Hot Take: D&D should eliminate spellcasting and replace it entirely

[ezekielraiden]

We've had a number of threads asking how we would fix martial characters. A handful of posters have suggested that spellcasters should be brought down closer to non-caster power levels, perhaps with the (usually admitted to be tedious) task of re-writing a large number of spells.

How about a different tack: Just scrap the spells. All of them. Every last one. Gone, poof, sayonara, good riddance to bad rubbish.

Obviously this does not mean that we leave classes that cast spells out in the cold. We would, of course, need to design a whole new system--or possibly set of systems--to replace spellcasting. But if we're having so many problems with spellcasters, and their rate of resource expenditure and regain, and how powerful they can become, and how versatile they almost always are (even the "limited" ones), etc. etc. ad nauseam, why keep spells? We've changed many, many other aspects of the game--attack matrices, saving throws, how you roll hit points, how you roll stats, number and frequency of attacks, initiative, monster statistics...let's do the same to spells.

Perhaps vestiges will survive. Fireball as a Wizard feature/option, Cure Wounds as a Cleric option, and so on. But if spellcasting is going to cause us so many problems, why not send it back to the drawing board, rather than continually circling around the same seemingly-irresolvable questions about non-casters?

[JNAProductions]

What would you replace it with?

You need something to give before you can take.

[MrStabby]

Sure...

What aspects would you want to preserve? How would you deliver those? Under any new system how would you keep classes differentiated and keep the gaming experience as rich as it is?



My approach would be to start with a matrix of theme and function. A class should have a tight theme - an aesthetic that it works towards. Then it should have its function - its strengths but also as explicitly its weaknesses. Then develop abilities that fit within the intersection. This may mean classes need to be broken down a bit - say a wizard might have a weakness doing single target damage, but the nectromancy theme seems like it should be good at snuffing out someones life therefore a necromancer cant be a wizard... I think the designers of 5th edition didn't give enough thought to what a caster type shouldn't be able to do as they should.

[Sam113097]

Didn’t Fourth Edition do this? If I recall correctly, it was widely disliked because, among other reasons, it limited a lot of the creativity and utility that people like in spellcasters.

[JellyPooga]

What would you replace it with?

You need something to give before you can take.

Spell points, skill based, fatigue to name a couple...take your pick. Mix'n'match if you want. Almost every other game uses a different system to the quasi-Vancian one that D&D still hangs on to and in almost every case, it's more balanced with whatever version of "martial" exists in that game.

D&D's magic system is pretty bad. Like, really bad. It deserves to go, IMO.

The problem, I think, is that D&D assumes magic to work. Whether someone resists it or a spell attack hit or misses is beside the point; the magic works automatically; no effort or skill involved. That's why it has to be gated by daily usage and that, in turn, creates an automatic imbalance between that which you can do at-will and that which you can't. These things cannot be compared easily, if at all. That's why D&D is one of the only systems in which I see people arguing over martial vs. caster balance. The core mechanic is not ubiquitous; it has two different systems that are not comparable. If D&D is going to run on a d20 system, then all of D&D should run on that system, including magic. Currently it does not.

Fourth edition tried to do this and failed because alongside making the system ubiquitous, they made the characters homogenous. For a good example of how to have diverse characters that use the exact same mechanics no matter what they do, see GURPS.

[Xervous]

At what point do we just say “play something that’s not DnD”?

[Kane0]

At what point do we just say “play something that’s not DnD”?

When that other thing becomes as well known and popular.

[Flallen]

I don't think there is a productive way to replace the system and still have it feel like it is the same game. I also don't think that the lack of pronounced martial abilities for higher levels is a spellcasting problem. There is plenty of space within the spell casting system to adjust the balance if desired.

[Yakk]

There are plenty of RPGs where non-spellcasters can do in-game mechanically awesome things that rival or exceed high-level 5e spellcasters.

Now, they are supernatural characters, but they aren't spellcasters.

[RSP]

When that other thing becomes as well known and popular.

So you only play D&D because it’s “popular”? Interesting motivation.

To the OP, other systems do magic better, but that would require playing those systems. I don’t think magic as designed in 5e is modular enough to swap it out for another system of magic, without changing the entire 5e system.

For instance, I liked WoD’s initial Mage magic system (no idea what later editions did because I’ve only played the original). I see no way to swap that for 5e’s Spellcasting without swapping the entire system; at which point you’re now playing Mage: The Ascension and not D&D 5e.

[Lupine]

Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but you’re going to have to come up with a pretty robust system to replace spell casting.

Personally, I think the versatility of spells is fine, but the problem is with just how many spells a spellcaster has. I’m curious to see your proposed engine swap.

[Kane0]

We've had a number of threads asking how we would fix martial characters. A handful of posters have suggested that spellcasters should be brought down closer to non-caster power levels, perhaps with the (usually admitted to be tedious) task of re-writing a large number of spells.

How about a different tack: Just scrap the spells. All of them. Every last one. Gone, poof, sayonara, good riddance to bad rubbish.


I’ve agreed with the majority of your assessments in those threads, so I could get on board with this. But I also agree with the others here in that it would be preferable to have a concept or draft to work with first, otherwise we’re sort of stuck looking at each other and saying ‘yeah, could work’

[fbelanger]

They try this in 4ed.

[Amnestic]

So you only play D&D because it’s “popular”? Interesting motivation.


It's easier to find a group when you say "Hey, lets play D&D" than "hey, lets play GURPS/Exalted/Mutants and Masterminds". While it's quite likely that your group would have a decent fun time with any of those three and more, they don't have anywhere near the brand recognition of D&D. Nothing does in the TTRPG space.

There's an automatic buy-in from people with a casual interest that might be put off by things they don't recognise.

[elyktsorb]

It's easier to find a group when you say "Hey, lets play D&D" than "hey, lets play GURPS/Exalted/Mutants and Masterminds". While it's quite likely that your group would have a decent fun time with any of those three and more, they don't have anywhere near the brand recognition of D&D. Nothing does in the TTRPG space.

There's an automatic buy-in from people with a casual interest that might be put off by things they don't recognise.

Can't find anyone to play gamma world.

[MaxWilson]

We've had a number of threads asking how we would fix martial characters. A handful of posters have suggested that spellcasters should be brought down closer to non-caster power levels, perhaps with the (usually admitted to be tedious) task of re-writing a large number of spells.

How about a different tack: Just scrap the spells. All of them. Every last one. Gone, poof, sayonara, good riddance to bad rubbish.

Obviously this does not mean that we leave classes that cast spells out in the cold. We would, of course, need to design a whole new system--or possibly set of systems--to replace spellcasting. But if we're having so many problems with spellcasters, and their rate of resource expenditure and regain, and how powerful they can become, and how versatile they almost always are (even the "limited" ones), etc. etc. ad nauseam, why keep spells? We've changed many, many other aspects of the game--attack matrices, saving throws, how you roll hit points, how you roll stats, number and frequency of attacks, initiative, monster statistics...let's do the same to spells.

Perhaps vestiges will survive. Fireball as a Wizard feature/option, Cure Wounds as a Cleric option, and so on. But if spellcasting is going to cause us so many problems, why not send it back to the drawing board, rather than continually circling around the same seemingly-irresolvable questions about non-casters?

For purely martial combat I'd rather just run GURPS: Martial Arts. The magic system (including all the individual spells) is the most interesting thing about AD&D or 5E.


It's easier to find a group when you say "Hey, lets play D&D" than "hey, lets play GURPS/Exalted/Mutants and Masterminds". While it's quite likely that your group would have a decent fun time with any of those three and more, they don't have anywhere near the brand recognition of D&D. Nothing does in the TTRPG space.

There's an automatic buy-in from people with a casual interest that might be put off by things they don't recognise.

You just say "Hey, let's play Dungeon Fantasy." If they ask what that is you say, "It's a roleplaying game where you risk your life to kill monsters and discover ancient treasures in a magical world." http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/dungeonfantasy/

Sell them on the setting, not the rule system.

[Man_Over_Game]

Didn’t Fourth Edition do this? If I recall correctly, it was widely disliked because, among other reasons, it limited a lot of the creativity and utility that people like in spellcasters.

That's my response. Although 4e didn't handle the noncombat elements as a "here is a world with real physics" kinda way, and instead was more on the lines of "you shift the rock using X amount of points".

And having DnD be fashioned after real-world concepts is pretty integral to the formula. It's a complicated problem.

DnD players want their magic to alter physics in a realistic way that has a forceful, defining impact on the world, but they don't want the same for combat (as the combat version of Teleport would just be a Fighter saying "I slit his throat" and the badguy dies).

There HAS to be that divide, otherwise you end up with something that's not DnD. DnD, at it's core, is basically just a bunch of people writing a story together that occasionally whip out a board game to resolve the combat scenarios, because they're really bad at writing those parts. You can't make it all a board game, and I don't know how to replace the spells in a less "physics-defining" way that doesn't just make the entirety of DnD into a board game.

But while there has to be the divide between those two elements of the game, that doesn't mean Martials and Casters have to find themselves stuck on either side of the divide. We can give Martials storytelling tools, we just can't remove the element of storytelling tools from the game.

The solution, from what I can tell, is to give Martials Spells (or spell-like physics). Or decide that DnD is better off as 4th Edition (100% board game) or FATE (100% storytelling).

Unless some genius can come up with a way of rewriting spells so it's not a board game and still physics-defining, but f-all if I can think of one.

[Segev]

Spell points, skill based, fatigue to name a couple...take your pick. Mix'n'match if you want. Almost every other game uses a different system to the quasi-Vancian one that D&D still hangs on to and in almost every case, it's more balanced with whatever version of "martial" exists in that game.

You'll have to give examples, because in my experience, unless everybody is using that magic system, magic wins out over non-magic. It's not the "quasi-Vancian" spellcasting that makes D&D magic "better" than martial stuff. It's the versatility. There is next to nothing that you can't justify as being "a spell." It can be a lot harder to think of how to let somebody whose explanation isn't "I magic at it" accomplish some things. Certainly not with the same ease and timing. "I cast a spell to teleport to the other side of these bars" is magic, so of course it's doable. "I squeeze my way between these bars" is believable...if you're small enough, the bars are far enough apart, etc.

"I bring down this keep with an army and siege weapons" is expensive, has lots of logistics, and is not exactly a small endeavor. "I cast a spell that makes the keep crumble to dust" just requires the wizard.

Making the spellcasting system work off of fatigue, or skill, or spell points won't change this. At best, making it work off of skill will bring it to parity with "I slip through the bars" as you remove the "how" from the equation and just make the difficulty based on what you're doing. But even then? If you have a varied set of skills, your "I do magic" skills risk becoming more powerful than any others because they can justify a lot more with their baliwick than more mundane skills. Is your "I teleport to the other side of the bars" skill just "spellcraft?" Is it "conjuration?" Is it "teleportation?" Is it one specific spell?

If you make it identical DC to cast the teleport spell and squeeze through the bars, why was it harder to teleport past those bars than it was to teleport the same distance across the room with no obstacles? Is it actually 0 DC to teleport across a room since you could walk across the room with no check?

All of these questions can be answered, and you could build a system around any of these ideas, but I don't think you'll solve the problem you're setting out to solve. The problem you're setting out to solve is rooted more in the concept that magic can do just about anything, because why couldn't it? While non-magic is rooted in more "believable" limitations. The best solutions involve breaking that paradigm, either by giving magic super-hard limits by making it have very specific in-setting mechanics by which it works, limiting what it can do and making it unable to do some things that you can do without magic, or by enabling epic feats of superhuman prowess by non-magical means. "Extraordinary abilities" being legitimately beyond real-world capacity despite not being magic. One Piece actually has some pretty good examples of this: look at Zoro and Sanji and the things they accomplish. They are NOT magical beings. They're just very well-trained men. Yet Sanji can practically set his legs on fire and kick so hard that he walks on the air, and Zoro can cut steel even with poor-quality swords and lift boulders that could comfortably be carved into a small cottage.

[Morty]

DnD players want their magic to alter physics in a realistic way that has a forceful, defining impact on the world, but they don't want the same for combat (as the combat version of Teleport would just be a Fighter saying "I slit his throat" and the badguy dies).


D&D players want spells to be better than everything else, ultimately. There's been a lot of words spent on the subject, but I think this is what it boils down to. People want D&D spellcasting to work in a very particular way, but this way is incompatible with them not dominating every other aspect of gameplay. Any attempt to bring it in line with others, one way or the other, is decried as "no longer D&D".

Really, attempts at giving non-casters cool and effective abilities meets less resistance than the mere suggestion that maybe casters shouldn't have dozens of powerful, reliable spells at their easy disposal. Less resistance, but still a lot of it, of course - hence why 5E firmly put the kibosh on any subsystem or set of powers that aren't spells.

[MoiMagnus]

For purely martial combat I'd rather just run GURPS: Martial Arts. The magic system (including all the individual spells) is the most interesting thing about AD&D or 5E.

I'd second this. D&D's core is magic. If there were to be only one thing in the D&D rulebooks, that would be spells and nothing else.
[Ok, maybe not, that would be its supernatural monsters. D&D creatures are even more central to D&D than its spells. But spells would be second in the list.]
And high level spells are the core of high level D&D. If you get rid of them, it's just giving up on making a real high level D&D experience and disguising your low-level D&D into a high level one by inflating numbers.

(I have no attachment with the Vancian magic system, so scrapping it in favour of 4e-like powers is fine for me. But don't assume other spells systems are easier to balance than the Vancian one just because they look so. And I do find that 5e classes are not restricted enough in their spell choices.)

[Segev]

D&D players want spells to be better than everything else, ultimately. There's been a lot of words spent on the subject, but I think this is what it boils down to. People want D&D spellcasting to work a very particular way, but this way is incompatible with them not dominating every other aspect of gameplay. Any attempt to bring it in line with others, one way or the other, is decried as "no longer D&D". Really, attempts at giving non-casters cool and effective abilities meets less resistance than the mere suggestion that maybe casters shouldn't have dozens of powerful, reliable spells at their easy disposal. Less resistance, but still a lot of it, of course - hence why 5E firmly put the kibosh on any subsystem or set of powers that aren't spells.

This is a straw man argument I see erected every time this topic comes up. "You don't want spells nerfed the way I want them to, so you want spells to be more powerful than anything." It always ignores the counterpoint that there are people who'd be thrilled to see extraordinary non-magical abilities that also can do amazing things that are just as powerful as magic.

Now, you're right that the D&D paradigm doesn't really have anything magic can't, in theory, accomplish. But in practice, the player base has been very receptive to individual items that do restrict the power of magic in the hands of particular characters. Heavily-themed casters who have restricted spell lists are some rather popular classes. Having the "do-everything mage" is an issue, yes, but ascribing "they just want magic to be better than anything" to anybody who disagrees with whatever latest "remove magic" or "change the whole system of magic" idea has come along is poor debate and not even very useful rhetoric unless your goal is merely to make an echo-chamber feel superior to those who disagree with it. Because telling somebody, "Oh, you just don't agree with me because you want this thing that you don't actually want but makes you sound unreasonable," is a great way to make them stop listening to you.

Unless I'm wrong for reading "wanting spells to be better than everything else is unreasonable" into your assertion, and you think that's a perfectly reasonable position to take. (I, personally, do not.)

[Luccan]

D&D players want spells to be better than everything else, ultimately. There's been a lot of words spent on the subject, but I think this is what it boils down to. People want D&D spellcasting to work in a very particular way, but this way is incompatible with them not dominating every other aspect of gameplay. Any attempt to bring it in line with others, one way or the other, is decried as "no longer D&D".

Really, attempts at giving non-casters cool and effective abilities meets less resistance than the mere suggestion that maybe casters shouldn't have dozens of powerful, reliable spells at their easy disposal. Less resistance, but still a lot of it, of course - hence why 5E firmly put the kibosh on any subsystem or set of powers that aren't spells.

Probably because people don't like stuff being taken away. Also, just gonna say a lot of classic spells are very much part of D&D's identity. In fact, the core identity of D&D probably boils down to the Attributes, Class system, Alignment, Races, and Vancian-inspired Spellcasting (as well as the spells themselves). 5e has already basically gutted Alignment and the future of meaningful distinction between the different fantasy races is up in the air. I don't think a lot is gained for people who like D&D (not those who play it because it's hard to get a game of anything else), by breaking yet another pillar of its identity. So yeah, generally I'm more in support of making non-spellcasters better than making spellcasters worse.


Can't find anyone to play gamma world.

Which edition?

[Man_Over_Game]

D&D players want spells to be better than everything else, ultimately. There's been a lot of words spent on the subject, but I think this is what it boils down to. People want D&D spellcasting to work in a very particular way, but this way is incompatible with them not dominating every other aspect of gameplay. Any attempt to bring it in line with others, one way or the other, is decried as "no longer D&D".

Really, attempts at giving non-casters cool and effective abilities meets less resistance than the mere suggestion that maybe casters shouldn't have dozens of powerful, reliable spells at their easy disposal. Less resistance, but still a lot of it, of course - hence why 5E firmly put the kibosh on any subsystem or set of powers that aren't spells.

I honestly don't think it's like that. We just want cool toys, like making a bridge out of Wall of Stone, or coming up with goofy solutions with Reverse Gravity, or putting the illusion of a shrub over you so you can nap in the middle of a prison riot (I had a gnome player do that last one for realsies).

That's really it. But how do you define effects like that that aren't "This happens"? How do you scale something like Fly as a mechanic without writing it as "You are Flying"? You could add more and more rules, but then we're talking about bogging the game down, requiring more lookup during noncombat scenarios, and turning it into more of a board game.

Look at the scaling utility effects in the game, the ones that utilize the same mechanics from beginning to end and just get bigger in scope. Jump Height, Lifting Capacity, Stealth vs. Passive Perception, etc. Realize that every single one of those is incredibly boring and weak, despite being fairly well-scaled for those numbers.

Balance and Physics don't really mesh. Heck, the Martial equivalent to Featherfall is simply being level 10 and just surviving 80 damage.

[Edit] After thinking about it, you probably could do something like having a "Self-Mobility" magic that increases your speed or allows you to fly, or so on that could have scaling factors that are easy to track, but...you're basically just rewriting Mutants and Masterminds.

[Avonar]

So you only play D&D because it’s “popular”? Interesting motivation.

To the OP, other systems do magic better, but that would require playing those systems. I don’t think magic as designed in 5e is modular enough to swap it out for another system of magic, without changing the entire 5e system.

For instance, I liked WoD’s initial Mage magic system (no idea what later editions did because I’ve only played the original). I see no way to swap that for 5e’s Spellcasting without swapping the entire system; at which point you’re now playing Mage: The Ascension and not D&D 5e.

Popularity is a part of it though. I'm a giant 13th Age fan, yet I've never been able to play in the system as I have been entirely unable to find a game to join or tempt someone into DMing it.

But yes, if you want to replace how spells work, you're talking about 6e at this point, there is way too much mechanical bits and pieces tied in.

I do quite like how it's done in 4e/13th Age, unique spells for different classes, you just need to bolster those with mechanics so that a firebolt doesn't feel like just a fire damage arrow. 5e magic is mechanically and flavourfully different from weapon fighting, as it should be.

[JellyPooga]

You'll have to give examples, because in my experience, unless everybody is using that magic system, magic wins out over non-magic. It's not the "quasi-Vancian" spellcasting that makes D&D magic "better" than martial stuff. It's the versatility. There is next to nothing that you can't justify as being "a spell." It can be a lot harder to think of how to let somebody whose explanation isn't "I magic at it" accomplish some things. Certainly not with the same ease and timing. "I cast a spell to teleport to the other side of these bars" is magic, so of course it's doable. "I squeeze my way between these bars" is believable...if you're small enough, the bars are far enough apart, etc.

"I bring down this keep with an army and siege weapons" is expensive, has lots of logistics, and is not exactly a small endeavor. "I cast a spell that makes the keep crumble to dust" just requires the wizard.

Making the spellcasting system work off of fatigue, or skill, or spell points won't change this. At best, making it work off of skill will bring it to parity with "I slip through the bars" as you remove the "how" from the equation and just make the difficulty based on what you're doing. But even then? If you have a varied set of skills, your "I do magic" skills risk becoming more powerful than any others because they can justify a lot more with their baliwick than more mundane skills. Is your "I teleport to the other side of the bars" skill just "spellcraft?" Is it "conjuration?" Is it "teleportation?" Is it one specific spell?

If you make it identical DC to cast the teleport spell and squeeze through the bars, why was it harder to teleport past those bars than it was to teleport the same distance across the room with no obstacles? Is it actually 0 DC to teleport across a room since you could walk across the room with no check?

All of these questions can be answered, and you could build a system around any of these ideas, but I don't think you'll solve the problem you're setting out to solve. The problem you're setting out to solve is rooted more in the concept that magic can do just about anything, because why couldn't it? While non-magic is rooted in more "believable" limitations. The best solutions involve breaking that paradigm, either by giving magic super-hard limits by making it have very specific in-setting mechanics by which it works, limiting what it can do and making it unable to do some things that you can do without magic, or by enabling epic feats of superhuman prowess by non-magical means. "Extraordinary abilities" being legitimately beyond real-world capacity despite not being magic. One Piece actually has some pretty good examples of this: look at Zoro and Sanji and the things they accomplish. They are NOT magical beings. They're just very well-trained men. Yet Sanji can practically set his legs on fire and kick so hard that he walks on the air, and Zoro can cut steel even with poor-quality swords and lift boulders that could comfortably be carved into a small cottage.

Ok, example. GURPS.

Every spell is a Skill, just like the Skill of wielding a sword, running or picking a lock. It works the same way as any other skill; to cast a spell you roll 3d6 and roll under your skill at it. Only difference is that it usually costs Fatigue points (casting spells is tiring, just like fighting in combat is), unless you've gotten so good at the spell that you've managed to reduce that cost to zero ("Hey! That's a bit like Wizards in D&D who get to cast a 1st level spell at-will at high levels!"). You can be really good at casting just Fireball, for example, or you can spread out your points to be good at a range of spells and other skills. Either way, the system balances itself out, because if you're really super-focused it one being the best at one thing, usually it means being pretty terrible at other things. No spell is so powerful that it will solve every situation and because the more powerful spells require knowing lower level spells (e.g. to know Fireball, you first have to know Create Fire), not only is it expensive to invest in casting spells (which can do all that D&D spells can do and more), but it can also mean being super good at the higher "level" spell means being sort of crappy at a more basic version of it (overkill exists!), but at least a Fire Mage has to know how to raise the temperature of some stew before he learns how to annihilate a continent with napalm; which makes sense.

So yeah, it's balanced, it makes sense, it is harder to teleport across a room than walk because 1) you have to learn how and 2) teleporting means you don't have to know how to squeeze through bars or jump over chasms or be fireproof to walk over lava (all of things you can spend points on in GURPS) or any other thing that might prevent you from just walking. Yes, liek any modular system, there are ways to break it, but in my experience, both as a player and a GM, GURPS handles the martial/magic divide really effectively.

Or did you want me to talk about Earthdawn instead? Arcane, for sure, but it's balanced. How about WoD? It has all sorts of different types of "magic", but they all sort of work alongside one another and more mundane effects quite happily. Warhammer Fantasy balances magic by making it super risky; which stops it from being abused, despite its potentially godlike power. Sure, magic is almost always very effective, no matter the system and abuse is a function of having rules at all, but D&D is really the only system I've seen get magic really...well, wrong.

Just my opinion, of course.

[Silly Name]

Whenever I see those suggestions, I think back to the ship of Theseus. For those who don't want to check up on an odd philosophical problem, the gist is: How many parts can you remove and substitute from a thing before it stops being what it was and becomes a new thing?

I think more people may be familiar with the hand-axe version of the problem: if you change both the head and the handle of an axe, it obviously is a new axe, but when did it become one? When you changed the handle or the head? When you changed both? And the more "pieces" you add, the harder it is to point at the moment it becomes something new.

So, sure, let's remove Vancian casting from D&D. Does it still look like D&D? I know many people would say "no". Others would say "yes". Other people may suggest removing classes, and be rebuked by crowds claiming that that's not D&D anymore, while some will insist that it's the d20 that makes D&D what it is.

And you may say "but D&D isn't any one of those things! It's the sum of them, and many more!" And you'd be correct, but, just like the ship of Theseus, if you change enough pieces at some point you'll have to admit it's not Theseus' ship/D&D anymore, and what the tipping point is varies depending on who you ask.

I would feel extremely anxious at the prospect of removing something that's been part of the core game fundamentally since its invention, and that oft sets D&D apart from other games. I also fail to see how reinventing new magic system is any way less tedious and complicated than rewriting problematic spells.



From another perspective... Vancian casting isn't broken. There's nothing inherently game-breaking in Vancian casting. What has caused people to complain over and over for two decades about martial/caster disparity is that in 3.X and 5e, casters keep getting handled cool shiny toys at every level, while the fighter and the barbarian and the ranger have to sit in the corner and hope the DM helps them out. The rogue is pigeonholed into trying to proc Sneak Attack and get pointed at traps and locked doors... Until the casters get the tools to completely bypass traps and locked doors.

But it wasn't always the case. It used to be that Fighting Men were the ones who could use the most magic items, making them stronger. It used to be that wizards had far less access to reality-altering powers. It used to be that followers and kingdoms were built right into the class package for martials. It used to be that the casters couldn't simply be better at everything. The thief was the only one with skills!

There's a bunch of OSR games out there that handle Vancian casting without much fuss, and even if I find myself mostly uninterested in the OSR I can appreciate some mechanical ideas that community has. So, hey, maybe the problem isn't Vancian casters - maybe the problem is that along the way the martials lost all their neat features that were supposed to turn them into leaders of men and cool heroic archetypes, and saddled down with the "guy at the gym" fallacy and other stuff that left them in the dust compared to casters.

[MrStabby]

The solution, from what I can tell, is to give Martials Spells (or spell-like physics). Or decide that DnD is better off as 4th Edition (100% board game) or FATE (100% storytelling).

Unless some genius can come up with a way of rewriting spells so it's not a board game and still physics-defining, but f-all if I can think of one.

I would start by trying to introduce a relationship - broadly and imprecicely between physical effects and damage. Much like falling damage does. If you want to pick someone up in the air and drop them you use the same spell as you would to pick anything else up out of combat, but the rules on falling create a mapping between physical effect and combat input.

So fore fire damage, for example, you create a number of different categories of "hot" and examples of what happens at those temperatures - paper burns, wood burns, gold melts, iron melts, rock melts etc. and then a damage per turn that that temperature does. So running into a building that it hot enough to burn wood would have the same effect as a spell hot enough to do the same. Then it would mean theat the fireball spell would also to more physical damage to different object types at different temperatures/degrees of upcasting.

I think this could work for the physical effects, mental spells would need a different approach though. And those with no physical analogy would need an extra level of creativity.

[langal]

Seriously play another game. Why play a game that is so unbalanced?

[Segev]

Ok, example. GURPS.

Every spell is a Skill, just like the Skill of wielding a sword, running or picking a lock. It works the same way as any other skill; to cast a spell you roll 3d6 and roll under your skill at it. Only difference is that it usually costs Fatigue points (casting spells is tiring, just like fighting in combat is), unless you've gotten so good at the spell that you've managed to reduce that cost to zero ("Hey! That's a bit like Wizards in D&D who get to cast a 1st level spell at-will at high levels!"). You can be really good at casting just Fireball, for example, or you can spread out your points to be good at a range of spells and other skills. Either way, the system balances itself out, because if you're really super-focused it one being the best at one thing, usually it means being pretty terrible at other things. No spell is so powerful that it will solve every situation and because the more powerful spells require knowing lower level spells (e.g. to know Fireball, you first have to know Create Fire), not only is it expensive to invest in casting spells (which can do all that D&D spells can do and more), but it can also mean being super good at the higher "level" spell means being sort of crappy at a more basic version of it (overkill exists!), but at least a Fire Mage has to know how to raise the temperature of some stew before he learns how to annihilate a continent with napalm; which makes sense.In my experience in GURPS, if you're building a mage, you can do a LOT more with the same points than you can with non-magic. Because you can narrow it down to just needing to be good at magic.

Now, you're right; a careful GM can make GURPS magic not outshine non-magic, but this usually winds up with magic being not worth doing at all, because it can't do anything useful. The balance of just the right amount of fatigue cost and just the right difficulty for just the right number of CP winds up with it being better to just say, "Screw it; magic and non-magic are just fluff. Tell me what result you want and how you get it, and we'll decide if it was magical or not afterwards."

Note that this "works," but leads to what a lot of people - myself included - dislike about generic systems: there's no actual feeling of distinction between methods, and your character is heavily disconnected from the mechanics. I mean, the most balanced system in the world might be, "Tell me what you want to have happen and flip a coin. If it's heads, describe how you succeed at it. If it's tails, describe what you tried to do and how it failed." Every character is equally powerful, here. Perfectly balanced. Satisfying? Well...that's subjective.


So yeah, it's balanced, it makes sense, it is harder to teleport across a room than walk because 1) you have to learn how and 2) teleporting means you don't have to know how to squeeze through bars or jump over chasms or be fireproof to walk over lava (all of things you can spend points on in GURPS) or any other thing that might prevent you from just walking. Yes, liek any modular system, there are ways to break it, but in my experience, both as a player and a GM, GURPS handles the martial/magic divide really effectively.D&D is similarly well-balanced between the caster/martial divide with a GM who doesn't let you "break it."

Note: I don't like GURPS, but I have built things in it. I have played in it. Because I gravitate towards mages or psychics, I know from experience that players who didn't still felt I was "overpowered." I won't say they're wrong (or right), but the sentiment persisted, which tells me that GURPS doesn't actually handle it better. (I did have to work harder to get a mage who wasn't utterly useless, though, because GURPS if you don't optimize to the point that it is almost trivial makes magic something that you fail at so much more often than you succeed that you may as well not bother.)


Or did you want me to talk about Earthdawn instead? Arcane, for sure, but it's balanced. How about WoD? It has all sorts of different types of "magic", but they all sort of work alongside one another and more mundane effects quite happily. Warhammer Fantasy balances magic by making it super risky; which stops it from being abused, despite its potentially godlike power. Sure, magic is almost always very effective, no matter the system and abuse is a function of having rules at all, but D&D is really the only system I've seen get magic really...well, wrong.

Just my opinion, of course.

I can't comment on Earthdawn. Warhammer Fantasy I've only played the wargame of, and it makes magic balanced by making mages cost more points, and spells be somewhat more random. And the fact that you aren't really balancing the mages against the martials in your own army; you're pitting army vs. army.

World of Darkness handles it as I first stated in my last post to you: EVERYONE does magic. You're playing Vampire? You're all vampires, with magical vampire powers. Sure, you pick different ones to make different characters, but you're all using the same magic and magic system. You're playing Werewolf? You're all werewolves, and you all have the shapeshifting, the regen, and access to magical Gifts. You're playing Changeling? You are all Changelings and all have access to the Cantrips or the Contracts (depending on edition), even if your individual ones are different from another character's. You're playing Mage? You're all mages.

In all cases, it's not that the system isn't "quasi-vancian" that balances it with non-casters. It's either that everybody is a caster, or the magic itself, independent of system powering it, is not as powerful or is more limited. (Or, in GURPS's case, is useless if you don't min/max it effectively, and if you do min/max it effectively, it goes back to being overpowered. There's no middle ground I have managed to find where you can actually be any good at magic and any good at anything else, without pushing magic to the point that it's dominating. I mean, I guess you could make it unreliable but not cripplingly so, but you'll still be terrible at anything else you try to do at that point, and the most efficient means of doing anything else becomes putting the points into magic, because magic CAN do it and you've already got it as the strongest thing in your arsenal.)

[Man_Over_Game]

I would start by trying to introduce a relationship - broadly and imprecicely between physical effects and damage. Much like falling damage does. If you want to pick someone up in the air and drop them you use the same spell as you would to pick anything else up out of combat, but the rules on falling create a mapping between physical effect and combat input.

So fore fire damage, for example, you create a number of different categories of "hot" and examples of what happens at those temperatures - paper burns, wood burns, gold melts, iron melts, rock melts etc. and then a damage per turn that that temperature does. So running into a building that it hot enough to burn wood would have the same effect as a spell hot enough to do the same. Then it would mean theat the fireball spell would also to more physical damage to different object types at different temperatures/degrees of upcasting.

I think this could work for the physical effects, mental spells would need a different approach though. And those with no physical analogy would need an extra level of creativity.

It's not bad, but it'd probably have to be both very simple and very broad, which is really hard to nail down. Too many specifics, and now you're spending an hour figuring out how much collision/fire damage you suffer while trying to avoid burning wall segments from falling on you. Not enough specifics, and you end up with 5e's skill system.

There's also this predicament that the more we go into detail on a system like that, the less and less it sounds like DnD. Although, tbh, the CR system works kinda like this and it doesn't really sound all that 'DnD', so as long as most of the complicated bits are behind the DM screen, it could probably work. But that also means telling your DM that you want to "Fly", and then he has to tell you how badly you do it, which is less than ideal if you didn't plan around the possibility of falling. Most players who use a Fly spell don't expect the necessity of Featherfall, and a "soft" system might mean they'd need to expect to fail. A lot.

That's a big Catch-22. Do you have the players define their own mechanics, and have it feel nothing like DnD, or does the DM handle all of it and the players have to be paranoid about expecting everything they do to potentially fail (like how Skills work)?

I dunno, neither really sounds like a step forward.



