time - on of the more high-powered D&D-like systems out there, the largely mundane Mat Cauthon is a hugely significant and fan-favorite character of vast importance to the plot.

You can have martial superheroes versus magical superheroes all you want (heck, if you play Fate Grand Order Cu Chulain gets to be both), but that's not the play experience D&D purports to offer, and changing the game or the game worlds such that this is true has traditionally not gone down well - case in point 4e.


Edit: My entire point with all of this is to say that I hate the Guy at the Gym and the related "wizards can do anything because magic" paradigm. And that paradigm is fueled inherently by assuming that only spell-casters are "magic" (what I've been calling "fantastic"). I think that an under-regarded part of 4e was the full-on acceptance that this isn't true. That everyone of any note is fantastic. It allows for much more internally-consistent worldbuilding and story-telling. It lets people be that big hero who's just that good while not raising huge flags as to why others aren't that good, despite training equally hard. Or lets you deal with people who didn't train that hard but are that good by channeling primal forces, etc.

The thing is, making a fantasy game where 'everyone of any note is fantastic' does not produce a balanced or internally-consistent game. There's game that does exactly those things, which was produced by a major game studio using a lot of money and heavily supported. That game is Exalted, and any idea of balance or thematic consistency in that game is a dumpster fire of epic proportions.

Additionally, superhero worlds have their own issues. A world in which the only people who are important are those who won the genetic lottery and the masses are helpless has all sorts of problems of its own that have to be wrestled with. Most superhero universes function explicitly using comic book logic that blatantly handwaves away the implications of such powers and adamantly refuses to let the supers change the world in fundamental ways.


But again, I'm not really worried about power differences in this set of posts. I'm trying to focus on the threshold question--can "mundanes" (I hate that term) break free of the Guy at the Gym and actually have cool abilities, even if by doing so they're obviously fantastic?

See, this is an answered question. The answer is yes, of course you can. In fact, almost every game not based in the Sword & Sorcery milieu accepts this explicitly.

If the question is 'can you do this in D&D' the answer is 'no, not really, not without fundamentally changing the nature of the game' because D&D incorporates an inherent inequality about character types at its core and always has. Raistlin Majere can achieve apotheosis, become divine and threaten to destroy the universe. His twin brother Caramon cannot. That's just the way it is.

Son of A Lich!
2018-12-08, 10:56 PM
I think we agree ultimately on there being a power discrepancy between classes. I run a lot of games myself but I'm always the DM. I feel like I have to watch out for the Mundanes and I'm always worried when I design encounters so that the players are aware of things they need in the future.

I feel I'm doing a good job if I don't have to babysit the encounter and give them exactly what they need, but I do pay close attention to making sure Boots of Flying or the ilk are available around level 7 or so.

I think that this is the core of the issue being discussed, however. Non-Magickers aren't allowed nice things, because it's not realistic. When push comes to shove, we do let some things slide (Shadow Monk is the first thing that comes to my mind), but the power of the wizard supreme is what makes that so frustratingly insurmountable.

I listen to Critical Role on my spare time, and listening to the first campaign compared to the second is a night and day difference. In the first, they had 1 druid, bard and Cleric for their spell casting needs. In the second Campaign, Everyone is a spell casting class except 2. Monk, Wizard, Warlock, Cleric, Cleric, Arcane Trickster, Zealot Barbarian.

This is the result; If you limit non-magickers to human expectations, everyone will want to be a Magicker instead. If the proverbial ceiling of a Magicker is "I can Cast almost any spell with a 9th level spell slot" and the ceiling for a non-magicker (Natively) is "I can swing a sword 4 times!" then there is no reason to chase 20th level non-magicker.

Same Idea, from the reverse perspective.

Like I said in my opening response :smalltongue:

Arbane
2018-12-09, 03:25 AM
Conan was absolutely supposed to represent a very high level D&D martial (and in 1e and 2e you could totally build Conan, he just has unusually good stats and a giant pile of non-weapon proficiencies).

You can't hear me snickering at this statement, but I assure you I am (http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2010/06/gygax-on-conan.html).


But it's irrelevant because I don't want to play a character who can cut the tops off mountains with a rainbow sword.

Fine, keep your games below level 10, then. It's not hard.


Fantasy is full of examples of magic swordsmen, sure. But it's also full of examples of non-magical people changing the fate of the world.

Thing is, fantasy, up until the 1960s or so, generally wasn't full of MAGICAL people changing the fate of the world - wizards were usually villains or advisors for the REAL heroes. (I've heard a theory that the rapid advancement of science and tech in the second half of the 20th century made magicians as heroes more acceptable, but I'm not sure I buy it.)


What you want, for game purposes, is that powers should present the same level of output for the same amount of investment (in dots, XP, or whatever) regardless of how they work. So investing in 'sword training' should produce roughly the same benefits as investing in 'alchemy training' or 'curses training' or any other form of magic.


Agreed.

Champions, Mutants and Masterminds, or pretty much any other effects-based RPG can manage that. (They can also manage to produce powers that will break the game right in half if the GM doesn't veto them, but that's the nature of such things.) So can FATE, with a little creativity.


The D&D warrior is intended to scale from 'dumb peasant with sharp stick' to 'Fafhrd' and the rogue from 'orphan cutpurse' to 'Gray Mouser,' but neither of those guys have any magical powers worth talking about. Meanwhile while the wizard is intended to scale from 'academic with parlor trick' to 'Ningauble of the Seven Eyes' who has the power to bend time and space and could extinguish Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser with a wave of a hand.

IIRC, Grey Mouser's done a few decent magic tricks - like killing his lover's father while being tortured on the rack, and vaporizing an entire circle of wizards. (Which would've been a lot more impressive if they hadn't been on HIS side.) Sheelba and Ningauble are probably not human, and both of them generally preferred to fast-talk the heroes into cleaning up messes than use any of their power.

Unavenger
2018-12-09, 03:49 AM
Fine, keep your games below level 10, then. It's not hard.

Alternatively, I can use homebrew mundanes which keep up at high levels (I find it curious that your position has changed from level 4 to level 10; perhaps I'm convincing you?), but I shouldn't have to turn to homebrew.

Florian
2018-12-09, 03:53 AM
But again, I'm not really worried about power differences in this set of posts. I'm trying to focus on the threshold question--can "mundanes" (I hate that term) break free of the Guy at the Gym and actually have cool abilities, even if by doing so they're obviously fantastic? I'm not claiming that any particular game system has the right balance of such things. Merely that the solution does not involve chaining certain character builds down to the mundane level while letting others casually violate laws of nature. Either everyone is fantastic or no one is. Splitting things down the middle is only contributing to this problem and preventing a solution.

I'm somehow getting the feeling that you're using the wrong approach here.

Your threshold question is directly tied to genre, genre conventions and archetypes.that will directly influence the expected aesthetics of something. What is considered appropriate for "Superheroes" might be a deal-breaker for "Sword & Sorcery" or the middle ground for "Swords & Planet" (or vice versa).

"Breaking free", as you call it, therefore is directly connected with what exact kind of genre(s) is intended to be catered to. I generally find that D&D tends to conflate the issue, as a lot of people apparently confuse "character level" with "power level" and understand the overall progression also as a progression along genres, ex. from "S&S" to "Superheroes", with stuff like E6 being used as a "stopping measure" to halt that advancement. All of that is not necessarily true. It rather means that you have to develop a good understanding what fits in and what is a deal-breaker for the intended genre that is going to be used for a given table/campaign. The concept of the "purely mundane Fighter" is nothing to take to a "Superhero" campaign, while a D&D-style Wizard is prolly nothing that fits in a "Sword & Sorcery" campaign. They don't have to, tho, the only "fix" needed is being open that some things work, others don't.

I mean, the whole Exalted RPG system with build around catering to "Superheroes", "Shonen" and such. IIRC, it can´t actually handle anything nearing a more "mundane" level without breaking down, basically the reverse situation to D&D.

Arbane
2018-12-09, 04:39 AM
Alternatively, I can use homebrew mundanes which keep up at high levels (I find it curious that your position has changed from level 4 to level 10; perhaps I'm convincing you?), but I shouldn't have to turn to homebrew.

Homebrew away. Xefas homebrewed a fighter-type (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?336731-quot-Today-is-victory-over-yourself-Tomorrow-is-your-victory-over-lesser-men-quot) who could keep up with spellcasters at high levels... by biting heavily off of Exalted. :smallamused:
I'm curious as to how. If the casters are bringing the dead back to life, building pocket-dimension vacation homes, summoning legions of angels, controlling minds, and so on, it's rather tough for the fighty-men to keep up without gaining the ability to put abstract concepts in a headlock and noogie them into submission.


Your threshold question is directly tied to genre, genre conventions and archetypes.that will directly influence the expected aesthetics of something. What is considered appropriate for "Superheroes" might be a deal-breaker for "Sword & Sorcery" or the middle ground for "Swords & Planet" (or vice versa).

Yeah, part of the problem is that D&D tries to pass itself off as emulating ALL fantasy. In my own experience, the only fantasy it emulates even half-well is 'D&D-based novels'.



I mean, the whole Exalted RPG system with build around catering to "Superheroes", "Shonen" and such. IIRC, it can´t actually handle anything nearing a more "mundane" level without breaking down, basically the reverse situation to D&D.

From what I've seen, Exalted CAN do a Puny Heroic Mortals campaign perfectly well... if you can deal with the fact that anything stronger than a angry ghost is a potential TPK.

Unavenger
2018-12-09, 04:52 AM
Homebrew away. Xefas homebrewed a fighter-type (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?336731-quot-Today-is-victory-over-yourself-Tomorrow-is-your-victory-over-lesser-men-quot) who could keep up with spellcasters at high levels... by biting heavily off of Exalted. :smallamused:

Ugh, mythos. No, I'll take mundane classes made by people who actually take the mundane archetype seriously any day.


If the casters are bringing the dead back to life
Interestingly, the definition of "Death" had to be changed because people kept doing that.


building pocket-dimension vacation homes
Which I'm sure help contribute to the campaign.


summoning legions of angels
My legions of undead who kill anything that they touch just aren't good enough for you, huh? HUH?


controlling minds
You mean another thing that people in real life do ALL THE GODDAMN TIME?

This is another reason I maintain that the rainbow-swords group are lacking in imagination and unwilling to explore ways to make the genuinely badass normal character work rather than outright dismissing it. And I really don't know how you can kid yourself into believing that manipulating people's desires and opinions to drive your goals isn't a thing that happens in the real world (most of the salient examples are from politics so I'll let you figure that out yourself).

Florian
2018-12-09, 06:22 AM
@Arbane:

I think that is specifically a 3.5E problem. AD&D had a lot of quirky stuff in it, that tied the more problematic, or let's say, "transformative" elements to the target genres. Rules like System Shocks Rolls made magic a bit unpredictable and dangerous to the user, so you had to think twice about using that powerful Polymorph spell, stuff like this.

It was already well known that a lot of groups house-ruled that stuff away to fit in more with their own style or intended genre. So with the transition to 3.0E (actually AD&D 3rd), they opted for a different approach, by taking this stuff out of the basic system by default, but including some very detailed advice and examples in the 3.0E DMG on how to get them in again, to fit the discreet rules elements found in the PHB to the individual table.

I think one of the best examples is the old Oriental Adventures: Campaign-specific classes, refit guidelines, as well as ban lists on how to make existing classes fit into Rokugan, Clan-specific PrC.

That pretty much changed with the edition update to 3.5E and the new mentality behind the then-current player base.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-09, 08:55 AM
Yeah, part of the problem is that D&D tries to pass itself off as emulating ALL fantasy. In my own experience, the only fantasy it emulates even half-well is 'D&D-based novels'.


At least for 4e and 5e, I can find no evidence of trying to emulate anything other than D&D. 3e's hubris was trying to be a generic system--even then only the core d20 system was supposed to be generic, not the specifics.

D&D is not a generic fantasy emulator. It doesn't claim to be. Some people think it is, but that's their problem, not the system's problem. Forks don't make good jackhammers, but that doesn't make them bad forks.

Florian
2018-12-09, 09:10 AM
At least for 4e and 5e, I can find no evidence of trying to emulate anything other than D&D. 3e's hubris was trying to be a generic system--even then only the core d20 system was supposed to be generic, not the specifics.

D&D is not a generic fantasy emulator. It doesn't claim to be. Some people think it is, but that's their problem, not the system's problem. Forks don't make good jackhammers, but that doesn't make them bad forks.

There's a huge difference between a "generic fantasy emulator" and being able to cover at least a slightly broad range of styles and genres. Mind, I'm not saying that this coverage is particularly good, because the various holy cows that have been dragged around for multiple editions by now are foiling that, but the situation is nowhere as bad as some folks claim. (I mean, you have the chance to create a Fafhrd and Grey Mouser team and have Lankhmar-style adventures and level up all to 20. No-one is forced to create an Übercharger and the GM has always the choices between using a Pit Fiend or a Level 20 "Black Knight" Anti-Paladin as BBEG).

4E is the odd duck in this regard. It´s actually quite a good skirmish level war-game and functions pretty well at that, but it´s so hard at odds with the free-form approach for anything outside of combat.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-09, 09:27 AM
There's a huge difference between a "generic fantasy emulator" and being able to cover at least a slightly broad range of styles and genres. Mind, I'm not saying that this coverage is particularly good, because the various holy cows that have been dragged around for multiple editions by now are foiling that, but the situation is nowhere as bad as some folks claim. (I mean, you have the chance to create a Fafhrd and Grey Mouser team and have Lankhmar-style adventures and level up all to 20. No-one is forced to create an Übercharger and the GM has always the choices between using a Pit Fiend or a Level 20 "Black Knight" Anti-Paladin as BBEG).

4E is the odd duck in this regard. It´s actually quite a good skirmish level war-game and functions pretty well at that, but it´s so hard at odds with the free-form approach for anything outside of combat.

I was specifically responding to claims that D&D tried to emulate everything but failed. It doesn't even try. 5e can do a range of things, as long as the core is characters actively seeking adventure. I've personally had games where the key events were all negotiations. And ones where they were epic fights.

5e is not Grey Mouser-style Swords and Sorcery. Nor does it intend to be. I'd say 5e tries most to be (based on the marketing) "D&D, the good parts version, remastered." Take the classic parts of D&D past, fit them together in a mechanical framework that makes them play nice and is easy to use, and add some pieces to complete the set.

From AD&D it takes the feeling of play--loose and flexible with lots of DM involvement.

From 3e and 4e it takes some mechanical bits and bobs, but little of the ethos.

From all of them it takes content, especially monster concepts (that are then remixed for the new mechanics).

Cluedrew
2018-12-09, 09:42 AM
I think we agree ultimately on there being a power discrepancy between classes.I don't think anyone would disagree with that*. The disagreement is more what to do about it. There are some who want to cut the casters down, others want to boost the martials up, many with some combination of the two and some are full on "embrace the power discrepancy!"

Right now we seem to be going between the "badass normal" and "fantastic martial" groups. Broadly speaking: The badass normal group wants to push what martials can do towards/to but not past what a human can plausibly do, while the fantastic martial group wants to push things into myths and legends where people did impossible things just by being that awesome, separate from the masters of magic. The first is sometimes accused of Guy at the Gym Fallacy, the second of making everything magic. Different people want different things, which is fine until they start hating on others for wanting something different.

* Actually some people do... a more significant group doesn't care because the "auto-balance" the game themselves.


Alternatively, I can use homebrew mundanes which keep up at high levels ([...]), but I shouldn't have to turn to homebrew.Do you have such a piece of homebrew? Because honestly I have never seen a "mundane" class that could get even close to the silly levels of D&D casters without becoming silly themselves.

Florian
2018-12-09, 10:13 AM
I don't think anyone would disagree with that*. The disagreement is more what to do about it. There are some who want to cut the casters down, others want to boost the martials up, many with some combination of the two and some are full on "embrace the power discrepancy!"

There're usually two things that baffle me in regard to this topic.

We have all seen what happened with 4E. Once you try to settle on a fixed style and mechanical balance point, a lot of folks feel they are not serviced anymore and will turn their back to the game.
Should be, say, settle on rebuilding all classes to fit into the T3 framework, the game will not be interesting anymore for the people in it for a T1 or T5 gaming experience.

Also, if we accept that we're talking about a very broad target audience and the fact that only a small bracket of the tiers can work together based on a mechanical balance point (T1-T2, T2-T3, T3-T4 and so on), it should be at least a bit obvious at we more or less need "duplicate classes" for more or less the same archetypes and roles spread amongst all the tiers and it makes no sense to try to forcefully upgrade some of the classes. I'm totally fine with having Fighter and Warblade in parallel, because they can fulfill the same role in different tier brackets, which broadens my options.

I actually like the approach they did take with the PF2 playtest. You are now either a full caster or a full martial, nothing in-between. Full martial classes have a bit more class feat slots and can use those to "pay" for magic access, in the steps 1-4, 5-6, 7-9th level of spells. So, for example, I can now fully chose between a no spells Paladin, and a Paladin with 9th level Cleric casting.

Edit: AMH/WMH for PF1 did some nice things for martials. Spell-less item crafting is already a thing, but Item Mastery feats allow martials to coax some additional SLAs from their equipment, which cover at least the basics, like movement moved, teleportation and some hard counters. A good "Iron Caster" build is centered around flexibly swapping feats around on the fly, to grab the right Item Mastery feat for the situation at hand.

Unavenger
2018-12-09, 12:13 PM
Do you have such a piece of homebrew? Because honestly I have never seen a "mundane" class that could get even close to the silly levels of D&D casters without becoming silly themselves.

Working on it. I've combed through the cleric, druid, psion and wizard lists for anything I can sensibly replicate, and then hoped that, despite the fact that there are some powers that I can't sensibly replicate, I should be fine because some psions and some wizards can't either, and most of these abilities don't even appear on all four lists to start with, and besides I can add some stuff that appears on none of the four lists and anyway most of the very-high-level stuff is just "Low-level stuff, but more so" and doesn't actually seem to represent much that's new.

Just finished DMing a session on no sleep and too much caffeine so might be a bit more coherent later but I think it's largely coming together nicely, and also just looking around there seem to be other mundane homebrews that aren't swordmagic, although ironically some of them are a bit OP (like there's a subsystem that offers you the ability to make all your attacks almost certainly instant kills at level 3). So far the most "Magical" ability is throwing powder at people that maybe blinds and confuses them and I'm pretty sure it can compete.

Arbane
2018-12-09, 02:07 PM
My legions of undead who kill anything that they touch just aren't good enough for you, huh? HUH?


Whose class feature is that?



You mean another thing that people in real life do ALL THE GODDAMN TIME?

This is another reason I maintain that the rainbow-swords group are lacking in imagination and unwilling to explore ways to make the genuinely badass normal character work rather than outright dismissing it. And I really don't know how you can kid yourself into believing that manipulating people's desires and opinions to drive your goals isn't a thing that happens in the real world (most of the salient examples are from politics so I'll let you figure that out yourself).

I would argue that you are comparing lighting to a lightning bug, but whatevs.

Dug this up from a previous iteration of the Interminable C/MD Debate (https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2tqa4&page=3?Pseudostatistical-analysis-of-martialcaster#140) on the Paizo forums:


I did, in one of the many threads we've had on this subject, suggest some thought exercise examples that might help demonstrate some of the disparities in problem-solving in a magic "have/have-not" system.

Some things off the top of my head that a party might have to deal with, especially at higher levels:

1.) You won a very difficult battle, are low on HP, and the dungeon starts to collapse. You are not near the entrance, the boss was not fought near an exit, and the debris will DEFINITELY kill you if you're still in the dungeon when it collapses. How do you solve this problem with magic? How do you solve it without magic?

2.) The dark lord's fortress must be infiltrated, and quickly, to gain access to a magic item he will use the following morning to destroy a large area full of innocent bystanders. It is a dark, windy, and rainy night, and the castle has slippery walls and a moat full of dire crocodiles. You do not know what sort of sentries are posted atop those treacherous walls. How do you get in with magic? How do you get in without magic?

