The Man Keeping the Martial Down

[Cluedrew]

So I think caster/martial disparity does exist. I'm not going to pin down exactly what it is here or how much of a problem it is in a given system. I have had long decisions about that and more on the subject already. But there is one thing that I can't ever remember coming up directly. That is how do the base rules of a system, not even getting into the caster or martial particular rules, effect caster/martial disparity?

(By the way, "the man" means "the system" or here base rules. I'm not sure how common that saying is.)

As you might of guessed, I think the answer is they actually hinder the martial. Before I get into the reasons as to why, let me explain my analysis. First I am assuming the caster and martial are supposed to be equal. If a caster vs. a martial army is the balance point or martial heroes are supported by caster fortune-tellers, then we would have to look at this from a different perspective. Second I am comparing conceptual vs. mechanical and seeing how the two archetypes are effect by that conversion. The conceptual character, whether they be a martial or a caster, is the one as laid out in gene (or just system) fiction. The mechanical character is the one in play, how is that concept filtered through the rules and the result. Third I am just looking at the basic rules and how they slant things. It is entirely possible to put special rules in place or tweak the numbers to compensate for what I talking about here.

Now, let's get down to the rules systems that effect caster/martial disparity:


HP: Starting high, the representation of health can sway the matter. HP is any system that uses two numbers, maximum and current. Current hitting 0 is significant and few other totals are nearly as significant if any. Also the maximum can usually vary widely.
Status Conditions: Dead might be the strongest debuff, but if the others are easy to inflict they can really change the flow of battle. And casters usually get way more ability to inflict them.
Burst vs DPS: Casters tend to burst and martials tend to strike repeatedly. When combat revolves around reaching a certain total, this can go either way. If casters can burst down entire HP bars then it favours them. If casters cannot then the steady damage of a martial is better.
100% at 2%: Following again from the fact you don't weaken as you take damage. Characters who strike quickly (and hence first) suffer for this a bit. But one group that really beliefs from this are those who thematically take a lot of hits and keep on fighting. So this one is in favour of the martial characters.
Save-or-Dies: Not actually a base rule or effect but I had to call this out. Being turned to stone is lethal yes, but so is having your head chopped off with a sword. Its the same thing and whatever abstraction you are using to represent an attack, stick with it please, don't let certain abilities skip the hole process.
Turn Based Combat: While mechanically simple dividing time into slices and then ordering everything within that slice (possibly rearranging the actual order of each event) is a very significant change from reality. The effects are strongest in one turn per character per round systems, weakens a bit with variable numbers of turns and more with off-turn actions.
No Reflexes: Actually the main reason, the others are sort of special cases of this one idea. Characters cannot react freely to what other characters are doing. Even if you are single step from cover, you cannot dive into it as someone lines a shot up at you. This is recovered in part by defensive dodge roles and other abstractions, but still the ones that suffer for it the most are those who are supposed to act and react quickly.
Locked In Place: This one I have to explain by metaphor. Imagine a system that uses square-grid based combat and characters can restrict movement in spaces adjacent to their own. How does a single character defend a four space wide hallway? Casters have various spells that might help, a martial has to turn around and chase the enemies that just ran by.
No Interruptions: No matter how big and awkward what your doing is, if it can be done in one turn no one can get in the way. Martial who use range weapons benefit from this, but casters even more so. The rules that try to patch this gap tend to be a lot more generous than the more realistic answer of "sorry".
Exception Based Abilities: This one is not even a rule, but a form of organization. Games whose rules are all written at once can account for every option, ones with expanding generally allow exceptions to override the base rules. The simpler your base and the more exceptions you have the more these apply.
Counters Not Included: When a special rule is given to a character, it is generally for that character to use. What are not included are the things other characters would need to counter that. Meaning that characters with complex special rules can leave others in a position where they just have to hope they can take it, with little or no ability to proactively counter the ability.
Scaling Core: On the opposite end, if the base doesn't scale very well than those who rely on it will fall behind. A simple example is a skill system that as you improve gives you better chances of success and nothing else. That is it never opens up new options and then it becomes a matter of: is a maxed out chance of success at something everyone can do match a special ability only a few can do? In my experience, no.
And that is what I have. If I had to summarize the whole section it would be: you can't just slap on special cases to get what you want. The base rules need to be designed with what you are going for as well. So if you want casters and martials to be on equal footing, the system should be designed for that as well.

[Willie the Duck]

Nothing here is wrong, I'm just not seeing a primary argument. Is this just a running tally of ways you think different parts of game system architecture work to the magic user's benefit, compared to a martial?

On a second note, the thread title seems too confrontational compared to the actual meat of your position. Everyone has read entirely too many 'why can't martials ever get any love?'-style threads (usually bringing up the valid statement that martials are often given short shrift in TTRPGs, but also often just whining about this fact), and frankly that's what I thought this was going to be. A more restrained thread title might serve your purposes better.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Even before any of that, I think you need to look at the basic ideas of the game. Does your setting encourage warrior/mage disparity? If you start with the swords-and-sorcery ideal of the brave warrior triumphing over the evil mage through grit and willpower, it's almost inevitable that your rules will come down in favor of magic-- the underlying assumption is that wizards are powerful and fighters are the underdogs. Like, the best example of caster/martial equality in a crunchy system I can think of is Exalted, which is built from the assumption that you're a demigod who can leap tall buildings in a single bound, mind-control crowds with a single speech, and teach your pet dog to breathe fire because you're Just That Good. It's a lot easier to balance spells against a baseline like that than it is when your base is Conan.

[Max_Killjoy]

Even before any of that, I think you need to look at the basic ideas of the game. Does your setting encourage warrior/mage disparity? If you start with the swords-and-sorcery ideal of the brave warrior triumphing over the evil mage through grit and willpower, it's almost inevitable that your rules will come down in favor of magic-- the underlying assumption is that wizards are powerful and fighters are the underdogs. Like, the best example of caster/martial equality in a crunchy system I can think of is Exalted, which is built from the assumption that you're a demigod who can leap tall buildings in a single bound, mind-control crowds with a single speech, and teach your pet dog to breathe fire because you're Just That Good. It's a lot easier to balance spells against a baseline like that than it is when your base is Conan.

On the flip side, it also matters what you want magic to be able to do in the setting. When healing, small buffs and nerfs, daily-life utility effects, and basic attacks that aren't much more dangerous than weapons are for the most part the extent of the magic most characters (including PCs) will ever get, then your "martial" characters aren't outclassed.

The problem comes when there's a disparity between what the two can accomplish.

[Cluedrew]

On the Primary Argument: Maybe I should have opened with it as well, but it is roughly: Consider and design/choose core rules that support your final vision. With a focus on how this shows up in caster/martial disparity because that is how I got there and because I am on a constant quest to figure out why caster/martial disparity is not a solved problem.

On the Thread Title: I guess it seems a bit charged. I should probably also try to focus on the general take away as well. "A Discussion of How Core Rules have Unintended Consequences on Caster/Martial Balance" feels a bit unwieldy though. Any ideas?

On Setting Concept: I'm assuming action fantasy, which is what I have dubbed the more modern fantasy often seen in games where physical and mystic powers are seen on both sides. Although often in different forms (knights vs. assassins, healers vs. necromancers). I think it is prominent in games because it opens up more play options. And most of the time those options are supposed to be similar in power. (So Grod_The_Giant: You are right but I feel like the gene has shifted over the years.)

On Underdogs: In my experience, underdog doesn't mean "well and truly inferior" but "disadvantaged background", "an underestimated strength" or sometimes as little as "an unexpected demographic". I mean there are stories where the hero wins against all odds, but usually I find the odds actually were in there favour the whole time, it just didn't look like it at first. But then I consider the willingness to work hard and the determination to push through as kinds of strength.

[Gallowglass]

So I think caster/martial disparity does exist.
...
Now, let's get down to the rules systems that effect caster/martial disparity:
...


So, okay, what are your solutions? That would be far more interesting and worthwhile that posting a comprehensive list of what everyone already knows.

First, you are obviously talking about some flavor of D&D because other systems don't have the same problems.
You didn't post it in a particular D&D Subforum so I can only guess what version you play.

I exclusively play 3.5/Pathfinder. (I'm going to guess that you are talking 5e) which means any answers I give will be useless to you.

For example, on of your problem areas is "Turn Based Combat: No Interruptions." But my version of D&D/Pathfinder has readied actions which, my tables, interpret to mean "If you ready an action to trigger on 'enemy starts doing this...' then your readied action proceeds the completion of their action. (Which, frankly I don't want to talk RAW and RAI here, its the only reasonable reason for the rule to exist. So if you want to respond to this with "you are using readied actions wrong! just... don't.) And it also has Attacks of Opportunity. When 3.0 first came out and replace 2e, attacks of opportunity where my least favorite addtion/change. They were so messy. But over the years, as I came to understand and embrace them, now I sometimes build entire chassis around using AoO effectively.

So there IS a built in action to allow counter-spelling and interrupting casting and moving to guard a 15' hallway. Its needlessly cumbersome, but its there. It could certainly be IMPROVED, but doing so would require modifying some core mechanics and probably isnt' worth it.

I'm -told- that 5e doesn't allow this which, okay, I don't know that for sure, as I've only played one session of 5e like three years ago. So that's why I assume you are talking 5e.

So, long story medium, I agree with your contention. All flavors of D&D have mechanics that service the needs of the caster over the martial.

This is because spell-casting was strapped on top of the martial combat system so it has poor interaction with it.

But, in my opinion, the REAL disparity isn't one you have listed. The real disparity is that the Caster gets a wide variety of spells that affect the OTHER systems outside of combat. They trivialize the skill-system, they trivialize the social system, they trivialize the making money systems, they trivialize all the other systems. And the spells interaction with those simpler and less structured subsystem is even greater and more devastating that their effect on combat.

[Telok]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems to be primarialy about thr WotC d20 D&Ds and the variants of them.

Most supers RPGs don't seem to have most/any of these issues. The Warhammer and Storyteller systems don't fit this. While I haven't played ShadowRun since 3e it doesn't seem to fit (except maybe some of the stuff with spirits). Pendragon and Call of Cthulhu are strongly themed to have magic users as almost exclusively opponent NPCs.

I don't recall these being an issue with early era AD&D, but I do think some items were appearing in a couple of the later AD&D games I played.

[Willie the Duck]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems to be primarialy about thr WotC d20 D&Ds and the variants of them.

Most supers RPGs don't seem to have most/any of these issues. The Warhammer and Storyteller systems don't fit this. While I haven't played ShadowRun since 3e it doesn't seem to fit (except maybe some of the stuff with spirits). Pendragon and Call of Cthulhu are strongly themed to have magic users as almost exclusively opponent NPCs.

I don't recall these being an issue with early era AD&D, but I do think some items were appearing in a couple of the later AD&D games I played.

There are definitely a few assumptions that probably are best to be declared. First and foremost, any game where all the players or none of the players are powerful magic users probably isn't a good fit for the situation (if you are playing Knights of the Round Table, and Merlin is a DMPC there to give you your quest, and Morgan Le Fay is the primary villain, than magic-martial disparity is part of the challenge, likewise the thrilling adventures of Merlin, Gandalf, and Dr. Strange also will not see a problem). Further, magic has to be able to do something that non-magic can't do (if comic book superhero character Ghostboy can walk through walls, but Impossible man can just punch through it, well then one effect being 'magic' is a distinction without consequence. CoC*, Superheroes games/Exalted, Storyteller**, and the like mostly fall into these categories.
*where you could theoretically play someone who knew spells, but given the SAN cost, you rarely, if ever, ended up actually doing so.
**where everyone in a given game was effectively the same level of 'mage'-ness

The TSR-D&D/Shadowrun/Warhammer situation is certainly a better example of having done the balance better than WotC-D&D, despite theoretically facing the same issues. In these cases, each decision has an opportunity cost. Shadowrun Mages give up a very real amount of build resources to get powers which are... nice, but do not overshadow guns or cyberclaws. AD&D wizards can do things that fighters can't... once or twice a day*, and that limitation has some actual teeth to it.
*plus, given how much of a fighter's actual power is more favorable from the magic item charts, the fighter may well have a magic sword which lets him cast those spells too

Mind you, particularly with TSR-era D&D, these issues could become problems, particularly at high levels and/or if you started poking at things/modifying things (such that some of the magic user constraints were lessoned), and people did that all the time. So you absolutely could see these problems with pre-WotC D&D, and many people did.

[Khedrac]

For a lot of these, I think it is less the concept but more the implementation tha provides the disparity.

For example:


Save-or-Dies: Not actually a base rule or effect but I had to call this out. Being turned to stone is lethal yes, but so is having your head chopped off with a sword. Its the same thing and whatever abstraction you are using to represent an attack, stick with it please, don't let certain abilities skip the hole process.
These don't inherently favour casters over martials, it's down to implementation.
Take (A)D&D
In 1st/2nd Ed/BECMI saving throws fall as levels increase so high level targets of spells very rarely fail them (1 in 20) - in general Save or Die spells are a mistake in combat unless you have nothing else useful to do - a damage spell will at least do somethng when they make their save while most save or dies did nothing.
In 3/3.5 Ed saving throws increase, but it is usually possible for casters to push the difficulty of the saving throw up faster than the save. Even if they keep pace, spells usually have a 50% chance of working - much better than 1 in 20. As a result save-or-die effects have a much bigger impact on game play and caster/martial disparity.

RoleMaster (and MERP) criticals are another example of "process shortcuts" as you call them (*nice term*) - they apply equally to maritals and casters, but it could be easier for martials to push their attack skills to get the criticals in the first place. That said, I think the balance was reasonable, but the spiky nature of fumble and criticals could badly upset expected combat results without causing disparity.

[Cluedrew]

On System: I have seen these in D&D 3.X and 5 and that is the only place I have seen all of them together. Systems with more symmetric ability design tend to avoid the worst aspects of exception based approach, both because those would be evenly distributed and because they tend not to stratify the rules in the same way. Systems that use more fluid action rules, or even through them out and let people do things in the order you think they should happen avoid problem with turn order and so on.

On Solutions: I love solving problems. I haven't said too much about it here because of a few reasons. First let me understand the problem, which includes hearing other people's opinions on the matter. Next these things are only problems if the consequences are unintended and uncompensated. You can run with these things or you can use other rules to account for their effects. I do take the final option in my own system, which is to replace these rules with others.

The health system is not quite pinned down, but currently it has a fix sized track and I am looking into negative modifiers for pain. I go with a narrative initiative system (whoever would go next does) and use similar rules for interruptions. I have an symmetric skill system that consumes almost the entire rule set that is more modular than exception based (which might just come down to knowing the exceptions ahead of time). System is still under development, but there are plenty of complete systems out there that have solved this problem.

And I've been a bit distracted while writing this post so some new posts have slipped in and I generally agree with them. Yes, even Khedrac saying that this isn't the major issue. Its just that has been covered again and again and I don't think this has been covered at all.

[Arbane]

Most supers RPGs don't seem to have most/any of these issues.

It can be a problem - quite a few supers systems let you define magic (or shapeshifting, or a green power ring) as a 'do anything' power that you can re-allocate as needed. This usually costs massively more than other characters' pre-set powers so it balances reasonably well, but it still offers all sorts of opportunities to break the plot if you're creative with it.

[Quertus]

Save-or-Dies: Not actually a base rule or effect but I had to call this out. Being turned to stone is lethal yes, but so is having your head chopped off with a sword. Its the same thing and whatever abstraction you are using to represent an attack, stick with it please, don't let certain abilities skip the hole process.[/

So, hmmm... I disagree with a number of your assertions. We'll take them one at a time, but let's start with the one above, because I disagree with it the most.

MtG is an awesome game because of the diversity of the play experience. Yes, by default, your opponent has 20 life, and your goal is to remove those 20 life. But you can also beat them by giving them 10 poison counters. Or having them draw from an empty deck. Or various "I win / you lose" cards. And that's ignoring the massive number of ways to facilitate the struggle, from resources to resource denial to battlefield manipulation to...

Torpedoing Role-playing doesn't stop when dice come out. I'm happy with my friends playing tactical basketball simulator. But, while they're doing that, I'm playing highschool drama. In other words, the easiest way to ensure that everyone has fun, everyone feels that they have a role to play, is to allow multiple vectors of fun simultaneously.

This sentiment that you express, that games should be samey and one-dimensional? I am strongly opposed to it. Queue jab at 4e. :smallwink:

The greatest advantage of an RPG over a cRPG… is open to debate*, granted, but I'll contend that is the ability to "rule 0" - to create rules on the fly for things that aren't covered by the rules.

When you've limited progress to a single dimension, it's simply a question how far along the progress bar a given action will take you. Even 4e wasn't that one-dimensional!

Or, let's look at Battletech. Sure, on the surface, it looks a lot like "dealing damage is the only thing". But, no, you can manipulate damage, heat, positioning, pilot damage, and whether the opposing mech is standing (which affects movement options), and even LoS. And even damage isn't against a pool of HP - big hits are more likely to disable limbs or even kill the pilot in one hit, whereas lots of hits for small damage are better for disabling damaged mechs, while the "best" weapons in the game deal their damage in inefficient, middling quantities. Physical attacks are much more likely to give status effects (like "knocked over" or "pilot dead"), but come at a penalty of occurring after Weapon attacks.

No matter which way you slice it, being able to approach things from multiple vectors is good.

Balance to the table. If your damage is so high that the SoD character never gets a chance to shine, it might be time to tone it back. If the Diplomacer is so bad that every fight actually happens, maybe it's time for them step up their game.

They're is absolutely no problem inherent to multiple vectors to victory (as evidenced by even one let alone multiple popular games which features such). That's my hill to die on.

* Another strong contender, for example, is "spending time IRL with your friends"

[Gallowglass]

With D&D 3.5/P one of the problems it the sheer number of different systems being used in any character. There are so many of them!

Each PC has 8! health pools. The HP health pool, the level health pool, and each attribute is its own health pool. The core combat mechanic shrinks the HP health pool, but there are disparate spells/powers/abilities/items/etc that allow you to focus on the attribute health-pools or level health-pool instead. The HP health pool has NO discernible effect on the usefulness of the character until it is 100% extinguished. The attribute and level health-pools gradually make the character worse as they are extinguished. The HP health pool has a large number of ways to replenish it, the other pools have smaller and more difficult ways to replenish them. In addition the HP health-pool grows quickly as the character levels, but the level health pool only goes up by 1 each level and the attribute health pools only go up VERY slowly, if at all, through a 1 every 4 level addition naturally and using spells and items to increase them on an arbitrary basis. A 20th level character very likely has three or four attribute health pools that are the exact same as they were when they were 1st level! And the other ones are likely only 1.5 to 2x what they were at level 1. Whereas the level Health pool is 20x what it was and the HP health pool is likely also nearly 20x what it was.

Even the most basic level of optimization tells you that it's far more effective to concentrate on the non-HP health pools. The caster has a large number of spells and abilities to do so in core. The martial really doesn't in core. This is because, when the combat system was designed, it ONLY used the HP health-pool. When spells were strapped on top of the combat system, they used these alternate effects to give it flavor and increase the options of the spellcaster. There's a reason why when you add ToB, SoM, and PoW, so many of the new abilities they add to the martial shift their focus to the alternate health pools.

Then you have defense! Each PC has >8! defenses. The Core combat defense is AC, but they have multiple flavors of AC for situational purposes. Touch AC, Flatfooted AC. AC is more fluid than offensive numbers. Then you have three saving throws as alternate defenses. Then you have SR and DR. Then you add on top abilities/features and spells that have negating or modifying effects on attacks against you. Once again, the martial, in core, really only attacks against AC and DR. The caster, on the other hand, can target whatever defense they want to and tend to go for whatever they think is the weakest defense. There's a reason why, when you add ToB, SoM and PoW, so many of the new abilities they add to the martial shift their focus to the alternate defenses.

So, your end goal is to -fix- the core mechanic to "fix" the disparity between the martial and the caster? I don't know how to do it, but I would start the thought exercise by simplifying. And then when you build it back up keep the core mechanic with a simple rule.

For every health pool, both the martial and caster have to have equal access to build toward aiming at each health pool

For every defense, both the martial and caster have to have equal access to build toward aiming at each defense.

That doesn't mean every character has to have the ability to target each defense and health pool, just that they have access to abilities that can while building their characters. You can build broadly to try and have something that will work for each defense and health pool, or you can specialize to only have something for a couple defenses and health pools but be much better at it.

Right now, the martial is forced to default to "really good at the one defense and health pool" with no ability to chose differently. The caster OTOH can choose to be "really good at ANY one defense and health pool" or "moderately good at all defenses and health pools." Hence the disparity.

And this is ONLY in combat. I'm just touching on doing damage and mitigating damage. You have a nearly endless number of non-combat minigames involved as well. Most use Skill-checks. Once again, the Martial has no features other than adding points as they level. But the Caster has access to spells and features that greatly alter the skill mini-games making them largely breakable with ease. Or bypassable.

This is a much harder nut to crack and one I'm not ready to take a stab at right now. But you should add it to your list.

[Kaptin Keen]

I have a ... sliver of a fix in my games: Barbarians can activate Rage to trigger a reroll, including all bonuses, against any status effects affecting them. It's a bit academic - no one plays a barbarian - but it does make Barbarians interesting wizard counters, in a way that's safisfyingly Conan-esque.

It's by no means Die Endlösung to the disparity - just a small fix that makes mages slightly unsure of themselves around big, hairy men in loincloths.

[Jama7301]

So, hmmm... I disagree with a number of your assertions. We'll take them one at a time, but let's start with the one above, because I disagree with it the most.

MtG is an awesome game because of the diversity of the play experience. Yes, by default, your opponent has 20 life, and your goal is to remove those 20 life. But you can also beat them by giving them 10 poison counters. Or having them draw from an empty deck. Or various "I win / you lose" cards. And that's ignoring the massive number of ways to facilitate the struggle, from resources to resource denial to battlefield manipulation to...



But most decks do regular damage + one gimmick. Infect decks aren't going to deal poison counters AND Mill you out AND get their damage through Graveyard Manipulation AND Counter you so you don't get to play, while still being a playable deck. In that game, if you try to generalize like that, you're deck is going to be massive, or not be very good at any one thing.

Variety of play is great! When one type of player gets to have most of the variety though, that's not great. Wizards are like a Magic the Gathering deck that touch on all sorts of gimmicks at minimal cost.

[Potato_Priest]

As far as the setting keeping the martials down goes, here is an excellent explanation of why it happens by Necroticplague. I have linked (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?526170-Martials-in-D-amp-D-and-similar-games-a-rambling&p=22060823&viewfull=1#post22060823) the post because I can't quote it directly.


I always thought the problem was that the two are held to different standards because of the types of characters they were based off of. Martials are based off of characters like Aragon, Conan, Batman, King Arthur: people who the stories center around, the protagonists. Their abilities get well-explored, and are always challenged, to provide a sense of tension. Meanwhile, mages tend to be based around Merlin, Gandalf, Saruman: people who basically act as just living plot devices, and are typically absent much of the story. They're DEM-lites, essentially. Giving that poorly-defined plot-device abilities into hands of those who aren't fettered by the same narrative shackles drastically changes things. Stuff goes from "every once in a while, when I've written myself into a corner" to "constantly, as is convenient".

That's why I beleive martials are shackled by having SOME kind of ceiling to struggle against, while mages get a free pass. Martials are the heroes who must overcome adversity, wizards are the walking DEMs who don't have limits so they can do anything to move the plot forward.

[Cazero]

TFurther, magic has to be able to do something that non-magic can't do (if comic book superhero character Ghostboy can walk through walls, but Impossible man can just punch through it, well then one effect being 'magic' is a distinction without consequence.
There are many very obvious consequences in having to break a wall to go through it, stealth factor and enabling enemy mobility to name only two.
In fact, every variance of method will create differences in outcome that may not matter in most cases, but invariably open or close options in specific circumstances. I wouldn't call something that can radically change every event going forward "a distinction without consequence".

[Willie the Duck]

There are many very obvious consequences in having to break a wall to go through it, stealth factor and enabling enemy mobility to name only two.
In fact, every variance of method will create differences in outcome that may not matter in most cases, but invariably open or close options in specific circumstances. I wouldn't call something that can radically change every event going forward "a distinction without consequence".

Well, since you point out a consequence, it's clear that it is an imperfect example. I made it mostly for expediency. That larger point, however, is that magic has to actually be different, or else it is just flavor and the distinction is academic. In a superhero game, it might matter that character A uses magic ghost powers to get through a wall while B blows it away (particularly if someone has some kind of ghost-zapping countermeasures), however, in a typical D&D-like game, a sufficiently resilient wall during a dungeoncrawl is effectively impenetrable to a martial character*, while a wizard with a passwall or insubstantiality effect can get by it (and one of the more valid critiques of the martial/nonmartial divide in all D&D, not just 3e or the like).
*yes, yes, hours upon hours with hammers, chisels, and pickaxes. Sometimes we're talking practical limitations, not absolute ones.

[Cazero]

Well, since you point out a consequence, it's clear that it is an imperfect example. I made it mostly for expediency. That larger point, however, is that magic has to actually be different, or else it is just flavor and the distinction is academic.
Being a magical mean is a difference in itself. Even ignoring the unavoidable differences of how your choice of method impacted the physical world, flavor is enough to empower flavor-targetting countermeasures.
And if you care at all about balance, you can trivially spread around the availability of those countermeasure in a proper gamist way, for example with backstabbing ignoring most magical protections (basically rock-paper-scissors with Rogue->Wizard->Fighter->Rogue), or allowing everyone to punch caster in the mouth while they're trying to speak words of power based on raw combat prowess (where wizards have range advantage but are helpless if fighters can reach melee).

[Cluedrew]

So, hmmm... I disagree with a number of your assertions. We'll take them one at a time, but let's start with the one above, because I disagree with it the most.And I look forward to hearing them all. But for now I will focus on save-or-dies and your objections from this post:

In the rich context of an role-playing game where characters can interact on a social or economic level as well as a physical one, where I can build buildings, sail ships, cook meals or (countless other options), how many different ways of "kill someone in direct combat" do we need? Magic: The Gathering is always about two planeswalkers fighting. What if the same match you could end up teamed up against a world eater or you could spend some solo time rehabilitating an island after a foe made a volcano go off to destroy some mage allies that were stationed there? I mean it doesn't but if it could I would hope it would develop those a bit more.
I think the binary nature of save-or-dies also makes them less interesting. It either works or it doesn't. Is there a Magic: The Gathering card that reads "Roll a die, on a six you win." I doubt it, you can't progress towards that goal nor can your opponent do much to counter it. (I mean there are mana pool and counter spell things, but that is a still a lot less than what interacts with creature cards. Like how you can buff or nerf the defences the save-or-die is targeting, but healing and damage accumulation and others give a lot more options around HP damage.)
There is also a concern with the "ability to prevent getting hurt" interpretation of HP (don't get Hit Points vs. Health Points). I already think it is one of the weaker views on the HP abstraction, but this does even worse because it ignores your reserved ability to dodge and just its you fatally anyways.
For the caster/martial discussion the only really important distinction is what abilities are treated this way and who gets them. Usually it works out to spells and casters.



With D&D 3.5/P one of the problems it the sheer number of different systems being used in any character. There are so many of them!

Each PC has 8! health pools.I hadn't even thought about that. Oddly I think of my three main points at the front of the thread it has more do with exceptions than health. Mostly because individual exceptions have built up to produce these new sub-systems that are not part of the base system and hence the characters who interact with the base system are comparatively venerable to them. Although it seems like they tried to patch it back into the base system by giving everyone the appropriate special abilities? I haven't actually read all of those books you mentioned.

[Willie the Duck]

Being a magical mean is a difference in itself. Even ignoring the unavoidable differences of how your choice of method impacted the physical world, flavor is enough to empower flavor-targetting countermeasures.
Um, okay. I'm not sure where your going with this that meaningfully interacts with my points. I think we're in agreement that [magic] can simply be a flag that you can attach to an effect that only really signifies that 'anti-[magic]' effects can target it. That's a real, but minor issue.


And if you care at all about balance, you can trivially spread around the availability of those countermeasure in a proper gamist way, for example with backstabbing ignoring most magical protections (basically rock-paper-scissors with Rogue->Wizard->Fighter->Rogue), or allowing everyone to punch caster in the mouth while they're trying to speak words of power based on raw combat prowess (where wizards have range advantage but are helpless if fighters can reach melee).

Oh sure. If you want mages and martials (let's keep it to 2 categories, for simplicities sake) to be able to do that same basic categories of activities, but also have differences in implementations, these are certainly ways to do it. The primary distinction is that magic users can do so with more punch, less chance of failure (spider climb, for instance, always works unless countermanded, whereas a martial might have to make a climbing check), but only a limited number of times per day, and with some serious limitations like spell disruption. Those are ways of keeping the differences distinct, even if magic and non-magic mostly can do the same things. That is a distinct grouping from what I was discussing, however, so again I'm not sure why you're addressing me with this.


I will focus on save-or-dies and your objections from this post:
[LIST]
In the rich context of an role-playing game where characters can interact on a social or economic level as well as a physical one, where I can build buildings, sail ships, cook meals or (countless other options), how many different ways of "kill someone in direct combat" do we need? Magic: The Gathering is always about two planeswalkers fighting. What if the same match you could end up teamed up against a world eater or you could spend some solo time rehabilitating an island after a foe made a volcano go off to destroy some mage allies that were stationed there? I mean it doesn't but if it could I would hope it would develop those a bit more.

You don't really need much of any. Honestly, having both armor class and hit points themselves aren't strictly needed and didn't exist (much) in Chainmail or the early forms of Arneson proto-D&D. It is simply a pacing mechanism designed to add a slight continuum between 'perfect' and 'on the casualty list.' On some level, there is an assumption in these games that people want to engage in a somewhat complex combat system. Although that has changed, where skill-based and narrative games make combat not-necessarily any more interesting than any other resolution-events in the game. Still, complex combat rules don't need to be complex because you can also cook meals seems like kind of a non sequitor answer - one does not mean much in relation to the other, although yes good that you can do both in a TTRPG, whereas MtG only needs one of those options.


I think the binary nature of save-or-dies also makes them less interesting. It either works or it doesn't.

I kind of agree with this. Binary effects can be an issue. Especially if the same basic mechanic is used as things with a less binary outcome. I think that's why, as WotC D&D moved from 3 to 4 to 5e, they started making save-or- effect much more like to-hit effects (you were likely to fail vs an individual effect, but that's okay since the consequence was more limited, and/or you would have more chances to roll to shake off the effect. TSR-era 'save-or-___' effects has a real problem in that they were often 'save-or-lose/die' and thus, to be balanced, you had to almost not be able to fail them by the time they regularly showed up. Unfortunately, a 5% chance of die/lose is still quite the wrench in the gameplay gears, and a lot of countermeasures/take-backs then had to come into play. I don't think a true resolution really congealed by the time the design ethos changed, although it would be interesting to find a game that went 100% in that direction.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I totally agree about Save or Die effects being a problem for balance. They're also (in my opinion) not very fun--either you're immune (in which case they're a waste) or you die. Wheeee!

The 5e developers agree with me. There just really aren't that many SoD spells in the game--the only four I could find are as follows:

Divine Word (7th level cleric): only kills if they fail a save and have less than 20 HP. So you need to whittle them down quite a ways or for them to be chaff. Great way to kill hordes of goblins though.

Magic Jar (6th wizard): Doesn't really kill, but effectively has that effect. Leaves the caster quite vulnerable, however. Humanoids only.

Power Word: Kill (9th Arcane). Has no effect when they're over 100 HP. No save if they're under that, however. But you only get 1 9th level slot per day. And most things at that point have more than 100 HP at full health. Great for taking down a wounded boss, but can't just straight bypass HP entirely.

Flesh to Stone (6th Wizard) Requires 3 failed saves before 3 successful ones, with what's normally a very strong save (CON). Also, if they pass their first save they're completely unaffected. Also concentration, so limits what else you can do.

There are a lot of strong crowd control spells, but they're harder to pump your DC for (basically impossible outside of a couple items) and still require someone to do HP damage. And they're mostly concentration, which limits you a lot.

[Max_Killjoy]

D&D still suffers from having a little mini-mechanic tacked on for each new thing, in a way, though less so than some previous editions. I tried to get into this in another thread recently, but really what's needed is a standardized system of some kind for all the possible effects, with resistance and defense and such, rather than a hodgepodge of HP, levels, Ability score "damage", saves that don't always do the same thing, etc.

Binary effects really are a problem, whether they're "save or suck", "save or die", "save or suffer", or whatever.

Compare all the "make this save or be mentally affected" spells and powers in D&D, where there's no gradation of impact or effect, to a system where a mental attacker needs to wear down the target's Willpower/Determination/Whatever, and/or gets degrees of effect based on how much they overcome the target's resistance by.

At least then non-magic-using characters could still somehow gain higher resistances to a lot of magical effects, and be on a more level playing field in that regard.

[Quertus]

With D&D 3.5/P one of the problems it the sheer number of different systems being used in any character. There are so many of them!

Each PC has 8! health pools. The HP health pool, the level health pool, and each attribute is its own health pool. The core combat mechanic shrinks the HP health pool, but there are disparate spells/powers/abilities/items/etc that allow you to focus on the attribute health-pools or level health-pool instead. The HP health pool has NO discernible effect on the usefulness of the character until it is 100% extinguished. The attribute and level health-pools gradually make the character worse as they are extinguished. The HP health pool has a large number of ways to replenish it, the other pools have smaller and more difficult ways to replenish them. In addition the HP health-pool grows quickly as the character levels, but the level health pool only goes up by 1 each level and the attribute health pools only go up VERY slowly, if at all, through a 1 every 4 level addition naturally and using spells and items to increase them on an arbitrary basis. A 20th level character very likely has three or four attribute health pools that are the exact same as they were when they were 1st level! And the other ones are likely only 1.5 to 2x what they were at level 1. Whereas the level Health pool is 20x what it was and the HP health pool is likely also nearly 20x what it was.

Even the most basic level of optimization tells you that it's far more effective to concentrate on the non-HP health pools. The caster has a large number of spells and abilities to do so in core. The martial really doesn't in core. This is because, when the combat system was designed, it ONLY used the HP health-pool. When spells were strapped on top of the combat system, they used these alternate effects to give it flavor and increase the options of the spellcaster. There's a reason why when you add ToB, SoM, and PoW, so many of the new abilities they add to the martial shift their focus to the alternate health pools.

Then you have defense! Each PC has >8! defenses. The Core combat defense is AC, but they have multiple flavors of AC for situational purposes. Touch AC, Flatfooted AC. AC is more fluid than offensive numbers. Then you have three saving throws as alternate defenses. Then you have SR and DR. Then you add on top abilities/features and spells that have negating or modifying effects on attacks against you. Once again, the martial, in core, really only attacks against AC and DR. The caster, on the other hand, can target whatever defense they want to and tend to go for whatever they think is the weakest defense. There's a reason why, when you add ToB, SoM and PoW, so many of the new abilities they add to the martial shift their focus to the alternate defenses.

So, your end goal is to -fix- the core mechanic to "fix" the disparity between the martial and the caster? I don't know how to do it, but I would start the thought exercise by simplifying. And then when you build it back up keep the core mechanic with a simple rule.

For every health pool, both the martial and caster have to have equal access to build toward aiming at each health pool

For every defense, both the martial and caster have to have equal access to build toward aiming at each defense.

That doesn't mean every character has to have the ability to target each defense and health pool, just that they have access to abilities that can while building their characters. You can build broadly to try and have something that will work for each defense and health pool, or you can specialize to only have something for a couple defenses and health pools but be much better at it.

Right now, the martial is forced to default to "really good at the one defense and health pool" with no ability to chose differently. The caster OTOH can choose to be "really good at ANY one defense and health pool" or "moderately good at all defenses and health pools." Hence the disparity.

And this is ONLY in combat. I'm just touching on doing damage and mitigating damage. You have a nearly endless number of non-combat minigames involved as well. Most use Skill-checks. Once again, the Martial has no features other than adding points as they level. But the Caster has access to spells and features that greatly alter the skill mini-games making them largely breakable with ease. Or bypassable.

This is a much harder nut to crack and one I'm not ready to take a stab at right now. But you should add it to your list.

There are several errors here.

First, HP and level scale at approximately the same rate.

Second, the most basic *accurate* level of optimization would tell you to evaluate damage vs health. If your average foe had 5 Int and 20 Str, would you attack Int? What if you dealt 10 Str damage, but only 1 Int damage?

Similarly, a good DPS Rogue or übercharger build is looking to one-turn kill an ancient dragon. So I'm not seeing the advantage in them targeting a different, smaller stat. Unless it's to let them take out two ancient dragons per round.

Which reminds me - your post is very 3e centric (thus my reply), whereas the OP seemed interested in a more system-agnostic discussion.

But, if we are discussing 3e, encounters can also be "defeated" through things which do not target any those 8 defenses, including diplomacy, turn undead, Rod of Construct Control, suffocation, starvation, or even oddball solutions like outliving your opponent, or healing them death.

Lastly, all this talks about PCs, not about monsters.


But most decks do regular damage + one gimmick. Infect decks aren't going to deal poison counters AND Mill you out AND get their damage through Graveyard Manipulation AND Counter you so you don't get to play, while still being a playable deck. In that game, if you try to generalize like that, you're deck is going to be massive, or not be very good at any one thing.

Variety of play is great! When one type of player gets to have most of the variety though, that's not great. Wizards are like a Magic the Gathering deck that touch on all sorts of gimmicks at minimal cost.

To continue the analogy, a good 3e übercharger build is like a deck with 20 1-drop win buttons, or 15 copies each of mountain, Lotus, Channel, and Fireball.

Not that comparing MtG to 3e hasn't been fun, bit I think it brings up something missing from the OP: viability of solutions.

I played !not-Diablo, where the Wizard got lots of cool powers, and had to play the minigame of carefully balancing their elements so that they always had something in their hotkeys to affect any given enemy. Whereas the Fighter was much stronger and easier, because their swords just worked.

Turn Undead doesn't work against most opponents. A lot of Wizard spells are going to find foes that are immune. The target is not undead, or is immune fire, or doesn't even have targeted stat. But, once you get to 3.5, a good Fighter build never has to worry about a foe being immune to HP damage.

[PhoenixPhyre]

As a note, I see uberchargers (or other high-op 3e martials) as being basically indistinguishable from a binary save-or-die effect. If it works, the enemy goes away. If it doesn't, you did roughly nothing. In my mind, that very binary nature is a problem.

5e gets around the binary problem by scaling the number of attacks, not the damage per attack (at least as much). So if you miss once, you still can hit normally on the next attack and do something. And except for a paladin doing a full nova, you're unlikely to one-round delete a big enemy. Spells are still a bit too binary for many effects--I'd like to see a lot more "save for half*" non-damage effects. I'd also like to see a lot more acceptance of martials doing amazing things (whether by ability checks or as class features or the like) without spells.

But the big thing is that purely binary effects (especially when that's all you do in a turn) are unfun in my mind.

[Max_Killjoy]

As a note, I see uberchargers (or other high-op 3e martials) as being basically indistinguishable from a binary save-or-die effect. If it works, the enemy goes away. If it doesn't, you did roughly nothing. In my mind, that very binary nature is a problem.

5e gets around the binary problem by scaling the number of attacks, not the damage per attack (at least as much). So if you miss once, you still can hit normally on the next attack and do something. And except for a paladin doing a full nova, you're unlikely to one-round delete a big enemy. Spells are still a bit too binary for many effects--I'd like to see a lot more "save for half*" non-damage effects. I'd also like to see a lot more acceptance of martials doing amazing things (whether by ability checks or as class features or the like) without spells.

But the big thing is that purely binary effects (especially when that's all you do in a turn) are unfun in my mind.

There are a lot of things where "save for half" can't happen, because the way the system (D&D) handles the effect in question is binary. How do you save for a result of half-Charmed, or half-Incapacitated, or half-Paralyzed?

[Cazero]

Um, okay. I'm not sure where your going with this that meaningfully interacts with my points. I think we're in agreement that [magic] can simply be a flag that you can attach to an effect that only really signifies that 'anti-[magic]' effects can target it. That's a real, but minor issue.
An issue? It's a feature. It makes magic feel different without throwing balance in the trash can. Balance doesn't matter one bit when writing a book, but is pretty important when you make a game.
With a system that isn't D&D, you could have a spell like spider climb allowing the mage to use a spellcraft skill instead of an athletics skill for climbing purpose, and it would be a lot more balanced by completely avoiding the issue of non-combat magic having to be ridiculously overpowered to account for them draining spell slots that where precious back when you unlocked the spell but are dirt cheap now that you've gained in power.


Oh sure. If you want mages and martials (let's keep it to 2 categories, for simplicities sake) to be able to do that same basic categories of activities, but also have differences in implementations, these are certainly ways to do it.
I'm not talking about having everyone do the same categories of activities. Verisimilitude of most settings will make a long list of big noes for martials. I'm talking about not making up a large variety of stupidly unbalanced mechanics for one category of activity.
Using magic opens new solutions to every problem. That include solutions to problems where martials can't do a thing. That also include trivializing problems that martials find inherently difficult. But then balance swings back and demands for martials to be highly competitive in categories of activity where magic isn't inherently superior.
You end up with a choice between poor balance, very weak magic, or martials who basicaly are superheroes.


The primary distinction is that magic users can do so with more punch, less chance of failure (spider climb, for instance, always works unless countermanded, whereas a martial might have to make a climbing check), but only a limited number of times per day, and with some serious limitations like spell disruption. Those are ways of keeping the differences distinct, even if magic and non-magic mostly can do the same things. That is a distinct grouping from what I was discussing, however, so again I'm not sure why you're addressing me with this.
I wasn't talking about that. But since you brought it up...
I just don't see how "you can only do the X thing Y times per day" makes this 'flavorful' or 'magical'. Sure, applying that specific limitation to martials generaly feels stupid, but you've just copied the words saying the spell is magical and used them to describe the mechanics used for general spellcasting, and I don't see the point of putting an extra metaphorical coating of [magic] tag on those mechanics.


edit :

There are a lot of things where "save for half" can't happen, because the way the system (D&D) handles the effect in question is binary. How do you save for a result of half-Charmed, or half-Incapacitated, or half-Paralyzed?
With weaker versions of the same conditions. So D&D still not having those weaker conditions is the obvious issue here.

[Gallowglass]

There are several errors here.

First, HP and level scale at approximately the same rate.



Which... I said in my post. I said they both are about 20x greater at 20th level than 1st...




Second, the most basic *accurate* level of optimization would tell you to evaluate damage vs health. If your average foe had 5 Int and 20 Str, would you attack Int? What if you dealt 10 Str damage, but only 1 Int damage?

Similarly, a good DPS Rogue or übercharger build is looking to one-turn kill an ancient dragon. So I'm not seeing the advantage in them targeting a different, smaller stat. Unless it's to let them take out two ancient dragons per round.



Absolutely nothing I said indicated that i would optimize to target stat A if stat B was a better choice. That's something you parsed that was not written by me.



Which reminds me - your post is very 3e centric (thus my reply), whereas the OP seemed interested in a more system-agnostic discussion.



I very clearly stated IN MY POST that his arguement targets D&D in general and implied that he should've posted it in the specific D&D forum he wanted actual advice in, then stated IN MY POST that my opinion would target 3.5/P because that's the system I use




But, if we are discussing 3e, encounters can also be "defeated" through things which do not target any those 8 defenses, including diplomacy, turn undead, Rod of Construct Control, suffocation, starvation, or even oddball solutions like outliving your opponent, or healing them death.



As I, clearly, called out, my post was specifically about attacking health pools and attacking defenses. I neither indicated, nor implied, nor argued that there aren't other ways to defeat encounters. In fact I specifically called out the other hundred or so minigames that would need to be addressed.

[/QUOTE]




Lastly, all this talks about PCs, not about monsters.



So? We're talking about PCs, not monsters.

In short, there are no "errors" as I am giving an opinion of the shortcomings and strengths of a particular system. Actually just one small part of a particular system. My "opinion" is not an "error" and nothing I stated was factually incorrect.

Honestly, Quertus, I get that your only joy on this forum is to be as confrontational and condescending as possible and oppose any viewpoint on the basis of wanting to argue with people, but seriously. At least read the post you respond to?

[Cluedrew]

Still, complex combat rules don't need to be complex because you can also cook meals seems like kind of a non sequitor answer - one does not mean much in relation to the other, although yes good that you can do both in a TTRPG, whereas MtG only needs one of those options.It is entirely a matter of effort, you can put effort into both areas and that is great too, but you are going to put effort (or rules text) into just one I know which I would prefer. I know it is not a really strong reason, but that is why it was just one in a list.

[Quertus]

In the rich context of an role-playing game where characters can interact on a social or economic level as well as a physical one, where I can build buildings, sail ships, cook meals or (countless other options), how many different ways of "kill someone in direct combat" do we need?

Lots. More than we have. How many creatures does MtG need? Sometimes, WotC wins, and published new creatures that are playable without invalidating / obsoleting old creatures. That's what keeps the game fresh, what all such games should aim for, IMO - continuous publication of equivalent-strength options that feel different at some fundamental level.