That's why my suggestion is to force everyone to have a balance of guaranteed effects ("Spells") and also have gambled effects ("Skills") that aren't inherently entitled to a single playstyle. Spells aren't the problem, the problem is that casters are the only ones that get spell-like effects while not having to gamble for anything. Take away "spell-like effects" from casters and give them to everyone else, to the point where everyone has to use those "spell-like effects" AND skills equally.

The game stays the same, it just means now everyone is playing the same game.

[Kyutaru]

Balance and Physics don't really mesh. Heck, the Martial equivalent to Featherfall is simply being level 10 and just surviving 80 damage.

Disagree on that point, it just requires more creativity. Squirrels and cats can already survive tremendous falls because their bodies contort to realigning themselves to land on their feet instead of something vulnerable and the twisting action they do midair slows down their descent. While adventurers might not always land on their feet, monks and other sufficiently trained martials may have mastered the art of slowing a descent by watching how animals do it. In real life this is completely impractical and Newtonian physics just says no. But then, even in real life Newtonian physics has been proven wrong due to freaky discoveries in space and this is D&D physics where insane martial stunts are accomplished all the time (like the previously mentioned surviving 80 damage falls -- with no broken limbs I might add).

Games have existed that were entirely martial in nature like Fallout and Wasteland where your stats revolve around gunplay, not a drop of magic to be seen. All one really needs to do is put the martials on the level of mages. THAT is the true issue D&D players have. By the lore, by the history, by the movies, by the very fact that magical items are better than normal ones, the concept of magic just being better than non-magic is stuck in their minds. The person you quoted was correct, D&D expects spells to be better at everything purely because they are magic and magic is better than non-magic inherently.

[Eldariel]

You just say "Hey, let's play Dungeon Fantasy." If they ask what that is you say, "It's a roleplaying game where you risk your life to kill monsters and discover ancient treasures in a magical world." http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/dungeonfantasy/

Sell them on the setting, not the rule system.

That's great when it works but it's still ultimately way more work than finding someone already DMing 5e or wanting to play 5e. If you, for whatever reason, don't have the mental energy or ability to persuade people on the matter, it's 5e or no game.

This same inertia is why brand recognition acts as a multiplicatory force: if people want to get into TTRPG, they'll phrase it as "I wanna play D&D" fairly often and it's very hard to even explain them what TTRPG is, let alone convince them to start with something else.

I just had this conversation with a teen at a park and she basically knew nothing but the name D&D. She would've been totally down for a D&D but her interest visibly dropped if I mentioned anything else. This is why companies in all sectors put so much resources into marketing: your actual product is almost irrelevant compared to its image.

[MrStabby]

That's great when it works but it's still ultimately way more work than finding someone already DMing 5e or wanting to play 5e. If you, for whatever reason, don't have the mental energy or ability to persuade people on the matter, it's 5e or no game.

This same inertia is why brand recognition acts as a multiplicatory force: if people want to get into TTRPG, they'll phrase it as "I wanna play D&D" fairly often and it's very hard to even explain them what TTRPG is, let alone convince them to start with something else.

I just had this conversation with a teen at a park and she basically knew nothing but the name D&D. She would've been totally down for a D&D but her interest visibly dropped if I mentioned anything else. This is why companies in all sectors put so much resources into marketing: your actual product is almost irrelevant compared to its image.

I also think that many people would get the wong idea if you said "lets play dungeon fantasy". It might involve RP, but probably wouldn't bring to mind a TTRPG. Also you would be made to stay away from children.

[Jamesps]

Alternatively:

Give everyone spell slots and let them do non magical things with the slots with a coolness level based on which level slot they use.

Maybe skills get more useful the higher slot you use rather than just relying on what numbers you're rolling. Maybe you can spend slots to get in-game lucky, finding a silver dagger as you're fighting a devil (not magically creating it, just adding it surreptitiously to the scene as if it was always there).

[Man_Over_Game]

That's great when it works but it's still ultimately way more work than finding someone already DMing 5e or wanting to play 5e. If you, for whatever reason, don't have the mental energy or ability to persuade people on the matter, it's 5e or no game.

This same inertia is why brand recognition acts as a multiplicatory force: if people want to get into TTRPG, they'll phrase it as "I wanna play D&D" fairly often and it's very hard to even explain them what TTRPG is, let alone convince them to start with something else.

I just had this conversation with a teen at a park and she basically knew nothing but the name D&D. She would've been totally down for a D&D but her interest visibly dropped if I mentioned anything else. This is why companies in all sectors put so much resources into marketing: your actual product is almost irrelevant compared to its image.

God, try to imagine describing a Slinky without the name Slinky.

[JellyPooga]

In my experience in GURPS

All I can say is that your experience of GURPS and mine are very different. Both as GM and as player, I've never heard anyone complain about mages and their balance against non-spellcasters. It may be that you've only played with very permissive GMs that allow high levels of Magery or have a higher level of background magic in the settings they've used; in either case, yes, spells can be very cheap to make very powerful. For the "baseline" recommendations in the core set, magic tends to be rather more limited than you suggest and even those that min/max on it still fall short on other skills, finding themselves incapable at functioning in areas they didn't buy a spell for, or with so many Disadvantages that their characters are borderline unplayable. It doesn't require a good GM to run a balanced game of GURPS, in my experience, it just requires one that enforces the rules.


World of Darkness handles it as I first stated in my last post to you: EVERYONE does magic. You're playing Vampire? You're all vampires, with magical vampire powers. Sure, you pick different ones to make different characters, but you're all using the same magic and magic system. You're playing Werewolf? You're all werewolves, and you all have the shapeshifting, the regen, and access to magical Gifts. You're playing Changeling? You are all Changelings and all have access to the Cantrips or the Contracts (depending on edition), even if your individual ones are different from another character's. You're playing Mage? You're all mages.

I've played in several cross-WoD games quite successfully with little to no complaint from anyone playing about the disparities between different styles of "magic"; the basic core system between all the WoD games makes them compatible and yes, there's some power differences, but they're not so noticable. As you mention yourself; even within (for example) Vampire, there are different types of magic that function in essentially the same way; different effects, different styles...same system.


In all cases, it's not that the system isn't "quasi-vancian" that balances it with non-casters. It's either that everybody is a caster, or the magic itself, independent of system powering it, is not as powerful or is more limited.

It's not solely that D&D magic is built the way it is that makes it imbalanced against non-magic, it's the difference betwee the resource based magic system vs. the non-resource based martial system. In all the games I've mentioned (except WHFRP), the system is the same, or largely the same, whether you use spells/magic or not; fundamentally they're operating on the same playing field. In D&D they're not; one is more powerful by design. Out of the gate, it's not balanced. It's then "balanced" by making it resource based, which doesn't work unless that resource is limited by something finite (e.g. a magic wand with a limited number of charges before it must be discarded).

As people have mentioned, giving martials resource based abilities does make them balanced against casters; Tome of Battle in 3e proved that quite effectively. It puts them on the same playing field. Unfortunately, many (like myself) don't like the idea of martials being limited by "per-day" abilities, or even "per-encounter"...it doesn't add up with the fantasy of playing that kind of character outside of the "magical martials" you see in a lot of anime, for example.

The baseline of D&D has always been the Fighting Man, that can just swing his sword all day, without limit. With roots as grounded as that, adding a resource based magic system doesn't add up, because the Fighting Man swiftly gets outclassed and has to change his identity in order to keep up. That's why the magic system should change to fit the martial archetype and not the other way around; because spellcasters can maintain their identity on the martials' ground, but the reverse is not also possible.

[Amechra]

You just say "Hey, let's play Dungeon Fantasy." If they ask what that is you say, "It's a roleplaying game where you risk your life to kill monsters and discover ancient treasures in a magical world." http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/dungeonfantasy/

Sell them on the setting, not the rule system.

The rough part of that is convincing someone else to run Dungeon Fantasy. Because the real issue is that it's pretty hard to find a group for games that aren't the current flavor of D&D that let you play instead of running the game.

Anyway, clearly the best solution is to use 5e's incredibly robust skill system. We just need to add a skill for each school of magic, and that's what you roll to do things! You want to fly up to the top of that wall? Well, spend a spell slot to roll an Intelligence (Transmutation) check instead of a Strength (Athletics) check - nothing could be simpler!

[Kyutaru]

That's great when it works but it's still ultimately way more work than finding someone already DMing 5e or wanting to play 5e. If you, for whatever reason, don't have the mental energy or ability to persuade people on the matter, it's 5e or no game.
Isn't that simply sloth? If I don't have the mental energy or ability to cook, it's delivery or no food. Taking whatever is available is the quick and easy route but you can't then complain that it's not as delicious as mom's casserole. The DM being such a focal point to D&D says that the system is not hardcoded to be any sort of way to begin with. It's a set of guidelines that are intentionally vague in areas to allow for players to fill in the blanks themselves. We had charts and tables and clearly written masterful rules for constructing castles, aerial combat, and more yet they dropped the heavy ruleset stuff because people were using it as the golden standard instead of defining their own path. We're not adventuring in Gary Gygax's universe, his was just the source for your own inspirations. Heck there are even different campaign settings that shift from edition to edition and we're not always in Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms. There are even official D&D settings with completely different magic systems like the Dragonlance series. The game has never been one particular set of consistent rules even within identical editions. Taking what you like and discarding what you don't for a customized campaign in a world all your own is one of the most basic foundations of D&D that they devote an entire section to it in the DMGs.

Brand recognition may be a powerful motivator just as World of Warcraft became a renowned MMO despite not having the most players of any of them but brands become popular because people tried them and liked what they saw. Pioneers are the courageous that attempt something outside of the conformity of expectations and it's what led Pathfinder to blow up even bigger than the D&D edition it was based off of. What reason would there be to ever play that game when D&D already exists? To try something new and wow it was better and outsold the original. If people were actually too afraid to try something that wasn't D&D that would never have happened. Instead, some people are afraid and use their fear to justify not exploring beyond the established comfort zone when it can be really fun. Personally I love Shadowrun, Infinity, Rifts, WoD, and would happily try new systems if offered.

[Civis Mundi]

Anyway, clearly the best solution is to use 5e's incredibly robust skill system. We just need to add a skill for each school of magic, and that's what you roll to do things! You want to fly up to the top of that wall? Well, spend a spell slot to roll an Intelligence (Transmutation) check instead of a Strength (Athletics) check - nothing could be simpler!

I couldn't agree more. This is why Truenaming was 3.5's post popular magic system.

[Amechra]

Kyutaro, Pathfinder succeeded the way it did because it was selling 3.X rules to people who felt like WotC had abandoned them, not because of any virtue of its own. Calling Paizo "pioneering" or "courageous" is dubious at best.

[Man_Over_Game]

Anyway, clearly the best solution is to use 5e's incredibly robust skill system. We just need to add a skill for each school of magic, and that's what you roll to do things! You want to fly up to the top of that wall? Well, spend a spell slot to roll an Intelligence (Transmutation) check instead of a Strength (Athletics) check - nothing could be simpler!

I mean, we kinda have some stuff like that, but it's generally limited to things like Illusion spells.

I'd be down for a solution like that. Everyone gets some stuff that's guaranteed, reality-altering stuff (most spells), and then everyone has stuff they gotta roll for that can get them into a lot of trouble when they fail (Disguise Self, Stealth). Block off most of the physical stuff from caster options (Invisibility, Detect Thoughts), give those to some other folks, and now everyone's got toys to play with.

You wanna play a Wizard that manipulates peoples' minds? They have that, it's called a BARD.

[Amechra]

I couldn't agree more. This is why Truenaming was 3.5's post popular magic system.

Exactly!

In all seriousness, though, Truenaming wasn't terrible because it was skill-based. It was terrible because 3.5's skill system was horribly broken, and because it was actually unfinished (there are places where they just straight-up forgot to include DCs. Oops?)

[Eldariel]

Isn't that simply sloth? If I don't have the mental energy or ability to cook, it's delivery or no food. Taking whatever is available is the quick and easy route but you can't then complain that it's not as delicious as mom's casserole. The DM being such a focal point to D&D says that the system is not hardcoded to be any sort of way to begin with. It's a set of guidelines that are intentionally vague in areas to allow for players to fill in the blanks themselves. We had charts and tables and clearly written masterful rules for constructing castles, aerial combat, and more yet they dropped the heavy ruleset stuff because people were using it as the golden standard instead of defining their own path. We're not adventuring in Gary Gygax's universe, his was just the source for your own inspirations. Heck there are even different campaign settings that shift from edition to edition and we're not always in Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms. There are even official D&D settings with completely different magic systems like the Dragonlance series. The game has never been one particular set of consistent rules even within identical editions. Taking what you like and discarding what you don't for a customized campaign in a world all your own is one of the most basic foundations of D&D that they devote an entire section to it in the DMGs.

Brand recognition may be a powerful motivator just as World of Warcraft became a renowned MMO despite not having the most players of any of them but brands become popular because people tried them and liked what they saw. Pioneers are the courageous that attempt something outside of the conformity of expectations and it's what led Pathfinder to blow up even bigger than the D&D edition it was based off of. What reason would there be to ever play that game when D&D already exists? To try something new and wow it was better and outsold the original. If people were actually too afraid to try something that wasn't D&D that would never have happened. Instead, some people are afraid and use their fear to justify not exploring beyond the established comfort zone when it can be really fun. Personally I love Shadowrun, Infinity, Rifts, WoD, and would happily try new systems if offered.

Sloth, yes. But if you have, say, family, a demanding job, and so on, it's simply a fact of life that you don't have that much energy left for your free time. Thus you probably will be forced to choose between playing a famous system or not playing. Certainly if you're currently not willing to GM for whatever reason.

[Kyutaru]

The baseline of D&D has always been the Fighting Man, that can just swing his sword all day, without limit. With roots as grounded as that, adding a resource based magic system doesn't add up, because the Fighting Man swiftly gets outclassed and has to change his identity in order to keep up. That's why the magic system should change to fit the martial archetype and not the other way around; because spellcasters can maintain their identity on the martials' ground, but the reverse is not also possible.

I don't think that's what's stopping progress because the same has existed in old fantasy JRPGs. The warrior classes often have abilities they can do like Whirlwind Attack freely that they acquire as they level while the mage classes are restricted to mana and even cast times. Some games sought to give warriors restrictions with technique points, combos, or even cooldowns/warmups but there were others that had no such restrictions and your sword-guy was your strongest unit even endgame because of how broken legendary weapons were versus spells.

It's possible to keep the current system and still have martials outperform spellcasters, much less keep up.


God, try to imagine describing a Slinky without the name Slinky.
Gosh, lots of stuff has taken on brand identity these days. Band-aid, Aspirin, Frisbee, Yo-Yo, Xerox, Velcro, Zipper, Popsicle, pretty soon we won't call them RPGs they'll just be referred to as D&Ds.


Kyutaro, Pathfinder succeeded the way it did because it was selling 3.X rules to people who felt like WotC had abandoned them, not because of any virtue of its own. Calling Paizo "pioneering" or "courageous" is dubious at best.

I never called Paizo pioneering or courageous, the words were near them but the context of my statements was towards the players who tried their systems. Pathfinder from all opinions I've gathered does a better job at D&D than D&D does and has better balance and refined classes from the original. Their path system was even taken and used for 5e subclasses, even WotC loved it.


You wanna play a Wizard that manipulates peoples' minds? They have that, it's called a BARD.

In fact, the greatest wizard of all time Myrddin Wyllt was a bard.

[OldTrees1]

Can you remove spellcasting? Can you replace it entirely? Let's check.

There is a Red Dragon lurking inside the lava lake in their lair. There are several magma tunnels, so engaging this wyrm probably means being able to do actions inside the lava.


Your party is a max level Barbarian and a max level Necromancer. Neither has spellcasting of course.


At this level the Barbarian can swim in Lava. It constricts their movement a bit and hurts a bit, but they can manage it for a couple hours. At this level the Necromancer creates some loyal fire immune undead (Flameskull for example) to go with the Barbarian as backup. The necromancer even rigs their spirit to one of the skulls so they can join in the fight. A few hours later the wyrm is dead and the Barbarian surfaces with the corpse. The corpse is covered is deep cuts, concussions, decay, and rot. The party celebrates and then prepares for the next leg of their journey.


So, yes you can removing spellcasting. All you need to do is rewrite 5E to handle non caster mages and non caster martials at all levels of play. Not a trivial task, but doable.

[Kyutaru]

I'd be down for a solution like that. Everyone gets some stuff that's guaranteed, reality-altering stuff (most spells), and then everyone has stuff they gotta roll for that can get them into a lot of trouble when they fail (Disguise Self, Stealth). Block off most of the physical stuff from caster options (Invisibility, Detect Thoughts), give those to some other folks, and now everyone's got toys to play with.
It's how the Star Wars RPGs work. Force powers aren't magic spells. They are class skills for Jedi.

[JellyPooga]

I don't think that's what's stopping progress because the same has existed in old fantasy JRPGs. The warrior classes often have abilities they can do like Whirlwind Attack freely that they acquire as they level while the mage classes are restricted to mana and even cast times. Some games sought to give warriors restrictions with technique points, combos, or even cooldowns/warmups but there were others that had no such restrictions and your sword-guy was your strongest unit even endgame because of how broken legendary weapons were versus spells.

It's possible to keep the current system and still have martials outperform spellcasters, much less keep up.

So you're saying that there were two different styles (resource based vs. not) and it wasn't balanced? Yeah, colour me not shocked. Whether the resource based thing is designed as being more powerful or if it's the not-resourced based one; the baseline is that one comes from a place of being inherently designed to be more or less powerful. In the case of your JRPG, the imbalance was from the assumption that "broken legendary weapons" should be so, so the other thing gets a different system to try and "balance" it ("we'll make spells powerful, but resource based so it's balanced...except the broken legendary sword has to be the best thing, so ramp it's stats up...oops, went too far and now spells look bad. Oh well. It sort of works, so slap a logo on it and call it done."). In the case of D&D, it's that magic should be the powerful thing and got a different system to the not-so-powerful thing. It's the same problem coming from different directions; adding a different system to "balance" the system doesn't work; it just creates imbalance. If you keep the system the same, you can still make the powerful thing powerful within that system; it just costs more, whether that be in levels, character points, in-game money or whatever.

For example, I doubt many people would argue that Rogues or Fighters are significantly imbalanced. They largely do different things; one has a greater focus on Combat, the other on Social, Exploration or a little of both or even all three. Why are they not imbalanced? Because although they do different things they use the same system; roll a d20, add an ability score and any other modifiers and beat a DC. Spellcasters don't do this. Sure, they have spell attacks and spell saves, but theoretically you could do everything that defines being a spellcaster without ever engaging in that system of roll a d20 and add [stuff]. A Rogue can't just "activate Sneak" and succeed at being sneaky, but a spellcaster can cast Invisibility and automatically be invisible; the system is fundamentally different and it's that which creates the imbalance.

[Man_Over_Game]

For example, I doubt many people would argue that Rogues or Fighters are significantly imbalanced. They largely do different things; one has a greater focus on Combat, the other on Social, Exploration or a little of both or even all three. Why are they not imbalanced? Because although they do different things they use the same system; roll a d20, add an ability score and any other modifiers and beat a DC. Spellcasters don't do this. Sure, they have spell attacks and spell saves, but theoretically you could do everything that defines being a spellcaster without ever engaging in that system of roll a d20 and add [stuff]. A Rogue can't just "activate Sneak" and succeed at being sneaky, but a spellcaster can cast Invisibility and automatically be invisible; the system is fundamentally different and it's that which creates the imbalance.

Martials are 'A'
Casters are 'B'
Resourceless Abilities are 'X'
Resourceful Spells are 'Y'

So how can you balance A * X = B * Y ?

You can't. You can only balance if A * (X+Y) = B * (X+Y).

All character types need to have the same foundations.

Sure, you can kinda compare the Long Rest Fireball to Sneak Attack. Sure, you can kinda compare Disguise Self to Performance. How the hell do you compare the Barbarian's Rage to Find Familiar? You can't.

If you want to stop comparing apples to oranges, you need to make sure everyone gets an apple and everyone gets an orange. Now you're comparing the Barbarian's apple to the Wizard's apple, and that's a lot easier to address.

[Pex]

No.

If you hate magic so much play a different game.

Your hatred does not mean I must do without.

Play another game.

[RSP]

It's easier to find a group when you say "Hey, lets play D&D" than "hey, lets play GURPS/Exalted/Mutants and Masterminds". While it's quite likely that your group would have a decent fun time with any of those three and more, they don't have anywhere near the brand recognition of D&D. Nothing does in the TTRPG space.

There's an automatic buy-in from people with a casual interest that might be put off by things they don't recognise.

Sure, but that buy in is completely off the table if you show up to a D&D game and say “I’ve got a completely re-worked game system homebrew to play.”

So for the purposes of this thread, D&D’s recognition hurts more than helps, as, I’m assuming, it’s easier to get a group of role players to play a different game, one with its own established and refined rules; than to convince them that it’s D&D you’re playing, but with a completely different system that isn’t D&D.

[Kyutaru]

For example, I doubt many people would argue that Rogues or Fighters are significantly imbalanced. They largely do different things; one has a greater focus on Combat, the other on Social, Exploration or a little of both or even all three. Why are they not imbalanced? Because although they do different things they use the same system; roll a d20, add an ability score and any other modifiers and beat a DC. Spellcasters don't do this. Sure, they have spell attacks and spell saves, but theoretically you could do everything that defines being a spellcaster without ever engaging in that system of roll a d20 and add [stuff]. A Rogue can't just "activate Sneak" and succeed at being sneaky, but a spellcaster can cast Invisibility and automatically be invisible; the system is fundamentally different and it's that which creates the imbalance.
Well on the point of imbalance, if the same system can have overpowered martials AND overpowered mages then it can be balanced to be fair to both. JRPGs focused on gear, D&D focused on magic. You can hybrid the two and give a balanced experience for both types. D&D has a very meager equipment focus, made even less relevant in this edition. At lvl 1 your sword does 1d8. At level 20 it does 1d8+3. Seriously? All the power is in the class multipliers and extra attacks, not the gear itself. Yet in a JRPG your starter sword has ATK 7 and your endgame sword has ATK 2300. There is clearly room for growth in the D&D system if you want martials to be able to obtain godlike power in their own right and many items boast magical properties that mimic spells and render those effects less relevant for casters, allowing casters endgame to focus on their newer ones that distinguish them. D&D has the same with things like Belt of Giant Strength eliminating the need to buff strength. Granted 5e has really toned all of this down but it's because of Wizards possessing Tenser's Transformation and turning any equipment into a buff for them too while DM campaigns that were stingy about the loot made fighters weak and ones that were plentiful made fighters overpowered. Itemization should not have taken a backseat in D&D but incorporated into the character class itself, like how a Kensei bonds with his sword or how a Warlock summons one out of thin air.

I mean even non-D&D games will have buffs and healing so not rolling d20s is a fact of life unless you want Cure Wounds and Haste to have a chance of failure.

[Pex]

Exactly!

In all seriousness, though, Truenaming wasn't terrible because it was skill-based. It was terrible because 3.5's skill system was horribly broken, and because it was actually unfinished (there are places where they just straight-up forgot to include DCs. Oops?)

Truenamer failed because of Truenamer, not the skill system. Truenamer set the DC too high in its formula. As you leveled it increased faster than you can improve your skill you fail more than succeed. Get rid of the times two multiplier and it works.

[BMF]

I don't doubt that people find it frustrating when they can't convince people to play their non-D&D games, but it is very funny to me to try to imagine a newbie hearing a DM say "OK, it's D&D5E, but throw away 2/3 of that Players Handbook you've just bought, because I've rewritten the magic system entirely."

How is this a practical solution to getting people to play your game? If you've got a group that trusts you as DM to rewrite the rules this extensively, seems like you'd have the credibility to suggest a new system.

[Kyutaru]

I don't doubt that people find it frustrating when they can't convince people to play their non-D&D games, but it is very funny to me to try to imagine a newbie hearing a DM say "OK, it's D&D5E, but throw away 2/3 of that Players Handbook you've just bought, because I've rewritten the magic system entirely."

How is this a practical solution to getting people to play your game? If you've got a group that trusts you as DM to rewrite the rules this extensively, seems like you'd have the credibility to suggest a new system.

A newbie wouldn't have much attachment to the old system anyhow so why not try the DM's system?

Veterans are the stickler and are quite attached to their tried and true methods and spells. But just as the newbie knows no difference a veteran hasn't even tried your new system yet. If people are that obstinate and flat out refuse to budge outside of their comfort zone to experience something they haven't but would rather sample the same things repeatedly then they are not the group to suggest new ideas to in the first place.

To throw back a counter example, imagine if I suggested eating at the new restaurant in town and get rejected because the group just wants to eat the same stuff they always have. That is not an adventurous group ready to brave the unknown and attempting to get them to budge is doomed from the start. Thankfully not everyone is like that and many are bold enough to try something new.

[Amnestic]

Sure, but that buy in is completely off the table if you show up to a D&D game and say “I’ve got a completely re-worked game system homebrew to play.”

So for the purposes of this thread, D&D’s recognition hurts more than helps, as, I’m assuming, it’s easier to get a group of role players to play a different game, one with its own established and refined rules; than to convince them that it’s D&D you’re playing, but with a completely different system that isn’t D&D.

To be clear, I don't think they should eliminate spellcasting, nor do I think any "introductory" group should steer too far from the baseline rules. There's some house rules that I think are totally fine for newbies ("hey, this cleric domain actually gets an extra skill choice on top of its other stuff!") but tearing out half the book and rewriting the game, definitely not.

[Jerrykhor]

There's no better way to put this so I'm just gonna say it: Eliminating spellcasting entirely is stupid. The whole Martial vs Spellcaster debate is stupid. You can't give spellcasters not-spells and pretend they are still spellcasters - that's stupid. If you think the game is not balanced then don't play it.

Capt America cannot do the things Dr Strange can do, but he is not useless. Sure, he had some magic items to help him, but so does Strange.

[BMF]

A newbie wouldn't have much attachment to the old system anyhow so why not try the DM's system?

If I, a newbie with no attachment to a system, were presented with the choice, by a DM I didn't know and trust already, between the following options: (1) D&D5E, but modified into near-unrecognizable form (which replacing the magic system would be), and (2) some other non-D&D system that followed a rulebook I could read and use, I would choose (2) every time. I'm sure others would disagree.



To throw back a counter example, imagine if I suggested eating at the new restaurant in town and get rejected because the group just wants to eat the same stuff they always have. That is not an adventurous group ready to brave the unknown and attempting to get them to budge is doomed from the start. Thankfully not everyone is like that and many are bold enough to try something new.

I would prefer to take a risk on a restaurant over an unknown DM's extensive homebrew any day. At least a meal is over quickly, and if it sucks everyone can leave without hurting anyone's feelings.

[Willie the Duck]

For purely martial combat I'd rather just run GURPS: Martial Arts. The magic system (including all the individual spells) is the most interesting thing about AD&D or 5E.
Definitely true. I’d rather make the non-magical part of D&D more like magic than the other way around.

Yes, 4e did a bunch of that and it was not popular, but it’s not clear to me that it could not be done, and in a way that was sufficiently D&D-esque enough to keep the D&D-seeking gamers happy. Make the skill/environmental-interaction system, a version of the combat system (make a Tome of Battle or GURPS:MA style martial class), and perhaps the social system have the same depth of complexity as D&D magic. Probably also truncate the worst-offender parts of magic like polymorph, summoning, simulacrum, and wish. Also make magic items* part of the expected norm again (perhaps with fighters once again getting access to the coolest magic items).
*I think D&D can be made to make spellcaster and non-spellcaster more compatible, but to make magic and non-magic to be on-par with each other seems like a futile effort.


In my experience in GURPS, if you're building a mage, you can do a LOT more with the same points than you can with non-magic. Because you can narrow it down to just needing to be good at magic.

Now, you're right; a careful GM can make GURPS magic not outshine non-magic, but this usually winds up with magic being not worth doing at all, because it can't do anything useful. The balance of just the right amount of fatigue cost and just the right difficulty for just the right number of CP winds up with it being better to just say, "Screw it; magic and non-magic are just fluff. Tell me what result you want and how you get it, and we'll decide if it was magical or not afterwards."

That’s pretty much how Hero System does it, and I think it actually does Fantasy settings better than GURPS (historical classical/medieval works, and GURPS Martial Arts, as Max mentions, work fine).

[Segev]

All I can say is that your experience of GURPS and mine are very different. Both as GM and as player, I've never heard anyone complain about mages and their balance against non-spellcasters. It may be that you've only played with very permissive GMs that allow high levels of Magery or have a higher level of background magic in the settings they've used; in either case, yes, spells can be very cheap to make very powerful. For the "baseline" recommendations in the core set, magic tends to be rather more limited than you suggest and even those that min/max on it still fall short on other skills, finding themselves incapable at functioning in areas they didn't buy a spell for, or with so many Disadvantages that their characters are borderline unplayable. It doesn't require a good GM to run a balanced game of GURPS, in my experience, it just requires one that enforces the rules.But in general, more capable of functioning on a broader spectrum than non-casters, because all they need is a new spell for that. And they're already excellent at spells. It's not the system of how spells work that creates the balance, or destroys it.


I've played in several cross-WoD games quite successfully with little to no complaint from anyone playing about the disparities between different styles of "magic"; the basic core system between all the WoD games makes them compatible and yes, there's some power differences, but they're not so noticable. As you mention yourself; even within (for example) Vampire, there are different types of magic that function in essentially the same way; different effects, different styles...same system.And yet you're all still using magic. They may be different systems of magic, but they all are magic. If you tossed "Wizard: the Spellbooking" in as a new splat, using quasi-vancian casting, it would not be automatically more powerful than the others, because all of them are still using magic.


It's not solely that D&D magic is built the way it is that makes it imbalanced against non-magic, it's the difference betwee the resource based magic system vs. the non-resource based martial system. In all the games I've mentioned (except WHFRP), the system is the same, or largely the same, whether you use spells/magic or not; fundamentally they're operating on the same playing field. In D&D they're not; one is more powerful by design. Out of the gate, it's not balanced. It's then "balanced" by making it resource based, which doesn't work unless that resource is limited by something finite (e.g. a magic wand with a limited number of charges before it must be discarded).The solution, then, is making the one that's underpowered more powerful. This is not just a numbers game, either. You can argue that spells should be stronger because you spend resources on them, but the issue you still run into is that spells are doing things that just aren't possible without them. Change that, and you start to actually solve the problem.

Vancian, spell points, or skill-based, the issue is that spells "can do anything," not that spells are "more powerful." The problem is versatility, not power.


As people have mentioned, giving martials resource based abilities does make them balanced against casters; Tome of Battle in 3e proved that quite effectively. It puts them on the same playing field. Unfortunately, many (like myself) don't like the idea of martials being limited by "per-day" abilities, or even "per-encounter"...it doesn't add up with the fantasy of playing that kind of character outside of the "magical martials" you see in a lot of anime, for example.Right here, you defeat your entire argument for changing the magic system to use a different or no resource. If non-casters getting resource-based mechanics to boost their allowable power doesn't close the gap, then the gap isn't power and isn't system-based. It's conceptual. ToB's success at closing the gap wasn't the bigger numbers: it was the new things it let the martials do. It gave them healing, and teleportation, and speed boosts, and other tricks that were previously "spells-only."

Expanding on that is where the solution to the problem lies, not in focusing on the quasi-vancian casting system. Give martials means of learning to do more. Not better: more. Martials already have tricks for numbers that magic is hard-pressed to match.

[BMF]

Right here, you defeat your entire argument for changing the magic system to use a different or no resource. If non-casters getting resource-based mechanics to boost their allowable power doesn't close the gap, then the gap isn't power and isn't system-based. It's conceptual. ToB's success at closing the gap wasn't the bigger numbers: it was the new things it let the martials do. It gave them healing, and teleportation, and speed boosts, and other tricks that were previously "spells-only."

Expanding on that is where the solution to the problem lies, not in focusing on the quasi-vancian casting system. Give martials means of learning to do more. Not better: more. Martials already have tricks for numbers that magic is hard-pressed to match.

I agree with this. I note that your fix (stuff like martial teleportation, feats of strength and speed that are essentially magic but aren't magic per game terms) basically turns martials into over-the-top anime combatants.

I think that is fun and cool, but I am sympathetic that some players don't want that kind of flavor in their games.

[Hael]

This is to put it mildly, throwing the baby out with the bath water.

I also disagree with the other poster. DnDs magic has historically been what made the game interesting to play in the first place. It’s a pretty dynamic system with a good deal of subtlety, combos and emergent gameplay. Unfortunately that has slowly been tweaked away at the altar of balance, with each new system being a dumbed down version of the former. Personally I’d much prefer if they went back to the 1e and 2e heydey in that regard, screw balance if it makes the game less fun.

The problem instead has always been with martials. DND never had a good martial system. (I c u, u c me, I hit for 1d6+5 against your ac). It’s bland and boring, and other ttrpgs have far more interesting systems.

IMo pathfinder had the best version in the DnD line, but ultimately at higher tiers of play the only conceivable way to maintain balance is some sort of magic item system that gives supernatural powers to the martial such that they can compete with casters. It’s ashame 5e got away from that.

[OldTrees1]

I think we should have 3 kinds of mages:
The resourceless mage. Aka the non caster caster or the At-will caster. Imagine a Necromancer that is limited by the amount of magic they can control at once rather than by some weird daily amnesia limits.

The long term caster. Aka your normal caster that regains spells daily. However let them keep some kind of cantrip.

The middle path. Aka 5E Warlock.