3.) The archfiend the party has been hunting has boasted the time of its masterstroke fast approaches, and uses its Greater Teleport to flee the battle to enact it. Every moment he's left free is a chance for him to recover from his injuries and advance his yet-unknown plans. How do you find and pursue the fiend with magic? How do you do so without magic?

4.) A locked-room murder of someone important to the party has occurred, and there are clear signs the crime scene was tampered with before the body was discovered to obscure potential evidence. How do you solve the mystery with magic? How do you solve it without magic?

5.) An army of orcs the likes of which has never been seen before is on the march. Their advance cannot be checked, only delayed, and their numbers are such even the entire party will be overwhelmed in minutes if they try to fight them. The land's only hope is for the orcs' advance to be slowed down as much as possible, and the NPC lords of the land to unite against the threat. The lords, however, do not like or trust each other and are dragging their feet in allying against the common threat since only the PCs have seen the sheer size of the orc army. How do you solve this problem with magic? How do you solve it without magic?

6.) The king is to be assassinated by an unknown third party at a well-guarded masquerade ball* the party is not invited to. The entire kingdom will collapse if the king is slain, but the guards will try to keep the party from entering even if they know of them because the lords gathered there will make their lives hell if anyone gatecrashes. How do you get in, find the assassins, and stop them with magic? How do you do it without magic? Bonus points if you can do so without making a scene.

I'm trying to make these both situations a party is likely to encounter but also not intentionally biased towards magic, although I will point out some of these things just have easier magic solutions baked into the rules.

*This one is admittedly the King's fault. Nothing good EVER happens at a masquerade ball, and the PCs should not attend if invited anyhow.

My main thing is simply that any party, at any level of optimization, will face many different problems, and it is naive in the extreme to assume the only problem that matters is "that enemy has all of its blood inside of its body."

This is the only problem some classes were designed to solve, while other classes were designed to potentially solve every problem, INCLUDING enemies being inconveniently upright and breathing. I've GMed enough to know that adventuring days pretty much invariably end up being structured around the pace set by mages in the party and that any given plotline tends to require a lot more caster-proofing than anything else.

Florian
2018-12-09, 02:18 PM
@Arbane:

Do you see what all of the quoted example have in common? They are solely based around a very narrow roadblock design, which means a very specific key to lock ratio in providing solutions against problems.

This is actually like pixelbitching around in a classical 80s text adventure: Let´s throw anything at it until the right thing hits the right pixel to make the problem go away and advance us to our next scene.

Cluedrew
2018-12-09, 03:23 PM
[...] it should be at least a bit obvious at we more or less need "duplicate classes" for more or less the same archetypes and roles spread amongst all the tiers and it makes no sense to try to forcefully upgrade some of the classes.I like that general idea, I'm not sure whole new classes is the way to do it, but a slider that moves the same archetype up and down tiers might work. I know Cosi had an idea about bringing back 4e tiers to make levels of play explicate and give you points where you could decide who you surpass the old limits. I liked that one as well, the only issue I had is the tier updates always boiled down to add magic and no social or technical ways of powering up.

To Unavenger: That sounds promising. Do you think you will put it up in homebrew when you are done?

To Florian (recent post): Do you have any other, better, concrete situations to use as examples in comparing the problem solving abilities of martials and casters?

EldritchWeaver
2018-12-09, 04:20 PM
I've already compared Aragorn - who isn't even at the top of the mundane game - to mid-level D&D wizards and decided that I'd rather have him on my side than the wizard until at least mid-to-high levels (no surprise, because one of the antagonists is a wizard of at least 13th level (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/controlWeather.htm) and he still doesn't manage more than convince the fellowship to take a different route), and I'd definitely take him over a high-level swordsage.

Not sure how Gandalf is that 13th level wizard. But if he is, he is one of the worst. 13th level grants access to Greater Teleport, which allows in theory to teleport directly to Mount Doom. If the GM say nope (because of energy interference) or you suspect Teleport Trap being active, then you jump to the base of the mountain. But by no means you trek through the entire country on foot. Phantom Steed, if you have to fly. So your preference for Aragorn is solely, because Gandalf's player is incompetent. Or maybe D&D doesn't emulate LotR. Not sure.


I would rather my Fighter be able to "Combat Fly" by "jumping good" and using the impact of his blows to help him stay aloft rather then tell him 'Ah, no... see, you can only jump 15 feet up in the air with this skill so you don't get to fight this time. Don't worry, a bunch of Flail Snails will be joining the fight later for you to take care of like the big boy adventurer you are".

Spheres of Might has Sparrow's Path (http://spheresofpower.wikidot.com/athletics#toc52), which can be upgraded to true flight.

Arbane
2018-12-09, 04:27 PM
@Arbane:

Do you see what all of the quoted example have in common? They are solely based around a very narrow roadblock design, which means a very specific key to lock ratio in providing solutions against problems.

This is actually like pixelbitching around in a classical 80s text adventure: Let´s throw anything at it until the right thing hits the right pixel to make the problem go away and advance us to our next scene.

Nonetheless, I think they're all legitimate situations that adventurers might find themselves in even if the GM ISN'T a railroading bastard, so how would you go about solving all of them with/out magic? The fact that most of them can be utterly trivialized with the right spell is more of a problem with D&D magic than with any of the situations.

Feel free to add more.

* The ship you're on is sinking.
* The airship you're on is falling out of the sky. (To be fair, 'break your fall with the rocky ground below and walk away' is a pretty typical way for a high-level fighter to 'solve' this.)
* You have to find a lost treasure in a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean.
* Solve a murder mystery.
* Save a poisoned friend.
* Break a curse.
* A crop blight is causing a famine.


Not sure how Gandalf is that 13th level wizard. But if he is, he is one of the worst. 13th level grants access to Greater Teleport, which allows in theory to teleport directly to Mount Doom. If the GM say nope (because of energy interference) or you suspect Teleport Trap being active, then you jump to the base of the mountain. But by no means you trek through the entire country on foot. Phantom Steed, if you have to fly. So your preference for Aragorn is solely, because Gandalf's player is incompetent.

There's an old Dork Tower comic (which I can't find, annoyingly) with the gang getting ready to play a Lord of the Rings game, and they're evaluating Gandalf's AMAZING MAGICAL POWER. "Well....I can talk to birds...." (And set pinecones on fire, etc, etc.)

They end up using him as a battering ram. :smallbiggrin:


Or maybe D&D doesn't emulate LotR. Not sure.

That's just crazy talk. It's got orcs, halflings, and magic swords, what more do you need?

Florian
2018-12-09, 04:41 PM
To Florian (recent post): Do you have any other, better, concrete situations to use as examples in comparing the problem solving abilities of martials and casters?

This is imho the totally wrong question.

You see, my problem with those examples are that they are a) binary, b) work on a game table time line, so solutions are keyed towards what we can do in a gaming session and c) are also keyed towards the regular combat round.

I rather have a problem with the initial choice, that you can either be a caster or a mundane. I would actually prefer that we "silo" "power" in broad categories that individual classes have easier or harder access to, but we reach an equal sum total in it.

Basically, we could start by introducing the branch of "ritual magic", that everyone (and their dog) can have access to, which will, as the name implies, need a ritual to complete, but this is were we shunt abilities like Planar Binding,Teleport and Wish to, accessible to all.

Second step would be to have a hard look at the fetish to have certain powers intrinsic to a class. The category "item magic" would then include such things as a Circle of Protection, Items that allow to fly and so forth. PF gives a hint here, as it actually is interesting and still somewhat "mundane" to be able to just coax a little bit more power or utility out of items.

Last step would be "enhancement magic". You need to be already good at a thing (hiding, sneaking, hitting things with a hammer) to unlock the ability to take that from (Ex) to (Su), if you so want to.

This is were I partially agree with Cosi. The three tiers of play are basically a good idea, but 4E implemented them horizontally (levels 1-10, 11-20, 21-30), but I rather think they should be implemented vertically (low, mid, high).

@Arbane:

You know, the answer is often as simple as strapping on a parachute, or simply walking away, not caring. It can also be waiting for a while and then starting a counter-assassination offensive and simply trying to get a new ruler in place after a successful public campaign. The thing is, I called certain things out as solutions, not options, because there's a marked difference there.

Lord Raziere
2018-12-09, 05:01 PM
Nonetheless, I think they're all legitimate situations that adventurers might find themselves in even if the GM ISN'T a railroading bastard, so how would you go about solving all of them with/out magic? Feel free to add more.

* The ship you're on is sinking.
* The airship you're on is falling out of the sky. (To be fare, 'break the fall with the pavement and walk away' is a pretty typical way for a high-level fighter to 'solve' this.)
* You have to find a lost treasure in a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean.
* Solve a murder mystery.
* Save a poisoned friend.
* Break a curse.
* A crop blight is causing a famine.

1. get on a rowboat and start paddling
2. uuuuuuuh. I'm currently trying to figure out a way for a ROGUE to solve this um....somehow improvise a parachute? or wait, wouldn't airships HAVE parachutes for this just for safety?
3. huh, I guess that does require magic, given that any diving equipment would need more advanced tech? but then again, if I'm in a world with airships that people fly in which THIS world doesn't even have, wouldn't I have tech advanced enough to dive down as well? do the airship and the diving equipment both count as magic?
4. I feel as if this is a "specific campaign" problem, in that solving a murder mystery is more of a campaign for naturally investigative and detail oriented players who watch those sorts of things all the time. there is an entire system out there called GUMSHOE where the entire game is focused on investigation and not on combat and therefore would naturally have all the ways to solve such a thing without magic, while a campaign like DnD only has like a couple skills for that as murder mysteries are not really the focus and players are more interested in combat, so they're more likely to use magic as a shortcut to get around having to look up investigation methods online.
5. given that there are ways to save poisoned friends in real life, this seems to be a matter of "do they have the medical training for this?"
6. now on the surface this is definitely a " only magic can solve this" problem, but fiction is riddled with all sorts of curses is broken by people do things that don't require a spellcaster to get rid of it, so it depends on the specific curse: if its just stuck on you, and no conditions to get rid of it, its a spellcaster required, but say if the curse is "you'll never be able to have money ever again until you apologize to the people you ripped off" or something then its just a matter of the person doing a specific action for the curse to be lifted. there is always those "can be lifted by the person doing a specific action" curses that is part and parcel of fairy tales
7. yeah.....this probably requires magic if you want to solve the crop blight. solving the famine is another matter: it depends on the economics and supplies around, on whether you can figure out a new source of food and so on. a cook could figure out a new recipe that completely changes what food is available to eat something, its all complex stuff that doesn't really REQUIRE magic, just knowledge and the proper connections and skills, magic would help, but its not vital. but the crop blight yes that probably requires magic simply because I have no idea how you'd solve a crop disease without it, I mean someone more knowledgeable might know a way to solve that in the modern day? but I don't.

so a lot of this really comes down to how much your willing to research up the ways people actually solved this sort of stuff and play out solving it without magical conveniences than whether or not magic is actually required. though some of scenarios seem to assume that magic got them into the problem in the first place (airship, curses) that have the potential to have mundane solutions to them as long as you plan them out in advance enough.

Florian
2018-12-09, 05:33 PM
Rasiere has a point. Especially in the D&D environment, too much hinges on the fetish that a character must have the internal, guaranteed power to solve something. I tend to call that sort of situation building "roadblock design". And it really is quite a bad habit.

Cluedrew
2018-12-09, 06:54 PM
You see, my problem with those examples are that they are a) binary, b) work on a game table time line, so solutions are keyed towards what we can do in a gaming session and c) are also keyed towards the regular combat round.I think I understand why (a) is a problem. I'm not sure why (b) and (c) are problems, I mean mixing it some longer time scale examples would be nice but actions combine into scenes and scenes combine into the campaign so looking at the building blocks should be useful. Also that doesn't give me any examples

(Also I read your comments on class design: That is fine but I don't think how one becomes a caster or a martial is the issue, rather what you do with those skill sets (and the variations there of).)


Basically, we could start by introducing the branch of "ritual magic", that everyone (and their dog) can have access to, which will, as the name implies, need a ritual to complete, but this is were we shunt abilities like Planar Binding,Teleport and Wish to, accessible to all.I had an initial kick back against the other two but I thought about it and I see how they could work. But this is... your solution to solving caster/martial is to make everyone a caster? (Outside of combat, which isn't a bit thing in many of the games I enjoy.)


You know, the answer is often as simple as strapping on a parachute, or simply walking away, not caring.Not caring about a problem does not solve it. See climate change, or your favorite unaddressed issue of today.


1. get on a rowboat and start paddling.What we are manly fighters, we swim to shore!

More seriously, you seem to be talking more about baseline competence than what a mundane/martial character can do. What can they bring that a caster can't:

As above, swim to shore. For bonus points use that impressive strength to tow a bit of hull with some survivors on it as well.
Assuming non-magical flight: fix the ship. Engineers are mundane after all. Of a very different sort than the one who breaks their fall with the ground.
Hold your breath, swim to the bottom of the lake, pick up the treasure, swim to the surface.
Outside of particular investigation skills, social skills. Read people, ask around for who might know what and who might of had a motive.
Medical skills of course. On a longer time scale being able to bring in someone else with medical skills or bringing them out to such a person (if that is difficult) may also count.
Nothing new for how to break a curse.
One addition is that the physical character might be able to go out there and help tear down the sick crops which might help stop the spread. If not a ranger type might be able hunt and gather some, but that might only buy time unless we go mythic. On the other hand there is often more than on character.
Actually as I went over it to write my list I realized you did a better job than I first though, but I had a few things to add still.

More than not being able to think of ways a martial could solve it, my issue is more that rule-sets don't support them. Like I mention some social solutions and well... yes lets just turn to D&D's robust, diverse, satisfying and practically non-existent social mechanics for this. D&D's real issue is that it has two main areas of competence, combat and spell casting. And being good at the latter makes you good at the former as often as not. This is a bit of a simplification but I have seen that systems with broader base mechanics and higher levels of base competence tend to do better with caster/martial.

lightningcat
2018-12-09, 08:28 PM
Something that has been lots in newer editions of D&D is the limitations placed on magic.
In 2e it took 10 minutes per spell level to memorize spells. No big deal when you could only cast a few spells. It took 10 minutes to be ready at 1st level. At 5th level it took 2 hours if you where totally out of spells, or completely replacing them. But at 20th level, it took 1760 minutes, which is 28 hours and 40 minutes. Suddenly it becomes a lot less worth it to cast the big spells.
In 3e, 3.5, and Pathfinder require 1 hour of study to regain spells. While in 5e, recovering spells is automatic after a long rest.
The loss of this limitation is only part of the problem, but it does mean magic users don't have one more reason not to use their magic instead of letting a mundane do the task instead.

The faster/easier magic use shows up in other places as well, while mundane effort continues to take the exact same amount of time and effort.

Lord Raziere
2018-12-09, 09:41 PM
yeah, DnD isn't good for solving anything social or anything that doesn't involve treating it as a combat encounter.

thats why you get 3.5 people coming up with tippyverse wizards so they can bypass the social skills and solve everything with magic. because the kind of political RTS-like game you'd normally play by being some guy with lots of social connections, authority and being good at convincing those people to do what you want for you so you have this army of things to face other armies of things is instead accomplished by dudes reading books.

superheroes in general aren't that good at the power of social connections, because those are often thrown to the side so that individual heroes can take down tons of mooks. for social connections to matter, being outnumbered must matter. ironically, in DnD being outnumbered DOES matter but often because a summoner or necromancer decides "lol having a party/peers is superfluous, look at my DIY army!" yet in dungeons it never does because all the monsters spreads themselves out for no reason so that adventurers can come in and kill them in little chunks.

when the most assured way to make sure they'd win is to just group up into some massive group that they cannot possibly take on all at once. a dozen goblins? probably a winnable PC encounter. 120 goblins? not something they'll win. unless the wizard has already somehow done some incredible feat of hax. it occurs to me that DnD also doesn't do stealth well, because there are too many stories of PCs taking on things with no caution or consideration as to whether they can actually win a fight. when an interesting challenge for them would be to have at least one encounter in a dungeon that they have to avoid no matter what and thus the entire dungeon is set up so that they have to get through without doing so.

but again, thats a "game focus" question, not all people like the stealth game stuff. and lots of people who play DnD like to play combat stuff. at the same time, DnD doesn't do stealth or social stuff well so....the people who like the combat and the magic stay, and the people who want better stealth and social systems soon leave for games that do that better. kind of a self-reinforcing cycle.

thats why some of the biggest games outside of DnD out there is Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: they are all about investigation, social skills and being stealthy, and in CoC you probably have to sneak around a lot to avoid dangers you can't fight, while Vampires have to keep themselves secret so that humanity doesn't gang up on them.

but yeah, its silly to expect that all the power comes in internally. some of the best heroes out are in fact incredibly reliant on external sources of power (Batman's is money, gadgets and knowing people, technically any hero who wields a weapon relies on someone to forge that weapon in the first place, Team work and The Power of Friendship are literally all about how you can't do everything alone, technically a mentor who helps you is an external power because your social connection with them that allows them to teach you, so every hero with a mentor technically got their SKILLS from an external source, even if the power is inherent they would've achieved it without guidance, so...external, being a leader is external power as well....lots of things are external power once you realize that you only get them from the circumstances around you...)

Ignimortis
2018-12-10, 01:53 AM
To be honest, if we're talking about D&D specifically, we have martials that don't do anything new ever (like 3.5 Fighters who just don't get any abilities outside of swording things to death 1-20) and casters who get new dazzling tools every 2 levels, and the jump is ever higher (going from Magic Missile to Glitterdust is neat, going from whatever level 8 spell to Wish is hilariously broken). That's a case of bad game design, because a Fighter 20 is still Boromir in terms of how much he's able to contribute to the story (not even Aragorn) and Wizards stopped being Gandalf probably after level 4 (if Gandalf were level 5, he'd Fly from Orthanc instead of summoning a bird buddy, or just Fireballed orcs at some point) and moved somewhere into Eru Iluvatar territory after level 11.

Sure, Fighter 20 would probably be able to outfight two hundred orcs, but without magic gear he's still toast against a thousand. Meanwhile Wizard 20 just drops the One Ring into Orodruin on the next day after learning of its' existence and deciding to stop it (he does have to prepare Teleport x2 and Scrying to find the Ring, of course).

So while I understand not wanting to play people who are ridiculously stronger than Conan or Aragorn, D&D stops being about this type of hero at level 5 or so. D&D doesn't do LotR well, and even 5e, which comes close, should probably ban all full-casters to be LotR-like. At level 10 you're supposed to be well into anime-style shenanigans, and level 20 would probably wreck Exalted or something like that, if we look at spells. If we look at non-casters only, well, yes, they can probably play weaker street-level superheroes in comics at level 20.

D&D has had this gap for a long time, but if you have, on one hand, a guy with a sword who does nothing beyond peak human potential (and not even a polymath, in 3.5 or 5e you don't get enough skills) at any level, and on the other hand is a guy who starts with a few unerring magical darts which can hit anything, per day, and ends up being able to summon greater demons and angels, stop time, bend reality on a massive scale with a snap of his fingers...well, that's just weird, isn't it? So why not fix it in either direction? Bring up the martials or tone down the magicians, either one would be fine with most people, I think.

And the funny thing is, Fighters aren't even that good at actual fighting. For them to be good at fighting, they'd have to be specifically better than any other class is, and most monsters as well, because he would be able to utilize the combat minigame more efficiently - as in, maybe, getting more actions per turn than anyone else, getting access to special tricks unavailable to anyone else, like called shots with scaling effects and feats of physical prowess that kinda look like magic but aren't, etc. You know, like those guys from ToB! Wonder what happened to them...

Unavenger
2018-12-10, 04:59 AM
Whose class feature is that?

I'm not looking up every class with diplomacy as a class skill for you.