I suppose one could go the 4e / point buy route, and let the player fluff it as desired - whether they turned their foe into a lawn ornament, launched them into orbit, froze their brain, or destroyed all of reality, then rebuilt the universe, only without them in it. So, in that case, maybe only 1 save-or-die effect needed.

I do agree, though, that there could be much better, more engaging games built around non-HP effects.


Magic: The Gathering is always about two planeswalkers fighting. What if the same match you could end up teamed up against a world eater or you could spend some solo time rehabilitating an island after a foe made a volcano go off to destroy some mage allies that were stationed there? I mean it doesn't but if it could I would hope it would develop those a bit more.

I mean, I dislike 1-on-1 and hate free for all formats. I much prefer teamwork alla D&D; thus, I gravitate towards 2-headed giant, emperor, or other team MtG formats.

Not quite the variety from 1-on-1 you meant, I'm sure.


I think the binary nature of save-or-dies also makes them less interesting. It either works or it doesn't. Is there a Magic: The Gathering card that reads "Roll a die, on a six you win." I doubt it, you can't progress towards that goal nor can your opponent do much to counter it. (I mean there are mana pool and counter spell things, but that is a still a lot less than what interacts with creature cards. Like how you can buff or nerf the defences the save-or-die is targeting, but healing and damage accumulation and others give a lot more options around HP damage.)

There are numerous not entirely dissimilar spells. My "favorite" is the Jack-in-the-Mox, which provides a random color of mana, or exploded for 5 damage on a 6. I lost 15 life for no mana gained in a single game in a tournament with those.

Coalition Victory was IIRC the original win button, giving you an automatic win if you control a land of each basic land type, and a creature of each color. There are numerous creatures which count or can count as every color, and you can do some land-search, but it's still a "if your deck came together (faster than your opponent killed you), you win!" card.

D&D would be better, IMO, if the other "damage" minigames were both as robust (lots interactions & options) and simple (no effect until you reach 0) as the HP minigame.


For the caster/martial discussion the only really important distinction is what abilities are treated this way and who gets them. Usually it works out to spells and casters.

In 3.0, the Great Cleave Improved Crit Keen Vorpal build had "no save just die" supremacy. The übercharger of either 3.0 or 3.5 certainly isn't bad. Neither is the well-buffed Rogue.

Personally, I would like greater caster/martial equality - both are "at will", both can play as either "I target one thing that 99% of the universe is vulnerable to" and/or "I can target so many different things that surely everyone must be vulnerable to at least one of my tricks".


But the big thing is that purely binary effects (especially when that's all you do in a turn) are unfun in my mind.

And what if they are fun in someone else's mind? Isn't it better to include them, and let the group decide what to use?

Although I'm not exactly a fan of having them, the group that removed them? I found their gameplay boring and samey. So, I'm not a fan of removing them (from 3e) without adding at least equal depth to what was lost by their removal.


There are a lot of things where "save for half" can't happen, because the way the system (D&D) handles the effect in question is binary. How do you save for a result of half-Charmed, or half-Incapacitated, or half-Paralyzed?

There are numerous systems that present gradations of effect, albeit often poorly. It is open to debate whether 3e would be better if it had 5x the number of conditions, and each effect listed the most logical hierarchy of possible effects (one poison may list dead / nauseous / dizzy, while another might list dead / blind / dazzled, for example).


Honestly, Quertus, I get that your only joy on this forum is to be as confrontational and condescending as possible and oppose any viewpoint on the basis of wanting to argue with people, but seriously. At least read the post you respond to?

Less "joy" and more like "brief escape from Ennui". Very, very little actually gives me joy. And reading comprehension isn't one of my strengths. Rereading your post in context, I see that my comments were generally unmerited (although I think at least the optimization question could be valid, if completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand).

I apologize for misrepresenting your position.

[PhoenixPhyre]

With weaker versions of the same conditions. So D&D still not having those weaker conditions is the obvious issue here.

Exactly. But you don't need an official condition for each thing--each spell could simply describe what the "lesser" effect is, and it doesn't have to be identical between "similar" spells.

Paralyzed/stunned -> half movement and no reactions for a turn OR can either act or move the next turn, not both OR ...

Charmed -> disadvantage on attacks against the caster for a turn OR target will listen to the next thing you say without immediately going hostile OR ...

I'd probably leave cantrips as no-effect (like an attack), because they're a resourceless thing. And you could calibrate the "lesser" effect vs the power of the spell if it hits--something like hold person would have a comparatively weak lesser effect, because it's a really strong spell. A weaker one might be more reliable. Instead of poisoned for a minute, it might be poisoned until the end of their next turn. Or for 1 attack.

[Pippa the Pixie]

This really is just about only a D&D problem...really a d20/3E/4E/5E problem.

And even more so....well....it's not a game rule problem.

It is a game play problem.

And it really comes down to the simple way of thinking: Mundanes must be put down all the time, but magic must always be free.

Just take the examples of:

Anything happens to put a mundane character down....they can't fly, breathe underwater, teleport or whatever....basicaly they encounter something they can't handel with their mundane skills and powers.....and everyone just nods, agress with it and says ''yup mundanes suck".

But....

Even the vague suggestion that anything any how in any way might effect a magic character...again, they encounter something they can't handel with magic......and everyone yells and screams and complains and would never, never do that because it would be ''wrong".

See the HUGE disconnect?

[Max_Killjoy]

Who is this "everyone" you speak of?

[Ignimortis]

This really is just about only a D&D problem...really a d20/3E/4E/5E problem.

And even more so....well....it's not a game rule problem.

It is a game play problem.

And it really comes down to the simple way of thinking: Mundanes must be put down all the time, but magic must always be free.

Just take the examples of:

Anything happens to put a mundane character down....they can't fly, breathe underwater, teleport or whatever....basicaly they encounter something they can't handel with their mundane skills and powers.....and everyone just nods, agress with it and says ''yup mundanes suck".

But....

Even the vague suggestion that anything any how in any way might effect a magic character...again, they encounter something they can't handel with magic......and everyone yells and screams and complains and would never, never do that because it would be ''wrong".

See the HUGE disconnect?

It's not a d20 problem. It's a generic problem. Very few people can stretch their suspension of disbelief to let non-magical characters perform unrealistic feats. At best, they can believe "razor wind by slashing rapidly" or "shockwave from hitting the earth very hard". Nobody can believe nonmagical nonpowered flight - levitation by the sheer force of will or soul or mind without any magic. Nobody can believe that something that isn't an extension of someone's basic capabilities can be non-magical. Flying, teleportation, rapid healing that isn't personal regeneration, etc.

Mundanes might be allowed to be superhumanly strong, durable, and maybe even fast/quick. Basic stuff, things people already have, but up to 11.

But as soon as magic comes into equation, everyone's suddenly fine with it. "Oh, it's magic, it can do whatever". In the end, magic gets a carte blanche on doing something that people can't imagine a non-mage doing.

[Kaptin Keen]

Or jumping really well :smallbiggrin:

In general, climbing and jumping really well works fine indoors - while I consider it reasonable for wizards to have an advantage outside. Although I've been known to simply do away with fly and teleportation spells entirely.

[Max_Killjoy]

It's not a d20 problem. It's a generic problem. Very few people can stretch their suspension of disbelief to let non-magical characters perform unrealistic feats. At best, they can believe "razor wind by slashing rapidly" or "shockwave from hitting the earth very hard". Nobody can believe nonmagical nonpowered flight - levitation by the sheer force of will or soul or mind without any magic. Nobody can believe that something that isn't an extension of someone's basic capabilities can be non-magical. Flying, teleportation, rapid healing that isn't personal regeneration, etc.

Mundanes might be allowed to be superhumanly strong, durable, and maybe even fast/quick. Basic stuff, things people already have, but up to 11.

But as soon as magic comes into equation, everyone's suddenly fine with it. "Oh, it's magic, it can do whatever". In the end, magic gets a carte blanche on doing something that people can't imagine a non-mage doing.

"Levitation by the sheer force of will or soul or mind" IS "magic" from certain angles.

Just because it doesn't involve spells, doesn't involve rude gestures and flinging a bit of dried poo at someone, doesn't mean it can't be or isn't magic.

The details of the setting in question matter a lot as to what's magic and what isn't.

[Ignimortis]

"Levitation by the sheer force of will or soul or mind" IS "magic" from certain angles.

Just because it doesn't involve spells, doesn't involve rude gestures and flinging a bit of dried poo at someone, doesn't mean it can't be or isn't magic.

The details of the setting in question matter a lot as to what's magic and what isn't.

Well, the question is, can it be dispelled? Can it be blocked by anti-magic procedures, is it affected by anything designed to stop magic from happening? If we say yes, then it's just another kind of magic, and people tend to "whatever" then too. If it's not, then everyone tends to say "well, how is it doing magic things without being magic?", etc.

[Max_Killjoy]

Well, the question is, can it be dispelled? Can it be blocked by anti-magic procedures, is it affected by anything designed to stop magic from happening? If we say yes, then it's just another kind of magic, and people tend to "whatever" then too. If it's not, then everyone tends to say "well, how is it doing magic things without being magic?", etc.

"Dispell or not dispell" is, IME, a very D&D way of "testing" whether something is "magic".

Other settings and other systems don't necessarily abide by that rubric.

[PhoenixPhyre]

"Dispell or not dispell" is, IME, a very D&D way of "testing" whether something is "magic".

Other settings and other systems don't necessarily abide by that rubric.

Agreed. And I think it's an example of people focusing on names of abilities more than they should (or sloppy naming, your choice). If they'd have been called "Unravel Spell" and "Spell-dampening field" (which really better fits their use), would people still use those as the key distinguishers for magic vs non-magic?

I'm very much in the "everything's fantastic" camp. "Fantastic" is my alternate word for "things that can't happen on Earth but are possible in this fantasy world"), which includes spells, dragons' flight and breath, barbarian's Rage[1], rogues' Evasion, fighters' Action Surge, etc. So "non-magic" (by which is meant "non-spell-casting") people are still fantastic, just in a different way. Some are magic, some do magic. But neither is limited by Earth biology and physics.

[1] I prefer to imagine a raging barbarian as hulking out, almost literally. Which is why it doesn't work in heavy armor--there's not enough give in the armor to accommodate the now-substantially-larger physique. But that's not canon, just my headcanon.

[Ignimortis]

"Dispell or not dispell" is, IME, a very D&D way of "testing" whether something is "magic".

Other settings and other systems don't necessarily abide by that rubric.

Well, Shadowrun still works around Counterspell and Dispelling, etc. Background count hits all magical stuff.

WoD has all supernatural powers be blocked by True Faith, whether they're Disciplines, Gifts or True Magic (maybe there's an exemption clause for whatever the Imbued have?).

[Cluedrew]

Mundanes might be allowed to be superhumanly strong, durable, and maybe even fast/quick. Basic stuff, things people already have, but up to 11.Why stop at 11? That's a mere 10% above what an Olympian can do. Why not 20, 30, 40 or 100?

You crank it up high enough and it might look like magic (it is certainly fantastic, see PhoenixPhyre) but it doesn't have to be. When you can throw rocks so hard they start doing armour piecing damage or dodge so fast it uses the same rules as a short range teleport or... well how long this list is goes depends on the line you draw. For instance I am quite happy to have "chi-type" abilities, a type of magic that comes from physical abilities, but other people don't like that.


But as soon as magic comes into equation, everyone's suddenly fine with it. "Oh, it's magic, it can do whatever".And this is one of the major reasons I think magic theory is important. It gives a framework for what a spell caster can do. You can adjust this to be really high or low and whatever shape you want. But I find it helps give the magic flavour and helps cut off power creep.

[comk59]

In terms of caster/martial disparity in D&D, I still think that the most egregious example is Wall of Force (or Forcecage, if you prefer). It may just be because my players tended to heavily lean on that particular spell, but it was worse than Save or Die for me. Unless the enemy had counter-magic or incorporeality, it was just an automatic "I Win" button.

When in the next game I houseruled that walls of force could be moved with the same Strength Check it took to move Immovable Rods, they practically rioted. It makes me wonder if the existence and assumption of magic as an automatic win condition is detrimental to games as a whole.

[PhoenixPhyre]

It makes me wonder if the existence and assumption of magic as an automatic win condition is detrimental to games as a whole.

Very much so. Especially when coupled with a belief that non-magic is weak. Weaker, in fact, than real life humans are on a regular basis. People (both DMs and players) low-ball normal human capabilities and put no limits on magic.

From a game perspective, that's why I'm so fond of the idea that spells and abilities do what they say, no more, no less. It puts hard expectation boundaries on what you get. Does it say it does X? No? Then that doesn't happen. Period. On the other hand, ability checks are open-ended, limited only by what makes sense in the fiction.

But lots of people don't like that, so YMMV.

[comk59]

From a game perspective, that's why I'm so fond of the idea that spells and abilities do what they say, no more, no less. It puts hard expectation boundaries on what you get. Does it say it does X? No? Then that doesn't happen. Period. On the other hand, ability checks are open-ended, limited only by what makes sense in the fiction.

But lots of people don't like that, so YMMV.

See, I take a different approach and like systems where magic is either a different kind of skill check, or a weapon attack. Essentially it lets the spellcaster use their casting stat in place of physical stats to accomplish stuff (whether this be healing, grappling, pushing, etc.). But none of the spells just work, you have to pass a casting check to even use them first. Which doesn't matter as much day to day, but can make a real difference in combat.

That, and I like to spread the "normal people can't do that" mojo around a bit. One of my martial characters has literally super-human strength thanks to muscle implants, while another has a drug that gives him Scent, Darkvision, and a +25 to perception tests (It's a d100 system, so not an insane bonus, but still pretty hefty).

I much prefer a game where everyone is different flavours of special, instead of one where most of the characters are above average, except for the super-special character who has abilities that always work no matter what.

[PhoenixPhyre]

See, I take a different approach and like systems where magic is either a different kind of skill check, or a weapon attack. Essentially it lets the spellcaster use their casting stat in place of physical stats to accomplish stuff (whether this be healing, grappling, pushing, etc.). But none of the spells just work, you have to pass a casting check to even use them first. Which doesn't matter as much day to day, but can make a real difference in combat.

That, and I like to spread the "normal people can't do that" mojo around a bit. One of my martial characters has literally super-human strength thanks to muscle implants, while another has a drug that gives him Scent, Darkvision, and a +25 to perception tests (It's a d100 system, so not an insane bonus, but still pretty hefty).

I much prefer a game where everyone is different flavours of special, instead of one where most of the characters are above average, except for the super-special character who has abilities that always work no matter what.

I'm not particularly fond of "superhero" games where each person has their particular ability set and that's all they can do. But that's mainly for genre and style reasons, not mechanics.

I don't like double-rolling (having to roll to see if your "spell" goes off, then rolling to see if you actually hit something with it), but that's an implementation detail.

My headcanon for D&D (5e is what I play) is heavily influenced by 4e, where everyone is special. There are no "I'm just an ordinary person" characters. It's a fantastic world, and I want it to be fantastic. In all senses of the word. Whether that comes from spells (which only have defined effects, so even the ones that don't require a saving throw or an attack roll only do so much, and most of that can be done by a talented non-caster), class abilities, racial traits, backgrounds (which I definitely give weight to--if you said at character creation that you've studied XYZ, I'm going to tell you about XYZ when you need it. No roll, just info. But that comes at an opportunity cost, because if you're a ivory tower scholar of XYZ, you're also not someone with active criminal network contacts.), I don't really care. But everyone is special.

I prefer team games, so balance does not imply identity. I'd rather not have a bunch of people who are either of
* omnicompetent
* so heavily specialized that they only have one trick

In my mind, proper characters for my games have a set of things they're especially good at and then a bunch of things that they can handle, but not super well, and maybe one type of thing that they don't do well at all at.

[2D8HP]

This really is just about only a D&D problem...really a d20/3E/4E/5E problem....


Yes, as has been discussed in other threads:


Well, original, only Fighters got to use THE most powerful magic items: swords. Seriously, until a certain uber staff was added to the game, magic swords were by far the most powerful magic item. The got the biggest bonuses, had the most special abilities, and we're frequently intelligent to boot. And magic swords were always the most common.

Later editions of D&D kept a lot of legacy stuff that was powerful because it was "cool" like the highest level spells, while thoroughly breaking the balance by removing stuff because "it wasn't fair". Things like: assumption that most play occurred at low levels, slow leveling through the first levels, even slower leveling for magic users, huge GP gold sinks to get powerful (training, spell research, scroll making), assumptions casters started old and would die in the campaign from old age before getting to high level, truly glass cannon magic-users with no unlimited spells per day (ie cantrips), spell casting easily interrupted, Fighters gaining worldly power / followers, and Fighters getting the best magic items.

All that stuff kept magic-users somewhat in check. Especially the low levels being the assumed standard for playing D&D ... at the higher levels it still broke down in Wizards favor to fairly large degree, probably intentionally.

And of course, people ignored it all as un-fun, and then complained that wizards ruled while fighters drooled. And those "unfun" elements all slowly got revised out of later editions. So really, there's no reason to be surprised that modern D&D still has issues for "legacy curse" reasons. The designers created the curse because that's what players wanted ... all the power with none of the original limitations.


Older editions of D&D, arcane magic features included:
- glass cannon hit points and AC
- very limited uses per day until high levels
- slow XP table
- could not cast effectively in melee

Playing a Wizard was playing the game on hard mode, unless you had a wall of Fighters and Clerics in front of you for defense. Your role was artillery for very dangerous situations.

Even so this broke down around or about level 10, but the game breaking down at higher levels due to magic in general is true for most editions of D&D. You either accept the silliness as all in good fun and plough on, or don't like it and reset with new characters. Or make an E6-like mod.*

Of course, in older edition getting a character to name level was quite hard unless your DM just handed out treasure like candy, which was unfortunaltey common. One of the issues with D&D's recent editions current rapid advancement is they didn't slow the progress to gaining higher level spell leveling up in the process. Getting access to level 6 spells used to take years of play, not less than a year.

--------------

Warhammer FRP, or 40k DH/Only War Psykers (I've read but not played the latter), as mentioned above, also makes for hard mode casters, since magic is a crap shoot. like playing a D&D Wild Mage, you have a passable chance of ass-ploding your own party. And in there's the added social hostility, which also featured in D&D's Dark Sun.

Older editions also didn't have meta-magic feats that only wizards could take, didn't have "defensive casting" or "5 foot steps" that would prevent a*caster*from being interrupted, casters lost their spell if they took damage while casting, spells had casting times that added to the casters initiative (Initiative of 15 and a casting time of 4, you START casting on 15, and your spells goes off on 11, leaving plenty of time to be interrupted), casters didn't have infinite capacity, always full component pouches, casters had to roll to see if they could even learn a new spell, rather than having them just spontaneously "poof" into their spell book, casters had to rest a full day to re-memorize used spells....

The problem isn't that mundane characters are too weak, the problem is that 3.x plus casters got a huge buff that they really didn't need. Couple that with the unlimited multi-classing mechanic of 3.x and things start to get really messy.

Plus, pre 3.x, each class had its own XP table. Some classes would need less XP than others to advance...the more powerful the class, the more XP it needed. Casters generally needed more XP per level than the Fighter did, but then the Fighter couldn't kill an entire room of orcs in a split second either.


Balance issues have been there at the start of D&D.
I can very much remember how in 70's early 80's it was hard to get anyone to play a "Magic User" (even when the Intelligence score roll was higher their Strength), simply because at low levels they had the least they could do (and the lowest hit points).
Most everyone played "Fighting-Men" to start, but those few who played for "the long game" found that "Magic Users" vastly overpowered other classes at high levels. Thematically and for "world building" it made sense, magicians should be rare, and "the great and powerful Wizard" should be more fearsome then the "mighty Warrior". But as a game? Having separate classes each doing their unique thing is more fun, and always hanging in the back while another PC does everything isn't.

While it ruins my "old school cred" I am in the tank for balance. So far in play (low levels so far) 5e seems to hit it about right, but I find high level play confusing and a bit dull, plus I lack the mental agility to effectively play a spell-caster anyway, plus I want to play Captain Sinbad the hero, not the villainous Sokurah the Magician!

I bought and read the 3e PHB over a decade ago, and have glanced at it, 2e AD&D, 3.5, and 4e but I never played those versions of D&D, so grab a shovel full of salt..

I've played B/X and 5e D&D recently, Oe D&D and 1e AD&D decades ago, and some other RPG's, so those are what I base my responses on.

While in theory Magic-Users became the most powerful characters (it even suggested so in the rules:

1974 - Dungeons & Dragons Book 1: Men & Magic,
(Page 6)

"Magic-Users: Top level magic-users are perhaps the most powerful characters in the game, but it is a long hard road to the top, and to begin with they are very weak, so survival is often the question, unless fighters protect the low-level magical types until they have worked up."...)

IIRC, in practice Mages were so weak that no one I knew played them long. We only did it when we rolled badly or (briefly) wanted a challenge, so I never saw any Mages past second level that weren't NPC's at my usual tables.

I did encounter some higher level Magic User PC's at DunDraCon around 1980 or so, but the players were bearded college student jerks, who thought they were all that because they could drive and vote!

So what if my character is "Just another imitation Conan", is your Gandalf/Merlin/Thulsa Doom expy that much better?

*rant* *rave* *grumble* *fume*

....anyway, it was such a long slog before a Magic User PC became less weak than the other classes that if they survived to become poweful it seemed like a just reward in old D&D.

Unlike D&D, in Stormbringer, on the other hand, you became a Sorcerer when you had really lucky rolls (high POW), which made the other PC's sidekicks, which for a player was LAME!

But as a Gamemaster I loved the Stormbringer magic system, which involved summoning and attempting to bind Demons (just so METAL!)..

One of my favorite games to play is Pendragon in which all but the 4th edition the spell-casters are all NPC's and all the PK's (player Knights) rock!

The "magic system" is a list of trope suggestions for the GM (unless you use the 4th edition in which magic use involves astrology, so you cast spells "when the stars are right", the 5th edition went back to magic use being NPC).

!In the WotC 5e D&D I play now, there's more than one class that can cast spells at 1st level, and they seem to be at least equal to the non-spell-casting classes so the fun is more evenly divided.

Many even suggest that Spell-casters are too powerful compared to non-casters which may be true, but that seems to be a just reward for how many rules their players need to keep track of in 5e D&D.

I'm still having fun playing Barbarians, Fighters, and Rogues so it's cool.

Call of Cthullu had a magic system that I admire, the more you know of magic the more likely you'll go insane!

Combine that with Stormbringer!

In Stormbringer Instead of casting spells Stormbringer you summon demons and elementals to make magic. For more poweful magic you have to summon more powerful beings and they need to be persuaded!

Couldn't demons just decide to eat you up yum-yum or rend your psyche and soul instead?

Damn straight!

What part of "secrets man was not meant to know" didn't you understand?!

Practicing magic is a dangerous act, otherwise every Tom, Rick, and witch Hazel would do it!

Magic as tool box "Levels to move the world" is LAME!

Magic should be more like fire, specifically hellfire!

Yes you may boil your tea (and incinerate your enemies!), but you run the risk of dooming yourself.

Now that's genre!

[Arbane]

[1] I prefer to imagine a raging barbarian as hulking out, almost literally. Which is why it doesn't work in heavy armor--there's not enough give in the armor to accommodate the now-substantially-larger physique. But that's not canon, just my headcanon.

"Hulking Out" might not be grotesque enough.

The first warp-spasm seized Cúchulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream. His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins switched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front... On his head the temple-sinews stretched to the nape of his neck, each mighty, immense, measureless knob as big as the head of a month-old child... he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn't probe it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek. His mouth weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and his liver flapped in his mouth and throat, his lower jaw struck the upper a lion-killing blow, and fiery flakes large as a ram's fleece reached his mouth from his throat... The hair of his head twisted like the tangle of a red thornbush stuck in a gap; if a royal apple tree with all its kingly fruit were shaken above him, scarce an apple would reach the ground but each would be spiked on a bristle of his hair as it stood up on his scalp with rage.
:smalleek:



It makes me wonder if the existence and assumption of magic as an automatic win condition is detrimental to games as a whole.

I think so, yeah - the problem is that traditionally, a D&D Magic-User literally had a collection of 'I Win' buttons, usable once a day, and their whole point was to hit said button at the right time. So the spells were 'balanced' by being powerful, but very limited-use.

At the other extreme, you've got games like Call of Cthulhu or Unknown Armies, where magic is often literally too much trouble to be worth it.


Very much so. Especially when coupled with a belief that non-magic is weak. Weaker, in fact, than real life humans are on a regular basis. People (both DMs and players) low-ball normal human capabilities and put no limits on magic.

Yup. People have done some impossible-seeming things is real life, never mind legends.

"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

[Cluedrew]

[Magic swords] got the biggest bonuses, had the most special abilities, and we're frequently intelligent to boot.Was that supposed to read "were"?

Anyways, I have something to say on the topic. Particularly an example of how normal skills (you know the ones non-casters* use) can come up pretty underwhelming.

Research DCs Information Found [note: is a table - c/p messed up formatting]
6 These are alanny (name on sight).
12 Alanny cannot fly, but they can glide long distances.
18 Alanny are the species most widespread across the starlanes.
25 The majority of the most powerful information brokers across the starlanes are alanny.
38 Alanny do not have territory or nations, instead they are organized into clans.
50 Proportionally few alanny are involved in any anti-builder or anti-human movements.So I poked around the rules and you would add attribute+attribute plus Xd8 for a skill roll. Both attributes are sharpness for investigation (I think that is the skill you would use here) which caps at 10 and a maestro of investigation adds 6d8. So the best possible investigator will not usually (avg. score 47 vs. DC 50) be able to uncover everything on that chart. The last point on this list is: Do these people actively hate us?

So most parties, with an investigator at the limits of human ability, will enter Alanny territory unsure if they will be lynched on sight.

I don't know what the casters in the system (psychics I recall) can do in this regard. I wouldn't be surprised if it blows this out of the water and for the space dogs' sake I kind of hope it does.

* Martial, but here explicitly extending to "rogues" as well as "fighters". In some systems that would just be a skill difference. In systems that treat skills separately one might split the martial from the skill-monkey but I am going to group them together for this discussion. Besides both not being casters, mechanical they both tend to operate directly off of base rules, instead of a special sub-system or collections of exceptions or special abilities. Or proportionately more so.

[CharonsHelper]

Was that supposed to read "were"?

Anyways, I have something to say on the topic. Particularly an example of how normal skills (you know the ones non-casters* use) can come up pretty underwhelming.
So I poked around the rules and you would add attribute+attribute plus Xd8 for a skill roll. Both attributes are sharpness for investigation (I think that is the skill you would use here) which caps at 10 and a maestro of investigation adds 6d8. So the best possible investigator will not usually (avg. score 47 vs. DC 50) be able to uncover everything on that chart. The last point on this list is: Do these people actively hate us?

So most parties, with an investigator at the limits of human ability, will enter Alanny territory unsure if they will be lynched on sight.

I don't know what the casters in the system (psychics I recall) can do in this regard. I wouldn't be surprised if it blows this out of the water and for the space dogs' sake I kind of hope it does.

* Martial, but here explicitly extending to "rogues" as well as "fighters". In some systems that would just be a skill difference. In systems that treat skills separately one might split the martial from the skill-monkey but I am going to group them together for this discussion. Besides both not being casters, mechanical they both tend to operate directly off of base rules, instead of a special sub-system or collections of exceptions or special abilities. Or proportionately more so.

Since it's my system - let me jump in here.

The big thing is - those aren't Investigation DCs. They're Research DCs - which is a different skill.

Basically Investigation is a combination of reading someone (if they're lying etc.) and finding stuff by searching (like clues at a crime scene). Research is like being a scholar and being able to... research stuff.

Research doesn't get to add any attribute. So - the max you could get is 6d8+0. BUT (and this is a big but) that's only what your character can remember off the top of their head. If you get on your computer and poke around for a minute, you get a second roll with x2 to your roll. Spend 10 minutes and you get a third roll with x3. An hour for x4, and a week for x5.

So, if you have ONE rank in Research and spend an hour researching, you'd have a chance of learning all of those things, and with TWO ranks you'd probably learn everything in that same hour. (3d8 x4 = mean of 54).

If you have max ranks you could probably find everything out in a minute of quick research. (The alanny are pretty common, and aren't supposed to be hard to find info about.)

Sorry that that wasn't clearer.

And even if you didn't know any of that info, you wouldn't be be lynched. Most alanny are rather outgoing, and while there is discrimination against humans throughout the starlanes, alanny tend to be much friendlier to other species than a lot of aliens that humans may encounter. Every group other than the builders have some individuals who are anti-human; the alanny have fewer than most.

I tried to make it so that none of the Research information is necessary to play the game - just interesting and/or might give you an edge. In the case of the alanny - you'd know that alanny were less likely to hate you just for being human.

Edit: On the topic at hand - I do agree that MANY systems have magic/psychics/force-users be too powerful and/or have too much utility and overshadow what the martials can do. I actually kept that in mind while designing my system, and while psychics are around, their abilities aren't nearly as broad as magical abilities often are.

[Quertus]

I think "some people get at-will abilities, while other people get limited-use abilities" is a big factor in how systems are balanced.

Similarly, I think "some people get active abilities, while other people get passive abilities" - or, at least, that they get a different balance of those two - can affect the balance and/or the perception of balance.

And then there's the complex question of evaluating various resource pools against each other.

To put those last two together in a 3e context: people complain about how much it costs the Fighter buy needful things like Flight that the Wizard just "gets for free" as part of his class, but do you realize just how much WBL it costs a 20th level Wizard to buy the 60 extra HP that the 20th level Fighter got for free as part of their class?

[Max_Killjoy]

Last time this came up, I tired to lay out the conflicting "wants" that some system/setting combinations try to simultaneously meet, and that some gamers seem determined to see enshrined -- that inherently cannot be met simultaneously.

1) The reality of the setting looks largely like our own for the general time period being duplicated.
2) The people there are largely like real human beings.
3) There's magic that lets some people do things that are otherwise impossible within that setting *.
4) At least some people can through just hard work, willpower, determination, skill, whatever, and having no magic at all, compete with those who do have magic **.

(* Magic as used here CAN be far broader / far more varied than "spellcasting".)
(** The word "Mundane" being avoided here because it always turns into a stupid violent brawl whenever someone uses that word in these discussions.)


This can be solved by:
* turning the dial down on magic
* turning the dial up on what people can do without magic (and also changing the setting to reflect this, you don't need draft animals when the farmer is stronger than an ox and has more endurance than a mule)
* broadening magic to include non-spellcasting "fantastic" abilities that most people still can't master and accomplish.

There is, however, one completely non-functional choice that some gamers, and some games, seem determined to pursue, that always ends in tears and/or a broken mangled wreck of a setting -- "I want my utterly non-magical, non-fantastic warrior to be able to beat spellcasters who cast level 9 spells, just by being that awesome" in a setting where the second solution above has not been applied.

Sorry, but in the typical D&D setting, with the typical D&D peasants and shopkeepers and artisans and beggers who are just like real-world people, the 20th level Fighter or Rogue who is on par with a 20th level Wizard is in their own way magical, and just as fantastic and unusual and "superpowered" as any level 20 spellcaster of any sort.

In that sort of setting, when your Fighter leaps 30 feet, dodges multiple attacks in midair, lands on a teetering post, and attacks multiple targets while balanced on it, sending them all flying away prone... your Fighter is no longer just "a fighting man" getting by on "grit and steel"... your fighter is just as fantastic as any spellcaster.

[Cluedrew]

Since it's my system - let me jump in here.
[...]
So, if you have ONE rank in Research and spend an hour researching, you'd have a chance of learning all of those things, and with TWO ranks you'd probably learn everything in that same hour. (3d8 x4 = mean of 54).That sounds more reasonable. I mean I was going through it pretty quickly after I remember that this was not a d20 system (I think I was thinking of Hearts of Darkness), roughly equivalent to someone hurriedly looking something up in a session. Combining what I know about your system's power level (more gritty mercenaries than grand heroes as I recall) that actually seems right.

I am wondering how I could make a "I know embarrassing facts from childhood" level researcher. You would probably have to put slots for types of information (I think more situational informational will be needed for that level). Or just see what Exalted does in its highest level related charms.


To put those last two together in a 3e context: people complain about how much it costs the Fighter buy needful things like Flight that the Wizard just "gets for free" as part of his class, but do you realize just how much WBL it costs a 20th level Wizard to buy the 60 extra HP that the 20th level Fighter got for free as part of their class?My first thought: What level of summon monster gets you a monster with at least 60 HP? Although if we want to be really sure we can pop this onto the 3.X form as an optimization question. I'm sure we will get a very well researched answer.

[CharonsHelper]

I am wondering how I could make a "I know embarrassing facts from childhood" level researcher. You would probably have to put slots for types of information (I think more situational informational will be needed for that level). Or just see what Exalted does in its highest level related charms.

Lol - not something that I plan to make mechanics for in my system.

I'm a big believer of systems not trying to be all things to all people, and I'm going for the "Be Bad-Donkey Space Privateers!" vibe, which doesn't really include digging up childhood secrets.

[Friv]

Sorry, but in the typical D&D setting, with the typical D&D peasants and shopkeepers and artisans and beggers who are just like real-world people, the 20th level Fighter or Rogue who is on par with a 20th level Wizard is in their own way magical, and just as fantastic and unusual and "superpowered" as any level 20 spellcaster of any sort.

In that sort of setting, when your Fighter leaps 30 feet, dodges multiple attacks in midair, lands on a teetering post, and attacks multiple targets while balanced on it, sending them all flying away prone... your Fighter is no longer just "a fighting man" getting by on "grit and steel"... your fighter is just as fantastic as any spellcaster.

I honestly don't see why "in this setting, exceptional training makes you able to do feats that would be physically impossible in the real world, and are impossible for the bulk of the setting, but can be done by certain people with certain training" is any more weird than "magic is real", and people can see you jump 30 ft and go, wow, that is a well trained person.

[Mendicant]

D&D still suffers from having a little mini-mechanic tacked on for each new thing, in a way, though less so than some previous editions. I tried to get into this in another thread recently, but really what's needed is a standardized system of some kind for all the possible effects, with resistance and defense and such, rather than a hodgepodge of HP, levels, Ability score "damage", saves that don't always do the same thing, etc.

Binary effects really are a problem, whether they're "save or suck", "save or die", "save or suffer", or whatever.

Compare all the "make this save or be mentally affected" spells and powers in D&D, where there's no gradation of impact or effect, to a system where a mental attacker needs to wear down the target's Willpower/Determination/Whatever, and/or gets degrees of effect based on how much they overcome the target's resistance by.

At least then non-magic-using characters could still somehow gain higher resistances to a lot of magical effects, and be on a more level playing field in that regard.

I think you're overstating the problem with binary effects. If the effect in question is a simple save-or-die I agree it's not great, but binary debuffs are much less problematic, and the alternative you're putting forward has its own potential pitfalls. If you're hitting a willpower track, your fighter buddy better have "intimidating shout" or whatever that also hits the willpower track or you're just racing each other. Doing a single, binary test to apply a tag like "shaken" is pretty elegant. It's immediately relevant to allies attacking other defenses, and it doesn't require a lot of work to manage or track.

[Max_Killjoy]

I honestly don't see why "in this setting, exceptional training makes you able to do feats that would be physically impossible in the real world, and are impossible for the bulk of the setting, but can be done by certain people with certain training" is any more weird than "magic is real", and people can see you jump 30 ft and go, wow, that is a well trained person.

Because if it's literally just training, then it represents the an entirely different limit on what the human body can accomplish, other non-adventuring, non-"special" people will still exceed what's possible "IRL", and you get the "farmers don't need draft animals any more" setting change I mentioned already.

[Max_Killjoy]

I think you're overstating the problem with binary effects. If the effect in question is a simple save-or-die I agree it's not great, but binary debuffs are much less problematic, and the alternative you're putting forward has its own potential pitfalls. If you're hitting a willpower track, your fighter buddy better have "intimidating shout" or whatever that also hits the willpower track or you're just racing each other. Doing a single, binary test to apply a tag like "shaken" is pretty elegant. It's immediately relevant to allies attacking other defenses, and it doesn't require a lot of work to manage or track.

But then you get into things charm and mind control, where there's no partial effect, a limited space for variable resistance, and other problems.

[Quertus]

There is, however, one completely non-functional choice that some gamers, and some games, seem determined to pursue, that always ends in tears and/or a broken mangled wreck of a setting -- "I want my utterly non-magical, non-fantastic warrior to be able to beat spellcasters who cast level 9 spells, just by being that awesome" in a setting where the second solution above has not been applied.

Sorry, but in the typical D&D setting, with the typical D&D peasants and shopkeepers and artisans and beggers who are just like real-world people, the 20th level Fighter or Rogue who is on par with a 20th level Wizard is in their own way magical, and just as fantastic and unusual and "superpowered" as any level 20 spellcaster of any sort.

Hmmm... I think that this harkens back to the OP. Could a Fighter 20 - a "better Fighter than anyone in this world" - just take components from a Wizard's hands faster than he could retrieve them? I mean, I think *I* would have a chance of success at that task (having done the equivalent IRL for the span of "longer than a typical D&D combat lasts"), so I think that a *real* Fighter 20 could probably keep several Wizards at bay simultaneously. Could a perfectly mundane Fighter 20 strike critical areas to disable special abilities of monsters? Again, I think I could poke a Beholder in the eye (and then die to the rest of its attacks, but still…), I think a *real* Fighter 20 could probably spend their turn and "mugglify" most any monster.

Or, you know, disable their attacking limbs, or their movement limbs, or their "cry for help" or "perceive the world" organs, or...

Game designers lack imagination.


My first thought: What level of summon monster gets you a monster with at least 60 HP?

That doesn't help the Wizard survive a Fireball, or Sneak Attack damage, or put them over the threshold for various spells (like Power Word…).

People undervalue what the Fighter actually gets. So let's put a GP value on it, before complaining how much they need to spend to "catch up".


Because if it's literally just training, then it represents the an entirely different limit on what the human body can accomplish, other non-adventuring, non-"special" people will still exceed what's possible "IRL", and you get the "farmers don't need draft animals any more" setting change I mentioned already.

Not necessarily. While you could argue that, say, Michael Jordan has some genetic advantages, is there really anything that made, say, Bill Gates or Gandhi special? Any genetic advantages possessed by Vincent Van Gogh or Helen Keller?

Just how "grim dark" are you willing to admit that the world we currently live in really is / isn't?

It may be comforting to think that Navy Seals or Fortune 500 / world leaders have some "special sauce" or "divine grace" that the common man lacks, but is that reality?

(For the record, Quertus, my signature academia mage, for whom this account is named, is a firm believer in "grim dark", in "special sauce", in the belief that he is simply incapable of achieving certain things)

What's wrong with the idea that everyone has that potential, but few reach it? And we're playing the few who are achieving their potential, rather than the ones asking, "would you like fries with that?"?

Why does that necessitate world-building on the level of world-altering changes? Our farmers in this world still need "horsepower", despite the existence of Einstein and Jackie Chan.


But then you get into things charm and mind control, where there's no partial effect, a limited space for variable resistance, and other problems.

Again, there is no reason beyond "it wasn't made that way in 3e" that these cannot have partial effects. Several posters have told you this already.

[JNAProductions]

Well, you can (in 3.5) have the four Heart of [ELEMENT] spells on you to gain total fortification, rendering you immune to Sneak Attack and crits.

[Friv]

Because if it's literally just training, then it represents the an entirely different limit on what the human body can accomplish, other non-adventuring, non-"special" people will still exceed what's possible "IRL", and you get the "farmers don't need draft animals any more" setting change I mentioned already.

I'm a pretty decent singer, but it doesn't matter how hard I train, I will never be able to sing the Queen of the Night's aria. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuBeBjqKSGQ) Most people won't. All you need to do is say that the training ceiling for certain people is higher and you have a setting in which the vast majority of farmers need normal farm equipment, but if you happen to come into town and see a farmer dragging his plow himself, you'd say, "Wow, that's pretty cool" instead of "Wow, that is not human."

This isn't even that unusual. There are entire genres of film, book, and legend about people who get effectively superhuman skill through training. It's Sherlock Holmes. It's Robin Hood. It's Guan Yu. It's Dominic Toretto.

[Arbane]

As someone said in one of the many, many discussions on this topic since D&D3 came out and 'Caster Supremacy' entered the vocabulary, it's a matter of scaling. If the wizard can build their own private universe, then the Fighter should be parrying volcanic eruptions. If the cleric can bring people back from the dead regularly, then the rogue should be able to sneak into the Underworld and smuggle a soul back to life.

But thats not what we have because "Realism" must always apply... but only to player characters who don't cast spells and literally NOTHING ELSE in D&Dland.



Or, you know, disable their attacking limbs, or their movement limbs, or their "cry for help" or "perceive the world" organs, or...

Game designers lack imagination.


Plenty of games already have these, D&D just generally isn't one of them.
To be fair, this isn't always a bad thing - getting permanently crippled 3 seconds after initiative starts SUUUUUCKS when it happens to a PC because of one or two bad die-rolls. Hit points give the combat professionals a small amount of security that they can fight for a bit before they're actually in danger of dying. The problem being that HP don't stop all the ways to insta-lose a fight that aren't 'get damaged'.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Plenty of games already have these, D&D just generally isn't one of them.
To be fair, this isn't always a bad thing - getting permanently crippled 3 seconds after initiative starts SUUUUUCKS when it happens to a PC because of one or two bad die-rolls. Hit points give the combat professionals a small amount of security that they can fight for a bit before they're actually in danger of dying. The problem being that HP don't stop all the ways to insta-lose a fight that aren't 'get damaged'.

Things like called shots, limb dismemberment, etc. work really well for gritty games where combat should be brutal, short, and rare. Or where characters are cheap. For something like D&D (where combat is a major part and there shouldn't be major trauma if the characters are to continue), they're a mistake IMO.

But I agree that (especially in 3e) there are way too may ways to bypass HP and "win" outright. And they're almost exclusively available to dedicated spell-casters. I'm very opposed to SoD and even most hard CC abilities. They're just not fun for anyone except the privileged one who gets to do it first. And so everyone gets immunities to them as part of the entry requirement (by spell or item). Which then basically removes them from the game or leads to an escalation race.

I don't care if it's not realistic, I want combat to be fun. Which means letting everyone act. Acting at a penalty is fine, getting locked out (either merely CC'd or dead) on turn 1 isn't so fine. I'm more fine with it happening to the monsters, unless there's only one. The DM gets to play too, and usually has more pieces on the board.

[Quertus]

Plenty of games already have these, D&D just generally isn't one of them.
To be fair, this isn't always a bad thing - getting permanently crippled 3 seconds after initiative starts SUUUUUCKS when it happens to a PC because of one or two bad die-rolls. Hit points give the combat professionals a small amount of security that they can fight for a bit before they're actually in danger of dying. The problem being that HP don't stop all the ways to insta-lose a fight that aren't 'get damaged'.


Things like called shots, limb dismemberment, etc. work really well for gritty games where combat should be brutal, short, and rare. Or where characters are cheap. For something like D&D (where combat is a major part and there shouldn't be major trauma if the characters are to continue), they're a mistake IMO.

But I agree that (especially in 3e) there are way too may ways to bypass HP and "win" outright. And they're almost exclusively available to dedicated spell-casters. I'm very opposed to SoD and even most hard CC abilities. They're just not fun for anyone except the privileged one who gets to do it first. And so everyone gets immunities to them as part of the entry requirement (by spell or item). Which then basically removes them from the game or leads to an escalation race.

I don't care if it's not realistic, I want combat to be fun. Which means letting everyone act. Acting at a penalty is fine, getting locked out (either merely CC'd or dead) on turn 1 isn't so fine. I'm more fine with it happening to the monsters, unless there's only one. The DM gets to play too, and usually has more pieces on the board.

My point was, 3e game designers (and many others) were quite uninventive in giving Wizards so many abilities that target so many defenses, yet failing to do so for muggles.

So, let's give PC muggle classes cool abilities that target multiple defenses, too. Let's give PC muggle classes cool abilities that give diverse status effects, too.

And, since we think it's be no fun for the PCs to encounter such SoD/SoS abilities, let's not give these abilities to monsters. If the GM adds these abilities to too many NPCs (like, say, more than one or two in a 2-year campaign), that's on them for making the game unfun for their group.

What did I miss?

EDIT: I didn't say "permanent disabled". My default duration was more like "a minute" (with maybe lesser penalties for a day). To tie this back into another conversation, the effect(s) and/or duration(s) could be tied into how much the Save was failed (or passed) by.

[Cluedrew]

This is the third time I am trying to write this post, so let's hope for the best.


I'm a big believer of systems not trying to be all things to all people, and I'm going for the "Be Bad-Donkey Space Privateers!" vibe, which doesn't really include digging up childhood secrets.I am actually against generic systems, a certain type of generic that basically means does not conflict with a range of settings, which means lacking a lot of interesting things.* I prefer a system focused on something or a toolbox system that lets you do that focusing yourself.

* This just occurred to me, but the magic system of D&D is one of the least generic part of it. And (despite my many complaints about it) it one of the most (mechanically) interesting parts of it. Which might be why it was so overdeveloped and overwhelmed the rest of the system.