Martials are 'A'
Casters are 'B'
Resourceless Abilities are 'X'
Resourceful Spells are 'Y'

So how can you balance A * X = B * Y ?

You can't. You can only balance if A * (X+Y) = B * (X+Y).

All character types need to have the same foundations.

Sure, you can kinda compare the Long Rest Fireball to Sneak Attack. Sure, you can kinda compare Disguise Self to Performance. How the hell do you compare the Barbarian's Rage to Find Familiar? You can't.

If you want to stop comparing apples to oranges, you need to make sure everyone gets an apple and everyone gets an orange. Now you're comparing the Barbarian's apple to the Wizard's apple, and that's a lot easier to address.

I strongly disagree. You can balance A * X = B * (X+Y) = C * (X+Z) = D * (X+Y+Z).
For example: YB > XA > XB
If XA is considered the baseline then B gets to choose when to hit above (YB) or below (XB) the baseline based on when they spend their limited resources. Adjust magnitudes and frequencies to taste, and you have a balanced system.

Characters don't need to have the same foundations. Many players don't want characters to all have the same homogenized foundations. Even players, like me, that have a strong preference of X vs Y can recognize others have a different preference. That means I value B * Y existing even if I want to play B * X.

[Kireban]

The simple answer is that you should stop playing D&D.
You don't like the system itself and look for alternatives that other systems provide, and the main reason why you don't play the other systems is that you don't find people to play them with...
So you want to change this system, and ruin it for other players who like it, so that you will have a "popular" system to play as you like?

[Willie the Duck]

I agree with this. I note that your fix (stuff like martial teleportation, feats of strength and speed that are essentially magic but aren't magic per game terms) basically turns martials into over-the-top anime combatants.

Or figures of folklore, fairy tales, and mythology. There's nothing in ToB that would be out of place amongst Beowulf, or Greek myth, the Tuatha Dé Danann, or even modern figures like Paul Bunyan.

[JellyPooga]

But in general, more capable of functioning on a broader spectrum than non-casters, because all they need is a new spell for that. And they're already excellent at spells. It's not the system of how spells work that creates the balance, or destroys it.Well, yeah, you could learn a spell for it...or you could learn the skill for it, or get an Advantage (if appropriate). Aside from Magery and IQ, there really isn't much in the way of being "excellent at spells" beyond sinking points into individual spells. In the exact same way you can be excellent at a broad spectrum of combat and non-magery by sinking points into individual skills, backed up by good ST, DX and appropriate Advantages.


And yet you're all still using magic. They may be different systems of magic, but they all are magic. If you tossed "Wizard: the Spellbooking" in as a new splat, using quasi-vancian casting, it would not be automatically more powerful than the others, because all of them are still using magic.Assuming Wizard: The Spellbooking functioned similarly to other WoD games except everything it did functioned on a similar level of automation via resource as D&D does compared to its parent system...well, yeah, it probably would be a bit more powerful, because even though WoD games tend also to have resources, they also depend on rolls for success, while W:tS does not. A Vampire rolling Obfuscation to pass invisibly is less powerful than a Wizard who gets to be invisible without a roll.


Vancian, spell points, or skill-based, the issue is that spells "can do anything," not that spells are "more powerful." The problem is versatility, not power.Versatility is power and that's part of the problem. GURPS solves it by making spells (and skills and Advantages) costly in terms of Character Points; if you want broad versatility, you need to pay for it at the expense of specialisation ("raw number power", if you will). D&D solves it by making spells limited by daily use; a fundamentally different system to the one martials use (albeit in 5ed the difference has been reduced with the increased number of long and short rest based "martial" features). And as a solution it fails, because the daily use ability must be more powerful (whether that be in numbers or versatility) than the thing that isn't, otherwise it wouldn't/shouldn't be limited in use. The imbalance is baked into the difference between those two systems.

I agree that the difference is conceptual. As I said; giving martials daily and short rest abilities works to balance the system, but it also starts taking away from the identity of one party. Superhero games are great, because everyone has superpowers, but when you give Steve Rogers a superserum to compete on the same playing field as Thor...well, he's not really Steve Rogers anymore; he's Captain America. So yeah, letting martials teleport and create sweeping flame strikes (increasing their versatility) could be seen as balanced, but to many people they're not martials anymore. Therefore, rather than make Steve look more like Thor, we need to change the way we look at Thor.

[Silly Name]

I agree with this. I note that your fix (stuff like martial teleportation, feats of strength and speed that are essentially magic but aren't magic per game terms) basically turns martials into over-the-top anime combatants.

I think that is fun and cool, but I am sympathetic that some players don't want that kind of flavor in their games.

And the wizard doing the same... isn't? Because he says some mystical mumbo jumbo first? Because that's not much different from anime protagonists shouting their techniques.

Look, Hercules could hold up the whole damn sky. Achilles was straight-up invulnerable save for a single spot on his body, and Beowulf too. Roland cleaved a mountain in two with just his (admittedly blessed) sword and the might of his arm! Arthur wrestled with a giant and won, Cúchulainn was able to face an entire army on his own when he was seventeen!

If you want wizards to be able to attain enough power to be able to teleport across the world and call down meteors from the heavens, or summon the help of mighty angels and devious demons while creating a backup body, you have to let the martials be able to do some feats of mythical proportions. You can't constrain martials to the power level of Conan while letting casters get away with the full range of superhero power levels.

[BMF]

Snip.

I agree! Those things are good and cool. There are lots of figures from mythology that can perform acts of physical might of these kinds; I shouldn't have limited it to anime-type stuff. But I have encountered many players who create martial characters that those players don't believe could do things like that. Oftentimes those players don't have the same hangups for magic use.

I completely understand, and agree, that this expectations mismatch is responsible for a lot of the power disparity at high levels. Often it is self-imposed by players themselves. I do not have a good fix for that.

[deljzc]

First. People like to play D&D because the popularity means it is easier to find play partners. You HAVE to play RPG's with other people. Picking an obscure game makes that pretty hard.

Second. In every edition it sounds like there is a disagreement on magic. How powerful. How plentiful. How easy to use.

I mean, it kind of all comes down to those three things. I just don't know if they will ever pick a balance between those three things that will make everyone happy.

You could bog down the rule books with a lot of optional rule variants. How to play gritty realism/low magic vs. normal. A page or two in the DMG about options for changing spells (like monsters). Optional guidelines on spell recuperation. Making at-will cantrips optional.

But there is always going to be a part of D&D that lends itself to creating all these things home brewed. Or internet based community options. D&D is an IDEAL game to try new rules and new ways to play. I mean yes, you have to have your play group buy-in. You have to find like-minded players for the changes you intend. And you have to be content that not everything is going to work perfect. That sometimes you just have to accept bad or illogical rulings from a human DM.

I hear all these suggestions but there is NOTHING stopping your group from trying them. To expect WotC to publish and clarify and rules lawyer all the possible rule options out there is unrealistic for a game like D&D.

D&D has always been best as a framework of rules. And most of the failings are when they over-manage the game with rules lawyers and complex answers.

Could many spells be better explained or written? Absolutely. And many times the interpretations and "official" errata on spells hurts more than helps.

But this game is still table based. Your table determines how powerful spellcasters are vs. martials. Nothing more, nothing less.

[Segev]

I agree with this. I note that your fix (stuff like martial teleportation, feats of strength and speed that are essentially magic but aren't magic per game terms) basically turns martials into over-the-top anime combatants.

I think that is fun and cool, but I am sympathetic that some players don't want that kind of flavor in their games.I am sympathetic, but I tend to have the response of, "Then play lower-level games." D&D handles both the more down-to-earth fantasy and the over-the-top fantasy, but it does it at different levels. If you want your characters less over-the-top, play games where they're lower level. Don't demand that, because you kind-of have what you want in martials at high level (but not really, since those, too, are pretty over-the-top), spellcasters have to be weaker or non-existent at high level. Instead, play at the levels that give you more what you want from both martials and casters.


Well, yeah, you could learn a spell for it...or you could learn the skill for it, or get an Advantage (if appropriate). Aside from Magery and IQ, there really isn't much in the way of being "excellent at spells" beyond sinking points into individual spells. In the exact same way you can be excellent at a broad spectrum of combat and non-magery by sinking points into individual skills, backed up by good ST, DX and appropriate Advantages.Except that, by the time you're good at magic, it's cheaper to pick up another spell than to start at the bottom and pick up a skill, especially for a stat that you've min/maxed away in favor of being better at magic.


Assuming Wizard: The Spellbooking functioned similarly to other WoD games except everything it did functioned on a similar level of automation via resource as D&D does compared to its parent system...well, yeah, it probably would be a bit more powerful, because even though WoD games tend also to have resources, they also depend on rolls for success, while W:tS does not. A Vampire rolling Obfuscation to pass invisibly is less powerful than a Wizard who gets to be invisible without a roll."If I make assumptions that make it more powerful because I say they will, it will be more powerful" isn't a very convincing argument. All I said was using a pseudo-vancian mechanic for them.

And no, actually, ONLY Mage and Changeling have regular need to roll to see if your magic works how you want; Vampire Disciplines give you flat out powers and Werewolf Gifts give you flat out powers. Conversely, D&D spells also require rolls, either from the caster or the target, which would easily be translated to "did it work?" rolls in WoD.

There's nothing specially powerful about spell slots that make magic that uses it more powerful than other systems.



I agree that the difference is conceptual. As I said; giving martials daily and short rest abilities works to balance the system, but it also starts taking away from the identity of one party. Superhero games are great, because everyone has superpowers, but when you give Steve Rogers a superserum to compete on the same playing field as Thor...well, he's not really Steve Rogers anymore; he's Captain America. So yeah, letting martials teleport and create sweeping flame strikes (increasing their versatility) could be seen as balanced, but to many people they're not martials anymore. Therefore, rather than make Steve look more like Thor, we need to change the way we look at Thor.So...don't play Captain America in a game where you don't want Captain America. If Steve Rogers was fine at levels 1-7, but the Superserum class feature at level 8 just ruins the class fantasy for you, don't play level 8+ games with that concept. Similarly, Thor won't really feel like Thor until he gets to the level where his kind of power is appropriate.

[Man_Over_Game]

I agree! Those things are good and cool. There are lots of figures from mythology that can perform acts of physical might of these kinds; I shouldn't have limited it to anime-type stuff. But I have encountered many players who create martial characters that those players don't believe could do things like that. Oftentimes those players don't have the same hangups for magic use.

I completely understand, and agree, that this expectations mismatch is responsible for a lot of the power disparity at high levels. Often it is self-imposed by players themselves. I do not have a good fix for that.

So the players that are concerned with martials being too "extra" explicitly want boring martials and amazing spellcasters?

That's what I'm getting from what you're saying. I'm not saying that they aren't entitled to their opinion, but I think that seems like a pretty selfish mentality in a multiplayer game. "I don't care about what's fair, I just care about it playing my way".

It's something that works in stories, movies and video games because you don't have to care about Gimli's or Gandalf's opinions. They don't have to be equals for you to enjoy it, but that same mentality doesn't work at the table.

[Dienekes]

We've had a number of threads asking how we would fix martial characters. A handful of posters have suggested that spellcasters should be brought down closer to non-caster power levels, perhaps with the (usually admitted to be tedious) task of re-writing a large number of spells.

How about a different tack: Just scrap the spells. All of them. Every last one. Gone, poof, sayonara, good riddance to bad rubbish.


Interesting notion. But what shall we replace it with?

Now personally, I’ve always thought Vancian casting was kinda crap. The best d20 “spellcasting” systems I’ve played would be the Spheres of Power and the Tome of Battle, neither use the vancian system.

However, I’m a rather big fan of mechanics working as narrative. And one thing I can say is that vancian casting does one thing well, and that’s creating a clear narrative divide between itself and that stuff those non-casters do. Because, let’s be honest here. It takes mental gymnastics to get vancian casting to represent mundane activity. “Yeah I can do this thing. But only once per day, and I probably won’t be able to do it tomorrow unless I meditate about it for an hour, but then I won’t be able to do some other thing that day.”

That’s insane. Nothing works like that. Hell most magic in stories doesn’t work like that. It really only represents the works of Jack Vance, and arguably not even very well. But it is extraordinarily unnatural.

So what will you replace it with?

Because if it’s not distinct with a feel that is inherently different from martial endeavors it will fail. As others have pointed out with 4e. Perfectly honest, the effects a Wizard could do with their At-Wills, encounter, and Daily powers were vastly different from what a Fighter or Rogue could do. But because it was all designed so similarly it did not feel distinct and magical.

Personally, I’d start by trying to think of what type of magic you’re trying to make. How should it feel, how is it distinct from just a natural ability that just happens to magical in nature. Or is that how it’s supposed to feel? (honestly getting that feeling would make Sorcerers feel more like their fluff and act more distinct than they have ever been)

Some have just straight brought Spheres of Power to 5e.

One thing I’ve done is make a Paladin whose magic abilities are at least partially fueled by how well they follow the tenets of their oath in and out of combat.

I have fiddled with an idea of making a magic system inspired by the Magic the Gathering card system. Where at the start of a casters turn they gain one Magic Point of a specific type. This can be used to cast spells of that type. Each turn that Magic Point refreshes and you can add another point of the same or different type. With more powerful effects costing more and differing Spell Points.

The idea being it takes time to acquire power to make those earth-shattering spells.

So when compared to a martial during encounters the first turn the martial would be indesputably more useful than the caster with their one spell point. By 2nd and 3rd turn it’s about even. And by the 4th the caster is really throwing around powerful magic. So yeah, the caster gets to keep their power. But the martial ability to do awesome but not quite as powerful things NOW is never not useful.

There’s also the ritual path I’ve seen others throw around. Which is essentially about gating the really powerful abilities along team-work lines.

Certainly, the Wizard is the one who can cast Wish. But to do that they must get the scale of a Great Wyrm, the cooking pot of a Hag, and the last whisper of a djinn. Best call your Cleric, Fighter, and Rogue buddies, and stock up on some potions. It’s going to be an adventure.

And of course there must be hundreds of other methods people much smarter than me have come up with.

But what are you trying to do with this stripped down spell casting, beyond mere balance?

How will you make a cleric feel like they’re drawing power from their god to restore life? Rather than just getting the ability to use the Medicine skill... but it’s magic, trust me.

[AntiAuthority]

D&D players want spells to be better than everything else, ultimately.


This is a straw man argument I see erected every time this topic comes up. "You don't want spells nerfed the way I want them to, so you want spells to be more powerful than anything." It always ignores the counterpoint that there are people who'd be thrilled to see extraordinary non-magical abilities that also can do amazing things that are just as powerful as magic.


I've seen some people argue that "spells/magic should be better" as an actual thing. I've seen it across the internet with defenses as, "Why would anyone bother learning magic if a sword can be as powerful", "Of course magic should be stronger", "It's poor world building if magic isn't stronger than everything else" or some variation of these. Also sometimes saying anything impossible by our standards, even if it's not casting spells such as being able to lift a mountain for example just turn non-spellcasters into "casters by another name."

Just not sure how common this mindset is among the DND crowd as a whole (might just be a vocal minority), but there are people who genuinely argue spellcasters should be stronger than none spellcasters.

[OldTrees1]

Interesting notion. But what shall we replace it with?

Now personally, I’ve always thought Vancian casting was kinda crap. The best d20 “spellcasting” systems I’ve played would be the Spheres of Power and the Tome of Battle, neither use the vancian system.

However, I’m a rather big fan of mechanics working as narrative. And one thing I can say is that vancian casting does one thing well, and that’s creating a clear narrative divide between itself and that stuff those non-casters do. Because, let’s be honest here. It takes mental gymnastics to get vancian casting to represent mundane activity. “Yeah I can do this thing. But only once per day, and I probably won’t be able to do it tomorrow unless I meditate about it for an hour, but then I won’t be able to do some other thing that day.”

That’s insane. Nothing works like that. Hell most magic in stories doesn’t work like that. It really only represents the works of Jack Vance, and arguably not even very well. But it is extraordinarily unnatural.

So what will you replace it with?

No idea what they would replace it with, especially since I want to keep it around, but I do have a couple big picture ideas for non caster mages.

1) At will use of magic but limitations on how much can be maintained at once. In 3.5e Necromancers of various stripes had rules for how many undead they could control. Imagine concentration being quantified so the mage can only have N points worth of things active at once. Some things would cost more than others, and some could scale with more concentration.

2) At will use of magic but limited by actions/time (with no action economy cheats like celerity). In 3.5e Warlocks could do magic at will using a different but similar system to spellcasting. However the balance principle there was the Warlock had a limited number of actions per turn. So if the actions are level appropriate for at will use, then it balances itself. This can also merge rituals and crafting for time based balance on the longer logistical scale.

[Kyutaru]

The idea being it takes time to acquire power to make those earth-shattering spells.

So when compared to a martial during encounters the first turn the martial would be indesputably more useful than the caster with their one spell point. By 2nd and 3rd turn it’s about even. And by the 4th the caster is really throwing around powerful magic. So yeah, the caster gets to keep their power. But the martial ability to do awesome but not quite as powerful things NOW is never not useful.
AD&D did something similar with casting times. Fighters had the advantage in that they can swing a bunch of times right now but casters had to deal with slow casting spells and interrupts from those very fighters. None of this 5-foot step to avoid concentration checks stuff because your spell had an actual casting time during which you as a mage were vulnerable.

What you're describing with magic is akin to what some JRPGs do called a warmup. It's the opposite of cooldown in that it takes several turns for certain abilities to come online. But all of these ideas basically give magic a limited and at times slower impact on the battle than straight up warriors which was itself a balancing act.

[clash]

Years ago I came up with the concept of a magic user that charged up to cast and they could choose at what point during the charge up they wanted to cast. So it's at will with limitations. They cant go all nova in one encounter a day because their strength is directly proportional to the number of combats and rounds of combat. They still have resource management and have to weight the choices of casting little big, cantrip etc. It also limits out of combat utility because of the design.
https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?500635-Battlemage-New-Base-Class
for anyone interested.

[jas61292]

5e casting is not fundamentally broken. To throw it out completely because, yes, casters, not martials, are the balance problem, is a bit extreme. That being said, if you were to do some sort of major re-write to balance out 5e, I absolutely would change casters. But it would not be the casting system I would change. It would be the casting classes.

The number one issue with casters is simply that they can do too much at once. The issue with Wizards, for instance, both from a mechanical and concept standpoint, is that they can simply do everything. This is a balance issue because... well... that's too much. But its also a conceptual issue. People love looking to other media to inspire characters, and frankly, outside of D&D based media, there are almost no characters that would be well described as similar to D&D wizard while simultaneously being described as of an acceptable power level to work in a balanced party with other characters. The kinds of magic characters that work well in that role are those whose thing is something like pyromancy, or teleportation, or seeing glimpses of the future. But the D&D wizard does not fit one of those roles. It fits all of them, plus summoning, buffing and polymorphing. Like seriously... the fact that the "Diviner" is considered strong because of how powerful they can be with transmutation (and other) spells should say all there is to be said.

While wizard is probably the biggest offender, I think all full casting classes have a bit of this issue. There is not enough focus, which is both non-thematic, and also highly overpowering. A balanced mage using the 5e system is one that has access to a very specific subset of magic. They should have many different ways to use that kind of magic. An Illusionist should have dozens of different applications for illusions. But that should be their thing. They should not be using half their slots on Misty Step and Shield because they should not get Misty Step or Shield.

Obviously remaking existing classes with this in mind, and probably replacing some with a number of new classes would be a ton of work. But I think that would be the only way that you can have both casters and martials together and not have the casters feel inherently stronger and more versatile. Not saying some martials couldn't also use some work, but as long as the answer to "what can you do?" for a caster is "everything," there will never be real balance.

[Man_Over_Game]

Interesting notion. But what shall we replace it with?

Now personally, I’ve always thought Vancian casting was kinda crap. The best d20 “spellcasting” systems I’ve played would be the Spheres of Power and the Tome of Battle, neither use the vancian system.

However, I’m a rather big fan of mechanics working as narrative. And one thing I can say is that vancian casting does one thing well, and that’s creating a clear narrative divide between itself and that stuff those non-casters do. Because, let’s be honest here. It takes mental gymnastics to get vancian casting to represent mundane activity. “Yeah I can do this thing. But only once per day, and I probably won’t be able to do it tomorrow unless I meditate about it for an hour, but then I won’t be able to do some other thing that day.”

That’s insane. Nothing works like that. Hell most magic in stories doesn’t work like that. It really only represents the works of Jack Vance, and arguably not even very well. But it is extraordinarily unnatural.

So what will you replace it with?

I could see it as a dice pool that you pull from to do pull off powerful tasks. Everything uses a DC value that you must hit for the effect to occur (even stuff like Fly or Invisibility), and you simply spend these power dice until you hit the DC needed for that effect.

For example, a Barbarian jumping an incredibly difficult gap requires a DC 20. His base bonus to jumping checks from all sources is a +10, so he starts pulling from his 10d6 power dice pool until he hits 15. It takes him 3 dice, so he now has 7d6 for the rest of the day.

This works for spells, skills, everything you can imagine, as long as you reflect the bonuses from each source, and the DCs for each power, correctly.

For example, healing someone's poison could be a DC 10. Someone with Medicine Proficiency might get a +3 to their roll, and another +5 from being a Paladin or Cleric, and maybe another +3 from stats. So while a Rogue can spend a few power dice to cleanse that person's poison, a Cleric could do so without expending any energy (or maybe require a minimum 1 power die if you feel like players shouldn't be able to spam powers).

It could be pretty broad, doing things like adding a "Pyromania" feat that gives you +5 to your bonus to any power that utilizes Fire. So when a DC 20 Barbarian power lets you engulf yourself in an element of your choosing, you can specialize as a Fire Barbarian and give them flaming hugs.

Dice scale with levels, bonuses and selectable powers are based on the individual classes and features you level into.

It effectively puts spells and skills on the same playing field, while keeping things limited in terms of resources, while also making sense. It's not that you can't cast X spells Y times during Z hours of the day, but that you're just friggin' exhausted and can't do anything else after a long day of adventuring (which applies universally to everyone).

In order to cut down on constant referencing, just set a design philosophy that bonuses never change. Players write down what they need to utilize their powers (So a DC 15 with a +9 total bonus just needs a total of 6 to be used for that power), and then just remember that "My Beast Mode power takes a total of 6 to use", and never let anything increase or decrease that value beyond level-up choices. If circumstances ever need to make things easier or harder, modify the external roll with something like the Dis/Advantage system. So instead of the Jump spell adding a +5 to your jump check bonuses it refunds your first die spent towards any jump checks.

I dunno, just a random idea. I like it tho. Might expand on it later.

[MaxWilson]

I've seen some people argue that "spells/magic should be better" as an actual thing. I've seen it across the internet with defenses as, "Why would anyone bother learning magic if a sword can be as powerful", "Of course magic should be stronger", "It's poor world building if magic isn't stronger than everything else" or some variation of these. Also sometimes saying anything impossible by our standards, even if it's not casting spells such as being able to lift a mountain for example just turn non-spellcasters into "casters by another name."

Just not sure how common this mindset is among the DND crowd as a whole (might just be a vocal minority), but there are people who genuinely argue spellcasters should be stronger than none spellcasters.

If you pay for power by taking a dependency on magic, you should get something in return. That doesn't necessarily mean you have to be "stronger" in some global sense. E.g. it's fine if a skilled thief can pick a lock faster and quiet than a wizard can enchant it open, and fine if a trained warrior can jump a gap that a scrawny wizard would need to Levitate over. It is less fine if someone wants to jump infinitely better than the trained warrior can, e.g. Superman-style jumps, while simultaneously insisting that that "isn't magic."

If you want to do supernatural stuff, you pay the supernatural price including vulnerability to anti-magic fields.


5e casting is not fundamentally broken. To throw it out completely because, yes, casters, not martials, are the balance problem, is a bit extreme. That being said, if you were to do some sort of major re-write to balance out 5e, I absolutely would change casters. But it would not be the casting system I would change. It would be the casting classes.

The number one issue with casters is simply that they can do too much at once. The issue with Wizards, for instance, both from a mechanical and concept standpoint, is that they can simply do everything. This is a balance issue because... well... that's too much. But its also a conceptual issue. People love looking to other media to inspire characters, and frankly, outside of D&D based media, there are almost no characters that would be well described as similar to D&D wizard while simultaneously being described as of an acceptable power level to work in a balanced party with other characters. The kinds of magic characters that work well in that role are those whose thing is something like pyromancy, or teleportation, or seeing glimpses of the future. But the D&D wizard does not fit one of those roles. It fits all of them, plus summoning, buffing and polymorphing. Like seriously... the fact that the "Diviner" is considered strong because of how powerful they can be with transmutation (and other) spells should say all there is to be said.

While wizard is probably the biggest offender, I think all full casting classes have a bit of this issue. There is not enough focus, which is both non-thematic, and also highly overpowering. A balanced mage using the 5e system is one that has access to a very specific subset of magic. They should have many different ways to use that kind of magic. An Illusionist should have dozens of different applications for illusions. But that should be their thing. They should not be using half their slots on Misty Step and Shield because they should not get Misty Step or Shield.

Obviously remaking existing classes with this in mind, and probably replacing some with a number of new classes would be a ton of work. But I think that would be the only way that you can have both casters and martials together and not have the casters feel inherently stronger and more versatile. Not saying some martials couldn't also use some work, but as long as the answer to "what can you do?" for a caster is "everything," there will never be real balance.

What I would change is to scrap the ability to get "free" spells on level-up. Wizards can do "everything" in D&D because fighters can do "everything", and in both cases it's conditioned on them going in dungeons and finding stuff they can use. The difference is that Fighters find stuff they can wear and hold with their hands, and wizards find old spellbooks. If you've ever read Jack Vance's Mazirian the Magician and seen how manic Mazirian is to get his hands on Turjan's new cloning spell you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Letting wizards (and sorcerers, etc.) materialize new spells out of nowhere just because they "leveled up" is akin to the Fighter materializing new magic items out of nowhere just because he leveled up. Neither should happen.

[ProsecutorGodot]

I don't see how you could replace it with anything that isn't obviously spellcasting with a fresh coat of paint on it. If the exploration into Psionics (and the scrapping of the Mystic as a whole) has shown us, it's that it's kind of difficult to make such a system with how 5E was designed initially.

All I could see happening is Spellcasting 2: Electric Boogaloo, where the rules are eerily similar but a concerted effort was made to avoid reusing any overlapping terms and things are slightly weaker than they were simply because the consensus was that they should be. Even if we extend this train of thought to a potential new edition, I don't see much different unless drastic design changes were made. Kind of like 4E, history repeats itself I guess.

I generally think moving martials up would be a better option than trying to push casters down. There's more room for that in the system than trying to rewrite huge swaths of the core rules.

[JellyPooga]

Except that, by the time you're good at magic, it's cheaper to pick up another spell than to start at the bottom and pick up a skill, especially for a stat that you've min/maxed away in favor of being better at magic.

In D&D terms you're kinda saying "By the time you've taken 10 levels in Wizard, you may as well take another level in Wizard rather than multiclass to Fighter". Well...yeah? Unless you've built to have a good blend of both magic and mundane, of course a Wizard is better off learning a spell to do a thing, rather than a new skill. That's what wizards do. Cast and learn spells. Similarly, a "Fighter" may as well learn a new weapon skill or technique rather than learn a spell; it's how he's built. Where GURPS does it right is in the cost of spells; magic is usually better than not-magic and consequently it's more difficult to learn (as a rule) and spells tend to have more prerequisites than the closest equivalent. It's balanced by build cost, not game mechanics.


"If I make assumptions that make it more powerful because I say they will, it will be more powerful" isn't a very convincing argument. All I said was using a pseudo-vancian mechanic for them.That is the assumption of vancian magic, by definition; its limited by daily use because it's more powerful. Except it ignores the fallibility of that limitation.


There's nothing specially powerful about spell slots that make magic that uses it more powerful than other systems.Internally, no. Spell slot vs spell slot is balanced. At-will vs. At-will is balanced. Spell slot vs. At-will cannot be. Inherently. It's the entire point of limiting the ability behind a resource. If ability A is limited by resource, it must be more powerful than ability B, which is not. A>B at any given point using both. That's an inherently imbalanced and flawed baseline. Wherever you go from there, that imbalance influences the system.


So...don't play Captain America in a game where you don't want Captain America. If Steve Rogers was fine at levels 1-7, but the Superserum class feature at level 8 just ruins the class fantasy for you, don't play level 8+ games with that concept. Similarly, Thor won't really feel like Thor until he gets to the level where his kind of power is appropriate.

In which case, then you have to ban Thor from games below "superserum" level. That's not really an option though and at that point you really have two separate and incompatible games. It says something about D&D that it tries and largely succeeds at mashing them together, but it doesn't change the fact that the incompatibility exists.

[Kyutaru]

Just not sure how common this mindset is among the DND crowd as a whole (might just be a vocal minority), but there are people who genuinely argue spellcasters should be stronger than none spellcasters.
In my experience it's almost exclusively a novel and D&D thing. They're used to Gandalf and Dr Strange and Elminster and Merlin. Did Aragorn exist? Sure, but he was a supporting character next to the awesome half-angel wizard who came back from the dead. Did King Arthur exist? Sure, but where would he be without Merlin guiding him and protecting the kingdom with his magics? Fantasy literature, which D&D is heavily based on, paint up mages like Harry Potter as more powerful than muggles and that's where they get their expectations from.

But gamers know better. You don't expect Warlocks to be superior to Rogues in World of Warcraft, in fact the opposite is true. In Dota where characters are split between Strength, Agility, and Intelligence the mages are not inherently superior to the melee tanks or assassins. Balance exists in all forms that are not storytelling because magic in gaming needs to be Hard Magic with solid restrictions and rules while magic in storytelling is too often Soft Magic without true limitations and used frequently in Deus Ex Machina.

[staylost]

As a random player who plays 5e about once a week I disagree with the premise, the rationale, and the means suggested by the post.

First, magic is not more powerful than martials generally. Magic does have more problem solving tools than martials do. But it is not stronger in a dpr sense. Magic/martials and pure martials are best there. Magic players end up putting those dpr focused characters in optimum conditions.

Second, the things that D&D has changed (AC tables, saving throws, etc.) remain exactly the same concept, but are simply reorganized. The spell system has already changed just as much if not more between editions.

Third, simply eliminating magic or spells in D&D would utterly gut the game. Or do you play 4E every time you play? No? That is because the majority did not find it engaging or fun when the spell system was sidelined. Getting rid of the traditional magic system almost killed the brand.

In the end the imbalance is justified. Your spreadsheet friendly, boardgame manipulator types enjoy D&D because they can master complicated spells for use in unexpected situations. Your "yahtzee" type players enjoy D&D because they can roll a barbarian and hit things without thinking about the number crunch. Your entertainers can enjoy the rogue. The point is the game is made to have characters that click with not only themes, but also personality types. This is how the game is able to draw enough people to the table to actually play the game. Getting rid of spells would just kill the brand - not because of angry fanboys, but because if you remove the ability to eek out a slightly more effective character through an enormous amount of work like primary magic users do, you remove a substantial part of the player base. And you need everyone at the table to really enjoy what D&D is all about: the story telling.

[Falconcry]

Sounds like rather then revamping D&D you should look into game from the 80’s called Maelstrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maelstrom_(role-playing_game).
The closest it had to magic was using herbs to cure diseases etc.

[Kane0]

Years ago I came up with the concept of a magic user that charged up to cast and they could choose at what point during the charge up they wanted to cast. So it's at will with limitations. They cant go all nova in one encounter a day because their strength is directly proportional to the number of combats and rounds of combat. They still have resource management and have to weight the choices of casting little big, cantrip etc. It also limits out of combat utility because of the design.
https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?500635-Battlemage-New-Base-Class
for anyone interested.

Has merit! Proves that the slot system is not the only viable one, ideally i’d like to see systems like this implemented alongside slots, points and other methods to differentiate casters.

[MaxWilson]

The rough part of that is convincing someone else to run Dungeon Fantasy. Because the real issue is that it's pretty hard to find a group for games that aren't the current flavor of D&D that let you play instead of running the game.

Heh. Touche.

[BMF]

So the players that are concerned with martials being too "extra" explicitly want boring martials and amazing spellcasters?

That's what I'm getting from what you're saying. I'm not saying that they aren't entitled to their opinion, but I think that seems like a pretty selfish mentality in a multiplayer game. "I don't care about what's fair, I just care about it playing my way".

It's something that works in stories, movies and video games because you don't have to care about Gimli's or Gandalf's opinions. They don't have to be equals for you to enjoy it, but that same mentality doesn't work at the table.

I don't think anyone wants their character to be boring! They want their character to be cool and effective at embodying the version of the character the player has in their head. I don't think it's unreasonable to want to play a non-magical character who is interesting, effective, and still not capable of performing the feats of Hercules. Best way to do that, as somebody said above, is to play lower-level games probably. Or play some other system I guess.

[Pex]

A newbie wouldn't have much attachment to the old system anyhow so why not try the DM's system?

Veterans are the stickler and are quite attached to their tried and true methods and spells. But just as the newbie knows no difference a veteran hasn't even tried your new system yet. If people are that obstinate and flat out refuse to budge outside of their comfort zone to experience something they haven't but would rather sample the same things repeatedly then they are not the group to suggest new ideas to in the first place.

To throw back a counter example, imagine if I suggested eating at the new restaurant in town and get rejected because the group just wants to eat the same stuff they always have. That is not an adventurous group ready to brave the unknown and attempting to get them to budge is doomed from the start. Thankfully not everyone is like that and many are bold enough to try something new.