Dug this up from a previous iteration of the Interminable C/MD Debate (https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2tqa4&page=3?Pseudostatistical-analysis-of-martialcaster#140) on the Paizo forums:

So in the video game version of Return of the King, amusingly, Aragorn has to beat up the King of the Dead before he accepts his offer (which he, Legolas or Gimli [player's choice] does handily) and when whichever of the three does, they find that the Paths of the Dead predictably start collapsing (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LoadBearingBoss). When they do, you have an extended scene where you have to run out of the Paths of the Dead backwards while beating the living (or undead) hell out of stragglers in the Army of the Dead who presumably haven't realised that the King has kinda given up at this point. This seems almost uncannily apropos.

The dark lord's fortress must be infiltrated quickly, and there are crocodiles and sentries? Cool: my character swims through the water in a crocodile-ish enough manner so as not to alert the crocodiles (or, how big is the moat? I can probably grapple across from this side of the moat in a pinch), climbs up the walls (slippery they may be, but slippery isn't unclimbable), sneaks past or incapacitates any sentries, and commits Grand Theft Artefact.

Immediate action spellsplinter manoeuvre (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1003.html) or equivalent; fiend goes nowhere, dies horribly.

Observation to see how the scene was tampered with and any imperfections in the tampering. Make a spy network check to see whether or not any of my lackeys saw what happened*.

D I P L O M A C Y. Alternatively, "Only hope" seems to be a bit fiat-ish. Find out what the orcs want to fight for and remove or redirect it; snipe out their leaders; poison their rations; set fire to their tents (or rations, or personal effects, or all of those and more) in their sleep; incite riots; make a personal army check to see how well my lackeys disrupt their game plan*.

Convince the guards to let us in ("Come on, it's a masquerade. No-one will know we're here...") or just lookit-a-distraction and sneak in. Watch everyone for suspicious behaviour. Steal the assassins' murder weapons and replace them with bladeless ones or equivalent, or just coax them into a back room and ka-POW.


To Unavenger: That sounds promising. Do you think you will put it up in homebrew when you are done?

Yup! Just... motivation and time to make an entire subsystem is... hard to come by.


Gandalf

I feel like you're having problem with the word "Antagonist."


-Snip-

To be clear, I'm not talking about the mundane classes we have; I'm talking about the mundane classes I'd like to see.

*I've chosen largely not to go for the "I have friends" route in my brew class.

Glorthindel
2018-12-10, 05:03 AM
Oh good, yet another "people who like playing bad-ass martials are having badwrongfun" thread.

Look. I like playing Fighters. I want my Fighter to be able to run, jump, fight without being forced into being an anime character. I want to play Robin Hood, Sir Galahad, and Gimli. And D&D lets me do that perfectly well.

No, having more than 4 hit points and doing more than D6 damage does not make me "magic" because these things are abstractions. One-shotting a Dragon with a normal sword is perfectly within the realm of a mundane without breaking anyones verisimilitude - it does not require magic to land that perfect blow into a weak point, it just requires speed, timing, and skill to spot the weak point.

High saving throws and abilities that allow you to dodge previously undodgable things does not make me "magic" because guess what - these things are abstractions. Taking no damage in the centre of a fireball is perfectly fine - it does not require super-speed or insta-summoned forcefields, it just requires battlefield awareness, and the speed to duck behind cover at the last minute (so what if no item of cover existed, show a tiny bit a narrative skill, its not particularly difficult).

Using magic items does not require me to be "magic"... its the goddamn item thats magic, not the person. I mean, its kinda in the name.

Look. I get why this discussion comes up. Wizard players get annoyed every time someone suggests nerfing them so that the mundanes to keep up. So get a bit of cathartic revenge by suggesting we shouldn't have our fantasy at all. But currently the game provides for both of us, so how about we drop this stupidity and let us both have the fantasy we want to ply. I promise I wont bitch every time you cast fly, as long as you stop saying I shouldn't be allowed to play the game. I don't care that you can incinerate 50-100 peons in a single blast, that is your job, while my job is to body-check that hulking behemoth that is bearing down on you. Let me play my role, and I will let you play yours.

Florian
2018-12-10, 05:46 AM
@clewdrew:

The reason behind that first step is actually defining what _is_ magic and what are regular laws of nature for a given game world. As an example, if we declare something like drawing a silver circle, writing some warding prayers/runes on strips of paper, invoking the Elder Sign and the Ward against the Evil Eye, gleaning some divinatory knowledge by reading the Tarot or birth horoscope to be entirely in the realm of the mundane for the game world in question, we already have a strong basis to build upon.

Using the "Ritual" category also has the strong benefit that we can work out a common framework to represent abilities learned and knowledge gained, that is less limited than going by something like the feat or spell format.

To use the original framework the OP used to categorize power, we redefine a bit what is part of the basic power level zero. Now Boris Becker is not only good at playing tennis, he can also pull off a Faust in his basement and call the devil for an infernal bargain.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-10, 05:52 AM
To use the original framework the OP used to categorize power, we redefine a bit what is part of the basic power level zero. Now Boris Becker is not only good at playing tennis, he can also pull off a Faust in his basement and call the devil for an infernal bargain.

Can't do this. Level 0 is calibrated to Earth. Level 1 is what's normal (or at least not obviously fantastic) to the world in fiction. It's still fantastic to us, however.

Florian
2018-12-10, 06:56 AM
Can't do this.

Can do. Grab some old (Sci-fi) movies and books and have fun looking at how we are partially more advanced in tech and knowledge now than we ought to be supposed in a vision of the future. (I actually adore the new Star Wars movies for keeping the retro look and not updating them)

One of the best pieces of world building I've ever read comes out of Russia an starts with the Labyrinths of Echo novel.

The authors did an extremely good job at working out the boundaries and transition between Science, Occcult and Magic. This is a pretty important part when it comes to the topic at hand and for the point you brought up.

Echo uses the concept that a thing dubbed "Plain Magic" exists and is directly tied to and an extension of the regular laws of physics. It can be explored and understood by the regular scientific principles, then put to work in the regular way as a method or tool.

"Occult Magic" is what happens when someone stumbles upon an hitherto unknown effect that is beyond the realm of "Plain Magic" right now. They work, yes, but no-one knows how and why at the time being. This is the realm of the "Arcane Orders". They try to find such effects, capitalizing on the monopoly of it, but also have research teams at work, finding out the actual how and why and will more or less transfer the "Occult Magic" to the realm of "Plain Magic" by doing so. The Orders are truly "arcane" by the sense of the word: They know that doing this, that and muttering those phrases will trigger the desired effect, but they don't know how and why.

"True Magic" is what shatters the laws of physics and reality. It needs knowledge from and and outside power source from a point that is beyond reality and will create effects that are impossible to achieve within the laws of nature and defy the scientific principles.

To explain that a bit: We are used to theory > research > thesis > prototype > more research > stable scientific knowledge > final product. The "Plain Magic" vs. "Occult Magic" model works as a believable model of a "augmented reality" by allowing to skip some steps and head right to the prototype stage, but also allows the previous and follow-up steps to happen.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-10, 07:14 AM
Florian, I think I wasn't clear enough. It's not about having a fictional world where some "magic" is ordinary. That's perfectly possible. But our real world is not that world. And that's what defines level 0. What's possible in the world we observe around ourselves right now (which includes the absence of anything we'd call "magic"). In fact, that's the break between level 1 and level 0.

Level 0 includes only those things that are possible on Earth, right now, by any person with adequate training and dedication. Anything "magical" or "occult" if it works is definitionally excluded. This also includes all non-ultra-hard-sci-fi--FTL travel, reactionless drives*, gravity control, nano-machines, any of that is not level 0. Anything esoteric or extrapolated, anything mystical--all these are excluded by definition from level 0. So changing it to include these things in the fiction destroys the whole framework. Things that exist only in the fiction, the ways the "normal" life of the fiction is different from our reality are defined to be levels 1 or 2.

Level 1 includes all those things that are normal in the fiction but are not possible in the regular, "real" world. So for most sci-fi, 99% of everything is at level 1. For an action movie, the hero and the antagonists are at level 1--their extraordinary levels of endurance and intelligence and skill push them over the boundaries. Batman at his weakest is still a strong Level 1 by virtue of the plot armor and fiat power he requires to function.

EldritchWeaver
2018-12-10, 07:28 AM
In 3e, 3.5, and Pathfinder require 1 hour of study to regain spells. While in 5e, recovering spells is automatic after a long rest.

That's not completely correct. You need in 3e, 3.5 and PF 8 hours of rest, then you can spend 1 hour to fill your spell slots. If you leave some open, you can fill them up with 15 minutes of study.


I feel like you're having problem with the word "Antagonist."

It's interesting how you strawman this. You never mentioned who this 13th level wizard was nor gave any clues who it might be, but by virtue of making it about Sauron (or is this also an incorrect interpretation) you ignore my points about Gandalf being a crappy D&D wizard. Considering the shown powers, Gandalf is likely a multiclass Fighter/Wizard (if you have to insist on simulating this character in D&D). The same goes for Sauron who literally cleaved through armies (don't know any wizard who does this). Nonetheless, even if Sauron is a 13th level wizard, he could have have used his spells much more efficiently. Scry-and-Die tactics are available at this point.

Florian
2018-12-10, 07:39 AM
@EldritchWeaver:

This is more about genre and primacy. When you want to play something akin to LoTR using D&D/PF rules, it doesn't matter what the classes/spells/items in the PHB can do by default, what matters is what is go and no-go with the genre you want to try and emulate. The same holds true when you go for a full-out MCU with the same rules-set and considerations.

For the former, Paladin and Ranger are the meridian point, for the later, DMM-Persist Cleric. Both works and are ok, until you try to use the full Wizard in the former and a simple Fighter in the later.

Cluedrew
2018-12-10, 08:30 AM
Oh good, yet another "people who like playing bad-ass martials are having badwrongfun" thread.

Look. I like playing Fighters. I want my Fighter to be able to run, jump, fight without being forced into being an anime character. I want to play Robin Hood, Sir Galahad, and Gimli. And D&D lets me do that perfectly well.I'm going to side with Lord Raziere and Ignimortis and say no, it really doesn't.

I mean it will let you do those things in the same way it let me play a social bard. Which is to say the character was fun but the social parts never had any impact. There were no mechanics to support all the social things I did and so they became nothing more than flavour text. Maybe if the campaign had gone on longer it would have developed into something actually significant. And that was a perfectly average GM, maybe a better-than-average GM could have made it work. But if you need a better-than-average GM the game system isn't really pulling its weight.

On the other hand, in a not combat focused game I played a combatant, the only one in the party. And I (well Ammanda, my character) single handily held off a swam of monsters while the rest of the party did non-combat things to get us out of there. It was my singular favourite moment and you know what anime powers were required to make it happen? Ammanda had a gun and a knife and knew how to use both. I don't enjoy D&D anymore, I've been ruined by systems that are actually good. (I am exaggerated slightly for dramatic effect, but it turns out "you don't know what you got until its gone" applies to bad things as well as good things.)

Talakeal
2018-12-10, 10:10 AM
@Florisn:

Pretty sure he is talking about Saruman.

Also, just because a spell is on the wizard list doesn't neccesarily mean that a given wizard has access to it.

Florian
2018-12-10, 10:31 AM
@PhoenixPhyre:

And I´m pointing out the one principal error that will lead to all the usual follow-up problems. Generally speaking, being "mundane" is mostly not grounded in our reality, but rather in the in-game reality we talk about. Glorthindel rightly pointed out that acceptance of things like Dragons or Fireballs as part of the in-game reality doesn't cancel out the wish to stay "grounded" in what would be considered "mundane" in respect to "magic". What will matter is the ability to "raise my shield" to block the Fireball or Dragonbreath, because that is deemed to be "grounded".

For that to happen, you have to actually tackle the topic how you want to have the interaction in such a way to Pull it down from 1 to 0.

@Talakeal:

Sorry, this was not about some nonsense like a "Wizard Spell List", but rather about the individual ability to do such things.

Frozen_Feet
2018-12-10, 10:53 AM
I just wanted to say that diving bells have been known technology since times of Aristotele. So "treasure at the bottom of the sea" can be solved with fairly low level engineering if the bottom is not too far. :smalltongue:

But really, that just reminds me: magic doesn't win non-magic just because magic is arbitrarily powerfull, it also wins because non-magic is artificially held back. Even basic feats of historical science and engineering are deemed out-of-genre (f. ex. aforementioned diving bells, early firearms) but magicians get to go whole hog with magic engineering. So we get airships and portal networks, but not hot-air balloons nor trains.

Unavenger
2018-12-10, 10:58 AM
you ignore my points about Gandalf being a crappy D&D wizard.

That's because Gandalf, unlike Saruman, isn't pitted against Aragorn so we don't have much of an indication of who would win or who's better at things, and, like you say, he's not a wizard or a mundane so why would I care about Gandalf in a thread about mundanes and wizards?

I see you basically complaining about me not addressing irrelevancies.

Ignimortis
2018-12-10, 10:59 AM
I'm going to side with Lord Raziere and Ignimortis and say no, it really doesn't.

I mean it will let you do those things in the same way it let me play a social bard. Which is to say the character was fun but the social parts never had any impact. There were no mechanics to support all the social things I did and so they became nothing more than flavour text. Maybe if the campaign had gone on longer it would have developed into something actually significant. And that was a perfectly average GM, maybe a better-than-average GM could have made it work. But if you need a better-than-average GM the game system isn't really pulling its weight.

On the other hand, in a not combat focused game I played a combatant, the only one in the party. And I (well Ammanda, my character) single handedly held off a swarm of monsters while the rest of the party did non-combat things to get us out of there. It was my singular favourite moment and you know what anime powers were required to make it happen? Ammanda had a gun and a knife and knew how to use both. I don't enjoy D&D anymore, I've been ruined by systems that are actually good. (I am exaggerated slightly for dramatic effect, but it turns out "you don't know what you got until its gone" applies to bad things as well as good things.)

Oh yes, I have to agree - D&D doesn't actually let you play a badass martial warrior who's very good at combat...because every PC is supposed to be somewhat good at combat. Oftentimes the spellcasters are better at combat, either due to certain situations or just being able to throw fireballs around for 8d6 while your sword swing is 2d6+4 and you get two per turn.

I've attempted to play Fighters both in 3.5 and 5e at some point, and they were awfully dull, because they never felt all that good at Fighting. Sure, they could swing a sword rather well, but in 3.5 half the party could do the same while throwing spells around, and in 5e you deal the same damage at level 9 that you did at level 4, only twice per turn, while Wizards graduated from Magic Missiles to Fireballs.

And, as you've noted, games which don't explicitly focus on combat usually feel much better for people who actually want to be a badass combatant, because there's no baseline competency. A powerful VtM character might be almost as bad at physical combat as a normal person without training, meanwhile a combat-focused vampire can tear apart a squad of special forces in nine seconds. Same in Shadowrun, where Street Samurai and Physical Adepts are just miles ahead of Deckers and Faces and Mages (until they summon spirits, *grumble*).

It's like having a Wizard 20 die to a few arrows to the chest and a Fighter 20 being able to solo-kill a fully capable and intelligently played Great Wyrm Dragon. D&D doesn't do that, it does the reverse, where the Wizard does everything and the Fighter becomes comparatively worthless as they level up.

NichG
2018-12-10, 11:00 AM
The problem with centering a concept around normalcy is that you lose the ability to cheat, and some concepts only work via cheating - that is, by being able to suspend implications and natural consequences in favor of narrative causality. If you want a realistic badass normal who can change the world, it's going to look more like Horatio Hornblower or Sharpe than Aragorn or Conan, because one guy whose main trick is hitting a bunch of stuff with a big piece of metal is really easy to make irrelevant even by other mundanes.

A real workable badass normal that can retain influence in a fantastical world will probably look more wizard-like than most wizards - smart, wise, well- informed, and willing to delegate and manipulate rather than being the one out there and swinging.

Once you've decided that a sword is your solitary interface with the world, it had better be a rainbow that can cut the tops off of mountains because a mayor with a couple thousand peasants can cut a hole in a mountain too. The fantastical elements are permission to not let that kind of thing get in the way of a particular character.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-10, 11:07 AM
@PhoenixPhyre:

And I´m pointing out the one principal error that will lead to all the usual follow-up problems. Generally speaking, being "mundane" is mostly not grounded in our reality, but rather in the in-game reality we talk about. Glorthindel rightly pointed out that acceptance of things like Dragons or Fireballs as part of the in-game reality doesn't cancel out the wish to stay "grounded" in what would be considered "mundane" in respect to "magic". What will matter is the ability to "raise my shield" to block the Fireball or Dragonbreath, because that is deemed to be "grounded".

For that to happen, you have to actually tackle the topic how you want to have the interaction in such a way to Pull it down from 1 to 0.


And my entire point is that you can't meaningfully conflate categories 0 and 1 without breaking everything (from a world-building stand-point) and opening up a big can of Guy at the Gym. Things that are dissimilar should be kept separate, not muddled together. And the follow on to that is that by accepting that you're already category 1, you're accepting that you're not bound by "normal" rules, but by the fictional rules (which can be anything that makes sense). Instead, I see people wanting to use their real world experience (category 0) to dictate what's possible in the fiction (category 1). This is a fundamental category error. Equivocating between the two is wrong.

As far as Glorfindel, I'm not actually saying that the presence of dragons makes the fighter non-mundane*. I'm taking the information presented by the setting at face value, noting that normal earth people cannot do things that are normal for adventurers (dodging a fireball that explicitly spreads around obstacles by hiding behind an obstacle is rather futile, yet rogues can do it without the obstacle). Same with getting hit by a dragon's bite/swipe/tail/etc and standing your ground. Conservation of momentum does not allow it unless dragons are made of styrofoam and moving real slow. So by definition, as a D&D-style adventurer you're already in category 1 after just a few levels (at latest). That is, my central contention is that "badass normals", whether they like it or not, are fantastic (not category 0), whether the game system defines it such or not. It's the only internally consistent way that respects rules, setting, and logic. Whether they're category 2 or not is rather irrelevant.

Defining it in this way also puts things on much more solid ground for world-building and story-telling (whether game or not-game). The simple "magic" vs "mundane" dichotomy fails at this, leaving it highly unclear as to what the actual rules in the fiction are and how they differ from the rules we know. And until you know the rules it's hard to break them well or to explore the consequences of these differences.

* Although for internal consistency, any magic in a setting makes the entire setting category 1 or 2 (because any magic breaks natural law, and any break of natural law requires a comprehensive rewrite including the offending thing, making "magic" part of natural law). But that's a separate discussion.

Florian
2018-12-10, 11:08 AM
@NichG:

Careful with such broad-sweeping assessments. You know, the CaS/CaW divide is a thing and that will heavily affect what you just wrote.

Unavenger
2018-12-10, 11:14 AM
Once you've decided that a sword is your solitary interface with the world

Who, in particular, has done that? :smallconfused:

NichG
2018-12-10, 11:41 AM
@NichG:

Careful with such broad-sweeping assessments. You know, the CaS/CaW divide is a thing and that will heavily affect what you just wrote.

Combat is only relevant if it is permitted to be. In 1e for example, the trick to surviving low levels was to always let hirelings fight in your stead. A character who is versatile (which includes both mechanical versatility e.g. wizards as well as conceptual or thematic flexibility e.g. non-archetypally- constrained real humans who go about changing the world) has other options than to fight, and those options can quickly steal the importance from someone who is focusing around their ability to fight.

A socially skilled player handed a Lv0 character (if mechanics are engaged, you automatically fail) can still have significant agency.


Who, in particular, has done that? :smallconfused:

Whoever first named the archetypal 'mundane' class Fighter.

Fighting ability is pretty much the worst thing you could try to build a competitive badass normal around. 'Ruler' would have avoided a lot of these pitfalls.

Ignimortis
2018-12-10, 11:47 AM
Whoever first named the archetypal 'mundane' class Fighter.

Fighting ability is pretty much the worst thing you could try to build a competitive badass normal around. 'Ruler' would have avoided a lot of these pitfalls.