I honestly don't see why "in this setting, exceptional training makes you able to do feats that would be physically impossible in the real world, and are impossible for the bulk of the setting, but can be done by certain people with certain training" is any more weird than "magic is real", and people can see you jump 30 ft and go, wow, that is a well trained person.Whole heartedly agree. I do not what to here about both magic and realism in your setting pitch. Accept the fantastic and let impossible things into the world or keep it grounded. I don't believe you can have it both ways.** And this is, in terms of conceptual image this might be the root problem. I am trying to look at a different part of it problem, the mechanical implementation of those concepts. Although considering how quickly people are heading back to the well worn path, maybe that is a dry well.

** Which is not to say you have to have powerful martials in the setting. But make that choice purposefully and don't pretend the other options are equal then.


That doesn't help the Wizard survive a Fireball, or Sneak Attack damage, or put them over the threshold for various spells (like Power Word…).

People undervalue what the Fighter actually gets. So let's put a GP value on it, before complaining how much they need to spend to "catch up".I can't put a GP value on it, but again I think we could ask the 3.X sub-forum for a GP value conversion of level 20 class features.

[Florian]

Hm.... Yes, you can have the "Man" keeping martials down.

Personally, I think this is mainly a D&D/Sim legacy that is grounded in trying to model RL physics first, then add "magic" as an additional layer on top.

[Max_Killjoy]

I'm a pretty decent singer, but it doesn't matter how hard I train, I will never be able to sing the Queen of the Night's aria. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuBeBjqKSGQ) Most people won't. All you need to do is say that the training ceiling for certain people is higher and you have a setting in which the vast majority of farmers need normal farm equipment, but if you happen to come into town and see a farmer dragging his plow himself, you'd say, "Wow, that's pretty cool" instead of "Wow, that is not human."

This isn't even that unusual. There are entire genres of film, book, and legend about people who get effectively superhuman skill through training. It's Sherlock Holmes. It's Robin Hood. It's Guan Yu. It's Dominic Toretto.

Compare the average high-school athlete to world record-holder for most track and field events, or look at the progression of world records... that's the range of what "inherent potential" and "training" can accomplish, despite everything we've learned over the last century or so about how the human body actually works and responds.

Now compare the world records to what would be needed for a "just training and determination, no magic, not fantastic, nope nope nope" martial character. We go from slow and fractional progression... to orders of magnitude.

Push that peak possible performance of the human body up by those orders of magnitude, and you will drag the average / mean upward of human capability upward with it, unless you just don't give a damn about a coherent setting.

"But I trained really hard and now I can leap 30 feet while dodging in mid-air during the leap, land balanced on a loose post, and kill 10 guys, just by training harder than anyone ever" IS fantastic, just as fantastic as flinging explosions from your bare hands, opening portals to other dimensions with a piece of chalk and a wall to draw on, or a Wish spell.

[Max_Killjoy]

As someone said in one of the many, many discussions on this topic since D&D3 came out and 'Caster Supremacy' entered the vocabulary, it's a matter of scaling. If the wizard can build their own private universe, then the Fighter should be parrying volcanic eruptions. If the cleric can bring people back from the dead regularly, then the rogue should be able to sneak into the Underworld and smuggle a soul back to life.

But thats not what we have because "Realism" must always apply... but only to player characters who don't cast spells and literally NOTHING ELSE in D&Dland.


On the flip side, I've comes across a lot of players who insist that their Fighters and Rogues must be utterly "mundane", no magic, nope nope nope, nothing the Fighter or Rogue does can be magic, it all has to just be determination and wits and steel and skill.

Which is fine, if either:

A) they dial down the power level on magic to match.
B) they accept that those characters will be outmatched by users of magic sometimes.

What they cannot have is everything at once. Cake, or eat it, chose one.

[Lucas Yew]

Having grown up in an environment which had Wuxia (or to be exact, Xianxia and up) as the "default" fantasy mindscape, I always found this Guy at the Gym Fallacy too silly for belief. In the case of combat power, if you can't crush skyscrapers with singular swings of your greatsword at-will by a high "level" (à la FFVIIAC), you're definitely doing it wrong (or so the majority around where I live believes); cue the inevitable shock and awe of nearby NPC witnesses for social values changes.

[Mechalich]

Whole heartedly agree. I do not what to here about both magic and realism in your setting pitch. Accept the fantastic and let impossible things into the world or keep it grounded. I don't believe you can have it both ways.** And this is, in terms of conceptual image this might be the root problem. I am trying to look at a different part of it problem, the mechanical implementation of those concepts. Although considering how quickly people are heading back to the well worn path, maybe that is a dry well.

Well, I think the mechanical element is an aspect of 'not all superpowers are equally super.' Magneto's Magnetic Mastery is simply a better power than Cyclop's Optic Blasts, even in a scenario where you rule that in a one on one blast to blast combat Cyclops always wins. There are just certain power sets that the more you add to them the more awesome they become, while there are others where if you add more all you're doing is increasing the damage roll. A big aspect of this is versatility, and 'magic' tends to have nearly-infinite versatility, while something like 'swordsmanship' doesn't.

A good example of how this unfolds can be found in the FATE/ series of anime, in which you have mostly martial-based legendary heroes, but you also have a caster class, and wouldn't you know the Caster class (or heroes from other classes who can use magic of their own) has a funny tendency to hijack the narrative every, single, time. Even more broadly, heroes with powers that are wide-ranging - such at the eponymous Archer's ability to copy other people's weapons and their special attacks - are just better than someone who's power is 'awesome sword that shoots energy blasts.'

Contrast this with the Disgaea games. In Disgaea the numbers go up to stupid levels - you can make a character do 10,000,000,000 damage if you grind out the right setup - but all action takes place on a rigid grid map with defined ranges and effects. Magic is then just a different type of attack sets with its own special moves compared to axes, swords, and guns and the magic using classes aren't necessarily any better than the martial ones.

So in order to serve the purpose of mechanical balance, it's important to not simply balance outputs, you also have to balance zones of capability. This is fairly tough - various White-Wolf games were supposedly built this way and yeah...that wasn't what happened. In the context of D&D it's worse because it absolutely mandates nerfing all the Tier I casters severely. PFs Tier 3 partial casters actually do get you most of the way though, which gives you some idea of just how much you have to nerf magic to allow even fairly powerful martials (and PF's got some potent martial classes) to keep up.


Personally, I think this is mainly a D&D/Sim legacy that is grounded in trying to model RL physics first, then add "magic" as an additional layer on top.

That's a consequence of how world-building actually works. Building a world using a completely new physics model intended to accommodate you fictional outputs is the kind of extreme writing challenge that only a rare breed of creator (like mathematical guru Greg Egan) is actually willing to undertake. Almost everyone else is going to take some version of the real world and then start adding layers that contain their fantastical elements and they'll either hope they can build in sufficient post-hoc justification to allow their world to make sense, or they'll just not care. The latter state is actually quite popular, especially in high magic worlds. There's a number of fantasy universes out there were everyone has magic - like the Codex Alera by Jim Butcher - and the author pretty much totally ignores how this fact and the capabilities of said ubiquitous magic would drastically distort the world because that's not the story they want to tell. There's also stories that are simply sufficient gonzo and crazed that verisimilitude nosedives in importance to the overall work - like pretty much anything ever produced by Studio GAINAX (ex. Kill la Kill).

The problem in game design is that players can, and will, test the boundaries of what a game allows and in this way break the game if at all possible. People do this all the time in video game RPGs, where exploiting your way to uber-godhood is a cottage industry on the internet (some games, particularly Diablo-style actioners, have gotten to the point where they functionally demand such manipulations from players), and the situation is worse in tabletop which at least in theory involves a much wider range of possible inputs and outputs than any video game. That means you have to actually try and create mechanics that hold up in-universe to sustain the setting. Sometimes you even have to try and do this for settings that were never intended to hold up in the first place - like the superhero genre (I'd love to see a superhero game come out and say 'look this world functions according to comic book logic, the GM is expected to outlaw and chicanery that would hurt extant themes, deal with it.')

[Max_Killjoy]

Having grown up in an environment which had Wuxia (or to be exact, Xianxia and up) as the "default" fantasy mindscape, I always found this Guy at the Gym Fallacy too silly for belief. In the case of combat power, if you can't crush skyscrapers with singular swings of your greatsword at-will by a high "level" (à la FFVIIAC), you're definitely doing it wrong (or so the majority around where I live believes); cue the inevitable shock and awe of nearby NPC witnesses for social values changes.

As noted above, there are players who want their Fighter, or whatever, to be that Guy at the Gym, to be "the fighting man" -- to be utterly and specifically not fantastic at all, and yet to be able to accomplish what would otherwise be impossible, all while the setting shows no signs of "normal human beings for this setting" being anything other than identical to real-world normal human beings.

There's no inherent conflict if the training for the Fighter or Rogue is similar to the training for, say, a Wizard, in that it opens up the fantastic -- that the Wizard gains the fantastic ability to cast spells, and the Fighter gets fantastic physical abilities. The inherent conflict comes in when it's claimed that a character can be utterly and specifically "mandane", but do things that are otherwise and outright fantastic in the context of the setting for the campaign.

[Quertus]

Well, I think the mechanical element is an aspect of 'not all superpowers are equally super.' Magneto's Magnetic Mastery is simply a better power than Cyclop's Optic Blasts, even in a scenario where you rule that in a one on one blast to blast combat Cyclops always wins. There are just certain power sets that the more you add to them the more awesome they become, while there are others where if you add more all you're doing is increasing the damage roll. A big aspect of this is versatility, and 'magic' tends to have nearly-infinite versatility, while something like 'swordsmanship' doesn't.

But the limits of the versatility of being a muggle are much greater than those of "swordsmanship". Surely game designers could have done a much better job creating muggles who could affect the plot much more effectively than someone like the 3e Fighter or Cyclops does.

[Cluedrew]

Personally, I think this is mainly a D&D/Sim legacy that is grounded in trying to model RL physics first, then add "magic" as an additional layer on top.I mean all settings operate like real life on some level (even Alice in Wonderland), with any exceptions they need. I think D&D and its ilk make two mistakes for this conversation. 1) they make exceptions only (or primarily) for explicate magic things and not for their other archetypes. 2) These exceptions are one way, magic can act on the rest of the world but the rest of the world can't act back on magic. The only solution for magic, is more magic. This is where the "Counters Not Included" bit comes in.


Having grown up in an environment which had Wuxia (or to be exact, Xianxia and up) as the "default" fantasy mindscape, I always found this Guy at the Gym Fallacy too silly for belief.I'm glad that there is some people out there that see it that way. This power games seems to be mostly a European (/North America) thing, rooted in that fantasy tradition. East Asia has many powerful (if slightly mystic) martial artists. I've read some Hindu myths where are archer threatens the ocean with a bow and arrow. It may have been magic? They blur the line a lot. Like if you are the spirit of wind, is causing a storm a martial thing or a caster thing. I suppose that is another way to solve the issue, everyone is both. Or course the martial side still has to account for something for it to feel like both.


Well, I think the mechanical element is an aspect of 'not all superpowers are equally super.' Magneto's Magnetic Mastery is simply a better power than Cyclop's Optic Blasts, even in a scenario where you rule that in a one on one blast to blast combat Cyclops always wins.Yeah, but they are not supposed to be equal. Power gaps are part of superhero fiction. And if you want to write a story about that, or everyone teaming up to face Caster in FATE/ go ahead. But I don't think D&D is supposed to be that story so it becomes a problem.

Also I agree with your point that you cannot rely on narrative structure to limit casters, which is how many stories do it.

[Max_Killjoy]

I mean all settings operate like real life on some level (even Alice in Wonderland), with any exceptions they need. I think D&D and its ilk make two mistakes for this conversation. 1) they make exceptions only (or primarily) for explicate magic things and not for their other archetypes. 2) These exceptions are one way, magic can act on the rest of the world but the rest of the world can't act back on magic. The only solution for magic, is more magic. This is where the "Counters Not Included" bit comes in.


Which is something I've been griping about in a few threads lately, especially regarding D&D -- the lack of a more granular, nuanced, mechanism for resisting various sorts of magic.

[Mendicant]

But then you get into things charm and mind control, where there's no partial effect, a limited space for variable resistance, and other problems.

There's no reason why you can't have partial effects here. Charmed is already an intermediary step towards dominated, and going straight to dominated is functionally equivalent to a save-or-die anyway. You could make another effect like "intrigued" or something if you want a halfway point to charmed, but I think it's a design mistake to make parallel health bars that don't talk to each other, and even if they do communicate they won't have the elegance or flexibility of a status tag/hp track combo.

[Bohandas]

Hm.... Yes, you can have the "Man" keeping martials down.

Personally, I think this is mainly a D&D/Sim legacy that is grounded in trying to model RL physics first, then add "magic" as an additional layer on top.

The problem isn;t that the ground state of the world's pgysics is semi-realistic. The problem is that the martial classes are both semi-realistic and also pseudo-medieval. And it's that last bit that really hamstrings them, with better equipment they'd be much more evenly matched. A long range spell doesn't get up to the effective range of a kalashnikov until caster level 19, and you're pretty much limited to 8 spells per round max if you mix twin spell, quicken spell, and split ray, as opposed to 60 bullets per round out of an AK-47


On the flip side, I've comes across a lot of players who insist that their Fighters and Rogues must be utterly "mundane", no magic, nope nope nope, nothing the Fighter or Rogue does can be magic, it all has to just be determination and wits and steel and skill.


This actually leaves a lot of room for the supernatural. It is supernatural, maybe even moreso than a wizard. The fireball spell can be done in real life with napalm or white phosphorus, but this can;t be done. Not at all


As noted above, there are players who want their Fighter, or whatever, to be that Guy at the Gym, to be "the fighting man" -- to be utterly and specifically not fantastic at all, and yet to be able to accomplish what would otherwise be impossible, all while the setting shows no signs of "normal human beings for this setting" being anything other than identical to real-world normal human beings.

Point of order. In D&D 3.5e regular professionals and craftsmen who are actually particularly good at what they do will all also fight abnormally well since they must necessarily be above level one in order to put more than 4 points in the relevant skills

[Max_Killjoy]

Hm.... Yes, you can have the "Man" keeping martials down.

Personally, I think this is mainly a D&D/Sim legacy that is grounded in trying to model RL physics first, then add "magic" as an additional layer on top.

Don't conflate anything D&D (the system, any version) has ever done with "sim" or "modelling RL physics".




This actually leaves a lot of room for the supernatural. It is supernatural, maybe even moreso than a wizard. The fireball spell can be done in real life with napalm or white phosphorus, but this can;t be done. Not at all


First... because it's been a point of contention when this topic has come up, to get it out of the way... as far as I'm concerned, for the context of this thread's subject, supernatural == fantastic == magic; "magic" is not constrained or limited to "spellcasting".

Second, choose whatever spells can't be duplicated with zero-safety-regs "stage tricks", and replace fireball.

Third, the point is that those players utterly refuse the idea that their "fighting manTM" is doing anything supernatural, fantastic, or magic -- utterly, totally reject it.




Point of order. In D&D 3.5e regular professionals and craftsmen who are actually particularly good at what they do will all also fight abnormally well since they must necessarily be above level one in order to put more than 4 points in the relevant skills


That's a separate issue with various editions just being a total failure in one way or another when it comes to "mapping" non-adventuring but competent characters.

[Friv]

On the flip side, I've comes across a lot of players who insist that their Fighters and Rogues must be utterly "mundane", no magic, nope nope nope, nothing the Fighter or Rogue does can be magic, it all has to just be determination and wits and steel and skill.

Which is fine, if either:

A) they dial down the power level on magic to match.
B) they accept that those characters will be outmatched by users of magic sometimes.

What they cannot have is everything at once. Cake, or eat it, chose one.

Again, a number of people are telling you that their personal disbelief is not broken by having Batman, or a wuxia hero, or Sherlock Holmes exist in their game.

Like, it's not your personal taste, that's fine, but it really isn't the absolute impossibility that you are treating it as, a fact that I can verify from my own table games.

[Max_Killjoy]

Again, a number of people are telling you that their personal disbelief is not broken by having Batman, or a wuxia hero, or Sherlock Holmes exist in their game.

Like, it's not your personal taste, that's fine, but it really isn't the absolute impossibility that you are treating it as, a fact that I can verify from my own table games.



First, you're conflating different works and the assertions they make. Batman is not Holmes is not some wuxia character, and their "settings" do not overlap.

Second, you're conflating edge-case individuals and "I can see reality from here" characters... with claims about "training" that go orders of magnitude beyond human capacity. A few of the more outlandish Wuxia moves get into the territory needed to "keep up with" spellcasters at high levels in D&D.

Third, this isn't about disbelief, this is about inherently conflicting, mutually exclusive assertions.

[Mechalich]

But the limits of the versatility of being a muggle are much greater than those of "swordsmanship". Surely game designers could have done a much better job creating muggles who could affect the plot much more effectively than someone like the 3e Fighter or Cyclops does.

Well, yes, but characters usually get one or at most two powers when it comes to game design. People complain about the overall weakness of fighters more than that of rogues because the rogues power suite of 'sneaky stuff' and 'general skullduggery' is much more versatile and generally applicable than the fighter's 'hurting things' power suite (and while the rogue can be replaced by spells or minions, it's more difficult to do so).

Overall, it's a general game design challenge to get power balance correct, especially in a game where play style might shift radically and where GMs commonly make major adjustments to rules that they find inconvenient. For example, in VtM spending a lot of points to make your vampire a murder machine who could win a duel with Blade is possible, but stupid. It costs a tiny fraction of the same point investment to buy a bunch of backgrounds that say 'I own the local SWAT team' and call them up whenever you need to bring the pain. However, this only holds true so long as a GM allows you reasonable access to your minions, if the GM structures the game so you absolutely, positively need to be able to fight your way through obstacles using just the core party, that drastically changes how valuable certain powers are.

Getting this right is really hard, and it becomes harder the more power you allow to accrue to your most powerful options. The obvious D&D example is spells like Miracle and Wish which by their very nature laugh at game balance.


I'm glad that there is some people out there that see it that way. This power games seems to be mostly a European (/North America) thing, rooted in that fantasy tradition. East Asia has many powerful (if slightly mystic) martial artists. I've read some Hindu myths where are archer threatens the ocean with a bow and arrow. It may have been magic? They blur the line a lot. Like if you are the spirit of wind, is causing a storm a martial thing or a caster thing. I suppose that is another way to solve the issue, everyone is both.

Wuxia is just superheroes set in a historical setting when you get down to brass tacks. Western fantasy tends to set its superheroes in the modern world, though it doesn't have to. Various interpretations of Arthurian legend (including, to me understanding, the most recent Guy Ritchie movie) have been quite happy to embrace this approach, among others, and plenty of fantasy settings with high magic and low verisimilitude are more or less this as well - Stormlight Archive Radiants are straight up superheroes just as much as any Wuxia martial master might be.

The problem arises when people want to have their fantasy that isn't a superhero game and where most of the characters are operating on the medieval street level rather than the legendary level. The Western fantasy literary tradition, with Howard and Tolkien and Lieber and Vance that inspired D&D operated on this level, and while those worlds have powerful spellcasters, they are almost universally NPCs. The base incompatibility at the heart of the system is that high-level casters aren't operating on the same scale as everybody else and never should have been playable in the first place. When D&D was initially conceived Gygax constructed the system such that a character actually living to become a high-level caster was nigh impossible and later authors also added fluff about high-level casters abandoning their homeworlds to go gallivanting about in other dimensions like Dr. Strange does all the time and thereby removing them from the board. This worked for a while, it didn't really become a problem until 3e provided full casters with a series of massive synergistic power-ups while claiming the playstyle could remain unchanged.

[Quertus]

Again, a number of people are telling you that their personal disbelief is not broken by having Batman, or a wuxia hero, or Sherlock Holmes exist in their game.

Doesn't help those who *are* insisting on completely mundane muggles, though.

But, yes, I think that "mundane muggles" can do a lot more than they're given credit for.


Third, this isn't about disbelief, this is about inherently conflicting, mutually exclusive assertions.

Wanting to be perfectly mundane, and wanting to keep up with high-level spellcasters is tough, I'll admit. But is it impossible?

Couldn't we make a "Muggle" (class, if 3e) that gets numerous SoS/SoD (or even NSJS) on-hit rider effects, "quick hands" reaction abilities / extra actions, "bardic knowledge"+ style knowledge of ways to do stuff (like where planar gates are located, completely mundane words that certain magical creatures will hear & respond to, etc), CPR to resurrect fallen allies, exercises / stretches to remove stat damage, therapy to remove sanity loss, evasion that extends to your mount (which gets massive bonuses because you know how to take care of it, let alone how to ride it), diplomacy, Willow level combat bluff, "action hero" ignoring wounds / "self-healing", etc? At what level (of ability, or actual 3e level) would a Wizard still care about having another Wizard, but no longer care about having a good Muggle?

[Mechalich]

Wanting to be perfectly mundane, and wanting to keep up with high-level spellcasters is tough, I'll admit. But is it impossible?

Couldn't we make a "Muggle" (class, if 3e) that gets numerous SoS/SoD (or even NSJS) on-hit rider effects, "quick hands" reaction abilities / extra actions, "bardic knowledge"+ style knowledge of ways to do stuff (like where planar gates are located, completely mundane words that certain magical creatures will hear & respond to, etc), CPR to resurrect fallen allies, exercises / stretches to remove stat damage, therapy to remove sanity loss, evasion that extends to your mount (which gets massive bonuses because you know how to take care of it, let alone how to ride it), diplomacy, Willow level combat bluff, "action hero" ignoring wounds / "self-healing", etc? At what level (of ability, or actual 3e level) would a Wizard still care about having another Wizard, but no longer care about having a good Muggle?

Very few people would interpret that pile of abilities as anything even resembling mundane.

When people speak of 'mundane' characters they're often picking a specific character in a piece of fantasy fiction who has few, if any, mystical powers. Conan gets brought up a lot because he technically qualifies. His stats are unrealistically high for anything you could probably buy in an actual game system, but other than that he doesn't have any specifically supernatural abilities. Also, and very importantly, Conan could, in a reasonable reading of his combat capabilities, probably fight ten decently trained fighters and win, maybe even engage in a running battle with twenty bandits and escape alive. But he couldn't walk into a fortress and ruthlessly slaughter hundreds while remaining completely unharmed, and that's one of the key verisimilitude-based points that people have internalized when they think about fantasy worlds. The most potent 'mundane' character is still someone who interacts with the world, even if they do so in a stylized 'Bond, James Bond' sort of way. By contrast even a modestly powerful magical character can hover atop the world and make decisions that impact billions without even being so much as noticed.

This is actually where mechanics can come into play. High-level mundane characters tend to get mechanical advantages that allow them to overcome effects, while magical characters get those that simply ignore them. A high-level rogue might be able to find and disarm every trap ever invented with trivial ease, but they still have to interact with the traps in the first place. A high-level wizard can just turn incorporeal and glide past everything. This is a mechanical problem that could be changed so that everyone interacts with various types of challenges in more or less the same way. To my understanding 4e D&D actually did this, to some degree anyway. Unfortunately the implementation meant that every character felt exactly the same in the process.

[Arbane]

Which is something I've been griping about in a few threads lately, especially regarding D&D -- the lack of a more granular, nuanced, mechanism for resisting various sorts of magic.

Here's a nice, simple one: Fighters are Realistic. Magic isn't Realistic, so magic doesn't work on Fighters if they don't want it to.

:smallbiggrin:



Third, the point is that those players utterly refuse the idea that their "fighting manTM" is doing anything supernatural, fantastic, or magic -- utterly, totally reject it.

Oh, so that's how to do a TM! Thanks!
There's a legitimate place for magicless heroes, but that place is not higher-level D&D.

(I keep reposting this quote, because I think he doesn a good job of explaining the problem. Max, your icon is appropriate to it...)


It's phrased in all kinds of different ways. Fighters shouldn't be too "anime". Or maybe Fighters should be more Conanesque. Or whatever. But it's actually really common that people think of a "Fighter" and they think of some fictional character who is like 4th level. Mad Martigan from Willow, Conan from Conan, Gimli from LotR, or whatever. That's their concept of a Fighter, and they don't want their character to do anything that character does not do.

Where this gets problematic is when it bumps right next to their next demand, that the party is hitting 5th level and they still want to be limited to a benchmark that is essentially 4th level. And while at that point you can in fact keep things kind of hobbling along with the same character with bigger numbers, after a few levels of that it becomes untenable. When the player is asking for their character to be archetypically identical to a 4th level concept and asking to be mechanically balanced with 9th level casters, you're up **** Creek.

That was the horrible revelation that was caused by the Tome Fighter. The harsh reality is that Mad Martigan is a 4th level character and the people who hold up Mad Martigan as the example are seriously not saying that they want higher level abilities that happen to be skinned as guts and luck, they are literally saying that they want to be quintessentially 4th level characters while being balanced with 9th level characters. It's an actually and actively contradictory thought pattern and there is no solution.

Contrariwise, the Tome Monk get accepted with hardly a blip. Some people quibble about it being overpowered. Some people even helpfully informed us that it was more powerful than a Core Monk. But people didn't tell us that any of it was out of theme. Because the Monk theme is one which can in fact continue growing until it's Goku. Similarly, "Wizard" is a character concept that just keeps growing forever. Your summoner summons electric rat, and then he summons a storm crow, and then he's summoning a thunder dragon. No one bats an eye at this ****.

But Fighter players seriously do get annoyed and even offended when their character can beat up an elephant with their bare hands. Also they get annoyed and offended when they notice that the other characters are more powerful than they are. It really is cognitive dissonance, and the solution is to force people to abandon the Fighter concept after a few levels.


When people speak of 'mundane' characters they're often picking a specific character in a piece of fantasy fiction who has few, if any, mystical powers. Conan gets brought up a lot because he technically qualifies. His stats are unrealistically high for anything you could probably buy in an actual game system, but other than that he doesn't have any specifically supernatural abilities.

If you want a good laugh and an amazing example of D&D's inability to actually emulate any of the fantasy fiction that inspired it, search for Gary Gygax's AD&D write-up of Conan for Dragon Magazine. Sky-high stats, level 10+ in multiple classes, and 'unconscious' psionic powers. :smallbiggrin: It was basically Gygax throwing up his hands and saying "no matter HOW high-level your character gets, they can NEVER be this cool!"

There's plenty of games you could make someone at Conan-level badassery, it's just that the other PCs made on the same number of points should be just as powerful/omnicompetent.

(I think Conan is officially a superhero now, as he's joining a team of Avengers (https://www.polygon.com/comics/2019/2/14/18223964/conan-avengers-wolverine-venom-punisher-marvel-comics-savage) in the comics. the mind boggles...)

[Mechalich]

If you want a good laugh and an amazing example of D&D's inability to actually emulate any of the fantasy fiction that inspired it, search for Gary Gygax's AD&D write-up of Conan for Dragon Magazine. Sky-high stats, level 10+ in multiple classes, and 'unconscious' psionic powers. :smallbiggrin: It was basically Gygax throwing up his hands and saying "no matter HOW high-level your character gets, they can NEVER be this cool!"

I've seen that write-up. The part about it I find interesting in the context of this sort of discussion is that Gygax's representation of Conan implies that he thought Conan was OP. And Conan isn't OP by any means. His most extreme achievement in Howard's stories might reasonably be noted as that time he killed a 'dragon' (which was just a big lizard, probably about as dangerous as an Allosaurus) using a combination of martial skill and trickery. In 3.5e D&D, Conan is maybe a 7/3 Barbarian/Rogue with really high stats in a few areas.

To interpret Frank's quote though, I agree he's right that certain concepts, and 'guy with no supernatural powers' is one of them, have a hard ceiling in terms of how far they scale. The thing is, I also think a huge number of players want to hold their adventures in a world where 'guy with no supernatural powers' remains relevant throughout the entire scope of PC power scaling, or at least a world that pretends this is true. And that's because I believe people want their characters to interact with the fantasy world rather than play fantasy supers where only the supers matter, which is the reality of superhero universes.

If this is true, and it's certainly true some of the time, including in most D&D fiction, then the trick is to find a way to impose a hard ceiling on the casters that is at least in roughly the same place as the martials (you can give the martials better utilization of magical equipment to make things fuzzier) that still allows them to throw around satisfying levels of magic. One way to do this is by limiting overall magical power, like how PF half-casters only get up to 6th level spells and have a reduced spell level progression. Another is introducing specific vulnerabilities, like making spells take longer to cast in order to render them functionally useless in combat. There are plenty of other ways to do it, though only certain methods will work for certain playstyles (which makes this particularly challenging for games like D&D).

[FaerieGodfather]

If you want a good laugh and an amazing example of D&D's inability to actually emulate any of the fantasy fiction that inspired it, search for Gary Gygax's AD&D write-up of Conan for Dragon Magazine. Sky-high stats, level 10+ in multiple classes, and 'unconscious' psionic powers. :smallbiggrin: It was basically Gygax throwing up his hands and saying "no matter HOW high-level your character gets, they can NEVER be this cool!"

Same phenomenon, closer to home: look at the 3.X statblock of any FR novel character in the FRCS. It's not just Drizzt and Elminster.


(I think Conan is officially a superhero now, as he's joining a team of Avengers (https://www.polygon.com/comics/2019/2/14/18223964/conan-avengers-wolverine-venom-punisher-marvel-comics-savage) in the comics. the mind boggles...)

god damn it, I have been working on this fanfic for ten years now.

[Morty]

D&D magic needs to be burnt to the ground and started from scratch. There's nothing particularly worthwhile or salvageable about it. The problem is that, sadly, it has seeped deep into the fantasy gaming genre and coloured people's expectations of what magic "should" be able to do. Not always or maybe even not most of the time, particularly when a system or story consciously tries to defy it. But often enough.

Trying to get non-magical skills to match it is a losing game, because you're trying to accomplish something that shouldn't be accomplished. Besides, using Conan as an example goes to show that D&D non-casters can't even really match up to the archetypal barbarian hero who pushes the limits of what's humanly possible. But it's not as if he lifts buildings bare-handed or anything.

It needs to remembered, though, that the supremacy of magic in D&D exists on purpose. Mages/wizards are the ultimate nerd superheroes who win through the power of being smart and prepared. Later on clerics and druids got to join them as honorary nerd superheroes. Of course, there's plenty of other systems where magic, or whatever else we call it, is superior. Those games are just more honest about it.

[Quertus]

Very few people would interpret that pile of abilities as anything even resembling mundane.

When people speak of 'mundane' characters they're often picking a specific character in a piece of fantasy fiction who has few, if any, mystical powers.

So, what in my list do you consider a "mystic power"?
Jabbing someone in the eye / pressure points / etc to impose blind / stunned / various other status effects?
The ability to react to someone else's action, rather than wait for a span of 6 seconds?
Knowing things? (OK, that one had a typo (darn autocorrect), and was supposed to read "know stuff", not "do stuff" or I just worded it oddly…)
CPR?
Massaging sore joints to remove related penalties?
Therapy alla CoC?
Evasion? OK, I'll grant that one is kinda out there…
Extending evasion to your mount?
Diplomacy? OK, I'll grant that one is kinda out there, the way most people ignorant of (or just ignoring) how it was handled in 2e interpret it…
Convincing people of the impossible? OK, I'll grant that one is kinda out there…
Turning "convincing people of the impossible" into a weapon?
HP?
Action surge healing? OK, I'll grant that one is kinda out there…
So, I don't know about you, but the only ones I reacted to were things "mundanes" could already do in D&D. My additions were, IMO, *more mundane* than D&D supposed "muggles".


By contrast even a modestly powerful magical character can hover atop the world and make decisions that impact billions without even being so much as noticed.

So high-level muggles need an explicit power "voice of the kingdom", that lets them impact policy decisions on a local / global / planar scale, simply by declaring that they are for or against something?


This is actually where mechanics can come into play. High-level mundane characters tend to get mechanical advantages that allow them to overcome effects, while magical characters get those that simply ignore them. A high-level rogue might be able to find and disarm every trap ever invented with trivial ease, but they still have to interact with the traps in the first place. A high-level wizard can just turn incorporeal and glide past everything. This is a mechanical problem that could be changed so that everyone interacts with various types of challenges in more or less the same way. To my understanding 4e D&D actually did this, to some degree anyway. Unfortunately the implementation meant that every character felt exactly the same in the process.

Yuck, no. :smallyuk: Knock does not give you a +20 bonus to open locks. That's what skill-boosting spells are for.

OK, fine. Invisibility gives you a +20 circumstance bonus to Hide (and hard no-sells LoS or being seen). I suppose you could spend the ink to explicitly call out exactly how every spell interacts with the skill system, but what would that look like? Knock is a hard no-sell on a door being locked, and gives you a +20 circumstance bonus on figuring out how to turn the knob, or how to lock it again? getting a surprise round / stealth checks involving that door? Disabling it permanently? I've got nothing here.

[Max_Killjoy]

Oh, so that's how to do a TM! Thanks!
There's a legitimate place for magicless heroes, but that place is not higher-level D&D.

(I keep reposting this quote, because I think he doesn a good job of explaining the problem. Max, your icon is appropriate to it...)


Frank Trollman[/B]]
It's phrased in all kinds of different ways. Fighters shouldn't be too "anime". Or maybe Fighters should be more Conanesque. Or whatever. But it's actually really common that people think of a "Fighter" and they think of some fictional character who is like 4th level. Mad Martigan from Willow, Conan from Conan, Gimli from LotR, or whatever. That's their concept of a Fighter, and they don't want their character to do anything that character does not do.

Where this gets problematic is when it bumps right next to their next demand, that the party is hitting 5th level and they still want to be limited to a benchmark that is essentially 4th level. And while at that point you can in fact keep things kind of hobbling along with the same character with bigger numbers, after a few levels of that it becomes untenable. When the player is asking for their character to be archetypically identical to a 4th level concept and asking to be mechanically balanced with 9th level casters, you're up **** Creek.

That was the horrible revelation that was caused by the Tome Fighter. The harsh reality is that Mad Martigan is a 4th level character and the people who hold up Mad Martigan as the example are seriously not saying that they want higher level abilities that happen to be skinned as guts and luck, they are literally saying that they want to be quintessentially 4th level characters while being balanced with 9th level characters. It's an actually and actively contradictory thought pattern and there is no solution.

Contrariwise, the Tome Monk get accepted with hardly a blip. Some people quibble about it being overpowered. Some people even helpfully informed us that it was more powerful than a Core Monk. But people didn't tell us that any of it was out of theme. Because the Monk theme is one which can in fact continue growing until it's Goku. Similarly, "Wizard" is a character concept that just keeps growing forever. Your summoner summons electric rat, and then he summons a storm crow, and then he's summoning a thunder dragon. No one bats an eye at this ****.

But Fighter players seriously do get annoyed and even offended when their character can beat up an elephant with their bare hands. Also they get annoyed and offended when they notice that the other characters are more powerful than they are. It really is cognitive dissonance, and the solution is to force people to abandon the Fighter concept after a few levels.




That's largely the same issue I've been trying to articulate since the first thread on this subject I posted in not that long after joining these forums.

They want a game in which their Fighting ManTM is at heart a normal person, nothing about him supernatural/fantastic/magical, is at the end of the day still a Normal Person (if at the far fictional edge of multiple capabilities); where that Normal Person can fight the highest of high magic and win, and where the Normal Person looks like and seems like and has the range of abilities of a Normal Person as we in our world would recognize, such that the setting is recognizable to them as "the real world as it could have been" rather than an utterly fantastic setting.

SOMETHING has to give in that list.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Yuck, no. :smallyuk: Knock does not give you a +20 bonus to open locks. That's what skill-boosting spells are for.

OK, fine. Invisibility gives you a +20 circumstance bonus to Hide (and hard no-sells LoS or being seen). I suppose you could spend the ink to explicitly call out exactly how every spell interacts with the skill system, but what would that look like? Knock is a hard no-sell on a door being locked, and gives you a +20 circumstance bonus on figuring out how to turn the knob, or how to lock it again? getting a surprise round / stealth checks involving that door? Disabling it permanently? I've got nothing here.

Invisibility (shoud) let you hide even in plain sight and disables sight-based things and gives you a bonus to attacking someone (because they can't see you). It shouldn't help you be quiet, which is part of being hidden (ie not detected). So no bonus to skills, just enables something you can't normally do (be hidden without cover).

Spells should not replace skills except where the spells are one or more of
a) way more expensive in real terms (either an expensive, non-replaceable component or a high level spell slot)
b) slower (if it takes 10 minutes to cast knock), if time is important
c) inconvenient (if a casting of knock only opens a single lock, for example, or makes lots of noise).

In general the best person to cast a "skill" spell on should be someone good at that skill already. Enhance the capabilities, don't replace. So cast invisibility on the stealthy guy so he doesn't even need to keep to the shadows. But doing that on the wizard won't get much, since he's not so good at moving quietly. Cast grant aptitude (a spell I made up) to temporarily give someone the ability to pick locks like a rogue with maxed skill points in that. Don't make a knock spell that just bypasses the situation altogether.

[Max_Killjoy]

Invisibility (shoud) let you hide even in plain sight and disables sight-based things and gives you a bonus to attacking someone (because they can't see you). It shouldn't help you be quiet, which is part of being hidden (ie not detected). So no bonus to skills, just enables something you can't normally do (be hidden without cover).

Spells should not replace skills except where the spells are one or more of
a) way more expensive in real terms (either an expensive, non-replaceable component or a high level spell slot)
b) slower (if it takes 10 minutes to cast knock), if time is important
c) inconvenient (if a casting of knock only opens a single lock, for example, or makes lots of noise).

In general the best person to cast a "skill" spell on should be someone good at that skill already. Enhance the capabilities, don't replace. So cast invisibility on the stealthy guy so he doesn't even need to keep to the shadows. But doing that on the wizard won't get much, since he's not so good at moving quietly. Cast grant aptitude (a spell I made up) to temporarily give someone the ability to pick locks like a rogue with maxed skill points in that. Don't make a knock spell that just bypasses the situation altogether.


That's my focus for magic in the RPG setting I'm working on -- most spells should be enhancements, not replacements or negations.

So a spell that creates "phantom tools" to let a thief pick a lock without tools, or a spell that temporarily gives a boost to the skill (such that the unskilled become competent and the competent become masters), is fine... but a spell that just negates locks (and thus the character investment in dealing with locks; along with implying the setting dissonance of why anyone uses mundane locks) immediately hits the trash bin.

[Quertus]

In general the best person to cast a "skill" spell on should be someone good at that skill already. But doing that on the wizard won't get much, since he's not so good at moving quietly.

Don't make a knock spell that just bypasses the situation altogether.

So, these seem the most important bits.

"Invisibility on the Rogue" is (and should remain) the optimal play. Agreed. If you want max stealth, start with the best chassis.

However.

Your group is, as a group, only as stealthy as the least-stealthy member. Invisibility is, at times, handy to throw on the tin can - or, yes, even on the Wizard himself - to keep the Rogue from saving his own neck / letting you all die rather than dieing with you, and going back to the tavern to find a more acceptable party (or, if what killed you didn't care about loot, just retiring after selling your stuff).

-----

Whether "Knock" should exist is an interesting design decision. Personally, I like abilities which communicate "we're too big for this baby stuff", much like SAO Kirito just letting bandits hit him, or Teleport largely negating travel, or teeth negating the need for food to be pre-mushed, or eyes largely negating the need to feel about blindly. I like games that have clearly delineated mechanical growth, as it provides impetus for the game as a whole to grow. But that's a matter of taste.

[Talakeal]

That's largely the same issue I've been trying to articulate since the first thread on this subject I posted in not that long after joining these forums.

They want a game in which their Fighting ManTM is at heart a normal person, nothing about him supernatural/fantastic/magical, is at the end of the day still a Normal Person (if at the far fictional edge of multiple capabilities); where that Normal Person can fight the highest of high magic and win, and where the Normal Person looks like and seems like and has the range of abilities of a Normal Person as we in our world would recognize, such that the setting is recognizable to them as "the real world as it could have been" rather than an utterly fantastic setting.

SOMETHING has to give in that list.

Are we talking fluff or crunch?

Also, are we talking about combat or out of combat?

[Quertus]

That's my focus for magic in the RPG setting I'm working on -- most spells should be enhancements, not replacements or negations.

So a spell that creates "phantom tools" to let a thief pick a lock without tools, or a spell that temporarily gives a boost to the skill (such that the unskilled become competent and the competent become masters), is fine... but a spell that just negates locks (and thus the character investment in dealing with locks; along with implying the setting dissonance of why anyone uses mundane locks) immediately hits the trash bin.

My ability "kick down the door" has, IRL, negated many a lock. As have my abilities "remove the hinges", "look for another way in", "look for another key", and "guy on the inside". I suppose I should add various bluff- and chance-based super powers to that list, too.

Heck, one time, I was trying to go to an interview, and got lost. I stopped at what looked like an information desk to ask directions, and was met with bafflement. I was told that, apparently, I came in the wrong door (which was supposed to be locked in a "secure military facility" kind of "supposed to"). The "guy at the desk" told me that he was honestly surprised that I managed to get from that door to him without being gunned down, and that security (who were terrifyingly well-armed) would be escorting me to my interview.

Given the sheer number of perfectly mundane ways I have personally managed to avoid picking a lock, why shouldn't magic have nice things, too?

[Telok]

But the limits of the versatility of being a muggle are much greater than those of "swordsmanship". Surely game designers could have done a much better job creating muggles who could affect the plot much more effectively than someone like the 3e Fighter or Cyclops does.

How about the fighter gets to be a noble, have real allies, command an army, and gets the social status to use them all.

A game where the people who get personal and direct 'shape the narrative/plot' powers are considered untrustworthy, are outsiders, or have limiting rules placed on them. While who don't get those direct powers are given the 'soft power' to do so through social actions.

Isn't that what AD&D originally did? And at about 10th level where the spells start becoming really problematic? So the setting and the tropes of the game were inherently part of trying to balance things.

So what happens to that game when you take away all the fighter goodies but keep the caster's spells?

[Max_Killjoy]

My ability "kick down the door" has, IRL, negated many a lock. As have my abilities "remove the hinges", "look for another way in", "look for another key", and "guy on the inside". I suppose I should add various bluff- and chance-based super powers to that list, too.

...

Given the sheer number of perfectly mundane ways I have personally managed to avoid picking a lock, why shouldn't magic have nice things, too?

So you don't see how those things you list would be a different experience within playing an RPG than just casting Knock and bypassing the situation entirely -- and all represent "character overcoming an obstacle through various means" elements similar to picking the lock... while the Knock spell just negates the obstacle entirely?

[PhoenixPhyre]

So, these seem the most important bits.

"Invisibility on the Rogue" is (and should remain) the optimal play. Agreed. If you want max stealth, start with the best chassis.

However.

Your group is, as a group, only as stealthy as the least-stealthy member. Invisibility is, at times, handy to throw on the tin can - or, yes, even on the Wizard himself - to keep the Rogue from saving his own neck / letting you all die rather than dieing with you, and going back to the tavern to find a more acceptable party (or, if what killed you didn't care about loot, just retiring after selling your stuff).

-----

Whether "Knock" should exist is an interesting design decision. Personally, I like abilities which communicate "we're too big for this baby stuff", much like SAO Kirito just letting bandits hit him, or Teleport largely negating travel, or teeth negating the need for food to be pre-mushed, or eyes largely negating the need to feel about blindly. I like games that have clearly delineated mechanical growth, as it provides impetus for the game as a whole to grow. But that's a matter of taste.

Invisibility acting as total stealth doesn't fit the name, much less the fiction. An invisible person in a tin can makes just as much noise as a visible one--more, in fact if they're not dextrous and not being careful. There can be other spells that aid in stealth. 5e has pass without trace which gives a group of people a +10 bonus to Dexterity (Stealth) checks for an hour but doesn't grant invisibility (so you still need cover to hide and can't walk out in the open). With the drastically reduced DCs, that's usually enough unless someone dumped DEX hard and is wearing the heaviest of armors. Not much use in combat, which is fine.

I don't like hard counters. To anything. If you don't want to deal with locks, have a rogue who's just that good that he's not going to fail. In 5e, the standard lock is DC 15. A level 11 rogue can't fail that (minimum roll is 10 due to reliable talent, automatic proficiency gives +4, a rogue has at least a +1 DEX mod), and can't even fail a DC 19 check, assuming a maxed ability score. So for a high-level party with a rogue, I'm not even going to make anyone roll for a door that's not arcanely locked (DC 25). And unless there are roaming patrols or traps (or time is a critical issue), I'm not going to make anyone explicitly roll for unlocking a door or chest. Because that's boring when they can repeat things.

That said, I have yet to see a caster actually learn, much less prepare knock.

I strongly dislike the idea of having "must be this tall to ride" signs on challenges--minimum "gear requirements" or "must have immunities" for encounters. I hate gear treadmills or "mandatory" gear requirements. I want most of a person's power to come from their innate abilities (class features, racial traits, spells known), and find things like "bonus feats, the class" (3e fighters), "skill list, the class" (some peoples' idea of rogues), or "big spell list, the class" (3e wizards) to be bad design. Give the classes actual features, and don't let spells (or other abilities) duplicate them without substantial cost (opportunity cost at a minimum, actual cost preferred). When comparing spells (or feats for that matter) to class features, the spell/feat should be an inferior substitute, not a replacement. It's something you get because you don't have a Rogue/Barbarian/Bard/etc, at a meaningful cost. Versatility at the cost of power.