If they want to play D&D they want to play D&D and they're not having BadWrongThoughts to do so. It doesn't hurt for them to try a different game, but it should be a different game not D&D with 2/3 of the rules thrown away. If they don't want to, get over it. Play D&D with them if you still want to and find other people who want to play the game you want. If you can't that's unfortunately disappointing, but you get over it. If you hate D&D, stop playing. Don't make others stop too.

[Man_Over_Game]

I don't think anyone wants their character to be boring! They want their character to be cool and effective at embodying the version of the character the player has in their head. I don't think it's unreasonable to want to play a non-magical character who is interesting, effective, and still not capable of performing the feats of Hercules. Best way to do that, as somebody said above, is to play lower-level games probably. Or play some other system I guess.

I think there's an option that makes everyone happy.

You mention playing lower level games as a solution. Would it be reasonable to have these Hercules powers as upper-level features, and then just have players play whatever power level they feel most comfortable with?

Nobody really has too many complaints about comparing level 1 Fighters with level 1 Wizards, yet there are many complaints when comparing level 15 Fighters to level 15 Wizards. Maybe the solution isn't changing the level 1-15 Wizard, or the level 1 Fighter.

Maybe we just have to fix the level 15 Fighter?

[Segev]

That is the assumption of vancian magic, by definition; its limited by daily use because it's more powerful. Except it ignores the fallibility of that limitation.

Here's our fundamental disconnect. "Being more powerful than other magic systems" isn't something that is part of Vancian magic. Vancian magic is simply defined as the literal fire-and-forget nature of the spells. You prep them, you have them until you use them. That's it.

Asserting that "because it's limited, it is more powerful than other options" is not a part of vancian magic. It is part of why spells are as strong as they are, but that is divorced from the limiting factor being Vancian-ish spell slots. That's there because there's a limiting factor.

Mage: the Ascension has a limiting factor, so it would be equally expected to be "more powerful" than non-magic options as quasi-Vancian "Wizard: the Spellbookening" would be. Vampire Disciplines cost blood points to use, so they, too, get to be more powerful than at-will abilities.

Asserting that the limitation of quasi-vancian spell slots means Wizard: the Spellbookbinding should be more powerful than other WoD splats is where I say you're presuming your conclusion. Quasi-Vancian spell slots could be argued to be LESS limiting than Mage or Vampire's issues, thus asserting that their spells would be commensurately weaker than MAge or Vampire magics to make up for it.

There is nothing about being quasi-Vancian that makes magic "better." That's a separate balance issue and discussion. If you replaced spell slots with mana points, it wouldn't change (see Psionics in 3.5). You're conflating the specifics of how magic spellcasting is limited in D&D (spell slots) to the fact that limiting it is what justifies making it stronger (to some extent). You're then asserting, therefore, that it's spell slots that make it too strong, and thus barking up the wrong tree to try to solve the problem you're observing.

[Silly Name]

I agree! Those things are good and cool. There are lots of figures from mythology that can perform acts of physical might of these kinds; I shouldn't have limited it to anime-type stuff. But I have encountered many players who create martial characters that those players don't believe could do things like that. Oftentimes those players don't have the same hangups for magic use.

I completely understand, and agree, that this expectations mismatch is responsible for a lot of the power disparity at high levels. Often it is self-imposed by players themselves. I do not have a good fix for that.

I want to preface this by stating that I don't think a player is wrong for wanting to play Conan in D&D: the Conan series is among the works that inspired D&D, and the Barbarian class is very much modelled on him rather than any real-world, historical "barbarian" as defined by the Graeco-Roman civilization, so that's a legit character concept.

However, it's a concept that can only go so far in the power spectrum from level 1 to 20. A very popular variant of the 3.5 rules was the E6 rulest, which capped level progression at 6. It struck a balance were you could have Conan work side by side with Merlin and Gandalf without getting overshadowed by them.

A player wanting to play Conan, however, must accept that the power level of Conan's foes isn't the same level at which a level 20 D&D full caster operates (or even a caster above level 10). The Cymmerian could always outwit and outbrawn the sorcers and enchantresses he faced. In the same vein, Gandalf wasn't able to just cast Meteor Swarm over the host of Mordor, allowing Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas to shine when huge battles broke out.

So, if "Conan the Barbarian" is the ceiling you want to aim for, you need to establish that during session 0. I've successfully ran campaigns where the party's Barbarian, Ranger and Rogue all cooperated with the Cleric towards slaying the Tarrasque, and everyone participated in that effort and nobody felt overshadowed by the other party members - but that was because we set expectations during session 0, we agreed on keeping the overall power level balanced and I was careful to hand the martials boons and magic items that kept them on par with the Cleric.

But if your party has Odysseus coexist with Doctor Strange, you run into the issue of Odysseus' legendary wits being infinitely less useful at solving problems that the Sorcer Supreme's magic powers. You don't need Odysseus to come up with a plan to escape Polyphemus, because Doctor Strange can just blast the cyclop to negative hitpoints, or turn him to stone, or make him fall asleep, or send him to another plane of existence or whatever else his magic can achieve. And Odysseus will feel shafted and useless, because his power level doesn't coincide with that of the rest of the campaign.

[OldTrees1]

That is the assumption of vancian magic, by definition; its limited by daily use because it's more powerful. Except it ignores the fallibility of that limitation.

Internally, no. Spell slot vs spell slot is balanced. At-will vs. At-will is balanced. Spell slot vs. At-will cannot be. Inherently. It's the entire point of limiting the ability behind a resource. If ability A is limited by resource, it must be more powerful than ability B, which is not. A>B at any given point using both. That's an inherently imbalanced and flawed baseline. Wherever you go from there, that imbalance influences the system.


Here's our fundamental disconnect. "Being more powerful than other magic systems" isn't something that is part of Vancian magic. Vancian magic is simply defined as the literal fire-and-forget nature of the spells. You prep them, you have them until you use them. That's it.

Hold on a moment, I think there is less disagreement that is initially apparent.

Imagine a system where
Character A does 15 points per turn.
Character B does 14 points per turn, except for a limited number of turns they do 17 points that turn.
Actual balance depends on frequency. You will also note that the limited use ability does not need to be vastly stronger.

Imagine a system where
Character A does 3 green or 3 blue per turn.
Character B does 3 red per turn, except for a limited number of turns they do 3 yellow or 3 orange.

Vancian Magic is generally designed as the first system. Penalize the baseline ability but give it a limited use above average ability. Nothing in the vancian mechanics require that design, you could use the second design, but generally vancian magic uses that first design.

AKA limited use abilities don't have to be stronger than at-will abilities, but they generally do use that design paradigm.

[Wise Weasel]

Therefore, rather than make Steve look more like Thor, we need to change the way we look at Thor.

I think this is the wrong idea: You need to change and fix the Setting.

Lets take that Avengers film for an example. Captain America and Thor are at way different power levels, but did you notice that in the movie it did not matter. Thor does battle feild control with his lightning and takes out the big worm monster targets. Captain America is down on the street saving people and taking on small groups of aliens. Along with Hawkeye as the spotter, Iron Man as battle field control too, Hulk is smashing, and Black Widow as special operations, they make for a great team.

But you won't see Cap flying around, shooting lightning and killing big space monsters. The same way Thor does not land and fight an alien trooper hand to hand for a minute. Black Widow, really is the stand out here, though. She is doing the special operations. The Avengers need to close the portal, but even the all powerful ones can't smash through the force field. Black Widow literately says this. Then she figures out that the Loki scepter can get through the force field and close the portal.

So did you notice every Avenger had something to do? Something unique and amazingly suited to their talents and abilities? You might watch the movie and say "wow, what amazing random luck the big battle worked out that way".

Well.....guess what? It was not Luck. It was all a set up. It was all planned and written out that way. Why you might ask? Well, the answer is to make a great ending to a great movie....and it worked.

D&D needs the exact same thing: not just for a single fight, but for the whole setting.



if your party has Odysseus coexist with Doctor Strange, you run into the issue of Odysseus' legendary wits being infinitely less useful at solving problems that the Sorcer Supreme's magic powers. You don't need Odysseus to come up with a plan to escape Polyphemus, because Doctor Strange can just blast the cyclop to negative hitpoints, or turn him to stone, or make him fall asleep, or send him to another plane of existence or whatever else his magic can achieve. And Odysseus will feel shafted and useless, because his power level doesn't coincide with that of the rest of the campaign.

Another good example. Notice how it's a given that no matter what Doctor Strange's spells will always work 100% of the time? Well, this is a setting issue. The setting if full of targets that say 'cast spell here for the easy win'.

What if the setting was not like that. What if the foe was more resistant to magic, or maybe could absorb cast magic or was even immune to magic? What if the setting made it harder for the spellcaster to target their spells? Or, much like the above Avengers example: What if the way to defeat a foe was some OTHER way, other then just blasting away with more powerful magic? What if you need Odysseus or the Black Widow?

[MaxWilson]

"Odysseus" isn't a character class--it's a player mindset. You can't bottle genius and put it on a character sheet. An Odysseus fighter infiltrates the Fomorians underwater even though he doesn't have magic of his own. An Odysseus wizard kills the Rakshasa even though it's immune to his spells. _How_ Odysseus achieves it will vary based on circumstances, but you can be pretty sure he doesn't just attack the problem head-on.

[JNAProductions]

I think this is the wrong idea: You need to change and fix the Setting.

Lets take that Avengers film for an example. Captain America and Thor are at way different power levels, but did you notice that in the movie it did not matter. Thor does battle feild control with his lightning and takes out the big worm monster targets. Captain America is down on the street saving people and taking on small groups of aliens. Along with Hawkeye as the spotter, Iron Man as battle field control too, Hulk is smashing, and Black Widow as special operations, they make for a great team.

But you won't see Cap flying around, shooting lightning and killing big space monsters. The same way Thor does not land and fight an alien trooper hand to hand for a minute. Black Widow, really is the stand out here, though. She is doing the special operations. The Avengers need to close the portal, but even the all powerful ones can't smash through the force field. Black Widow literately says this. Then she figures out that the Loki scepter can get through the force field and close the portal.

So did you notice every Avenger had something to do? Something unique and amazingly suited to their talents and abilities? You might watch the movie and say "wow, what amazing random luck the big battle worked out that way".

Well.....guess what? It was not Luck. It was all a set up. It was all planned and written out that way. Why you might ask? Well, the answer is to make a great ending to a great movie....and it worked.

D&D needs the exact same thing: not just for a single fight, but for the whole setting.

Another good example. Notice how it's a given that no matter what Doctor Strange's spells will always work 100% of the time? Well, this is a setting issue. The setting if full of targets that say 'cast spell here for the easy win'.

What if the setting was not like that. What if the foe was more resistant to magic, or maybe could absorb cast magic or was even immune to magic? What if the setting made it harder for the spellcaster to target their spells? Or, much like the above Avengers example: What if the way to defeat a foe was some OTHER way, other then just blasting away with more powerful magic? What if you need Odysseus or the Black Widow?

What works in movies, books, and other stories does not always work in TTRPGs.

[Kyutaru]

"Odysseus" isn't a character class--it's a player mindset. You can't bottle genius and put it on a character sheet. An Odysseus fighter infiltrates the Fomorians underwater even though he doesn't have magic of his own. An Odysseus wizard kills the Rakshasa even though it's immune to his spells. _How_ Odysseus achieves it will vary based on circumstances, but you can be pretty sure he doesn't just attack the problem head-on.

You can though. Bottle genius and put it on a character sheet. Give heroes an ability involving coming up with a genius plan or maneuver that has direct game results. I mean this is basically akin to Bardic Inspiration and Bless already, giving you some genuine edge due to factors we can't see or explain. If you need the enemy to be vulnerable to your attacks then just have the enemy be vulnerable to your attacks and explain it away as you came up with some really cool trick. Can it be done by player ingenuity? Probably. But it can also be done with a dice roll on your "Craft Plan" skill check.

[Theodoxus]

I didn't read the whole thread, because lazy, so maybe this was touched on (looked like it might have been at the top of page 4) - but the problem with magic is that it's a limited resource and even things like Superiority Dice are already banging on the "why is this a limited resource, in universe?" portal.

The D&D multiverse has a very weird 'exhaustion' problem that simple training doesn't take care of. There's really no 'IRL' reason that Commander's Strike couldn't be used every round. At best, one could argue that the enemy quickly learns to ignore the fighter and listen for the rogue's sneak attack thereby negating it (somehow) - but that wouldn't work with most beasts, mindless undead, oozes, etc. Magic is artificially gated with spell slots to make the game "fair". Not that life is fair, so why we try so hard to make a game fair is beyond me - but that's a different discussion.

Ultimately though, eliminating spellcasting and replacing it entirely with something else that isn't some real world equivalent (flamethrowers, tazers, cars, cell phones, video chat... the technological equivalent of spells is mindnumbingly boring) is just renaming magic. Magic by any other name is just as powerful - to bash a metaphor into the ground.

Really, the only system of magic I'd consider would be something akin to Mage (as noted on page 1). But I don't think it would require a complete dismantling of the rest of the systems. It would, at it's most basic level, be built upon cantrips. Each cantrip would unlock a related, but more powerful upgrade. And different schools could be mixed together to get unique effects. Provide a bit of a template for the classic spells for players to sink their teeth into, and maybe a few examples of completely new spells that work strangely (an evocation/enchantment that debuffs armor when it's hit with acid, perhaps).

The last bit is figuring out how to power it all. I'm personally a fan of no damage being more than a typical martial can put out - something like sneak attack damage if you can gain a specific advantage (maybe Advantage, maybe something else) - but that would allow magic to be mostly without cost. I can see some people balking at unlimited healing (though I think it's kinda silly given the rest mechanics, but whatever). Can make some schools, some specific combinations, actually have a cost. THP, perhaps. And if you have none, you can always burn your actual HP...

[Kyutaru]

Magic is artificially gated with spell slots to make the game "fair".

I actually don't think it's that at all. Spell slots have existed since even the broken editions when fighters were a joke and wizards were gods with spells that didn't have defined limitations but near limitless reach and scope. Read through the 2nd edition spell list and you'll find tons of obscenely powerful and broken spells that had permanent duration or incredibly long ranges or physics shattering effects. Back then it was accepted that wizards were more powerful which is why it took more experience points to level one. Fighters only need 1000 xp to hit level 2 while Mages needed 2500 xp and this resulted in two characters of the same xp total having very different levels. D&D spells were less about hard rules and more generic fantasy roleplay descriptions that left a lot to DM discretion and players abused it for all it was worth to make their casters into world-shaping immortals. Magic got so out of hand at the time that even in the D&D lore a wizard tried to use an epic spell to become a god which led to the destruction of the Weave and the death of the magic goddess.

Vancian magic is not about limitation to make the game fair because wizards were grossly unfair even with it and later spells came along that let them basically ignore it. Instead it's just the style of casting, the idea that mages cast all their very long spells during preparation except for the trigger word and basically stored all the magical energy before unleashing it with the final incantation. Recovering spells took hours if not days because each one took a long time to cast, longer than the single round it takes to activate them. This concept of drainage and expending the energy promoted the rest cycle and adventuring days, the realistic storytelling tool that had adventurers require sleep and sustenance and survival because they couldn't just go all day long adventuring. Fatigue and exhaustion were huge components to tabletop war games and D&D began as one.

[MaxWilson]

In my experience in GURPS, if you're building a mage, you can do a LOT more with the same points than you can with non-magic. Because you can narrow it down to just needing to be good at magic.

Now, you're right; a careful GM can make GURPS magic not outshine non-magic, but this usually winds up with magic being not worth doing at all, because it can't do anything useful. The balance of just the right amount of fatigue cost and just the right difficulty for just the right number of CP winds up with it being better to just say, "Screw it; magic and non-magic are just fluff. Tell me what result you want and how you get it, and we'll decide if it was magical or not afterwards."

Note that GURPS 4E actually does this--unlike GURPS 3E, in 4E there's no real psionics system any more, just a bunch of powers that you buy with the "Psionic" origin attached (which gives you a minor discount and makes you vulnerable to anti-psionic effects, etc.). Even the magic system has moved in this direction. I think it's terribly bland and it's one of the reasons I started drifting back towards D&D, which has actual structure to its magic system, not just a bunch of orthogonal components.


Note: I don't like GURPS, but I have built things in it. I have played in it. Because I gravitate towards mages or psychics, I know from experience that players who didn't still felt I was "overpowered." I won't say they're wrong (or right), but the sentiment persisted, which tells me that GURPS doesn't actually handle it better. (I did have to work harder to get a mage who wasn't utterly useless, though, because GURPS if you don't optimize to the point that it is almost trivial makes magic something that you fail at so much more often than you succeed that you may as well not bother.)

Point-buy systems are generally whacko, and GURPS' point-buy chargen system is one of my least favorite things about it. If I were going to run a GURPS Dungeon Fantasy game I'd totally keep all of the runtime rules from Martial Arts, but I'd make my own character generation system with a lot more structure. Not necessarily a full class-and-level system, but definitely a larger-granularity system than the default, with more things like prerequisites before you can buy the best powers, so that progression has a certain order that is harder to cherry-pick.

Anyway, if you're saying that GURPS' magic system is not particularly balanced, [shrug] maybe. I don't really like GURPS' magic system, even the old one before they moved towards 4E's powers-by-another-name approach. It's simultaneously too weak and tactical and too powerful, in a weird way, but a different weird way than AD&D's or 5E's systems.


Definitely true. I’d rather make the non-magical part of D&D more like magic than the other way around.

Yes, 4e did a bunch of that and it was not popular, but it’s not clear to me that it could not be done, and in a way that was sufficiently D&D-esque enough to keep the D&D-seeking gamers happy. Make the skill/environmental-interaction system, a version of the combat system (make a Tome of Battle or GURPS:MA style martial class), and perhaps the social system have the same depth of complexity as D&D magic. Probably also truncate the worst-offender parts of magic like polymorph, summoning, simulacrum, and wish. Also make magic items* part of the expected norm again (perhaps with fighters once again getting access to the coolest magic items).

5E's system has a lot of weird outliers, but you could go a long way towards cutting spellcasters down to the same power level as warriors just by eliminating all minionmancy spells including Mass Suggestion and Simulacrum, eliminating Forcecage and Wall of Force, eliminating Shield and Absorb Elements, and eliminating all shapechanging spells and effects including Animal Shapes. Whether you should do that is of course up to your personal taste, but it does seem to be true that it's not so much magic that is overpowered in 5E as a large number of specific spells.

================================================== ======


I actually don't think it's that at all. Spell slots have existed since even the broken editions when fighters were a joke and wizards were gods with spells that didn't have defined limitations but near limitless reach and scope. Read through the 2nd edition spell list and you'll find tons of obscenely powerful and broken spells that had permanent duration or incredibly long ranges or physics shattering effects. Back then it was accepted that wizards were more powerful which is why it took more experience points to level one.

2nd edition balances wizards not just by making them slow to advance but also by making them fragile. Can't cast spells while moving, spells are subject to interruption while casting, can't wear armor while casting spells (although priests can, and Elven Chain doesn't count as armor), and have only 35 HP at 20th level (in an edition where Fireball does up to 10d6 (35) damage and permadeath occurs at 0 HP or (optional rule) at -10 HP, and save-or-die effects abound, and even resurrection magic can perma-kill you), and most wizards just plain aren't smart enough to ever cast 9th level spells even if they do hit 20th level.

That said, even the lower-level spells in 2nd edition are indeed great fun and often incredibly powerful. Dominate and Magic Jar, for example, are both 5th level spells but more powerful in many ways than 5E's 8th level version of Dominate Monster.

[AntiAuthority]

If you pay for power by taking a dependency on magic, you should get something in return. That doesn't necessarily mean you have to be "stronger" in some global sense. E.g. it's fine if a skilled thief can pick a lock faster and quiet than a wizard can enchant it open, and fine if a trained warrior can jump a gap that a scrawny wizard would need to Levitate over. It is less fine if someone wants to jump infinitely better than the trained warrior can, e.g. Superman-style jumps, while simultaneously insisting that that "isn't magic."

If you want to do supernatural stuff, you pay the supernatural price including vulnerability to anti-magic fields.

Magic, fantastic, extraordinary, superhuman, supernatural, mythological, etc. whatever you want to call characters that can pull off impossible stunts without using spells... There are genuinely people who think spells should be stronger than anyone who trains their bodies because "it's realistic that those who train their minds get ahead in life than those who train their bodies" and argue that anyone who wants superpowered warriors in D&D are trying to ruin the spirit of the game.

About supernatural prices, one of the 3.PF designers talked about this, (https://seankreynolds.wordpress.com/2014/06/04/ex-su-and-martial-characters/) and said the solution to labeling everything impossible as magic might be part of the issue of giving non-spellcasters nice things. I have to agree, and I think characters like Superman, Thor, Hercules, Beowulf, etc. wouldn't be considered magic users (such as casting spells) by DND terms and would probably be closer to something like a Fire Elemental or some other fantastic creature as a random example. The Fire Elemental doesn't cast spells to keep itself lit, its flames won't go out if it goes into an anti-magic field or someone casts Dispel Magic on it and it's not infinitely better than magic users just because it works in an field so it's not exactly magic by DND terms. Hercules' strength wasn't able to be suppressed to my knowledge (there was a plant that protected one hero from sorcery, so Hercules wouldn't be considered magic in myths) but the guy was far from invincible, needed help on his labors and ultimately died to being poisoned. If you want to consider Superman or any mythological warrior magic, I can understand your reasoning but I think they would more closely resemble beings that work inside anti-magic fields.




In my experience it's almost exclusively a novel and D&D thing. They're used to Gandalf and Dr Strange and Elminster and Merlin. Did Aragorn exist? Sure, but he was a supporting character next to the awesome half-angel wizard who came back from the dead. Did King Arthur exist? Sure, but where would he be without Merlin guiding him and protecting the kingdom with his magics? Fantasy literature, which D&D is heavily based on, paint up mages like Harry Potter as more powerful than muggles and that's where they get their expectations from.

But gamers know better. You don't expect Warlocks to be superior to Rogues in World of Warcraft, in fact the opposite is true. In Dota where characters are split between Strength, Agility, and Intelligence the mages are not inherently superior to the melee tanks or assassins. Balance exists in all forms that are not storytelling because magic in gaming needs to be Hard Magic with solid restrictions and rules while magic in storytelling is too often Soft Magic without true limitations and used frequently in Deus Ex Machina.

Agreed 100%. Harry Potter is about magic being superior to muggles, while the BBEGs of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are magic users. The only real reason magic is considered superior to anything else is because it was written that way and some people interpreted that as making sense. A novel doesn't need balance, it's not like the other characters are being controlled by real people... A game is pretty different though lol.




I agree! Those things are good and cool. There are lots of figures from mythology that can perform acts of physical might of these kinds; I shouldn't have limited it to anime-type stuff. But I have encountered many players who create martial characters that those players don't believe could do things like that. Oftentimes those players don't have the same hangups for magic use.

I completely understand, and agree, that this expectations mismatch is responsible for a lot of the power disparity at high levels. Often it is self-imposed by players themselves. I do not have a good fix for that.

Yeah, that is a problem... The issue is that only magic users get the high powered lifted from mythology thing going for them. The fantasy genre was influenced by mythology and folklore, but magic users got to keep abilities from mythologies while spellcasters aren't held up to the same standard. Even AD&D held up legendary figures like Cu Chulainn, Hercules, Beowulf and Siegfried as model fighters.

[langal]

You can though. Bottle genius and put it on a character sheet. Give heroes an ability involving coming up with a genius plan or maneuver that has direct game results. I mean this is basically akin to Bardic Inspiration and Bless already, giving you some genuine edge due to factors we can't see or explain. If you need the enemy to be vulnerable to your attacks then just have the enemy be vulnerable to your attacks and explain it away as you came up with some really cool trick. Can it be done by player ingenuity? Probably. But it can also be done with a dice roll on your "Craft Plan" skill check.

Just take player involvement out of it? It's supposed to be a thinking game. Resourcefulness should be rewarded. "Resourcefulness" shouldn't be dictated by a skill check. You can just auto-pilot the game as a full simulation. Like have the computer playing both teams in Madden.

[Kyutaru]

Just take player involvement out of it? It's supposed to be a thinking game. Resourcefulness should be rewarded. "Resourcefulness" shouldn't be dictated by a skill check. You can just auto-pilot the game as a full simulation. Like have the computer playing both teams in Madden.
It's a roleplaying game, not a turn-based tactics simulation. Autopilot is exactly how some groups do it. Heck the old DMGs even had ways to speed through combat to get to the good stuff -- roleplaying. They even have examples listed with characters performing Intelligence checks to solve puzzles or get clues, completely bypassing the minutia and getting back to the storytelling. The game engine is merely a platform for assisted narration with combat derived from old timey war games. THOSE were the tactical simulation strategy games, not D&D. The RPG itself wasn't even balanced or fair, just a meat grinder for players who had to use wits to avoid as much combat as possible because it was grossly stacked against them.

[Segev]

Hold on a moment, I think there is less disagreement that is initially apparent.

Imagine a system where
Character A does 15 points per turn.
Character B does 14 points per turn, except for a limited number of turns they do 17 points that turn.
Actual balance depends on frequency. You will also note that the limited use ability does not need to be vastly stronger.

Imagine a system where
Character A does 3 green or 3 blue per turn.
Character B does 3 red per turn, except for a limited number of turns they do 3 yellow or 3 orange.

Vancian Magic is generally designed as the first system. Penalize the baseline ability but give it a limited use above average ability. Nothing in the vancian mechanics require that design, you could use the second design, but generally vancian magic uses that first design.

AKA limited use abilities don't have to be stronger than at-will abilities, but they generally do use that design paradigm.
I still feel like you're not recognizing the issue. There is no connection between "Vancian" and "more powerful" beyond "Vancian provides a limited resource -> limited resources allow greater power." It's not Vancian, specifically, that makes D&D spellcasting more powerful than non-spellcasting. It's the versatility.

You could remake spellcasting to be Vampire Disciplines using blood points, psionic power points, or the like. It wouldn't make spellcasting diminish in power.

My sole argument on this part of the topic is that associating Vancian spell slots with casting being overpowered is erroneous. That leads to suggestions of fixing it by using some other limiting mechanic. This would have zero impact on the relative power of spells to non-spells. The only way to impact that is to change what spells can and can't do, or to change what can and can't be done without spells.

[SpawnOfMorbo]

What would you replace it with?

You need something to give before you can take.

Give them just cantrips and then slightly boost said cantrips.

Make it where each caster can do one thing well and not really anything else all that well.

If it's good enough for some players, it's good enough for others, right?

[JellyPooga]

I still feel like you're not recognizing the issue. There is no connection between "Vancian" and "more powerful" beyond "Vancian provides a limited resource -> limited resources allow greater power." It's not Vancian, specifically, that makes D&D spellcasting more powerful than non-spellcasting. It's the versatility.

You're right, it's not vancian magic that makes it more powerful. That's not what I've been saying. It's the disparity between it as a time-gated, resource based mechanic and the mechanics that govern the other, which are not.

Versatility is just another aspect of "power"; if one character can do X and another can do Y, Z and W but only Q number of times, the latter is more powerful; he has more solutions at any given time except when Q is zero (at which point the game will usually stop until Q is no longer zero) That is power just as much as the values of those letters is.


You could remake spellcasting to be Vampire Disciplines using blood points, psionic power points, or the like. It wouldn't make spellcasting diminish in power.Precisely. It's not the mechanic, alone, but the disparity between a resource based mechanic and one that is not. Vampire works because everyone is using the same resource to fuel their abilities; bloodpoints. Regardless of what they can do, the resource is the same and predicated on the same principles. It's balanced. D&D does not do this and as a result is not balanced.


My sole argument on this part of the topic is that associating Vancian spell slots with casting being overpowered is erroneous. That leads to suggestions of fixing it by using some other limiting mechanic. This would have zero impact on the relative power of spells to non-spells. The only way to impact that is to change what spells can and can't do, or to change what can and can't be done without spells.

All mechanics are limiting. They're the difference between playing make-believe and playing a game. The trick to designing a balanced game is to make sure everyone is playing the same game. It can be asymmetric; look at Netrunner for an example of an excellently designed asymmetrical game. The point is that the basic mechanics that everyone is using must have the same basic assumptions.

D&D does not do this because vancian casting does not have the same basic assumptions as the rules that martial characters use. As demonstrated by Tome of Battle (as I mentioned), when you give martials the same basic assumption as spellcasters, the gameplay balances. Where it failed wasn't in game balance but in theme. I'm just saying to reverse the process. 4E did it too and it was largely balanced. Where that failed was in making characters homogenous as well as balanced. That doesn't have to be the case (see: Vampire, for example).

I'll say it again; it's not vancian casting alone. It's vancian casting in a system that has characters that use it and other characters that don't use any resource limited features. That's the disparity and it cannot be fixed by any amount of number or quality balancing.

[Silly Name]

"Odysseus" isn't a character class--it's a player mindset. You can't bottle genius and put it on a character sheet. An Odysseus fighter infiltrates the Fomorians underwater even though he doesn't have magic of his own. An Odysseus wizard kills the Rakshasa even though it's immune to his spells. _How_ Odysseus achieves it will vary based on circumstances, but you can be pretty sure he doesn't just attack the problem head-on.

Of course it isn't a character class - but if you were asked to create Odysseus as a D&D character, you wouldn't give him magic powers. My comparison was between the skillsets of two fictional characters, and how one can be reduced to irrelevancy by the other - because Doctor Strange's powers let him solve the problems Odysseus needs to outwit with a snap of his fingers, and he's just as smart as the King of Ithaca anyway. So what's Odysseus narrative role when Strange is just as smart but also able to do magic?

That's why I talked about setting player expectations and power level - you can have Gandalf coexist with Pippin and Merry in LotR, because a book you don't have to worry about Pippin's player feeling shafted. Tolkien simply wrote his book so that every member of the Fellowship had a role to play, but LotR would be an awful D&D campaign: wildly varying power levels among the party, everyone getting split up, there isn't even a proper boss battle!

So, again, the baseline problem some people face isn't that wizards are "too powerful" or fighters "too weak"*, but that they establish different power levels for martials and casters and then complain when there's a gap in party balance. You need to regulate that, and maybe the books should be more explicit about the power spectrum you'll go through as you level up: gritty heroic fantasy gives the way to mythic and epic fantasy which in turn leads you to being superheroes.

*I will reiterate, though, that martials lost a lot of the mechanics that were supposed to make them more powerful at high level. The game should look back and realise that you can fill the gap by giving martials different kinds of power than "hit more, hit harder", and/or giving them the ability to do something others can't do.

[DeadMech]

I need to stop reading threads like this... no... people need to stop posting threads like this.

How about instead of ruining the best parts of the game you instead look for ways to improve the worst parts of the game.

A fighter isn't boring and ineffective because wizards exist. It's because fighter is bad and the subsystems it interacts with are bad. Bring back progression to the skill system and stop locking everything necessary to do various interesting physical fighting maneuvers behind limited and permanent feats. And stop with the guy at the gym fallacy. This is a fantasy setting. Warriors are going to do things that are in some way supernatural. Just accept it already.

Actually learn the lessons ToB taught and stop turning up your nose because it's too "Anime".

[kazaryu]

We've had a number of threads asking how we would fix martial characters. A handful of posters have suggested that spellcasters should be brought down closer to non-caster power levels, perhaps with the (usually admitted to be tedious) task of re-writing a large number of spells.

How about a different tack: Just scrap the spells. All of them. Every last one. Gone, poof, sayonara, good riddance to bad rubbish.

Obviously this does not mean that we leave classes that cast spells out in the cold. We would, of course, need to design a whole new system--or possibly set of systems--to replace spellcasting. But if we're having so many problems with spellcasters, and their rate of resource expenditure and regain, and how powerful they can become, and how versatile they almost always are (even the "limited" ones), etc. etc. ad nauseam, why keep spells? We've changed many, many other aspects of the game--attack matrices, saving throws, how you roll hit points, how you roll stats, number and frequency of attacks, initiative, monster statistics...let's do the same to spells.

Perhaps vestiges will survive. Fireball as a Wizard feature/option, Cure Wounds as a Cleric option, and so on. But if spellcasting is going to cause us so many problems, why not send it back to the drawing board, rather than continually circling around the same seemingly-irresolvable questions about non-casters?

honestly, this is a hard pass for me.

The problem, as i see it, is that people try to impose 'realistic' limitations on martials, but not magic users. This is of course because magic users by themselves are inherently unrealistic. Whereas we read about people that were good with swords in our history books. So the solution is, well, stop imposing 'realistic' limitations on martials. DnD isn't meant to be a 'realistic' settings. at its core its not meant to be hyper gritty. its hero fantasy. thats why a high level fighter is able to take dozens of 'hits' at once and just shrug them off.

how this problem is expressed mechanically comes down to a fairly open ended skill system (thus requiring people to essentially come up with their own system). and poor non combat support for martials. And since people are inherently biased, they naturally default to imposing realistic limitations where they shouldn't. Keep in mind, the average bonus a professional person will have to their specific skill set is something around a +6. thats something PC's typically achieve around lvl 4-5. lvl 15-20? they become superhuman in their bonuses. the fighter isn't just 'a strong man at the gym.' he's literally the most talented swordsman this world has seen in this century. DnD PC's are mythical hero material. Let them exemplify that.

one good example i've seen in other threads: let barbarians do damage to wall's of force. don't let them break it instantly. don't give them a 'no' button. but let 'em **** it up. why not? this isn't Arnold Schwarzenegger we're talking about. this is hulk jr.



now, that being said, if a group *does* want to play in a more gritty, down to earth campaign. thats fine, they just need to recognize that those limitations need to be applied evenly, across both martials and caster's.