Only if your game assumes fighting ability to be something that everyone has in comparable amounts, i.e. every character is expected to perform at least passably in combat. If those who aren't focused on combat are forced to take cover and pray that their badasses win or at least do something that's not directly related to taking out the opposition, then being combat capable very much a good defining trait.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-10, 11:50 AM
Whoever first named the archetypal 'mundane' class Fighter.

Fighting ability is pretty much the worst thing you could try to build a competitive badass normal around. 'Ruler' would have avoided a lot of these pitfalls.

I'll admit, one of the fundamental problems with using 3e's Fighter as the base for a "badass normal" is that they struggle to even reach "normal". They're handicapped even against category 0 late-medieval warriors, except in their unusual durability. Many of them even struggle ride a horse (due to the whole skill system problems).

But that's a system-specific issue. The 2e "fighter" didn't have those same problems (had others, but not those); neither does the 4e or 5e versions (each of which has their own issues, to be sure).

Unavenger
2018-12-10, 11:53 AM
Whoever first named the archetypal 'mundane' class Fighter.

Fighting ability is pretty much the worst thing you could try to build a competitive badass normal around. 'Ruler' would have avoided a lot of these pitfalls.

I mean, sure, though even the fighter doesn't just fight (though it comes close enough to call with its pitiful skill list, mind). But the fighter definitely isn't the be-all and end-all of what the martial archetype is, even in standard 1st-party D&D.

EldritchWeaver
2018-12-10, 12:36 PM
That's because Gandalf, unlike Saruman, isn't pitted against Aragorn so we don't have much of an indication of who would win or who's better at things, and, like you say, he's not a wizard or a mundane so why would I care about Gandalf in a thread about mundanes and wizards?

I see you basically complaining about me not addressing irrelevancies.

It would have been nice to know that you only consider Saruman as acceptable benchmark. I'd really like to know, how you come to the conclusion, that Saruman is so high level while remaining so useless.

Still, I did mention the scry-and-die tactic which at 13th level an antagonistic wizard would be able to do. I don't remember any anti-scrying measures in LotR, but I haven't read it for a while.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-10, 12:45 PM
It would have been nice to know that you only consider Saruman as acceptable benchmark. I'd really like to know, how you come to the conclusion, that Saruman is so high level while remaining so useless.

Still, I did mention the scry-and-die tactic which at 13th level an antagonistic wizard would be able to do. I don't remember any anti-scrying measures in LotR, but I haven't read it for a while.

Since the only "scrying" anyone really mentions is the Palantir, the fact that you're exposed to the Eye of Sauron is quite a decent anti-scrying measure (unless you're Aragorn, which again points out the fact that he's not mundane even in-setting).

NichG
2018-12-10, 01:38 PM
I'll admit, one of the fundamental problems with using 3e's Fighter as the base for a "badass normal" is that they struggle to even reach "normal". They're handicapped even against category 0 late-medieval warriors, except in their unusual durability. Many of them even struggle ride a horse (due to the whole skill system problems).

But that's a system-specific issue. The 2e "fighter" didn't have those same problems (had others, but not those); neither does the 4e or 5e versions (each of which has their own issues, to be sure).

I'd argue that if you took a theoretical-optimization 3.5 wizard and projected them purely through the lens of being unbeatable in combat, you'd get something which one might call Tier 3. The really transformative thing is being able to say 'I have the power to choose the context in which I will deal with this challenge', and that's something which in principle even a 2e "fighter" could have, but only to the extent that their player stops trying to make a character whose thing is being good at fighting and instead makes a person who is trying to be successful in that world.


I mean, sure, though even the fighter doesn't just fight (though it comes close enough to call with its pitiful skill list, mind). But the fighter definitely isn't the be-all and end-all of what the martial archetype is, even in standard 1st-party D&D.

The term 'martial' is similarly bad. Basically, agency or power comes from casting off one's limitations, so a character who is defined by a limitation or a niche ends up having trouble making themselves relevant in the same space as characters either whose niche is all-encompassing, or characters who are free to simply act. A soldier in the real world isn't going to change the course of a war on the basis of their aim, and if soldier-y things are how they define themselves then there's going to be a pretty severe upper limit to the degree to which they will be able to personally choose the fate of the world. But if they end up distinguishing themselves and then go into a political career...

You don't have to go this far, but I do think it's useful to imagine that 'mundane' means 'may not use mechanics, and automatically fails when mechanics are used against them' and then see what things you can and cannot accomplish and more importantly how you have to go about doing it. That, I think, will get you closer to the sorts of things which lie at the base of a power that any kind of character could use. Maybe a good example (although this is still in the Lv1 or 'fantastical' category) would be Sy from Twig. Or Croaker from Black Company (pre-ascension) for a less fantastical version. They can be involved in military situations, while not being forced to only interact with the world through martial means (and in both cases, not really being very effective at all compared to the scale of things they face when they personally try to make use of martial means). Sy is effective because good social and psychological manipulation makes you as powerful as the most powerful person you can manipulate. Croaker is effective because he has tactical and strategic savvy, and an army to direct with it.

Along these points, a character whose only power is 'gets to ignore genre conventions' might be viable in a lot of cases...

Unavenger
2018-12-10, 02:22 PM
'may not use mechanics, and automatically fails when mechanics are used against them'

Even assuming "Mechanics" to mean spells, powers, SLAs, PLAs and manoeuvres, I don't think it's fair to say that you should automatically fail when a "Mechanic" is used against you, because the spell's fallibility is part of the magical nature of the power, not usually the nature of the target (John Doe gets a will save against being charmed or even insta-killed, not because he's special, but because it's actually written in the spell descriptions that he does). I'm not also convinced that resistance to magic is supposed to be a magical ability (actual SR is, sure, and so is the spellthief's spellgrace, but the occult slayer's magical defence is (ex) - which may not mean nonmagical, but is certainly implied to in this instance).

Mundane has to be a restriction, sure, but I don't think it should mean actually handicapping yourself compared to a random commoner.

EldritchWeaver
2018-12-10, 02:23 PM
Since the only "scrying" anyone really mentions is the Palantir, the fact that you're exposed to the Eye of Sauron is quite a decent anti-scrying measure (unless you're Aragorn, which again points out the fact that he's not mundane even in-setting).

But that's not how scrying works in the D&D rules. You could argue that the LotR setting has special rules, but then we aren't comparing Saruman to RAW (as in PHB) anymore. Which is Unavenger has been implying with his "I prefer Aragorn over Saruman when playing D&D".

Unavenger
2018-12-10, 02:31 PM
I really don't know how we got from "A seventh-level spell slot didn't do much more than make Aragorn do the thing he was doing, but in a different way" to "Aragorn would totes beat Saruman, lol!" but I'm not the one who made that leap.

(Incidentally I would love to live in a world where I didn't have to have a gender marker for people not to use he/his as though on reflex, but never mind that.)

geppetto
2018-12-10, 02:47 PM
Florian, I think I wasn't clear enough. It's not about having a fictional world where some "magic" is ordinary. That's perfectly possible. But our real world is not that world. And that's what defines level 0. What's possible in the world we observe around ourselves right now (which includes the absence of anything we'd call "magic"). In fact, that's the break between level 1 and level 0.

Level 0 includes only those things that are possible on Earth, right now, by any person with adequate training and dedication. Anything "magical" or "occult" if it works is definitionally excluded. This also includes all non-ultra-hard-sci-fi--FTL travel, reactionless drives*, gravity control, nano-machines, any of that is not level 0. Anything esoteric or extrapolated, anything mystical--all these are excluded by definition from level 0. So changing it to include these things in the fiction destroys the whole framework. Things that exist only in the fiction, the ways the "normal" life of the fiction is different from our reality are defined to be levels 1 or 2.

Level 1 includes all those things that are normal in the fiction but are not possible in the regular, "real" world. So for most sci-fi, 99% of everything is at level 1. For an action movie, the hero and the antagonists are at level 1--their extraordinary levels of endurance and intelligence and skill push them over the boundaries. Batman at his weakest is still a strong Level 1 by virtue of the plot armor and fiat power he requires to function.

Someone needs to watch a few episodes of "Ghost adventures" Our real world encompasses things a lot weirder then some people think. Actually nano robotics is also real right now, just rare and expensive.

EldritchWeaver
2018-12-10, 02:47 PM
I really don't know how we got from "A seventh-level spell slot didn't do much more than make Aragorn do the thing he was doing, but in a different way" to "Aragorn would totes beat Saruman, lol!" but I'm not the one who made that leap.

(Incidentally I would love to live in a world where I didn't have to have a gender marker for people not to use he/his as though on reflex, but never mind that.)

I never said "Aragorn would totes beat Saruman, lol!", I said that you said, that given the choice between playing Aragorn or Saruman, you would choose Aragorn. And that was coincidentally the starting point of the whole discussion: Why Saruman comes up short of your expectations. Which you didn't address. Instead you are dishonest and evade answers, because you can't defend your choice given the D&D rules set. Since you aren't interested in a discussion, I'm finished with this, too.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-10, 02:51 PM
Someone needs to watch a few episodes of "Ghost adventures" Our real world encompasses things a lot weirder then some people think.

But not things that violate the basic conservation laws (like taking a dragon's swipe without moving or not getting singed by a point-blank fireball in an empty space, both of which are staples of D&D at this point). And I don't know what staged "reality" shows have to do with anything. Fake things are fake.

Yes, the real world is weird. But definitionally, it doesn't include anything that breaks the laws of nature. Because otherwise those wouldn't be the laws of nature. And magic, by its very nature, breaks those laws wide open. So do most staples of fantasy adventure gaming. And most sci-fi as well. Heck, most "realistic" fiction violates those laws, because writers are not scientific specialists. All that means is that they're fantastic. Fantastic is not wrong. Realistic is not good. Nor vice versa.

Mechalich
2018-12-10, 04:41 PM
Yes, the real world is weird. But definitionally, it doesn't include anything that breaks the laws of nature. Because otherwise those wouldn't be the laws of nature. And magic, by its very nature, breaks those laws wide open. So do most staples of fantasy adventure gaming. And most sci-fi as well. Heck, most "realistic" fiction violates those laws, because writers are not scientific specialists. All that means is that they're fantastic. Fantastic is not wrong. Realistic is not good. Nor vice versa.

In terms of 'realistic' fiction or action thrillers, it's important to note the different between implausible and impossible. You average action thriller or historical fiction piles up a series of extremely implausible coincidences to the point that events actually unfolding in this way is ridiculous, but each individual event will be something that could happen, and maybe not even an especially low percentage thing if taken in isolation. I mean, if you start multiplying events that each have a 10% chance of happening, you into the 1 in a billion range before your episode is over. Now, at some point a system or a narrative that piles on coincidences becomes clearly fantastical - John Wick, for example, is deliberately stylized to the point of being unreal - but the margin is unclear. By contrast, something that is clearly impossible according to known physical laws is that way from the get go.

Mage: The Ascension even mediated its entire magic system on this distinction, wherein coincidental magic was something you could hide beneath a 'well that could have happened' even if it was shatteringly unlikely, and vulgar magic was anything blatantly impossible. So if you blew up a house in a way that was plausibly a gas explosion that was coincidental, but if you hurled fireballs at it from across the street that was clearly vulgar, even though you might be casting the same 'spell' in both cases. Now, coincidental vs. vulgar in MtA was the source of endless arguments, because no one is clear how to divide such things, and it's the same way in fiction. If CSI fantastical because they made it so blood tests and DNA analysis ran unreasonably quickly for the sake of drama even though the technologies were otherwise deployed fairly accurately? That's an open debate.

A game like D&D, and many other fantasy RPGs, contains both the blatantly impossible, and also events that are incredibly implausible even within that context, because you're still operating on action-adventure tropes even after magic has been added.

Unavenger
2018-12-10, 05:25 PM
I never said "Aragorn would totes beat Saruman, lol!", I said that you said, that given the choice between playing Aragorn or Saruman, you would choose Aragorn.

No, I didn't. I said that I would take Aragorn over a D&D wizard of mid-levels. Also, I said that the equivalent of a 7th-level spell didn't do much against Aragorn. You misread what I said at least twice and blamed me for it.

Arbane
2018-12-10, 05:31 PM
Whoever first named the archetypal 'mundane' class Fighter.

Fighting ability is pretty much the worst thing you could try to build a competitive badass normal around. 'Ruler' would have avoided a lot of these pitfalls.

Yup. It doesn't help that every time an interesting variation of 'fighter' comes up, it got calved off into a new class. Woodland Fighter? Now it's a ranger. Holy Fighter? Now it's a Paladin. Angry Fighter? Now it's overpowere a Barbarian. Etc, etc.


I'll admit, one of the fundamental problems with using 3e's Fighter as the base for a "badass normal" is that they struggle to even reach "normal". They're handicapped even against category 0 late-medieval warriors, except in their unusual durability. Many of them even struggle ride a horse (due to the whole skill system problems).

But that's a system-specific issue. The 2e "fighter" didn't have those same problems (had others, but not those); neither does the 4e or 5e versions (each of which has their own issues, to be sure).

Yup. Good luck in 3.X making a fighter who can do decently at things a fighter OUGHT to be able to do: Handle & ride a horse, get through an obstacle course, build forts, keep armor & weapons in decent shape, hike cross-country, recognize heraldry....


Croaker is effective because he has tactical and strategic savvy, and an army to direct with it.


That army DOES include several wizards. Just sayin'.

Cluedrew
2018-12-10, 07:17 PM
Why do people get angry when someone else misreads their post? It happens all the time and if we got angry about it every time we would never get to discuss the actual topic. And I realize right now it is now several layers removed from that.


Only if your game assumes fighting ability to be something that everyone has in comparable amounts, i.e. every character is expected to perform at least passably in combat. If those who aren't focused on combat are forced to take cover and pray that their badasses win or at least do something that's not directly related to taking out the opposition, then being combat capable very much a good defining trait.Yes I completely agree. Ways of fighting are not as interesting as actually the distinction between fighting or not. Actually in D&D I tend to play social or otherwise not combat focused character (concepts, everyone fights in D&D). Out side of that I have actually played a lot of character's whose main (or whole) thing is that they fight. And they are so much more fun there. Even if the Fighter was the best combatant, unless it is on a whole different scale than the rest of the classes I don't think it would be as fun.

Also things getting constantly stiffened out of the fighter class is also a problem. I think maybe making it "military" and giving it abilities based off of that could rescue it and still keep it somewhat unique. Built fortifications, predict enemy movements, find and command allies, boost the other PCs with good formations. The list goes on.


No, I didn't. I said that I would take Aragorn over a D&D wizard of mid-levels. Also, I said that the equivalent of a 7th-level spell didn't do much against Aragorn. You misread what I said at least twice and blamed me for it.OK, what do you mean by "take"? Play as? Choose as an ally in a hypothetical you end up in D&D land/Middle Earth? Also what sort of level range is mid-level? Or what abilities would you associate with a mid-level caster if you want to put it that way.

geppetto
2018-12-10, 07:41 PM
But not things that violate the basic conservation laws (like taking a dragon's swipe without moving or not getting singed by a point-blank fireball in an empty space, both of which are staples of D&D at this point). And I don't know what staged "reality" shows have to do with anything. Fake things are fake.

Yes, the real world is weird. But definitionally, it doesn't include anything that breaks the laws of nature. Because otherwise those wouldn't be the laws of nature. And magic, by its very nature, breaks those laws wide open. So do most staples of fantasy adventure gaming. And most sci-fi as well. Heck, most "realistic" fiction violates those laws, because writers are not scientific specialists. All that means is that they're fantastic. Fantastic is not wrong. Realistic is not good. Nor vice versa.

now your talking about a failure of narration not the rules.

Who says you didnt move? You just didnt move out of a 5 ft square. You can move a lot within a 5ft area. Google professonal dancers just to see how much without taking into account actual acrobats or stunt guys. Fireball guy got singed, just not actually wounded. The body can take all kinds of punishment that wouldnt count as a wound.

And seems like a failure of imagination all around. Millions of people over the ages have seen the same things those ghost shows have, I've lived in a haunted house and those things are definitely real and not following any law of nature we know.

Your arbitrarily limiting yourself and then arguing against your own opinions as if they were facts. They arent.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-10, 07:57 PM
now your talking about a failure of narration not the rules.

Who says you didnt move? You just didnt move out of a 5 ft square. You can move a lot within a 5ft area. Google professonal dancers just to see how much without taking into account actual acrobats or stunt guys. Fireball guy got singed, just not actually wounded. The body can take all kinds of punishment that wouldnt count as a wound.

And seems like a failure of imagination all around. Millions of people over the ages have seen the same things those ghost shows have, I've lived in a haunted house and those things are definitely real and not following any law of nature we know.

Your arbitrarily limiting yourself and then arguing against your own opinions as if they were facts. They arent.

A simple calculation using estimated values says that a dragon's swipe hits with ~1550 Ns of impulse. It's in contact with the shield for a fraction of a second. Thus, you're experiencing something like 3 kN of force. That's not nothing. Yet it doesn't push you back even 5 feet. What. Yet by mid levels you should be able to tank multiple dragons in a single day. And you can stand in the middle of a dragon's lightning breath wearing metal armor and take minimal (relative to health) damage. Or kill a dragon by smacking it in the flank with a mace.

And a fireball, by the rules expands to fill its space. So if you're at ground zero, there's no space where you can go. Yet one person takes scratch damage (little enough that it can be completely neglected) while the commoner next to him is obliterated even if he makes his save. That's evasion, and even in 3e that's marked Ex (meaning extraordinary == fantastic). And the rogue has it from level 2.

All of these things don't fit with the rules of reality as we know them even if we ignore the existence of fireball and dragons. That they're normal for the fictional world makes them category 1, not category 2, but nonetheless they're fantastic (ie not existing in our world). Same goes for most movie heroes, frankly. Yes, in some ways they're not even capable of what a regular person on Earth can do, but in other ways they go beyond. And that's enough.

Lots of people have seen lots of things that don't exist--the human brain is very good at imagining things, seeing patterns in clouds and other such things. And shows like that merely feed the imagination.

Arbane
2018-12-10, 09:33 PM
Nothing like watching people break out the physics textbooks in a FANTASY GAME discussion. :smallmad:

"As always, magic is limited by your imagination - if you can imagine it happening, it does. And martial powers are limited by your imagination - if you can imagine a reason why it can't happen, it doesn't." - LightWarden

NichG
2018-12-10, 09:54 PM
That army DOES include several wizards. Just sayin'.

I guess this is kind of my point - you can, mundanely, direct the activities of things which are not at all within your own personal physical capabilities. A military commander in real life might say words which in effect cause the deployment of guns, tanks, planes, and bombs - furthermore, just because a tank is better at taking a hit than they are doesn't mean that the tank crew has more agency or power or utility than them. Their utility comes from having an overarching view of the situation, experience of those kinds of interactions, and the skill to best make use of the abilities presented by those resources. The orders they give are their 'spells', and can have as much or more effect on the world as the spells of a D&D wizard.

Florian
2018-12-11, 04:31 AM
@PhoenixPhyre:

It´s pretty important to understand what the abstractions of hp, AC and saves in a D&D-based environment actually mean. It´s actually quite good to get a hand on the older stuff, mainly AD&D 1st, as Gygax explains a lot in his rumbling way about this. One thing of perpetual amusement for me is that actually got it right in 4E with the Bard, Warlord and minions, but utterly failed to explain those design decisions, which were 100% based on the thoughts Gygax and Anderson had when introducing those.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-11, 05:51 AM
@PhoenixPhyre:

It´s pretty important to understand what the abstractions of hp, AC and saves in a D&D-based environment actually mean. It´s actually quite good to get a hand on the older stuff, mainly AD&D 1st, as Gygax explains a lot in his rumbling way about this. One thing of perpetual amusement for me is that actually got it right in 4E with the Bard, Warlord and minions, but utterly failed to explain those design decisions, which were 100% based on the thoughts Gygax and Anderson had when introducing those.