The common perception is that "magic" (ie spell-casters) get versatility and power. Their spells can do anything that "makes sense" and always work or can do things that are impossible. On the flip side, "martials" are held to a worse-than-real-life standard. That double standard needs to die. Either everyone is fantastic and can do larger-than-life things (with appropriate limits) or no one is (or can). Will that mean cutting down the power of spell-casters? Sure. And that's a good thing IMO for the game. Make opportunity costs real. A wizard should have to choose what they can do, just like anyone else. No more "just give me a day and I can do anything!" standards.

[Max_Killjoy]

Are we talking fluff or crunch?


We're talking about both. If they're disconnected, such that the "fighting man" is supposed to be utterly non-magical at the "fiction layer", but he clearly has fantastic/superhuman/magical abilities in the "mechanical" layer, then the problems being discussed here still exist.




Also, are we talking about combat or out of combat?


Both.

[Gallowglass]

The issue (in 3.5/P D&D) then is all the minigames and how the caster interacts with them vs how the mundane interacts with them.

Here's a non-authoritative, non-exhaustive list of some of them:

combat minigame
battlefield control minigame
stealth minigame
disabling/creating traps minigame.
social minigame
crafting items minigames
making money minigames
researching minigame
investigating minigame
tracking minigame
animal handling minigame


Fighters are only good at combat. All their abilities are tied around it. They have no abilities for the other minigames at all.

Then you have other mundanes that are SUPPOSED to be good at their minigames.

Rogues are supposed to be good at the stealth and traps minigames. Ideally, their class abilities and options give them an advantage over other classes on those minigames.

However, with minimal resource investment, any full caster can trivialize or so skew those minigames they can easily out-rogue the rogue who dedicates massive resources to those minigames.

You can cut and paste ANY of the minigames in for "stealth" and you end up with the same outcome.

In an ideal system, the specialist will be better at their minigames than the generalist (at those cost of being worse at the other minigames than the generalist)

In this system, the generalist easily outstrips the specialists.

I don't know what the answer is. Lets say you decide "okay, we want specialists rogues to be better at stealth than any wizard. So we either amp up the rogue's abilities to outstrip the wizards magic or we descale the wizard's magic to, at the best, be less than what an average rogue can accomplish.

The problem was less pronounced before spell-bloat factored in. When the edition first came out and the wizards possible spell list was, like, 20 spells of each level. Now its hundreds. That same bloat problem happened in 2e too. And probably will happen in 5e if it hasn't already. Less pronounced, but it was still there. The base spell list contained spells that trivialized most minigames already.

Published spells have already set the magic bar so very high, that if you scale up the rogue, you end up creating a scale where you now have to set perception of enemies so very high to keep things interesting that is becomes impossible for any nonspecialist to ever succeed. But if you scale down the wizard instead you piss off people because "it doesn't feel like magic anymore." If you have invisibility only give a +3 bonus instead of a +20 bonus to stealth, basically saying "your spell is now the equivalent of the skill focus: stealth that the rogue would arguably be likely to take" then it doesn't feel worthwhile anymore. Or believable. I mean, "i'm invisible, how is that only a +3?"

And if you remove the spells that target the minigames, you end up with a very small spell list that's all blasting spell focused and isn't' very interesting.

Assuming you aren't willing to just move to a completely different magic system, I'd like to see the spell list gone over and spells modified to put them on scale with what the average specialist can accomplish. But I don't know how to do that without destroying the flavor of magic.

I imagine it would end up looking like this:

Detect Magic

Casting Time: 1 standard action
Component: V, S

EFFECT

Range: 60 ft
Area: Cone-shaped emanation
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 round/level
Saving Throw: none, Spell Resistance: No

This spell gives you an escalating bonus to both active and passive perception checks to detect magical auras.

On passive checks, it gives you a base +3 bonus to perception checks to detect magical auras.

On active checks, it gives you a +3 bonus on one round of searching, a +5 bonus on a second round of searching an a +7 bonus on subsequent rounds of searching.

In addition, use of the spell gives you a +3 bonuses to Knowledge(arcana) and/or spellcraft rolls to identify magical items or spells being cast.

DEFAULT: Any character has the ability to make perception checks to detect magical auras. DCs vary based on strengths of magical auras

With this change, every character can now potentially "detect magic" but the wizard who invests in detect magic and uses the spell will have a bonus on scale with a character who invests effort and resources into being a specialist in the perception minigame.

[Bohandas]

And if you remove the spells that target the minigames, you end up with a very small spell list that's all blasting spell focused and isn't' very interesting.

No, you'd have to remove those too. "combat minigame". These are the spells that trivialize the fighter because the fighter has to attack one person at a time like a chump.

[Talakeal]

We're talking about both. If they're disconnected, such that the "fighting man" is supposed to be utterly non-magical at the "fiction layer", but he clearly has fantastic/superhuman/magical abilities in the "mechanical" layer, then the problems being discussed here still exist.




Both.

I ask because this problem is pretty much unique to D&D 3.X which runs on a very abstract combat engine and also assumes that figters do nothing but fight. These assumptions are not always true.

Everytime the MvC debate comes up people act like it is some impossible to square circle, but almost every RPG and fantasy fiction can manage to do it.

[Max_Killjoy]

I ask because this problem is pretty much unique to D&D 3.X which runs on a very abstract combat engine and also assumes that figters do nothing but fight. These assumptions are not always true.

Everytime the MvC debate comes up people act like it is some impossible to square circle, but almost every RPG and fantasy fiction can manage to do it.

It's not impossible to solve, it's just that some players hate the actual solutions, as detailed upthread*.

Some manage to solve it via one of the options laid out previously. Some don't actually manage to solve it, they just fig-leaf it by pretending that fiction/mechanics dissonance isn't a problem, or that the fiction layer doesn't matter at all.


* As follows:

> Dial magic, usually/specifically spellcasting, down, such that it doesn't overwhelm or negate everything else
> Dial non-spellcasting up, and allow it to be explicitly fantastic, don't try to pretend that Fighters and Rogues are just "peak normals"
> Dial non-spellcasting up, assert that it's "peak normal", adjust "normal" in accordance, and then follow through with changes to the setting to reflect that
> Embrace the disparity and make it an aspect of the setting and system and campaigns (see old White Wolf's Mage)


What you can't do is have it all -- a "like real life but" setting, and high magic spell-casters, and no-magic-no-fantastic-no-superhuman-nope "fighting menTM" who can somehow keep up with high-magic spellcasters. But that's exactly what some settings pretend they're doing, and what some gamers demand.

[Talakeal]

> Embrace the disparity and make it an aspect of the setting and system and campaigns (see old White Wolf's Mage)

Its funny, I was actually going to use Mage as an example of a game which doesn't suffer from this problem.

So, out of curiosity, what would you consider AD&D or 5E to be? Toned down magic? Explicitly supernatural martials? Both?

[Willie the Duck]

How about the fighter gets to be a noble, have real allies, command an army, and gets the social status to use them all.

A game where the people who get personal and direct 'shape the narrative/plot' powers are considered untrustworthy, are outsiders, or have limiting rules placed on them. While who don't get those direct powers are given the 'soft power' to do so through social actions.

Isn't that what AD&D originally did? And at about 10th level where the spells start becoming really problematic? So the setting and the tropes of the game were inherently part of trying to balance things.

So what happens to that game when you take away all the fighter goodies but keep the caster's spells?


The issue (in 3.5/P D&D) then is all the minigames and how the caster interacts with them vs how the mundane interacts with them.

Here's a non-authoritative, non-exhaustive list of some of them:

combat minigame
battlefield control minigame
stealth minigame
disabling/creating traps minigame.
social minigame
crafting items minigames
making money minigames
researching minigame
investigating minigame
tracking minigame
animal handling minigame

Fighters are only good at combat. All their abilities are tied around it. They have no abilities for the other minigames at all.

Fundamentally, Telok, you are right. The system(s) where many-to-most people cut their teeth on what a TTRPG looks like, and set their expectations up that martials and spellcasters would be roughly equally enjoyable play experiences*, was when the martials had a lot more going for them than they did by 3e. Mind you, the spellcaster also had more constraints (in as much as their constraints actually had some teeth to them, and getting them to the level where they actually felt powerful almost felt like it required DM collusion), but mostly it was because the fighter (and thief) classes had more versatility. They had hands in all Gallowglass's minigames (and when you consider their name-level ability to be leaders of armies, oftentimes were the straight-out best at much of it). Even just by the more prevalent expectation that the pre-name-level adventuring actually would take place in a dungeon meant that a high bend-bars/lift-gates chance was valuable in a way that a wizard needed a mid-to-high level spell to replicate. Moreover, it was not considered being 'un-mundane' for a fighter to get the magic loot (of which most was meant for the fighter), which often gave them X/day spells. Somehow when 3e came out, it brought out new conceptions of what balance meant, but then also did its' level best to constrain the mundane classes to the sleekest interpretation of what they should be.
*Note different term from 'balanced,' as, even when that term was used for TSR-era A/D&D, it didn't have the same connotation.

[PhoenixPhyre]

So, out of curiosity, what would you consider AD&D or 5E to be? Toned down magic? Explicitly supernatural martials? Both?

I don't know AD&D, but 5e I'd say is both. Not only do most martials have some kind of explicitly spell-based abilities [1], but they're very comfortable saying that martials are going well beyond the "norm" for the population and even become superheroic (their words) at high levels. But (compared to earlier editions) magic has also been toned down substantially. Concentration means you can't buff yourself up the wazoo; spells now do explicitly (and only) what they say they'll do. Invisibility doesn't let you auto-hide (or even give a bonus to stealth), it just lets you try to hide without cover (and gives advantage when attacking + stops LoS). Knock only opens one lock per casting, and it's explicitly very loud. Many fewer spell slots and no easy ways of boosting DCs. Many spells are outright weaker.

And I think that's the only way to go, at least if you want D&D-style adventures and settings. 3e-style T1 casters (and martials that would match them), when played full out, make settings go sideways and require a completely different style of gameplay. Which isn't bad, but it's definitely not what I'm looking for from D&D. If you stick to purely "mundane" martials and cut casters to match, you can't get all the fantastic stuff I want out of a D&D setting or adventure. So the best plan is to meet in the middle somewhere. Tone down the too-powerful casters and unleash the oppressed and held back martials.

[Max_Killjoy]

Its funny, I was actually going to use Mage as an example of a game which doesn't suffer from this problem.


Mage doesn't suffer from the problem because it embraces the disparity and says "if you have no magic, you're unlikely to be a threat".

But even then, there are players who will insist this isn't true "because vampires and werewolves"... as if the abilities of vampires and werewolves "aren't magic". Which is sort of a parallel with the insistence from some players that in D&D the fantastic abilities of high-level non-casters "aren't magic". There aren't enough eye-roll emotes to express me reaction to this parsing on the part of those players.



So, out of curiosity, what would you consider AD&D or 5E to be? Toned down magic? Explicitly supernatural martials? Both?


I don't remember AD&D not having the problem.

5e is a bit of toned-down spellcasting, and a bit of explicitly fantastic/magical ability on the part of non-casters, but still has the problem to a degree.

[Talakeal]

Mage doesn't suffer from the problem because it embraces the disparity and says "if you have no magic, you're unlikely to be a threat".

Which is just nonsense. If my Mage party was jumped by a group of muggles who had spent as much XP on combat abilities as we had on magic, we would have been up the creek without a paddle.

Likewise, I don't think we would have even noticed if someone without any real magic had joined the party as the vast majority of our problems couldn't be solved with magic.

[Frozen_Feet]

Having grown up in an environment which had Wuxia (or to be exact, Xianxia and up) as the "default" fantasy mindscape, I always found this Guy at the Gym Fallacy too silly for belief.

As a Guy at the Gym, I find the fallacy too silly to believe, because apparently a lot of people go to really boring gyms. (Causing them to lowball even what ordinary humans are capable of.)

Using real athletes as reference has its place even in fantasy, but not as the maximum characters should be able to do. It should be used as a ground level, the treshold for a truly fantastic character to pass.

Ironically, AD&D actually worked like this. The values for carrying and lifting capacity for Strength scores from 3 to 18/100 were calibrated according to then-current weightlifting records. But then you got yourself Gauntlets of Giant Strength (etc.) and started flinging boulders around. There's a series of magic items that are clearly Thor's belt, gloves and hammer and they give you suitably epic abilities to go with them.

[Man_Over_Game]

This seems to be built directly on the biases of DnD systems, but it's not true across the board.

In Rifts, for example, a mage can open a portal to another world, shoot lightning from his finger tips and fly, but a Juicer (Steroid Junkie) can take a tank shell to the shoulder and easily turn that mage into swiss cheese with a good assault rifle. Mages in Rifts are easily killed, but have options to actually cripple targets before they can kill you, which nobody else can really do. Mages have to resort to controlling the battlefield while their Juicer friends handle the heavy lifting. Of course, the game is poorly balanced, but making each side have their niche results in neither party feeling left out.

Now, DnD has mages deal a lot of damage in comparison to Rifts, so it doesn't quite work out the same way. In the end, out of 100 random scenarios, you want the Fighter to be able to solve just as many as the Wizard can, and...that's not exactly how it's going to work when the Wizard can fly, turn invisible, detect thoughts, etc.

Or, put in another way, a Wizard's ability to solve problems must also be equal to a Fighter's ability to solve problems, and there's often a disparity if the Fighter can't solve non-combat problems.



Wizard
Fighter


Utility
UW
0


Combat
CW
CF


For Fighter to be equal to Wizard, the Fighter's Utility + Combat must be the same as the Wizard's Utility + Combat. However, a Fighter does not provide anything for utility. The solution is to either provide some means for the Fighter to provide some utility benefit, or to nerf Wizards (Casters) until they're combined effectiveness is equal to the Fighter's combined effectiveness.

This doesn't work if Fighters and Wizards are equal in combat effectiveness, and Wizards also provide utility effectiveness, which is how 5e DnD runs it. Bit of a shame, really.

[Max_Killjoy]

Which is just nonsense. If my Mage party was jumped by a group of muggles who had spent as much XP on combat abilities as we had on magic, we would have been up the creek without a paddle.

Likewise, I don't think we would have even noticed if someone without any real magic had joined the party as the vast majority of our problems couldn't be solved with magic.

Perhaps I had the misfortune of hearing nothing but Mage Supremacists talk about the game and how Mages compare to vampires, werewolves, mortals, etc.

(And I'm not joking, the Mage players I knew were consistently adamant that nothing stood a chance against Mages, because Mages controlled reality, and that everyone else was playing by their rules... it's just that the Technocracy Mages were winning that battle for to make the rules.)

[Max_Killjoy]

This seems to be built directly on the biases of DnD systems. In Rifts, for example, a mage can open a portal to another world, shoot lightning from his finger tips and fly, but a Juicer (Steroid Junkie) can take a tank shell to the shoulder and easily turn that mage into swiss cheese. Mages in Rifts are easily killed, but have options to actually cripple targets before they can kill you, which nobody else can really do. Mages have to resort to controlling the battlefield while their Juicer friends handle the heavy lifting. Of course, the game is poorly balanced, but making each side have their niche results in both parties being excellent.


The Juicer is explicitly fantastic, just using "technology" instead of "magic", IIRC.

[Jama7301]

Which is sort of a parallel with the insistence from some players that in D&D the fantastic abilities of high-level non-casters "aren't magic". There aren't enough eye-roll emotes to express me reaction to this parsing on the part of those players.


Is that because you're viewing the abilities through the lens of "what a mundane can do on Earth" rather than "What an highly trained an exceptional mundane can do in world x"?

Would we call people like Usain Bolt or Simone Biles magic, because they outclass people in their field here on Earth? We don't. Why does the assumption feel like it seems into wild off fantasy worlds of D&D? That fighters who do crazy things like create tremors with blows and jump to the point of having limited flight HAVE to be seen as magic? The physics of these fantasy worlds can be anything! A sufficiently skilled person should be able to do things, without it being magic, that we could never conceive of doing here.

It feels really weird to me that any high level ability has to be chalked up as "Magic" instead of "The physics of this world working as intended".

[Willie the Duck]

Which is just nonsense. If my Mage party was jumped by a group of muggles who had spent as much XP on combat abilities as we had on magic, we would have been up the creek without a paddle.

Likewise, I don't think we would have even noticed if someone without any real magic had joined the party as the vast majority of our problems couldn't be solved with magic.

Well, someone already brought up somewhere that modern weaponry makes it a lot harder to make a magic system which does stuff that no one else can. Regardless, Mage is an interesting part of the WoD in that in theory it has some of the most epic stuff and 'a mage can turn a vampire into a deck chair' or whatever the quote was, but actual starting powers are usually pretty darn tame and the specifics of the magic system (especially paradox) highly incentivize Mages to come up with non-magickal solutions. For all the griping that the Forge Theory advocates did about the WoD ruleset, it did set up a specific playstyle that did incentivize thinking outside of your basic powerset.

That said, all the WoD games are built such that 'muggles' (Vampires ghouls, Werewolf kin, hedge mages, etc.) are simply put 'worse in every way' compared to full born Mages/Werewolves/Vampires/etc. you don't get some amazing amount of attribute/skill/background points in exchange for playing a 'normie.'

[Max_Killjoy]

Is that because you're viewing the abilities through the lens of "what a mundane can do on Earth" rather than "What an highly trained an exceptional mundane can do in world x"?

Would we call people like Usain Bolt or Simone Biles magic, because they outclass people in their field here on Earth? We don't. Why does the assumption feel like it seems into wild off fantasy worlds of D&D? That fighters who do crazy things like create tremors with blows and jump to the point of having limited flight HAVE to be seen as magic? The physics of these fantasy worlds can be anything! A sufficiently skilled person should be able to do things, without it being magic, that we could never conceive of doing here.

It feels really weird to me that any high level ability has to be chalked up as "Magic" instead of "The physics of this world working as intended".

Already addressed, multiple times.

Either those tremor-inducing blows and flight-like jumping are fantastic within the context of the setting (that is, supernatural, superhuman, magical, deeply extraordinary, whatever) and you can have a setting that looks a lot like "the real world, appropriate time period, but with magic"... or they're something that's within the "normal range" of capabilities, and the setting changes drastically to account for those differing human capabilities.

There's no problem with saying "you can train intensely to reach fantastic abilities" -- that's effectively what a wizard is doing. "You can punch the ground and create an earthquake" is explicitly orders of magnitude into the fantastic, if you want your setting to look anything like any time or place that ever actually existed on planet Earth.

The problem arises when "you can train intensively to reach abilities which match those of high-level spellcasters, and there's nothing fantastic about it in the context of this setting" -- that's effectively the same as making 9th-level spells "just a matter of training, but perfectly mundane" within your setting. And once you do that, you either have to follow through, or get a setting that falls apart at the slightest examination.

[Max_Killjoy]

Well, someone already brought up somewhere that modern weaponry makes it a lot harder to make a magic system which does stuff that no one else can. Regardless, Mage is an interesting part of the WoD in that in theory it has some of the most epic stuff and 'a mage can turn a vampire into a deck chair' or whatever the quote was, but actual starting powers are usually pretty darn tame and the specifics of the magic system (especially paradox) highly incentivize Mages to come up with non-magickal solutions. For all the griping that the Forge Theory advocates did about the WoD ruleset, it did set up a specific playstyle that did incentivize thinking outside of your basic powerset.

That said, all the WoD games are built such that 'muggles' (Vampires ghouls, Werewolf kin, hedge mages, etc.) are simply put 'worse in every way' compared to full born Mages/Werewolves/Vampires/etc. you don't get some amazing amount of attribute/skill/background points in exchange for playing a 'normie.'

There's that too -- "normies" in WOD just do not get the same "build resources" that the supernaturals do, at least per any of the published rules.

[Talakeal]

Perhaps I had the misfortune of hearing nothing but Mage Supremacists talk about the game and how Mages compare to vampires, werewolves, mortals, etc.

(And I'm not joking, the Mage players I knew were consistently adamant that nothing stood a chance against Mages, because Mages controlled reality, and that everyone else was playing by their rules... it's just that the Technocracy Mages were winning that battle for to make the rules.)

Mages can "do more" than any of the other supernaturals, but this doesn't actually amount to a whole lot in daily life from either a crunch or fluff perspective.

Mages are more of the chess-master type, they can potentially beat the other splats, but only if they prepare for everything before hand, and it would take an extremely paranoid player and a very liberal GM for a Mage to actually come out ahead if they are fighhting on the enemy's terms, for example a werewolf jumping them from the spirit world or even a swat team kicking down their door.

[Arbane]

There's no problem with saying "you can train intensely to reach fantastic abilities" -- that's effectively what a wizard is doing. "You can punch the ground and create an earthquake" is explicitly orders of magnitude into the fantastic, if you want your setting to look anything like any time or place that ever actually existed on planet Earth.

Nothing says they have to be easy.


The problem arises when "you can train intensively to reach abilities which match those of high-level spellcasters, and there's nothing fantastic about it in the context of this setting" -- that's effectively the same as making 9th-level spells "just a matter of training, but perfectly mundane" within your setting. And once you do that, you either have to follow through, or get a setting that falls apart at the slightest examination.

Very few D&D settings actually don't fall apart - Generic Fantasy Land is kinda-medieval despite all the things in the setting that SHOULD have completely upended the social order, Because Tolkien.
Dark Sun doesn't fall apart now, because it DID fall apart long ago, as all the Big Magic and such completely ruined the world.

[Willie the Duck]

Perhaps I had the misfortune of hearing nothing but Mage Supremacists talk about the game and how Mages compare to vampires, werewolves, mortals, etc.

(And I'm not joking, the Mage players I knew were consistently adamant that nothing stood a chance against Mages, because Mages controlled reality, and that everyone else was playing by their rules... it's just that the Technocracy Mages were winning that battle for to make the rules.)

Have you ever heard anyone debate 'who would win in a fight (Superman/Batman/Hulk/Etc.)?' It's the same thing. With D&D, you always know the person really upset about the martial-spellcaster divide, because they always explain how the spellcaster would totally be prepared for whatever scenario the counter-arguer might dream up (in the same way that batman would totally get the drop on Supes and have a kryptonite whatnot available and blahdittiblah). With Mage vs. rest of WoD it is usually more Hulk vs. whomever (including Batman or Superman). The tired refrain will be something along the lines of, 'what, didn't you knowwww? The Hulk's strength is proportionate to his range and there's no upward boundary! His strength can be literally in-fi-nite! How can your measly Kryptonian or perfectly-planning mortal compare to infinite? I declare myself this debate's winner, I shall now put my fingers in my ears and shout lalala over your protestations!' By the same token, a Mage can do anything. An-y-thing.

Now I deliberately amped up the poindexterism of those examples to highlight how frustrating they are. Technically speaking, a Mage can do anything. Which is to say, there are no explicit out of bounds effects, gated by Storyteller buy in and some general guidelines mapping die-successes to overall power level. Mind you, a starting mage will usually have 1-3 dice to do their magic, whereas starting Werewolves and Vampires can often start with 5-8 dice to do their effects (in that they are usually determined with an attribute plus your magical discipline-like abilities pips added together, whereas a Mage just rolls their Arete, which will be 1-3 at start).

The Mage book does declare that Vampires are treated by Mage Magick as objects, and not people, indicating that they have little resistance to it (and the line about lawn chairs), so that's a little like AD&D 1e/Gamma World, where it said you could mix and match games, and that Gamma World characters brought into AD&D games would automatically fail all saving throws, since they didn't come from a world with magic). However, just like that situation, the game rules* weren't actually designed to work together, no matter how many fans wanted to play mixed groups. Thus it really came down to 'how powerful are mages compared to ____?' 'depends on how the Storyteller rules.' But that's not as fun a story as Mages running rough shod over everyone else.
*at least for the ones that existed when this fan narrative was made, in the case of WoD

EDIT: If you want to throw another spanner in that debate, at the time that this narrative was solidifying, Mummies were immortal... Im-mor-tal!

[Jama7301]

Already addressed, multiple times.

Either those tremor-inducing blows and flight-like jumping are fantastic within the context of the setting (that is, supernatural, superhuman, magical, deeply extraordinary, whatever) and you can have a setting that looks a lot like "the real world, appropriate time period, but with magic"... or they're something that's within the "normal range" of capabilities, and the setting changes drastically to account for those differing human capabilities.

There's no problem with saying "you can train intensely to reach fantastic abilities" -- that's effectively what a wizard is doing. "You can punch the ground and create an earthquake" is explicitly orders of magnitude into the fantastic, if you want your setting to look anything like any time or place that ever actually existed on planet Earth.

The problem arises when "you can train intensively to reach abilities which match those of high-level spellcasters, and there's nothing fantastic about it in the context of this setting" -- that's effectively the same as making 9th-level spells "just a matter of training, but perfectly mundane" within your setting. And once you do that, you either have to follow through, or get a setting that falls apart at the slightest examination.

Thank you, and sorry for making you clarify again. These threads run together sometimes, and I have a hard time parsing what's been said, and how and so on. My apologies.

[Max_Killjoy]

Thank you, and sorry for making you clarify again. These threads run together sometimes, and I have a hard time parsing what's been said, and how and so on. My apologies.


Sorry if I came across as angrier than I meant to be.

[Jama7301]

Sorry if I came across as angrier than I meant to be.

Nah, you're good. I just latched on to that paragraph and well, *gestures*. It's all good.

[Max_Killjoy]

Have you ever heard anyone debate 'who would win in a fight (Superman/Batman/Hulk/Etc.)?' It's the same thing. With D&D, you always know the person really upset about the martial-spellcaster divide, because they always explain how the spellcaster would totally be prepared for whatever scenario the counter-arguer might dream up (in the same way that batman would totally get the drop on Supes and have a kryptonite whatnot available and blahdittiblah). With Mage vs. rest of WoD it is usually more Hulk vs. whomever (including Batman or Superman). The tired refrain will be something along the lines of, 'what, didn't you knowwww? The Hulk's strength is proportionate to his range and there's no upward boundary! His strength can be literally in-fi-nite! How can your measly Kryptonian or perfectly-planning mortal compare to infinite? I declare myself this debate's winner, I shall now put my fingers in my ears and shout lalala over your protestations!' By the same token, a Mage can do anything. An-y-thing.

Now I deliberately amped up the poindexterism of those examples to highlight how frustrating they are. Technically speaking, a Mage can do anything. Which is to say, there are no explicit out of bounds effects, gated by Storyteller buy in and some general guidelines mapping die-successes to overall power level. Mind you, a starting mage will usually have 1-3 dice to do their magic, whereas starting Werewolves and Vampires can often start with 5-8 dice to do their effects (in that they are usually determined with an attribute plus your magical discipline-like abilities pips added together, whereas a Mage just rolls their Arete, which will be 1-3 at start).

The Mage book does declare that Vampires are treated by Mage Magick as objects, and not people, indicating that they have little resistance to it (and the line about lawn chairs), so that's a little like AD&D 1e/Gamma World, where it said you could mix and match games, and that Gamma World characters brought into AD&D games would automatically fail all saving throws, since they didn't come from a world with magic). However, just like that situation, the game rules* weren't actually designed to work together, no matter how many fans wanted to play mixed groups. Thus it really came down to 'how powerful are mages compared to ____?' 'depends on how the Storyteller rules.' But that's not as fun a story as Mages running rough shod over everyone else.
*at least for the ones that existed when this fan narrative was made, in the case of WoD

EDIT: If you want to throw another spanner in that debate, at the time that this narrative was solidifying, Mummies were immortal... Im-mor-tal!

I remember the whole Mummy thing. :smalltongue:

To be fair, I read the Mage rules once, saw a system tailor-made to generate Storyteller-player arguments, and the stuff about how they interact with other "supernaturals", and never picked the game up again.

[Mechalich]

Very few D&D settings actually don't fall apart - Generic Fantasy Land is kinda-medieval despite all the things in the setting that SHOULD have completely upended the social order, Because Tolkien.
Dark Sun doesn't fall apart now, because it DID fall apart long ago, as all the Big Magic and such completely ruined the world.

Generic Fantasy Land is kinda-medieval because people world-building from an extant baseline is possible and world building a completely fantastical reality wherein people can train really hard and turn into One Punch Man produces a gag comedy, not adventure stories.

The thing is, most setting design is for single-author narrative projects not collaborative multi-party games, but when switching to the game structure there's a failure to adjust setting design accordingly to the needs of the new scenario.

The average fantasy narrative setting breaks down pretty easily. Many of them break really hard, but they are able to cover themselves through various bits of sleight of hand and by bringing the curtain down before the full implications sink in. Take Wuxia. Wuxia settings are inherently ridiculous, because they involve single individuals with the power to slaughter hundreds or even thousands and to take complete control of the political system by eliminating any and all leadership figures they don't like on a whim. The movie Hero, in a rare case of acknowledging the reality of the setup, calls this out explicitly when Broken Sword storms the palace and the thousands of imperial guards are helpless to protect the king. That's okay within the context of the movie because there's a big debate about ethics and power at the center and everything else is just window dressing. However, if you let that happen in a game setting some player is just going to go murder the Emperor, burn down the palace, and laugh as everything descends into chaos just because they can. And by the way, we have complete evidence that this happens from video games, every time a video game allows players to do something horrible that derails the narrative a significant fraction of players jump at doing it, which is why story-critical NPCs require arbitrary invincibility.

One of the key points of the non-fantastical Fighting Man is that he cannot break the setting. He can't walk into a random town and murder everyone, and for many players and GMs that's a feature, not a bug.

Now, it doesn't have to work that way. It's perfectly okay to play fantasy superheroes and let the party break things and rampage with all the crazy power they want. It has implications for the kind of game you run and the kind of stories that game can tell, but it's perfectly okay to enact a low-immersion escapist power fantasy in your games. Nothing wrong with doing that.

But if you want the setting to work and to actually resemble a setting that the players understand, then you need to assert that boundaries present in actual people on earth (with some fudging) still matter because even if the PCs and major antagonists all surpass those limits the ordinary populace is still bound by them.

[Arbane]

Generic Fantasy Land is kinda-medieval because people world-building from an extant baseline is possible and world building a completely fantastical reality wherein people can train really hard and turn into One Punch Man produces a gag comedy, not adventure stories.

/stares at you in spellcaster


Take Wuxia. Wuxia settings are inherently ridiculous, because they involve single individuals with the power to slaughter hundreds or even thousands and to take complete control of the political system by eliminating any and all leadership figures they don't like on a whim.

All the ones who don't have adequate kung-fu and the Mandate of Heaven, that is.

[Florian]

Don't conflate anything D&D (the system, any version) has ever done with "sim" or "modelling RL physics".

It´s more a matter of the underlying thought processes than the actual execution. We have the part that things are supposed to work as we expect them to do, often by also trying to model physics, then we have the part that are explicitly outside of that and ignore the first part, which is magic. D&D just stands out because of the extremely sharp divide between those two parts, with everything that is not possible in RL automatically being either a spell or a magic item.

[Cluedrew]

The average fantasy narrative setting breaks down pretty easily. Many of them break really hard, but they are able to cover themselves through various bits of sleight of hand and by bringing the curtain down before the full implications sink in.I mean you can build them so they don't, you just have put a bit more thought into it. Perhaps a lot more thought than many. So for raw power range, the simplest way to solve it in my experience is to pack all the intermediate levels. Many settings skip levels of power so that the second tier is so far below the highest that it doesn't matter.

On the other hand if there are enough level 1s who can take on all the level 2s and enough 2s for the 3s... then there is no group that "no one can touch" even if the level 1s cannot do anything. Plus it forces the population of the mid-levels up so there is enough sane ones to act as a stabilising force. Throw in resource dependencies from high to low (food, ammo, mana, whatever) and you get... a plausible* society that includes city destroying levels of power. I mean they aren't actually city destroying threats any more because there are people just a step or two below them defending that city.

Also I was bouncing around ideas to help address the system issues I mentioned (I don't know if anyone remembers post #1 at this point). I got one for turns. Besides just scaling numbers of actions you could give faster characters more prepared actions. Say** each prepared action has a defined "If X than I Y" for a kind of limited X and Y. Casters might be slower and so get one. A normal warrior might get two, an a faster one three or four. A lightning fast warrior might abandon the whole thing and basically get to insert their turn whenever they want.

There are deeper issues, but that is my 5 minute idea.

* I've never seen one unless we include bombs (traditional to nuclear) and the like.
** Assuming we don't dump formal turns all together and keep that tactical element.

[Kyutaru]

To look at the problem, I'd welcome you to examine card games.

MARTIAL CARDS VS MAGIC CARDS

Similar to Hearthstone or Magic, there are many ordinary seeming cards in your typical TCG. Fireballs that deal flat damage from afar, creatures with attack and defense and nothing else, big dudes with Trample or other combat tricks like First Strike, and none of these are bad at the game. In fact, the usual way to play card games is by splitting your deck focus between useful creatures that have strong efficient stat power (martial cards) and supporting them with removal or buff effects (magic cards). Generally you do this because they cannot replace each other in any but the most specialized of decks.

Take a simple martial card, the 2/2 first strike lion. This creature will swing before others in combat without retaliation, similar to gaining the initiative and then sneak attacking during the surprise round. A magic card equivalent would be the 1/1 direct damage sorcerer. This creature can simply be expended to target and damage anyone on the battlefield. They both have similar effects, dealing damage that can't be responded to, and while the martial has more potential in attack and defense, the magician can hurt things that are in the back lines or even the enemy player itself. The magician has more versatility in exchange for raw power.

Personally, I feel this supports what 5e has already, with martials being significantly more damaging, especially on crits. However they have to account for accuracy while the magician usually doesn't. This mileage varies according to enemy type and seems to make the magical approach more reliable. However, we're discounting the other types of effects you will find in both card games and D&D.

THREAT LEVEL NOT EQUAL

Take for instance buffs and removals. When you cast a spell that gives +1/+1 to a creature's stats, who are you going to cast it on? The 2/2 first strike lion would synergize greatly with the added offense while being a scary 3/3 threat that is harder to remove. It's certainly a better choice for your buff spell than the sorcerer unless you want to make the sorcerer a better blocker or survive incoming damage. Such circumstances may arise but traditionally you're better off buffing the lion. Similarly, using a removal spell to eliminate one of these threats from the field favors the martial cards again. A 2/2 first strike lion with synergistic buff potential is likely a more dangerous threat than the weakling despite his damaging ability. Perhaps not, sometimes it's better to remove the sorcerer as he's known as a pinger (deals 1 dmg to things) and can prove quite annoying in combat, effectively finishing off wounded enemies the lion can't first strike completely alone. But you can also kill off the sorcerer significantly easier than you could the lion, perhaps with a sorcerer of your own (the lion would survive a sorcerer's attack). Generally speaking, either can pose a threat to you but the lion is noticeably more difficult to remove later in the game and will often be the preferred target for removal.

Looking at 5e, this holds over yet again. Buffs multiply the effectiveness of martial characters much more than they do the casters. Cast Haste on your wizard and he'll become a mean, lean, staffing machine! Look at those low attack rolls and that 1d6-1 dmg go! Meanwhile the fighter is sitting there rolling 25 dmg strikes 90% of the time. Cast Haste on him instead. And Enlarge. And Heroism. And Blur. And pretty much any other buff that isn't for Self only. Martials generally have extremely efficient combat stats and will do far better with those buffs than your mage will. Most mages only buff their own defense because they're just that weak and fragile without them. Meanwhile, if you are using debuffs or control magic, what's a bigger threat? That wizard who can cast a maximum of one spell per turn as long as he's not surrounded by bad guys or being harassed by an archer or counter wizard? Nah, people generally try to control the beasts and warriors rushing headlong at them into melee. Thank god they tend to be really easy to do that to since their saving throws are low against those sorts of effects.

ARTIFACT AND ENCHANTMENT POWER

Card games also tend to have two other types of cards: usable items that you summon to the field and global enchantments that affect everyone on it. These come in both martial and magical varieties so I won't compare them here. This is the one area where magical cards tend to become overpowered since they can link up effects in a daisy chain of cause and effect that renders the game over or unwinnable for your opponent. Sort of like a wizard who has succeeded in casting multiple spells to make himself virtually unkillable.

Yet D&D has its own versions of such cards that don't quite have the same result. Equipment supplants artifacts and tends to heavily favor martial characters given its stat buffing nature. All kinds of weapons and armor that serve no purpose to a wizard will benefit a fighter tremendously. With enough stacking, the fighter can even surpass the wizard in reliability and danger level, even accounting for the wizard's ability to hit many enemies at once. The wizard can only stack so much with items as they tend to not have synergistic effects but are more fire-and-forget one-off powers (at least the sort wizards use, barring protection items). Martials clearly win the equipment arms race with players savoring loot more than they do that new spell scroll they just found. Passive effects beat consumables, and martial vs magic is all about stacking those passive combat enhancers versus using spells as ammunition.

With global effects, such as weather, mass spells, and terrain, it seems to be a caster advantage given how disadvantaged martials get when their ability to perform is hindered but in truth it's the opposite. Casters are often just as impacted by the same global threats, even being at greater risk of them due to lower health and the ability to have their spells interrupted. Even Line of Sight can be an issue in the wrong sort of terrain, favoring characters that prefer to move towards their targets versus the ones that rely on sight. Wizards do get an edge in that they can negate disadvantaged situations with spells like Fly, Control Weather, or Dimension Door. But similar spells work on martial types as well and, as mentioned above, focusing on buffing them tends to work out better. Teleport the fighter to the enemy instead of using it to reposition your wizard.

CONCLUSION

Overall I think there's a good, healthy balance between the martial and magical character potentials. The martials benefit greatly from the tools of the caster and the caster benefits greatly from the martial character's presence as both a buff target and a potential guardian. But there's one caveat -- martials depend on casters for buffs, removal, enchants, problem-solving spells, counters, divination, etc but casters can do perfectly alright without the guys who bring nothing to the team but warm bodies and damage. Some martials are a bit better in this area, offering party buffs and other help, but generally speaking the wizard can Tenser's Transformation into a warrior when needed or hurl Fireballs instead of javelins. They can use all their buffs on themselves instead and deal their own damn damage. Very rarely do DMs structure an encounter where a juggernaut is required for the caster to stand a hope of surviving the turn. Smart casters usually have plenty of ways to work around such obstacles.

[Florian]

IAlso I was bouncing around ideas to help address the system issues I mentioned (I don't know if anyone remembers post #1 at this point). I got one for turns. Besides just scaling numbers of actions you could give faster characters more prepared actions.

Take a look at how Splittermond handles this (if you can read german). It uses a so-called "Tick System" instead of standard turn-based, so tracking the time of individual actions and when they are fully executed. One of the better parts of the system is that reactions and interrupts play a very important role, especially when compared to something like AoOs from D&D.

As for your other point, I get the impression that you´re thinking too much in D&D terms. For example, take a look at Shadow of the Demon Lord. Here, a character progresses through three very distinct phases while advancing along the levels:
- Novice Paths: The basic four fantasy classes (Fighter, Cleric, Thief, Wizard).
- Expert Paths: A huge slew of more specialized classes, from Druid, to Sorcerer, to Executioner, Knight, Paladin....
- Master Paths: One specialist class for each type of magic.

Note that advancement in SotDL does not directly correlate with power. By entering into a new path, you add more options to the character, which have to be build up in power by progressing along that path, before you switch again for more options. So a Fighter > Paladin > Theurgist might have more options and a vastly deeper understanding of magic, but didn't outpace the lowly Fighter all that much.

You can find similar effects in point-based games like L5R 4th and the aforementioned Splittermond, which use thresholds for character development. As in, you need to have spent a certain amount of XP to "unlock" the next higher set of abilities or raise the cap on skills and attributes.

[Quertus]

Related to the OP - I think that the system can impair certain concepts (like, say, exorbitant skill costs in certain point buy systems makes the 7 degrees / "skill monkey" style character concept all but useless). But I don't think that the conditions in the OP inherently necessitate a martial / caster divide (as my many muggle examples hint at that stance).


So you don't see how those things you list would be a different experience within playing an RPG than just casting Knock and bypassing the situation entirely -- and all represent "character overcoming an obstacle through various means" elements similar to picking the lock... while the Knock spell just negates the obstacle entirely?

Um, nope, I don't.

Let's say you're using some lockpick minigame that I hate. I choose to bypass that minigame by using "man on the inside" vs I choose to bypass that minigame by using "Knock"? It's the same from where I'm sitting.

Why would you view them as different?

-----

To put it another way, the Babylon 5 CCG had you to use different stats for various purposes, but there was a card (the name eludes me) that let you use an arbitrary stat instead. Not entirely unlike how Doran the Siege Tower from MtG lets (and forces) creatures to deal damage based on their Toughness rather than their Power.

Point is, reframing the challenge is a minigame I personally enjoy. Being able to magically open locks, Teleport past doors, corrode locks, make electronic devices take random actions (like randomly lock/unlock, in the case of an electronic door), etc, are all ways of reframing "pick the lock" into a different thing. Just like "kick down the door", "search for a hidden key", "look for another entrance", etc, similarly reframe the challenge.


Invisibility acting as total stealth doesn't fit the name, much less the fiction. An invisible person in a tin can makes just as much noise as a visible one--more, in fact if they're not dextrous and not being careful. There can be other spells that aid in stealth. 5e has pass without trace which gives a group of people a +10 bonus to Dexterity (Stealth) checks for an hour but doesn't grant invisibility (so you still need cover to hide and can't walk out in the open). With the drastically reduced DCs, that's usually enough unless someone dumped DEX hard and is wearing the heaviest of armors. Not much use in combat, which is fine.

I don't like hard counters. To anything. If you don't want to deal with locks, have a rogue who's just that good that he's not going to fail. In 5e, the standard lock is DC 15. A level 11 rogue can't fail that (minimum roll is 10 due to reliable talent, automatic proficiency gives +4, a rogue has at least a +1 DEX mod), and can't even fail a DC 19 check, assuming a maxed ability score. So for a high-level party with a rogue, I'm not even going to make anyone roll for a door that's not arcanely locked (DC 25). And unless there are roaming patrols or traps (or time is a critical issue), I'm not going to make anyone explicitly roll for unlocking a door or chest. Because that's boring when they can repeat things.

That said, I have yet to see a caster actually learn, much less prepare knock.

I strongly dislike the idea of having "must be this tall to ride" signs on challenges--minimum "gear requirements" or "must have immunities" for encounters. I hate gear treadmills or "mandatory" gear requirements. I want most of a person's power to come from their innate abilities (class features, racial traits, spells known), and find things like "bonus feats, the class" (3e fighters), "skill list, the class" (some peoples' idea of rogues), or "big spell list, the class" (3e wizards) to be bad design. Give the classes actual features, and don't let spells (or other abilities) duplicate them without substantial cost (opportunity cost at a minimum, actual cost preferred). When comparing spells (or feats for that matter) to class features, the spell/feat should be an inferior substitute, not a replacement. It's something you get because you don't have a Rogue/Barbarian/Bard/etc, at a meaningful cost. Versatility at the cost of power.

The common perception is that "magic" (ie spell-casters) get versatility and power. Their spells can do anything that "makes sense" and always work or can do things that are impossible. On the flip side, "martials" are held to a worse-than-real-life standard. That double standard needs to die. Either everyone is fantastic and can do larger-than-life things (with appropriate limits) or no one is (or can). Will that mean cutting down the power of spell-casters? Sure. And that's a good thing IMO for the game. Make opportunity costs real. A wizard should have to choose what they can do, just like anyone else. No more "just give me a day and I can do anything!" standards.

Wow. Let's take it from the top.

We do not disagree on invisibility. However, sometimes, after you sent the Rogue in invisible, he's an idiot (OK, that one is probably a given), trips some alarm, and the guards come out and search the grounds. At that point, turning the tin cans invisible (and asking them to hold still) can sometimes prevent a TPK, or worse, getting expelled.

Hard counters are a matter of taste. I personally do like them. Among other things, they make it harder for the GM to railroad.

Knock is pretty suboptimal. Which is why I suspect Quertus, my signature academia mage, for whom this account is named, probably knows it. :smalltongue: I don't know that he's ever cast it, though.

This tall to ride… if the adventure is on another plane, you have to have some way to get there, no? I'm not sure how you can have that adventure without being "this tall". Unless there's neon signs pointing to the nearest planar gate or something, someone has to have the power or knowledge to get you there. Of course, I advocate being able to fall all the way back to "an NPC can get you to the other plane" if the PCs are, in fact, not tall enough to ride by themselves (or just letting the plot "fail" / be one that the PCs cannot interact with).

I agree that the specialist should generally be the goto guy. We even agree on who that is re: stealth & invisibility. We may disagree between The Wren & Hermione as to who is the "specialist" in opening locks, however, because neither answer is inherently "wrong". Which means that the system making that decision invalidates certain character concepts.

I also strongly agree that it's good to give classes (lesser) options to fill various niches, to (among other things) prevent necessitating cookie-cutter parties.