[Lucas Yew]

I repeat, I believe Fictional Jock Wish Denial is a major telling sign of nerds going too far towards the moral event horizon, even for whatever revenge (rightfully justified or not) the latter seek against the former demographic. Though completely removing the spellcaster archetype might be going too far in the opposite direction, so the route of quenching the "anti-Animesque" ideas might be more productive here instead.


Just not sure how common this mindset is among the DND crowd as a whole (might just be a vocal minority), but there are people who genuinely argue spellcasters should be stronger than none spellcasters.

Which is one major kind of population that gives me spasms every time I spot them on the Internet or anywhere else... Well, like some others said, they can work, in literature/plays/movies/etc., but NOT in a multiplayer game.


Years ago I came up with the concept of a magic user that charged up to cast and they could choose at what point during the charge up they wanted to cast. So it's at will with limitations. They cant go all nova in one encounter a day because their strength is directly proportional to the number of combats and rounds of combat. They still have resource management and have to weight the choices of casting little big, cantrip etc. It also limits out of combat utility because of the design.
https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?500635-Battlemage-New-Base-Class
for anyone interested.

It's a very pleasant surprise though, to see someone had nearly the same thought as I did to take care of the 5MWD problem (though I never ironed out the ideas with written words beyond my brain's mindscape). At least the "grounded" martials, if they even coexist with said casters, now have a definitely justified meat shield job at the very least when protecting the casters from losing their charged up problem solver spell...

[Segev]

I repeat, I believe Fictional Jock Wish Denial is a major telling sign of nerds going too far towards the moral event horizon

I still reject any argument that starts with this assertion. I have never seen, at least in discussions on these boards, a plurality of support for the notion of magic being more powerful than non-magic based on the idea that brains should always be superior to brawn in fantasy. I only see it around here when it is asserted that that is the "real" motivation for not agreeing to "nerf spellcasters" or "remove spells" or "change everything about spellcasting" as the obvious solution. That is, I see people ascribing that position to those who they disagree with, but never anybody they ascribe it to defending nor claiming it.

The better solution is improving non-casters. Expand the awesomeness. And the voices calling for this obviously can't be espousing "Fictional Jock Wish Denial." Because we're arguing for the Jock Wish to be Fulfilled.

Heck, the very terming of it as "Jock Wish Denial" to not want spellcasters nerfed is backwards: nerf spellcasters and don't change "jocks," and the "jocks'" wishes are still denied; you've just now also denied the spellcasters' wishes. It sounds more like there's a "Fictional Nerd Wish Denial" call going out, and those advocating it are claiming that refusing to deny "Nerd Wishes" are denying "Jock Wishes."

I advocate fulfilling both nerd and jock wishes. Make martials great!

[Silly Name]

I still reject any argument that starts with this assertion. You do not get to tell me what I think or what my motives are, nor do you get to assert what others "really" believe or want. I have never seen, at least in discussions on these boards, a plurality of support for the notion of magic being more powerful than non-magic based on the idea that brains should always be superior to brawn in fantasy. I only see it around here when people wish to assert that that is the "real" motivation for not agreeing to "nerf spellcasters" or "remove spells" or "change everything about spellcasting" as the obvious solution.

The better solution is improving non-casters. Expand the awesomeness. And the voices calling for this obviously can't be espousing "Fictional Jock Wish Denial." Because we're arguing for the Jock Wish to be Fulfilled.

Heck, the very terming of it as "Jock Wish Denial" to not want spellcasters nerfed is backwards: nerf spellcasters and don't change "jocks," and the "jocks'" wishes are still denied; you've just now also denied the spellcasters' wishes. It sounds more like there's a "Fictional Nerd Wish Denial" call going out, and those advocating it are claiming that refusing to deny "Nerd Wishes" are denying "Jock Wishes."

I advocate fulfilling both nerd and jock wishes. Make martials great!

Heartily agreed.

Plus I think it's way easier from a design perspective to improve martials than it is to fundamentally alter how spellcasting works anyways.

[OldTrees1]

I still feel like you're not recognizing the issue. There is no connection between "Vancian" and "more powerful" beyond "Vancian provides a limited resource -> limited resources allow greater power." It's not Vancian, specifically, that makes D&D spellcasting more powerful than non-spellcasting. It's the versatility.

My sole argument on this part of the topic is that associating Vancian spell slots with casting being overpowered is erroneous. That leads to suggestions of fixing it by using some other limiting mechanic. This would have zero impact on the relative power of spells to non-spells. The only way to impact that is to change what spells can and can't do, or to change what can and can't be done without spells.


You're right, it's not vancian magic that makes it more powerful. That's not what I've been saying. It's the disparity between it as a time-gated, resource based mechanic and the mechanics that govern the other, which are not.

Versatility is just another aspect of "power"; if one character can do X and another can do Y, Z and W but only Q number of times, the latter is more powerful; he has more solutions at any given time except when Q is zero (at which point the game will usually stop until Q is no longer zero) That is power just as much as the values of those letters is.

All mechanics are limiting. They're the difference between playing make-believe and playing a game. The trick to designing a balanced game is to make sure everyone is playing the same game. It can be asymmetric; look at Netrunner for an example of an excellently designed asymmetrical game. The point is that the basic mechanics that everyone is using must have the same basic assumptions.

D&D does not do this because vancian casting does not have the same basic assumptions as the rules that martial characters use. As demonstrated by Tome of Battle (as I mentioned), when you give martials the same basic assumption as spellcasters, the gameplay balances. Where it failed wasn't in game balance but in theme. I'm just saying to reverse the process. 4E did it too and it was largely balanced. Where that failed was in making characters homogenous as well as balanced. That doesn't have to be the case (see: Vampire, for example).

I'll say it again; it's not vancian casting alone. It's vancian casting in a system that has characters that use it and other characters that don't use any resource limited features. That's the disparity and it cannot be fixed by any amount of number or quality balancing.

Okay so I addressed magnitude in the last post and why limited use abilities generally, but not always, are designed to be stronger than resourceless abilities. Specifically when the resourceless ability of the resource based class is designed to be weaker than the resourceless ability of the resourceless class.

Now for versatility. First, how do limited resources impact versatility.

At its core there will be a versatility imbalance regardless of how I design the system.
Imagine a system X where
Character A does 3 green or 3 blue per turn.
Character B does 3 red per turn, except for a limited number of turns they do 3 yellow or 3 orange.

Imagine a system Y where
Character A does 3 green, 3 blue, or 3 purple per turn.
Character B does 3 red per turn, except for a limited number of turns they do 3 yellow or 3 orange.

In system X, during the day, character B is more versatile. In system Y, during the day, character A is more versatile. In system Y, character A is also, all else equal, strictly better than character B. So we can't use system Y unless there is some other factor. Thus, pending the discovery of the other factor, those with limited use abilities will tend to have more options than those with resourceless abilities (because those options decrease when used). However system X is not so bleak, sure character B will be more versatile than character A, but it does not need to be an overwhelming difference. Character A could have 10 options and character B could have 12 options. Since it does not need to be an overwhelming difference, the characters can be balanced despite not using the same foundation.

Okay, now for vancian magic in particular.

D&D designs vancian magic to be a long list of options (that is growing as the edition ages) from which each caster gets a list, and then makes a sublist from that list, and then gets to use that sublist all day as they spend limited resources on it. Sorcerers have it the worse while still being vancian and they get a list of 1+level (until mid level) limited resource options from the ever growing list.

So there are 2 components to this.
1) The ever growing list
2) The fixed size sublist
Vancian magic does not inherently need the ever growing list. But WotC loves that idea so let's assume it is inherent to VancianWotC

Now think about Warlock Invocations. Their invocation list could continue to grow. Their invocation sublist is a decent length and would be longer if warlocks did not have spells. The warlock invocation model is a resourceless model that also grows in versatility. You could do a similar thing for other more resourceless focused classes.

So yes, vancian magic is more versatile than fixed (not sure the right word) features granted to most resourceless focused classes. However you could use something like the invocation model. If you did then there is nothing mechanically preventing the versatility imbalance from being an overwhelming imbalance. Since it does not need to be an overwhelming difference, the characters can be balanced despite not using the same foundation.

Obviously this solution fits vancian like Sorcerers better than vancian like Clerics. But if you want the sublist to be modified, then make both sublists be editable.

Summary

The limited resources do cause some inherent difference in versatility.
The vancian model for limited resources has a lot of versatility and grows that versatility over time.
However resourceless models can be designed to have similar versatility to the vancian model.
The inherent difference in versatility does not need to be overwhelming, so resourceless classes can exist alongside resource based classes.

[Lucas Yew]

I advocate fulfilling both nerd and jock wishes. Make martials great!


Heartily agreed.

Plus I think it's way easier from a design perspective to improve martials than it is to fundamentally alter how spellcasting works anyways.

Oh, I absolutely do agree with your notions, really. Sorry if it seemed like I vouched for dragging spellcasters down, which I'm not. Let everyone be supers if they wish so in fictionland!

By the way, if explicit, "official" warnings are added in the rulebooks that if you deliberately choose to be non-super you can have hurt feelings for getting overshadowed by the others who choose to be super, would that help?

[Segev]

Oh, I absolutely do agree with your notions, really. Sorry if it seemed like I vouched for dragging spellcasters down, which I'm not. Let everyone be supers if they wish so in fictionland!

By the way, if explicit, "official" warnings are added in the rulebooks that if you deliberately choose to be non-super you can have hurt feelings for getting overshadowed by the others who choose to be super, would that help?
Not really. The "superness" should be a function of level in a d20-like system.

What should be there is a suggestion that, if you want a particular level of "superness," you should play games at that level. Maybe offer some version of "E6" rules as optional rules to keep things at a particular level.



On versatility and the ever-expanding list: I think the solution there is just to have whatever non-spellcasters use also get an ever-expanding list. WE have this with feats, sort-of, but the reason ToB was so successful was that it gave something a bit more easily-expanded than feats. (If it had gotten as much later-book support as spells had the whole time, it would have done even better.)

[OldTrees1]

On versatility and the ever-expanding list: I think the solution there is just to have whatever non-spellcasters use also get an ever-expanding list. WE have this with feats, sort-of, but the reason ToB was so successful was that it gave something a bit more easily-expanded than feats. (If it had gotten as much later-book support as spells had the whole time, it would have done even better.)

Agreed.

You know I am a bit fan of a very robust feat system*, but WotC is still learning how to do that.
ToB on the other hand is a system that WotC knows how to expand. So it is easier for them. I do like how some reimaginings of ToB even support resourceless class designs.

*Long list of feats. Without feat trees, but with level requirements. Characters get a few/several/many feats depending on class type. Individual feats are worth a level's worth of features. With a versatile breadth of options.

[MaxWilson]

Of course it isn't a character class - but if you were asked to create Odysseus as a D&D character, you wouldn't give him magic powers. My comparison was between the skillsets of two fictional characters, and how one can be reduced to irrelevancy by the other - because Doctor Strange's powers let him solve the problems Odysseus needs to outwit with a snap of his fingers, and he's just as smart as the King of Ithaca anyway. So what's Odysseus narrative role when Strange is just as smart but also able to do magic?

... So, again, the baseline problem some people face isn't that wizards are "too powerful" or fighters "too weak"*, but that they establish different power levels for martials and casters and then complain when there's a gap in party balance.

I believe in get your point, but I'm making a different point: Odysseus is a player type, of players who are good at adapting to circumstance and thinking on their feet.

If you have one Odysseus player playing a wizard, and another Odysseus player joins the group, either the second Odysseus will play a wizard too (and they'll swap spells and wreck face together), or else the second Odysseus will play something else like a Fighter (and probably get the first Odysseus to forge him some gear, and together they'll wreck face).

Presuming that the party is facing threats worthy of Odysseus's time and attention--threats which are much tougher on paper than they are--having twice as much wily brainpower in the party is never a bad thing. In fact you could probably have a third Odysseus who is nothing but a disembodied voice with no abilities at all (another player whom the other players get to call on the phone for advice but who doesn't actually join sessions) and he would still add value to the party, e.g. as OPFOR for trial runs during their planning process.

[ezekielraiden]

Alright. As expected, my thread asplode (hot take indeed), but sadly I can't really respond to most people. Sorry guys--I'd love to, truly, but having minimum one post at character limit and another for overflow is too much. Doubly 'cause I'm so verbose--dozens of replies would be literally pages of printed text. So I'll respond to a few here on this page, and if more people want to engage or challenge or whatever, I'll try to keep up. No promises--if I get a dozen replies, I'll be condensing.

I'll use terms like "martial" and "magic." I don't think the supernatural is exclusively "magic." I strongly support the "transmundane" (AFAIK my term) in fiction: stuff "merely" superlative skill, but which has somehow exceeded the limits of mundanity in the process. That which "should be" mundane, which grew out of mundanity, but has transcended it to become a supernatural version thereof. The smith who knows know magic, but can forge magic swords because she's just that good. The thief of legend whose prowess has grown so great, he can steal the color of a dapper swain's eyes (shout-out to 4e there). The sword-fighter of such amazing talent, they can reflect fireballs and cut rays of light. Etc.

So my "magic" is most (usually not all) supernatural things that aren't transmundane. When I use "martials," I mean characters that derive the majority of their power from mundane or transmundane skills, even if they might also happen to know some magic, and "spellcasters" or "magic-users" etc. get most of their power from magic, with little transmundane skill. (Note: here, things like Psionics, Incarnum, etc. are "magic" even if formally they're distinct.)


I have never seen, at least in discussions on these boards, a plurality of support for the notion of magic being more powerful than non-magic based on the idea that brains should always be superior to brawn in fantasy.
I haven't seen it here, in those terms, but I have seen it many, many times elsewhere. Won't give specifics (dislike cross-forum drama). Just know a VERY vocal minority exists (exact size: ???), completely convinced that magic can, should, and must be clearly stronger than non-magic. Once nearly had an argument on an artist's stream, because he specifically said this ("magic should always be more powerful" IIRC). I let it go, first, his house, his rules; second, (b) avoiding being That Guy raising a stink about dumb stuff. But yes, this opinion really does exist.

It's found (IMO even here), again by different words but same idea, in responses to both the BO9S and 4e D&D--for the latter, by both its critics and some of its designers. We've heard the "Fightan Magic" tripe the former got tarred with, and its grossly-overpowered-supplement reputation with many DMs...despite it being demonstrably less powerful than magic proper, minus a couple edge cases with bad writing (e.g. IHS). These critics usually don't openly say magic should be better than physical might, let alone the reason why. But the core notion--that it was wrong for physical might to achieve these sometimes-supernatural-adjacent effects--is still there. More importantly, it is valid to gloss that as "magic just SHOULD be better than non-magic." The expectations applied to non-magic effects are almost always extremely restrictive and confining, both narratively and mechanically. See also: the furor over "disassociated" mechanics, which are perfectly fine if they're magical and totally unacceptable if they're not (rather, AIUI, a mechanic cannot be "disassociated" if it's magic, because magic can do ~~anything!~~)

And then as noted, even 4e's designers kept trying--intentionally or not--to make the Wizard the most powerful class while it was in development, and Rob Heinsoo had to keep stepping in and adjusting it back down again, according to an interview with him. He even admitted that he might have overcorrected slightly, but that it would work out in the end. I don't think it's coincidental that one of the (bogus and inaccurate) criticisms of 4e was that it "made Fighters into Wizards" (along with all sorts of completely ridiculous and false claims like Fighters shooting lightning/fire from their hindquarters.) The vehemence, consistency, frequent inaccuracy, and specifically martial-centric nature of the complaints doesn't paint a good picture.


The better solution is improving non-casters. Expand the awesomeness.
Honest question: Do you genuinely believe it is possible to give non-casters something on a par with wish and have caster fans accept it? Because that's the kind of thing we have to be willing to do if we're going to make non-casters achieve..."parity" has put off some people in the past, but that's the kind of thing we need to achieve, a reasonable approximation of similar ability-to-shape-the-world.


Heck, the very terming of it as "Jock Wish Denial" to not want spellcasters nerfed is backwards: nerf spellcasters and don't change "jocks," and the "jocks'" wishes are still denied; you've just now also denied the spellcasters' wishes. It sounds more like there's a "Fictional Nerd Wish Denial" call going out, and those advocating it are claiming that refusing to deny "Nerd Wishes" are denying "Jock Wishes."
It seems to me that you are going a bit too far, at least relative to what I called for in the OP. I did, after all, specifically say that we couldn't just leave casters out to dry. But if we keep circling around the same problems over and over again, maybe there's something wrong with the implementation of magic currently, that can only be addressed by rebuilding from the beginning in a different way.

That doesn't mean refusing to grant wishes. It does mean that we may be granting one group's wishes in a way that is truly incompatible with granting another's, and can only grant both groups' wishes by going back to the drawing board and building the whole edifice from whole cloth, caster and non-caster both.


Summary The limited resources do cause some inherent difference in versatility.
The vancian model for limited resources has a lot of versatility and grows that versatility over time.
However resourceless models can be designed to have similar versatility to the vancian model.
The inherent difference in versatility does not need to be overwhelming, so resourceless classes can exist alongside resource based classes.
Important follow-up question: What about if we are working from a system that is already unbalanced in versatility? Your comparison was between two systems of specific natures--ones that may not map to our current situation. That is, is it possible for a system to exist where the versatility of one character-option-set ("class/es") is so great that no amount of "catching up" is possible for things excluded from that set? Because that's, more or less, the assertion I'm making here, that spellcasting has an inherent problem (of design, culture, and implementation) that can only be addressed by re-writing it.


Not really. The "superness" should be a function of level in a d20-like system. What should be there is a suggestion that, if you want a particular level of "superness," you should play games at that level. Maybe offer some version of "E6" rules as optional rules to keep things at a particular level.
Which runs into the serious problem (that I've seen over and over, both in advertised games and in games I've actually played) where even when a DM expressly states they want a solid, reliable early experience....they play at 1st level. And often get flabbergasted by how fragile and easily-squished 1st-level PCs are. 1st level has an absolutely magnetic attraction; DMs will start there, stubbornly, no matter what value or benefit there is to starting at other places, no matter how much it would be good for brand-new players to get a not-incredibly-lethal first experience. (I have, in fact, seen a fellow-player driven away from D&D entirely because of this!)

Which is why I advocate for a first-level experience optimized for brand-new players (relatively low on decisions, but relatively durable), so long as it comes with official, in-book, and most importantly NOT deprecated rules for "zero-level" characters. Doing it this way actively supports those players who really do want that experience, while averting the real, visible problem of "(almost) every DM wants to start at 1st level no matter what."


On versatility and the ever-expanding list: I think the solution there is just to have whatever non-spellcasters use also get an ever-expanding list. WE have this with feats, sort-of, but the reason ToB was so successful was that it gave something a bit more easily-expanded than feats. (If it had gotten as much later-book support as spells had the whole time, it would have done even better.)
If that's on the table, I agree. But notice how quickly both this thread and the "how to fix martials" threads draw people asking, "You aren't going to do it like The Edition That Shall Not Be Named, are you? That would be awful and no one would play it."

[NichG]

I think I'm late to this party, but for the last few months I've been working on a d20/D&D 3.5 rewrite from the ground up, where the design goal (or part of it) is that all characters of all types are basically what would be at least Tier 1, in multiple different overlapping ways. I didn't remove spellcasting, I removed the spell list, and then I wrote ability lists for each of the 9 base classes which are each about equal in terms of number of options, ability to pick up those options mid-game, and in terms of having answers to standard questions like 'how do you deal with flying enemies, how do you deal with planar shenanigans, etc'. Three of the base classes are martial, three are traditional spellcaster archetypes, and three are types which use gadgets and gimmicks. In addition, all characters regardless of base class get to add a variant of PrCs on top of their class progression, which can be retrained just by going to an organization headquarters and spending a few days (so they can pick and choose some supporting class features, and swap them around almost like a wizard would swap daily spells) as well as an association with one or more 'Myths' which are the deity-equivalents of the setting and which grant a new dramatic editing ability every 5 levels.

So every character has a spell list, a number of slots they can rotate class abilities through which can be picked up during play, and 4-5 broad-scope dramatic editing powers.

By construction, even at the level of the cosmology, nothing at all in the setting is intended to be 'mundane'. Setting level, the world was destroyed and the only thing that remains and has the ability to hang together in a Lovecraftian void is the stories told of legendary or heroic deeds, which have taken on a life of their own and are literally the matter the world is made of. So there's explicitly 'no guy at the gym' excuses.

I guess we'll see how it plays when I run it.

(I can post the mechanics part at least if people are interested, but it's a hefty read at around 210 pages).

[Silly Name]

Honest question: Do you genuinely believe it is possible to give non-casters something on a par with wish and have caster fans accept it? Because that's the kind of thing we have to be willing to do if we're going to make non-casters achieve..."parity" has put off some people in the past, but that's the kind of thing we need to achieve, a reasonable approximation of similar ability-to-shape-the-world.

[...]

Important follow-up question: What about if we are working from a system that is already unbalanced in versatility? Your comparison was between two systems of specific natures--ones that may not map to our current situation. That is, is it possible for a system to exist where the versatility of one character-option-set ("class/es") is so great that no amount of "catching up" is possible for things excluded from that set? Because that's, more or less, the assertion I'm making here, that spellcasting has an inherent problem (of design, culture, and implementation) that can only be addressed by re-writing it.


Wish isn't problematic as it's made out to be... Because most people don't play at the levels where Wish is an actual option. The disparity emerges much sooner, and that's what needs to be addressed.

I'll reiterate that I absolutely don't think the problem is within the "Vancian" portion of "Vancian magic" - Vancian magic is simply a method to handle resources, not something that inherently creates imbalance in class design.

We have three problems, fundamentally:
1) The class chassis is much more restrictive for martials than it is for casters. The most important choice a martial character makes is what class(es) they take levels in, and those define their skillset, while casters get to take a class level and build their own toolbox anyway.

2) Martials lack exclusivity at what they do. That is, the casters can easily creep in what're supposed to be the martials' areas of expertise, because casters are given spells that can interact with pretty much every area of the game, whereas martials aren't give the tools to go outside the box.

3) Martials have been saddled down with the "Guy at the Gym" fallacy, demanding that even high-level martial characters be forbidden from performing mythic feats of strength and agility, despite being expected to fight titans and archfiends and dead gods.

I think it is perfectly possible to improve martials while at the same time retouching some details of the spellcasting system without having to revise the fundamental concepts of D&D.

For example...

1) Expand skill use and let high-level skill checks be more powerful - leap over chasms, balance on a razor-thin rope, jump from horse to horse and ride while standing up, tame raging hellbeasts and stuff like this. High risk, high reward performances. In the same vein, make combat maneuvers a more extensive system, easier to access and with far more options of what they can let you do.

2) Give martials ways to attract followers or intimidate entire crowds, as options built into the class. Give them features that can't be replicated with spells, stuff only they can do. Let an high-level barbarian be able to damage a wall of force, and high-level fighters have the heroic resolve to shake off being charmed and other effects... Stuff like this.

3) Narrow down casters: impose more limitations on what they can learn. Requisites for learning spells, class options that trade power for versatility, scrap the spells that do nothing but step on the toes of other characters, rebalance the more broken ones.


"What about the guys who don't want to play as demigods and superheroes?" Well, there's still space for them, just at lower levels, where those powers still don't pop up. The power spectrum of D&D is big, and different folks will prefer different areas of that spectrum. Just make it clear in the books, give some examples of what the differences are between Tier 1 and Tier 4 play, and everyone will be able to pick what range of levels they want their campaigns and characters to be at.

[Edea]

Well, define what a 'spell' is, first.

If Conan the completely mundane barbarian decides to flex his pectorals at a mountain in the distance and cause it to collapse in on itself, is that a spell? If a ranger starts dual-wielding their weapons so quickly that the blades heat up and catch fire, is that a spell? If a monk runs a mile in six seconds, is that a spell? If a rogue knifes you in the back so precisely that she actually destroys your soul, is that a spell? If a fighter stomps the ground so hard that all nearby foes are launched permanently into orbit, is that a spell? If a paladin creates a gate and summons a group of solars from the holy realms of Celestia by Smiting the fabric of reality with his fist, is that a spell?

Now, if we're being 3.5e-tier pedantic, those would all probably fall under 'supernatural abilities' and not rely mechanically on Vancian-type spell slots. But the point remains: what is a spell? If a wizard stood there and replicated any of those effects by waving their hands around, chanting something in a forgotten dialect of Draconic and rubbing bat guano all over their faces, those are suddenly all spells now, yeah?

There's no reason why a 'non-spellcaster' should be forbidden from re-flavoring effects generally considered 'spells' to better fit their class archetypes; hell, ToB and the entirely of 4th edition are precisely that. We could even use Vancian-type spell slots to track use limits, just call them something else, like 'action surges' or whatever.

But people in the hobby got mad at these things. Like, really mad. There seems to be this weird insistence that 'mundane purity' is capable of mechanically co-existing with Class 9 Reality Benders, barring either a conscious effort to make it so on the part of the DM/players (in which case it's a failure of a rules system) or complete indifference/ignorance as to how the game works (in which case the system being used is irrelevant and they might as well be playing strip poker).

TL;DR, as has been said multiple times already: WotC has already tried to 'remove' spellcasting, it was not well-received, WotC wants to make money and sell product, they reneged, and things went back to normal. I don't think it's going away anytime soon.

[ezekielraiden]

Not sure why this got moved here. It's not homebrew. I'm not proposing any specific changes to the rules. Guess I'll have to ping an admin since no one said anything...


Wish isn't problematic as it's made out to be... Because most people don't play at the levels where Wish is an actual option. The disparity emerges much sooner, and that's what needs to be addressed.
That it is not commonly played matters little to me. If the game is going to bill itself as a cooperative-teamwork roleplaying game, I expect that whatever things it offers for us to do will meet that goal. That means having, as noted, a reasonable approximation of parity--even at those upper levels. It doesn't have to be perfect, but....well, every edition except 1e and 4e has sucked at this. Sucked really hard actually--and 1e really only gets by because it made classes play completely different games once they hit "endgame" levels (Fighters as political figures with demesnes, retainers, income, warfare, etc.; Thieves as the heads of criminal enterprises of various sorts; Clerics becoming the high priest of a legit temple; Wizards settling down and doing research from their high towers; etc.)


I'll reiterate that I absolutely don't think the problem is within the "Vancian" portion of "Vancian magic" - Vancian magic is simply a method to handle resources, not something that inherently creates imbalance in class design.
Well that's sort of my point. Whether or not we keep the "Vancian," it's the spells themselves that are the problem. Hence, scrapping the system and replacing it seems like a good idea, yet no one seems to want to.


1) The class chassis is much more restrictive for martials than it is for casters. The most important choice a martial character makes is what class(es) they take levels in, and those define their skillset, while casters get to take a class level and build their own toolbox anyway.
Agreed. Well, I'd argue that both sides are weirdly shut out: there's essentially no equivalent on either side. Martials never get to make choices even approximating the least-choice-y spellcaster, and there is not (and, barring late-4e, has never been) a basically-no-choices spellcaster either.


2) Martials lack exclusivity at what they do. That is, the casters can easily creep in what're supposed to be the martials' areas of expertise, because casters are given spells that can interact with pretty much every area of the game, whereas martials aren't give the tools to go outside the box.
I think a better way to phrase this is:
There is, in net effect, little to nothing that martial characters can do, which a well-prepared spellcaster cannot meet-or-beat. There are spells for doing damage, inflicting any condition a martial character can inflict,
There are many things spellcasters can do, which no martial can meaningfully imitate. There are no martial equivalents to a huge swathe of (again, possible) spells that can be cast.

This is a fundamental and, I argue, unfair asymmetry. Either both sides should have things the other simply cannot replicate no matter how hard they try (without literally learning the ways of the other side), or neither should have anything the other can't do. That doesn't necessarily mean limiting spellcasters--but it does mean that we may want to consider some "trimming" if there are too many, or too powerful, ways that spellcasting simply outright exceeds martial capabilities with little to nothing to mitigate that difference.


3) Martials have been saddled down with the "Guy at the Gym" fallacy, demanding that even high-level martial characters be forbidden from performing mythic feats of strength and agility, despite being expected to fight titans and archfiends and dead gods.
Absolutely. Most martial characters are more limited than real-world Olympian athletes, let alone fantastic beyond-human beings native to a world where the list of fundamental elements is earth, air, fire, and water.


I think it is perfectly possible to improve martials while at the same time retouching some details of the spellcasting system without having to revise the fundamental concepts of D&D. For example... 1) Expand skill use and let high-level skill checks be more powerful <snip> 2) Give martials ways to attract followers or intimidate entire crowds, as options built into the class. <snap>
These would, assuredly, be progress on doing martial archetypes better. But--see above. I legitimately do not care that wish is beyond a level typically played: if it is a level offered to be played at all, it is reasonable and fair to ask that level to provide a reasonable parity between fundamental character archetypes--and few archetypes are as fundamental as "martial."


3) Narrow down casters: impose more limitations on what they can learn. Requisites for learning spells, class options that trade power for versatility, scrap the spells that do nothing but step on the toes of other characters, rebalance the more broken ones.
If this is successful, sure, I can grant that it could work. Here's the problem: every edition since 1e has tried to do this to some extent. Every edition has failed, except 4e. And you see how virulently, vocally anti-4e most people are, even today--it's shown up in this very thread, that even the hint of 4th edition methods, concepts, or philosophy is met with immense skepticism, often outright rejection without a single specific named. Given that this effort has failed not just once, but arguably five times (2e, 3e, 3.5e, PF, and 5e), it seems to me that we give too little credence to the idea that a more deep-level reboot, one that tries to recapture what good things D&D spellcasting did achieve without 40+ years of ossified baggage, is in fact necessary to achieve success where so many attempts have failed.


"What about the guys who don't want to play as demigods and superheroes?" Well, there's still space for them, just at lower levels, where those powers still don't pop up. The power spectrum of D&D is big, and different folks will prefer different areas of that spectrum. Just make it clear in the books, give some examples of what the differences are between Tier 1 and Tier 4 play, and everyone will be able to pick what range of levels they want their campaigns and characters to be at.
Well, as noted, this is why I advocate constructing robust, effective, and (though I didn't mention it before) scalable zero-level rules. In essence, you make a sorta-kinda "Basic" that is, in some sense, a spooled-out prelude to "actually being 1st level." Low HP, few resources, few mechanics, etc. This thread isn't meant to define a specific set of rules (hence why I'm not sure it belongs in Homebrew), but to discuss at a relatively high level of abstraction whether we have unfairly dismissed the notion that keeping spellcasting as it is, with just a few tweaks/additions/subtractions, is simply inadequate to the task in practice, whether or not it "should be" adequate to the task in theory.


There's no reason why a 'non-spellcaster' should be forbidden from re-flavoring effects generally considered 'spells' to better fit their class archetypes; hell, ToB and the entirely of 4th edition are precisely that. We could even use Vancian-type spell slots to track use limits, just call them something else, like 'action surges' or whatever.

But people in the hobby got mad at these things. Like, really mad. There seems to be this weird insistence that 'mundane purity' is capable of mechanically co-existing with Class 9 Reality Benders, barring either a conscious effort to make it so on the part of the DM/players (in which case it's a failure of a rules system) or complete indifference/ignorance as to how the game works (in which case the system being used is irrelevant and they might as well be playing strip poker).

TL;DR, as has been said multiple times already: WotC has already tried to 'remove' spellcasting, it was not well-received, WotC wants to make money and sell product, they reneged, and things went back to normal. I don't think it's going away anytime soon.

I have, in fact, made this exact point elsewhere, that the problem is insoluble because all of our avenues are cut off. That is, we could...
1. Do nothing. This is untenable because it leaves a meaningful portion of the fanbase--one that is active and engaged, a rare and important thing for something as niche as TTRPGs--out in the cold yet again.
2. Nerf casters. This is untenable because, as both this thread and others have demonstrated, people get really upset if you do this. They complain about having their toys taken away, in not so many words.
3. Buff martials. This is untenable because, as the reaction to both 4e and BO9S demonstrated, non-martials are very liable to be offended by martials achieving these things, and will riot. Not all, but many.
4. Attempt to recalibrate both ends slightly, so no one is technically "nerfed" or technically "buffed" but each has an area of focus. Both 3e(/3.5e) and 5e--and, indeed, PF to some extent as well--have tried this and failed.

Now, obviously, some people contest at least one of these. Segev denies that #3 is true, but I have not heard his replies to most of what I've said yet, so I won't dig any deeper into his thoughts until he can respond to mine. Most people I have interacted with who think things are just fine (whether because they simply deny that there is any power gap at all, or they recognize it and think it is good) deny #1--that doing nothing is perfectly fine. D&D editions have generally (with the exception of 4e) tried #4 repeatedly, with...well, as described, at best mixed results.

(Also, as a side note? That's not actually what 4e did at all. "Reflavoring spells as something other than spells" is a common misunderstanding of 4e repeated mostly by people who did not play it. I can't say whether or not you played it yourself, but having very recently done an analysis of a relevant comparison--powers with the Fear keyword available to Fighters and to Wizards respectively--it's very clear that the two are designed with different goals in mind. They use the same mechanical structure, yes, but that's purely for parsimony, not because they represent identical things. Just as AC is the common mechanical framework for everything from a literal piece of metal keeping you safe, to simply being too slippery to hit, to literal divine protection, to a long-term maybe-visible-maybe-not magical field surrounding your person: it's a unified mechanic representing a wide variety of things, so that it's easy to read and know the ultimate effects, even if the processes vary widely.)