I understand those original thoughts, but don't think they're relevant, honestly. For one thing, origins are not destiny. Lots of things have changed since then. For another, those explanations come down to plot armor/luck. A dragon's paw should have zero chance of missing a given 5' space; a fireball fills the space uniformly with enough energy to toast commoners no matter what. Thus, people that can stand against a dragon or evade a fireball at it's center are more than commoners in some objective fashion. They're special. They're fantastic.

Mechalich
2018-12-11, 06:54 AM
I understand those original thoughts, but don't think they're relevant, honestly. For one thing, origins are not destiny. Lots of things have changed since then. For another, those explanations come down to plot armor/luck. A dragon's paw should have zero chance of missing a given 5' space; a fireball fills the space uniformly with enough energy to toast commoners no matter what. Thus, people that can stand against a dragon or evade a fireball at it's center are more than commoners in some objective fashion. They're special. They're fantastic.

Except, the entire concept of the Combat Round is an abstraction. An 'attack' is not a single sword stroke or dragon claw swipe and a character is not necessarily in the same space at the moment a fireball goes off as they are at the beginning and end of a round. This is very clear when D&D is translated into narrative form (in novels) and character's ability to tank obviously lethal blows evaporates.

Sure there are certain blatantly impossible things that can happen, but these are mostly math errors. Falling damage, for example, is stupidly easy to survive in 3e because it uses the exact same damage matrix as it did in 2e, only HP got massively increased in the meantime (in 2e, 20d6 damage had an extremely good chance of killing any character).

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-11, 07:18 AM
Except, the entire concept of the Combat Round is an abstraction. An 'attack' is not a single sword stroke or dragon claw swipe and a character is not necessarily in the same space at the moment a fireball goes off as they are at the beginning and end of a round. This is very clear when D&D is translated into narrative form (in novels) and character's ability to tank obviously lethal blows evaporates.

Sure there are certain blatantly impossible things that can happen, but these are mostly math errors. Falling damage, for example, is stupidly easy to survive in 3e because it uses the exact same damage matrix as it did in 2e, only HP got massively increased in the meantime (in 2e, 20d6 damage had an extremely good chance of killing any character).

I'm sorry, that explanation does not work for me at all. A rogue can canonically dodge a fireball with no damage (not even to his plot armor) while standing naked in a 10x10 room with no openings. That's saying that one of the following is true:
a) the rules and the setting are completely disconnected and nothing we do can help us reason from one to the other.
b) the rogue (like every other thing in this fictional universe) is larger than life and can do things we can't do.

For me, a) is anathema. It says that the fiction and the tools we use have nothing to do with each other. Not even an abstraction, just completely unrelated. At that point, I'd rather the system confessed that and slaughtered the sacred cows--there's way too much simulationist baggage hanging around for that to be intentional. B) is a much simpler option and is productive--it explains many of the difficulties, smoothes many of the edges, and generally fits very well with both the stories being told and the settings in which they're told, as well as the rules themselves.

Note that in 3e (which made this distinction), evasion is explicitly marked as Ex, meaning that it's beyond the capabilities of normal people. That, right there, is proof that the designers felt that this ability was fantastic.

Edit: and no "game abstraction" can account for the fact that a high-level 5e fighter can hit 8 separate people, separated by up to 600 feet, with bolts from a heavy crossbow (which in real life requires tens of seconds and significant equipment to span even once) and run 30+ feet, all while wearing heavy armor and dodging attacks, and all in the span of 6 seconds. Heck, a 2nd level fighter can shoot 2 bolts in 6 seconds. While also being an expert swordsman (on par with a knight) and is equally expert in any weapon he comes across. If that's not fantastic, I'm not sure what would qualify.

And in 5e, at least, my supposition (that everything's fantastic) is actually canon. There's explicitly a level of "magic" (their term, not mine) that pervades everything and that everything is connected to. This is separate from the Weave (or whatever it's called in a particular setting) that grants access to spell-casting. A dragon's breath (or flight), a barbarian's Rage, a fighter's Action Surge, a rogue's Evasion--these are all things that tap into this background field in a way that's separate from casting spells. It's normal for that setting, but impossible on Earth. And it solves all the problems that people have, at least if people take it seriously. All the problems except for this self-contradictory desire to be "normal" and keep up with those that are explicitly not normal.

Unavenger
2018-12-11, 08:20 AM
OK, what do you mean by "take"? Play as? Choose as an ally in a hypothetical you end up in D&D land/Middle Earth? Also what sort of level range is mid-level? Or what abilities would you associate with a mid-level caster if you want to put it that way.

I've already explained this and I'm half-tempted not to play it back to you just because you weren't paying attention, but whatever. I mean that I would, given uncertain challenges ahead, only rather take a wizard as an ally than Aragorn once they hit 9th, maybe even 11th level. And I mean this because there's very little that the wizard can do* that Aragorn can't compared to the converse (and he's not even peak mundane).

*I am assuming core and that the wizard isn't played by someone who's memorised the monster manual to find polymorph shapes.


I'm sorry, that explanation does not work for me at all. A rogue can canonically dodge a fireball with no damage (not even to his plot armor) while standing naked in a 10x10 room with no openings.

Here's a question: has this situation ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER actually come up in a real game, or is it just an empty hypothetical which proves nothing but that otherwise-reasonable abilities produce incoherent results in absurd hypotheticals?

EDIT:


Note that in 3e (which made this distinction), evasion is explicitly marked as Ex, meaning that it's beyond the capabilities of normal people. That, right there, is proof that the designers felt that this ability was fantastic.

(Ex) abilities are "not something that just anyone can do or even learn to do without extensive training." That's distinct from (Su) abilities, which "are magical and go away in an antimagic field". Otherwise, we'd have to accept that duelists' parrying skills are "Fantastic", which is rubbish.

Florian
2018-12-11, 08:30 AM
@Unavenger:

In this thread, we've talked about D&D itself being the source of its own genre, while still being able to emulate a lot of other genres.Your answer only makes sense if you drop the notion of there being a T5 or T1 game, but there being a general D&D game.

I actually agree with the other point. A fantasy game needs the ability to envision fantastical outcomes, else you should rather stick to a simulation like Phoenix Command.

Unavenger
2018-12-11, 08:33 AM
@Unavenger:

In this thread, we've talked about D&D itself being the source of its own genre, while still being able to emulate a lot of other genres.Your answer only makes sense if you drop the notion of there being a T5 or T1 game, but there being a general D&D game.

Of course there's a general D&D game. Fighters and other T5 classes are just really bad at it.


I actually agree with the other point. A fantasy game needs the ability to envision fantastical outcomes, else you should rather stick to a simulation like Phoenix Command.

I mean duh. Wizards do fantastical things, so a fantasy game needs to envision the results of that. But the fantasy genre has room for people who don't use magic.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-11, 08:43 AM
Here's a question: has this situation ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER actually come up in a real game, or is it just an empty hypothetical which proves nothing but that otherwise-reasonable abilities produce incoherent results in absurd hypotheticals?


How is the fact that the rogue's abilities explicitly do not depend on getting out of the way, taking cover, or any other such thing (and thus cannot be explained narratively as such without breaking causality, and thus must be fantastic) an absurd hypothetical? It's definitional. Rogues can do something that normal earth humans cannot. Therefore they are fantastic.



(Ex) abilities are "not something that just anyone can do or even learn to do without extensive training." That's distinct from (Su) abilities, which "are magical and go away in an antimagic field". Otherwise, we'd have to accept that duelists' parrying skills are "Fantastic", which is rubbish.

A commoner, no matter how advanced as a commoner cannot learn Evasion. Thus, it's not a matter of training. It's restricted to rogues (and others who get that class feature). And I'm perfectly willing to accept that duelists parry fantastically. For me, most of what various classes do is fantastic.

Once you get above 1st level (or similar power levels) creatures, everyone and everything is fantastic. That's my entire point. There is no normal. There is no loophole that lets you do fantastic things without being fantastic. And being fantastic =/= "doing magic". It just means you're better than an Earth human at some specific thing. You are not bound by the Guy at the Gym. How far you take that depends on the game, the system, the setting, and the circumstances. But the basic fact that everyone of any consequence in this fantastic universe is fantastic is a given. An absolute. Once you leave this reality (including alternate histories), you enter the realm of the fantastic with no exceptions.

Talakeal
2018-12-11, 08:47 AM
Here's a question: has this situation ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER actually come up in a real game, or is it just an empty hypothetical which proves nothing but that otherwise-reasonable abilities produce incoherent results in absurd hypotheticals?.

I saw it happen once, rogue trapped in a room and wanted to evade a fire trap that filled said room. The DM said no.

Talakeal
2018-12-11, 08:53 AM
Doesn't the extreme "rules as physics" viewpoint kind of ruin the whole purpse of the thread?

Saying that anything which isnt a perfect simulation (ie all of them) because it has some abstractions taken means the universe is fantastic really kills the distinction between type one and type zero. You might as well change the definition of type 0 to "reality" and type 1 to "fiction," at this point because not even the most mundane minutia driven ruleset is going to be able to squeek by.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-11, 09:12 AM
Doesn't the extreme "rules as physics" viewpoint kind of ruin the whole purpse of the thread?

Saying that anything which isnt a perfect simulation (ie all of them) because it has some abstractions taken means the universe is fantastic really kills the distinction between type one and type zero. You might as well change the definition of type 0 to "reality" and type 1 to "fiction," at this point because not even the most mundane minutia driven ruleset is going to be able to squeek by.

I'm not looking at the rules except as they illuminate/influence the fiction. I fully accept that there are abstractions and that's ok. But when the rules even stripped of abstractions demand that someone be able to do fantastic things, I have a choice. Either the setting is incoherent/internally inconsistent and cannot be subjected to any reason at all or those things are fantastic. One choice is much simpler than the other.

And it isn't bound even to game rulesets. This is more general. You can have historical fiction (or even modern fiction) that plays nicely, where no rules of physics are violated. Even slice of life anime fits this bill acceptably. So there is fiction that isn't fantastic. But fantasy adventure fiction isn't that fiction. Neither the fantasy part nor the adventure part (as commonly interpreted*) allow it to be.

The only way to have a semblance of fictional (ie not mechanical) equality between characters is if they're all playing the same fictional game. Either everyone has the chance to go beyond the merely human (of the earth variety) or no one does. At least if you want to avoid pure authorial fiat.

Things this does not mean--you don't have to have "anime" (meaning specifically the over-the-top shonen anime protagonist style) fighters. Or unbounded wizards. Or everyone casting spells. You just have to lay the Guy at the Gym to rest, leaving him to those genres that claim to be representing our reality. Allow people to be fantastic (in all meanings of the word). To go beyond the limits of the mundane. To do things thought impossible.

* You can have totally historically-valid accounts of "adventure". I'm not disputing that. But D&D-style pulpy adventure is not that style at all.

Talakeal
2018-12-11, 10:19 AM
I'm not looking at the rules except as they illuminate/influence the fiction. I fully accept that there are abstractions and that's ok. But when the rules even stripped of abstractions demand that someone be able to do fantastic things, I have a choice. Either the setting is incoherent/internally inconsistent and cannot be subjected to any reason at all or those things are fantastic. One choice is much simpler than the other.

And it isn't bound even to game rulesets. This is more general. You can have historical fiction (or even modern fiction) that plays nicely, where no rules of physics are violated. Even slice of life anime fits this bill acceptably. So there is fiction that isn't fantastic. But fantasy adventure fiction isn't that fiction. Neither the fantasy part nor the adventure part (as commonly interpreted*) allow it to be.

The only way to have a semblance of fictional (ie not mechanical) equality between characters is if they're all playing the same fictional game. Either everyone has the chance to go beyond the merely human (of the earth variety) or no one does. At least if you want to avoid pure authorial fiat.

Things this does not mean--you don't have to have "anime" (meaning specifically the over-the-top shonen anime protagonist style) fighters. Or unbounded wizards. Or everyone casting spells. You just have to lay the Guy at the Gym to rest, leaving him to those genres that claim to be representing our reality. Allow people to be fantastic (in all meanings of the word). To go beyond the limits of the mundane. To do things thought impossible.

* You can have totally historically-valid accounts of "adventure". I'm not disputing that. But D&D-style pulpy adventure is not that style at all.

It seems to me that once you are calculating the forces of the monsters blows and then contrasting it with the static grid based combat rules to prove that the setting is innately fantastic you have gone beyond that point.

Its like claiming that the characters in a perfectly mundane slice of life movie have "fantastic cosmetology powers" because, it being a Hollywood production, they wake up first thing in the morning clean shaven and with lerfect hair and makeup.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-11, 11:37 AM
It seems to me that once you are calculating the forces of the monsters blows and then contrasting it with the static grid based combat rules to prove that the setting is innately fantastic you have gone beyond that point.

Its like claiming that the characters in a perfectly mundane slice of life movie have "fantastic cosmetology powers" because, it being a Hollywood production, they wake up first thing in the morning clean shaven and with lerfect hair and makeup.

I'm showing that the fiction does not match the real life expectations. Therefore either the fiction is incoherent or the fiction is fantastic. One breaks things. The other doesn't. Easy pick, in my opinion.

And your second example doesn't work for me either. The equivalent to your example is that D&D weapons don't seem to break/degrade as quickly as they should, or that there is no "haven't gone to the bathroom" penalty. There are necessary accommodations for the medium (which includes out-of-order filming) and then there are straight up breaks with reality (like evasion. Or standing in a dragon's breath and blocking it with your shield (an iconic fictional occurrence)). I would say that for many shows there's a point at which they're pushing the line. The characters who always have a perfect appearance, despite spending weeks in the woods. The CSI "zoom and enhance" thing. Computer hacking as depicted in most movies. Friends, where none of them seem to work at all yet live high-expense lives in an expensive city. All of those are fantastic--bound only by the internal logic of the fictional world, not by our every-day reality. The other option is to refuse to suspend disbelief and not be able to enjoy things.

I repeat. Fantastic is not bad. Fantastic is good in my mind. Fantastic things are freed from the nit-picking of "well, can he really do that?" The more you insist that you're "grounded" or "realistic", the more you invite, nay demand nit-picking. And that's toxic to verisimilitude. Better to fully accept those places where you're not realistic than to falsely deny it and try to cover it up with babble (techno- or otherwise). Truth is better than lies. Same goes (for me) for movies that take themselves seriously and try to "get it right". They inevitably fail, and in failing leave my suspension of disbelief in pieces. Because they aren't living up to their own claims. If they don't claim that high prize I can be more forgiving. I try to judge things on what their goal is--are they trying to be realistic? Then I'll judge based on realism. If they claim to be fantastic (which is a wide range), I'll judge based on the internal logic of the fiction. If they claim to be funny, then humor is what must be demanded. Etc.

But yes, I guess you might say that for me, "fantastic" is the default for fiction. And for most non-fiction (which bears little if any connection with reality).

Segev
2018-12-11, 11:46 AM
I can't help but feel we're veering off-topic without even realizing it. It seems like the argument has devolved into whether D&D or the rules support or demand that PCs be "fantastic," "extraordinary," or "larger-than-life," or not.

That wasn't the original thesis question of this thread.

The original thesis question of the thread was whether non-magical people should, in fiction and particularly games, be allowed to do things that are fantastic. That are so blatantly beyond the Guy At The Gym that it becomes no more a valid basis of comparison than "The Nerd At The Library" is a valid basis of comparison to determine what a wizard can do.

What do I care whether the Nerd At The Library can read a table full of books, wave his hands over some graphite ground off of his pencil, chant some words, and cause a 20'x20' square on the floor to become slippery or not? I know a wizard can perform a similar feat, even if the Nerd At The Library never could.

What do I care whether the Guy At The Gym can juggle the entire stack of weight-disks and hurl them with precision at targets on the wall? I want my throwing-specialist barbarian to be able to do just that.

Once we allow that, no, the Guy At The Gym couldn't flex his mighty pecs and bounce an javelin thrown by a(n internet) troll with nary a scratch off of his oiled chest, but Butch Butcherson the Gentleman Wrestler who has 15 levels of Fighter can, we can start to find ways to close the gap at high level between casters and non-casters. Just because the 17th level rogue isn't casting 9th level spells doesn't mean he can't be doing - even non-magically - equally impressive, impossible-in-the-real-world feats.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-11, 11:53 AM
I can't help but feel we're veering off-topic without even realizing it. It seems like the argument has devolved into whether D&D or the rules support or demand that PCs be "fantastic," "extraordinary," or "larger-than-life," or not.

That wasn't the original thesis question of this thread.

The original thesis question of the thread was whether non-magical people should, in fiction and particularly games, be allowed to do things that are fantastic. That are so blatantly beyond the Guy At The Gym that it becomes no more a valid basis of comparison than "The Nerd At The Library" is a valid basis of comparison to determine what a wizard can do.

What do I care whether the Nerd At The Library can read a table full of books, wave his hands over some graphite ground off of his pencil, chant some words, and cause a 20'x20' square on the floor to become slippery or not? I know a wizard can perform a similar feat, even if the Nerd At The Library never could.

What do I care whether the Guy At The Gym can juggle the entire stack of weight-disks and hurl them with precision at targets on the wall? I want my throwing-specialist barbarian to be able to do just that.

Once we allow that, no, the Guy At The Gym couldn't flex his mighty pecs and bounce an javelin thrown by a(n internet) troll with nary a scratch off of his oiled chest, but Butch Butcherson the Gentleman Wrestler who has 15 levels of Fighter can, we can start to find ways to close the gap at high level between casters and non-casters. Just because the 17th level rogue isn't casting 9th level spells doesn't mean he can't be doing - even non-magically - equally impressive, impossible-in-the-real-world feats.

Thanks for this. You've encapsulated the core of my point better and in fewer words than I can.

If I had a superpower, it would involve writing too many words...

gkathellar
2018-12-11, 11:55 AM
It seems to me that once you are calculating the forces of the monsters blows and then contrasting it with the static grid based combat rules to prove that the setting is innately fantastic you have gone beyond that point.

Its like claiming that the characters in a perfectly mundane slice of life movie have "fantastic cosmetology powers" because, it being a Hollywood production, they wake up first thing in the morning clean shaven and with lerfect hair and makeup.

The point is that no real person could ever do some of the of things your average fantasy-action hero does, and that implicitly suggests that people in your average fantasy-action universe can achieve by muscle and skill what people in our world can't. They are both "mundane," in the sense that their abilities are an extrapolation of things we see in the real world, and "fantastic," in that their abilities are an extrapolation of things we see in the real world.

We're inclined to call Conan "mundane" because anyone in the real world can swing around a sword and get angry and woo princesses, but he's clearly fantastic in that no one can do it the way he does.

We're inclined to call Drizz't "mundane" (relatively speaking, I mean) because poise and grace and and agility are real things that real people have, but he's clearly fantastic in that he can walk on snow without leaving footprints.

We're inclined to call a D&D rogue "mundane" because picking locks and jumping out of the way of explosions and hitting people in the spinal column are skills that an actual real life human could acquire, but a rogue is clearly fantastic in that its sneak attacks become something out of Mortal Kombat and it can jump out of the way of explosions completely unharmed.

How far, exactly, this all goes is a function of the milieu. At a certain point the fantastical elements become highly visible enough that they may be off-putting to some people. But so-called "mundane" things in action fantasy (and most action in general, if we're being honest) are frequently fantastical in nature. And once we've accepted that, it makes it easier to accept that these are aesthetic choices that have very little to do with realism except insofar as realism is an aesthetic. If you're okay with Conan but not with Five-Shadow Creeping Ice Enervating Strike, that's fine, but they're both fantastical.

Talakeal
2018-12-11, 12:31 PM
How far, exactly, this all goes is a function of the milieu. At a certain point the fantastical elements become highly visible enough that they may be off-putting to some people. But so-called "mundane" things in action fantasy (and most action in general, if we're being honest) are frequently fantastical in nature. And once we've accepted that, it makes it easier to accept that these are aesthetic choices that have very little to do with realism except insofar as realism is an aesthetic. If you're okay with Conan but not with Five-Shadow Creeping Ice Enervating Strike, that's fine, but they're both fantastical.