Related to the OP - I think that, if each player got to pick one area for their character to "shine", that the system could make that bad. Take ShadowRun for example. The Decker gets to shine in the net, the Mage gets to shine in Astral space, and nobody else can even participate. But the solo? He shines in combat… but everyone else gets to participate in his minigame. Happily, this is done right, IMO, and just makes him look cooler by comparison. But a bad system could easily have everyone's "shine" feel different, making some unsatisfying, either in how little they shine compared to others in their field, how quick or unimpressive their shine minigame is, or even how easily obviated their shine minigame is (see my various ways to not pick a lock IRL).

"Give me a day, and I can do anything" - isn't that better than "give me a day, and I can still do nothing"? Isn't being able to participate in the session a good thing?

[Florian]

Couldn't we make a "Muggle" (class, if 3e) that gets numerous SoS/SoD (or even NSJS) on-hit rider effects, "quick hands" reaction abilities / extra actions, "bardic knowledge"+ style knowledge of ways to do stuff (like where planar gates are located, completely mundane words that certain magical creatures will hear & respond to, etc), CPR to resurrect fallen allies, exercises / stretches to remove stat damage, therapy to remove sanity loss, evasion that extends to your mount (which gets massive bonuses because you know how to take care of it, let alone how to ride it), diplomacy, Willow level combat bluff, "action hero" ignoring wounds / "self-healing", etc? At what level (of ability, or actual 3e level) would a Wizard still care about having another Wizard, but no longer care about having a good Muggle?

You are thinking too much in D&D terms and design.

Quite often, there is a hard wall between the mundane and magic. Either you have magic, or you don't. Magic is the free pass to do stuff that is outside or above the mundane. In games like D&D or that are inspired by D&D, this often takes the form of spells.

Now consider this: If you do your initial world building and rules representing the world right, you have the choice how much of the "magic" to directly integrate into the physics and how they interact. For example, if we consider the function and ability to draw "magic circles", create functioning wards/seals/signs, create golems, become invincible to bathing in dragon blood or to perform a "summoning ritual" as true, then there's no pressing need to give "muggles" anything, but we have to rethink how to access all that stuff and what Wizards now are.

I tend to mention Splittermond a lot and I forgot to answer one of your recent queries, it´s time to remedy that. IMHO, the strength of that system is that it manages a smooth integration and interaction of mundane and magic. Both have clearly defined bottoms and ceilings, but the strength of the system lies in allowing a synthesis of both to go up and beyond those. For example, your archetypical Knight benefits from pumping XP in armor and shield skills and talents, but will only reach highest efficiency by supplementing that with protection magic skills and talents, but without losing the "look & feel" of a "muggle". In the same way, your archetypical "Combat Wizard" will supplement his Protection magic by investing into armor/shield stuff mentioned above, without losing their flavor.


"Give me a day, and I can do anything" - isn't that better than "give me a day, and I can still do nothing"? Isn't being able to participate in the session a good thing?

Hm... let me think....

Nah, total failure at more than one level.

Ok, let me use the Dark Heresy family of games as an example here. The basic assumption here is, if you have a 50% chance to succeed at a task, you succeed, no dice needed. So most characters tend to be proficient and competent with stuff that is either common, routine or very easy. What that exactly means shifts up with XP investment into skills and talents, a specialist will still not have to roll, but have a higher chance at success at something that is outside of routine/easy, as a character that will have to rely on luck at one point or another.

D&D is pretty much borked in that regard, as it cannot handle that in a more fluid way but rather tends to use absolutes. Once you cannot simply talk to someone or tell a white lie without having to resort to Diplomacy and Bluff, it breaks down. In this case, it is quite fair to say that if a Fighter can't relocate all skill points and feats after a good night sleep, giving the ability to do so to another class for free is a bit.... well...

[Mechalich]

On the other hand if there are enough level 1s who can take on all the level 2s and enough 2s for the 3s... then there is no group that "no one can touch" even if the level 1s cannot do anything. Plus it forces the population of the mid-levels up so there is enough sane ones to act as a stabilising force. Throw in resource dependencies from high to low (food, ammo, mana, whatever) and you get... a plausible* society that includes city destroying levels of power. I mean they aren't actually city destroying threats any more because there are people just a step or two below them defending that city.


In practice, I don't think this really works. Real life social systems will never acquire the sort of mandated pyramidal stability to make this sort of thing work, especially when in many cases the top few tiers will be only a handful of people and they are far more likely to ally into an overpowering oligarchy that can dominate those below them utterly and reduce the bottom rungs to miserable slavery instead, or the first person to the height of the hierarchy will systematically hollow out the tiers immediately below them and then ruler as a tyrant over the masses afterwards. I mean, it sounds like a useful way to approach design, but I just don't know of a case where it works.


Quite often, there is a hard wall between the mundane and magic. Either you have magic, or you don't. Magic is the free pass to do stuff that is outside or above the mundane.

Also, it's usually the case that only a very small percentage of the people in any given setting will have magic or any kind. There are settings were everybody has magic - Codex Alera is one - but those tend to have massive verisimilitude problems - Codex Alera definitely does - and are often very weird besides. Even settings where it is assumed that all PCs will have magic need to deal with the issue that the bulk of the NPC population doesn't have magic.

Now, it's perfectly possible to say that the masses just aren't special and will never be more than minions and mooks compared to the magic using elite unless in great numbers (if then) and the story is about the magical people. That's how essentially all WoD games were built and while there are some tricky problems with that approach it's certainly a doable option. Many modern epic fantasy series are built this way too. In the Wheel of Time all of the major characters have magic of some kind by the end (Mat, Perrin, and Rand all have different forms of magic, but they've all got some), as do all the major characters in the Stormlight Archive. If your magic-users are sufficiently rare and their magic is not overwhelmingly powerful, this doesn't even necessarily present any huge world-building problems. For instance at the beginning of the Wheel of Time all of the magic users live in one big tower way far off and project a limited amount of influence over the rest of the world allowing it to resemble a standard pseudo-medieval setup without too much trouble, it's only when their numbers, power, and capabilities sharply increase that things start to fall to pieces (and to the credit of the authors it is implied that the world that comes after the epic conclusion changes into one that looks very different rather quickly).

The real trouble comes when you want the non-magic users to compete head to head and one to one with the magic users. As Max_Killjoy has noted repeatedly this means you either impose a strict cap on the kinds of things magic can do (or impose a hugely crippling cost on its use, like in those works were a mage burns through their own life force to cast spells) or you have to change the baseline of what ordinary people can do, which is functionally the same as turning your setting into one where everyone has magic.

That leaves basically three options as I see it:
1. Low-powered or otherwise limited magic that can't provide an insurmountable edge compared to the non-magical approach.
2. Magic for everyone in the whole setting.
3. Superheroes, with all the consequences thereof.

The inherent problem that D&D, specifically has, it that its trapped between two competing intents. There's some people who very much want it to be #1 (and R.A. Salvatore is one of them) and there's others who want it to be #3 (and Ed Greenwood is in this camp) who are twisting themselves into knots trying to play in the same sandbox in order to maximize their respective profits.

[Florian]

@Mechalich:

I tend to disagree a bit. For one thing, the fiction you cite as an example seems to suffer a bit from what I tend to call the "Shonen Syndrome": Meet barrier > Take out Sladgehammer > Fail at breaking thru barrier > Go training a bit > Get Bigger Sledgehammer > Break Barrier > Rinse and repeat. That's the reason why certain kinds of fiction make very bad example points when we're talking about a TTRPG.

Quite a lot of the game systems I use tend to follow a very different kind of internal logic, tho. They grant magic the ability to ignore the mundane rules and even go deep into the impossible, but differentiate between the knowledge of how it can be done and having the means/power to actually pull it off or sustain it.

As a simple example, in DSA/Dark Eye, a caster can learn any spell right from the start. The system uses various kinds of spell points and (re)gain mechanics, with the cost not being tied to the spell but to the desired effect, as in, 1 SP per point of damage dealed/healed, the costs of a Cure Poison/Disease being dependent on the particular poison/disease and so on. Magic still has no upper limit and is quite fantastic, but the ability to really pull the high power stuff off is very rare. The Cleric equivalent are the Blessed, who have to build up Karmic Points with the deity granting them miracles. You have to be an effing saint to build up a point balance to spent on an effect that can easily rival anything D&D or even AM can offer, but then you have to start gaining those points again....

I tend to mention Splittermond quite often, because that uses an interesting variant of it. Mechanically, you still have your spell points, but its your choice whether to "use" or "lock" them. In this context, "lock" means to activate a permanent effect whose cost is reduced from your spell points total until you end it, thereby reducing your potential pool size, while "use" will generate an instant effect and you have to wait until your pool refreshes again. The key difference between "mundane" and "magic" characters (and the spectrum in between) is based on the weighting of "locked" vs. open to "use" spell point management.

Edit: To clarify that a bit, yes, in a sense, that means that everyone uses magic. The basic setup is geared towards supporting both, the "mundane" and the "magical" feeling and the accompanying verisimilitude that goes with it. "Locked" points enhance what is already there, while "use" points give you momentarily tremendous power.

[Quertus]

You are thinking too much in D&D terms and design.

No, that misses the point.

The claim of the OP is that something curiously like a subset of 3e rules creates the martial / caster divide. I am simply demonstrating with the most 3e-like system I can think of (which, curiously, is 3e) how so much of that divide is *not* inherent to the underlying system.


Quite often, there is a hard wall between the mundane and magic. Either you have magic, or you don't. Magic is the free pass to do stuff that is outside or above the mundane. In games like D&D or that are inspired by D&D, this often takes the form of spells.

Now consider this: If you do your initial world building and rules representing the world right, you have the choice how much of the "magic" to directly integrate into the physics and how they interact. For example, if we consider the function and ability to draw "magic circles", create functioning wards/seals/signs, create golems, become invincible to bathing in dragon blood or to perform a "summoning ritual" as true, then there's no pressing need to give "muggles" anything, but we have to rethink how to access all that stuff and what Wizards now are.

I'm not sure what any of that has to do with HP, turn-based combat, or exception-based abilities.


I tend to mention Splittermond a lot and I forgot to answer one of your recent queries, it´s time to remedy that. IMHO, the strength of that system is that it manages a smooth integration and interaction of mundane and magic. Both have clearly defined bottoms and ceilings, but the strength of the system lies in allowing a synthesis of both to go up and beyond those. For example, your archetypical Knight benefits from pumping XP in armor and shield skills and talents, but will only reach highest efficiency by supplementing that with protection magic skills and talents, but without losing the "look & feel" of a "muggle". In the same way, your archetypical "Combat Wizard" will supplement his Protection magic by investing into armor/shield stuff mentioned above, without losing their flavor.

Flavor? Sure. But wouldn't be acceptable to the die-hard muggle lovers.


Hm... let me think....

Nah, total failure at more than one level.

The complaint I was responding to is, IMO, usually best worded as, "the Wizard actually gets to play the game, and the Fighter doesn't, so we should make it to where nobody gets to play the game." My response continues to be, "wouldn't it be better if, instead, we make it to where *everyone* can play the game?".


Ok, let me use the Dark Heresy family of games as an example here. The basic assumption here is, if you have a 50% chance to succeed at a task, you succeed, no dice needed. So most characters tend to be proficient and competent with stuff that is either common, routine or very easy. What that exactly means shifts up with XP investment into skills and talents, a specialist will still not have to roll, but have a higher chance at success at something that is outside of routine/easy, as a character that will have to rely on luck at one point or another.

D&D is pretty much borked in that regard, as it cannot handle that in a more fluid way but rather tends to use absolutes. Once you cannot simply talk to someone or tell a white lie without having to resort to Diplomacy and Bluff, it breaks down. In this case, it is quite fair to say that if a Fighter can't relocate all skill points and feats after a good night sleep, giving the ability to do so to another class for free is a bit.... well...

Sorry, how does Dark Heresy get around rolling Diplomacy vs Bluff for white lies? Because my experience with War Hammer Fantasy definitely includes rolling dice "like a failure" for just that scenario, and I suspect Dark Heresy does, too.

[Mechalich]

I tend to disagree a bit. For one thing, the fiction you cite as an example seems to suffer a bit from what I tend to call the "Shonen Syndrome": Meet barrier > Take out Sladgehammer > Fail at breaking thru barrier > Go training a bit > Get Bigger Sledgehammer > Break Barrier > Rinse and repeat. That's the reason why certain kinds of fiction make very bad example points when we're talking about a TTRPG.

Okay, I've been at pains to cite series that are as popular as a I know. Wheel of Time is the best-selling, most popular high fantasy epic of the past several decades in the English-language. It just is. Stormlight Archive, while unfinished, is a massively well known project. Codex Alera is the high fantasy by Dresden Files author Jim Butcher. If you can't make a jump from what's popular in a genre to functional games, then there's a problem. Most modern, English-speaking high-magic fantasy (and most East Asian fantasy too in my experience) embraces the 'fantasy superheroes' approach and gives all major characters supernatural abilities of some kind. It's somewhat ironic in that Tolkien more or less invented the modern incarnation of the genre with high-fantasy low-magic world, but that combination is now (and I suspect the massive influence of D&D contributed to this) really quite rare.

Now there does seem to be a current trend to produce works of sword & sorcery where the characters are primarily 'mundanes' struggling in a universe where rare and elusive magic users lord over the populace and the highly elite mundane heroes have to somehow outwit and overcome them which draws on the heritage of Howard and Lieber and others, but in such setups the magic available to the villains isn't part of the PC tool box. D&D, as I mentioned, has stories like this. Drizzt, much like Conan, fights a lot of wizards (and priestesses), and his 'party' is comprised more or less entirely of mundanes and he has a tendency to break up with wizard allies after a short time. And that works, because you can have magic work very differently in a system where it is not intended to be a PC tool. The problem that D&D has it that it takes the magical abilities possessed by the villains that it is intended to take absolutely everything the PCs have to overcome and turns around and hands them to the PCs. This isn't unique to D&D - there are superhero systems that, drawing a little too closely from comics, allow certain OP powers that were never meant to belong to the good guys into everyday builds.


Edit: To clarify that a bit, yes, in a sense, that means that everyone uses magic. The basic setup is geared towards supporting both, the "mundane" and the "magical" feeling and the accompanying verisimilitude that goes with it. "Locked" points enhance what is already there, while "use" points give you momentarily tremendous power.

That's seems to me like it's straight up everyone uses magic, it's just that the fluff is pretending otherwise. And that's fine, but mechanically everyone is still using magic, they're just doing so in different ways, some of which may be more subtle than others. There's plenty of this in lots of games. Humanoid giants are in lots of games after all, and they're often completely 'non-magical' even though you have to play really fast and loose with physics and biomechanics to allow them to exist.

[Florian]

@Quertus:

Bottom to top, no quotes.

Either you, or the people introducing you to Warhammer missed a crucial point. Assuming ordinary circumstance, a WH/DH character is very competent. The whole system is geared towards ignoring those and only handling extraordinary circumstances.

Things get screwed when you remove ordinary circumstances and only deal with extraordinary circumstances instead, tho.

As for D&D, the problem only starts when you don't allow characters to be competent, but always call for a contested roll. Meaning you can't have a conversation without rolling for Diplomacy or you can't tell a white lie without rolling for Bluff, two things that are entirely uncalled for. That is, because they disregard any assumption of basic competency. Thus the complaint: When you have to prove anything you want to try on a mechanical basis, then a class that can get "hard counters" after a long rest rules supreme, which is pretty wrong.

Being a die-hard "muggle lover" myself, that is all that matters.

It shows that some concepts don't really work when your overall goal is creating parity between the different classes. Take a look at 4E: The design here was very clear about having more or less standardized effects in concert with standardized rounds. You want non-standardized effects, get rid of the round structure. Instead, ask the question what skill it takes and what time to draw a Magic Circle against Evil when it is not a spell.

And that leads us full circle back to D&D.... which screwed up with the M/C thingie in such a brutal way, don't even try to apologize here.

[Talakeal]

The complaint I was responding to is, IMO, usually best worded as, "the Wizard actually gets to play the game, and the Fighter doesn't, so we should make it to where nobody gets to play the game." My response continues to be, "wouldn't it be better if, instead, we make it to where *everyone* can play the game?"

Care to elaborate on what exactly "the game" is and who wants more people unable to play it?

In my experiance people dont like how martials are arbitrarily prohibited from participating in certain content, for example overlymrestrictive cross class skills, everything and its mother being immune to sneak attack and combat manuevers, trap finding, uber charge builds being pretty binary, etc.

Likewise peoples problems with casters is that they dont actually use the systems in the book, teynjust bypass them, for example who needs to worry about all the detailed economic rules when they can just conjure infinite walls of salt?

Are you talking about exceptional stuff, like adventures on other planes or the bottom of the sea? Because in my experiance one caster can cover the entire party, and lacking a caster you can just buy a potion / wand / scroll and then be good to go.

[Satinavian]

That's seems to me like it's straight up everyone uses magic, it's just that the fluff is pretending otherwise. And that's fine, but mechanically everyone is still using magic, they're just doing so in different ways, some of which may be more subtle than others. There's plenty of this in lots of games. Humanoid giants are in lots of games after all, and they're often completely 'non-magical' even though you have to play really fast and loose with physics and biomechanics to allow them to exist.

Splittermond has no classes. It is point buy with slowly raising caps. There are magical abilities and nonmagical abilities and they roughly are equally powerful. If you want to build a muggle, you buy nonmagical stuff, if you want to build a wizard, you buy magical stuff.

Now there are abilities that you can buy that would help with all your magic without giving out any powers directly. In theory those would make wizard characters and muggle characters more attractive. The first one get most out of them, the other ones can forgoe them completely and syve the points where the hybrids would be compelled to invest in some of them but not getting as much out of it.

But overall this incentive seems to be too weak. Splittermond is mostly dominated by hybrid characters. The real wizard and the pure muggle are slightly suboptimal in that system. Not least because there are often synergies in combining magical and nonmagical tools.



"Give me a day, and I can do anything" - isn't that better than "give me a day, and I can still do nothing"? Isn't being able to participate in the session a good thing?

No.

"Give me a day and I can do anything" means nothing less than "every challenge that is known beforehand or lasts longer than one day becomes utterly trivial and not even worth the time playing through it".

That is indeed one of the many flaws of D&D magic and the reason the wizards in most other systems look closer to D&D sorcerers than to D&D wizards rule wise.

[Florian]

Correct. Still more or less answers the initial OP by proving that "the man" can support mundane and magic on equal footing without favoring one over the other. That hybrids win out is the actual prove of that, as the magic side gains by investing in mundane stuff instead of just getting it via magical means/magic overwriting everything else.

[Max_Killjoy]

Care to elaborate on what exactly "the game" is and who wants more people unable to play it?

In my experiance people dont like how martials are arbitrarily prohibited from participating in certain content, for example overlymrestrictive cross class skills, everything and its mother being immune to sneak attack and combat manuevers, trap finding, uber charge builds being pretty binary, etc.

Likewise peoples problems with casters is that they dont actually use the systems in the book, teynjust bypass them, for example who needs to worry about all the detailed economic rules when they can just conjure infinite walls of salt?

Are you talking about exceptional stuff, like adventures on other planes or the bottom of the sea? Because in my experiance one caster can cover the entire party, and lacking a caster you can just buy a potion / wand / scroll and then be good to go.

This goes back a long way, but if my memory serves "The Game" is effectively 5d wizard chess -- the time-bending, nested-contingency, "but I had a defense ready for that" "but I had a bypass for that defense just in case" "that doesn't work, see page blah blah blah in obscure sourcebook you've never heard of" nonsense that ends up sounding like a cross between the Wesley/Inigo banter and two nerds debating the trivia minutia of their favorite 30-book series.... on a bizarro cocktail of speed, quaaludes, and LSD.

If that's the case, the complaint IS NOT that "fighters don't get the play the game", the complaint is other players constantly trying to make fantasy RPGs "about" 5d wizard chess in the first place.

[Max_Killjoy]

Um, nope, I don't.

Let's say you're using some lockpick minigame that I hate. I choose to bypass that minigame by using "man on the inside" vs I choose to bypass that minigame by using "Knock"? It's the same from where I'm sitting.

Why would you view them as different?

-----

To put it another way, the Babylon 5 CCG had you to use different stats for various purposes, but there was a card (the name eludes me) that let you use an arbitrary stat instead. Not entirely unlike how Doran the Siege Tower from MtG lets (and forces) creatures to deal damage based on their Toughness rather than their Power.

Point is, reframing the challenge is a minigame I personally enjoy. Being able to magically open locks, Teleport past doors, corrode locks, make electronic devices take random actions (like randomly lock/unlock, in the case of an electronic door), etc, are all ways of reframing "pick the lock" into a different thing. Just like "kick down the door", "search for a hidden key", "look for another entrance", etc, similarly reframe the challenge.


There's a door. It's locked. It's an obstacle. It's (hopefully) there because it makes sense "in the fiction".

There's a long list of ways that the character can engage that obstacle, from picking the lock to talking someone into opening the door to kicking it in to finding another way in to whatever.

There's no "re-framing", because the point was never "pick the lock", it was that the character wanted to get into the room and there was something making getting into the room harder, and the character has to come up with a way to get around it.

There is no "minigame".

"Knock" is the magic equivalent of one of those automatic lock picking "guns", or a "I brought a door hacking spike" in a Star Wars game. It just negates the situation, and any thought or effort that any other character might put into working through the situation.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Care to elaborate on what exactly "the game" is and who wants more people unable to play it?

In my experiance people dont like how martials are arbitrarily prohibited from participating in certain content, for example overlymrestrictive cross class skills, everything and its mother being immune to sneak attack and combat manuevers, trap finding, uber charge builds being pretty binary, etc.

Likewise peoples problems with casters is that they dont actually use the systems in the book, teynjust bypass them, for example who needs to worry about all the detailed economic rules when they can just conjure infinite walls of salt?

Are you talking about exceptional stuff, like adventures on other planes or the bottom of the sea? Because in my experiance one caster can cover the entire party, and lacking a caster you can just buy a potion / wand / scroll and then be good to go.


This goes back a long way, but if my memory serves "The Game" is effectively 5d wizard chess -- the time-bending, nested-contingency, "but I had a defense ready for that" "but I had a bypass for that defense just in case" "that doesn't work, see page blah blah blah in obscure sourcebook you've never heard of" nonsense that ends up sounding like a cross between the Wesley/Inigo banter and two nerds debating the trivia minutia of their favorite 30-book series.... on a bizarro cocktail of speed, quaaludes, and LSD.

If that's the case, the complaint IS NOT that "fighters don't get the play the game", the complaint is other players constantly trying to make fantasy RPGs "about" 5d wizard chess in the first place.

Yeah. Quertus's idea of "the game" is (from the game designer's perspective) a mistake. It's an ascended bug in the system that wasn't supposed to be there anyway. So the reason that only some people can play "the game" is that those characters are abusing a bug in the system. And bugs should get patched.

That doesn't mean that that playstyle is bad, just that it's not supposed to be in that particular game at all, let alone the most important part of it. There are other games that cater to it. But trying to shoehorn it into D&D, in particular, makes for bad times and broken systems.



"Knock" is the magic equivalent of one of those automatic lock picking "guns", or a "I brought a door hacking spike" in a Star Wars game. It just negates the situation, and any thought or effort that any other character might put into working through the situation.

I agree with this. Situations that should be (are designed to be) challenging at a particular level of play (abstractly speaking) should be a challenge. No one should have a set of automatic "I win" buttons for them at that point. At a later point, trivializing those particular challenges is fine, and everyone[1] should either have an "I win" button or the DM should simply wave them away because they're pointless. A solo character dealing with a single guard at level 1 should be a challenge. A solo character dealing with a single guard at level 20 should not be a challenge, and probably isn't worth even going into "initiative mode" for. Just narratively ask what the character does and narrate that.

Giving some people "I win" buttons against relevant challenges is just plain bad design. If everyone has them, then they're no longer relevant challenges (by definition). If no one has them, then they're a challenge for everyone. If only 1 person has them, then the challenge isn't relevant as long as that person's along.

[1] where "everyone" means "everyone who wants them", ie equality of access. You can choose to not take those "I win" buttons, but that's a conscious choice with consequences. It's saying "I want this challenge to remain relevant to me."

[CharonsHelper]

In the case of Knock - it could probably be fixed just by making it really loud.

It would be better than letting the barbarian smash it open because it's fast and won't chance breaking what's inside, but it's inferior to someone who invested in lockpicking because that doesn't let everyone around know you're there.

I did the same thing with electronic locks in the system I'm making. Sure, there's a tool to brute force open them (I don't want PCs to be "stuck") but it sets off all of that system's alarms - which is bad.

[Quertus]

Care to elaborate on what exactly "the game" is and who wants more people unable to play it?

In my experiance people dont like how martials are arbitrarily prohibited from participating in certain content, for example overlymrestrictive cross class skills, everything and its mother being immune to sneak attack and combat manuevers, trap finding, uber charge builds being pretty binary, etc.

Likewise peoples problems with casters is that they dont actually use the systems in the book, teynjust bypass them, for example who needs to worry about all the detailed economic rules when they can just conjure infinite walls of salt?

Are you talking about exceptional stuff, like adventures on other planes or the bottom of the sea? Because in my experiance one caster can cover the entire party, and lacking a caster you can just buy a potion / wand / scroll and then be good to go.


No.

"Give me a day and I can do anything" means nothing less than "every challenge that is known beforehand or lasts longer than one day becomes utterly trivial and not even worth the time playing through it".


This goes back a long way, but if my memory serves "The Game" is effectively 5d wizard chess -- the time-bending, nested-contingency, "but I had a defense ready for that" "but I had a bypass for that defense just in case" "that doesn't work, see page blah blah blah in obscure sourcebook you've never heard of" nonsense that ends up sounding like a cross between the Wesley/Inigo banter and two nerds debating the trivia minutia of their favorite 30-book series.... on a bizarro cocktail of speed, quaaludes, and LSD.

If that's the case, the complaint IS NOT that "fighters don't get the play the game", the complaint is other players constantly trying to make fantasy RPGs "about" 5d wizard chess in the first place.


Yeah. Quertus's idea of "the game" is (from the game designer's perspective) a mistake. It's an ascended bug in the system that wasn't supposed to be there anyway. So the reason that only some people can play "the game" is that those characters are abusing a bug in the system. And bugs should get patched.

That doesn't mean that that playstyle is bad, just that it's not supposed to be in that particular game at all, let alone the most important part of it. There are other games that cater to it. But trying to shoehorn it into D&D, in particular, makes for bad times and broken systems.

So, when I say "the game", I am not referring to 5d Wizard chess (although, yes, I happen to like that minigame), but to the RPG (in most cases, that means D&D). Or, rather, to the breadth of minigames that an RPG has to offer. So props to Talakeal for having the right of it (mostly).

You've got a Beholder floating over a pool of lava. You've got an underwater portal to another plane with invisible incorporeal guardians. Your spell jamming vessel just exploded. You want to scout out a trap-filled maze. Your sun will die within 3 years unless you can enter the heart of a dieing star and awaken the trapped sun god. Etc etc etc.

It's actually easier to discuss in the context of ShadowRun, because the answer to balance there was "what's that?" & "nobody can play the game". If there are x characters, playing x minigames, everybody else sits there twiddling their thumbs (x-1)/x of the time.

So, ShadowRun is what the game looks like when nobody can play the game. I am advocating letting everybody play the game.

The Wizard being able to interact with any minigame, given time, is… questionable. Personally, I think that the game is best when every character can interact with almost every minigame, all the time.

Now, you may disagree with me. You may like catching up on your texts while someone else is getting their spotlight time in ShadowRun. You may enjoy not having to participate most of the session. You may prefer more enforced spotlight sharing, or even prefer spotlight sharing through "shine or unable to participate" mechanics.

But me? I prefer systems where everybody gets to participate (even if not equally). Even in ShadowRun, the poster child of "you cannot participate", *everyone* can participate in combat. And this is true of combat in most systems (pretty much anything short of "Thor and the sentient potted plant" territory).

This is why, despite me personally finding RPG combat to be snooze mode compared to war game combat, I love combat in RPGs. It's the one time that it's guaranteed that the whole party can participate. Unless, of course, the Fighter is an idiot, and doesn't have a ranged weapon, or forces the Wizard to play his personal buff bot. Or you're playing 2e (the best RPG of all time) and your foe is immune to your attacks (you don't have a sufficiently magical weapon) and you lack the creativity to participate in other ways. Or you're a typical D&D Wizard who is out of spells.

But, usually, unless you're making things feel really contrived or you have a really specialized party, not everybody will participate in a scouting mission, or in disarming a trap. Not everyone will (and, in my groups, certainly not everyone should!) participate in "talky time". Rarely will everyone participate in strategy (although, IME, there had been a strong correlation between "better group" and "higher participation").

And don't get me started on the epic challenge of the locked door, and how it's so impossible for anyone to ever participate in that minigame. :smallamused:

Clearer what I mean when I say someone cannot play the game now?

[Quertus]

No.

"Give me a day and I can do anything" means nothing less than "every challenge that is known beforehand or lasts longer than one day becomes utterly trivial and not even worth the time playing through it".

That is indeed one of the many flaws of D&D magic and the reason the wizards in most other systems look closer to D&D sorcerers than to D&D wizards rule wise.


There's a door. It's locked. It's an obstacle. It's (hopefully) there because it makes sense "in the fiction".

There's a long list of ways that the character can engage that obstacle, from picking the lock to talking someone into opening the door to kicking it in to finding another way in to whatever.

There's no "re-framing", because the point was never "pick the lock", it was that the character wanted to get into the room and there was something making getting into the room harder, and the character has to come up with a way to get around it.

There is no "minigame".

"Knock" is the magic equivalent of one of those automatic lock picking "guns", or a "I brought a door hacking spike" in a Star Wars game. It just negates the situation, and any thought or effort that any other character might put into working through the situation.


I agree with this. Situations that should be (are designed to be) challenging at a particular level of play (abstractly speaking) should be a challenge. No one should have a set of automatic "I win" buttons for them at that point. At a later point, trivializing those particular challenges is fine, and everyone[1] should either have an "I win" button or the DM should simply wave them away because they're pointless. A solo character dealing with a single guard at level 1 should be a challenge. A solo character dealing with a single guard at level 20 should not be a challenge, and probably isn't worth even going into "initiative mode" for. Just narratively ask what the character does and narrate that.

Giving some people "I win" buttons against relevant challenges is just plain bad design. If everyone has them, then they're no longer relevant challenges (by definition). If no one has them, then they're a challenge for everyone. If only 1 person has them, then the challenge isn't relevant as long as that person's along.

[1] where "everyone" means "everyone who wants them", ie equality of access. You can choose to not take those "I win" buttons, but that's a conscious choice with consequences. It's saying "I want this challenge to remain relevant to me."

I believe that determining what level of challenge something is "supposed to be" is railroading. Just present the scenario, and let the reality of the rules, the characters capabilities, and their choices determine how difficult it is.

Why do I avoid the "pick the lock" minigame IRL? Well, (let's say) because it's illegal. And slow. If I need to get in *right now*, I'll kick down the door. Otherwise, I'll search for a more legal / "less likely to get someone to call the cops on me" (even if it's my property / I have the owner's permission), to avoid the "talk to the cops" minigame. That sounds believable, right?

Now, I can accept that some people might have a problem with minmaxed characters who either cannot participate or singlehandedly solve a problem (see ShadowRun). And I can certainly see the problem with the max-maxed character who can singlehandedly solve every problem.

The funny thing is, afaict, the Wizard is the former. He can only solve the subset of problems that he has a spell prepared for. Memorize Knock? What if there's two locked doors? Or none? There's so many different types of potential problems, real Wizards at real tables don't actually solve everything. What they can do is adapt to different parties, to cover weaknesses.

I continue to view them as the working model, that all other classes should strive to emulate.

Now, they're is some concern about some of their solutions being overly effective. My response is, to put it squarely in 3e parlance, give them d10 HD, full BAB, the ability to cast in armor, and make all their spells at will abilities. Then balance the Fighter up to their level. Then nerf everybody's "win buttons" to taste.

[Man_Over_Game]

I believe that determining what level of challenge something is "supposed to be" is railroading. Just present the scenario, and let the reality of the rules, the characters capabilities, and their choices determine how difficult it is.

Why do I avoid the "pick the lock" minigame IRL? Well, (let's say) because it's illegal. And slow. If I need to get in *right now*, I'll kick down the door. Otherwise, I'll search for a more legal / "less likely to get someone to call the cops on me" (even if it's my property / I have the owner's permission), to avoid the "talk to the cops" minigame. That sounds believable, right?

Now, I can accept that some people might have a problem with minmaxed characters who either cannot participate or singlehandedly solve a problem (see ShadowRun). And I can certainly see the problem with the max-maxed character who can singlehandedly solve every problem.

The funny thing is, afaict, the Wizard is the former. He can only solve the subset of problems that he has a spell prepared for. Memorize Knock? What if there's two locked doors? Or none? There's so many different types of potential problems, real Wizards at real tables don't actually solve everything. What they can do is adapt to different parties, to cover weaknesses.

That's not always how it is, though. A Wizard might have limited resources, but a Wizard who focuses primarily on combat often outperforms a Fighter who has no choice but to focus on combat.

Usually, a Wizard has a mixture of both utility and combat, and performs just as well in combat as the Fighter. But the balance is off, here. The Fighter provides very little to non-combat scenarios, where the Wizard can.

Most of what I've seen is a combat-focused Wizard, being better than a Fighter at combat, and neither being good at utility,
-OR-
A balanced Wizard being just as useful as the Fighter in combat and solving several problems out of combat.

In neither of these scenarios does a Fighter really get to shine against the Wizard's capabilities. The Fighter might shine in a few niche scenarios (at low levels in certain editions of DnD, or when attrition is so bad that the Wizard has ran out of resources), but those scenarios are few and far between.

If something like DnD is broken into 3 pillars of Combat, Exploration, and Social Interaction, the Wizard is competent in all three when the Fighter is only competent in one. Where's the fairness in that?

[Quertus]

That's not always how it is, though. A Wizard might have limited resources, but a Wizard who focuses primarily on combat often outperforms a Fighter who has no choice but to focus on combat.

Usually, a Wizard has a mixture of both utility and combat, and performs just as well in combat as the Fighter. But the balance is off, here. The Fighter provides very little to non-combat scenarios, where the Wizard can.

Most of what I've seen is a combat-focused Wizard, being better than a Fighter at combat, and neither being good at utility,
-OR-
A balanced Wizard being just as useful as the Fighter in combat and solving several problems out of combat.

In neither of these scenarios does a Fighter really get to shine against the Wizard's capabilities. The Fighter might shine in a few niche scenarios (at low levels in certain editions of DnD, or when attrition is so bad that the Wizard has ran out of resources), but those scenarios are few and far between.

If something like DnD is broken into 3 pillars of Combat, Exploration, and Social Interaction, the Wizard is competent in all three when the Fighter is only competent in one. Where's the fairness in that?

Oh, I've never said D&D was balanced or fair. Quertus, my signature academia mage, for whom this account is named, is constantly outshone by the party Fighter & Monk. But, yes, in most groups, you'll see what you've seen.

Balance to the table. That's the golden rule. Follow that, and you won't see that.

Now, would it be nice if the Fighter a) had some built-in "game" outside fighting, or b) had "fighting" "in the bag" the way a ShadowRun Solo Street Samurai does? Well, sure. But even working with what we've got in 3e, the ubercharger can be "more than effective enough" to "rule" most combat.

Anyway, relevant to this thread, as I've said, there is nothing inherent in the design of d20 games (HP, turn-based, what have you) that necessitate a Muggle inferiority complex. The fault is not in their stars, but in themselves, that they are to be Wizards' underlings.

[Florian]

@Quertus:

Let´s go at this from a different design perspective. Basic assumption is that we can clearly identify the core activities that we want to feature in a game system - combat, exploration, social interaction and such.

Now I partially agree with what you wrote about SR. Only partial because the model of "exclusive access" breaks down exactly because of "Combat" being the only core activity that everyone has access to, basically negating the niche protection of the combat specialists, especially since every other character will have the gear to upgrade combat abilities beyond their initial niche.

You might want to contrast that with Leverage, which is also a heist-based game system and goes for total "exclusive access" by only having the "bruiser" participate in combat, no one else.

Other game systems approach the method of siloing abilities for each core activity more in the manner of granting high or low access, depending on the chosen niche for a character. While you can't shine beyond being functional with low access, you are at least not locked out, but you won't infringe on someone with high access.

As a side-note, an interesting point is based on what you can consider to be a fetish amongst D&D players: Distrust of the GM coupled with the empowerment that comes with the knowledge that a character has the granted ability to pull certain things off, like wanting to be able to cast Plane Shift to, well, be able to plane shift.

In a way, I think that D&D 4E actually was on the right track by separating "combat magic" from "ritual magic", as in low access to combat, high access to magic.

What's also open is the question of how much can be generally externalized as a neutral factor and interfaced with having either, high or low access to it. As in, does a setting with a number of portals/rifts really need a Plane Shift spell or is that not rather redundant when knowledge of/access to those things s a given? This would bring us to the basic situation that either a game world has portals, or it doesn't, removing the need to argue about things like said spell.

[Max_Killjoy]

That's not always how it is, though. A Wizard might have limited resources, but a Wizard who focuses primarily on combat often outperforms a Fighter who has no choice but to focus on combat.

Usually, a Wizard has a mixture of both utility and combat, and performs just as well in combat as the Fighter. But the balance is off, here. The Fighter provides very little to non-combat scenarios, where the Wizard can.


Part of that comes from locking Skills and non-combat Proficiencies largely into other classes... the Fighter is set up by the "devs" across multiple editions to intentionally not have a lot of non-combat utility.

[Jakinbandw]

Part of that comes from locking Skills and non-combat Proficiencies largely into other classes... the Fighter is set up by the "devs" across multiple editions to intentionally not have a lot of non-combat utility.

It's one of the nice things in 5e. A fighter can use one of their extra feats to pick up stuff like ritual magic, or a couple cantrips which will tend to have decent out of combat utility. Also people tend to all have roughly the same number of skills with rouges and bards breaking that only a bit.

[Bohandas]

Part of that comes from locking Skills and non-combat Proficiencies largely into other classes... the Fighter is set up by the "devs" across multiple editions to intentionally not have a lot of non-combat utility.

This brings up a tweak to the game that I've been mulling over. What if we made skill modifiers be equal to exactly one half of the relevant ability score, (and then increased all fixed DCs by five). This would remove a lot of unnecessary math and it would also fix the skill system so that characters actually had enough skill points.

[Florian]

This brings up a tweak to the game that I've been mulling over. What if we made skill modifiers be equal to exactly one half of the relevant ability score, (and then increased all fixed DCs by five). This would remove a lot of unnecessary math and it would also fix the skill system so that characters actually had enough skill points.

Why, tho? It´s a lot easier to establish what can be done without a roll in the first place.

[Man_Over_Game]

Part of that comes from locking Skills and non-combat Proficiencies largely into other classes... the Fighter is set up by the "devs" across multiple editions to intentionally not have a lot of non-combat utility.

And that's fine, as long as the campaign is being defined by everyone equally.

Using the three pillars I used as an example before (Combat, Social, Exploration), the Fighter doesn't have to have much emphasis on Exploration or Social, as long as he dominates in Combat.

Let's just say we give the Fighter some rough estimates, where we scale things from 1-10 on how much that class contributes, with 5 being the average character in the team, 1 being very minimal impact from the class features, and 10 effectively carrying the team in that pillar.


Combat: 6
Exploration: 1
Social: 1



Now, let's compare this to an expected, generic Wizard:


Combat: 5
Exploration: 5
Social: 4


(The numbers are not about precision, but about quantifying the concept, making it easier to grasp and read).


Even if the Wizard contributes slightly less in combat than the Fighter, the Wizard still contributes 5x more everywhere else. In order for a Fighter to have as much of a spotlight, he'd need a 12 in combat, effectively hosing every possible combatant put in front of him. The Wizard would have to feel vastly inferior to the Fighter in combat, and that's not usually the case.

Or, put in another way, why is the Fighter allowed to feel inferior in Exploration and Social scenarios, but the Wizard is rarely inferior in combat?

When Fighters are as good at exploring and solving puzzles as Wizards, that's when a Wizard should be allowed to contribute in combat. But that'll never happen.

[Kyutaru]

Even if the Wizard contributes slightly less in combat than the Fighter, the Wizard still contributes 5x more everywhere else. In order for a Fighter to have as much of a spotlight, he'd need a 12 in combat, effectively hosing every possible combatant put in front of him. The Wizard would have to feel vastly inferior to the Fighter in combat, and that's not usually the case.

The thing is the Fighter does have that 12 in combat when the wizard buffs him. When you have crazy buffs, you use them on your beatstick. Not on yourself. The wizard buffed is barely an 8 in combat. The fighter is the optimal target for such spells and becomes ludicrous under their effect.

[PhoenixPhyre]

In my opinion, the best way to let everyone have more utility outside of combat in D&D is to slaughter a few sacred cows and take a page from 4e.

Take a subset of current spell effects, remove them from the spell lists entirely, and transform them into "incantations" that anyone of the appropriate level can learn and use. Make them require one or more of
a) substantial time
b) costly components
c) special circumstances ("an arcane conflux of ley lines", "cast by the blood of the high prince", etc)

The classic "ritual" classes (wizard, cleric) could get bonuses when they perform certain types of incantations or "free" incantations at level up. Then anyone can provide the teleportation, water breathing, plane-shifting, etc.

In a 5e context, the relevant spells would be something like
* all current ritual spells.
* many of the current "non-combat" spells (those with cast times > 1 action) other than the summoning spells
* A lot of the "altered movement" or "information gathering" spells such as fly, Locate X, etc. spells.
* All of the "resting utility" ones like Tiny Hut, Rope Trick, etc.

These would be willing-only, so even things like polymorph could get split into a combat version (still a spell, but able to be used balefully and to create stronger creatures) and a weaker, low-CR-only version (say capped out at CR 1/8) as an group incantation.

[Quertus]

@Florian:

Nice to know that Leverage solved the ShadowRun "problem" of group participation in combat, and created a purely siloed experience.

I really like the "high and low access" concepts. My (completely unofficial) vocabulary would say that the low access can "participate", without preventing the high-access from "shining".

As loathe as I am to break character, I think 4e… well, no, didn't exactly do it right. If combat is the only thing, then making combat magic roughly equal to combat muscles/steel seems only reasonable. And I'm a fan of (powerful) ritual magic. But 4e felt like it took the magic out the game, exponentially more than 3e already had.

But I don't get the point of your last paragraph about world-building.

[Max_Killjoy]

@Florian:

Nice to know that Leverage solved the ShadowRun "problem" of group participation in combat, and created a purely siloed experience.

I really like the "high and low access" concepts. My (completely unofficial) vocabulary would say that the low access can "participate", without preventing the high-access from "shining".

As loathe as I am to break character, I think 4e… well, no, didn't exactly do it right. If combat is the only thing, then making combat magic roughly equal to combat muscles/steel seems only reasonable. And I'm a fan of (powerful) ritual magic. But 4e felt like it took the magic out the game, exponentially more than 3e already had.

But I don't get the point of your last paragraph about world-building.

ShadowRun's problem is that it locked characters out of certain parts of the game entirely, that it siloed certain parts of the action -- how does creating a MORE siloed experience solve that, other than by forcing more than half the table to sit around doing nothing for long stretches?

[PhoenixPhyre]

ShadowRun's problem is that it locked characters out of certain parts of the game entirely, that it siloed certain parts of the action -- how does creating a MORE siloed experience solve that, other than by forcing more than half the table to sit around doing nothing for long stretches?

I agree. Siloing is not fun for me. It also feels railroad-adjacent to hard code some things as "combat" and others as "not combat". I should be able to do lots of things that aren't direct damage to contribute during a hostile encounter. And sometimes breaking things (or heads) can be useful outside of explicit combat.

Game makers should worry about what kinds of scenarios they're trying to support and what approaches fit the fiction they're creating. Then scatter those approaches throughout the character options, with no one having a monopoly on any particular approach or family of approaches. Sure, in each specific scenario different approaches will have different utility, but overall each character should have access to a bunch of useful approaches to any given scenario, even if they're not turn-key solutions.

[Quertus]

ShadowRun's problem is that it locked characters out of certain parts of the game entirely, that it siloed certain parts of the action -- how does creating a MORE siloed experience solve that, other than by forcing more than half the table to sit around doing nothing for long stretches?

They demonstrated that it was possible to create a truly, purely siloed game, presumably that makes sense with fluff and crunch matching each other.

That neither of us would enjoy such a game - and that I actively advocate for pretty much exactly the opposite style - in no way makes that BadWrongFun for those who enjoy that kind of thing.

[Cluedrew]

Take a look at how Splittermond handles this (if you can read german). It uses a so-called "Tick System" instead of standard turn-based, so tracking the time of individual actions and when they are fully executed. One of the better parts of the system is that reactions and interrupts play a very important role, especially when compared to something like AoOs from D&D.That sounds really good system. My big question is: what does that due to the pace of combat? I imagine it would definitely slow it down but you could make other changes to a game to speed it back up.


In practice, I don't think this really works.What does "in practice" mean in the context of me painting some broad strokes of a theoretical magic using society? I added and deleted this section several times. It is getting a bit off topic (might make a good world building thread) so I think I will just admit that yeah, its not going to be that simple, the power pyramid only address the fundamental problem of untouchable levels of power.