[DwarfFighter]

I've given the OP's suggestion some thought, and he should definitely implement it as a house rule and see how his players like it.

I don't think this is something WotC should implement. A lot of players like the concept of magic in the D&D game, and considering that the high quality of its current implementation, keeping it as part of the core rule seems like the best option.

[theVoidWatches]

Years ago, Grod proposed replacing DnD3.5 with Mutants and Masterminds (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?279503-D-amp-D-in-M-amp-M-a-new-approach-to-rebalancing-3-5-PF). I think he had the right idea - by building martial and magical characters both with the same tools, neither is stronger than the other.

[Silly Name]

That it is not commonly played matters little to me. If the game is going to bill itself as a cooperative-teamwork roleplaying game, I expect that whatever things it offers for us to do will meet that goal. That means having, as noted, a reasonable approximation of parity--even at those upper levels. It doesn't have to be perfect, but....well, every edition except 1e and 4e has sucked at this. Sucked really hard actually--and 1e really only gets by because it made classes play completely different games once they hit "endgame" levels (Fighters as political figures with demesnes, retainers, income, warfare, etc.; Thieves as the heads of criminal enterprises of various sorts; Clerics becoming the high priest of a legit temple; Wizards settling down and doing research from their high towers; etc.)

I guess a better way to word that is that Wish isn't really the offender here - rather, it's the myriad of spells it can replicate and that act as "Press Here to Solve Problems" buttons. Wish is, conceptually, an ok spell for the most powerful of wizards to have.

As you say, the problem emerges when the other classes don't have anything that compares or competes. A Fighter with his earldom or even kingdom or a Rogue at the head of a thieves' guild have so many resources at their disposal they could compete, using different kinds of power. That's why I insist the biggest offender here is the removal of those options from the chassis of martial characters, rather than the expanding spell list (mind you, the all-encompassing spell list is its own problem).



Well that's sort of my point. Whether or not we keep the "Vancian," it's the spells themselves that are the problem. Hence, scrapping the system and replacing it seems like a good idea, yet no one seems to want to.

Well, to me, Vancian is the system. The spells are simply the particulars, and I am in favor of removing some and reworking others. But, given enough time, I could write down a completely new spell list for each D&D caster while keeping the overall system (Vancian casting, spell levels, schools...) intact.



I think a better way to phrase this is:
There is, in net effect, little to nothing that martial characters can do, which a well-prepared spellcaster cannot meet-or-beat. There are spells for doing damage, inflicting any condition a martial character can inflict,
There are many things spellcasters can do, which no martial can meaningfully imitate. There are no martial equivalents to a huge swathe of (again, possible) spells that can be cast.

This is a fundamental and, I argue, unfair asymmetry. Either both sides should have things the other simply cannot replicate no matter how hard they try (without literally learning the ways of the other side), or neither should have anything the other can't do. That doesn't necessarily mean limiting spellcasters--but it does mean that we may want to consider some "trimming" if there are too many, or too powerful, ways that spellcasting simply outright exceeds martial capabilities with little to nothing to mitigate that difference.

Completely agreed. While I also think the answer to the martial/caster disparity isn't nerfing the casters to the point they're equal to martials as-they-are, the most functional answer is a middle of the road approach. Take some, gain some.



If this is successful, sure, I can grant that it could work. Here's the problem: every edition since 1e has tried to do this to some extent. Every edition has failed, except 4e. And you see how virulently, vocally anti-4e most people are, even today--it's shown up in this very thread, that even the hint of 4th edition methods, concepts, or philosophy is met with immense skepticism, often outright rejection without a single specific named. Given that this effort has failed not just once, but arguably five times (2e, 3e, 3.5e, PF, and 5e), it seems to me that we give too little credence to the idea that a more deep-level reboot, one that tries to recapture what good things D&D spellcasting did achieve without 40+ years of ossified baggage, is in fact necessary to achieve success where so many attempts have failed.

4e gets unfairly bashed, and I agree there were a lot of cool ideas in there (and a lot of stuff that has been lifted by 5e but that WotC tries to hide), but I also think at least some of the complaints on feel were valid.

4e handled martials incredibly well, established clearly the "tiers" of power characters would go through and, for all its flaws, was an injection of creativity and willingness to tread new grounds that WotC should embrace again.

But I think it didn't really capture how magic works in D&D in the minds of enfranchised players: the Vancian system is a very big part of the identity of the game, even ending up being referenced almost word-for-word in novels and lore... So doing away with that was bound to draw some ire.

I think we should look to 4e for solutions and inspiration, as well as 1e and many other games on the market. There has been a second RPG renaissance coinciding with 5e's release... But this time WotC wasn't the leader, nor is it profiting off it as much as it did during the early 2000s boom. So, look there! Seek interesting ideas, ways to differentiate classes and create thematic spell lists, while also maintaining D&D's aspects that make it recognisably D&D.

[ezekielraiden]

I've given the OP's suggestion some thought, and he should definitely implement it as a house rule and see how his players like it.
I wouldn't run 5e unless someone paid me. It's only a small step up from 3.5e/PF in terms of difficulty of running IMO. (Mind, I haven't run it myself, but I've seen too many DMs flounder and fall with it; for being a supposedly "DM-empowering" edition, the tools it offers for supporting DMs are...lacking, IMNSHO.) I run Dungeon World, and have considered running 4e and 13th Age, occasionally glancing at other non-D&D systems. And, it's worth noting? DW and 13A both keep something analogous to Vancian rules....but they built a new system, they didn't try to preserve as much of the old one as they physically could.


I don't think this is something WotC should implement. A lot of players like the concept of magic in the D&D game, and considering that the high quality of its current implementation, keeping it as part of the core rule seems like the best option.
I'm curious what "high quality" you speak of---and why you seem to think that I'm saying there would be no magic whatsoever. I'm not. What I am saying is, maybe we're trying to preserve trappings and details that we shouldn't. A vocal minority responded poorly to the removal of THAC0, for example, but that's now considered to have been one of the few inarguably positive changes introduced by 3rd edition. Just seems like we're striving really really hard to preserve as many fine details as possible, rather than taking a frank look at things and building something that meets our needs (and yes, "our needs" includes "recognizability" and "beloved classics." But the list of beloved classic spells is quite short, and usually isn't the problematic spells--glitterdust is more powerful than burning hands, but the latter has much more cultural weight than the former.

Just because one is re-building the spellcasting system, doesn't mean that we can't re-build old favorites too. But in rebuilding them, we can take an active role in deciding what should work how, rather than passively accepting received wisdom and (as often as not) treating mere quick-fix conventions as though they were ironclad laws.

[Morphic tide]

"If I make assumptions that make it more powerful because I say they will, it will be more powerful" isn't a very convincing argument. All I said was using a pseudo-vancian mechanic for them.

And no, actually, ONLY Mage and Changeling have regular need to roll to see if your magic works how you want; Vampire Disciplines give you flat out powers and Werewolf Gifts give you flat out powers. Conversely, D&D spells also require rolls, either from the caster or the target, which would easily be translated to "did it work?" rolls in WoD.

There's nothing specially powerful about spell slots that make magic that uses it more powerful than other systems.

The point being made is that spellcasting vs. not does has mechanical interactions that necessitate spellcasting hold superiority in a lot of situations. The balancing factor is literally "how often do I get to overpower you?", on the basis of limited use vs. not. The thing that has its uses limited fundamentally must be more powerful on a per-use basis than the thing that is not to be more powerful, or else it is imbalanced in the sense of being underpowered.

---

As the thread has moved into homebrew design, one of my own thoughts is having the sort of situation of a Spell Point Warlock, but preparing that short-rest pool with rolls for if you can/how much it costs to ready spells. Then the shtick of Arcane is being able to go over capacity at risk to oneself, the shtick of Clerical magic is getting to call in more mid-combat at a maybe-do-nothing cost, and the shtick of the "primal" casting is repetition at the cost of being stuck with what you got the first time.

The major issue, to me, is that Bounded Accuracy kinda kills design space, because you have to go through a number of weird pains to make a natural progression of "can't/hard/easy/always" as you level, because a +20 is outside the scope. 5e, as a system, is specifically predicated on not being able to entirely invalidate the low-level properties, though this does somewhat advantage Martials over previous editions because they don't need much of any source of bonuses.

In a much-less-intense sense, forcing specialization and minimizing niche-bypasses among the spellcasters is the real solution, because the problem is simply that there's too much extra width in spells. Rather than the trees, I'd just mirror the way Martials have it on top of the way the Aegis worked in 3.5, where a lot of functionality is locked behind feats and you have to pick niches you fill at the start instead of a single homogeneous "Wizard" list.

[NigelWalmsley]

Well that's sort of my point. Whether or not we keep the "Vancian," it's the spells themselves that are the problem. Hence, scrapping the system and replacing it seems like a good idea, yet no one seems to want to.

Then it seems like your thread title is kind of needlessly provocative. Also like you're really overstating your case. The vast, vast majority of spells are fine. Even in core, the overwhelming majority of spells at any given level are, at worst, slightly too low level. There's nothing wrong with Color Spray, Cloudkill, Black Tentacles, Stinking Cloud, Acid Fog, Finger of Death, or any number of other things. The issue is that e.g. Polymorph is completely busted.


Agreed. Well, I'd argue that both sides are weirdly shut out: there's essentially no equivalent on either side. Martials never get to make choices even approximating the least-choice-y spellcaster, and there is not (and, barring late-4e, has never been) a basically-no-choices spellcaster either.

The Tome of Battle classes come close on the martial side, as does the Warmage on the caster side (I would say that Warmage v ToB is about even in terms of choice). That said, you are broadly correct that the game has tended to conflate power source with playstyle in a way that's not desirable.


(without literally learning the ways of the other side)

Why is that a problem? Who says that these things have to be "sides"? In the real world, armies don't have an "army radio" that is totally different from "civilian radio". They use regular radio (modulo whatever ruggedizations) because that's the best tool for the job.


I guess a better way to word that is that Wish isn't really the offender here - rather, it's the myriad of spells it can replicate and that act as "Press Here to Solve Problems" buttons. Wish is, conceptually, an ok spell for the most powerful of wizards to have.

Honestly, Wish isn't really a power level problem. There are three primary problems with Wish:

1. Wish takes a very long time to resolve optimally, because it explicitly encourages you to evaluate every spell that exists.
2. Wish interacts badly with spells that are balanced by or around non-standard components, casting times, or other restrictions it ignores.
3. Wish has broken interactions with the SLA and Supernatural ability rules.

The fact that Wish costs a big pile of XP to use means that, in practice, it's seldom a better idea to use it to dumpster-dive for the best 8th level spell when you could just cast a very good 9th level spell.


As you say, the problem emerges when the other classes don't have anything that compares or competes.

Another source of the problem is the fact that the system treats these things in a second-class, ad hoc fashion. The fact that the impact of spells like Fabricate or Major Creation on the world is totally unconsidered means you don't have a place to put non-combat abilities for non-casters. You could very easily imagine a Rogue leaning on contacts producing an effect that's on par with Scrying in terms of solving a mystery, but the fact that the mechanics for that are "use the skill system I guess" makes it unlikely in practice.


4e gets unfairly bashed, and I agree there were a lot of cool ideas in there (and a lot of stuff that has been lifted by 5e but that WotC tries to hide), but I also think at least some of the complaints on feel were valid.

4e's basic problem was that it was a radical reimagining of D&D when what the fanbase wanted was an incremental improvement on D&D. People were, broadly, happy with 3e (see: the enormous and enduring success of Pathfinder, relative to basically every other D&D retroclone). They had specific complaints, but the tools developed by 3e and the lessons learned during it provided a framework for moving forward in a reasonable way. Then 4e threw all of that out in favor of a bunch of radical new ideas. That was already going to piss people off, but 4e poured gas directly on the fire with choices like "being extremely terrible", "cutting things people love for no reason", and "insulting the fanbase".

There are genuinely good ideas in 4e. It's conception of monster roles is far more coherent than 3e's (though not perfect). Tiers solve many of the problems 3e had. Unified resource management is wrong for D&D, but it's an interesting idea. Skill challenges were a good idea (if implemented very poorly). If you came to me with 4e as your fantasy heartbreaker, I'd be mildly impressed. It's just disastrously bad as an edition of D&D.

[Pex]

I wouldn't run 5e unless someone paid me. It's only a small step up from 3.5e/PF in terms of difficulty of running IMO. (Mind, I haven't run it myself, but I've seen too many DMs flounder and fall with it; for being a supposedly "DM-empowering" edition, the tools it offers for supporting DMs are...lacking, IMNSHO.) I run Dungeon World, and have considered running 4e and 13th Age, occasionally glancing at other non-D&D systems. And, it's worth noting? DW and 13A both keep something analogous to Vancian rules....but they built a new system, they didn't try to preserve as much of the old one as they physically could.



How wonderful for you. Seriously. Great. Do that. Play the games you like. Your preference doesn't mean the game I like must completely change to reflect what you want. I will never play Call of the Cthulhu. I will never play Paranoia again. I don't like them. That doesn't mean those games must not exist and those who like and play them are having BadWrongFun. Those games do not need to change how they work to satisfy my tastes so they can feel fortunate that I'd want to play them. Likewise D&D does not need to get rid of 2/3 of its rules to satisfy your preferences.

[Kyutaru]

I'll use terms like "martial" and "magic." I don't think the supernatural is exclusively "magic." I strongly support the "transmundane" (AFAIK my term) in fiction: stuff "merely" superlative skill, but which has somehow exceeded the limits of mundanity in the process. That which "should be" mundane, which grew out of mundanity, but has transcended it to become a supernatural version thereof. The smith who knows know magic, but can forge magic swords because she's just that good. The thief of legend whose prowess has grown so great, he can steal the color of a dapper swain's eyes (shout-out to 4e there). The sword-fighter of such amazing talent, they can reflect fireballs and cut rays of light. Etc.

So my "magic" is most (usually not all) supernatural things that aren't transmundane. When I use "martials," I mean characters that derive the majority of their power from mundane or transmundane skills, even if they might also happen to know some magic, and "spellcasters" or "magic-users" etc. get most of their power from magic, with little transmundane skill. (Note: here, things like Psionics, Incarnum, etc. are "magic" even if formally they're distinct.)
So if we're going in that light then everything from Goku to Superman is purely martial with no magic whatsoever. Ki blasts are just inner cultivated spiritual energy, moving insanely fast is just that, and laser eyes are just something any Kryptonian can do, just like Saiyans are half-ape. I mean Supes is even weak to magic, it's one of his Achilles' heels and Goku was almost turned into chocolate by it.

I'm not sure what the issue is if we're letting such characters onto the same stage as wizards.

[olskool]

I found a way to make Spell Casting less certain during play and it works pretty well. I just use the existing Proficiency Check System for Casting Spells (and certain Special Class Abilities). To cast a spell, your PC/NPC must roll against a DC of [10+ Spell Level] with cantrips being a 0-Level spell. The caster gets their Proficiency Bonus and Attribute Bonus to add to the casting roll. Failed rolls DO NOT cost a spell slot UNLESS a Fumble is rolled on the "Skill Test" to cast. IF the caster is under RANGED FIRE, the DC increases to 15+Spell Level (certain FEATS will prevent this increase). IF they are under MELEE ATTACK, the DC rises to 20+Spell Level (again, certain FEATS will help the caster). The system works pretty well and requires only minimal modifications to the rules as written.

[OldTrees1]

Honest question: Do you genuinely believe it is possible to give non-casters something on a par with wish and have caster fans accept it? Because that's the kind of thing we have to be willing to do if we're going to make non-casters achieve..."parity" has put off some people in the past, but that's the kind of thing we need to achieve, a reasonable approximation of similar ability-to-shape-the-world.

You addressed this to Segev but I think I could point something out quick.

Wizard 20 gets a 9th level spells per day. A resourceless non-caster would be able to do a 20th level appropriate action every round. For the resourceless non-caster, parity might mean actions comparable to 7th level spells but the ability to do them every round increases their impact to be comparable to that of higher level spells once per day.

For resource using non-casters, then it will be an uphill discussion but a doable discussion for class A and class B to have comparable 1/day abilities at 20th level.

I think this is a doable discussion.


Important follow-up question: What about if we are working from a system that is already unbalanced in versatility? Your comparison was between two systems of specific natures--ones that may not map to our current situation. That is, is it possible for a system to exist where the versatility of one character-option-set ("class/es") is so great that no amount of "catching up" is possible for things excluded from that set? Because that's, more or less, the assertion I'm making here, that spellcasting has an inherent problem (of design, culture, and implementation) that can only be addressed by re-writing it.
Well my comparison was investigating the inherent nature of vancian magic (and later the inherent version of growing class list->finite known sublist vancian). Not a particular actualized version.

You were/are talking about a content bias problem. These are a bit orthogonal. With the exception of "if splat books increase the class list ==> the class will grow in versatility" (which can apply to non casters), there is no mechanical limitation to parity. It is all a content bias problem. Solve the content bias problem and the math allows you to complete the design.

Is it possible for the versatility of one character-option-set to be so great that on other character-option-set can be designed to catch up? Not unless it is Pun Pun. Content bias, not understanding the mathematical frameworks, and insufficient creativity are the only obstacles. Although content bias is a hard obstacle to address.

You feel removing vancian magic helps reset the design document which could help combat some of the content bias. If that is your objective, I suggest adding vancian magic back in once you succeed. non-caster/at-will/3E-warlock mages are my jam, but I know of several players that prefer vancian caster mages. So I would prefer both to exist once you beat the content bias issue.

[Azuresun]

How wonderful for you. Seriously. Great. Do that. Play the games you like. Your preference doesn't mean the game I like must completely change to reflect what you want. I will never play Call of the Cthulhu. I will never play Paranoia again. I don't like them. That doesn't mean those games must not exist and those who like and play them are having BadWrongFun. Those games do not need to change how they work to satisfy my tastes so they can feel fortunate that I'd want to play them. Likewise D&D does not need to get rid of 2/3 of its rules to satisfy your preferences.

Thank you!

[Segev]

Because it’s been alluded to, I feel the need to point out that, at least for me, there is a significant difference between the criticisms of ToB and 4E. Not the least of which is that the former are largely baseless (as in, the arguments themselves tend to be demonstrably counterfactual), and the latter are structural.

I dislike 4E because it made every class a martial adept. I do not, however, have a problem with martial adepts. I would have had the same issue if every class had become a spellcaster. Different mechanics make classes and categories of classes feel different. 4E lacked that.

Martial adepts were an interesting attempt. I think they largely succeeded, though they could have gone further. You don’t need 2 wishes per day to be “supreme” when you can flash step (line of sight teleport) at will, for example.

The criticisms of martial adepts tend to be about how “broken” they are, which is simply mathematically not true (outside a couple specific exploits), and that they’re “too anime” (usually accompanied by a perjorative I will avoid using). While one can make anime moves out of some of it, it doesn’t actually specifically draw on oriental imagery for the most part and doesn’t require any anime tropes in execution. Such criticisms are often disguised “guy at the gym” fallacies.

So no, the reasons for the criticisms are not the same, and they’re not even equally valid.

[ezekielraiden]

Because it’s been alluded to, I feel the need to point out that, at least for me, there is a significant difference between the criticisms of ToB and 4E. Not the least of which is that the former are largely baseless (as in, the arguments themselves tend to be demonstrably counterfactual), and the latter are structural.

I dislike 4E because it made every class a martial adept. I do not, however, have a problem with martial adepts. I would have had the same issue if every class had become a spellcaster. Different mechanics make classes and categories of classes feel different. 4E lacked that.
<snip>
So no, the reasons for the criticisms are not the same, and they’re not even equally valid.

I very much challenge the notion that 4e classes did not have "different mechanics." (I have snipped the rest because I don't disagree.)

Actions you could take in combat were all presented with the same overall structure (the "power card"). Generalizing beyond that is extremely difficult, because despite there being a common format, many, many powers deviate from it. Not all powers have targets. Some powers have triggers, others do not. Some powers depend on a hit, other powers just happen. Some powers have lots of keywords, some have very few (potentially none, though I'd be surprised). The only thing you can emphatically say about all powers is that they do something, but what player-facing rules element can't be described that way?

As far as I can tell, the thing you can say is that, with the PHB1 and PHB2, every class had the AEDU system. But even that didn't linger hegemonically--within 2 years of launch, 4e had PHB classes that were not AEDU-based (Psionic classes, other than Monk, have a power point/augment system; it wasn't very popular, but it was pretty different). Then Essentials subclasses came along and offered classes that never got daily powers, re-did how encounter powers worked, or treated encounter powers as though they were daily powers (Bladesinger).

If your complaint is that all powers used the same format, I'd like to point out that all 5e spells use the same format. Further, as people have taken great pains to note, truly "non-caster" characters are somewhat difficult to make in 5e. There is no class in 5e that cannot potentially cast spells--Barbarians, Fighters, and Rogues all get at least one subclass which specifically invokes at least one spell effect at least once. Fighters and Rogues specifically become spellcasters with specific subclasses, while Ancestral Barbarians learn to cast a specific ritual spell. In 5e, one must always "choose" NOT to be a spellcaster. (Unless you're running Basic-only, I guess, but...why would you???) Note the quotes around "choose"--the phrasing implies caster-ness is essential, which is a very arguable position, but at the very least it is always the case that every character class could, eventually, cast spells, unless you specifically choose the options that don't.

Why is it just fine and dandy for 5e to push the spell framework onto literally every class, but not fine for 4e to push the power framework onto every class? Unless I'm missing something very important about your problem--and it definitely sounds like there's more going on than just "they used the same framework for every class, no matter what variations happened within it."

[Clistenes]

When that other thing becomes as well known and popular.

That's like saying "hey, let take this game that is so popular and well-liked and make it like those other less popular, less profitable games!

I don't think WotC will like that approach...

If there are systems that use spellcasting and systems that don't, and the former are more popular, nobody in charge will be willing to ditch spellcasting to make D&D more like the latter...

I mean, people who enjoy D&D would just migrate to Pathfinder, Old School or anything similar...

I think you should give those other non-D&D a try.

[ezekielraiden]

So if we're going in that light then everything from Goku to Superman is purely martial with no magic whatsoever. Ki blasts are just inner cultivated spiritual energy, moving insanely fast is just that, and laser eyes are just something any Kryptonian can do, just like Saiyans are half-ape. I mean Supes is even weak to magic, it's one of his Achilles' heels and Goku was almost turned into chocolate by it.

I'm not sure what the issue is if we're letting such characters onto the same stage as wizards.

Superman and Son Goku are not D&D characters, so I don't see how the argument applies. Literature isn't tabletop gaming. They can, at times, inform one another, as with the Salvatore novels, or how Dresden Files has spawned its own games IIRC. Things can certainly flow in both directions.

If we expand beyond fantasy fiction,* things get Weird, because we have things like fantastic license biology, which covers both of your examples, and "super science," which is usually seen as neither "magical" nor "mundane," but some other thing entirely. If we are faced with such a thing, then of course my taxonomy would expand to be: magic (which covers "spellcasting," miracles, most "psionics," and other "spooky" kinds of things), super-science (which covers machinery, circuitry, robotics, energy blasts, and a certain subset of "psionics"), and what I have called "the transmundane" (which covers example characters Charles Atlas, Batman, Lord Greystone aka Tarzan, Doc Savage, and certain versions of James Bond, as well as the aforementioned superlative thieves/blacksmiths/etc.) Works that put all three on equal footing are just about as common as works that don't--and the "science vs magic" thing is a very common trope in any universe where both exist.

Notably, in a broader fiction context, many characters make use of more than one of these, as opposed to fantasy fiction, where characters usually use just one (with small touches of the other at most, in most cases). Frex, most versions of Superman have him extremely intelligent on top of his other powers, which verges on transmundane since his Kryptonian brain isn't supposed to be that much "better" than ours, he's just using it really well. Or consider Batman, who is absolutely a transmundane character (incredible super-master of martial arts, forensics, finance, disguise, escape arts, psychology, engineering/gadgetry, etc.), but who employs a certain amount of super-science in what he does (every version with a Bat Computer basically explicitly states that he designed and built it himself, or designed it himself and assembled it from small parts manufactured by others).

And here's the real killer:
When you can give me a non-spellcasting 5e Fighter or Rogue that actually matches what Saiyans or Kryptonians can do, I'll grant you that there's no real cause for concern. (Well, other than that whatever build you've found for that class is the obvious best choice.) But since I'm pretty sure you can't do that, I don't really see how this argument applies to the game on hand.

*Some pedants will argue that "science fiction" is a specific subset of "fantasy fiction," but I hope you will at least grant me that when we speak of "fantasy," we usually don't mean hyperdrives, atom-splitting, the Three Laws of Robotics, etc. If the distinction drawn bothers you, then consider me to have said "supernatural fantasy" instead of just "fantasy." Sci-fi is generally not lumped in with supernatural fiction, even though both frequently violate the laws of nature with a flagrant disregard.

[Morphic tide]

Why is it just fine and dandy for 5e to push the spell framework onto literally every class, but not fine for 4e to push the power framework onto every class? Unless I'm missing something very important about your problem--and it definitely sounds like there's more going on than just "they used the same framework for every class, no matter what variations happened within it."

Because it's the At-Will, Encounter, Daily, Utility(?) framework that's complained about. It isn't the common formatting, it's the common use mechanic that is literally obligatory for every class in the first two years of the edition's existence. As you mentioned, it took until Psionics for literally any other usage paradigm to enter the edition, so until then, literally everyone was a Martial Adept in broad functional terms. Meanwhile, in 5e, you have a choice to partake in spellcasting, even if it is a choice on literally every class. You can play a non-spell character in the initial release of 5e, you can even play a roughly per-encounter character in the form of the Battlemaster Fighter, while in 4e you had to wait two damn years to see an actual choice of usage paradigm.

[Morgaln]

Because it's the At-Will, Encounter, Daily, Utility(?) framework that's complained about. It isn't the common formatting, it's the common use mechanic that is literally obligatory for every class in the first two years of the edition's existence. As you mentioned, it took until Psionics for literally any other usage paradigm to enter the edition, so until then, literally everyone was a Martial Adept in broad functional terms. Meanwhile, in 5e, you have a choice to partake in spellcasting, even if it is a choice on literally every class. You can play a non-spell character in the initial release of 5e, you can even play a roughly per-encounter character in the form of the Battlemaster Fighter, while in 4e you had to wait two damn years to see an actual choice of usage paradigm.

I... fail to see the problem. What's wrong with all classes sharing a basic structure for how they work?

[NigelWalmsley]

There is no class in 5e that cannot potentially cast spells--Barbarians, Fighters, and Rogues all get at least one subclass which specifically invokes at least one spell effect at least once.

So what? Even if they didn't, they could simply multiclass into a class that can cast spells, which would give them spellcasting. You don't play a class, you play a character. If you build your character in a way that does not involve casting spells, you do not cast spells. Doesn't matter if you could have built them in a way that instead does cast spells, because you didn't do that.


I... fail to see the problem. What's wrong with all classes sharing a basic structure for how they work?

Variety is the spice of life. Having classes that work in genuinely different ways adds depth to the game, and can improve the flavor of classes with well-chosen mechanics. Spell Preparation is a good match for the Wizard, because carefully choosing abilities based on expected opposition works well for a class that is about knowledge and learning. But it wouldn't make any sense at all for a Barbarian.

[OldTrees1]

I... fail to see the problem. What's wrong with all classes sharing a basic structure for how they work?

At-Will, Encounter, and Daily powers feel different from each other. An At-Will Mage (3E Warlock) feels very different from a Daily Mage (Vancian casters). When the mechanical differences create a textural difference, players will have preferences. Even strong preferences. Some of the criticism of ToB was disappointment over it being balanced Encounter Warriors rather than balanced At-Will Warriors, but the fandom quickly realized there were fans of Encounter Warriors too. Since options for At-Will Warriors still existed, that criticism mellowed into personal preferences.

The AEDU structure spit on those preferences. Instead of keeping, expanding, and balancing the types people were used to and wanted, WotC's 4E said "Use this uniform compromised gestalt instead". To which many were upset because it did not match their preferences.

If a system considers the AEDU system the only structure, then it neglects a lot of customers and will lose those customers.

[Kyutaru]

And here's the real killer:
When you can give me a non-spellcasting 5e Fighter or Rogue that actually matches what Saiyans or Kryptonians can do, I'll grant you that there's no real cause for concern. (Well, other than that whatever build you've found for that class is the obvious best choice.) But since I'm pretty sure you can't do that, I don't really see how this argument applies to the game on hand.
D&D is the literature rather than the combat system. It's the fantasy and roleplay instead of the mechanics. The mechanics themselves are free reign and extremely customizable with DMs ruling on optional variants and splatbooks all the time. Past editions even placed a heavy emphasis on tailoring the rules to your campaign rather than tailoring your campaign to the rules. They even did this in official settings like the different magic system used in Dragonlance or the magic-rich Faerun where shops sell power. If the stories have martial characters on par with wizards then the campaign can too. Prior to the official product removing spellcasting purely because you say it will make for a better game someone needs to actually make a better game out of the existing one to show that the model works and is still fun or even more fun than the old one. This is a task left to DMs who make up their variant rules and systems in an effort to build a better RPG and you wouldn't believe how much inconsistency there is in that thought process. The Homebrew boards are chock full of conflicting ideas of what will improve the game.

If someone feels that purging the game of traditional magic is necessary because martials are at a disadvantage then introduce mechanics such as these characters possess to sure up the difference. If it catches on and becomes popular or fun to people then future editions may see the very same.

[Cluedrew]

If D&D's spellcasting system is replaced I wouldn't mind one that has most of the same flavour but actually reflects that in the mechanics, it should also double down on that flavour. For instance I read a lot of D&D books (Forgotten Realms, Dragon Lance, Dark Sun) and the "you have to rememorize spells" thing came up once in dozens of books. You know what did come up a lot? Perpetration over days to years, components, dark pacts and … OK some stupidly powerful wizards whose rules you couldn't really translate over to a game but let us focus on the first ones. I think you could get something much more fun. I want to play with a magic system that includes a description of how to obtain the courage of a thief for your magic rope.

In short I feel the current spellcasting framework is just an unmarked cardboard box for effects

[Quertus]

I'm only on page 2 so far, so sorry if this is covered, but… let's hear about this "magic bullet" of GURPS.

So, how many "GURPS points" should Wizards of each level have, with which to build their casting?

How does GURPS handle some simple spells, like, say, Fireball, Disintegrate, Animate Dead, Dominate Person, Flesh to Stone, and Summon Animal Companion spells? (EDIT: I'd better add Flight, Dimension Door, Invisibility, Knock… any other simple iconic spells?) Include All costs, skills, prerequisites, math, and details of effects.

Let's see if we can get the Playground to agree that this is a simple magic bullet that cures caster / muggle disparity.


My approach would be to start with a matrix of theme and function. A class should have a tight theme - an aesthetic that it works towards. Then it should have its function - its strengths but also as explicitly its weaknesses. Then develop abilities that fit within the intersection.

So, I want the 2e Wizard: the caster who, by default, gets 0 spells as they level. They are limited to what they find and research; no automatic spell progression, no magic item Wal-Mart.

Also, they cannot make Concentration checks (that is, they auto-fail Concentration checks related to their spellcasting).

But, in theory, any given Wizard *could* do absolutely anything (except, you know, face tank a butter knife without using magic).

[Kyutaru]

Also, they cannot make Concentration checks (that is, they auto-fail Concentration checks related to their spellcasting).
Ah yes the good old days when you could Counterspell with your fist. A piece of rope and a gag are better at stopping wizards than an anti-magic sphere. Grappling overpowered. I also miss when spells were truly divided into their components and since metamagic didn't exist you had to use spells that fit the situation. Tied up? Looks like Somatic and Material components are beyond you, but hey there's plenty of Voice-activated spells. Stuck in a Silence 10' Radius zone? That's okay, there are spells that only have Somatic and Material components. With the rise of Harry Potter and sorcerers the game has become more about just throwing around spells like mutant X-men powers. It'd be nice to return to the ritualistic days.

[Morty]

How wonderful for you. Seriously. Great. Do that. Play the games you like. Your preference doesn't mean the game I like must completely change to reflect what you want. I will never play Call of the Cthulhu. I will never play Paranoia again. I don't like them. That doesn't mean those games must not exist and those who like and play them are having BadWrongFun. Those games do not need to change how they work to satisfy my tastes so they can feel fortunate that I'd want to play them. Likewise D&D does not need to get rid of 2/3 of its rules to satisfy your preferences.

I really don't see how saying "the way this element of a game works is poor and it needs to be changed" equates to telling anyone they're having BadWrongFun (I hate this term in general - it's pointless escalation) or telling them they need to stop playing it. Literally nothing the OP can do or say will affect your game in any fashion. Why twist the argument to construe it as some kind of personal attack on you and your playstyle?



Variety is the spice of life. Having classes that work in genuinely different ways adds depth to the game, and can improve the flavor of classes with well-chosen mechanics. Spell Preparation is a good match for the Wizard, because carefully choosing abilities based on expected opposition works well for a class that is about knowledge and learning. But it wouldn't make any sense at all for a Barbarian.