I disagree.

There are huge thematic differences between a movie which attempts to portray combat as realistically as possible within the medium, one which runs on action movie logic and the rule of cool but still keeps things superficially plausible, and one where people are flying around shooting fireballs and throwing eachother through concrete.

I thought Phoenixphyre's originally list was incredibly helpful at illustrating this distinction and I even showed it to my irl gaming group.

But now that we are into "everything that is not a perfect simulation is unrealistic and therefore fantastic" it becomes significantly less useful as a tool for analyzing stylistic preferances.

Unavenger
2018-12-11, 01:06 PM
Once we allow that, no, the Guy At The Gym couldn't flex his mighty pecs and bounce an javelin thrown by a(n internet) troll with nary a scratch off of his oiled chest, but Butch Butcherson the Gentleman Wrestler who has 15 levels of Fighter can

To the surprise of no-one, neither of those is a character concept that really interests me.

(Incidentally, I love the strawman that the Guy at the Gym represents. "People want things that are possible in real life, which must mean a gym rat and not standing on a bridge taking down forty trained soldiers without getting tired." Though of course I'd rather not have my character get stabbed from underneath with a longspear.)

EDIT: Incidentally, I recommend Badass of the Week for inspiration of what your mundane characters should be doing (most of them are real life people). It's too profane to show you directly, but here are some excerpts with some of the swearing edited out:

"Now, Bill Speakman was six feet, six inches tall, and he had the awesome ability to chuck a hand grenade about twice as far as anyone else in his Regiment. And once he got to his trench, he started chucking bombs like it was Super Mario Bros 2 on the 38th Parallel. Any time he saw a muzzle flash, heard a battle cry, or saw a group of dudes, he whizzed a frag in there[...] At one point a nearby British machine gun team was taken out by an enemy attack, so Speakman, out of bombs, just ran over with his rifle and single-handedly started swinging his rifle and fists[...] until he’d retaken the position. Then he went back for more grenades. He did this ten goddamn times over the course of four hours of non-stop combat.[...]But still the enemy came on, undeterred in their ferocious attack. Speakman, already wounded by a mortar shell in the leg and a bullet in the shoulder (when ordered by a superior officer to fall back and get medical attention for his multiple shrapnel wounds, Speak simply yelled “stuff it” and kept fighting), was that at one point the British started calling in mortar fire [I]on their own position. The New Zealand mortar crews started putting so many rounds on the hill that they had to pour beer down the barrels of their mortars to keep the rounds from cooking off and blowing up in the tube.[...]Even this wasn’t enough – the battle was lost, and no 400 men on earth were going to be able to hold that hill against 6,000 Chinese soldiers. The hours passed, Speakman ran out of grenades and ammo and was chucking rocks, beer bottles, and anything else he could at the enemy. When they closed for hand to hand combat, Speakman mentioned that they were “so close you didn’t have time to pull back the bolt”. Yet still he fought on, knife to knife with an enemy that outnumbered him like something out of a martial arts flick.

When the order came to retreat, Big Bill Speakman personally led an attack that drove the Chinese back just enough for the British to retreat out of there. He came away from the battle with multiple grievous wounds, exhausted, and limping, but his actions had saved the lives of many of the men on the hill that day."

"After a super-fun night fighting off repeated counterattacks, Pavlov's platoon was reinforced to twenty-five men the following morning. There were also nearly a dozen women trapped in the hardened military bunker that at one point used to be their homes, and Pavlov wisely had everyone – soldiers and civilians – [turning] this ordinary apartment building into a fortress of impenetrable deathdealing awesomeness. Within a few hours, every approach to the building was cleared of debris and cover, sprinkled with land mines, and redecorated with thousands of feet of barbed wire. [...]By the time they were done, this was the sort of place that would have withstood the zombie apocalypse.

Of course, the main difference between the Battle of Stalingrad and the Zombie Apocalypse is that the swarm of humanity rushing towards Sergeant Pavlov was highly intelligent, well-coordinated, and highly-trained in the use of hand grenades and automatic weapons. This made things a little complicated, and having full regiments of German infantry charge the apartment day and night from every possible angle shouting and shooting at you was about as much fun as hiring Pyramid Head from the Silent Hill games to perform at your child's birthday party. Despite the unrelenting onslaught, Sergeant Pavlov tirelessly urged his men to [kill everyone attacking them], as he and his men desperately held out against constant bombardment by human wave attacks. Repairs to the structure were made by the light of day, and at night the tracer fire poured out by the 25 men in the fortress was so intense that their killzone was visible across the entire battlefront – in some ways standing out like a beacon of heroic resistance against the Nazis, and a detail that earned Pavlov the Code Name LIGHTHOUSE.

The Germans hurled everything and the kitchen sink at this dude, but for some ungodly reason they just couldn't slow [him] down. Even though bodies were piling up and they still couldn't take the building, the Germans also couldn't just chill out and ignore the dude, either – Pavlov held the main road approach to the Volga, and the Germans couldn't win the battle unless they were able to cross that river. So they kept throwing guys at him, and Pavlov kept killing them all.

When the Germans weren't occupying his bullets with the fleshy parts of their abdomens, Pavlov was personally out on the roof with a pair of binoculars sexting coordinates to Soviet artillery guns, which then in turn rained death down on the Nazi positions. At one point the Germans got so fed up with this jerk that they called in a full Panzer Division, rolled their up tanks so close to the house that they basically jammed their gun barrels through the windows and shot point-blank into the living room, but even this failed miserably – Pavlov saw them coming and had already cleared out the main floors and moved his anti-tank weaponry into the basement, where gunners blasted straight through the floor armor of the tanks and blew the Frankenberries off everyone inside. The panzers held in reserve were then shot through the thin armor at the tops of their turrets as marksmen on the roof armed with PTRS anti-tank rifles blasted a few dozen rounds of high-explosive armor-piercing ammunition the size of a baby's fist down from the roof, through the Nazi tank commanders, and right into the hull, where the bullet ignited the ammunition stores and sent the tank up like a TNT stick stuffed with M80s and Black Cats on Chinese New Year. By the time the Panzers figured out what [was going on], they were already too close to the structure, and they couldn't raise their turret guns high enough to shoot back.

Just keeping this daily regime of Nazi-capping insanity up for a couple days is impressive, but for TWO FULL MONTHS the men of the 42nd Regiment, 13th Guards Rifle Division held their ground.

[...]

But, despite all that, the greatest testament to Pavlov's defense is this – when the Russians captured the Sixth Army, they noticed that German commander General Friedrich von Paulus' personal map of the battlefield had the structure circled in red and with the hand-written word "Castle" next to it.

The Russians maps had simply labeled it "Pavlov's House.""

"Erik returned his neighbor’s kindness by knocking on the dude’s door and burying a sword in him when he opened it. That guy’s cousin, a battle-hardened warrior known as Hrafn the Dueler, challenged Erik to a duel, so Erik the Red killed that idiot too. [...] Erik found himself in a huge brawl where he killed Thorgest’s two adult sons and “certain other men” in hand-to-hand combat with a huge two-handed Viking longaxe."

"They stole secret information, listened in for assassination plots, scoped out city defenses and made notes of how many soldiers were stationed in town garrisons. They planted forged documents, passed messages to undercover agents, and spread false rumors to throw off the enemy. Occasionally they’d sabotage an operation, poison a water supply, or slit a nobleman’s throat in his sleep."

"Screaming into battle with two flintlock pistols and a terrifying-looking cutlass Black Bart led his men storming into town, destroyed the garrison, threw all the fort’s cannons into the ocean, shelled the town with a couple broadsides of raking cannon fire, and set three Portuguese trading ships ablaze in the harbor on his way out of town.

[...]

Once those dudes pointed out the main treasure ship, Black Bart sailed right up to it – in broad daylight – boarded the thing at the head of a swarming mass of cutthroat pirates, captured it without firing a shot, looted 90,000 gold coins from the ship’s hold, and then peeled outta there before the two hulking battleships could get close enough to fire on him.

[...]

He burned 20 ships in Martinique Harbor, captured a brigantine that happened to have the Governor of Martinique on board, and then hung the governor from the yardarm of Royal Fortune."

"In a story that sounds like something out of a badass kung fu grindhouse movie, when Trieu was 19 she killed her evil sister-in-law in a straight-up hardcore backwoods street fight, fled into the wilderness, climbed a mountain, and spent the next several months training herself how to become an even more efficient human killing machine so that she could destroy the Chinese and liberate her people once and for all."

"[T]his guy smashed the bear so hard in the nose with his head that it not only stunned the bear, it made it drop him.

[...]

But Yusuf Alchagirov, bloodied from being punched, clawed, and bitten by a 1,000-pound Brown Bear and then thrown off a cliff, didn't die. He woke up seven hours later, picked himself up, and walked back home. On the way there he found a team of villagers that had been sent to find out why he'd missed dinner. He'd broken four ribs, had a couple bite wounds and bruises, but was otherwise OK."

"In a brief but incredibly brutal flurry of kicks, punches, elbow strikes, and tiger claws, the Family Shen whirled throughout their living room, beating [up every] thug stupid enough to wander aimlessly into their wheelhouses. Shen's quote on the subject is priceless – he just says, "It was self defence. I really cannot remember what kung fu skills I used. It was quite messy. Only seven people were injured because the rest were scared and stayed outside. Some of them ran away."

Which is basically him saying he would have snapped every single one of them in half if he'd had the chance, and that he was disappointed that he only pummeled seven men unconscious basically by himself."

"So on February 26, 2010, when a team of thirty evictors, bulldozer drivers, and assorted goons showed up on Youde's land armed with clubs and ominous-looking Member's Only jackets, they ran into one fifty year-old man rolling this thing out of his storage shed and aiming it in their direction[...] a MLRS made out of PVC pipe and a wheelbarrow. Each of these tubes was loaded with a powerful rocket-like firework, primed and ready to launch, and as soon as those cudgel-toting suckers were in range he let loose a barrage of gunpowder bombs that lit up Hubei province like the Chinese New Year.

[...]

So Yang Youde built a cannon tower next to his house. And when I say "cannon tower", I mean like the Warcraft II [one] – a tall, homemade lookout tower equipped with a portable PVC rocket launcher capable of firing projectiles 300 feet through the air, an arsenal of super-explosive fireworks, a megaphone, and a couch where he could max and relax while watching for intruders. When these guys came back, he was ready to shove a few hundred pounds of gunpowder down their esophagi.

Two weeks ago, on May 26, the evictors came back, and this time, they were ready for whatever Yang could throw at them. Or so they thought. That afternoon Youde looked out from his watchtower to see a line of a hundred men equipped with riot shields and clubs, supported by a tank platoon of bulldozers and construction equipment.

Unable to advance through this insanity, the evictors were held at bay for roughly an hour, when the police showed up and broke up the battle. The evictors were sent crying back to their dirtbag bosses [...] He still owns the farm."

"The thugs didn't know what the hell hit them. Omari charged in, swinging hard, beating back three giant thugs with machetes. Screaming like a madman, not only to make himself more intimidating but to warn the children what was going on, Omari rushed ahead, furiously clubbing at his enemies. After a brief, intense battle, Omari somehow managed to force the intruders out of his room, down the hall, and finally sending them retreating out the front door of the Home, chasing them out into the yard.

With all three men out in the front yard, Omari continued to menace them with his weapon (a home improvement tool which, somehow, in the hands of this righteously hardcore badass was even more threatening than a trio of gigantic machetes). Then, from behind, he heard the sounds of children crying – the kids had come to the door, and now were frightened by the battle taking place inside their home.

Overcome with worry for the kids, Omari ran back to the open door, quickly trying to assure the kids that everything was alright. He turned back around just in time to see a machete swing down at his face.

But Anthony Omari didn't go down immediately. Bleeding intensely from the face, his vision obscured by blood and rapidly becoming dimmer and more blurry by the minute, Omari swing wildly, connecting with his assailant, driving the coward back once again. Stumbling, his strength failing him, Omari ran to the front door of the home, closed it, and locked it. Only after the orphans were safe did he allow himself to pass out."

"Ruksana Kauser charged out, grabbed the notorious terrorist Abu Osama by his head, and in one badass judo MMA move slammed the back of his skull up against the wall of her living room with enough force to crack a cue ball. Then, as he was backed up against the wall, she smashed him with the axe (just for good measure)."

"Staring down at an insane armada of tens of thousands of Turks was a force of only 500 Knights, led by the immovable resolve of Jean Parisot de la Valette [...] The battle raged across the countryside night and day in a near-constant stream of death and swordfighting, until finally, four months after they arrived, the Turkish army decided to pack up and head home. They had lost an estimated 25,000 warriors to fighting and disease, and they didn’t have any more fight left in them."

"He quickly realized that A GREAT WHITE SHARK BIT HIS HEAD and he was now all up in the grille of a 10 foot-long eating machine. The thing caught him completely off-guard, sinking it's teeth into his head and shoulders and driving his dive mask into his face, breaking his nose. Then the shark took a second bite, chomping down on Eric's back and torso, driving it's rows of razor-sharp teeth through his diving suit and puncturing his skin in its effort to devour this wayward mollusk-hunter.[...] Eric used the one arm that wasn't inside the shark's mouth to start punching the shark. Think about that for a minute. This guy is in the process of being eaten, and he has the presence of mind and the determination wailing on this thing . He's punching this ten-foot long, two ton shark in the eye, desperately trying to free himself from this thing's mouth and prevent himself from doing a real-life re-enactment of Jaws 4: The Revenge. Finally, the shark got sick of it and let Eric go. He swam up to the surface, was pulled out of the water by his son, and rushed to the hospital for treatment."

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-11, 02:11 PM
I disagree.

There are huge thematic differences between a movie which attempts to portray combat as realistically as possible within the medium, one which runs on action movie logic and the rule of cool but still keeps things superficially plausible, and one where people are flying around shooting fireballs and throwing eachother through concrete.

I thought Phoenixphyre's originally list was incredibly helpful at illustrating this distinction and I even showed it to my irl gaming group.

But now that we are into "everything that is not a perfect simulation is unrealistic and therefore fantastic" it becomes significantly less useful as a tool for analyzing stylistic preferances.

Your last sentence goes too far. It's not "not a perfect simulation = fantastic", it's "media of the style that D&D (and other such things) suggest are fantastic and therefore should not be limited to so-called reality because reality is both too boring and has too many unfun things in it". And my big point was that category 1 =/= category 0. They're meaningfully separate, and category 1 can have totally gonzo people in it (although it usually doesn't), as well as mostly "grounded" people. Conan is thoroughly category 1, but his limits are only set by the writer's whim, not by reality. Additionally, category 1 is not category 2 (although they're both fantastic and both blur together quite a bit at the edges). And even within category 2 there's a wide range of power levels--a dude who can, at best, make blue things yellow temporarily is still a category 2 character. He's not very powerful, but he's category 2.

If I were to categorize movies, I'd say that it's a rare action (rather than historical drama) movie that stays firmly in category 0. Most take liberties for a better film. Wounds aren't as debilitating (or are more catastrophic than necessary). Disease isn't as rampant. Hollywood ugly is in full effect. People charge in nicely cinematic ways and the heroes aren't offed by random shots in the first 2 minutes (ie plot armor). Basically, it's life with all the uninteresting/unphotogenic edges smoothed off. And that's the hallmark of category 1 fantasy. For "real" category 0, you need something like a documentary or re-enactment.

The parts about individual systems and mechanics--that was me taking my usual headlong dive down rabbit holes. I have a bad habit of chasing arguments to the bitter end despite them being entirely tangential to the real point. They're neither necessary nor important and I apologize for chasing them so far.

Segev
2018-12-11, 02:25 PM
My main point is that you can have your gritty realism, or your heroic fantasy that is still lower-end, or your wizards and warriors of One Piece anime action. You can have them all in d20's 20-level progression, even. They represent different bands of levels.

It is not unrealistic to expect that a level 20 fighter keep up with a level 20 wizard, in general. But it is unrealistic to expect that to be the case while insisting that the level 20 fighter be subject to The Guy At The Gym fallacy, or even subject to being no better than the sum total of every Olympic champion ever. The level 20 fighter also need not be mischaracterized as "superman" or "a superhero."

YEs, superheroes probably fight on that level, and yes, a level 20 character probably could BE a superhero, but by insisting on dismissing level 20 D&D characters as "superheroes," you're deliberately conflating loss of genre with the power level. It implicitly denies the argument while pretending to agree with it "but." It isn't actually agreeing at all; it's just trying to undermine any attempt to discuss the issue by rejecting the argument entirely.

One Piece is not a superhero story. Even DBZ isn't a superhero story, outside of Great Saiyaman's efforts in an all-too-brief arc.

A high-fantasy story can have what are essentially super-powered heroes who are not magic/spellcasters, but who fit the fantasy pseudo-medieval millieaux. That is the point.

Allow for the extraordinary and don't feel limited to making them spandex-clad superheroes in their powers.

Superheroes, for all their might, are generally one-trick ponies (Superman being a massive exception, and even then most of his non-flying-brick package is often ignored). d20 heroes have enormous bags of tricks, and several of them at a minimum are on the level 20 par when they hit that level. They're very different in feel.

Arbane
2018-12-11, 02:52 PM
I saw it happen once, rogue trapped in a room and wanted to evade a fire trap that filled said room. The DM said no.

Tell them Gygax says they're wrong. (ISTR one of his editorials in Dragon Magazine back in 1980-something saying that yes, even a hero chained naked to a rock should get a saving throw against a dragon's breath, because MAYBE there's some plausible way they could survive. He was a big fan of old pulp adventures, with their wildly unlikely escapes from Certain Death.)


To the surprise of no-one, neither of those is a character concept that really interests me.

Have you considered NOT playing D&D? There's a lot of other RPGs out there.



EDIT: Incidentally, I recommend Badass of the Week for inspiration of what your mundane characters should be doing (most of them are real life people). It's too profane to show you directly, but here are some excerpts with some of the swearing edited out:


Nice to see that Summon Wall of Text is still an EX at-will. :smallamused:

Soooo... what level do you think a D&D character would have to be to do any of that stuff?


It is not unrealistic to expect that a level 20 fighter keep up with a level 20 wizard, in general. But it is unrealistic to expect that to be the case while insisting that the level 20 fighter be subject to The Guy At The Gym fallacy, or even subject to being no better than the sum total of every Olympic champion ever. The level 20 fighter also need not be mischaracterized as "superman" or "a superhero."


That would be a terrible mischaracterization. A Fighter becomes a Superhero at 8th level.

https://songoftheblade.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/0cbmnqy.png
And the blog I got it from. (https://songoftheblade.wordpress.com/2016/10/13/a-history-of-the-fighters-extra-attacks-versus-low-level-monsters/)

Unavenger
2018-12-11, 03:23 PM
Have you considered NOT playing D&D? There's a lot of other RPGs out there.

I mean, I know there are. But it's relatively trivial to modify D&D to my expectations (you need, basically, one new class plus changing the way that falling and lava work to actually kill people).


Soooo... what level do you think a D&D character would have to be to do any of that stuff?

Currently, there are a few examples of things that D&D characters can do that are considered unrealistic (for example, a critical hit and a regular hit from a great white shark deals 27-57 damage, meaning that our friend Eric is, assuming he's an expert with CON 16, at least fourth level and more likely at least fifth or sixth level) or taking a critical hit from a machete (assuming it's a d8 weapon wielded by someone with a decent strength, a critical could technically still deal little enough damage only to stagger a first-level character.

30 CR 1/2 warriors is just shy of an EL 9 encounter*. To defeat that encounter alone without taking damage implies a character of at least 13th level. 50 CR 1/2 warriors is about EL 10 or 11*, but the guy who punched them out had a little help from his son and only ever got to beat up 7 of them before the rest ran away (though technically he still defeated the encounter) so it's not clear what level that makes him, although certainly at least 5th.