Finally I would like to propose the mechanical definition of caster and martial which I have sort of been working on during this thread and I would like to see what everyone thinks about it. In trying to pin down the base mechanical effects I have been thinking about the base mechanics of the two archetypes. Really what I got is that "martial" characters draw most of their power from pushing the numbers on the base systems up while "caster" characters use special abilities and exceptions to gain their power.

Under the "created a basic simulation and then add magic" system creation rules D&D and many other systems use. I think it also is easier to let the second get out of hand, you can add stupid exceptions easer than numbers being unexpectedly high. For counters base systems are interacted with more often and so have counters. Special one offs don't get developed enough to have real counters.

[Max_Killjoy]

Take a look at how Splittermond handles this (if you can read german). It uses a so-called "Tick System" instead of standard turn-based, so tracking the time of individual actions and when they are fully executed. One of the better parts of the system is that reactions and interrupts play a very important role, especially when compared to something like AoOs from D&D.

As for your other point, I get the impression that you´re thinking too much in D&D terms. For example, take a look at Shadow of the Demon Lord. Here, a character progresses through three very distinct phases while advancing along the levels:
- Novice Paths: The basic four fantasy classes (Fighter, Cleric, Thief, Wizard).
- Expert Paths: A huge slew of more specialized classes, from Druid, to Sorcerer, to Executioner, Knight, Paladin....
- Master Paths: One specialist class for each type of magic.

Note that advancement in SotDL does not directly correlate with power. By entering into a new path, you add more options to the character, which have to be build up in power by progressing along that path, before you switch again for more options. So a Fighter > Paladin > Theurgist might have more options and a vastly deeper understanding of magic, but didn't outpace the lowly Fighter all that much.

You can find similar effects in point-based games like L5R 4th and the aforementioned Splittermond, which use thresholds for character development. As in, you need to have spent a certain amount of XP to "unlock" the next higher set of abilities or raise the cap on skills and attributes.

It's a shame Splittermond isn't available in English, my German isn't up to more than street signs and basic survival, if that at this point.

I'd really like to see how it handles a lot of different things, based on the descriptions you've posted.

[Florian]

That sounds really good system. My big question is: what does that due to the pace of combat? I imagine it would definitely slow it down but you could make other changes to a game to speed it back up.

The big change here is that you generally use a "Tick Map" in addition to a battle map, to keep track of the passing of time and note when what happens. So you generally use more minis and markers, shifting the burden to more visual information tracking. Task and action resolution are fairly quick for a system that can be counted as being rules heavy, tho.

[Ignimortis]

In my opinion, the best way to let everyone have more utility outside of combat in D&D is to slaughter a few sacred cows and take a page from 4e.

Take a subset of current spell effects, remove them from the spell lists entirely, and transform them into "incantations" that anyone of the appropriate level can learn and use. Make them require one or more of
a) substantial time
b) costly components
c) special circumstances ("an arcane conflux of ley lines", "cast by the blood of the high prince", etc)

The classic "ritual" classes (wizard, cleric) could get bonuses when they perform certain types of incantations or "free" incantations at level up. Then anyone can provide the teleportation, water breathing, plane-shifting, etc.

In a 5e context, the relevant spells would be something like
* all current ritual spells.
* many of the current "non-combat" spells (those with cast times > 1 action) other than the summoning spells
* A lot of the "altered movement" or "information gathering" spells such as fly, Locate X, etc. spells.
* All of the "resting utility" ones like Tiny Hut, Rope Trick, etc.

These would be willing-only, so even things like polymorph could get split into a combat version (still a spell, but able to be used balefully and to create stronger creatures) and a weaker, low-CR-only version (say capped out at CR 1/8) as an group incantation.

Yes. That actually makes sense. But too many people like their martials so completely mundane they somehow can't do anything magical in a magical world. And those people are the ones holding the game back for the last...well, since inception, really.


ShadowRun's problem is that it locked characters out of certain parts of the game entirely, that it siloed certain parts of the action -- how does creating a MORE siloed experience solve that, other than by forcing more than half the table to sit around doing nothing for long stretches?

Shadowrun has options for participation in combat for everyone. Deckers can hack enemy equipment and surroundings, mages have a slew of combat spells and another wagon of "non-combat spells that are great in combat", also spirits can invalidate almost any combat PC if you can reliably drag out a Force 8+ spirit, faces can use Leadership and/or PI-Tacs to coordinate, riggers have combat drones.

It's much better (except the spirits part) than the D&D model of "everyone does damage, so as a guy who is primarily geared for combat you have no unique schtick".

The problem is that all of the other areas of the game...don't really let combat characters contribute. Social situation? Mingle and try not to glitch at best. Matrix? Can't do that without a cyberdeck. Astral and/or magic? You can't do anything with magic, and even as an adept you don't really do much besides astral perception, if even that. So everyone gets to do their thing in combat in SR 5E, but combat guys usually can sneak well, notice stuff...and kill things. That's about it. They can't get into other parts of the game, but somehow everyone got access to combat.

[CharonsHelper]

The problem is that all of the other areas of the game...don't really let combat characters contribute. Social situation? Mingle and try not to glitch at best. Matrix? Can't do that without a cyberdeck. Astral and/or magic? You can't do anything with magic, and even as an adept you don't really do much besides astral perception, if even that. So everyone gets to do their thing in combat in SR 5E, but combat guys usually can sneak well, notice stuff...and kill things. That's about it. They can't get into other parts of the game, but somehow everyone got access to combat.

Yeah - I'll +1 that that's a major issue in Shadowrun. But the few times I played it was as a decker, and I always felt guilty when I was just doing stuff while everyone else watched for at least 5-10 minutes. Sure I was mediocre in combat, but I still participated.

I actually don't think that every character type needs to be able to participate in every encounter type. BUT - if a part of the game is designed to be done by just 1-2 PCs, it should be fast! Streamline the heck out of it and get the action back to where everyone gets to play. I know that was one of the big design pillars in my system. Hacking and piloting? Mostly solo and pretty important - but win or lose they're designed to get the action back to the game's bread-and-butter ASAP.

[Florian]

ShadowRun's problem is that it locked characters out of certain parts of the game entirely, that it siloed certain parts of the action -- how does creating a MORE siloed experience solve that, other than by forcing more than half the table to sit around doing nothing for long stretches?

They successfully challenged the status quo by removing the ongoing compromise that physical combat/physical activities are something that every character should be able to engage in.

Unlike SR, where each core activity is more or less completely walled off, Leverage is highly interconnected. Thief has to get the keycard to Bruiser, Bruiser has to switch of the alarm, while Face has to distract the guard from spotting Bruiser on the camera system, so it´s actually more of a group activity instead of less.

Not exactly my kind of game, but an interesting experience nonetheless.


As loathe as I am to break character, I think 4e… well, no, didn't exactly do it right. If combat is the only thing, then making combat magic roughly equal to combat muscles/steel seems only reasonable. And I'm a fan of (powerful) ritual magic. But 4e felt like it took the magic out the game, exponentially more than 3e already had.

But I don't get the point of your last paragraph about world-building.

Oh, we don´t need to argue about the execution, the only thing I find important is pointing out the design paradigm to break down "magic" as a single block and explicitly silo it into combat magic, exploration magic, utility magic with very little overlap and such.

The point I was musing about hits a bit on the mundane vs. magic divide, especially when it comes to characters, especially since someone earlier criticized that adding magic as part of the mundane will mean that everyone is a caster then.

I don't know how the english version of the CoC Cthulhu Arcana is, but a lot of the "spells" there have an explicit physical component that works because of the "caster" understands the mystical background of it. So, for example, "Summon Hastur" means building a stone tower with a window pointing in the right direction and if you've done everything right, Hastur will appear once the full moon shines thru that window at the right angle.

IMHO, that moves "Summon Hastor" away from the "it´s a spell, so it is for spell casters" territory, over to setting and world building, moving it closer to being a mundane activity.


Yes. That actually makes sense. But too many people like their martials so completely mundane they somehow can't do anything magical in a magical world. And those people are the ones holding the game back for the last...well, since inception, really.

In my experience, that phenomenon is only more or less common in D&D and PF, nearly nowhere else. The important part here is to keep the "look & feel" intact, that it is the character doing the heroic deeds, not the equipment or spells.
While a SR Street Samurai or Razorbabe is as equipment-dependent as a D&D/PF Fighter or Barbarian, including potentially lugging around modifications in the million Nuyen range, the feeling that it´s the character, no outside force or abilities, doing the action stays more or less intact. I also think that is why trying to solve certain issues with subsystems like Path of War often fail, because they feel even more spell like.

Edit: Ok, I use SM again as an example. The game abilities are structured around three tiers of play, the normal range, the heroic range and the legendary range, which also include hard caps on max attributes, skill ranks and active magical effects that can be sustained. A starting character will most likely start at ceiling of the normal range and will have to grow horizontally, before being able to advance vertically, then repeat that process.

The group I play in has one of those "mundane only" players, as well as a "wizard only" player, still we all have a fairly 50-50 distribution between mundane and magical skills and talents.
- Elementalist: Has all focus points in reserve for "use", gives off a very caster-y vibe because the answer to everything is "Spell!".
- Bladedancer: 50-50 mix of "use" and "lock", Great Wuxia vibe because of the focus on flashy moves.
- Warden: Has all focus points "locked" for subtle self-enhancements like a heightened aura auk aggression.

The interesting thing is, according to D&D/PF design-truisms, this should not work. We are all using identical mechanics and resource pools, something that is considered to be a no-go. But I think what these abilities interface with makes the difference. Locking an anti-magic effect on the shield still means that the Warden will use his very mundane combat skills at blocking, just expanding the options to now block incoming spells, too. The Elementalist had to invest into ranged combat things for aiming his spells and precision, but the spell format keeps this from feeling like a mundane thing.

[Satinavian]

I believe that determining what level of challenge something is "supposed to be" is railroading. Just present the scenario, and let the reality of the rules, the characters capabilities, and their choices determine how difficult it is.No, i wholeheartly agree with just presenting the scenario and let the characters/players figure it out - or not.

But if i like that, why would i want to have a character in the group who trivializes every scenario that gives the group a day or more to plan or prepare ? Such a character is poisonous to this approach.

The funny thing is, afaict, the Wizard is the former. He can only solve the subset of problems that he has a spell prepared for. Memorize Knock? What if there's two locked doors? Or none? There's so many different types of potential problems, real Wizards at real tables don't actually solve everything. What they can do is adapt to different parties, to cover weaknesses.Yes, that would be nice. But you don't need the ability to completely change your spellcasting selection every day with a theoretically unlimited pool of options. A sorcerer would have the spell to solve something or not. That is an inherently better design.

There is also no reason why wizards should be more versatile than other classes when it comes to closing gaps/covering weaknesses. In most other systems the charatcer options that could cover a lot of weaknesses at least in a rudimentary way are those that don't excel anywhere and only have comparatively weak powers.

[Florian]

Yes, that would be nice. But you don't need the ability to completely change your spellcasting selection every day with a theoretically unlimited pool of options. A sorcerer would have the spell to solve something or not. That is an inherently better design.

There is also no reason why wizards should be more versatile than other classes when it comes to closing gaps/covering weaknesses. In most other systems the charatcer options that could cover a lot of weaknesses at least in a rudimentary way are those that don't excel anywhere and only have comparatively weak powers.

Just musing a bit: Prior to 3E, the only cost attached to becoming a specialist was by picking a class. The rest you got for free as part of the whole class package and by leveling up. So there was a real cost involved when the Magic User hat to pack Knock to replace the Thief, for example when that player couldn't come to a session.

Now we basically have the reverse situation. A Rogue will have to invest their limited resources (skill points, feats, Rogue Talents) to be able to be a specialist in their chosen field, stuff that are most likely permanent investments, while the comparative cost, either "wasting" one spell slot or lugging around a scroll of Knock is trivial because it is not permanent.

[Ignimortis]

In my experience, that phenomenon is only more or less common in D&D and PF, nearly nowhere else. The important part here is to keep the "look & feel" intact, that it is the character doing the heroic deeds, not the equipment or spells.
While a SR Street Samurai or Razorbabe is as equipment-dependent as a D&D/PF Fighter or Barbarian, including potentially lugging around modifications in the million Nuyen range, the feeling that it´s the character, no outside force or abilities, doing the action stays more or less intact. I also think that is why trying to solve certain issues with subsystems like Path of War often fail, because they feel even more spell like.


I dunno, I very much like PoW because it actually feels like my own character's abilities. I'd say those systems often fail because they're too fantastical for the "muh realism" crowd. And I like SR Street Samurai, because, well, it's rather hard to take away your cyberarm unless you're in a position to lose everything anyways.



The interesting thing is, according to D&D/PF design-truisms, this should not work. We are all using identical mechanics and resource pools, something that is considered to be a no-go. But I think what these abilities interface with makes the difference. Locking an anti-magic effect on the shield still means that the Warden will use his very mundane combat skills at blocking, just expanding the options to now block incoming spells, too. The Elementalist had to invest into ranged combat things for aiming his spells and precision, but the spell format keeps this from feeling like a mundane thing.

That is...interesting. I might look into it when I finally get off my rear and start doing something about my own system in the works.

[Satinavian]

In my opinion, the best way to let everyone have more utility outside of combat in D&D is to slaughter a few sacred cows and take a page from 4e.

Take a subset of current spell effects, remove them from the spell lists entirely, and transform them into "incantations" that anyone of the appropriate level can learn and use. Make them require one or more of
a) substantial time
b) costly components
c) special circumstances ("an arcane conflux of ley lines", "cast by the blood of the high prince", etc)

The classic "ritual" classes (wizard, cleric) could get bonuses when they perform certain types of incantations or "free" incantations at level up. Then anyone can provide the teleportation, water breathing, plane-shifting, etc.

In a 5e context, the relevant spells would be something like
* all current ritual spells.
* many of the current "non-combat" spells (those with cast times > 1 action) other than the summoning spells
* A lot of the "altered movement" or "information gathering" spells such as fly, Locate X, etc. spells.
* All of the "resting utility" ones like Tiny Hut, Rope Trick, etc.

These would be willing-only, so even things like polymorph could get split into a combat version (still a spell, but able to be used balefully and to create stronger creatures) and a weaker, low-CR-only version (say capped out at CR 1/8) as an group incantation.

Sounds like "everyone is a mage but some mages use swords to fight".

For me those things that can work as rituals were always the core of what magic is about.

[GloatingSwine]

Sounds like "everyone is a mage but some mages use swords to fight".

For me those things that can work as rituals were always the core of what magic is about.

It also sounds like "The world is so thoroughly and inherently magical that people learn to use it about as commonly as they learn to walk".

Which is basically true of your average fantasy RPG setting that has caster/martial disparity.

It isn't actually rare and special to be a mighty wizard, every adventuring party's got one and probably a spare, there's an old sage on the outskirts of every damn town and village and they run one or more countries.

With magic and mages already that common, the real question is why isn't everyone capable of at least a little basic magery.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Sounds like "everyone is a mage but some mages use swords to fight".

For me those things that can work as rituals were always the core of what magic is about.

Everyone (of consequence) can do magic, but not everyone choses to. And even throughout magical history, there are a lot of "rituals" that anyone capable of carefully following directions could do, even if they weren't a mage. That's what I'm going for here. There are still a lot of specialized things (summoning creatures is a big one) that don't fit here and the "magic-using" classes are better at using incantations than joe average is, but the raw capability is spread throughout. Because the other way lies the Caster-Martial disparity.


It also sounds like "The world is so thoroughly and inherently magical that people learn to use it about as commonly as they learn to walk".

Which is basically true of your average fantasy RPG setting that has caster/martial disparity.

It isn't actually rare and special to be a mighty wizard, every adventuring party's got one and probably a spare, there's an old sage on the outskirts of every damn town and village and they run one or more countries.

With magic and mages already that common, the real question is why isn't everyone capable of at least a little basic magery.

I wouldn't say "as commonly as they learn to walk", but certainly more widespread than just wizards. My setting has whole tranches of "common magic"--chants and rituals used by commoners as part of their daily life. THings like chants, that while they're being performed, make the weeds easier to pull or keep flies away from cattle. They only have small effects, and don't have persistent effects. Larger things, usually involving a ritual sacrifice (animal or a token blood sacrifice) can have longer-lasting effects and are used, for example, to aid the birthing process for animals. Sacrifice an old sheep with a particular chant and ceremony and the lambs will be born more easily and stronger. Combine a pin-prick's worth of blood from a community and, mixed with animal blood (for volume) and with a particular dedication ceremony, spread it on the gates of the village to ward against accident and disease. Etc.

Adventurer incantations require more soul-power (ie higher level) and either time, monetary sacrifice, or special circumstances because their effects are much larger scale, including planeshifting, teleportation, resurrection, etc.

[Quertus]

No, i wholeheartly agree with just presenting the scenario and let the characters/players figure it out - or not.

But if i like that, why would i want to have a character in the group who trivializes every scenario that gives the group a day or more to plan or prepare ? Such a character is poisonous to this approach.
Yes, that would be nice. But you don't need the ability to completely change your spellcasting selection every day with a theoretically unlimited pool of options. A sorcerer would have the spell to solve something or not. That is an inherently better design.

Is it? A great many modules I've ran would disagree, as they are predicated upon the notion that the party will eventually be able to do "x", for various values of "x".

Now, one could argue that the combination of "mutable abilities" and "win buttons" is a bad one, and I wholeheartedly agree: the one time I was given a *real* shapeshifter, I 100% dominated every single encounter. I was quite literally the broken definition of "tier 1 - better than the specialists in their chosen field".

But the Wizard is not that. They are "mutable abilities" + (some) "win buttons", given time. Whenever I talk about how the Muggle could handle travel to another plane simply by knowing about and walking to an existing portal, or when I talk about how a muggle could get from Point A to Point B (in 2d Space) by walking there, people always shoot that down? Exactly the same thing here. Sure, eventually the Wizard could open the door, but the Rogue (or even Fighter) can do it now.

Since this multidimensional balance seems too challenging, I continue to recommend making all Wizard spells be usable at will, to make achieving balance easier.


There is also no reason why wizards should be more versatile than other classes when it comes to closing gaps/covering weaknesses. In most other systems the charatcer options that could cover a lot of weaknesses at least in a rudimentary way are those that don't excel anywhere and only have comparatively weak powers.

… Honestly, I think that the problem is bigger and deeper than this.

Just look at all the ways I have personally dealt with the epic challenge the locked door IRL while avoiding the "pick the lock" minigame. Oh, and I even left out "copy the key". Now imagine all the other mundane ways one might approach that challenge, even before magic is added into the mix.

Game designers, scenario designers (both module writers and GMs), and players are all at fault for a lack of creativity, for linear thinking, for unrealistic niche dividing lines.

IRL, I'm a software developer by trade - probably about as "Wizard" a profession as you can get. Yet I've used each of (depending on how you count) 5-7 "handle locked door" techniques… eh, we'll say 1 to several times each in my life. Imagine what a trained adventurer should be able to do to the epic challenge of a locked door in comparison!

IMO, if you have to rely on the Wizard doing something about it tomorrow, somebody probably failed, hard, somewhere. Whether that's the game designer, the adventure writer, the players, or some combination thereof.

Quertus, my signature academia mage, for whom this account is named? In the past ~10 levels, his net contribution to the party - outside logistics - could have been handled by a bag of flour. And if the Muggle players had known that trick, and packed flour? He probably would not have had to have contributed even that.

Wizards are not "versatile" in any way that should be meaningful to a properly versatile, skilled, well-rounded Muggle, when IRL *me* has around half a dozen Muggle methods to laugh at the need for Knock… tomorrow.

[Satinavian]

But the Wizard is not that. They are "mutable abilities" + (some) "win buttons", given time.That is the same thing for every scenario that provides time. Which most of them do. Especially if you want to have foreshadowing buildup and information gathering.

Really, the only situation where "given time" means that the wizard is not this broken a combination are those where he can't prepare anyway and the ability to switch spells is irrelevant.


There is really no reason to keep it. Which is why nearly all other RPGs, as soon as they got a bit away from being a D&D clone got rid of it.


Whenever I talk about how the Muggle could handle travel to another plane simply by knowing about and walking to an existing portal, or when I talk about how a muggle could get from Point A to Point B (in 2d Space) by walking there, people always shoot that down?Because it is not a power, only a plot device ? Because such a portal might not even exist ?

I don't even know what that is supposed to prove and why you bring it again and again. If you want to say that knowledge skills, if the system has them, are a nice tool, i don't see any disagreement.


Exactly the same thing here. Sure, eventually the Wizard could open the door, but the Rogue (or even Fighter) can do it now. Since this multidimensional balance seems too challenging, I continue to recommend making all Wizard spells be usable at will, to make achieving balance easier.Yes, the ability to nova is one of the issues with D&D spellcasting. Wizards get rare ressources they can bundle where it matters and hold back when it is not needed. Everyone else can't. That is one of the reasons, casters tend to dominate the most important and memorable scenes in D&D even if they are horribly unoptimized.

Wizards are not "versatile" in any way that should be meaningful to a properly versatile, skilled, well-rounded Muggle, when IRL *me* has around half a dozen Muggle methods to laugh at the need for Knock… tomorrow.
The knock spell was never my example.

The knock spell is weak and rather irrelevant. The only reason it seems good is that the "open locks"-skill is utter garbage by comparison. It costs skillpoints, a heavy investment for noncasters and it can fail.



Everyone (of consequence) can do magic, but not everyone choses to. And even throughout magical history, there are a lot of "rituals" that anyone capable of carefully following directions could do, even if they weren't a mage. That's what I'm going for here. There are still a lot of specialized things (summoning creatures is a big one) that don't fit here and the "magic-using" classes are better at using incantations than joe average is, but the raw capability is spread throughout. Because the other way lies the Caster-Martial disparity.
You misunderstood.

For me those who do ritual magic with all the utility applications, long casting times and big effects are the primary magic users of the setting that deserve names like wizards while those who only can do fast fast magical combat tricks and use magic only for fighting are hardly deserving this designation.

I have played several characters in various (non D&D) systems that only could do ritual and utility magic and would take up a weapon and armor if the need to fight arose. Those were always wizards or magicians or druids or witches. No one would ever have considered them on the martial side of a caster-martial disparity.


I am very sceptical of you can remove all the important magic and make it into rituals everyone can learn while still keep the idea of "caster classes" or "muggle classes". The class stops being particularly relevant for how magical your character actually is.

Also summoning is one of the most iconic rituals you can make rules for. This one you want to keep as a spell ?

[Talakeal]

Yes. That actually makes sense. But too many people like their martials so completely mundane they somehow can't do anything magical in a magical world. And those people are the ones holding the game back for the last...well, since inception, reallyt.

That's kind of a loaded way of phrasing it.

Prefering a more low-key or grounded world is a preferance, and its just as valid as any other.

Imagine saying the same thing about say, Game of Thrones or even The Lord of the Rings, tremendously popular and succsesful fantasy works which do not incude omnipresent over the top super-powers.

[PhoenixPhyre]

You misunderstood.

For me those who do ritual magic with all the utility applications, long casting times and big effects are the primary magic users of the setting that deserve names like wizards while those who only can do fast fast magical combat tricks and use magic only for fighting are hardly deserving this designation.

I have played several characters in various (non D&D) systems that only could do ritual and utility magic and would take up a weapon and armor if the need to fight arose. Those were always wizards or magicians or druids or witches. No one would ever have considered them on the martial side of a caster-martial disparity.

I am very sceptical of you can remove all the important magic and make it into rituals everyone can learn while still keep the idea of "caster classes" or "muggle classes". The class stops being particularly relevant for how magical your character actually is.

Also summoning is one of the most iconic rituals you can make rules for. This one you want to keep as a spell ?

I'm working in a D&D framework here, and thus trying to be as compatible as possible. Since the primary complaint is that "fighters" can only fight and "wizards" can fight AND utility, the idea is to spread out the utility to everyone that wants it. In this style, ritualistic magic is available to anyone who can pay the price in time, intrinsic power, costly components, and focus. This works well, for me, because it fits the general fictional pattern of someone conducting a ritual that they found in a book and it actually works (usually with bad results, but...).

Specialists (wizards, etc) can do those rituals more effectively and efficiently and can wield magic in places that a non-specialist can't (ie without the trappings of a ritual to hold and channel the energy for them). For a specialist caster, they themselves are the ritual object. For most people, the mental and spiritual discipline needed for this is beyond them--if they try they usually fail. A wizard is the arcane ritual for these prompt effects. A cleric is the literal channel for the will of their deity. Anyone can bless water, given the equipment and the time. Only a cleric, the embodiment of the will of their god, can call down fire from heaven onto the wicked.

So specialist casters give up weapon prowess (to some degree) to instead channel the magic around them into spells. They can also do things that no one else can do with rituals.

This last part is where summoning fits. I'd make a general "summon to make a deal/do a task" process (ie the part that doesn't involve gaining a combat-minion) a series of incantations ranging from the easy to the very difficult (depending on what you're summoning and what you're asking them to do). You'd probably need some form of name, with having the true name letting you summon precisely and actually bind them to an unwilling task.

On the other hand, summoning a generic creature to fight for you or accompany you in your adventures is a different process and would remain a spell. Because summoning an elemental to break down a door or a demon to assault your foes is a different level of risk, both for you and for them, and has a different bargain/reward/duration structure. It's an open-ended task, something that no creature will willingly accept unless it's short and fixed duration. And being short duration, having a huge ritual to perform it makes it useless. It requires binding them to your will, something you can't do normally without a true name. But since you're not summoning a specific individual creature, you can't have the true name.

So specialist casters can do magic faster, cheaper, and more effectively than non-specialists. But magic is everywhere and through everything. Everyone, whether they do it in the form of spells or not, is using magic. This framework is designed to grant the "non-casters" access to the whole library of ancillary effects in a D&D-compatible framework.

[PhoenixPhyre]

That's kind of a loaded way of phrasing it.

Prefering a more low-key or grounded world is a preferance, and its just as valid as any other.

Imagine saying the same thing about say, Game of Thrones or even The Lord of the Rings, tremendously popular and succsesful fantasy works which do not incude omnipresent over the top super-powers.

In such a low-key/grounded world, there already isn't the caster/martial disparity because you've lopped off the top of the power curve entirely, the part that only casters can reach. The problem only exists in the mid-level or fully fantastic worlds.

And even in Game of Thrones you have fantastic elements and people with "super-powers", people who do/are magic. Not as much at the beginning, but certainly in the later books/seasons. You're quite far from grounded here.

With a framework for what's allowed, you can scale things properly in both directions and keep balance. If you insist that "non-casters" have to stay pure and can't have anything fantastic at all, then things break as soon as you move away from that very-low-power regime.

[Max_Killjoy]

That's kind of a loaded way of phrasing it.

Preferring a more low-key or grounded world is a preference, and its just as valid as any other.

Imagine saying the same thing about say, Game of Thrones or even The Lord of the Rings, tremendously popular and successful fantasy works which do not include omnipresent over the top super-powers.


The problem isn't that some people want to read about or game in a low-key / grounded world. Hell, both settings I'm working on are on the aggregate more low-key and grounded than any D&D setting ever.

The problem comes about when a certain subset of gamers adamantly demands that in even the most very fantastic magic-laden worlds, their martial characters must be utterly totally completely free of any magic, fantastic, or supernatural mojo, with all their abilities 100% based on skill, grit, will, effort, and normal human capability -- and able to keep up with the most fantastic capabilities of the spell-casting characters. At most, they have a magic sword or armor or whatever, but the actual character-person must be absolutely within the realm what could be imagined as a peak-capability real-world human-being.




In such a low-key/grounded world, there already isn't the caster/martial disparity because you've lopped off the top of the power curve entirely, the part that only casters can reach. The problem only exists in the mid-level or fully fantastic worlds.

And even in Game of Thrones you have fantastic elements and people with "super-powers", people who do/are magic. Not as much at the beginning, but certainly in the later books/seasons. You're quite far from grounded here.

With a framework for what's allowed, you can scale things properly in both directions and keep balance. If you insist that "non-casters" have to stay pure and can't have anything fantastic at all, then things break as soon as you move away from that very-low-power regime.


Or, what he said.

[Talakeal]

The problem isn't that some people want to read about or game in a low-key / grounded world. Hell, both settings I'm working on are on the aggregate more low-key and grounded than any D&D setting ever.

The problem comes about when a certain subset of gamers adamantly demands that in even the most very fantastic magic-laden worlds, their martial characters must be utterly totally completely free of any magic, fantastic, or supernatural mojo, with all their abilities 100% based on skill, grit, will, effort, and normal human capability -- and able to keep up with the most fantastic capabilities of the spell-casting characters. At most, they have a magic sword or armor or whatever, but the actual character-person must be absolutely within the realm what could be imagined as a peak-capability real-world human-being.




Or, what he said.

That's not the impression I got, to me the post I was responding to seemed to imp,y that mundane characters were holding the entire settin back rather than simply creating a balance disparity.

Are there people who insist a perfectly mundane character can compete with high level magic, or is that a popular strawman?

I personally have said that with an abstract combat system like D&D a pre-epic composite martial character who took the best parts of each edition could hold their own alongside a 3.X wizard whose GM had the good sense to ban or modify the cheesiest spells, and that you can pair up a super-hero and an action-hero in a narrative witho breaking versimilitude, but thats about as far as I go.

[Max_Killjoy]

That's not the impression I got, to me the post I was responding to seemed to imp,y that mundane characters were holding the entire settin back rather than simply creating a balance disparity.

Are there people who insist a perfectly mundane character can compete with high level magic, or is that a popular strawman?


Those gamers exist -- I first encountered it as a thing here, on these forums. Right from the first time I participated in a discussion here on this topic, whenever someone suggested that "martials" could have fantastic abilities of their own, "magic" but not spellcasting, at least one poster has objected on the grounds that it violates their conception of the character as utterly non-magical.

As I read it, the post you were replying to was saying that the demand by those players that their martial characters be utterly unmagical and yet absolutely able to keep up with the sort of spellcasters that D&D presents at high level, is one of the root causes of the issue this thread is addressing -- which ties into my assertion that something has to give, and that part of the problem is that certain players refuse to "give" on any of the elements.

IMO, it's asking for the impossible to have a setting that's "grounded" and at least appears to work like the real world of some time and place that exists or used to exist, right down to the people being like real-world humans for the most part... and D&D-scale magic and spellcaster characters... and perfectly nonmagical martial characters who keep up with them or even best them just based on "steel and grit and cleverness and sinew"... all packaged together in a way that makes any darn sense.

The players in question want their character in the range and type of Conan or Fafhrd or The Gray Mouser, living up to the tales of these characters besting evil sorcerers... mastering the witch-queen either in battle or in bed... overcoming magic not with magic of their own, but with the aforementioned "steel and grit and cleverness and sinew". But... the magic and the magic users that they're besting are for the most part minor compared to what the magic users of D&D are capable of. The "pulp fantasy hero" scale of those characters and the "D&D scale" are two entirely different things. Even the recurring antagonist or one particular protagonist of my WIP fiction would go through most of Conan's sorcerous foes like a hot mage-knife through butter, and they very roughly map out around level 12 in 5e, with neither being an actual wizard as such.


I think those players would be far happier with something along the lines of Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of (the Mophidius product that is based on a TON of research, and that I think has the Howard estate's stamp approval), or Primeval Thule, or the like, or using one of those systems for their own setting.

[Talakeal]

Those gamers exist -- I first encountered it as a thing here, on these forums. Right from the first time I participated in a discussion here on this topic, whenever someone suggested that "martials" could have fantastic abilities of their own, "magic" but not spellcasting, at least one poster has objected on the grounds that it violates their conception of the character as utterly non-magical.

As I read it, the post you were replying to was saying that the demand by those players that their martial characters be utterly unmagical and yet absolutely able to keep up with the sort of spellcasters that D&D presents at high level, is one of the root causes of the issue this thread is addressing -- which ties into my assertion that something has to give, and that part of the problem is that certain players refuse to "give" on any of the elements.

IMO, it's asking for the impossible to have a setting that's "grounded" and at least appears to work like the real world of some time and place that exists or used to exist, right down to the people being like real-world humans for the most part... and D&D-scale magic and spellcaster characters... and perfectly nonmagical martial characters who keep up with them or even best them just based on "steel and grit and cleverness and sinew"... all packaged together in a way that makes any darn sense.

The players in question want their character in the range and type of Conan or Fafhrd or The Gray Mouser, living up to the tales of these characters besting evil sorcerers... mastering the witch-queen either in battle or in bed... overcoming magic not with magic of their own, but with the aforementioned "steel and grit and cleverness and sinew". But... the magic and the magic users that they're besting are for the most part minor compared to what the magic users of D&D are capable of. The "pulp fantasy hero" scale of those characters and the "D&D scale" are two entirely different things. Even the recurring antagonist or one particular protagonist of my WIP fiction would go through most of Conan's sorcerous foes like a hot mage-knife through butter, and they very roughly map out around level 12 in 5e, with neither being an actual wizard as such.


I think those players would be far happier with something along the lines of Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of (the Mophidius product that is based on a TON of research, and that I think has the Howard estate's stamp approval), or Primeval Thule, or the like, or using one of those systems for their own setting.

This is a really common claim, but I have yet to see any good evidence in favor of it and tons of (admittedly anecdotal) evidence against.

[Max_Killjoy]

This is a really common claim, but I have yet to see any good evidence in favor of it and tons of (admittedly anecdotal) evidence against.


The claim that they'd be happier with a different system?

Or a different claim?

D&D is very unlikely to ever be what they want it to be. It is likely that even in some future edition, the scale of spellcasting / spellcaster power will always invalidate what they say they want -- the magic in D&D will always get to the point where they have to accept at least one of the following:

* their martial character also has to have fantastic / supernatural / "magical" abilities (not spellcasting or the like, magical) to be on par with the spellcasters
* their martial character is not and cannot be on par with the spellcasters
* the setting is such that humans / human-like-beings have a "natural scale of potential" that far exceeds that of real-world humans
* the setting falls apart at the slightest objective examination

[Talakeal]

The claim that they'd be happier with a different system?

Or a different claim?

D&D is very unlikely to ever be what they want it to be. It is likely that even in some future edition, the scale of spellcasting / spellcaster power will always invalidate what they say they want -- the magic in D&D will always get to the point where they have to accept at least one of the following:

* their martial character also has to have fantastic / supernatural / "magical" abilities (not spellcasting or the like, magical) to be on par with the spellcasters
* their martial character is not and cannot be on par with the spellcasters
* the setting is such that humans / human-like-beings have a "natural scale of potential" that far exceeds that of real-world humans
* the setting falls apart at the slightest objective examination

All of the above.

IMO AD&D works fine to counter all of these points.

Note the term "sligtest" on your last point. All fiction falls apart at some level of scrutiny, the real question is the more subjective one about how closely you need to scrutinize something to be immersed in it.

[Max_Killjoy]

All of the above.


Um... the player has to accept "all of the above", even the ones that conflict with each other?

That sounds more like the fourth one -- "falls apart under the slightest scrutiny".




Note the term "sligtest" on your last point. All fiction falls apart at some level of scrutiny, the real question is the more subjective one about how closely you need to scrutinize something to be immersed in it.


See sig below.




IMO AD&D works fine to counter all of these points.


AD&D... where the spellcaster gets Wish, Meteor Swarm, and a host of other such spells.. and an absolutely-no-fantastic-no-supernatural-no-magic "martial character" gets... a sword, and determination, and mighty thews?

If the "martial character" is actually on par with that spellcaster at higher levels... then that's either option 3 or option 4 on my list.

[PhoenixPhyre]

AD&D doesn't even pretend to keep them on par. At low levels, casters suck. By design. They're totally, intentionally the carry. At high levels, casters rule. By design. So AD&D is a bad example of one where "mundane" people keep up with casters at all levels. It was the place where "linear fighters, quadratic wizards" started, for goodness sake.

[Kyutaru]

AD&D doesn't even pretend to keep them on par. At low levels, casters suck. By design. They're totally, intentionally the carry. At high levels, casters rule. By design. So AD&D is a bad example of one where "mundane" people keep up with casters at all levels. It was the place where "linear fighters, quadratic wizards" started, for goodness sake.

Fighters were at their peak performance in 2nd edition, sporting crazy potential like 5 attacks per round that don't get worse successively with a Thaco that guaranteed you're only missing on a 1. With a few wizard buffs they get disgusting fast. The linear aspect is true as they require casters for the multiplication effects. But that's all editions, Fighters get much better when buffed while Wizards see meager improvements comparatively. But what truly made casters "quadratic" back then was how broken their spells were. Polymorph Any Object, Gate, Prismatic Sphere, Stoneskin, Wall of Force, Haste doubling all your attacks, Fireball (in that HP environment), saveless Power Word Kill in a low hp environment, all divination and messaging, Permanency, etc. There was hardly anything they couldn't do because the spells had few to no limitations. The imagination was all you were capped by for some spells while others were just ludicrously strong. They had the same sorts of spells as we do now yet through the editions the most broken of them have been severely nerfed and limitations added.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Fighters were at their peak performance in 2nd edition, sporting crazy potential like 5 attacks per round that don't get worse successively with a Thaco that guaranteed you're only missing on a 1. With a few wizard buffs they get disgusting fast. The linear aspect is true as they require casters for the multiplication effects. But that's all editions, Fighters get much better when buffed while Wizards see meager improvements comparatively. But what truly made casters "quadratic" back then was how broken their spells were. Polymorph Any Object, Gate, Prismatic Sphere, Stoneskin, Wall of Force, Haste doubling all your attacks, Fireball (in that HP environment), saveless Power Word Kill in a low hp environment, all divination and messaging, Permanency, etc. There was hardly anything they couldn't do because the spells had few to no limitations. The imagination was all you were capped by for some spells while others were just ludicrously strong. They had the same sorts of spells as we do now yet through the editions the most broken of them have been severely nerfed and limitations added.

Let's compare.

AD&D Fighters: Great at dealing direct damage and surviving. Yay!
AD&D Wizards: Can do anything they can imagine. Yay!

To me, those don't even seem to be in the same ballpark. You still have the "fighters can't do anything out of combat" problem and the "wizards can do anything" problems.

[Man_Over_Game]

Anyone know of a system where "Fighters" are good in combat and bad everywhere else, and "Wizards" are bad in combat and good everywhere else?

Rifts is one that I'm familiar with, but I'd like to hear of others.

[Kyutaru]

Let's compare.

AD&D Fighters: Great at dealing direct damage and surviving. Yay!
AD&D Wizards: Can do anything they can imagine. Yay!

To me, those don't even seem to be in the same ballpark. You still have the "fighters can't do anything out of combat" problem and the "wizards can do anything" problems.

Precisly, I agree. It was less of a wizard issue though and more of a "certain spells need to be banned" issue. Most of the high level magics were fairly ordinary and merely powerful. Something your hasted fighter swinging 10 times per round for 25 dmg against the 200 health boss can relate to. The DMG even suggested not allowing every spell to be accessible and without a scroll the wizard couldn't learn it. So part of me feels this was intentional as they incorporated various overpowered spells mingled among the normal ones. Truly spectacular spells for the more heroic campaigns existed in the books alongside some of the worst uses for a spell lot ever conceived.

[Arbane]

Let's compare.

AD&D Fighters: Great at dealing direct damage and surviving. Yay!
AD&D Wizards: Can do anything they can imagine. Yay!

To me, those don't even seem to be in the same ballpark. You still have the "fighters can't do anything out of combat" problem and the "wizards can do anything" problems.

I guess it's time to post...
http://i.imgur.com/jNT6Ce6.png


So part of me feels this was intentional as they incorporated various overpowered spells mingled among the normal ones. Truly spectacular spells for the more heroic campaigns existed in the books alongside some of the worst uses for a spell lot ever conceived.

Someone pointed out that in AD&D, the Magic-User spells at 6th+ level aren't for dungeon explorers, they're for dungeon administrators.

[Quertus]

With magic and mages already that common, the real question is why isn't everyone capable of at least a little basic magery.

Why doesn't Conan have magic? Heck, with all the programmers around IRL, why can't everyone program their VCR, or write a basic phone app?


That's kind of a loaded way of phrasing it.

Prefering a more low-key or grounded world is a preferance, and its just as valid as any other.

Imagine saying the same thing about say, Game of Thrones or even The Lord of the Rings, tremendously popular and succsesful fantasy works which do not incude omnipresent over the top super-powers.

Wow. Usually, the problem is only that people want to run Conan alongside Elminster, or Joe Average alongside Superman. There's a time and place for such characters, but it's usually not alongside characters who completely outclass them - almost certainly not if you care about balance.

But what you just said? That's a completely different problem. That's not The Shoveler claiming to be a superhero, that's The Shoveler claiming to be the pinnacle of superheroes.

If a kid with a rusty knife can one-shot mechs with any regularity, you're not playing Battletech any more. There is a limit to how much you can warp things and still claim to be playing the same game. Even e6 still (incongruously IMO) leaves the "omnipresent over the top super-powers" like gods around.


That is the same thing for every scenario that provides time. Which most of them do. Especially if you want to have foreshadowing buildup and information gathering.

Really, the only situation where "given time" means that the wizard is not this broken a combination are those where he can't prepare anyway and the ability to switch spells is irrelevant.

Well, yes. The mundane super power "buy stuff" (like potions of water breathing) can (in some systems) give even Muggles this "with time, I can do anything" capability. At which point, with enough time, money, and intelligence (pun intended), anyone can do anything.

Bug? Or feature? I'm not sure, tbh. But I feel confident saying, "can do nothing, ever" is a) almost always a bug; b) not entirely unlike how martials feel to those who complain about M/C issues.

Personally, I don't particularly enjoy the "buy gear / swap spells" minigames. I'd just as soon have everyone be at 100%, all the time.


There is really no reason to keep it. Which is why nearly all other RPGs, as soon as they got a bit away from being a D&D clone got rid of it.

Lost context. I'll check on this in a bit


Because it is not a power, only a plot device ? Because such a portal might not even exist ?

What's the difference? If the plot requires us to get to another plane, but they're no way there, isn't that a world-building / scenario-building issue?

OTOH, if this is a sandbox… I suppose i could leverage knowledge of the world having *no* portals to other planes to some advantage - especially if this were D&D, where that would be bizarre.


I don't even know what that is supposed to prove and why you bring it again and again. If you want to say that knowledge skills, if the system has them, are a nice tool, i don't see any disagreement.

Oh. When people talk about what an "all Muggle" party can't do, "travel to other planes" is usually in that list. I contend that they can… you just have to wait for it… wait for it… just like the plug & play Wizards.


Yes, the ability to nova is one of the issues with D&D spellcasting. Wizards get rare ressources they can bundle where it matters and hold back when it is not needed. Everyone else can't. That is one of the reasons, casters tend to dominate the most important and memorable scenes in D&D even if they are horribly unoptimized.

Wow. That is a cool new way of expressing one of the problems. I don't know that I've ever thought in terms of spotlight quality/importance balance issues before.

It's only the case for *optimally* played Wizards - kinda the "anti Quertus", anti "player's first Wizard" scenario - so not every table - but I can definitely see it as an argument for making resource distribution even (alla my "make all Wizard spells usable at will" mantra).


The knock spell was never my example.

The knock spell is weak and rather irrelevant. The only reason it seems good is that the "open locks"-skill is utter garbage by comparison. It costs skillpoints, a heavy investment for noncasters and it can fail.

No, but it is the classic example, and one of the most productive to discuss.


You misunderstood.

For me those who do ritual magic with all the utility applications, long casting times and big effects are the primary magic users of the setting that deserve names like wizards while those who only can do fast fast magical combat tricks and use magic only for fighting are hardly deserving this designation.

I have played several characters in various (non D&D) systems that only could do ritual and utility magic and would take up a weapon and armor if the need to fight arose. Those were always wizards or magicians or druids or witches. No one would ever have considered them on the martial side of a caster-martial disparity.


I am very sceptical of you can remove all the important magic and make it into rituals everyone can learn while still keep the idea of "caster classes" or "muggle classes". The class stops being particularly relevant for how magical your character actually is.

You have a most interesting PoV. Suffice it to say, everyone my senile mind remembers talking to about this topic seemed happy giving everyone access to rituals, but only Wizards get Quick Magic. It would be like saying everyone can sacrifice to & pray to the gods for miracles, but only Priests can pull off guaranteed effects *right now*.

I can see doing things your way, but understand that, IME, it's not the prevalent perception.

Also, the Wizard I like to run? He would do everything with magic. He world user magic to comb his hair, magic to change his clothes. Or maybe that's not hair - that's actually orichalcum wires growing out of his skull. Maybe that's not clothes, that's actually solidified dreams. The Wizard I *want* to run? There would be nothing *mundane* about him.

[CharonsHelper]

Precisly, I agree. It was less of a wizard issue though and more of a "certain spells need to be banned" issue. Most of the high level magics were fairly ordinary and merely powerful. Something your hasted fighter swinging 10 times per round for 25 dmg against the 200 health boss can relate to. The DMG even suggested not allowing every spell to be accessible and without a scroll the wizard couldn't learn it. So part of me feels this was intentional as they incorporated various overpowered spells mingled among the normal ones. Truly spectacular spells for the more heroic campaigns existed in the books alongside some of the worst uses for a spell lot ever conceived.