For the most part, 3E/PF or 5E's variety is that you cast spells or you don't. And if you do, you have more options every day than anyone who doesn't will through most of their career.

[Morgaln]

So what? Even if they didn't, they could simply multiclass into a class that can cast spells, which would give them spellcasting. You don't play a class, you play a character. If you build your character in a way that does not involve casting spells, you do not cast spells. Doesn't matter if you could have built them in a way that instead does cast spells, because you didn't do that.



Variety is the spice of life. Having classes that work in genuinely different ways adds depth to the game, and can improve the flavor of classes with well-chosen mechanics. Spell Preparation is a good match for the Wizard, because carefully choosing abilities based on expected opposition works well for a class that is about knowledge and learning. But it wouldn't make any sense at all for a Barbarian.

I find the 4e system far more flavorful than 3.5. The reason? It gave martials actual mechanics to work with. Martials and spellcasters in 3.5 don't work on different mechanics. Casters have a mechanic attached to them that they can use (spellcasting), while martials don't. Martials can attack; that's it. It's nothing special; they do the same thing every turn. Any additional effects they get are usually passive in nature (backstab, evasion, most feats). They don't have cool names for their moves like casters have for their spells. If you want to be versatile, you have to play a caster.

In 4e, that is not true. in 4e, it doesn't matter if flavorwise, you're a caster or not. You get to play with the same amount of toys, no matter where your power comes from. Casters fill a role; so do martials; and the tools they have will support that role. Casters don't get special treatment, they just get different toys to do their thing. It's so much more flavorful when the fighter or barbarian can choose from a number of different attacks, that not only have different names but also do things besides dealing damage. You suddenly open up so much more versatility by allowing martials to add tactical options on par with those of casters. I find it a small price to pay that casters no longer get to feel special and superior in comparison.

[OldTrees1]

For the most part, 3E/PF or 5E's variety is that you cast spells or you don't. And if you do, you have more options every day than anyone who doesn't will through most of their career.

At Will
3E Fighter
3E Warlock

Encounter
3E ToB
5E Warlock

Daily
n/a
3E Wizard

There is more variety that you are crediting. The 3E Warlock, 5E Warlock, and 3E Wizard play quite differently. Just like the 3E Fighter and 3E ToB play differently. Now it is true that 3E/5E did not do that variety justice, the 3E Fighter did not have enough level appropriate at-will options. But the variety was there despite the scope deficiencies.


I find the 4e system far more flavorful than 3.5. The reason? It gave martials actual mechanics to work with. Martials and spellcasters in 3.5 don't work on different mechanics. Casters have a mechanic attached to them that they can use (spellcasting), while martials don't. Martials can attack; that's it. It's nothing special; they do the same thing every turn. Any additional effects they get are usually passive in nature (backstab, evasion, most feats). They don't have cool names for their moves like casters have for their spells. If you want to be versatile, you have to play a caster.

In 4e, that is not true. in 4e, it doesn't matter if flavorwise, you're a caster or not. You get to play with the same amount of toys, no matter where your power comes from. Casters fill a role; so do martials; and the tools they have will support that role. Casters don't get special treatment, they just get different toys to do their thing. It's so much more flavorful when the fighter or barbarian can choose from a number of different attacks, that not only have different names but also do things besides dealing damage. You suddenly open up so much more versatility by allowing martials to add tactical options on par with those of casters. I find it a small price to pay that casters no longer get to feel special and superior in comparison.

Yes 4e made some improvements. Now if only they started with an A Fighter, a E Fighter, and maybe a D Fighter instead of an AED Fighter. Oh and maybe a A Warlock, and a D Wizard rather than just AED casters. You did not address the point that variety is the spice of life. AEDU for everything is not variety and is not required to accomplish the improvements you are saluting.

Once you learn how to design an A class, E class, and D class for Fighters, Rogues, Clerics, and Mages, then you also know how to design AE classes, AD classes, ED classes, and AED classes. Then you can present a variety of classes. But 4e decided to collapse everything into AEDU rather than do the intellectual legwork.

[paddyfool]

Many have tried ways to rebalance. Not many have succeeded.

Fantasy Craft did an interesting job of more balanced d20 spellcasting, with a skill-based MAD spell points based system for most spellcasting. Mages in that start out knowing only cantrips as well, and at level 1 to 2 they rely on use of their many skill points to do other skills based activities at least as much as they do their spells. And even once their more powerful spells do come online, it's all too easy to burn through all the spell points you have and have to fall back on your wits + weapons + cantrips again.

Good luck getting a group together for a system that hasn't had an official update in at least 5 years, though.

[2D8HP]

We've had a number of threads asking how we would fix martial characters. A handful of posters have suggested that spellcasters should be brought down closer to non-caster power levels, perhaps with the (usually admitted to be tedious) task of re-writing a large number of spells.

How about a different tack: Just scrap the spells. All of them. Every last one. Gone, poof, sayonara, good riddance to bad rubbish.[...]


I have no problem with this, but I simply don't play high level spell-casters myself and if someone wants me to put on the DM hat again I limit how many spell casting class levels a PC may have.


[...]Vancian casting isn't broken. There's nothing inherently game-breaking in Vancian casting. What has caused people to complain over and over for two decades about martial/caster disparity is that in 3.X and 5e, casters keep getting handled cool shiny toys at every level, while the fighter and the barbarian and the ranger have to sit in the corner and hope the DM helps them out. The rogue is pigeonholed into trying to proc Sneak Attack and get pointed at traps and locked doors... Until the casters get the tools to completely bypass traps and locked doors.

But it wasn't always the case. It used to be that Fighting Men were the ones who could use the most magic items, making them stronger. It used to be that wizards had far less access to reality-altering powers. It used to be that followers and kingdoms were built right into the class package for martials. It used to be that the casters couldn't simply be better at everything. The thief was the only one with skills!

There's a bunch of OSR games out there that handle Vancian casting without much fuss, and even if I find myself mostly uninterested in the OSR I can appreciate some mechanical ideas that community has. So, hey, maybe the problem isn't Vancian casters - maybe the problem is that along the way the martials lost all their neat features that were supposed to turn them into leaders of men and cool heroic archetypes, and saddled down with the "guy at the gym" fallacy and other stuff that left them in the dust compared to casters.


Very true


Seriously play another game. Why play a game that is so unbalanced?


True, right, proper, good, and beautiful D&D was unbalanced...

...unbalanced in favor of "martials", at all but stratospherically high levels that required years of gameplay a caster PC was unlikely to survive to, and those high levels were an afterthought, since the designers assumed the PC's would build a stronghold and high level play would be an amalgamation of Chainmail and Monopoly.


[....]the baseline of D&D has always been the Fighting Man, that can just swing his sword all day, without limit. With roots as grounded as that, adding a resource based magic system doesn't add up, because the Fighting Man swiftly gets outclassed and has to change his identity in order to keep up. That's why the magic system should change to fit the martial archetype and not the other way around; because spellcasters can maintain their identity on the martials' ground, but the reverse is not also possible.


I'm fine with "nerfing" casting, but I'd be fine with nerfing martials a bit as well, but I truly think 5e D&D is a fine game as is at low levels, it's only high levels that seem off to me.


I think there's an option that makes everyone happy.

You mention playing lower level games as a solution. Would it be reasonable to have these Hercules powers as upper-level features, and then just have players play whatever power level they feel most comfortable with?

Nobody really has too many complaints about comparing level 1 Fighters with level 1 Wizards, yet there are many complaints when comparing level 15 Fighters to level 15 Wizards. Maybe the solution isn't changing the level 1-15 Wizard, or the level 1 Fighter.

Maybe we just have to fix the level 15 Fighter?


Or just limit play at level 15.


I want to preface this by stating that I don't think a player is wrong for wanting to play Conan in D&D: the Conan series is among the works that inspired D&D, and the Barbarian class is very much modelled on him rather than any real-world, historical "barbarian" as defined by the Graeco-Roman civilization, so that's a legit character concept.

However, it's a concept that can only go so far in the power spectrum from level 1 to 20. A very popular variant of the 3.5 rules was the E6 rulest, which capped level progression at 6. It struck a balance were you could have Conan work side by side with Merlin and Gandalf without getting overshadowed by them.

A player wanting to play Conan, however, must accept that the power level of Conan's foes isn't the same level at which a level 20 D&D full caster operates (or even a caster above level 10). The Cymmerian could always outwit and outbrawn the sorcers and enchantresses he faced. In the same vein, Gandalf wasn't able to just cast Meteor Swarm over the host of Mordor, allowing Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas to shine when huge battles broke out.

So, if "Conan the Barbarian" is the ceiling you want to aim for, you need to establish that during session 0. I've successfully ran campaigns where the party's Barbarian, Ranger and Rogue all cooperated with the Cleric towards slaying the Tarrasque, and everyone participated in that effort and nobody felt overshadowed by the other party members - but that was because we set expectations during session 0, we agreed on keeping the overall power level balanced and I was careful to hand the martials boons and magic items that kept them on par with the Cleric.

But if your party has Odysseus coexist with Doctor Strange, you run into the issue of Odysseus' legendary wits being infinitely less useful at solving problems that the Sorcer Supreme's magic powers. You don't need Odysseus to come up with a plan to escape Polyphemus, because Doctor Strange can just blast the cyclop to negative hitpoints, or turn him to stone, or make him fall asleep, or send him to another plane of existence or whatever else his magic can achieve. And Odysseus will feel shafted and useless, because his power level doesn't coincide with that of the rest of the campaign.


Again, high levels are where the problem is, and frankly my choosing to play a "martial" in the first place is in part because I want to play a regular human exploring a fantastic world, caster players have different expectations, and high levels are for them.


[...]2nd edition balances wizards not just by making them slow to advance but also by making them fragile. Can't cast spells while moving, spells are subject to interruption while casting, can't wear armor while casting spells (although priests can, and Elven Chain doesn't count as armor), and have only 35 HP at 20th level (in an edition where Fireball does up to 10d6 (35) damage and permadeath occurs at 0 HP or (optional rule) at -10 HP, and save-or-die effects abound, and even resurrection magic can perma-kill you), and most wizards just plain aren't smart enough to ever cast 9th level spells even if they do hit 20th level.

That said, even the lower-level spells in 2nd edition are indeed great fun and often incredibly powerful. Dominate and Magic Jar, for example, are both 5th level spells but more powerful in many ways than 5E's 8th level version of Dominate Monster.


I only very briefly played 2e, but I played a fair bit of 0e and 1e (and BD&D), and all that was true of them, IMNSHO 3e WD&D broke as much as it fixed, 5e is better but it could've gone farther to being more like TD&D, that said I like 5e's 1st level better than TD&D's.


Give them just cantrips and then slightly boost said cantrips.

Make it where each caster can do one thing well and not really anything else all that well.

If it's good enough for some players, it's good enough for others, right?


Seems fine to me.

Anyway, 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 much those versions of D&D, so grab a shovel full of salt..

I've played B/X and 5e D&D more 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 only).

In the WotC 5e D&D I've played more recently 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!

Thread after thread after thread someone posts something along the lines of:


I wish someone would make a game that...

Well "someone" has, either Tunnels & Trolls in 1975, RuneQuest in 1978, Champions in 1981, Stormbringer in 1981, or Pendragon in 1985 (among others), all generally did whatever it is the complainer wishes "someone" would publish (different games for different complaints).

Anyway, TD&D had different XP thresholds to "level up" for different classes, something like that could be implemented again, it also just plain took longer to gain those levels in right, true, good, proper, and beautiful D&D!

As an alternative, take a page from Stormbringer, and have the more powerful the magic one employs increase the likelihood that a demon will eat a sorcerers mind and soul yum yum!

It's one way to balance.

[Segev]

I very much challenge the notion that 4e classes did not have "different mechanics." (I have snipped the rest because I don't disagree.)

Actions you could take in combat were all presented with the same overall structure (the "power card"). Generalizing beyond that is extremely difficult, because despite there being a common format, many, many powers deviate from it. Not all powers have targets. Some powers have triggers, others do not. Some powers depend on a hit, other powers just happen. Some powers have lots of keywords, some have very few (potentially none, though I'd be surprised). The only thing you can emphatically say about all powers is that they do something, but what player-facing rules element can't be described that way?

As far as I can tell, the thing you can say is that, with the PHB1 and PHB2, every class had the AEDU system. But even that didn't linger hegemonically--within 2 years of launch, 4e had PHB classes that were not AEDU-based (Psionic classes, other than Monk, have a power point/augment system; it wasn't very popular, but it was pretty different). Then Essentials subclasses came along and offered classes that never got daily powers, re-did how encounter powers worked, or treated encounter powers as though they were daily powers (Bladesinger).

If your complaint is that all powers used the same format, I'd like to point out that all 5e spells use the same format. Further, as people have taken great pains to note, truly "non-caster" characters are somewhat difficult to make in 5e. There is no class in 5e that cannot potentially cast spells--Barbarians, Fighters, and Rogues all get at least one subclass which specifically invokes at least one spell effect at least once. Fighters and Rogues specifically become spellcasters with specific subclasses, while Ancestral Barbarians learn to cast a specific ritual spell. In 5e, one must always "choose" NOT to be a spellcaster. (Unless you're running Basic-only, I guess, but...why would you???) Note the quotes around "choose"--the phrasing implies caster-ness is essential, which is a very arguable position, but at the very least it is always the case that every character class could, eventually, cast spells, unless you specifically choose the options that don't.

Why is it just fine and dandy for 5e to push the spell framework onto literally every class, but not fine for 4e to push the power framework onto every class? Unless I'm missing something very important about your problem--and it definitely sounds like there's more going on than just "they used the same framework for every class, no matter what variations happened within it."

I confess that I became disgusted enough with 4e in its first year or so of existence that I never went back and tried out anything that came out 2+ years after its launch. Maybe that's unfair, but by then, I had played in two games of it and loathed everything about the experiences, from chargen to the actual mechanics at the table. I won't hold the lameness of the dungeon crawls against it, because that's as much on the DM as the system, but it didn't help. It just wasn't a fun system to play, because I frankly wanted to be playing characters that it had words describing but which felt no different than any other class and which felt like they had fewer tactical options than a stereotypical "I attack again" 3.0 Fighter, despite having on paper more options, because they all amounted to the same thing.

I don't think it was (just) the format; it was the fact that it was the "AEUW" or whatever system on everything. 5e does, yes, spread spells around amongst various classes, but it had features that aren't spells on all of them, too. Many of those features have unique mechanics, from the Wild Sorcerer's wild magic to the Battle Master's superiority die. 4e had nothing but martial adept maneuvers, even if some of them were called "magic spells."

Now, argument could be made that Martial Adept maneuvers in 3e were "basically spells," but even there, they had distinct mechanisms: encounter-use/refresh, faster refresh methods, etc.

4e did, essentially, get rid of spells. I contend, however, that if 4e had made EVERYTHING spells, it still would have failed.

Games thrive on the modular systems that are easily expanded.

[Morphic tide]

2D8, I'm going to have to quote Grod's Law:

I swear, the number of times I've seen arguments like this... you know what, I'm proposing a new fallacy, right here and now. Call it Grod's Law: You cannot and should not balance bad mechanics by making them annoying to use. When you do:

The disruptive munchkin ignores it, argues it, or forces the rest of the group to suffer through it. His power remains the same, and he gets more annoying to play with.
The inappropriate powergamer figures out how to circumvent the restriction. His power remains the same.
The reasonable player either figures out how to circumvent the restriction (rendering it moot), avoids the class (turning it into a ban) or suffers through it. His power remains the same and/or his enjoyment goes down.
The new player avoids the class or suffers through it. His enjoyment goes down.

Notice how the problem players feel the least impact?

The issue with inconvenience/unreliability as the downside of magic is that it's still stupidly overpowered, it's just even less fun to use than the simple fire-and-forget of most D&D magic under Wizards of the Coast. "60% lose your character, 20% win everything" is not going to be a fun game, because that 60% removes a player outright and that 20% makes everyone else irrelevant. Neither should be automatic to playing an official class at any percentage outside the flat-out horror genres where losing is expected.

"Secrets man was not meant to know" is only supposed to mean you're screwed in horror settings. Or particular forms of legend-based roleplaying with gods around to actively punish hubris, but many people look on those situations as their own sort of horror. Heck, from Greek mythology, fire is a secret that man was not meant to know, and the Titan that smuggled it to us was gravely punished for doing so. But man kept the secret of fire, and built a great deal of civilization on it.

It can very much represent a guile hero's acquisition of phenomenal cosmic power instead of some horror thing.

[NigelWalmsley]

Perpetration over days to years, components, dark pacts

The problem is that this is one of those things that doesn't translate well from stories to TTRPGs. Tracking components is deeply annoying if you do it in any detail. Going on a quest to find an Apple of Discord and the Horn of the Gatekeeper so you can cast Animate Dead is cool once, but it's only cool once. Doing that every time you want to cast Animate Dead is a pain, as is doing it every time you want to cast a 4th level spell. It's not going to work well unless you're willing to turn your game into Ars Magica, and while Ars Magica is a reasonable enough game to play, it's not really a great solution to the problem "casters are too good".


For the most part, 3E/PF or 5E's variety is that you cast spells or you don't. And if you do, you have more options every day than anyone who doesn't will through most of their career.

That might be true of 5e, but it's not true in 3e (I can't really speak to PF, and from what little I understand it would depend if you counted things from e.g. DSP). It's true that "casters versus non-casters" is the most obvious distinction, but there's plenty of variety to be had. Even within casting, prepared and spontaneous casters, or Wizards and everyone else have very different dynamics (i.e. you can give Wizards new spells as loot). Looking beyond casting, you have things like Binders, Incarnates, Warlocks, Crusaders, Psions, Dragon Shamans, or Warblades. And, sure, you could describe some or all of those as "basically casters", but I think that would be entirely missing the point.


I find the 4e system far more flavorful than 3.5. The reason? It gave martials actual mechanics to work with. Martials and spellcasters in 3.5 don't work on different mechanics. Casters have a mechanic attached to them that they can use (spellcasting), while martials don't. Martials can attack; that's it.

That's a mechanic. Maybe it's not a very interesting mechanic, but it is in fact a mechanic. Also, there are absolutely more mechanically interesting martials out there, most notably the ToB classes. I reject your argument as factually false.


I confess that I became disgusted enough with 4e in its first year or so of existence that I never went back and tried out anything that came out 2+ years after its launch. Maybe that's unfair

I don't think that's unfair. If my first encounter with someone is them punching me directly in the face out of the blue, I'm not going to feel any obligation to talk to them again, even if their friends claim they've "totally changed". Your time is valuable, and 4e already demonstrated that it isn't a good use of it.

[Cluedrew]

On Components: Yes a direct translation probably isn't going to work. I have a bunch of ideas about what you could do to make it work that I could discuss them in detail if you are curious. Really though I just would like to spells like they are happening in the world and not being picked from a menu like in a CRPG so if there is a rework I would like them to keep an eye on flavour, even if it isn't quite that one.

[Psyren]

It's easier to find a group when you say "Hey, lets play D&D" than "hey, lets play GURPS/Exalted/Mutants and Masterminds". While it's quite likely that your group would have a decent fun time with any of those three and more, they don't have anywhere near the brand recognition of D&D. Nothing does in the TTRPG space.

There's an automatic buy-in from people with a casual interest that might be put off by things they don't recognise.

With respect, that's hardly D&D's problem, nor is it the problem of those who like and support D&D. OP should take Xervous' advice.

[Kyutaru]

Honestly I feel D&D's biggest flaw is also one of the things keeping it unique -- saving throws. So much in magic becomes you either do nothing or do everything and carry the team. Min-maxing stats to get the highest DC keeps mages from being anything but cookie cutter and severely limits multi-classing options unless you just want buffs. Like weapons don't have this problem. You attack multiple times and allies can cover any misses with damage of their own. But spells NEED to work or you wasted your turn and many of them define whether the battle is a victory or a loss with a single roll. That's too much power in a player's hands and way too much dependence on swingy RNG for success or failure. Every other skill check isn't going to mean the end of the party if you failed it and rarely will a successful one make a challenge effortless.

Other roleplaying games have made attempts to deal with status effects in other ways to keep from a heavy reliance on a binary switch. If you fix that problem with D&D then the whole caster/martial divide is less pronounced because they don't literally decide whether you live or die with a single spell.

[VoxRationis]

Honestly I feel D&D's biggest flaw is also one of the things keeping it unique -- saving throws. So much in magic becomes you either do nothing or do everything and carry the team. Min-maxing stats to get the highest DC keeps mages from being anything but cookie cutter and severely limits multi-classing options unless you just want buffs.
You could make it so that your DCs for different saving throws depended on different core stats (though I'd argue that it shouldn't be purely symmetrical, i.e., Strength adds to Strength save DCs, as that would nix more archetypal character concepts and make things more mechanically less interesting).

If you were really committing to a rewrite of things, you could take the Pillars of Eternity route and make each base stat affect something else about the nature of spells, affecting the area, damage, duration, etc. You'd still probably end up with certain stats being of higher priority (area is often less important than damage, for instance, since one is quite often trying to kill or disable a single target), but you'd be getting relevant benefit from diversity.

If you really, really wanted to shake things up, you'd do as above, but switch things up depending on the school or class of magic.


But spells NEED to work or you wasted your turn and many of them define whether the battle is a victory or a loss with a single roll. That's too much power in a player's hands and way too much dependence on swingy RNG for success or failure. Every other skill check isn't going to mean the end of the party if you failed it and rarely will a successful one make a challenge effortless.

Other roleplaying games have made attempts to deal with status effects in other ways to keep from a heavy reliance on a binary switch. If you fix that problem with D&D then the whole caster/martial divide is less pronounced because they don't literally decide whether you live or die with a single spell.

What sort of ways to they avoid binary switches? The advantage of binary status effects is that they're very easy to implement in a tabletop ruleset; making status effects into gradations demands a lot of on-the-fly calculation, which slows things down if one's not using a computer. Do they go for sort of hierarchies of effects, like 3.5s shaken<frightened<panicked?

[Morgaln]

That's a mechanic. Maybe it's not a very interesting mechanic, but it is in fact a mechanic. Also, there are absolutely more mechanically interesting martials out there, most notably the ToB classes. I reject your argument as factually false.


Attacking is not a mechanic unique to martials. It's a base feature of the system that is shared among casters and not-casters equally. Casters even get spells that allow them to be equally effective at attacking as the martials, so you can't even say it's just a theoretical possibility.
Also, the existence of some non-casters with interesting mechanics in a single supplement does not counter my argument. It remains fact that various martial classes, especially the basic classes that don't require additional supplements (like fighter, rogue and barbarian), have no mechanics to call their own and at best get passive bonuses that they can choose when to apply. All core classes should be interestingin their own right. They should all have something unique to them. D&D completely fails in that regard, but 4e at least tried to rectify that.

[Cluedrew]

With respect, that's hardly D&D's problem, nor is it the problem of those who like and support D&D.Not until they refuse to play anything else, then there is a problem with those who like and support D&D. Not that is everyone by any means.

[NigelWalmsley]

Every other skill check isn't going to mean the end of the party if you failed it and rarely will a successful one make a challenge effortless.

I would challenge at least the second part of this. A lot of skill checks are "roll once, beat challenge". That's a completely workable paradigm for the game to have. The issue with saving throws is the mismatch between incremental progress by damage dealers and SoDs.


You could make it so that your DCs for different saving throws depended on different core stats (though I'd argue that it shouldn't be purely symmetrical, i.e., Strength adds to Strength save DCs, as that would nix more archetypal character concepts and make things more mechanically less interesting).

That doesn't really solve the problem. It maybe makes it possible for you to plan out a specific multiclassed Wizard build (like you take the Strength spells, and become a Wizard/Fighter), but ultimately specialization is still very likely the correct strategy. Going all-in on Constitution instead of Intelligence doesn't really fix the problem.


What sort of ways to they avoid binary switches? The advantage of binary status effects is that they're very easy to implement in a tabletop ruleset; making status effects into gradations demands a lot of on-the-fly calculation, which slows things down if one's not using a computer. Do they go for sort of hierarchies of effects, like 3.5s shaken<frightened<panicked?

A lot of conditions aren't binary switches. If you inflict some negative levels, or ability penalties, or Slow, you've made a meaningful contribution, but the fight isn't over. You could focus casters more on that kind of thing, with classic SoDs as finishing moves (and, of course, make that kind of thing more available to martials).


Attacking is not a mechanic unique to martials.

And the things spells do are not unique to casters. Let alone any particular caster. Do casters do more things? Sure. Better things, even. But martials still have abilities. I'm as down on martials as the next guy, but the notion that they don't have mechanics attached to them is false.


It remains fact that various martial classes, especially the basic classes that don't require additional supplements (like fighter, rogue and barbarian), have no mechanics to call their own and at best get passive bonuses that they can choose when to apply.

"They get no mechanics, except for the mechanic that they get". I don't need Tome of Battle for your argument to be false, your argument just is false.


Not until they refuse to play anything else, then there is a problem with those who like and support D&D. Not that is everyone by any means.

Frankly, anyone's problem with the D&D rules is a D&D problem. Maybe it's not worth solving, but you should at least be willing to make that argument, rather than effectively going "tough luck, I'd rather D&D be a game I like than a game you like". The latter is just kinda pointlessly being a selfish jerk.

[Morgaln]

And the things spells do are not unique to casters. Let alone any particular caster. Do casters do more things? Sure. Better things, even. But martials still have abilities. I'm as down on martials as the next guy, but the notion that they don't have mechanics attached to them is false.



"They get no mechanics, except for the mechanic that they get". I don't need Tome of Battle for your argument to be false, your argument just is false.



You are wilfully ignoring my point, therefore you are not qualified to judge whether it is false or not. Every class can attack. Every class has passive bonuses. Casters have active abilities. Martials don't. In particular, those martials that are core classes don't. Therefore, martials don't have mechanics they can call their own, because they are the basic mechanics of the game available to everyone. And that is what 4e did better. You still haven't addressed that.

[Morty]

Now that I've thought about it, the notion of multiple subsystems seems to be mostly concentrated in mid-to-late 3.5. In core 3E, you have casters and non-casters. 4E tried to unify everyone around a common power scheme and we know how it went. Then 5E pivoted very hard to the baseline caster/non-caster division and compensated by giving many classes access to spells. I'm not sure how much of late 3.5's variety Pathfinder kept. Path of War exists, but is third party. And PF2E returned to the caster/non-caster division just like 5E. Either you have spells, or you don't - and then you have nothing comparable to them. The sole exception is Alchemist, which has its own thing.

[Kyutaru]

What sort of ways to they avoid binary switches? The advantage of binary status effects is that they're very easy to implement in a tabletop ruleset; making status effects into gradations demands a lot of on-the-fly calculation, which slows things down if one's not using a computer. Do they go for sort of hierarchies of effects, like 3.5s shaken<frightened<panicked?
Yes, that is one of the ways I've seen. Like instead of Freezing being an effect there is Chilled first. Two chills turns into a freezing. Getting hit with warmness lowers a chill effect but makes you prone to burning. Stuns don't simply happen but require a vulnerability window to be set first, like a Staggered condition that becomes Stun. In this way it's not only very difficult for a single person to inflict the status singlehandedly, which promotes teamwork, but it's also more likely that it's done over multiple turns barring combo attacks. Similarly if an enemy already has a certain condition like Burning then perhaps it makes him more vulnerable to a synergy condition like Enrage while immune to an opposing condition like Sleep. I've also seen in tabletops where applying a condition can only have a partial effect depending on the roll. It's not Save or Die but Save or Consult This Chart. Generally barely failing the DC has the minimal effect while losing by 5 or 10 (or by 1 or 2 extra successes in these games) results in a more potent effect. Likewise, passing your saving throw phenomenally can result in you being immune to further attempts for a while.

Status effects do not have to be binary and Save or Lose does not need to be how casters are balanced. Fourth edition also had minor effects that should see a return to the gameplay. Something as simple as moving troops around can matter a lot. Not to shaft casters entirely spells should also reflect a degree of control that can be repurposed at will. It's a shame how in D&D Burning Hands does what Burning Hands does because spells are unique snowflakes that only do one thing. Yet in a Vampire game casting a two notch Fire spell lets you manipulate it in any way you'd like provided the end resulting area and control range is the same as Burning Hands.

[Zombimode]

Now that I've thought about it, the notion of multiple subsystems seems to be mostly concentrated in mid-to-late 3.5.

I don't know. Psionics is very early, Warlock as well. And you have countless of feats and PRCs all over the place that introduce mini-subsystems specific to that PRC or (class of) feat.

[jjordan]

We've had a number of threads asking how we would fix martial characters. A handful of posters have suggested that spellcasters should be brought down closer to non-caster power levels, perhaps with the (usually admitted to be tedious) task of re-writing a large number of spells.
So you're addressing the perceived power disparity by eliminating the large number of spells and making such spells as remain class features or the equivalent. Which is one way to go.

If this is an issue for you there are some simpler fixes that don't require as much work.

Solution 1:

All spells, but not cantrips, now have a DC equal to 8 plus the spell level. Casters must make a skill check versus their primary casting ability in order to successfully cast a spell. Casters now have a possibility of failure (less than 50%) which reduces their power without the need to do any extensive re-writes. The downside is that this cuts more deeply against lower level spell casters than it does against higher level casters.

Variation 1:

Putting modifiers in place to increase/reduce the difficulty of casting. Casting while actively in combat? -1. Casting as a ritual? Roll with advantage. Another caster who knows the spell is helping you? And so on.
Variation 2:

Variable success. Exceed the DC by a certain level and get bonus goodies. Fail the roll by a certain number and bad things happen. If you use this you can up the DC to 9 plus the spell level for sorcerers.


Solution 2:

Spell lists. Reducing the number of spells available to casters without getting rid of them all is another way to reduce the power of casters. Spell lists particularly impact divine casters (which includes warlocks, to my mind). It makes sense for a benevolent deity to be passing out the healing spells. Others? Not so much. Arcane casters can be controlled by restricting them to a single school (and letting them pick up other schools as feats).

Solution 3:

Spells are hard to learn. Each spell has a task DC equal to the level of the spell times 10 and a learning period equal to the level of the spell times 2. After each learning period (during which the character spends the majority of their time studying the spell) the caster may make an attempt to learn the spell by rolling against the DC. They subtract their roll from the task DC and when it is reduced to zero they have learned the spell. You can increase the difficulty by adding materials costs (simple gold investment per learning period) or adding material requirements (go find some powdered dragon claw). Cantrips are feats/features not spells for the purposes of this solution. This impacts arcane magic users and not divine magic users so I suggest using it in conjunction with Solution 2, limiting the spells a divine caster has access to.

[Pex]

Attacking is not a mechanic unique to martials. It's a base feature of the system that is shared among casters and not-casters equally. Casters even get spells that allow them to be equally effective at attacking as the martials, so you can't even say it's just a theoretical possibility.
Also, the existence of some non-casters with interesting mechanics in a single supplement does not counter my argument. It remains fact that various martial classes, especially the basic classes that don't require additional supplements (like fighter, rogue and barbarian), have no mechanics to call their own and at best get passive bonuses that they can choose when to apply. All core classes should be interestingin their own right. They should all have something unique to them. D&D completely fails in that regard, but 4e at least tried to rectify that.

4E tried to make all classes unique by making them all the the same? Does not compute. All the classes functioned the same way in mechanics. They had equal number of things available and progressed the same. Every ability was X[W] damage of (type) + condition or someone moves. If condition = harmful save ends, since condition = someone heals can happen. X and the severity of the condition increases as levels increase. Variety, such as it exists, is plugging in different values for the variables, but it's all the same formula. That's the sameness. Classes pushed the same buttons and recovered their uses of pushes back the same way.

Wizard looks like it gets a few powers that do not follow the formula, but in reality they do because in those cases X = 0.

[Psyren]

Not until they refuse to play anything else, then there is a problem with those who like and support D&D. Not that is everyone by any means.

That's still only a problem with those specific people (i.e. OP's friends) that refuse to try anything else.

The solution here is for the OP, if they really dislike spellcasting and their group will try any modification to the game as long as "D&D" stays in the title somehow, to eliminate spellcasting from their game. That's something we can kind of help with (and in fact, there's a thread on the 3.5 forum right now trying to do exactly that.) But proposing that the designers ruin everyone else's fun with D&D to accommodate the preferences of one group is just not realistic.

[Xervous]

That's still only a problem with those specific people (i.e. OP's friends) that refuse to try anything else.

The solution here is for the OP, if they really dislike spellcasting and their group will try any modification to the game as long as "D&D" stays in the title somehow, to eliminate spellcasting from their game. That's something we can kind of help with (and in fact, there's a thread on the 3.5 forum right now trying to do exactly that.) But proposing that the designers ruin everyone else's fun with D&D to accommodate the preferences of one group is just not realistic.

It should be about fun and what works for your group, not pushing your world view as the one true way(TM). I personally have accepted that I’m not squarely in WotC’s target audience and have been making do. The name brand identity of D&D can pull in the reclusive individuals and save you some effort on assembling a group, yes, but if you deem that a compromise it’s by definition a tradeoff on an approach that costs more effort.

[Psyren]

It should be about fun and what works for your group, not pushing your world view as the one true way(TM). I personally have accepted that I’m not squarely in WotC’s target audience and have been making do. The name brand identity of D&D can pull in the reclusive individuals and save you some effort on assembling a group, yes, but if you deem that a compromise it’s by definition a tradeoff on an approach that costs more effort.