Sergeant Pavlov and Big Bill Speakman, mind, were in the middle of a warzone, trying to handle small armies. Pavlov and his men took down a Panzer division. Pathfinder gives an animated tank CR 12 (http://aonprd.com/MonsterDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Animated%20Tank), and while it has a lot fewer hit points than a standard tank (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipment/vehicles/land-vehicles/tank/) I can assume that Pavlov's access to anti-tank weaponry makes up for that. Just taking out a single panzer division with 25 soldiers and 10 civilians is one thing. Inspiring that motley crew to hold the position for two months against everything an entire army can throw against you? That's the stuff of legendary heroism, that's the stuff of a character around 20th level. This guy got a squad and a bunch of civilians to go up against an army and win. Even a 20th-level wizard, unless played with all of the paranoia and forwards-planning of a forumite, would be at significant risk of death.

In all of the chaos of the conflict that Speakman ended up in, it's harder to total up his body count, but he certainly put his "fantastical" evasion to good use seeing as he was being shot at by his own side's artillery. I have to put him at least mid-level for what he accomplished, but I can't really get an exact level.

And so forth. I'm not going to assign a level to all of them, but Sergeant Pavlov showed, at the very least, the combat ability that would be expected of a 20th-level character.

*Mind you, multiplying up encounter sizes too much gets you weird results.

Talakeal
2018-12-11, 08:43 PM
You know, I realized something, the whole "rules as physics" discussion is completely orthogonal to the discussion at hand.

It is my personal pet-peeve when someone takes the limitations of the medium a story is told in to be the "narrative truth" of the setting. "Rules as physics" annoys me in games just like people freeze framing sci-fi movies and picking apart the special effects shots for "calcs" annoys me in move discussion.


But it really has nothing to do with whether or not you can have a fantastic element as a mundane part of a setting.


Tell them Gygax says they're wrong. (ISTR one of his editorials in Dragon Magazine back in 1980-something saying that yes, even a hero chained naked to a rock should get a saving throw against a dragon's breath, because MAYBE there's some plausible way they could survive. He was a big fan of old pulp adventures, with their wildly unlikely escapes from Certain Death.)

This is the same GM with all the crazy house rules in the other thread, so telling them that they are wrong about something is really just spitting in the ocean at this point.

I personally see nothing wrong with that explanation; I like the hero finding some novel way to overcome the odds. What I don't like is the insistence that such a roll means that the otherwise mundane PC MUST have some way to magically become intangible and simple phase through the fire.

NichG
2018-12-11, 09:24 PM
Just taking out a single panzer division with 25 soldiers and 10 civilians is one thing. Inspiring that motley crew to hold the position for two months against everything an entire army can throw against you? That's the stuff of legendary heroism, that's the stuff of a character around 20th level. This guy got a squad and a bunch of civilians to go up against an army and win. Even a 20th-level wizard, unless played with all of the paranoia and forwards-planning of a forumite, would be at significant risk of death.

...

And so forth. I'm not going to assign a level to all of them, but Sergeant Pavlov showed, at the very least, the combat ability that would be expected of a 20th-level character.

*Mind you, multiplying up encounter sizes too much gets you weird results.

Just for reference, I've had a pair of 6th level casters rout a low-magic army thousands strong over the course of a month in a campaign before. They basically just used Fly + Fireball at night, directed at whatever undefended cluster of people or supplies they could spot. It doesn't kill thousands directly, but the lack of any reasonable recourse when the aggressors can operate in a target rich environment is brutal for morale. 1% attrition per day before the actual fighting even starts, for a march that everyone knows will take a month is a strong deterrent. So I'd put 'holding off an army on your own' as a Lv6 to ~Lv10 range task in D&D.

geppetto
2018-12-11, 09:33 PM
A simple calculation using estimated values says that a dragon's swipe hits with ~1550 Ns of impulse. It's in contact with the shield for a fraction of a second. Thus, you're experiencing something like 3 kN of force. That's not nothing. Yet it doesn't push you back even 5 feet. What. Yet by mid levels you should be able to tank multiple dragons in a single day. And you can stand in the middle of a dragon's lightning breath wearing metal armor and take minimal (relative to health) damage. Or kill a dragon by smacking it in the flank with a mace.

And a fireball, by the rules expands to fill its space. So if you're at ground zero, there's no space where you can go. Yet one person takes scratch damage (little enough that it can be completely neglected) while the commoner next to him is obliterated even if he makes his save. That's evasion, and even in 3e that's marked Ex (meaning extraordinary == fantastic). And the rogue has it from level 2.

All of these things don't fit with the rules of reality as we know them even if we ignore the existence of fireball and dragons. That they're normal for the fictional world makes them category 1, not category 2, but nonetheless they're fantastic (ie not existing in our world). Same goes for most movie heroes, frankly. Yes, in some ways they're not even capable of what a regular person on Earth can do, but in other ways they go beyond. And that's enough.

Lots of people have seen lots of things that don't exist--the human brain is very good at imagining things, seeing patterns in clouds and other such things. And shows like that merely feed the imagination.


Fascinating. So tell me, when did you put a dragon on a scale so that you could its weight? And whats the density of its muscle fibers? Are those bulky muscles or fast twitch muscles? You must know so that you could calculate the force of its blow? And did you catch it on camera? Cause that could get you your own reality show.

And where does it say you should tank multiple dragons a day? I missed that passage in the PHB fighter entry. Do point it out for me please.

While we're at it whats the chemical composition of this worlds atmosphere? Maybe its thicker then earth and causes more drag then on our world reducing force.

Fireball fills its space, sure. Whats the temp on that fireball? Length of exposure? What kind of fire? Expanding gasses? Liquid chemical? There must be a physical medium to carry the heat. What is it?

People walk on hot coals without burning their feet because the heat doesnt transfer fast enough if you do it right. Among other reasons. Stunt men cover themselves in flammable gel and go up as human torches without getting burned. People walk out of burning buildings without a scratch everyday.

Look at the effects of real explosions in war zones. There are thousands of cases of one guy getting pulped while the guy right next to him with all the same gear is untouched. And thats not movie heroes. Its real people everyday.

I mean holy strawman. You've invented so many arbitrary assumptions that are necessary for your point to be valid that I cant even count them.

And thats not taking into a account the real life examples of 100% human beings with no magical powers doing things in the really real world that you also want to rule out of possibility for ...... reasons.

Its even more laughable then the people telling us that the characters we have been playing for 50 years having fun, in a game whose entire purpose is to have fun are somehow not up to their required task of being fun. Because apparently we're just dumb gaming hillbillies who dont know that we're not actually having fun with our characters in our games. Which is again is literally the only point for any of this to exist.

Florian
2018-12-11, 09:40 PM
@Talakael:

I think that the root cause for this comes from the "Simulation" approach that is still at the core and center of many D&D-like TRPGs. Once you start by modeling RL physics and then add to it, things get wobbly fast as your comparison points get out of synch.

RazorChain
2018-12-11, 10:34 PM
I'm sorry, that explanation does not work for me at all. A rogue can canonically dodge a fireball with no damage (not even to his plot armor) while standing naked in a 10x10 room with no openings. That's saying that one of the following is true:
a) the rules and the setting are completely disconnected and nothing we do can help us reason from one to the other.
b) the rogue (like every other thing in this fictional universe) is larger than life and can do things we can't do.

For me, a) is anathema. It says that the fiction and the tools we use have nothing to do with each other. Not even an abstraction, just completely unrelated. At that point, I'd rather the system confessed that and slaughtered the sacred cows--there's way too much simulationist baggage hanging around for that to be intentional. B) is a much simpler option and is productive--it explains many of the difficulties, smoothes many of the edges, and generally fits very well with both the stories being told and the settings in which they're told, as well as the rules themselves.

Note that in 3e (which made this distinction), evasion is explicitly marked as Ex, meaning that it's beyond the capabilities of normal people. That, right there, is proof that the designers felt that this ability was fantastic.

Edit: and no "game abstraction" can account for the fact that a high-level 5e fighter can hit 8 separate people, separated by up to 600 feet, with bolts from a heavy crossbow (which in real life requires tens of seconds and significant equipment to span even once) and run 30+ feet, all while wearing heavy armor and dodging attacks, and all in the span of 6 seconds. Heck, a 2nd level fighter can shoot 2 bolts in 6 seconds. While also being an expert swordsman (on par with a knight) and is equally expert in any weapon he comes across. If that's not fantastic, I'm not sure what would qualify.

And in 5e, at least, my supposition (that everything's fantastic) is actually canon. There's explicitly a level of "magic" (their term, not mine) that pervades everything and that everything is connected to. This is separate from the Weave (or whatever it's called in a particular setting) that grants access to spell-casting. A dragon's breath (or flight), a barbarian's Rage, a fighter's Action Surge, a rogue's Evasion--these are all things that tap into this background field in a way that's separate from casting spells. It's normal for that setting, but impossible on Earth. And it solves all the problems that people have, at least if people take it seriously. All the problems except for this self-contradictory desire to be "normal" and keep up with those that are explicitly not normal.

This whole discussion is very D&D centric. The rules of D&D are bad or good in that effect they don't try to explain anything. Fireball is just a damage effect that lasts for an instant and some character get a gimmick to negate the damage. The whole system is like that which kinda makes any explanation kinda mute. People don't come to an agreement what HP represent in the system and therefore the system isn't consistent in how to handle HP, AC or many other things. Then you kinda just have to fluff things, explain or narrate things away.

"Yeah my rogue ceases to exist for a second while the fiery inferno of the fireball incinerates the poor sod beside me in the enclosed room" Is just as valid explanation as anything else.

So I have to agree with you. Most things in D&D is fantastical because the rules aren't bound to what is normal and the level system dictates that you can't stay normal as you advance in level. At least not in real world standards.

But this applies to D&D and is inherent to D&D world. D&D literally slaps you around with a rubber chicken while it screams in your ear "YOU ARE PLAYING A GAME" with it's ruleset.

Other games do just fine portraying tier 0 and still being heroic, it's just a matter of scale. Most heroes slayed maybe one dragon not dozens while reading the newspaper and sipping a cup of tea. When you start throwing meteors down on your opponents then you have kinda just thrown the scale out of the window and are playing a superhero game.

Cluedrew
2018-12-11, 10:36 PM
I've already explained this and I'm half-tempted not to play it back to you just because you weren't paying attention,I apologize. I will drop this section of the conversation if you do not wish to continue it.


I can't help but feel we're veering off-topic without even realizing it. It seems like the argument has devolved into whether D&D or the rules support or demand that PCs be "fantastic," "extraordinary," or "larger-than-life," or not.

That wasn't the original thesis question of this thread.

The original thesis question of the thread was whether non-magical people should, in fiction and particularly games, be allowed to do things that are fantastic. That are so blatantly beyond the Guy At The Gym that it becomes no more a valid basis of comparison than "The Nerd At The Library" is a valid basis of comparison to determine what a wizard can do.Yes, this is great. I had a similar idea but this is much better put.

My original idea had some stuff about fantastic thing being projections of mundane things. I applied it to some other ideas how the outdoors people become rangers and how social people turn into bards that can win the hearts of crowds in a few minutes and so on. That is what the "fantastic" is supposed to be about in my opinion.

Ignimortis
2018-12-11, 10:44 PM
Just taking out a single panzer division with 25 soldiers and 10 civilians is one thing. Inspiring that motley crew to hold the position for two months against everything an entire army can throw against you? That's the stuff of legendary heroism, that's the stuff of a character around 20th level. This guy got a squad and a bunch of civilians to go up against an army and win. Even a 20th-level wizard, unless played with all of the paranoia and forwards-planning of a forumite, would be at significant risk of death.

In all of the chaos of the conflict that Speakman ended up in, it's harder to total up his body count, but he certainly put his "fantastical" evasion to good use seeing as he was being shot at by his own side's artillery. I have to put him at least mid-level for what he accomplished, but I can't really get an exact level.

And so forth. I'm not going to assign a level to all of them, but Sergeant Pavlov showed, at the very least, the combat ability that would be expected of a 20th-level character.

Except getting results expected of a legendary hero doesn't attest to someone being level 20. Level 20, in D&D, means that you're superhuman - not necessarily superheroic, but superhuman, because even a level 20 Commoner with base stats of 10 has something like 50 HP, +10 BAB, +6 to all saves and a few skills at +8. By our world's standards, he's still a polymath who can take a few bullets to the chest and keep walking. That's a Commoner. A Fighter would literally walk up to a tank and carve it to pieces in a single round, even with a non-magical sword. A Wizard, well, the war would be over by lunch after a few well-placed Scrying+Teleport+Dominate Person combos.

Legendary heroes are such because they get unexpected results against impossible odds. Think "multiple adventuring days with nothing but Deadly and Overwhelming encounters, six times a day". That's why Pavlov and Speakman could be called legendary - they're probably level 4 or 5 and yet they did things way outside of their power scale, thus becoming the stuff of legend.

Lord Raziere
2018-12-11, 11:05 PM
I'm going to side with Lord Raziere and Ignimortis and say no, it really doesn't.

I mean it will let you do those things in the same way it let me play a social bard. Which is to say the character was fun but the social parts never had any impact. There were no mechanics to support all the social things I did and so they became nothing more than flavour text. Maybe if the campaign had gone on longer it would have developed into something actually significant. And that was a perfectly average GM, maybe a better-than-average GM could have made it work. But if you need a better-than-average GM the game system isn't really pulling its weight.

On the other hand, in a not combat focused game I played a combatant, the only one in the party. And I (well Ammanda, my character) single handily held off a swam of monsters while the rest of the party did non-combat things to get us out of there. It was my singular favourite moment and you know what anime powers were required to make it happen? Ammanda had a gun and a knife and knew how to use both. I don't enjoy D&D anymore, I've been ruined by systems that are actually good. (I am exaggerated slightly for dramatic effect, but it turns out "you don't know what you got until its gone" applies to bad things as well as good things.)

Yeah, this isn't really an "anime fighter" problem.

this is a "the system your talking about determines what the games focus is before you ever choose the class" problem.

for example, choosing a paladin in DnD is like choosing to use a fancy pistol as opposed to a regular pistol. the regular pistol is a fighter. now, the fancy pistol is fancy, but the thing that makes it appealing has nothing to do with its function. functionally speaking, a paladin is a fighter with a bunch things like divine magic added on to kill evil and such. which does it job, its functional.

problem is, its got that "paladin code and alignment requirement" attached to it, in a game where morality doesn't actually have meaning outside of who gets to hurt who more. a paladin would be a better in a game actually designed to handle someone being a paladin, but thats not DnD's focus. DnD's focus is killing things and having lots of spells to make it more convenient to kill things. its like having a knight in chess that you can only play if you draw a card, when there are no cards in chess. the alignment rule and the paladin code have nothing to do with the focus of the game and have no real impact outside of what the players give it.

similarly, rogues? are a skill class in a game where skills aren't elaborated on enough to be engaging. the reason why spellcasting classes work is not because they are powerful, its because people can engage with an elaborate system of spells, and figure out how to do various things with them.

its like designing a card game with various TCG like elements and forgetting to give a chunk of those classes similar interactions. not every deck has to have cool combos or whatever, but at least let them be more than aggro. fighter and paladin really just one aspect of this problem? druid pretty much has a similar problem in that its alignment requirements and caring about nature don't actually have anything to do with adventuring, and the class is probably better served by just removing the restrictions altogether and allowing people to play the druid- and thus discard or play out the druid fantasy in any way they want. or discard or play out the paladin fantasy any way they want. why should the game dictate how you act? screw that, if you want to play some chaotic good paladin who holds themselves to no oaths and is empowered by holy stuff anyways, I see no reason why not. the codes are honestly just distractions if your not going to establish better ways of interacting with them and playing out the morality of these people. which DnD doesn't and will never do.

really, there are a lot of issues with DnD, and they all boil down to "this game is incoherent when everyone else has learned that game focus is everything" and the fighter thing is just a symptom of that. since its the game with lots of spells for its spell classes, DnD therefore becomes the charop spell game, because thats what it focuses. and by this point, I don't really care enough to bother with fixing it. let people have their incoherent broken game if they have fun with it, life is too short to get hung up over it, I'm just analyzing for the sake of it.

geppetto
2018-12-11, 11:28 PM
Just for reference, I've had a pair of 6th level casters rout a low-magic army thousands strong over the course of a month in a campaign before. They basically just used Fly + Fireball at night, directed at whatever undefended cluster of people or supplies they could spot. It doesn't kill thousands directly, but the lack of any reasonable recourse when the aggressors can operate in a target rich environment is brutal for morale. 1% attrition per day before the actual fighting even starts, for a march that everyone knows will take a month is a strong deterrent. So I'd put 'holding off an army on your own' as a Lv6 to ~Lv10 range task in D&D.

why were the people leading the army too stupid to send out scouts during the day to look for resting wizards?

NichG
2018-12-12, 01:20 AM
why were the people leading the army too stupid to send out scouts during the day to look for resting wizards?

They did, as well as preparing baits and false targets and other countermeasures. But, it's hard for non-magical scouts to locate a party that can use Rope Trick and is moderately smart about where they hide it.

EldritchWeaver
2018-12-12, 03:18 AM
...the class is probably better served by just removing the restrictions altogether and allowing people to play the druid- and thus discard or play out the druid fantasy in any way they want. or discard or play out the paladin fantasy any way they want. why should the game dictate how you act? screw that, if you want to play some chaotic good paladin who holds themselves to no oaths and is empowered by holy stuff anyways, I see no reason why not. the codes are honestly just distractions if your not going to establish better ways of interacting with them and playing out the morality of these people. which DnD doesn't and will never do.

Just pointing out that Paizo for 2e playtest decided to broaden the Paladin class to allow all three good alignments. People quit over this. Personally, being prescriptive of how you play something should be optional in the game rules.

Unavenger
2018-12-12, 08:23 AM
why were the people leading the army too stupid to send out scouts during the day to look for resting wizards?

Plus, Pavlov would have got shot out of the sky if he'd tried that. Did this army not have bows, at least?


Except getting results expected of a legendary hero doesn't attest to someone being level 20. Level 20, in D&D, means that you're superhuman - not necessarily superheroic, but superhuman, because even a level 20 Commoner with base stats of 10 has something like 50 HP, +10 BAB, +6 to all saves and a few skills at +8. By our world's standards, he's still a polymath who can take a few bullets to the chest and keep walking. That's a Commoner. A Fighter would literally walk up to a tank and carve it to pieces in a single round, even with a non-magical sword. A Wizard, well, the war would be over by lunch after a few well-placed Scrying+Teleport+Dominate Person combos.

Legendary heroes are such because they get unexpected results against impossible odds. Think "multiple adventuring days with nothing but Deadly and Overwhelming encounters, six times a day". That's why Pavlov and Speakman could be called legendary - they're probably level 4 or 5 and yet they did things way outside of their power scale, thus becoming the stuff of legend.

50hp is about enough to take a critical hit and a regular hit from a great white shark. "Superhuman", tell Eric the badass that. A few skills at +8? I have a few skills at +8. No fighter could get through the tank's almost two thousand hit points and hardness ten with a bog-standard greatsword in a round; the tank would shoot him to death before he cracked it open. And no 4th or 5th level character could lead 25 low-level warriors and 10 low-level commoners into battle against literal hundreds of CR 16-24 encounters, even over the course of two months, and expect to survive, let alone win. EL = APL + 5 or more (assume Pavlov's squad count as a rest of a party if you think he's only 5th-level) is almost certain death. EL = APL + 15 should just be death, or at best 1 in a million of survival. We're saying that he survived hundreds of these encounters, so if you're suggesting that he's level 5, you're saying that the probability that he should have survived that is about:

0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 1

...that means that you should expect it to happen far less than once in the history of the world. There could have been a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion battles on every day that the Earth existed and the chance against a 5th-level character facing those odds and surviving would still be so titchy that you could multiply it by the cube of the number of the atoms in the universe and it would still have to be written in standard form.

There is nothing 5th-level about this character.

NichG
2018-12-12, 11:55 AM
Plus, Pavlov would have got shot out of the sky if he'd tried that. Did this army not have bows, at least?