I do think that a lot of the OP spells started out as intentionally OP boss moves. That, and 3.x was the first edition where high level martials didn't make 70+% of their saves.

[Talakeal]

Um... the player has to accept "all of the above", even the ones that conflict with each other?

That sounds more like the fourth one -- "falls apart under the slightest scrutiny".




See sig below.




AD&D... where the spellcaster gets Wish, Meteor Swarm, and a host of other such spells.. and an absolutely-no-fantastic-no-supernatural-no-magic "martial character" gets... a sword, and determination, and mighty thews?

If the "martial character" is actually on par with that spellcaster at higher levels... then that's either option 3 or option 4 on my list.

In my experiance AD&D disproves all of the points you raised in the quoted post, and has never broken my versimilitude as long as I accept that certain things (like HP) are gamist abstractions.

In combat high level fighters get 3 plus attacks per round that are likely to hit on anything but a one, and make all of their saving throws on anything but a one. The wizard is likely to go last and automatically loses their spell if they are hit (not damaged) by an attack.

Out of combat, wizards simply don't have the infinite spells to change the world that they do in 3.X. All of the things that break the economy or the nature of space time wide open were added in 3.X.

The, ideal party is a balanced one. Its like fighting a war against one enemy who has a lot of bombs but nothing to drop them, one enemy who has a lot of planes but nothing to drop out of the , and one guy who has a mix of bombs and planes.


Also, as for your last point, fighters in every edition of D&D have magic items. Nobody ever objected to it, and it didn't fix 3.X balance, so the whole idea that people reject a fighter with any magic whatsoever or that giving a figter "super powers" will fix the 3.X CMD is pretty much nonsense imo.

[Quertus]

Fighters were at their peak performance in 2nd edition,

2e was best edition. Magic shops, automatic spell acquisition, HP bloat - 3e broke too many things.


Anyone know of a system where "Fighters" are good in combat and bad everywhere else, and "Wizards" are bad in combat and good everywhere else?

Rifts is one that I'm familiar with, but I'd like to hear of others.

Rifts? Oh, you said that.

[Arbane]

It also sounds like "The world is so thoroughly and inherently magical that people learn to use it about as commonly as they learn to walk".

Which is basically true of your average fantasy RPG setting that has caster/martial disparity.

It isn't actually rare and special to be a mighty wizard, every adventuring party's got one and probably a spare, there's an old sage on the outskirts of every damn town and village and they run one or more countries.

With magic and mages already that common, the real question is why isn't everyone capable of at least a little basic magery.

You might want to check out:

Earthdawn: An attempt at making a D&D-ish setting make sense. All PC classes, even the fighty-types, are explicitly using magic to boost their abilities.

RuneQuest: All player-characters are expected to start knowing a few minor spells. But if you want someone dead, stabbing them repeatedly with a spear is much more efficient.

[Man_Over_Game]

Rifts? Oh, you said that.

I really hope there are more examples. It'd be really quite sad if there aren't.

"Fighters" being bad outside of combat is often assumed with a lot of TTRPG systems, yet the idea of a "Wizard" being worse in combat than "Fighters" is apparently very rare. It makes sense, considering that's the reason for this whole thread, but a bit sad that many game developers haven't recognized the bad trend.

Or maybe game developers don't consider anything that's not combat to be relevant. 4e did that, and the disparity between Fighter types and Wizard Types were actually extremely low.

Maybe that's the solution: If you care about balance, make the game only about combat; otherwise, don't.

[Edit] I guess the Warhammer 40k TTRPG is kinda like this, where Spess Mahreens were deathbots and everyone else were cannon fodder with backstories.

[Max_Killjoy]

In my experience AD&D disproves all of the points you raised in the quoted post, and has never broken my verisimilitude as long as I accept that certain things (like HP) are gamist abstractions.


I feel like you're reading half of each of my posts. You seem to think I'm trying to make an argument or an attack, when I'm presenting (yet again, on this topic) an analysis of how a certain subset of players want a set of things from their system and setting combo that are, when taken together, inherently conflicting.

If you're talking about four-item list, AD&D can't "disprove them" or "satisfy them all", they're not claims or talking points -- it's the list of mutually exclusive "solutions" to the inherent dilemma and contradictions introduced by trying to have non-fantastic utterly-"mandane" Fighter in the same game as the sorts of spellcasters epitomized, but not limited to, 3.x.




In combat high level fighters get 3 plus attacks per round that are likely to hit on anything but a one, and make all of their saving throws on anything but a one. The wizard is likely to go last and automatically loses their spell if they are hit (not damaged) by an attack.

Out of combat, wizards simply don't have the infinite spells to change the world that they do in 3.X. All of the things that break the economy or the nature of space time wide open were added in 3.X.


First, I don't have time to go dig my AD&D books out of storage and go through how easy it was for a wizard to avoid the problems of going last or being hit, even as far back as that edition.

Second, we're not even talking about totally breaking the economy or the nature of speacetime. A spell as simple as Knock is as much on-point here as Wish (and Wish was around in AD&D...).




The ideal party is a balanced one. Its like fighting a war against one enemy who has a lot of bombs but nothing to drop them, one enemy who has a lot of planes but nothing to drop out of the , and one guy who has a mix of bombs and planes.


Yeah, that last guy... that's the D&D spellcaster. Especially in, but not limited to, 3.x




Also, as for your last point, fighters in every edition of D&D have magic items. Nobody ever objected to it, and it didn't fix 3.X balance, so the whole idea that people reject a fighter with any magic whatsoever or that giving a fighter "super powers" will fix the 3.X CMD is pretty much nonsense imo.


Where did I say anything about fighters not having magic weapons or armor? In fact, I even said at one point "maybe they have magic weapons or armor or whatever..." as part of the description of the sort of character the "just steel and grit" players want to play.

Sorry you've missed the posters who are adamant that their Fighter be utterly devoid of fantastic abilities, but they've repeatedly posted to threads on this topic before. If you really want to take that last half-step and just openly call me a liar about that, I guess I can waste the time to go back and find those posts this weekend or whenever I can fit it in. I wonder if the max post size here can handle all the links I'll come up with... (And at this point, yeah, I do feel like I'm being called a liar, because I've said "no, really, it's there, I've seen it repeatedly", and just getting "no you haven't" in response.)

As for the CMD specific to 3.x... it's a situation where the spellcasters do have superpowers (in a broad sense), and that leaves the list of choices I laid out previously -- and it's an all-encompassing list. Every option falls into one of the listed possibles.


The point of all this isn't to promote a single solution to the contradiction, it's only to demonstrate that there is an inherent contradiction and lay out the possible resolutions, each of which involves giving something up. Individual gamers will have to choose which thing they give up. The one thing that cannot be had here is everything at the same time.

[Kyutaru]

I really hope there are more examples. It'd be really quite sad if there aren't.

"Fighters" being bad outside of combat is often assumed with a lot of TTRPG systems, yet the idea of a "Wizard" being worse in combat than "Fighters" is apparently very rare. It makes sense, considering that's the reason for this whole thread, but a bit sad that many game developers haven't recognized the bad trend.

Or maybe game developers don't consider anything that's not combat to be relevant. 4e did that, and the disparity between Fighter types and Wizard Types were actually extremely low.

Maybe that's the solution: If you care about balance, make the game only about combat; otherwise, don't.

[Edit] I guess the Warhammer 40k TTRPG is kinda like this, where Spess Mahreens were deathbots and everyone else were cannon fodder with backstories.

Another example is the Warhammer-based board game HeroQuest, which I'm sure is going to spark nostalgia among many of you. The fighter-type Barbarian was your combat powerhouse and utterly terrible at doing anything other than slaughtering half the dungeon solo. Three skull dice was too strong and he could upgrade to five dice easily. Meanwhile, the Wizard only rolled one dice for combat and had extremely limited spells that couldn't be spammed. Once it was gone, it was gone for the rest of the dungeon and they could only bring nine of them. They were useful buffers, combat enhancers, and tactical enablers but only a bare few spells caused any damage and the fighter could easily trump it in a single turn with a little luck. Those spells were best reserved for boss enemies with high defense dice.

[Talakeal]

Max, I am not trying to fight with you or call you a liar. I do think that most people on both sides in this thread (and the previous 500 incarnations of it), including you, are to some degree doing some version of what happens in an internet echo chamber and ascribing all opposing view points to every member of the opposing side, which is more or less what I am arguing against. The "guy at the gym fallacy" and the "caster martial disparity bingo," both give the impression that it is a black and white dichotomy where people either want mundane suck-ass martials or anime super heroes, with no in between, or that there are is no way to balance a D&D mage against a D&D martial.

In my experience with AD&D (and many other fantasy adventure RPGs) over many decades I have never seen this actually play out anywhere except 3.X.

When you state that "One of these four points MUST be true," I was simply countering that in my experience none of those four points are true in AD&D (or most other D&D-like RPGs I have played).

Likewise, you stated that Conan has nothing except a maybe a sword, determination, and mighty thews, and I was responding that in D&D Conan would have a whole host of other attributes and abilities, not the least of which is an arsenal of magic items.

In my example about planes and bombs, do note that I am talking about parties, not individuals. A party of four wizards (or four fighters for that matter) would likely get their teeth knocked in by a more balanced party, and in actual play would die horribly unless they were very high level and either just so happened to have just the right spells prepared for every dungeon and / or had no pressure on them to stop them from going back to town and resting up and researching new spells constantly, in which case a balanced party would almost certainly be more efficient for clearing dungeons.


My main point is not the power or versatility of the spells themselves that are the problems, rather how convenient they are. For example, 2E wish always ages you five years, takes an hour and a half to memorize, requires a level 9 spell slot (you get 1 at 18 or 19, 2 at level 20, no bonuses), requires 2d4 days of bedrest after casting, and has a built in clause about the DM twisting any wishes they find to be abusive.

Compare this to the 3.X shapechanging into a zodar and getting unlimited XP free wishes which includes the ability to conjure any magic item you can imagine without DM interference.

[Mechalich]

Sorry you've missed the posters who are adamant that their Fighter be utterly devoid of fantastic abilities, but they've repeatedly posted to threads on this topic before. If you really want to take that last half-step and just openly call me a liar about that, I guess I can waste the time to go back and find those posts this weekend or whenever I can fit it in. I wonder if the max post size here can handle all the links I'll come up with... (And at this point, yeah, I do feel like I'm being called a liar, because I've said "no, really, it's there, I've seen it repeatedly", and just getting "no you haven't" in response.)


It's not even that fighters, or even any PCs at all, should be devoid of fantastic abilities, it's that, if you want to have 'the masses' be devoid of fantastic abilities then you need to acknowledge that in your design.

For example, in Vampire: the Masquerade it is a critical point of the game that the masses both have no fantastical abilities whatsoever and yet were still powerful enough to overwhelm all vampires through sheer weight of numbers as far back at the 15th century or so which is why the Masquerade came into being and the game is able to exist at all. Once you establish this point you can't have all-powerful elder vampires who are completely untouchable to the masses even in millions vs. one scenarios or the setting breaks down (of course, because it was a White-wolf game they did exactly that).

In a setting with spellcasters as powerful as those present in D&D the masses are quickly rendered utterly irrelevant and the result is that if the world manages to avoid one of several potential mystical apocalypses it eventually stabilizes around competing polities ruled by immortal god-king spellcasters - that is, it becomes Dark Sun (though it need not be that dark, there's not reason why you shouldn't have good and neutral mystic overlords in addition to evil ones).

Now you can certainly build such a world, it's just that the stories you tell in it have two tiers. You have the god-king tier where the sorcerers and their chosen servants engage in various machinations in which the fate of the world (or at least sizeable regions) is at stake, and you have the masses tier where various creative people creep around and have adventures in the shadow of much more powerful beings who either actively control the state of the world or just can't be bothered and sit back and mess with everyone according to their whims (Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser, after all, spend a very large percentage of their respective stories as the b****** of Sheelba and Ningauble). And this is the same sort of power dynamic that happens in a modern superhero world if you remove the guardrails of comic book logic that prevents the heroes and villains from chopping the world up into little fiefdoms (minus a few exceptions like Dr. Doom).

But a lot of people don't want to game in those worlds. They don't want a mid-level party to be able to march into a mid-sized two-thousand person town and effortlessly slaughter everyone, because it breaks the setting and, frankly, is really kind of stupid (just like those Civil war battles in Skyrim where you relentlessly murder dozens of guards in endless waves without the slightest trouble). And i think what happens is that many people - guided by the literature - hit on the idea that one point of balance here is that the warrior types don't have any supernatural abilities, and so even peak conditioning, expert training, and some magical gear have their limits and yield characters who can beat ten men but not one hundred. Unfortunately there are no such obvious limits for magical powers, so that part gets neglected, often with a 'well wizards are super-rare' dodge.

[Max_Killjoy]

It's not even that fighters, or even any PCs at all, should be devoid of fantastic abilities, it's that, if you want to have 'the masses' be devoid of fantastic abilities then you need to acknowledge that in your design.

For example, in Vampire: the Masquerade it is a critical point of the game that the masses both have no fantastical abilities whatsoever and yet were still powerful enough to overwhelm all vampires through sheer weight of numbers as far back at the 15th century or so which is why the Masquerade came into being and the game is able to exist at all. Once you establish this point you can't have all-powerful elder vampires who are completely untouchable to the masses even in millions vs. one scenarios or the setting breaks down (of course, because it was a White-wolf game they did exactly that).

In a setting with spellcasters as powerful as those present in D&D the masses are quickly rendered utterly irrelevant and the result is that if the world manages to avoid one of several potential mystical apocalypses it eventually stabilizes around competing polities ruled by immortal god-king spellcasters - that is, it becomes Dark Sun (though it need not be that dark, there's not reason why you shouldn't have good and neutral mystic overlords in addition to evil ones).

Now you can certainly build such a world, it's just that the stories you tell in it have two tiers. You have the god-king tier where the sorcerers and their chosen servants engage in various machinations in which the fate of the world (or at least sizeable regions) is at stake, and you have the masses tier where various creative people creep around and have adventures in the shadow of much more powerful beings who either actively control the state of the world or just can't be bothered and sit back and mess with everyone according to their whims (Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser, after all, spend a very large percentage of their respective stories as the b****** of Sheelba and Ningauble). And this is the same sort of power dynamic that happens in a modern superhero world if you remove the guardrails of comic book logic that prevents the heroes and villains from chopping the world up into little fiefdoms (minus a few exceptions like Dr. Doom).

But a lot of people don't want to game in those worlds. They don't want a mid-level party to be able to march into a mid-sized two-thousand person town and effortlessly slaughter everyone, because it breaks the setting and, frankly, is really kind of stupid (just like those Civil war battles in Skyrim where you relentlessly murder dozens of guards in endless waves without the slightest trouble). And i think what happens is that many people - guided by the literature - hit on the idea that one point of balance here is that the warrior types don't have any supernatural abilities, and so even peak conditioning, expert training, and some magical gear have their limits and yield characters who can beat ten men but not one hundred. Unfortunately there are no such obvious limits for magical powers, so that part gets neglected, often with a 'well wizards are super-rare' dodge.


Exactly.

But that's why "a setting where most people largely have the same limits as real-world people" and "any notion of a coherent setting at all" are two of the things I list that can be given up.

If the player wants their "within non-fantastical/non-magical limits" character to be able to challenge what are effectively superhuman spellcasters, then either the setting can change to enable those characters -- and by extension countless NPCs across the setting -- to do things that WE, in OUR WORLD would consider fantastic, but that are utterly normal in the fictional world; or they can just discard any notion of a setting that makes any sense or holds up at all.

[Max_Killjoy]

Max, I am not trying to fight with you or call you a liar. I do think that most people on both sides in this thread (and the previous 500 incarnations of it), including you, are to some degree doing some version of what happens in an internet echo chamber and ascribing all opposing view points to every member of the opposing side, which is more or less what I am arguing against. The "guy at the gym fallacy" and the "caster martial disparity bingo," both give the impression that it is a black and white dichotomy where people either want mundane suck-ass martials or anime super heroes, with no in between, or that there are is no way to balance a D&D mage against a D&D martial.


There are at least two general categories of ways to balance the two, as listed -- dial down spellcasters, or dial up martials.

There's no dichotomy being presented here, no black-and-white... the two dials could both be turned to meet somewhere between.

It's not that those players want suck-ass martials -- it's that they want "mundane martials" to be able to keep up with spellcasters in a game where spellcasters quickly escalate to superhuman, AND they want a fairly standard-looking fantasy world with standard-looking masses of standard-seeming people, AND they want to claim it all makes sense.

I'm not arguing for or against "mundane martials" or any other place for martials on a supernatural power scale or scope -- I'm only arguing that "mundane martials" don't work unless the gamer is willing to give up something else.




In my experience with AD&D (and many other fantasy adventure RPGs) over many decades I have never seen this actually play out anywhere except 3.X.

When you state that "One of these four points MUST be true," I was simply countering that in my experience none of those four points are true in AD&D (or most other D&D-like RPGs I have played).

Likewise, you stated that Conan has nothing except a maybe a sword, determination, and mighty thews, and I was responding that in D&D Conan would have a whole host of other attributes and abilities, not the least of which is an arsenal of magic items.


In some versions of D&D, those other abilities for supposedly non-magical Classes ARE fantastic, they're not spellcasting, but they are "magic" in that they blatantly blow past what are otherwise the peak human limitations in that setting. That is, the issue is solved by "dialing up the martials", even if some don't want to admit that those martials have reached their own superhuman scale by upper levels.

And I did note that perhaps those characters have magic items -- but at least in my experience, it takes a stack of magic items for a pure Fighter to be on par with a Wizard... but then the Wizard gets magic items of his own.




My main point is not the power or versatility of the spells themselves that are the problems, rather how convenient they are. For example, 2E wish always ages you five years, takes an hour and a half to memorize, requires a level 9 spell slot (you get 1 at 18 or 19, 2 at level 20, no bonuses), requires 2d4 days of bedrest after casting, and has a built in clause about the DM twisting any wishes they find to be abusive.

Compare this to the 3.X shapechanging into a zodar and getting unlimited XP free wishes which includes the ability to conjure any magic item you can imagine without DM interference.



Taking what you are saying about 2e as true for the sake of argument, then the one that applies to 2e is "dial down the spellcasters", at least comparison to 3.x.

[CharonsHelper]

Unfortunately there are no such obvious limits for magical powers, so that part gets neglected, often with a 'well wizards are super-rare' dodge.

I do think that it would be POSSIBLE to allow much of this sort of stuff - but you'd have to have major weaknesses to wizards which D&D has never had (though earlier editions had some of them).

1. Have major drawbacks to the biggest spells. Make them take multiple rounds in which the caster is vulnerable etc. Early D&D did some of this - but they often left backdoor methods to plug those holes for the caster.

2. Have high level martials be inherently resistant to magic - which could lead to a RPS scenario between badass martials, casters, and armies. Armies can overwhelm any martial, high level martials can power through spells to take down casters (hopefully a martail & caster are about equal for the same leveled character - but the martials are much more common in lore) while casters can nuke armies. As an example - the martial could gain some sort of magical resistance pool which would have to be beaten through before SoD/SoS spells can do anything - in D&D terms without extra rules, the spells which require the target to be below X HP are a decent way of doing it.

3. Possibly make casters be able to more easily counter each-other, where (for example) a level 6 caster could mostly shut down a level 10 caster for a short time (though would run out of juice) giving his martial allies a chance to stab him while he can't cast. (I always WANTED 3.x's counterspelling system to work - but even after spending major character resources it was always mediocre. About the only way to do it decently was for a bard to counterspell with Dispel Magic after he'd already gotten Inspire Courage and a couple of buffs up - since he'd already done his job and even a 50-60% chance to shut down an equal level wizard was worth it.)

[Cluedrew]

My answer to martials up or casters down is usually both, or it can be bring the casters down. In one of the previous iterations of this thread someone said it was pointless to give martials near infinite power because casters had infinite power. Ignoring the fact that that would still be progress I realized: Who wants to play/tell a story about an infinitely powerful character? OK people do, but I certainly don't because as it gets harder and harder to tell interesting stories as power-levels get further and further away from real life. As the story gets more distant from reality the difference usually has to be about that difference. And at this point I think I am just babbling.

Maybe I will try to think of another thing to say about base rules. Does anyone else have anything to say about that? I don't mind if we go over the old caster/martial paths again, but I would really like to explore this other view to see if there is anything interesting there.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I do think that it would be POSSIBLE to allow much of this sort of stuff - but you'd have to have major weaknesses to wizards which D&D has never had (though earlier editions had some of them).

1. Have major drawbacks to the biggest spells. Make them take multiple rounds in which the caster is vulnerable etc. Early D&D did some of this - but they often left backdoor methods to plug those holes for the caster.

2. Have high level martials be inherently resistant to magic - which could lead to a RPS scenario between badass martials, casters, and armies. Armies can overwhelm any martial, high level martials can power through spells to take down casters (hopefully a martail & caster are about equal for the same leveled character - but the martials are much more common in lore) while casters can nuke armies. As an example - the martial could gain some sort of magical resistance pool which would have to be beaten through before SoD/SoS spells can do anything - in D&D terms without extra rules, the spells which require the target to be below X HP are a decent way of doing it.

3. Possibly make casters be able to more easily counter each-other, where (for example) a level 6 caster could mostly shut down a level 10 caster for a short time (though would run out of juice) giving his martial allies a chance to stab him while he can't cast. (I always WANTED 3.x's counterspelling system to work - but even after spending major character resources it was always mediocre. About the only way to do it decently was for a bard to counterspell with Dispel Magic after he'd already gotten Inspire Courage and a couple of buffs up - since he'd already done his job and even a 50-60% chance to shut down an equal level wizard was worth it.)

1. The issue with this is that those aren't fun. Especially in a combat heavy game like D&D, people will always seek ways to avoid those drawbacks (or sweep them aside). It's great for fiction, but not so much for games. People don't often want to be wizards to only cast spells narratively and cower in combat. At least it's so in my games.

2. That doesn't avoid the "break the world" issues. If only the walking tank can fight the genocidal man, then you've got a superhero situation, which always run on a big dose of suspension of disbelief. They're also not so great for balance, because hard counters kinda stink when you're the one being countered.

3. Still has the "only casters can play" problem. 5e makes counterspelling easier (3rd level spell on a lot of lists counters everything 3rd and below and those above with a decent chance), but cast-counter duels aren't that much fun either.

I think the only way to do it is to both cut casters from their quasi-omnipotence and abandon the "only casters are magic/fantastic" thing some people have and spread the "caster-like" wealth. Or play different games where everyone's toned down (ie Pendragon, where casters are NPCs only) or toned up (Exalted, Godbound). It's the middle-ground that's hard.

[CharonsHelper]

1. The issue with this is that those aren't fun. Especially in a combat heavy game like D&D, people will always seek ways to avoid those drawbacks (or sweep them aside). It's great for fiction, but not so much for games. People don't often want to be wizards to only cast spells narratively and cower in combat. At least it's so in my games.

I didn't mean that ALL spells would be slow to cast - just the biggest ones. So for your 3rd level slot, do you take the big bad X, or do you take a less powerful fast-cast spell? Also - I don't think that it's that bad to charge up for a turn or three if the turns are fast enough - especially if you're using side-based initiative. (Even if the total turn was the same length - charging up your move with side-based initiative doesn't FEEL as bad, because your buddies are still doing stuff during the turn.)


2. That doesn't avoid the "break the world" issues. If only the walking tank can fight the genocidal man, then you've got a superhero situation, which always run on a big dose of suspension of disbelief. They're also not so great for balance, because hard counters kinda stink when you're the one being countered.

I didn't mean R-P-S on the individual basis - but on a worldbuilding one. If the setting has 50 wizards that can devastate armies, but several thousand martials who are their equal in combat (who themselves would die to said armies) then the world sorta works, but the group dynamic is fine because 1 martial is only equal to 1 wizard.


3. Still has the "only casters can play" problem. 5e makes counterspelling easier (3rd level spell on a lot of lists counters everything 3rd and below and those above with a decent chance), but cast-counter duels aren't that much fun either.

Oh - you'd definitely have to make counterspelling more interesting than just saying "I counterspell" *rolls dice*.

[Florian]

In a setting with spellcasters as powerful as those present in D&D the masses are quickly rendered utterly irrelevant and *Snip*

Ok, an analogy what is wrong with D&D-style magic and tends to seep into every discussion about this topic:
Magic is like a smartphone and spells are like the apps. Once you have them downloaded and installed, they are instantly ready to use and will perform their function. To "balance" this, only classes with a very weak combat chassis have a smartphone of any kind and you must be this tall to use the app, meaning level gating them. Scrolls, wands and staves are the equivalent to investing in some power banks, to prolong the battery life of your smartphone.

As Satinavian, me and a few others already mentioned, there are game systems/settings that don't treat magic as the simple "Have it? Yes/No." of the smartphone analogy and spells not as the self-powered and ready to run apps. Mostly, they express magic as an external power source, serious practitioners of magic as people who have mastered the techniques to store something of that and spells as an interface to that power that have to be fueled in some way or another to either start their effect or keep it running.

Potentially same power peek, the later even a bit higher because there is no need to level gate, nothing is preventing someone from learning the equivalents of a Gate and Wish spells right from the get-go, but still the reverse situation, because while you're guaranteed the spell, you're not guaranteed to either gain enough power to use them or to have enough power at hand when you need it the most.

Add to that one of the oddities of D&D/PF, automatic growth of HP, saves, BAB and such, without having to invest anything in it. While your 1st level Wizard can be one-shot by a house cat, a 10th level Wizard can beat down a lion with his quarterstaff at no investment involved. That is not the case for most other systems where you have to make active investments into offensive, defensive and general survival abilities, forcing you to make a lot of choices about your priorities.

[Florian]

But the Wizard is not that. They are "mutable abilities" + (some) "win buttons", given time. Whenever I talk about how the Muggle could handle travel to another plane simply by knowing about and walking to an existing portal, or when I talk about how a muggle could get from Point A to Point B (in 2d Space) by walking there, people always shoot that down? Exactly the same thing here. Sure, eventually the Wizard could open the door, but the Rogue (or even Fighter) can do it now.

Hm, ok, two things:

The argument is mostly about the difference between internal and external power sources and by extension, having to rely on the GM. You might know from past conversations that I don't differentiate too much between having the Gate spell, owning a Candle of Invocation, paying a NPC for the service to cast Gate (maybe from a scroll) or simply looking for a permanent gate somewhere. For me, knowing that there are multiple ways to reach the same goal is enough and as a GM, I tend to include anything in a module or scenario that might be needed to succeed, more or less independent of the characters involved (as in, doors without keys are a bit weird, magic traps without deactivation words, too...). For a lot of others, tho, it is absolutely important that they have a secured internal access to such things, as it forms the basis of their whole planning and interaction with the game world.

The other thing is that I question a bit whether you have stayed up to date in regards to how to handle a Wizard. I don't mean the whole theory-talk about what could be possible under an extremely lenient GM and some such, but simply best practices how to build them and manage their resources, especially how to stay flexible and how to use stable multi-functional spells to gain access to support or i-win-buttons on the fly. A rather simple example would be using feats that rapidly speeded up the time it takes to fill a slot on thy fly, or swap out prepped spells or knowing which summons will grant access to certain SLAs/SUs and so on. That's not exactly high-OP stuff, but rather part and parcel of what can be found in the more up to date guides.

[Max_Killjoy]

Ok, an analogy what is wrong with D&D-style magic and tends to seep into every discussion about this topic:
Magic is like a smartphone and spells are like the apps. Once you have them downloaded and installed, they are instantly ready to use and will perform their function. To "balance" this, only classes with a very weak combat chassis have a smartphone of any kind and you must be this tall to use the app, meaning level gating them. Scrolls, wands and staves are the equivalent to investing in some power banks, to prolong the battery life of your smartphone.

As Satinavian, me and a few others already mentioned, there are game systems/settings that don't treat magic as the simple "Have it? Yes/No." of the smartphone analogy and spells not as the self-powered and ready to run apps. Mostly, they express magic as an external power source, serious practitioners of magic as people who have mastered the techniques to store something of that and spells as an interface to that power that have to be fueled in some way or another to either start their effect or keep it running.

Potentially same power peek, the later even a bit higher because there is no need to level gate, nothing is preventing someone from learning the equivalents of a Gate and Wish spells right from the get-go, but still the reverse situation, because while you're guaranteed the spell, you're not guaranteed to either gain enough power to use them or to have enough power at hand when you need it the most.

Add to that one of the oddities of D&D/PF, automatic growth of HP, saves, BAB and such, without having to invest anything in it. While your 1st level Wizard can be one-shot by a house cat, a 10th level Wizard can beat down a lion with his quarterstaff at no investment involved. That is not the case for most other systems where you have to make active investments into offensive, defensive and general survival abilities, forcing you to make a lot of choices about your priorities.

Whenever this topic, or others like it come up, it occurs to me that maybe these discussions would greatly benefit from more gamers having broader exposure to a variety of systems... that maybe some gamers just interpret what's being said through the lenses of black-box magic and leveled progression and so on, without the alternatives coming to mind.

[Satinavian]

Anyone know of a system where "Fighters" are good in combat and bad everywhere else, and "Wizards" are bad in combat and good everywhere else?

Rifts is one that I'm familiar with, but I'd like to hear of others.
There are some, but none that is actually good enough in other ways to play it.

Usually it works by casting being really time consuming and benefitting from an controlled and serene environment. That makes magic just impractical or even completely useless in tactical combat while still being quite beneficial in preparing the battlefield or for other strategic purposes.



Well, yes. The mundane super power "buy stuff" (like potions of water breathing) can (in some systems) give even Muggles this "with time, I can do anything" capability. At which point, with enough time, money, and intelligence (pun intended), anyone can do anything.The caster has also the the super power to buy a potion. He doesn't need the ability to make the water breathing spell available to cast on a whim if that is not important enough to waste a "spell known" equivalent or other real costs.

What's the difference? If the plot requires us to get to another plane, but they're no way there, isn't that a world-building / scenario-building issue?Yes. If the plot is on another plane, there will be a way to get there. As with every other possible plot location. Have you ever seen a low level plot on an island without it starting there or a ship travelling there ?

OTOH, if this is a sandbox… I suppose i could leverage knowledge of the world having *no* portals to other planes to some advantage - especially if this were D&D, where that would be bizarre.Seems to be quite popular with the vast number of groups and DMs who don't particularly like planar adventures or want to ditch the cosmology for something else.

For non-D&D, well, of three current fantasy RPG settings i play in which have other planes, two don't have any such portals, only planar travel spells, the third has a set low double digit number of known portals for the whole world. Which are all in the center of cities utilizing this planar travel possibility, only open at certain times and heavily guarded and certainly no obscure knowledge.


You have a most interesting PoV. Suffice it to say, everyone my senile mind remembers talking to about this topic seemed happy giving everyone access to rituals, but only Wizards get Quick Magic. It would be like saying everyone can sacrifice to & pray to the gods for miracles, but only Priests can pull off guaranteed effects *right now*.If you discuss with people stuck in the D&D mindset of combat being the thing that matters most and which should define what a character is. Or who want to give existing martial D&D characters self sufficiency.

[Mechalich]

Whenever this topic, or others like it come up, it occurs to me that maybe these discussions would greatly benefit from more gamers having broader exposure to a variety of systems... that maybe some gamers just interpret what's being said through the lenses of black-box magic and leveled progression and so on, without the alternatives coming to mind.

Black-box magic and leveled progression, albeit not precisely in D&D fashion, are what you get in most video games, whether it's jRPGs, Skyrim, or your average MMO. Regardless of how much of that's due to cross-pollination the idea of fire-and-forget magical effects tied to a resource pool (point based systems are probably more common than spell slots, but D&D doesn't get any less imbalanced when you switch to psionics so that's not really significant) is firmly entrenched at this point. It's also a fairly convenient system to use at a table, is easy to write content for, and has fairly good rules clarity to prevent arguments. 'I use X, it does Y' is a simple and effective formula that unfortunately happens to be particularly vulnerable to balance issues, especially when you start allowing multiple output variables to interact.

By contrast, systems where you build character powers by adding up points like in GURPS or by formulating effects on the fly like in MtA or Ars Magica have some very clear abuse points and tend to lead to a great many arguments with the GM if people at the table aren't willing to be accommodating. Heck, many of the most contentious or known to be broken D&D spells are some of the most open-ended ones like Charm Person, and Polymorph. Nobody complains about Scorching Ray. The perfectly manageable magic system doesn't exist, everything's a trade off.

[Max_Killjoy]

Black-box magic and leveled progression, albeit not precisely in D&D fashion, are what you get in most video games, whether it's jRPGs, Skyrim, or your average MMO. Regardless of how much of that's due to cross-pollination the idea of fire-and-forget magical effects tied to a resource pool (point based systems are probably more common than spell slots, but D&D doesn't get any less imbalanced when you switch to psionics so that's not really significant) is firmly entrenched at this point. It's also a fairly convenient system to use at a table, is easy to write content for, and has fairly good rules clarity to prevent arguments. 'I use X, it does Y' is a simple and effective formula that unfortunately happens to be particularly vulnerable to balance issues, especially when you start allowing multiple output variables to interact.

By contrast, systems where you build character powers by adding up points like in GURPS or by formulating effects on the fly like in MtA or Ars Magica have some very clear abuse points and tend to lead to a great many arguments with the GM if people at the table aren't willing to be accommodating. Heck, many of the most contentious or known to be broken D&D spells are some of the most open-ended ones like Charm Person, and Polymorph. Nobody complains about Scorching Ray. The perfectly manageable magic system doesn't exist, everything's a trade off.


The point isn't that we'd find perfect, the point is there'd be broader understanding that those tradeoffs and alternatives even exist.

It's like we're having a discussion about car design and some of the participants have only ever seen hatchbacks. Or talking about cellphone design in a room where half the participants think that cellphone and iphone are synonyms.

[Quertus]

I really hope there are more examples. It'd be really quite sad if there aren't.

"Fighters" being bad outside of combat is often assumed with a lot of TTRPG systems, yet the idea of a "Wizard" being worse in combat than "Fighters" is apparently very rare. It makes sense, considering that's the reason for this whole thread, but a bit sad that many game developers haven't recognized the bad trend.

Or maybe game developers don't consider anything that's not combat to be relevant. 4e did that, and the disparity between Fighter types and Wizard Types were actually extremely low.

Maybe that's the solution: If you care about balance, make the game only about combat; otherwise, don't.

[Edit] I guess the Warhammer 40k TTRPG is kinda like this, where Spess Mahreens were deathbots and everyone else were cannon fodder with backstories.

There was a Diablo-like cRPG (Dark Stone, maybe?) where the Wizard had cool out of combat utility, but the Fighter was so much better & easier to play in combat.

I think "making the game be only about one thing" *may* make it less likely that you'll get complaints about balance. But that might be overly optimistic.

On a related note… Are the colors in MtG really balanced? Do people complain about color balance, or just the balance of individual cards?


Hm, ok, two things:

The argument is mostly about the difference between internal and external power sources and by extension, having to rely on the GM. You might know from past conversations that I don't differentiate too much between having the Gate spell, owning a Candle of Invocation, paying a NPC for the service to cast Gate (maybe from a scroll) or simply looking for a permanent gate somewhere. For me, knowing that there are multiple ways to reach the same goal is enough and as a GM, I tend to include anything in a module or scenario that might be needed to succeed, more or less independent of the characters involved (as in, doors without keys are a bit weird, magic traps without deactivation words, too...). For a lot of others, tho, it is absolutely important that they have a secured internal access to such things, as it forms the basis of their whole planning and interaction with the game world.

The other thing is that I question a bit whether you have stayed up to date in regards to how to handle a Wizard. I don't mean the whole theory-talk about what could be possible under an extremely lenient GM and some such, but simply best practices how to build them and manage their resources, especially how to stay flexible and how to use stable multi-functional spells to gain access to support or i-win-buttons on the fly. A rather simple example would be using feats that rapidly speeded up the time it takes to fill a slot on thy fly, or swap out prepped spells or knowing which summons will grant access to certain SLAs/SUs and so on. That's not exactly high-OP stuff, but rather part and parcel of what can be found in the more up to date guides.

Well, IMO, that's not "best practices", it's "optimization". If what you care about is table balance, it's arguably worst practices. Of course, I'm advocating making all spells be usable at will, and then dragging the Fighter kicking and screaming up to the Wizard's level.

For that first bit… I find your stance (and analysis) most reasonable.

[Satinavian]

The point isn't that we'd find perfect, the point is there'd be broader understanding that those tradeoffs and alternatives even exist.

It's like we're having a discussion about car design and some of the participants have only ever seen hatchbacks. Or talking about cellphone design in a room where half the participants think that cellphone and iphone are synonyms.
I share those feelings.

[Quertus]

@Cluedrew

So, I've been trying to tease this apart, and hold it in my senile mind long enough to post it, but I think that the m/c divide may be an issue with confusing physics & mechanics. What do I mean by that?

Well, by definition, muggles have to follow the laws of physics. Personally, I believe most Wizards follow the laws of physics, too - just their physics has an expanded playbook - but that's another debate. The important part is, by definition, muggles obey physics.

But that isn't the same as following the rules.

Suppose the rule is, "by default, you get one action, and no ability to react to the actions of others".

People can easily imagine ways that magic, which can "ignore physics" might be able to break that rule. But, when they conflate that game mechanic rules with physics, they get it in their head that a muggle cannot break that rule when, in reality, someone with the physical skills / combat training / whatever is the one who should have the *easiest* time breaking / being the exception to that rule.

Does that make any sense at all? And, if so, could it be responsible for the phenomenon you are investigating?

[Man_Over_Game]

On a related note… Are the colors in MtG really balanced? Do people complain about color balance, or just the balance of individual cards?

Individual balance between colors is a real.concern. Black, for instance, cannot remove enchantments or artifacts. Red cannot remove enchantments. Blue has weak creatures. Green lacks instants that don't target artifacts or friendly creatures.

People do not consider black weak, despite it having a major weakness.

Even if a Wizard-type in a TTRPG had a major weakness, people would still play them. The problem I have with Fighter-types is that their weakness is half of the game (Roleplaying).

I've tried playing around the Fighter's problems, and it's enough for me to never play one again. Sure, I can Roleplay being scary, but what's that compared to a Cause Fear spell? Sure, I can forage for my own food in the wilds, but Goodberry sustains a group of people with no effort. No matter how hard a Fighter might try to makea difference out of combat, a caster can always do it better.

Eventually, it just felt like it'd be better if I didn't try.

The weakness of a Wizard is supposed to be their low health and armor, but the latest edition of DnD has Wizards earn about 25% less HP than Fighters, and most tanking builds incorporate casting levels for the defensive spells that become available by doing so. Even a Fighter becomes a better Fighter by being part mage.

However, a Wizard becomes less of a Wizard by being part warrior. Which says a lot. Of course, this is all very specific to DnD 5e, but considering that's the most popular TTRPG at the moment, it's more likely to be relevant to the most number of people (and people who visit this forum).

[Kyutaru]

Individual balance between colors is a real.concern. Black, for instance, cannot remove enchantments or artifacts. Red cannot remove enchantments. Blue has weak creatures. Green lacks instants that don't target artifacts or friendly creatures.

People do not consider black weak, despite it having a major weakness.

Though even these tropes are not common throughout all of Magic. Depending on era, or if you play Vintage, some of the rules have been broken before. Black has the Phyrexian Tribute and Quagmire Druid, Red gets Chaos Warp that can handle any permanent, Blue has had some of the strongest creatures in the game before such as Leviathan, Green gets the Beast Within that can handle any permanent as an instant, they even gave White and Red a counterspell. And of course none of these really matter when colorless can do everything now, even stuff none of the other colors can do themselves.

Similar to how D&D 1e is such a different beast from its later editions, time has a way of screwing with the balance of games.

#bringback2e

[Quertus]

Individual balance between colors is a real.concern. Black, for instance, cannot remove enchantments or artifacts. Red cannot remove enchantments. Blue has weak creatures. Green lacks instants that don't target artifacts or friendly creatures.

People do not consider black weak, despite it having a major weakness.

Even if a Wizard-type in a TTRPG had a major weakness, people would still play them. The problem I have with Fighter-types is that their weakness is half of the game (Roleplaying).

I've tried playing around the Fighter's problems, and it's enough for me to never play one again. Sure, I can Roleplay being scary, but what's that compared to a Cause Fear spell? Sure, I can forage for my own food in the wilds, but Goodberry sustains a group of people with no effort. No matter how hard a Fighter might try to makea difference out of combat, a caster can always do it better.

Eventually, it just felt like it'd be better if I didn't try.

The weakness of a Wizard is supposed to be their low health and armor, but the latest edition of DnD has Wizards earn about 25% less HP than Fighters, and most tanking builds incorporate casting levels for the defensive spells that become available by doing so. Even a Fighter becomes a better Fighter by being part mage.

However, a Wizard becomes less of a Wizard by being part warrior. Which says a lot. Of course, this is all very specific to DnD 5e, but considering that's the most popular TTRPG at the moment, it's more likely to be relevant to the most number of people (and people who visit this forum).

Green has Naturalize, and technically could target its opponents' creatures with buffs. But, yes, the colors play differently (and generally work better together).

Role-playing? I don't think we're using that word the same way. Also, I'm not sure about "being scary", but Goodberry has a high opportunity cost that foraging for food does not.

EDIT:
#bringback2e

In addition to you displaying a more encyclopedic knowledge of MtG cards, gotta +1 this bit. 2e is best game ever. :smallbiggrin:

[Man_Over_Game]

Role-playing? I don't think we're using that word the same way. Also, I'm not sure about "being scary", but Goodberry has a high opportunity cost that foraging for food does not.


I couldn't think of a better, succinct word to call it, but I mean for any scenario a character does stuff out of combat. Anybody can Roleplay, but a Fighter does nothing to assist in doing it productively. A Rogue gets some skills, a Bard can persuade people, but a Fighter only gains things that assist in combat (at least, with the newer editions).

Goodberry doesn't have that high of a cost. Level 1 spells aren't usually that hard to get in most editions it's in, and the casters who can get it are usually ones who can change what spells they prepare each day. That is, the only time it costs a Caster to get Goodberries is when the Caster feels that the cost isn't a problem. It'll never be a real problem for a Caster to have Goodberries.

Sure, that's a niche problem, but consider the kinds of things you'd expect a Fighter to be able to assist with in a non-combat scenario, using his Fighter-specific skillset:


Intimidate people.
Hunt for food.
Track a target.
Climb something.
Carry something.
Watch for danger



I'm not sure about how it is in other editions, but most of those are replicated in 5e as level 1 and 2 spells and done better. A 5e Fighter can only pick about 2-3 of those to do. A 5e Wizard starts level 1 with 6 leveled spells.

I could see a concern where the Fighter would be considered valuable if the Wizard ran out of resources, but I've seen more DMs view that more as a hazard than a goal.

[Max_Killjoy]

I couldn't think of a better, succinct word to call it, but I mean for any scenario a character does stuff out of combat. Anybody can Roleplay, but a Fighter does nothing to assist in doing it productively. A Rogue gets some skills, a Bard can persuade people, but a Fighter only gains things that assist in combat (at least, with the newer editions).

Goodberry doesn't have that high of a cost. Level 1 spells aren't usually that hard to get in most editions it's in, and the casters who can get it are usually ones who can change what spells they prepare each day. That is, the only time it costs a Caster to get Goodberries is when the Caster feels that the cost isn't a problem. It'll never be a real problem for a Caster to have Goodberries.

Sure, that's a niche problem, but consider the kinds of things you'd expect a Fighter to be able to assist with in a non-combat scenario, using his Fighter-specific skillset:


Intimidate people.
Hunt for food.
Track a target.
Climb something.
Carry something.
Watch for danger


I'm not sure about how it is in other editions, but most of those are replicated in 5e as level 1 and 2 spells and done better. A 5e Fighter can only pick about 2-3 of those to do. A 5e Wizard starts level 1 with 6 leveled spells.

I could see a concern where the Fighter would be considered valuable if the Wizard ran out of resources, but I've seen more DMs view that more as a hazard than a goal.


This is why in my long-ongoing hunt for a system, one of the requirements is that magic is a thing that characters can learn, and learning more of it takes more build resources, and its a tradeoff with being able to do other things; and another requirement is that magic enhances or bridges or offers alternatives with tradeoffs, it doesn't replace or negate.

[Kyutaru]

Sure, that's a niche problem, but consider the kinds of things you'd expect a Fighter to be able to assist with in a non-combat scenario, using his Fighter-specific skillset:

Just to play the Devil's Advocate for a moment, that skillset pretty much amounts to the one Hercules sported. He found lots of ways to make use of "being strong and good at physical stuff" while still being the most famous hero in existence.

[Gallowglass]

Just to play the Devil's Advocate for a moment, that skillset pretty much amounts to the one Hercules sported. He found lots of ways to make use of "being strong and good at physical stuff" while still being the most famous hero in existence.

Sure, but he lived in a world with a very permissive DM "Reroute the river to clean the stable? okay"...
... only pure martial encounters "Its a big lion! Its a big boar! Its a big bull!" ...
...and still managed to do some skill check challenges a normal fighter wouldn't have the skill ranks to do "charm the amazon queen into giving you her girdle!"...
...used class skills not in the fighter class set "who says poison use is a thief only thing?"...
... and occasionally added a spellcaster to his party to do what he couldn't "I need you to play your harp and put the doggie to sleep" "Its a lute" "whatever bard, just do it" ...
...And finally, exhibited multiple feat trails that a normal fighter would be forced to pick just one "I'm good with a club AND a bow!"

You know, in the Avengers comic book I always wished Hercules would grab Hawkeye's bow some time and just shoot the **** out of everybody and watch Hawkeye go all googly eyed.

[Man_Over_Game]

Just to play the Devil's Advocate for a moment, that skillset pretty much amounts to the one Hercules sported. He found lots of ways to make use of "being strong and good at physical stuff" while still being the most famous hero in existence.

Hercules is also a demi-god. For a DnD-esc Fighter to hit that fantastical level of power, you're talking about the end of several real-time years of playing.

The Fighter starts being redundant at level 1. "Hercules", the Fighter, finally catches up to those early level Wizard features around level 15 or so. But...now the Wizard doesn't really care. Not when he can teleport regularly or drop meteors from the sky.

Rather, if the Fighter at level 1 started out as useful as Hercules, how is the Fighter supposed to scale from there? At level 5, is he supposed to pull an Atlas and hold up the sky? WHere do you go from there?


There's no solution. Either the Fighter starts useless and fights an uphill battle that he never wins, or he starts out fantastic (just to be interesting compared to the Wizard) and never really does anything better or new.

[Gallowglass]

A Wizard might start out casting Goodberries, but he can sure do a lot more than that later on.

Goodberries?

your wizard is a druid. The pointy hat is a lie. You should've guessed from the brown bear "familiar".

*druid wizard looks uncomfortable and shifty*

*suddenly pulls out flaming acorns and starts tossing them at us while running away screaming "Magic missile! Magic missile!*

[Cluedrew]

@Cluedrew

"]So, I've been trying to tease this apart, and hold it in my senile mind long enough to post it, but I think that the m/c divide may be an issue with confusing physics & mechanics. What do I mean by that?

Well, by definition, muggles have to follow the laws of physics. Personally, I believe most Wizards follow the laws of physics, too - just their physics has an expanded playbook - but that's another debate. The important part is, by definition, muggles obey physics.

But that isn't the same as following the rules.

Suppose the rule is, "by default, you get one action, and no ability to react to the actions of others".

People can easily imagine ways that magic, which can "ignore physics" might be able to break that rule. But, when they conflate that game mechanic rules with physics, they get it in their head that a muggle cannot break that rule when, in reality, someone with the physical skills / combat training / whatever is the one who should have the *easiest* time breaking / being the exception to that rule.
Does that make any sense at all? And, if so, could it be responsible for the phenomenon you are investigating?That makes sense, a lot of sense actually. Especially considering how that reflects with mechanics in other types of games (particularly war games and strategy games that RPGs have their history in). Now for responsibility... I can't really say because I don't think like that. I feel like creative laziness ("Its magic[period goes here]") is a contributing factor plus the fact that one habits and conventions are established they are hard to break.

But I like this idea. I kind of gone from "How to solve this?" to "Why hasn't this been solved already?" when I realized that solving this problem is easy. OK not really easy, but way easier to solve than one would think just looking at D&D.


There's no solution. Either the Fighter starts useless and fights an uphill battle that he never wins, or he starts out fantastic (just to be interesting compared to the Wizard) and never really does anything better or new.What? I mean completely ignoring the fact you have implicitly ruled out scaling down the wizard, you think that Hercules is as high as a physically-empowered character can go? You have heard of Dragon Ball right?

Not that making everyone absurdity powerful is the solution I would pick myself. But it is a solution in that it exists and it would solve that particular issue.

[Quertus]

I couldn't think of a better, succinct word to call it, but I mean for any scenario a character does stuff out of combat.

In combat vs out of combat utility, perhaps?


Anybody can Roleplay, but a Fighter does nothing to assist in doing it productively. A Rogue gets some skills, a Bard can persuade people, but a Fighter only gains things that assist in combat (at least, with the newer editions).

Anybody can roleplay. Anybody can also take actions in and out of combat. Fighters don't get many explicit buttons to push outside of combat. I guess it depends on how much your group likes player skills (I'm personally a fan) as to how much that matters.


Sure, that's a niche problem, but consider the kinds of things you'd expect a Fighter to be able to assist with in a non-combat scenario, using his Fighter-specific skillset:


Intimidate people.
Hunt for food.
Track a target.
Climb something.
Carry something.
Watch for danger



I know several "Fighters" IRL; I would trust them, on average, to about half that list.

However, they all have numerous *other* useful skills.


I'm not sure about how it is in other editions, but most of those are replicated in 5e as level 1 and 2 spells and done better. A 5e Fighter can only pick about 2-3 of those to do. A 5e Wizard starts level 1 with 6 leveled spells.

2e - the best RPG - gave everyone an increasing number of skills as they leveled. Yes, Fighters got slightly fewer, but they generally ruled the roost anyway.


I could see a concern where the Fighter would be considered valuable if the Wizard ran out of resources, but I've seen more DMs view that more as a hazard than a goal.

IMO (and in the opinion of Quertus, my signature academia mage, for whom this account is named), that's backwards-thinking. Quertus lets the muggles attempt to solve problems using their infinite replenishable resources before allocating any of his valuable, limited resources to solving the problem magically.

I'm not quite as crazy as Quertus, but I fully agree that the cheaper solution is generally better. The limited, powerful resources should generally be the fallback plan if the unlimited resources prove inadequate.


This is why in my long-ongoing hunt for a system, one of the requirements is that magic is a thing that characters can learn, and learning more of it takes more build resources, and its a tradeoff with being able to do other things; and another requirement is that magic enhances or bridges or offers alternatives with tradeoffs, it doesn't replace or negate.

Hmmm... I'm still trying to figure out the difference between "teleporting inside or corroding the lock replaces" and "kicking in the door or having a man on the inside replaces". Also, trying to figure out the hate for my beloved "replacement" minigame.

+X to Y is boring. Handing the BBEG flowers and proposing to them is interesting. "You are my quest". At least, that's my opinion.


Hercules is also a demi-god. For a DnD-esc Fighter to hit that fantastical level of power, you're talking about the end of several real-time years of playing.

The Fighter starts being redundant at level 1. "Hercules", the Fighter, finally catches up to those early level Wizard features around level 15 or so. But...now the Wizard doesn't really care. Not when he can teleport regularly or drop meteors from the sky.

Rather, if the Fighter at level 1 started out as useful as Hercules, how is the Fighter supposed to scale from there? At level 5, is he supposed to pull an Atlas and hold up the sky? WHere do you go from there?


There's no solution. Either the Fighter starts useless and fights an uphill battle that he never wins, or he starts out fantastic (just to be interesting compared to the Wizard) and never really does anything better or new.

Fantastic to be interesting? Sure. Fantastic to be competent, or balanced? Hardly. In fact, at low OP, the 1st level Fighter is usually OP compared to the Wizard, in the editions of D&D I've played.

Could a 20th level Muggle* pull his own weight partying with a Wizard 20? No. He'd have already sniped all their foes, unseen, before Wizard got there. And was using ventriloquism and voices to answer the Wizard's Divinations (correctly, btw) after he replaced the Wizard's Divinations spell components with Foldier's crystals as a joke.

* A hypothetical, completely mundane** class
** Still gets WBL


Goodberries?

your wizard is a druid. The pointy hat is a lie. You should've guessed from the brown bear "familiar".

*druid wizard looks uncomfortable and shifty*

*suddenly pulls out flaming acorns and starts tossing them at us while running away screaming "Magic missile! Magic missile!*

Thank you for the laugh!

[Mechalich]

What? I mean completely ignoring the fact you have implicitly ruled out scaling down the wizard, you think that Hercules is as high as a physically-empowered character can go? You have heard of Dragon Ball right?

Not that making everyone absurdity powerful is the solution I would pick myself. But it is a solution in that it exists and it would solve that particular issue.

Well, even in the Dragonball case, there's limits to the game utility of power combat power. Bulma, despite being a completely normal human (nominally anyway), keeps being given stuff even as the power level accelerates to universe smashing because she's the only one with out-of-combat technical skills.

You could make a character in a TTRPG with the abilities: flies with lightspeed perfect maneuverability, immune to damage, auto-hits one target per round for infinite damage, and though they'd be utterly dominant in combat their ability to do things out of combat would still limit their ability to contribute to the game. The Hulk - who has most of these traits (he can't fly, but his ability to leap mountains mostly makes up for it) struggles to contribute to the Avengers when it's not time to smash, to the point that he spends a lot of his time converted into a completely different character with other traits in order to be useful.

'Hurting things' is only one sphere of gameplay, so no matter how good you are at it that's not going to be enough unless that's the only thing that ever happens in game. D&D was built out from tabletop wargames where that actually was true, and 1e and 2e AD&D had very few rules for what happened outside of combat aside from a very specific set of thief abilities so everyone could mostly share things ad hoc. Compare Baldur's Gate II, where the class and stats of your lead character are largely irrelevant, to Pathfinder: Kingmaker, where they matter a great deal and skill choice is essential for major challenges, to the point of influencing conversation options with the final boss. The central issue being that 'spellcasting' is sufficiently broad that is can be applied, with a little creativity, to pretty much any conceivable task (in a game like Mage: the Ascension, this is explicitly true). As a result even non-casters who are given a sphere of things to be good at, like the Rogue's stealth and skullduggery or the Ranger's wilderness lore are only good some of the time while the wizard's abilities are always useful. You don't have to balance power alone, you have to balance applicability.

A good comparison example is Aquaman. He's plenty good in a fight, can hold his own against other top-tier threats no prob, an he also has a set of ancillary powers on top of that, but those powers are only useful in an aquatic environment. On land he's just a big and tough dude. Meanwhile if you're Green Lantern, you're just as good if not better in a fight, but your power suite of conjure anything you can imagine is always useful. If you had to consider 100 randomly generated Justice Missions, and you're Superman drafting your team, okay, they'll be a handful where Aquaman is the definitive number one pick, but most of the time you're only picking him if you can think of anything better. Meanwhile, Green Lantern's always coming off the board with a high pick.

[Ignimortis]

That's kind of a loaded way of phrasing it.

Prefering a more low-key or grounded world is a preferance, and its just as valid as any other.

Imagine saying the same thing about say, Game of Thrones or even The Lord of the Rings, tremendously popular and succsesful fantasy works which do not incude omnipresent over the top super-powers.

Those things you mentioned don't have mages that can shape the world at a whim. Their fighters might not be fantastical...but their mages are so close to being real-world charlatans who have some secret knowledge about how things work, instead of reality-breaking shenanigans, that it doesn't matter.

Meanwhile D&D has always had fantastical mages, but struggled a lot with fantastical warriors. Since D&D is the ur-RPG, many of the systems that followed it had similar problems. As someone who, admittedly, hasn't played a lot of different systems (more or less D&D 3.5/4/5, PF, VtM, Shadowrun and a few heartbreakers based on D&D or ST), I notice this stuff in almost everything that doesn't presume explicitly that you're playing at a very specific power level or a very specific type of character.

D&D always had that AFAICR (3.5 was both the worst with the wizard/figher split and the best with focused list/martial adept split), VtM just makes everyone magical by default and it's pretty much fine. Shadowrun (at least 5e) has serious issues with Magicrun, but Awakened characters are less overpoweringly strong and more...easily versatile while not really losing strength compared to mundanes. I've been reading the Exalted 3e corebook and though I like what I see, it's explicitly magical and it's magic of the same type for everything, like Vampire, so it might not be the best solution for a more generic game.

[Florian]

@Ignimortis:

Try a slightly different perspective: The failure of the systems you mentioned is establishing the "mundane spectrum" first, then adding the "magical spectrum" with a hard barrier in-between those two (Magic/Cyber: Yes/No?) as a second layer on top of that.

The alternative is handling both on the same spectrum, possible with the result that we now would have a "hybrid spectrum" on top of that, depending on how we allow both to interact.

Spells in D&D map to their own 0 to 9 spectrum, which has no correlation whatsoever to other elements, be it BAB, skill points and so on. The only time that worked was within the premisses of the original game and setting, with the massive post-apo, Dying Earth vibe of magic being completely forgotten knowledge and spells being the equivalent of getting your hands on the physical print-out of a random wikipedia page (mostly thru dungeon delving).

Other system have a parallel growth on both spectrums, including identical caps. In short, while a trained fencer and a mage pumping power into a "sword of air" spell will advance in parallel, a trained fencer using a "sword of air" spell will beat them both.

[Cluedrew]

+X to Y is boring. Handing the BBEG flowers and proposing to them is interesting. "You are my quest". At least, that's my opinion.I really hope that there is a longer story behind this. Is there?

As for the main idea itself I fall into the camp of the middle way. Which is to say I like open ended rules that lie between no rule for something and a push button option. I have found these in Fate (might be some in Fudge) and Powered by the Apocalypse. There are probably others. But I will explain it by example, an Apocalypse World hack's Go Aggro variant (or intimidate skill in D&D terms, I can't remember which one it was).

So the move basically worked like this: when you threaten someone with leverage and they believe you will do it roll, on a strong hit they have (incentives) to give in or just do if they are a NPC and on a weak hit they have smaller incentives to give in. Actually I might be mixing several moves in my head but this illustrates my point anyways. Also some other points but I will be skipping over those points as they are different topics.

Those incentives are very well defined. Some of them are completely defined in mechanical terms, the softest is a debuff that has a defined effect but the duration is a bit open to interpretation. That part is mechanically defined. What is not defined is what is leverage. The standard example is a big weapon you can hurt them with. But other things work, like a big weapon you can hurt someone they care about or the ability to impose sanctions against their organizational or childhood secrets you could reveal to the world.

This is the best place for me because no rules... well in role-playing you can get something from nothing and I have done text base role-playing with no rules at all. But if I am going to use rules those should provide something. Defining everything means you get situations where not only what you can do is defined, but the how you can do it. And that gives you a button you can push. In the middle, you have given me a tool I can do something with, but left the how I use it open. And that is the sweet spot for me. (I could go on trying to pin down the exact thresholds, but I feel this give the general point.)

Also did you see my other reply to you? It came in at an awkward time just before yours and possibly out of sight so I could see it being missed.


Well, even in the Dragonball case, there's limits to the game utility of power combat power. Bulma, despite being a completely normal human (nominally anyway), keeps being given stuff even as the power level accelerates to universe smashing because she's the only one with out-of-combat technical skills.Yes, I mean I wouldn't just port Dragonball but if I had to try and make a fighter that could contribute with a level 20 wizard I would scale things that high. Through in the ability to carry someone while moving at absurd speeds and you have an effective replacement for teleport. Or go a different direction and the fighter can spend 15 minutes to set up a protected shelter that can fit 20 people, provides cover and magic protection* to those inside of it.

* Yes, without being magic itself. This breaks the "only counter to magic is more magic" rule and I believe this is a good thing.

[Bohandas]

[QUOTE=Mechalich;23869346]'Hurting things' is only one sphere of gameplay,[/url]

What we really need is to expand the limits of what's being hurt by them, and change them from the just guy that fights people, into the guy that fights people, and smashes down walls and doors, and uproots trees, and who cuts holes on the spacetime continuum for quick travel.

[Cluedrew]

'Hurting things' is only one sphere of gameplay,

What we really need is to expand the limits of what's being hurt by them, [...].I prefer to extent the limits of what you can do with physical power. Simple things include better athletics for getting around. Enchanting is out but creating high quality goods by hand still seems appropriate. If you would stretch a little massage therapy is kind of physical, maybe they could use that as an out-of-combat healing option? (Leaning on HP as a energy as well as any actual wounds to make it less mystic.

Although I do remember a conversation where we created "wish-complete" abilities for each archetype and the martial's was destroy anything. So that the hurt more method could also work.

[Man_Over_Game]

Yes, I mean I wouldn't just port Dragonball but if I had to try and make a fighter that could contribute with a level 20 wizard I would scale things that high. Through in the ability to carry someone while moving at absurd speeds and you have an effective replacement for teleport. Or go a different direction and the fighter can spend 15 minutes to set up a protected shelter that can fit 20 people, provides cover and magic protection* to those inside of it.

* Yes, without being magic itself. This breaks the "only counter to magic is more magic" rule and I believe this is a good thing.

I like this idea.

[Talakeal]

Well, even in the Dragonball case, there's limits to the game utility of power combat power. Bulma, despite being a completely normal human (nominally anyway), keeps being given stuff even as the power level accelerates to universe smashing because she's the only one with out-of-combat technical skills.

You could make a character in a TTRPG with the abilities: flies with lightspeed perfect maneuverability, immune to damage, auto-hits one target per round for infinite damage, and though they'd be utterly dominant in combat their ability to do things out of combat would still limit their ability to contribute to the game. The Hulk - who has most of these traits (he can't fly, but his ability to leap mountains mostly makes up for it) struggles to contribute to the Avengers when it's not time to smash, to the point that he spends a lot of his time converted into a completely different character with other traits in order to be useful.

'Hurting things' is only one sphere of gameplay, so no matter how good you are at it that's not going to be enough unless that's the only thing that ever happens in game. D&D was built out from tabletop wargames where that actually was true, and 1e and 2e AD&D had very few rules for what happened outside of combat aside from a very specific set of thief abilities so everyone could mostly share things ad hoc. Compare Baldur's Gate II, where the class and stats of your lead character are largely irrelevant, to Pathfinder: Kingmaker, where they matter a great deal and skill choice is essential for major challenges, to the point of influencing conversation options with the final boss. The central issue being that 'spellcasting' is sufficiently broad that is can be applied, with a little creativity, to pretty much any conceivable task (in a game like Mage: the Ascension, this is explicitly true). As a result even non-casters who are given a sphere of things to be good at, like the Rogue's stealth and skullduggery or the Ranger's wilderness lore are only good some of the time while the wizard's abilities are always useful. You don't have to balance power alone, you have to balance applicability.

A good comparison example is Aquaman. He's plenty good in a fight, can hold his own against other top-tier threats no prob, an he also has a set of ancillary powers on top of that, but those powers are only useful in an aquatic environment. On land he's just a big and tough dude. Meanwhile if you're Green Lantern, you're just as good if not better in a fight, but your power suite of conjure anything you can imagine is always useful. If you had to consider 100 randomly generated Justice Missions, and you're Superman drafting your team, okay, they'll be a handful where Aquaman is the definitive number one pick, but most of the time you're only picking him if you can think of anything better. Meanwhile, Green Lantern's always coming off the board with a high pick.

This really seems to be an argument against one note characters rather than martial characters.

I agree that one note characters are bad, is anyone really arguing for them?

Pulp heroes aren't just fighters, they are leaders, detectives, thieves, poets, charmers, trackers, scientists, alchemists, doctors, tinkers, artists, athletes, and a million other mundane skills that are non-magical but still denied to 3.X fighters.


Those things you mentioned don't have mages that can shape the world at a whim. Their fighters might not be fantastical...but their mages are so close to being real-world charlatans who have some secret knowledge about how things work, instead of reality-breaking shenanigans, that it doesn't matter.

Meanwhile D&D has always had fantastical mages, but struggled a lot with fantastical warriors. Since D&D is the ur-RPG, many of the systems that followed it had similar problems. As someone who, admittedly, hasn't played a lot of different systems (more or less D&D 3.5/4/5, PF, VtM, Shadowrun and a few heartbreakers based on D&D or ST), I notice this stuff in almost everything that doesn't presume explicitly that you're playing at a very specific power level or a very specific type of character.

D&D always had that AFAICR (3.5 was both the worst with the wizard/figher split and the best with focused list/martial adept split), VtM just makes everyone magical by default and it's pretty much fine. Shadowrun (at least 5e) has serious issues with Magicrun, but Awakened characters are less overpoweringly strong and more...easily versatile while not really losing strength compared to mundanes. I've been reading the Exalted 3e corebook and though I like what I see, it's explicitly magical and it's magic of the same type for everything, like Vampire, so it might not be the best solution for a more generic game.

Right.. but why is it the low key martials that are holding the system back and not the over the top mages?

Personally I believe that, as with most things, the solution lies somewhere in the middle.

3.X is particular bad in its implementation, martials suck too much even when there are no casters around, and casters can break the game in infinite ways even if they don't have to worry about muggle tag-alongs.


Yes, I mean I wouldn't just port Dragonball but if I had to try and make a fighter that could contribute with a level 20 wizard I would scale things that high. Through in the ability to carry someone while moving at absurd speeds and you have an effective replacement for teleport. Or go a different direction and the fighter can spend 15 minutes to set up a protected shelter that can fit 20 people, provides cover and magic protection* to those inside of it.

* Yes, without being magic itself. This breaks the "only counter to magic is more magic" rule and I believe this is a good thing.

Does this help anything though?

Those feats are still only mid-level spells; Goku's only really amazing ability is that he can punch stuff real good, and an uber-charger fighter can already do that.

[Cluedrew]

I like this idea.Thanks, an idea is forming for a Soldier class, with sub-classes for military specializations. (I like more focused flavour in class and "military" is just focused enough while being kind of flexible, they don't even have to actively be in the military.) Thing is I don't know enough about D&D 5e (the edition I am most likely to play again) to do it properly.


Does this help anything though?

Those feats are still only mid-level spells; Goku's only really amazing ability is that he can punch stuff real good, and an uber-charger fighter can already do that.I think it helps, but that is not to say it solves the problem in one fell swoop. Really the only way to do that would be to make a martial class that covers all the martial archetypes and is as stupid powerful as a wizard at max level. But I'm interested enough in that power level to develop whole new classes for it. Actually I'm not sure if I am motivated enough to the first 10 levels of such a class. I should put that work into my homebrew system that has kind of stalled out recently.

Still I think it could be done, figure out things that can be done with effectively limitless strength and physical coordination beside hitting things. Throw Charisma in there or non-magical applications of Intelligence and Wisdom to fill up and gaps and I see no reason why you couldn't do it, especially one who knows more about D&D than I.

And if I am in a different system where I only have to measure up to an incredibly powerful wizard instead of an absurdly powerful one, all the better.

[Ignimortis]

Right.. but why is it the low key martials that are holding the system back and not the over the top mages?

Personally I believe that, as with most things, the solution lies somewhere in the middle.

3.X is particular bad in its implementation, martials suck too much even when there are no casters around, and casters can break the game in infinite ways even if they don't have to worry about muggle tag-alongs.


Low-key martials are holding the system back more than the over-the-top mages because they're the standard many people expect. I think that if you remove the Fighter from the D&D paradigm, and replaced it with a high-power martial, I'd say the outcry would be much higher than if you removed the Wizard and replaced them with something closer to focused mages of 3.5 - most people play spellcasters thematically anyway.

Actually, about 3.5...it's both the worst D&D has ever been in that regard, and the best. CHB is terrible - we have the lowest of lows with Fighter, Monk and Paladin, and the highest of highs with Cleric, Druid and Wizard. But the splats can remedy that - take focused mages and martial adepts instead of PHB classes, and suddenly the gap is much, much closer, especially if the mage players don't try and hyperoptimize to get some sort of access to the usual T1 tricks. Suddenly, nobody is good at everything, but everyone is good at something, and you can work together to become more than the sum of your parts.

[Kyutaru]

Honestly, the biggest issue with spellcasters today is that they assume they have free access to all magic in the book. I greatly miss the books of 2e that blatantly spelled out for the stubborn or stupid that spell availability is 100% the DM's decision. There were blatantly overpowered magic spells in 2e that DMs regularly nerfed or disallowed. There were also countless nigh useless magic spells that served little to no purpose outside of roleplaying some cantrip that a wizard once did in a book. Why would you ever need a magic spell that makes your clothes dry??

If more DMs took charge and limited casters the way they should be limited, this whole quadratic wizard thing would be nonsense. One way to force people to use less optimal spells is by making optimal magic EXCEEDINGLY RARE AND SPECIAL! Having access to Haste is not a given. It's a trump card, your best tool in the arsenal. Heck, many NPC wizards don't even have the top end spells despite having Intelligence scores higher than you. Clearly they are aware of how broken they are so why don't they have them? Availability is not universal.

But since RAW it sort of is, and all DM Discretion gets treated like homebrew, people will continue to complain about what casters are capable of doing. It gets worse every time a splatbook comes out with some stupid feat or new spell that makes the problem worse. Heck, even 3rd edition had to come out with a new player's handbook to explicitly nerf spells people were abusing that the DM could have done on his own. Far too much hand holding is this age of D&D where tabletop gamers expect the rules to be as ironclad as a war game.

Rant aside, I think forcing your wizards to specialize and preventing them from being able to use the standard swiss army knife of spells that every wizard ever takes ever no matter what is the simplest solution because it literally requires no effort. Player wants to cast something insane? Tell him no.

Magic the Gathering had this problem many times. Some new spell comes out that has crazy interaction potential with another spell. So don't allow the same deck to have both spells. They didn't ban cards overly often but they did split them up by COLOR, by SPEED, and by BLOCK. Sorry, that overpowered spell you want to use from Alpha set is incompatible with the modern sets in this format. You're free to use them in a no-holds-barred Vintage match but here we respect common decency. Here we have limits and rules and you can't just take any 60 cards in the game and use them together.

[Rhedyn]

Idk this is a pretty D&D specific problem that any other RPG solves if they try.

For most generics, once things get to "Superhero" every one is a superheroes. You don't run into the issue of people having Super Magic while the other guy is good on his BMX.

[Kyutaru]

Idk this is a pretty D&D specific problem that any other RPG solves if they try.

For most generics, once things get to "Superhero" every one is a superheroes. You don't run into the issue of people having Super Magic while the other guy is good on his BMX.

Part of the problem is that spellbooks keep expanding with hundreds of options while Fighters don't get additional feat slots and can only use two weapons at a time. The more spells you add to the game, the stronger the wizard gets. The more weapons or feats you add to the game, the more OPTIONS the fighter has to choose from but they are still mutually exclusive.

Stop letting casters take the best of everything. Control their power limits yourself. My player's illusionist is not even ALLOWED to have Fireball. If he wants to cast evocation nukes, he can use shadow magic. Those spells are reserved for invokers. They are their trump cards. No you may not splash them.

2e did a great job limiting casters with school opposition. Choices had to be made and you were even forced to prepare spells of your own school. Opening that up to being a free-for-all was not so wizards could cherry pick the strongest stuff but so that players didn't feel artificially handicapped by the rules to create the characters they wanted. You want to be a Necromancer who uses Illusions? Oh sorry you can't. That's what removing the limits was meant to cure. Not enabling your wizard to become an Archmage.

[Talakeal]

Low-key martials are holding the system back more than the over-the-top mages because they're the standard many people expect. I think that if you remove the Fighter from the D&D paradigm, and replaced it with a high-power martial, I'd say the outcry would be much higher than if you removed the Wizard and replaced them with something closer to focused mages of 3.5 - most people play spellcasters thematically anyway.

I suppose that's one way to put it.

So, using that logic, would you also say that pizza parlors and hamburger joints are holding back dining because they are far more popular and therefore plentiful than more niche foods like Ethiopian restaurants?




Actually, about 3.5...it's both the worst D&D has ever been in that regard, and the best. CHB is terrible - we have the lowest of lows with Fighter, Monk and Paladin, and the highest of highs with Cleric, Druid and Wizard. But the splats can remedy that - take focused mages and martial adepts instead of PHB classes, and suddenly the gap is much, much closer, especially if the mage players don't try and hyperoptimize to get some sort of access to the usual T1 tricks. Suddenly, nobody is good at everything, but everyone is good at something, and you can work together to become more than the sum of your parts.

That's certainly an opinion. I certainly have zero interest in playing any of those classes, and I don't think I am alone there.

Also, can you really say that it is more balanced than 4E?

[Jama7301]

L

Actually, about 3.5...it's both the worst D&D has ever been in that regard, and the best. CHB is terrible - we have the lowest of lows with Fighter, Monk and Paladin, and the highest of highs with Cleric, Druid and Wizard. But the splats can remedy that - take focused mages and martial adepts instead of PHB classes, and suddenly the gap is much, much closer, especially if the mage players don't try and hyperoptimize to get some sort of access to the usual T1 tricks. Suddenly, nobody is good at everything, but everyone is good at something, and you can work together to become more than the sum of your parts.

Splat diving is awful. Having to get Complete Mage to just switch Wizards for Focused Specialists, and Book of 9 Swords for Martial Adepts, plus the core 3 books for general rules and creatures, that's a big ol' pain. It's one of the worst things about 3.5.

[Kyutaru]

Splat diving is awful. Having to get Complete Mage to just switch Wizards for Focused Specialists, and Book of 9 Swords for Martial Adepts, plus the core 3 books for general rules and creatures, that's a big ol' pain. It's one of the worst things about 3.5.

Heh, but it's kind of the point. The company exists to sell books. They're going to find ways to make you buy them.

[Jama7301]

Heh, but it's kind of the point. The company exists to sell books. They're going to find ways to make you buy them.

Sure. Sell them books. I'm just one person who got tired of it, haha.

I just don't like how excessive it felt in 3.5. Started to feel like a chore to find anything interesting and useful.

Edit: Idly, I wonder how many more useful spells and magic-focused classes/PrC were in the splats versus helpful martial things. I'm sure it's skewed by spell lists being a lot larger than like, Feat lists, but I'm sure there's some metric that seems like a reasonable comparison.

[awa]

Sure. Sell them books. I'm just one person who got tired of it, haha.

I just don't like how excessive it felt in 3.5. Started to feel like a chore to find anything interesting and useful.

Edit: Idly, I wonder how many more useful spells and magic-focused classes/PrC were in the splats versus helpful martial things. I'm sure it's skewed by spell lists being a lot larger than like, Feat lists, but I'm sure there's some metric that seems like a reasonable comparison.

I very much agree with this even when I owned the books actually finding the stuff I wanted was a huge chore. If the book was owned by the dm or another player the odds of me using something from it dropped to practically nill. Worse was when a dm decided to ban stuff outside of books he owned fine in theory but when i only owned books he didn't it became problematic. Thank god for the internet that compiled all these things in sort-able lists without that I would have been in trouble.

[Quertus]

I really hope that there is a longer story behind this. Is there?

There are numerous stories; none of them mine. C'mon, you think a) I've had a GM who could run with that, let alone at the same time as b) a party that wouldn't find that an anticlimactic ending or c) that I'd **** over my party that way? I might try it in a 1-on-1 game, but I prefer double-digit players. The quote is from "Kuba & the two strings"


As for the main idea itself I fall into the camp of the middle way. Which is to say I like open ended rules that lie between no rule for something and a push button option. I have found these in Fate (might be some in Fudge) and Powered by the Apocalypse. There are probably others. But I will explain it by example, an Apocalypse World hack's Go Aggro variant (or intimidate skill in D&D terms, I can't remember which one it was).

So the move basically worked like this: when you threaten someone with leverage and they believe you will do it roll, on a strong hit they have (incentives) to give in or just do if they are a NPC and on a weak hit they have smaller incentives to give in. Actually I might be mixing several moves in my head but this illustrates my point anyways. Also some other points but I will be skipping over those points as they are different topics.

Those incentives are very well defined. Some of them are completely defined in mechanical terms, the softest is a debuff that has a defined effect but the duration is a bit open to interpretation. That part is mechanically defined. What is not defined is what is leverage. The standard example is a big weapon you can hurt them with. But other things work, like a big weapon you can hurt someone they care about or the ability to impose sanctions against their organizational or childhood secrets you could reveal to the world.

This is the best place for me because no rules... well in role-playing you can get something from nothing and I have done text base role-playing with no rules at all. But if I am going to use rules those should provide something. Defining everything means you get situations where not only what you can do is defined, but the how you can do it. And that gives you a button you can push. In the middle, you have given me a tool I can do something with, but left the how I use it open. And that is the sweet spot for me. (I could go on trying to pin down the exact thresholds, but I feel this give the general point.)

This sounds like one of those places where our desires differ. Some day, my senile mind may think to make a thread about this, but don't hold your breath.


Also did you see my other reply to you? It came in at an awkward time just before yours and possibly out of sight so I could see it being missed.

Hmmm...


That makes sense, a lot of sense actually. Especially considering how that reflects with mechanics in other types of games (particularly war games and strategy games that RPGs have their history in). Now for responsibility... I can't really say because I don't think like that. I feel like creative laziness ("Its magic[period goes here]") is a contributing factor plus the fact that one habits and conventions are established they are hard to break.

That's fair. It's a little bigger than I said. Hopefully, once we get good muggles, we can break the D&D habits of limiting their Wizards to comparative mediocrity.


But I like this idea. I kind of gone from "How to solve this?" to "Why hasn't this been solved already?" when I realized that solving this problem is easy. OK not really easy, but way easier to solve than one would think just looking at D&D.

I'm glad you like it. I agree that it should be "easy" to fix. I just don't like muggles (I like my characters Magical), so I'm not the one who should be dictating how they can contribute.



'Hurting things' is only one sphere of gameplay,

What we really need is to expand the limits of what's being hurt by them, and change them from the just guy that fights people, into the guy that fights people, and smashes down walls and doors, and uproots trees, and who cuts holes on the spacetime continuum for quick travel.

While I don't disagree for balance, I know some will for not being mundane.

It's a lack of creativity that people cannot make useful mundanes.


If you would stretch a little massage therapy is kind of physical, maybe they could use that as an out-of-combat healing option? (Leaning on HP as a energy as well as any actual wounds to make it less mystic.

IRL, my mom beat cancer with massage, so I'd say it's not a stretch.


Right.. but why is it the low key martials that are holding the system back and not the over the top mages?

Because that's not how those words are usually used?

When there was inequality in the party, Obi Wan doesn't complain that Annikan can do so much more than he can, and is "holding him back". When the class has both gifted and special needs students, and the teacher has to teach to the slowest learner, they don't complain that the gifted kids are holding the class back. When I'm acting beside, eh, Christina Ricci, I don't complain that her acting skills are "holding me back".

The Fighter not being able to do anything but fight could be argued to be "holding D&D back" in numerous ways. D&D has impetus to *not* develop more detailed noncombat minigames;
The D&D Wizard catches flak for being "too powerful", despite even the 3e Wizard only being mediocre compared to Wizards in other games / genre / media;
D&D adventures are forced to coddle the enemic Fighter, and cannot "be all that they can be", in either power or scope.

If all the Fighter can do is fight things, then you cannot make a module that doesn't involve fighting things, else you make the Fighter an invalid character. That sounds like holding the game back to me.

[Talakeal]

When there was inequality in the party, Obi Wan doesn't complain that Annikan can do so much more than he can, and is "holding him back". When the class has both gifted and special needs students, and the teacher has to teach to the slowest learner, they don't complain that the gifted kids are holding the class back. When I'm acting beside, eh, Christina Ricci, I don't complain that her acting skills are "holding me back".

The Fighter not being able to do anything but fight could be argued to be "holding D&D back" in numerous ways. D&D has impetus to *not* develop more detailed noncombat minigames;
The D&D Wizard catches flak for being "too powerful", despite even the 3e Wizard only being mediocre compared to Wizards in other games / genre / media;
D&D adventures are forced to coddle the enemic Fighter, and cannot "be all that they can be", in either power or scope.

If all the Fighter can do is fight things, then you cannot make a module that doesn't involve fighting things, else you make the Fighter an invalid character. That sounds like holding the game back to me.

At no point was I ever, at all, defending a character who can "only fight".

This was a conversation about having viable non-magical characters, not about one-dimensional ones.

For example, in my current campaign the party sorceress is by far the most one dimensional person in the party as she has taken nothing but direct damage spells, while everyone else has a plethora of non-combat skills and abilities being mundane.


Edit: And, to refute your acting analogy, bigger and more over the top does not mean better or more skilled. If I was acting alongside someone like Calculon from Futurama I could easily say that he is holding me back by forcing me to abandon all subtlety in my performance to keep up with his bombastic overacting.

[Man_Over_Game]

If all the Fighter can do is fight things, then you cannot make a module that doesn't involve fighting things, else you make the Fighter an invalid character. That sounds like holding the game back to me.

I don't necessarily like the idea of making the Fighter only about combat, but I am saying that's what the DnD trend has been.

That's not necessarily saying that the Fighter Player can't do anything out of combat, but that the Fighter part of the Fighter Player isn't adding anything to the non-combat elements of the game. Anything a Fighter can do out of combat, anyone else can do better. The Fighter is limited to the default, which is a pretty low bar.

In order for intra-party balance to be a thing, there are two options:

Have the Wizard would be the opposite, having only non-combat abilities and not providing anything for combat.
Have the Fighter provide as much non-combat utility as the Wizard does.


Option 1 is the same problem that you're describing (now describing Wizards), so that's out.
Option 2 *might* be possible, but it would require a lot of creativity from the developers, and a lot of pulling back on what Wizards are capable of.

If Non-combat was just as important as Combat, it almost seems impossible to make Fighters balanced with Wizards. We've gotten the balance for combat down in 5e, now it's time to start balancing around everything else.

[Cluedrew]

This sounds like one of those places where our desires differ. Some day, my senile mind may think to make a thread about this, but don't hold your breath.That would be an interesting thread Quertus and Cluedrew Talk About Their Differences. I'd try it, although there have been sections of other threads dedicated to it before.

For instance I am not going to go over how what the two of us consider magical is quite different.


It's a lack of creativity that people cannot make useful mundanes.Quick question: Are we talking about creativity in design or creativity in use? Creativity in design, of course. But for creativity in use you need tools to be creative with and some times you just don't have enough of those.

[Kyutaru]

Anyone remember how d20 Modern had six classes, one for each attribute?

You're not a fighter, you're just a strong guy. If you want to be a fighter, take weapon feats.

Some of these arguments sound like that's what people would prefer we have. An attribute that defines your character instead of the class.

[CharonsHelper]

Anyone remember how d20 Modern had six classes, one for each attribute?

You're not a fighter, you're just a strong guy. If you want to be a fighter, take weapon feats.

Some of these arguments sound like that's what people would prefer we have. An attribute that defines your character instead of the class.

It was a different beast. Not comparable to D&D style classes.

Ignoring the mediocre balance (Fast hero was the best; at least dipping at least a level for the +3 defense boost was VERY common - and Smart/Charismatic heroes were bad - though admittedly, I remember when Naruto d20 built upon them and made them reasonably balanced by giving Strong/Tough/Dedicated bonus feats & making skills VERY important) you weren't expected to actually stick with one class. The system assumed a LOT of dipping, and that you'd jump into the advanced classes starting at level 4.

[Mechalich]

There are certainly other versions of the D20 system that have less disparity than D&D 3.X. Star Wars Saga, for one, is a lot better. The Soldier class gets a bunch of useful out of combat skills like Mechanic and the Jedi class has the least skill points of any class in the game. Force powers, because of the weird way Saga's hybrid skill system works, are massively OP at low-levels and stupidly weak at high levels but actually fairly balanced in the mid-levels. They are, however, just as vulnerable to utility gain via power bloat in the same way spells are, which seems to be a recurring problem.

5e actually manages to preserve a greater amount of balance through the curious fact of simply having less books due to its pathetic publishing schedule. The problem is that this is not a path to profitability and most game systems, if given the chance to spew out new out new character options, will always take it.

[Quertus]

One thing that I think has been overlooked in this thread is the beauty of the Fighter class. It's right there in the name: "Fighter". It's actually a brilliantly designed class, optimal for those who only care about war gaming, and want to zone out during the "talky bits" (ie, everything else). If they wanted a primarily combat character with a little more range, they ought to telegraph it similarly, by calling the class a "Ranger". :smallwink:

Really, the Fighter doesn't need to be changed. The übercharger can contribute to combat as much as needed. If you want to contribute outside combat, you should pick a different muggle class. So, what's needed is that Muggle class.

-----

Many threads ago, I suggested the idea of making all characters "gestalt", as an inherent part of character creation. The idea was, you choose how your character contributes in combat as one side of the gestalt, and how your character contributes outside of combat as the other side of the gestalt. Arguably, you could break it down into smaller bins, like "survival", "Exploration", "talky bits", etc. Perhaps "how" should be replaced with "what tools your character comes with to".

I like the idea of different packages having different point costs, and the players getting to mix and match as they see fit. Want to be a Fighter / Sherlock Holmes with Cthulhu-style ritual magic? Or a combat Mage who relies on stealth out of combat? It's all mix and match class features.


At no point was I ever, at all, defending a character who can "only fight".

But that *is* the Fighter, which is part of how he could be argued to be holding D&D back. Here's not weak (see übercharger), he's just one-dimensional.


This was a conversation about having viable non-magical characters, not about one-dimensional ones.

I suspect those might be related, to your standards of "viable", at least. I think that the pure war gamer might be happy with the übercharger.


For example, in my current campaign the party sorceress is by far the most one dimensional person in the party as she has taken nothing but direct damage spells, while everyone else has a plethora of non-combat skills and abilities being mundane.

Cool. You should probably post those abilities here, for reference, for those who cannot imagine a muggle being useful outside combat.


Edit: And, to refute your acting analogy, bigger and more over the top does not mean better or more skilled. If I was acting alongside someone like Calculon from Futurama I could easily say that he is holding me back by forcing me to abandon all subtlety in my performance to keep up with his bombastic overacting.

Is Christina Ricci known for "bombastic overacting"? I picked a name at random, despite the fact that I may not have seen one of her movies since Adam's Family.


I don't necessarily like the idea of making the Fighter only about combat, but I am saying that's what the DnD trend has been.

That's not necessarily saying that the Fighter Player can't do anything out of combat, but that the Fighter part of the Fighter Player isn't adding anything to the non-combat elements of the game. Anything a Fighter can do out of combat, anyone else can do better. The Fighter is limited to the default, which is a pretty low bar.

In order for intra-party balance to be a thing, there are two options:

Have the Wizard would be the opposite, having only non-combat abilities and not providing anything for combat.
Have the Fighter provide as much non-combat utility as the Wizard does.


Option 1 is the same problem that you're describing (now describing Wizards), so that's out.
Option 2 *might* be possible, but it would require a lot of creativity from the developers, and a lot of pulling back on what Wizards are capable of.

If Non-combat was just as important as Combat, it almost seems impossible to make Fighters balanced with Wizards. We've gotten the balance for combat down in 5e, now it's time to start balancing around everything else.

ShadowRun certainly has some interesting ideas on that…


That would be an interesting thread Quertus and Cluedrew Talk About Their Differences. I'd try it, although there have been sections of other threads dedicated to it before.

For instance I am not going to go over how what the two of us consider magical is quite different.

It is? I don't remember that. Darn senility.


Quick question: Are we talking about creativity in design or creativity in use? Creativity in design, of course. But for creativity in use you need tools to be creative with and some times you just don't have enough of those.

Ostensibly, creativity in class design. But it's bigger than that.

"Tools" could come from your class, yes. They could also come from the world-building step. Or adventure design. Or from the character's background. Or from player skills. Or from literal tools.

If a Fighter literally has *no* tools to work with, it represents a failure at every level.

[Ignimortis]

I suppose that's one way to put it.

So, using that logic, would you also say that pizza parlors and hamburger joints are holding back dining because they are far more popular and therefore plentiful than more niche foods like Ethiopian restaurants?

Not sure if this analogy works out, TBH. But seeing as D&D has had a large influence over western perception of Fighters, it could be? You go to pizza parlors and hamburger joints because you know what you're gonna get for your money, even if the pizza is a bit too greasy and the hamburgers have a tendency to fall apart as you eat them. It's just less hassle and you're not worried you won't like it on some level anyway.



That's certainly an opinion. I certainly have zero interest in playing any of those classes, and I don't think I am alone there.

Well, the way I see it, there should be a default Fighter - but it should be more of a Rogue/Fighter gestalt. No Sneak Attack, keep everything else, give Mettle and all good saves. Durable, can shake off magic like it's nothing, very competent in lots of mundane activities - both combat and noncombat. If the game also has ritual-style casting for everyone, it should be totally fine.

And a Wizard-style class that's very versatile can be a 6-level caster with tons of slots to spare, but slow progression and less access. You pay in power for being a generalist, that sort of thing. Kinda like Ultimate Magus in some way - your versatility and ability to go all day are almost unparallelled, but you're lagging behind specialists who can only do things of one nature.



Also, can you really say that it is more balanced than 4E?

Not really, no. But my personal feeling of 4e is that it went a few steps too far in homogenization of things. Having everyone work off the same AEDU standard might not have been the best idea. Perhaps letting everyone have that A(t-will), but spreading E(ncounter) and D(aily) between classes would be better. Something like...Fighters get AE and some U, Rogues get AD and some U, casters get a very weak A, but more of E and D, and also some U?



The D&D Wizard catches flak for being "too powerful", despite even the 3e Wizard only being mediocre compared to Wizards in other games / genre / media

Wait, what? I mean, yes, media wizards are often more powerful than a wizard from, say, levels 1 to 10? But I don't think I've ever seen a wizard who would be as incredibly powerful as a 20-th level D&D 3e Wizard. The dude is functionally immortal, can create new planes of existence and reshape reality with a word.

[Arbane]

I don't necessarily like the idea of making the Fighter only about combat, but I am saying that's what the DnD trend has been.


Yup.

Every time a Fighty-type shows traces of being interesting it gets peeled off into a new class, leaving the pristine blandness of The Fighter.