The range of fireball for a 6th level caster is 640ft. The range increment of a longbow is 100ft. So you're looking at a -12 just from that alone. In the end, the Lv1 archers basically could only hit on a natural 20 - and even that contingent on being able to actually see the target to pick the correct 5ft square to aim at (or take their chances at guessing correctly), which is why the wizards attacked under cover of darkness, cast, and moved. When we calculated it out, even in an ambush or prepared defender scenarios, the army could not obtain a significant chance of taking out the wizards before they could successfully flee beyond the maximum range of the bows even when taking into account that this basic pattern would have to be repeated thirty times over the course of the month long march.

It bears mentioning that for an 8th level caster, one wouldn't even need to do this calculation, since a CL 8 Enlarged Fireball has a range of 1480ft, which is 280ft beyond the maximum range (10 increments) of the furthest-shooting standard weapon (repeating crossbow). So such a character can casually climb a mountain top, snipe at an army from a distance without fear of reprisal, and have 3 additional actions at minimum before any Lv1 character breaking out in a flat run could actually bring themselves into range and take a counter-shot.

Florian
2018-12-12, 02:30 PM
@NichG:

You know, it´s always fascinating to compare the results of different sub-systems. The general D20 core is a skirmish-level war game for dungeon crawling. If you extrapolate from that point, you get the results you're describing. Now take a look at PF, which offers different sub-systems to use instead of the skirmish rules when the need arises, starting with such things as uses the rules for a Chase instead, so on. What you describe would not happen, once we switch to one of the higher "zoom modes", especially the ones that deal with armies and mass combat.

Yes, there is a basic conflict there, for people who follow the "rules as physics"-approach.

Cluedrew
2018-12-12, 06:11 PM
To Florian: For those of us less knowable about (having never played) Pathfinder: could you describe these systems?

Also I think I just hit on some names for the three levels.

Level 0: Mundane (or Realistic if you want to keep mundane for non-caster, I just say "not a magic user" outside of these conversations myself) - As in real life. People like that exist and things like that happen.

Level 1: Borderline - Two main sub-types: We honestly are not sure if it is possible, at least not without going into very particular analysis, or it is possible but with astronomically low odds of working.

Level 2: Fantastic - It, in some way, shape or form, goes beyond what is possible in the real world. Most* supernatural things fall into this, but also things like the fighter or Kung Fu artist who has surpassed mundane human limits, the rogue who can hid in plan sight or the ranger that can track you by the morning due.

* all depending on how you want to call it.

RazorChain
2018-12-12, 07:24 PM
@NichG:

You know, it´s always fascinating to compare the results of different sub-systems. The general D20 core is a skirmish-level war game for dungeon crawling. If you extrapolate from that point, you get the results you're describing. Now take a look at PF, which offers different sub-systems to use instead of the skirmish rules when the need arises, starting with such things as uses the rules for a Chase instead, so on. What you describe would not happen, once we switch to one of the higher "zoom modes", especially the ones that deal with armies and mass combat.

Yes, there is a basic conflict there, for people who follow the "rules as physics"-approach.

I agree that D&D doesn't work if you limit yourself to the laws of physics or what is within the realm of possibility.

D&D is more like Star Treks technology of convenience. You apply an effect and explain it within the game rules, physics be darned.

If people don't want that then they have to use a different system like for example Gurps where falling damage is calculated by mass x velocity and factors in gravity as well.

Or like Phoenixpyre mentioned knock back from a dragon hitting you, that's factored into the Gurps combat ruled

NichG
2018-12-12, 11:48 PM
@NichG:

You know, it´s always fascinating to compare the results of different sub-systems. The general D20 core is a skirmish-level war game for dungeon crawling. If you extrapolate from that point, you get the results you're describing. Now take a look at PF, which offers different sub-systems to use instead of the skirmish rules when the need arises, starting with such things as uses the rules for a Chase instead, so on. What you describe would not happen, once we switch to one of the higher "zoom modes", especially the ones that deal with armies and mass combat.

Yes, there is a basic conflict there, for people who follow the "rules as physics"-approach.

It's also a meta-game issue, in the sense that rules act as promises that the players can hold certain things to be given (and then have the opportunity to optimize their plans under that assumption). When you have multiple subsystems, there's the consideration of who gets to choose when to use one or the other (a meta-game choice), and there's a power differential involved in who ends up controlling that decision which will affect the in-game chances of different groups to succeed or fail.

Ignimortis
2018-12-13, 11:50 AM
50hp is about enough to take a critical hit and a regular hit from a great white shark. "Superhuman", tell Eric the badass that. A few skills at +8? I have a few skills at +8. No fighter could get through the tank's almost two thousand hit points and hardness ten with a bog-standard greatsword in a round; the tank would shoot him to death before he cracked it open.


A level 5 Fighter with actual stats and not "you know, 10s in everything" can have 50 HP or about that much. With 16 CON we're looking at about 49 HP at level 5, actually. And yet Eric probably wouldn't survive a critical hit with a knife that just hit him in the heart or punctured a lung, even though D&D daggers do at best 2d4+STRx2 damage on a crit, so about 12-14 damage in good circumstances.

Why? Because that's how real world works, and it's not D&D, and D&D ceased to pretend it's anywhere realistic beyond maybe the first three to five levels a long time ago (I'd say that 3e embraced the change wholesale). Level 9 characters are superhuman, because they can survive wounds nobody on Earth would and do things considered impossible by our Earthly standards, like jumping 8 feet straight up without much trouble (Leap of the Heavens means you don't need a run-up and you get +5 if you do that, it's a DC 32 Jump/Acrobatics check, you can have +12 from skill, +5 from STR, +3 from Skill Focus, +2 from Athletic or something, there, you can take 10 and get a 32 check every time and that's without explicit superpowers or magic coming in. Leaping Dragon Stance just gives you 10 feet bonus at level 5).

D&D doesn't simulate reality in too much detail. That much is obvious, because to qualify for probable level 20 Fighterdom in D&D-rules-verse you actually would need to take on a platoon of armed fighters by yourself and win solo, then regenerate your injuries in about a week of bed rest despite tanking wounds that would probably kill a normal man ten times over and then get dropped from the orbit and survive, since an average level 20 Fighter would survive that just by having 20 CON and about 250 HP, which is more than falling damage can ever deal.

Oh, and various Ubercharger and Hood builds would like a word about that 2k HP on a Tank. Hell, even a normal slightly optimized Fighter might still be able to deal with it, because that hardness 10 doesn't mean jack when a tank has an AC of 2. Power Attack for 20 BAB, get +40 on each hit, do about 200 damage per round, can't miss except on a natural 1, can't be actually hit except on a natural 20 unless denied access to their WBL, so even a poor build would probably make mincemeat out of a tank in a minute or two.

Imagine seeing a guy in shining knight armor just run up to a tank and carve it to pieces in about a minute of hopping about? And he can do it naked and with a combat knife in five minutes unless he dies first. And his better-trained and better-equipped brother can just charge, jump high in the air and land on the tank, swing wildly for 6 seconds and make a pile of metal scrap.


And no 4th or 5th level character could lead 25 low-level warriors and 10 low-level commoners into battle against literal hundreds of CR 16-24 encounters, even over the course of two months, and expect to survive, let alone win. EL = APL + 5 or more (assume Pavlov's squad count as a rest of a party if you think he's only 5th-level) is almost certain death. EL = APL + 15 should just be death, or at best 1 in a million of survival. We're saying that he survived hundreds of these encounters, so if you're suggesting that he's level 5, you're saying that the probability that he should have survived that is about:

...that means that you should expect it to happen far less than once in the history of the world. There could have been a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion battles on every day that the Earth existed and the chance against a 5th-level character facing those odds and surviving would still be so titchy that you could multiply it by the cube of the number of the atoms in the universe and it would still have to be written in standard form.

There is nothing 5th-level about this character.

That's the whole point. Levels by themselves are not indicative of the opposition the character is expected to take on and win, it's a separate subsystem, and what actual levels in D&D dictate is how durable you are and how good you are at your stuff. If you can't take 40 damage without risk of dying outright, then you're, at best, a level 20 wizard who dumped CON. A trained soldier who presumably has d8 hit dice at least should be able to take double that amount and still be standing. You can't be a level 20 D&D Fighter if a single stab wound from a non-magical knife to the chest kills you. Even level 5 is questionable under this criterion. Real people can, by their wit, ingenuity and sheer luck, do things that aren't possible for similarly statted D&D characters, and yet fail to do anything that would definitively qualify them for high levels.

Talakeal
2018-12-13, 01:07 PM
I agree that D&D doesn't work if you limit yourself to the laws of physics or what is within the realm of possibility.

D&D is more like Star Treks technology of convenience. You apply an effect and explain it within the game rules, physics be darned.

If people don't want that then they have to use a different system like for example Gurps where falling damage is calculated by mass x velocity and factors in gravity as well.

Or like Phoenixpyre mentioned knock back from a dragon hitting you, that's factored into the Gurps combat ruled

You will never find a game that perfectly simulates reality. GURPS may be closer than D&D, but it is still very abstracted in many ways.

I personally think the ability to mentally divorce the game mechanics from the narrative is more i portant than looking for a game that perfectly simulates the world you want to imagine.

RazorChain
2018-12-13, 10:22 PM
You will never find a game that perfectly simulates reality. GURPS may be closer than D&D, but it is still very abstracted in many ways.

I personally think the ability to mentally divorce the game mechanics from the narrative is more i portant than looking for a game that perfectly simulates the world you want to imagine.


Nothing can simulate reality but reality itself. I try to find systems with mechanics that support the narrative.

Florian
2018-12-13, 10:57 PM
Hm....

There's a concrete flaw in this kind of thinking. It is not that hard to model physics, but it is rather hard to model something that is unknown or to simplify things by way of creating a game system that can still be used at a table without bogging down actual game play.

The "Guy in the Gym"-Fallacy often comes up when a system either produces or expects system-based results that are (starkly) as odds with the expectations one might have based on RL physics, or the abstractions that are used tend to produce absolutely wrong results.

For the later, there's actually quite a good example. In AD&D 1st, combat was a continuous thing with all involved being imaging as always attacking, dodging and parrying, all the time. The "to attack" roll and multiple attacks gained by specialization, represented not individual attacks/strikes/hits per se, you did that all the time, but rather the chance(s) to break through the opponents defenses. Therefore combat rounds of 10 minutes, re-rolling of initiative, individual action speed based on weapons and the chance to interrupt actions, as the whole simulation here was based on the flow of combat, not on the individual actions. In a sense, the move to 3E/d20 actually killed that, if you get my meaning.

geppetto
2018-12-13, 11:04 PM
They did, as well as preparing baits and false targets and other countermeasures. But, it's hard for non-magical scouts to locate a party that can use Rope Trick and is moderately smart about where they hide it.

No not really. In a world where thats a common possibility scouts would have dogs or some other scent animal and if they got anywhere near the camp they would smell where they landed to set up and leads the scouts right there like treeing a cougar.

You would also visually follow the little buggers down and be able to tell where they landed within a reasonably small area. Making it especially easy for an army which would be able to send out hundreds of people and animals to scour the area to find them. Hunters and scientists capture or kill actual predatory birds this way every day.

Problems like this are more of a failure of GM problem solving skills then ruleset.

geppetto
2018-12-13, 11:15 PM
You will never find a game that perfectly simulates reality. GURPS may be closer than D&D, but it is still very abstracted in many ways.

I personally think the ability to mentally divorce the game mechanics from the narrative is more i portant than looking for a game that perfectly simulates the world you want to imagine.

We need an upvote button.

Talakeal
2018-12-14, 11:26 AM
Out of curiosity, do other d20 games like d20 modern that are explicitly not trying to model high fantasy superheroes actually have more complex rules for physics?

I personally play a lot of sword and sorcery style RPGs and tabletop war games that are explicitly lower power levels than D&D and take place in much more Earth like worlds and I can't think of any of them that don't use linear damage for falling or have people be moved around in combat based on the force of their enemies blow; although I do know of a few where you always move back when you lose combat, move back based on damage taken, or can be intentionally pushed a good distance by a larger opponent.



Nothing can simulate reality but reality itself. I try to find systems with mechanics that support the narrative.

I am not actually sure what you mean by this. Could you please elaborate?

Are you making a Ron Edwards style GNS argument? Or are you saying that the rules of D&D and similar games do not support their narrative?


I think everyone likes systems that support the narrative, they just have different levels of abstraction they are willing to tolerate to make the game actually playable at the table.

Florian
2018-12-14, 11:43 AM
Uff. Yeah, there were some systems around that used D20 as basis but tried harder to not give D20 the lead but instead either model physics or a genre. D20 Traveller and Conan come to my mind.

I find the other statement to be quite clear, actually. We already have a more or less good understanding how complex systems like physics should behave, because we experience them as part of daily existing (I take you hostage and slit your throat, it´s not 1d4+2 against your 120hp, for example). Mind that I said understanding of, not insight in, which is quite different. Based on that, we actually are capable of imaging situations with different rules and physics, but we often need the crutch of rules and abstractions to deal with those.

Edit: Edwards was not wrong on this account. Using our knowledge as a crutch to handle things in-game shackles us to that very knowledge, see: Verisimilitude.

NichG
2018-12-14, 02:16 PM
No not really. In a world where thats a common possibility scouts would have dogs or some other scent animal and if they got anywhere near the camp they would smell where they landed to set up and leads the scouts right there like treeing a cougar.

You would also visually follow the little buggers down and be able to tell where they landed within a reasonably small area. Making it especially easy for an army which would be able to send out hundreds of people and animals to scour the area to find them. Hunters and scientists capture or kill actual predatory birds this way every day.

Problems like this are more of a failure of GM problem solving skills then ruleset.

We can continue to quibble about the details of the scenario but I think it's generally unproductive to do so. We will inevitably start setting up more and more elaborate strawmen of 'what ifs?' that diverge from the actual course of play which occurred. You can ask 'what if the army tried using dogs to track the wizards?' and I can say 'okay, how do the dogs get the scent to tell the wizards apart from the 1000 other humans that have been moving through the area?' and then you might say 'well, the wizards must have had lunch in the area and scouts could find an old campground' and I might say 'okay, so when the scouts go out and look and don't find anything like that, what then?' and so on and so on. In the end, what we're really discussing is, 'does this outcome seem authentic?', and if it doesn't feel authentic then any sort of discussion of hypothetical moves and counter-moves will just reflect that bias.

So to get at the heart of it, why doesn't the outcome seem authentic to you?

If, for example, you sent a small squad of modern soldiers armed with rocket launchers and a helicopter and a daily supply of rockets and fuel at a medieval army numbering around a thousand, I'd expect exactly this outcome. For that matter, even for two modern nations, if it would be the case that one force had air support and the other didn't, one would expect that even a handful of planes and their pilots would have an effect on the outcome of similar scale to differences of hundreds or even thousands of soldiers on the ground. So when you replace a couple of attack helicopters with a pair of individuals that personally wield weapons with roughly similar parameters, what changes? Would it matter if I hadn't told you the level of the characters - e.g. if it were a pair of Lv20 wizards lazily using the exact same plan of action as these Lv6 characters?

Note, I don't consider the two wizards routing the army as a failure of the ruleset or even as a problem. Because such outcomes are possible, that means that it is reasonable to say to the players 'you have a month, there's an army of 1st level rabble coming to cause problems for this place you care about, solve it'. And since this was an E6 campaign, in the end this particular interaction helped establish the '6th level is epic' concept quite well.

EldritchWeaver
2018-12-14, 03:20 PM
If you employ Spheres of Power, then you can employ magic attacks all day (or all night). I can think of builds being able to destroy that army without anyone being able to fight back. You can get enough range and infinite "fireballs" and long flight duration. A bit more efficient than flying archers and unlimited ammunition, who need also DR 10/bludgeoning to avoid damage by enemy arrows.

RazorChain
2018-12-14, 03:41 PM
I am not actually sure what you mean by this. Could you please elaborate?

Are you making a Ron Edwards style GNS argument? Or are you saying that the rules of D&D and similar games do not support their narrative?


I think everyone likes systems that support the narrative, they just have different levels of abstraction they are willing to tolerate to make the game actually playable at the table.

If I'm going to play a game that focuses on a fantastic dungeon romp then D&D is great and has everything I need, so it pretty much supports it's core narrative. Instead of trying to metnally divorce the mechanics from the narrative I'd rather choose mechanics that support the narrative. If the mechanics/system is in the way or breaking the immersion then I'd rather not use it.

Let's take the people who want to play a guy in the gym, D&D doesn't support it at higher level. I tried to play a mixed martial artist based on Conor Mcgregor using the monk in 5e but had a hard time why he could run up walls suddenly and achieved all kinds of fantastic powers. I just had to accept the fact that he had become fantastic.

If I don't want the mechanics to get in the way in any kind of form or shape I'll just use a very light system like Prime Time Adventures, Twerps or just freeform.

I mean there are lot's of people that love to optimize or tinker with their characters and like to engage with the mechanics of the game, for some this is one of the biggest factor for them. I value immersion more and I hate systems that don't allow me to do reasonable things because the mechanics don't allow it.

RazorChain
2018-12-14, 03:52 PM
Uff. Yeah, there were some systems around that used D20 as basis but tried harder to not give D20 the lead but instead either model physics or a genre. D20 Traveller and Conan come to my mind.

I find the other statement to be quite clear, actually. We already have a more or less good understanding how complex systems like physics should behave, because we experience them as part of daily existing (I take you hostage and slit your throat, it´s not 1d4+2 against your 120hp, for example). Mind that I said understanding of, not insight in, which is quite different. Based on that, we actually are capable of imaging situations with different rules and physics, but we often need the crutch of rules and abstractions to deal with those.

Edit: Edwards was not wrong on this account. Using our knowledge as a crutch to handle things in-game shackles us to that very knowledge, see: Verisimilitude.

This is what I call realistic expectation in gaming. Get a noob, tell him nothing about the mechanics of D&D and allow him to blunder into walls when you veto perfectly reasonable things that the system doesn't allow for and allow for things that make no sense in the context of realistic expectation.

Most people accept it because it's a game, like when you hit that invisible wall in a CRPG and can get no further and you think "Ah yeah limitations, the world ends here."

I agree you don't have to model physics perfectly, you only have to cater to peoples realistic expectations. Or you can just do without it and cater to their fantastical expectations, tell them it's a superhero game and they expect people to fly and punch through walls

Talakeal
2018-12-14, 07:29 PM
If I'm going to play a game that focuses on a fantastic dungeon romp then D&D is great and has everything I need, so it pretty much supports it's core narrative. Instead of trying to metnally divorce the mechanics from the narrative I'd rather choose mechanics that support the narrative. If the mechanics/system is in the way or breaking the immersion then I'd rather not use it.

Let's take the people who want to play a guy in the gym, D&D doesn't support it at higher level. I tried to play a mixed martial artist based on Conor Mcgregor using the monk in 5e but had a hard time why he could run up walls suddenly and achieved all kinds of fantastic powers. I just had to accept the fact that he had become fantastic.

If I don't want the mechanics to get in the way in any kind of form or shape I'll just use a very light system like Prime Time Adventures, Twerps or just freeform.

I mean there are lot's of people that love to optimize or tinker with their characters and like to engage with the mechanics of the game, for some this is one of the biggest factor for them. I value immersion more and I hate systems that don't allow me to do reasonable things because the mechanics don't allow it.

This is all well and good, and I don't think you will run into many people who disagree with you here.*

But I was originally talking about shortcuts like linear falling damage and the models remaining within the same space in combat and whether they were part of the game's fictional narrative or simple mechanical limitations of the tabletop medium that are necessary to keep play moving, not pretending a guy who can run up walls is just a normal joe.


*Although, I will argue that, barring magic items, the D&D fighter is generic enough that you can use it to play the "guy at the gym" at level 20 well enough, just as you can use it to play Achilles or Captain America, because the fighters only real gimmick is "fights good" which is pretty easy to imagine at any level of grittiness.