I fully agree that no world view is the One True Way. But D&D as a game is designed around the assumption that spellcasting exists and is necessary, especially past low levels, even if only through items. Ripping all that out isn't impossible, but the devil will very much be in the details, and it's likely to need a lot of time-consuming effort and iteration that OP could simply put towards convincing their group to try {system that already does what they want.}

[Morty]

I don't know. Psionics is very early, Warlock as well. And you have countless of feats and PRCs all over the place that introduce mini-subsystems specific to that PRC or (class of) feat.

Psionics and warlocks were there since the start or very early, true. Of course, 3.0 had existed for a while before that. The warlock was probably a significant step towards more variety. But Incarnum, ToB and ToM came out a couple years later, and I think that's when the idea that there's more to it than "magic" or "no magic" really clinched. Tome of Battle, in particular, was a paradigm shifter... but, again, one the two new editions of the game chose to all but entirely abandon.

What I realized while looking things up for this post is that 3.5 lasted far shorter than I thought. 2003-2007, since I don't think they released any new material after 4E was announced.

[NigelWalmsley]

You are wilfully ignoring my point, therefore you are not qualified to judge whether it is false or not. Every class can attack. Every class has passive bonuses. Casters have active abilities. Martials don't. In particular, those martials that are core classes don't. Therefore, martials don't have mechanics they can call their own, because they are the basic mechanics of the game available to everyone. And that is what 4e did better. You still haven't addressed that.

Martials, even Core martials, do have active abilities. Rage is an active ability. Stunning Fist is an active ability. Smite is an active ability. You would be entirely justified to say that those abilities are bad, but they do exist. And even passive abilities like Sneak Attack and Favored Enemy can change tactics substantially. Even the Fighter gets a handful of Fighter-exclusive feats. You are simply factually wrong that there are no mechanics only non-casters get. You may think those mechanics are weak or lame or whatever, but they are in fact a part of the game.


I don't know. Psionics is very early, Warlock as well. And you have countless of feats and PRCs all over the place that introduce mini-subsystems specific to that PRC or (class of) feat.

Also the Marshal. And it really is unfair to lump all of casting in a single bucket. Sorcerers, Bards, Clerics, Wizards, and Warmages are all mechanically distinct in meaningful ways.

[Cluedrew]

Frankly, anyone's problem with the D&D rules is a D&D problem. Maybe it's not worth solving, but you should at least be willing to make that argument, […].I mean I think the argument for a more flavourful system is pretty straight forward. Brings things into the world more, helps you improvise rules in new situation and helps inform design but that is not really player facing. Maybe that isn't straight forward. I think the only counter argument - besides takes less energy - is that it is more generic if you don't but I think that ship has sailed.


That's still only a problem with those specific people (i.e. OP's friends) that refuse to try anything else.Agreed, I could have said more about it but I thought it was pretty self evident.

[Segev]

Technically, combat is a subsystem. It's just one that everybody uses. I was going to say skills were, but on reflection, skills are probably the purest expression of d20's core system mechanic, so it wouldn't count as a subsystem; it's the system. Or maybe they are, very slightly, since they add ranks and specialized bonuses into the d20+stat mod base rules.

In any event, 3.0 was designed with the mindset that feats would open up their own subsystem of specialized rules, and that fighters would have huge access to these (particularly for combat); the early assessment of Fighter was that it was a very powerful class! This assessment was later determined to be wrong, of course, but the history of what people assumed and expected is important to note.

Feats also were an expansion on the notion of "weapon proficiencies" into a whole category of special abilities. "Nonweapon proficiencies" became skills.

In 1e and 2e, the Thief had a unique subsystem all his own: all those rogue skills we see as the mainstay of the class (and why it is The Skill Class to begin with) used to be a percentile chart that gave d100 percentages that were the chance a thief of a given level would succeed at opening locks, using magic devices, hiding, moving silently, disarming traps, etc.

3.5 did go further in developing coherent subsystems designed to be shared between subsets of classes, though.

[Willie the Duck]

Technically, combat is a subsystem. It's just one that everybody uses. I was going to say skills were, but on reflection, skills are probably the purest expression of d20's core system mechanic, so it wouldn't count as a subsystem; it's the system. Or maybe they are, very slightly, since they add ranks and specialized bonuses into the d20+stat mod base rules.

3e/D20 certainly tried to make that be the case (or at least create a generalized resolution mechanic, of which skills was a specific implementation). However, D&D as a whole is rather notable in that it really didn't initially have a generalized resolution model (p. 51 of Cook Expert notwithstanding), with skills being very much a vestigial add-on. Whether 3e (and the retrenched-but-similar 4e and 5e models) succeeded in undoing this quality is something of an open question. I feel like, for something to be the core system mechanic, you'd almost have to be able to answer it to the question, 'without knowing the specifics of the situation, you would first assume that the mechanism you'd bring to bear is _____.' For GURPS, that's clearly the skill system. For modern D&D, I just don't know. Everyone's complaints about the D&D's skill systems are, frankly, pretty valid.

[Segev]

3e/D20 certainly tried to make that be the case (or at least create a generalized resolution mechanic, of which skills was a specific implementation). However, D&D as a whole is rather notable in that it really didn't initially have a generalized resolution model (p. 51 of Cook Expert notwithstanding), with skills being very much a vestigial add-on. Whether 3e (and the retrenched-but-similar 4e and 5e models) succeeded in undoing this quality is something of an open question. I feel like, for something to be the core system mechanic, you'd almost have to be able to answer it to the question, 'without knowing the specifics of the situation, you would first assume that the mechanism you'd bring to bear is _____.' For GURPS, that's clearly the skill system. For modern D&D, I just don't know. Everyone's complaints about the D&D's skill systems are, frankly, pretty valid.

Certainly, in 5e, the answer to that question is "an ability check." I think in 3e, too, the answer in the general sense is "a d20 roll of some sort." With it probably being a skill roll or a save.

[Pyotrnator]

For setting/tone-related reasons, I ended up running a campaign in which all full casters were disallowed, and the party consisted of two fighters, a rogue, a monk, and a paladin. The players ended up quite liking it - everyone got to shine in their own ways, and the removal of all of the spells that trivially bypass obstacles introduced an element of creative problem solving that they all really enjoyed.

[Morty]

3e/D20 certainly tried to make that be the case (or at least create a generalized resolution mechanic, of which skills was a specific implementation). However, D&D as a whole is rather notable in that it really didn't initially have a generalized resolution model (p. 51 of Cook Expert notwithstanding), with skills being very much a vestigial add-on. Whether 3e (and the retrenched-but-similar 4e and 5e models) succeeded in undoing this quality is something of an open question. I feel like, for something to be the core system mechanic, you'd almost have to be able to answer it to the question, 'without knowing the specifics of the situation, you would first assume that the mechanism you'd bring to bear is _____.' For GURPS, that's clearly the skill system. For modern D&D, I just don't know. Everyone's complaints about the D&D's skill systems are, frankly, pretty valid.

3E's skill system kind of looks like someone saw GURPS, thought it was neat and tried to weld it onto D&D, but stopped halfway. I don't feel like D&D has ever known what to do with non-combat, non-magical skills. The very fact that there's a separate "skills" category is, after all, very arbitrary. And there's no such distinction for spells, incidentally - a spellcaster can learn and cast combat and non-combat spells as they please.

[Kane0]

I don't feel like D&D has ever known what to do with non-combat, non-magical skills. The very fact that there's a separate "skills" category is, after all, very arbitrary. And there's no such distinction for spells, incidentally - a spellcaster can learn and cast combat and non-combat spells as they please.

Seconded.
Tenchar

[Pex]

3E's skill system kind of looks like someone saw GURPS, thought it was neat and tried to weld it onto D&D, but stopped halfway. I don't feel like D&D has ever known what to do with non-combat, non-magical skills. The very fact that there's a separate "skills" category is, after all, very arbitrary. And there's no such distinction for spells, incidentally - a spellcaster can learn and cast combat and non-combat spells as they please.

At least with the Epic Level Handbook they attempted to allow skill use to do the supernatural.

I think they got spooked with the power level of 3E. They overreacted with 4E to make everyone the same. 5E brought back the variety and some power, but they're leery of going too far. That's probably why in an unrelated subject whenever there's a vagueness in the rules they always rule against what would make the player happy. Any attempt to increase power as they try in Unearthed Arcana gets yelled at here. Personal opinion not every objection was justified but some were, yet it's all subjective.

I don't recall if it's this thread or another, but someone wrote something I sort of agree with. Some people are adamant that only magic can do the fantastic. It's another way of talking about Guy At The Gym. Only spells are permitted to let PCs do the interesting stuff. It's that attitude that needs to be overcome so that the Fighter can jump the 30 ft chasm when the Wizard flies.

[Willie the Duck]

Certainly, in 5e, the answer to that question is "an ability check." I think in 3e, too, the answer in the general sense is "a d20 roll of some sort." With it probably being a skill roll or a save.

I'm going to disagree. IMO, there is no default, but if there was one/the closest thing it has, is "do you have ______?" Remember, we don't have to assume a roll is even involved. Much of the pathways to accomplishing goals/resolving problems in D&D (TSR era and 5e) are basically inventory checks. Situation: hungry-->ration check. Situation: low hp-->hit dice, spells, potion check. Curses, disease, death, obstacle in flying castle or other plane are magic resource checks. Something like a wall can be a spell, inventory (rope and grappling hook), or ability/skill check. Even when you constrain yourself to things where d20s are rolled, if you don't know the specifics of the situation, assuming ability check rather than combat (which yes in 5e uses the same structure, but I thought we were considering different) seems unclear because combat is so much of that for which the game has actual structure.


At least with the Epic Level Handbook they attempted to allow skill use to do the supernatural.
...
I don't recall if it's this thread or another, but someone wrote something I sort of agree with. Some people are adamant that only magic can do the fantastic. It's another way of talking about Guy At The Gym. Only spells are permitted to let PCs do the interesting stuff. It's that attitude that needs to be overcome so that the Fighter can jump the 30 ft chasm when the Wizard flies.

I think the mindset that already had the ELH planned when designing 3e was part of the problem: it delegated 'unrealistic' fighters to this one poorly thought through early splatbook covering level ranges with which most people wouldn't bother. There really needed to be thinking about fighters moving from realistic to cinematic to mythic (additional adjectives as needed) over the course of the first 10-12 levels.

[Cluedrew]

I don't feel like D&D has ever known what to do with non-combat, non-magical skills. The very fact that there's a separate "skills" category is, after all, very arbitrary. And there's no such distinction for spells, incidentally - a spellcaster can learn and cast combat and non-combat spells as they please.Seconded.
TencharI think this is the legacy of its war-game roots. Combat is your basic ability, magic becomes various specialty abilities and anything else is a once off special rule. For some reason the skill system has never really gotten the attention it needs to be pushed beyond that. And you really can, there are plenty of systems out there where the combat "system" is just a skill.


I don't recall if it's this thread or another, but someone wrote something I sort of agree with. Some people are adamant that only magic can do the fantastic. It's another way of talking about Guy At The Gym. Only spells are permitted to let PCs do the interesting stuff. It's that attitude that needs to be overcome so that the Fighter can jump the 30 ft chasm when the Wizard flies.The difference between fantastic and magic has been the basis of my position for... not sure how long but I think that is one thing that has survived my last couple of updates to my position as some of the other pieces of changed. Point is you may of heard it from me or PP (I think they say this too but I can't remember how the full name is spelt) or someone else. Its an idea that has been floating around the forums.

[FabulousFizban]

then it stops being a sword & sorcery setting and just becomes... sword. I might as well play a skill based system like CoC at that point.

[Zakhara]

then it stops being a sword & sorcery setting and just becomes... sword. I might as well play a skill based system like CoC at that point.

I think there's a distinction to be made between "magic is not present in any capacity" and "magic is not an academically-understood mechanism characters harness." Vancian magic is pretty far removed from what frequents the S&S genre.

I think it would be very reasonable to offer a few different magic systems at once and not prioritize any one in particular; as D&D is perhaps the quintessential gateway RPG, it could be beneficial to broaden this facet of the game. Or, indeed, offer the explicit option to excise parts without tying an arm behind its back.

[Kyutaru]

I think there's a distinction to be made between "magic is not present in any capacity" and "magic is not an academically-understood mechanism characters harness." Vancian magic is pretty far removed from what frequents the S&S genre.

I think it would be very reasonable to offer a few different magic systems at once and not prioritize any one in particular; as D&D is perhaps the quintessential gateway RPG, it could be beneficial to broaden this facet of the game. Or, indeed, offer the explicit option to excise parts without tying an arm behind its back.
As well, the setting in Magic-as-academia games tends to have stunted technological development because magic does everything. Even in Harry Potter the wizards know basically nothing about technology and still live like medieval mages, unable to even lock a door without a spell, while the Muggle world around them flourishes and advances with fantastic inventions and innovations. Barring or restricting magic can actually lead to a more progressive world where the martials can sufficiently keep up with the outlawed spellcasters.

[NigelWalmsley]

That kind of thing is a lazy worldbuilding issue. Magical stasis is not a realistic depiction of magic. You give people a tool, and they will develop more sophisticated ways to use that tool. Doesn't really matter if it's a dangerous tool either. Most of the technology you interact with on a daily basis has some component or other that'll kill you if used wrong.

[Kyutaru]

That kind of thing is a lazy worldbuilding issue. Magical stasis is not a realistic depiction of magic. You give people a tool, and they will develop more sophisticated ways to use that tool. Doesn't really matter if it's a dangerous tool either. Most of the technology you interact with on a daily basis has some component or other that'll kill you if used wrong.

With what incentive though? Picture this... we have the knowledge and technology to have a clean environment without dependence on fossil fuels. Yet as long as the magical oil and gas solutions that power everything exist there is no incentive to switch to a more costly and less powerful form of technology even if we could develop it to be greater. The easy solution, the cheapest option, will be what capitalism favors and people only advance beyond when there is a direct commercial advantage to doing so. Magical stasis can be very real because even with magic as a tool people will try to develop things using magic, not things that would have been developed WITHOUT magic. There's no earthly reason that someone would need to invent a microwave when you can magically cook your food. There's no purpose to airplanes when magically levitating ships and teleportation circles exist. There's no incentive to study human physiology when clerics can heal the most grievous wounds by faith alone. The real world has plenty of stasis as it stands because while people can DREAM of a utopia where certain things are not needed it doesn't become a priority until it's too expensive to continue doing it the way we always have.

Humans are averse to change. The SPECIES welcomes change through the generations but the INDIVIDUAL hates when everything they once knew to be true is turned upside down and replaced with something they have to learn all over again as a novice. It'd be like losing levels just for aging because your existing wizard powers have been supplanted by newer better ones that you need to train for.

[NigelWalmsley]

There's no earthly reason that someone would need to invent a microwave when you can magically cook your food.

Of course. But that doesn't mean there's no reason to invent a food-warming enchantment that behaves like a microwave. Or a more efficient cooking spell, or one that's easier to cast, or one that works at a larger scale. Innovation doesn't have to happen on the same lines as it does in our own world. But it will happen.

[OldTrees1]

Of course. But that doesn't mean there's no reason to invent a food-warming enchantment that behaves like a microwave. Or a more efficient cooking spell, or one that's easier to cast, or one that works at a larger scale. Innovation doesn't have to happen on the same lines as it does in our own world. But it will happen.


Innovation doesn't have to happen on the same lines as it does in our own world. But it will happen.

I notice this also implies the possibility that they might never create a 2nd cooking spell, because the innovation might not happen on the same line as it does in our own world.

We might have vast culinary innovations, and they might have biological expertise to the extent that "A wizard did it" is a mundane explanation for highly advanced magic equivalent to yet unreached levels of genetic engineering.

If the lines of innovation have even less overlap, you might describe it as stunted technological progress if only comparing the lines of innovation we discovered in our world. So it might simply be a matter of whether the perspective is counting the innovation of teleportation as part of "technology" or not.

[Segev]

There is a short story called "The Road Not Taken." (Unfortunately, it is named after a famous poem, and I believe it's not the only work thus named, either, so that's rarely enough to search it out.) It tells the story of aliens invading the Earth only to find a rather nasty surprise: because humanity did not discover a key, very easy technology, humanity developed well beyond the alien species in other areas to accommodate the needs that were forced on them for lack of this tech.

People will develop microwaves to cook their food if not everybody CAN magically heat their food. To claim otherwise is to claim that nobody will invent the bow and arrow if people can cast magic missile. Nobody will develop leather armor if people can cast mage armor. Nobody will learn to sew if people can cast mending.

[OldTrees1]

People will develop microwaves to cook their food if not everybody CAN magically heat their food. To claim otherwise is to claim that nobody will invent the bow and arrow if people can cast magic missile. Nobody will develop leather armor if people can cast mage armor. Nobody will learn to sew if people can cast mending.

Depends on the degree of specialization and division of labor in the society for that need.
Cooking food is something almost universal. It is technically possible to get by without ever cooking but I would bet everyone has cooked at least once. So another means of cooking food would be invented unless the existing means was universally available (or if the society had greater division of labor around cooking). Although they might just invent a bonfire instead of a microwave. Once you reach "good enough", then innovation might be redirected elsewhere depending on interests.

Bow & arrow if someone can cast magic missile: If everyone that would use either could cast enough magic missile, then the bow would not be invented. So it does not need to be complete coverage, but it needs to be sufficient coverage. Which is just a refinement of your point.

Leather armor vs mage armor: Similar case, if everyone that would wear armor could cast enough mage armors, then there would be no armorsmiths. So it does not need to be complete coverage, but it needs to be sufficient coverage. Which is just a refinement of your point.

Sewing vs mending: This is a bit of an odd case. If I want to patch something, I could take it to a seamstress, or I could learn to sew. If not everyone that wanted mending could cast mending, they might just all go to pay for the services of someone with mending.

[Satinavian]

As well, the setting in Magic-as-academia games tends to have stunted technological development because magic does everything. Even in Harry Potter the wizards know basically nothing about technology and still live like medieval mages, unable to even lock a door without a spell, while the Muggle world around them flourishes and advances with fantastic inventions and innovations. Barring or restricting magic can actually lead to a more progressive world where the martials can sufficiently keep up with the outlawed spellcasters.
Seems strange.

If magic exists than it becomes another branch of science. People investigating and advancing magic are literally the same kind of people that would investigate other laws of nature and other technology.

You wold not get magigians and technologists competing with each other, you would get magitech where magic is used where magic offers a better solution and other stuff is used where it doesn't. Both the pure magical and the nonmagical way would be clearly inferior and be left along the way.

[Kyutaru]

If magic exists than it becomes another branch of science. People investigating and advancing magic are literally the same kind of people that would investigate other laws of nature and other technology.
Worlds like the one in Harry Potter don't have competing branches because magic has been hidden from the technologists. They advanced on separate tracks in separate civilizations. Had magic been a thing they were aware of then they would naturally look to the mages to solve their crisis instead of discovering their own innovations out of necessity and sacrifice. So many modern inventions have been discovered during times of war including zippers, radar, and duct tape. We wouldn't even have the Internet were it not for war and the same was true for nuclear technology and two-way radios (hello cellphones). When deprived of the easy answer and forced to innovate against enemies, humans discovered amazing things. In a world of magic, there wouldn't be a reason to do so.

Bows and arrows would be unnecessary because gunwands that fired magic missiles would exist. Leather armor would never be a thing because the shops are full of robes enchanted with mage armor. Sewing needles would be an unknown invention because all clothing is crafted by wizards and that's simply been how it always has been. If you want to craft or mend clothing, you go to wizard school. Could you imagine trying to enter in a career you know of through a completely different route? Imagine if instead of going to medical school you wanted to learn how to heal people through the clever application of rocks. Who on earth would pursue such an endeavor when we have established science dating back thousands of years on anatomy? It would be much the same in the magical world.

[Satinavian]

I don't think Harry Potter has good worldbuilding.

That is not how humans/scientists behave. Sure, we would not have certain technologies because magic does it better. But in the end that means we have more/better stuff than we have now.


I mean, we completely gave up the development of analog computers in favor of digital ones decades ago, because the digital ones work better. Does that mean we are now somehow behind a fictional civilisation that never had digital technology and improved the lackluster analog computers instead ?

A magical civilisation would be more advanced, not less. Because its inventors just have more tools to play around with.

[Segev]

I mean, we completely gave up the development of analog computers in favor of digital ones decades ago, because the digital ones work better. Does that mean we are now somehow behind a fictional civilisation that never had digital technology and improved the lackluster analog computers instead ?

I know this wasn't the thrust nor core of your point, but I wanted to point out that the hypothesis behind any counterargument here would be that this fictional civilization discovered, say, quantum computing earlier than we did because it somehow is a more natural evolution of analog computers than it is of digital ones. Or some other computing technology that is a net-superior one that the innovation around the limits of analog computing led them to while we were "content" with digital computing.

Not saying it would definitely go that way, but that's the theory behind the idea that you can be more advanced if you miss out on something that makes a "good enough" technology.

Typically, to really sell it, you need to show how the lack of the "good enough" technology leads to greater pressures to invent other solutions. "Advancing in different tech" can also be an answer. No, the computers they have aren't as good, but they did develop flying cars, perhaps.

[Cluedrew]

If magic exists than it becomes another branch of science.Engineering actually. Figuring out the fundamental rules of magic would be a field of science but creating spells and such would actually be a kind of engineering. I just had this revelation that in "Magic vs Science" as it is usually portrayed is actually more "Magic vs Engineering". Its kind of off topic but I just wanted to say it.

Still in favour of a huge rework of D&D's magic system.

[ebarde]

Honestly I feel that while magic is broken in pretty much every edition, martials usually are even worse designed just by being extremely dull to play. You have to go out of your way as a fighter to not just do the one thing you decided to specialize in over and over, and it's frankly not particularly engaging.

So I guess you kinda have to rework them both, or just get rid of all classes lol

[Segev]

Honestly I feel that while magic is broken in pretty much every edition, martials usually are even worse designed just by being extremely dull to play. You have to go out of your way as a fighter to not just do the one thing you decided to specialize in over and over, and it's frankly not particularly engaging.

So I guess you kinda have to rework them both, or just get rid of all classes lol

This is why Tome of Battle, and its successor by Dreamscarred Press, Path of War, are so beloved by their proponents. The mechanics may have some resemblance to spells, in that they're chunks of "you can do this" features, but they play sufficiently like being a martial combatant that they feel like what they're representing and they give options (and even force you to make choices about options) every round.

[ebarde]

I think the main problem with fighter and any sort of martials for that matter, is theming. They never really decide if the fighter is supposed to be a believable combatant just an extremely skilled one, or someone whose skillset is just as fantastical as that of a spellcaster, breaking the limits that would be reasonable for any sort of real human. Because of it, martials are sorta weirdly stuck in the middle of the realism scale, in a game that's honestly too high fantasy for this general concept to ever work.

And you also get into a point where your abilities are so underwhelming, the most interesting thing about your character is their cool gear. Like, the whole mundane person fighting against fantastical creatures thing would probably work better in a game that didn't just dished out magical stuff in every chest.

[Segev]

I think the main problem with fighter and any sort of martials for that matter, is theming. They never really decide if the fighter is supposed to be a believable combatant just an extremely skilled one, or someone whose skillset is just as fantastical as that of a spellcaster, breaking the limits that would be reasonable for any sort of real human. Because of it, martials are sorta weirdly stuck in the middle of the realism scale, in a game that's honestly too high fantasy for this general concept to ever work.

And you also get into a point where your abilities are so underwhelming, the most interesting thing about your character is their cool gear. Like, the whole mundane person fighting against fantastical creatures thing would probably work better in a game that didn't just dished out magical stuff in every chest.

Taking the two things they can't decide between as given, there are consequences to each assumption.

If the fighter is to be "skilled but believable," then it's impossible for the fighter to keep up with the wizard who is inherently allowed to become fantastical.

If the fighter is to be "fantastical, but physical about it," then it's easy enough to keep him up with the casters.

The trouble is that games beyond a certain level simply don't support "skilled but believable" unless you're willing to layer on tons of magic items to "explain" why this "mortal" person is doing the fantastical stuff. But at the point you do that, you already lose the "believable" angle.

A lot of the "but fighters shouldn't be able to do that!" comes down to a power level desire. If you want lower power, play lower-level games.

[OldTrees1]

Taking the two things they can't decide between as given, there are consequences to each assumption.

If the fighter is to be "skilled but believable," then it's impossible for the fighter to keep up with the wizard who is inherently allowed to become fantastical.

If the fighter is to be "fantastical, but physical about it," then it's easy enough to keep him up with the casters.

The trouble is that games beyond a certain level simply don't support "skilled but believable" unless you're willing to layer on tons of magic items to "explain" why this "mortal" person is doing the fantastical stuff. But at the point you do that, you already lose the "believable" angle.

A lot of the "but fighters shouldn't be able to do that!" comes down to a power level desire. If you want lower power, play lower-level games.

This reminds me of one of the dungeon design books. In it there were rules for planar dungeons, including one where the walls were made out of lava. To be nice the floor & ceiling were walls of force.

I can imagine a "skilled but believable" fighter going through that dungeon. While carried. By a Fire Giant. On a Spit. With an apple in their mouth.

On the other hand I can imagine a "fantastical, but physical about it," fighter braving the baking hot temperatures.

[Luccan]

This reminds me of one of the dungeon design books. In it there were rules for planar dungeons, including one where the walls were made out of lava. To be nice the floor & ceiling were walls of force.

I can imagine a "skilled but believable" fighter going through that dungeon. While carried. By a Fire Giant. On a Spit. With an apple in their mouth.

On the other hand I can imagine a "fantastical, but physical about it," fighter braving the baking hot temperatures.

Part of the problem might be popular perceptions of things and active abilities being preferred to passive ones. I could easily see that dungeon being a case of repeated Constitution/Fortitude saves to survive and keep operating at full capacity. A high level fighter, then, would easily show his prowess over a wizard... who didn't cast spells, but that's not the point atm. Because it would be a passive ability to make it through and because in popular perception lava isn't dangerous until you touch it (which is why you don't immediately die if you fall in it in D&D), it isn't as impressive that a high level fighter can survive. Even if in reality he's displaying miraculous survivability. Which is a legitimate reason martials should get cool abilities, don't get me wrong, but I think the fact that most characters in media are basically super human even in "realistic" stories isn't helping things.

[OldTrees1]

Part of the problem might be popular perceptions of things and active abilities being preferred to passive ones. I could easily see that dungeon being a case of repeated Constitution/Fortitude saves to survive and keep operating at full capacity. A high level fighter, then, would easily show his prowess over a wizard... who didn't cast spells, but that's not the point atm. Because it would be a passive ability to make it through and because in popular perception lava isn't dangerous until you touch it (which is why you don't immediately die if you fall in it in D&D), it isn't as impressive that a high level fighter can survive. Even if in reality he's displaying miraculous survivability. Which is a legitimate reason martials should get cool abilities, don't get me wrong, but I think the fact that most characters in media are basically super human even in "realistic" stories isn't helping things.

In the edition in question, proximity to lava caused medium fire damage. So a high Con resulting in fast healing, or fire resistance would be passive abilities that would have helped.

Also, that was not "high level". High level would be submerged lava tunnels. :smallbiggrin:

But to your point, I am not sure active abilities are preferred to passive ones. I definitely prefer passive (or at least triggered) abilities. However medium level passive fighter abilities are even rarer than medium level active fighter abilities. So that perceived preference might be the crowd moving to what is available, rather than what is preferred.

[AntiAuthority]

I think the main problem with fighter and any sort of martials for that matter, is theming. They never really decide if the fighter is supposed to be a believable combatant just an extremely skilled one, or someone whose skillset is just as fantastical as that of a spellcaster, breaking the limits that would be reasonable for any sort of real human. Because of it, martials are sorta weirdly stuck in the middle of the realism scale, in a game that's honestly too high fantasy for this general concept to ever work.


About fighters and themeing... AD&D heavily implied they were by saying Hercules, Cu Chulainn, Beowulf and Siegfried were Fighter. Wish the design philosophy went with this in mind for later editions.


Taking the two things they can't decide between as given, there are consequences to each assumption.

If the fighter is to be "skilled but believable," then it's impossible for the fighter to keep up with the wizard who is inherently allowed to become fantastical.

If the fighter is to be "fantastical, but physical about it," then it's easy enough to keep him up with the casters.

The trouble is that games beyond a certain level simply don't support "skilled but believable" unless you're willing to layer on tons of magic items to "explain" why this "mortal" person is doing the fantastical stuff. But at the point you do that, you already lose the "believable" angle.

A lot of the "but fighters shouldn't be able to do that!" comes down to a power level desire. If you want lower power, play lower-level games.

I agree, the issue is that some players want to remain completely bound to reality and susceptible to getting injured and killed by the same things as regular human beings at high levels while also being able to wrestle extinct animals and have punch outs with multiple eldritch abominations on a daily basis. Aragorn from Lord of the Rings is a low level character, but Sol Badguy on the other hand...

[ebarde]

Like, what would even be the example of fighters in high fantasy media? I can't think of many characters from high fantasy and mythology that isn't way more impressive than any fighter. Probably also cause the fighter is like extremely hyper specialized into doing one thing, while if you look at say Aragorn from LOTR he was a ridiculously good swordsman and also a better tracker than the elf in their party, all the while being proficient in a bunch of random skills and abilities.

[OldTrees1]

Like, what would even be the example of fighters in high fantasy media? I can't think of many characters from high fantasy and mythology that isn't way more impressive than any fighter. Probably also cause the fighter is like extremely hyper specialized into doing one thing, while if you look at say Aragorn from LOTR he was a ridiculously good swordsman and also a better tracker than the elf in their party, all the while being proficient in a bunch of random skills and abilities.

Well let's start with Aragorn, then level up to Conan, then to Cú Cuchulain, then to Beowulf, then to Heracles, then to Gilgamesh, ...
then to 9th level :smallbiggrin:.


As for imagining high level high fantasy I have the following method:
1) Where is the adventure? How can they get there, survive being there, and be able to act while there. If I tell your 20th level fighter to invade the moon, how do they do it?
2) What are they facing? What obstacles are meant to be trivial by now? If I tell your 20th level fighter to defeat a lich somewhere in the planes, how do they deal with the lich's obscurity, mobility, and defenses?

A simple combined example I am still working on is the Great Red Wyrm inside the submerged magma tunnels of their lair in one of the peaks of gehenna.
1) I have ideas, but not enough ideas about how high level travels to other planes. I can improve on that.
2) I have ideas for dealing with highly mobile long range enemies.
3) I have ideas for dealing with extreme heat, but I am still struggling with imagining fighting in lava. I can improve on that.

[Segev]

About fighters and themeing... AD&D heavily implied they were by saying Hercules, Cu Chulainn, Beowulf and Siegfried were Fighter. Wish the design philosophy went with this in mind for later editions.



I agree, the issue is that some players want to remain completely bound to reality and susceptible to getting injured and killed by the same things as regular human beings at high levels while also being able to wrestle extinct animals and have punch outs with multiple eldritch abominations on a daily basis. Aragorn from Lord of the Rings is a low level character, but Sol Badguy on the other hand...

So the question to ask is: if you want to punch out eldritch abominations, how do you see your "believable, reality-bound" fighter doing that?

[Kyutaru]

So the question to ask is: if you want to punch out eldritch abominations, how do you see your "believable, reality-bound" fighter doing that?

I don't think it can be done unless we're talking mission objectives here. One does not simply punch Cthulhu but one can certainly invade his world through portals and punch out the Cthulhu demons on your way to find the magic Macguffin that lets you seal the portal and save the world. Wizards meanwhile can open those portals but their faces get ripped apart by a few of these eldritch horrors.

But really Fighter doesn't have to be bound in reality, but in folk lore and fantasy legend where wizards already exist.

Leveling up as a fighter should be something like wizard spell tiers, bracketed into another sort of power scale:

Lvl 1 - Soldier
Lvl 3 - Veteran
Lvl 5 - Aragorn, King of the Freefolk, Hunter of Orcs, Slayer of Trolls
Lvl 7 - Conan the Conqueror
Lvl 9 - Beowulf, Perseus, Odysseus, Achilles, and other legendary heroes
Lvl 11 - Hercules, the demigod of Strength
Lvl 13 - Richter Belmont, the Vampire Hunter, Enemy of Dracula
Lvl 15 - Every guy ever named Sousuke, blatantly breaking physics
Lvl 17 - Siegfriend and Gilgamesh, Unrivaled Warriors of Immortal stature
Lvl 19 - Sun Wukong the Monkey King, Defier of Gods, Breaker of Fate
Lvl 21 - Goku, the Superest Saiyan, Master of Martials
Lvl 35 - Thanos the Inevitable
Lvl 40 - Saitama, One Punch Man

[Vahnavoi]

So the question to ask is: if you want to punch out eldritch abominations, how do you see your "believable, reality-bound" fighter doing that?
That's a lame question to ask, because the very story Call of Cthulhu answers that:

You ram it with a ship.

In the story, it was a steam boat, but in a game it could as well be a galleon or other suitably massive ship. Alternatively, you turn the ship and make the abomination eat a full broadside of cannonfire, ballista bolts or whaling harpoons.

If that's conceptually impossible in the game you're playing, then it's not the question to ask. Instead, the question to ask is: if no realistic effort of human co-operation and engineering can do it, why should the parlor tricks of mere mortal magic-users be any more effectual?

[OldTrees1]

Leveling up as a fighter should be something like wizard spell tiers, bracketed into another sort of power scale:

Lvl 1 - Soldier
Lvl 3 - Veteran
Lvl 5 - Aragorn, King of the Freefolk, Hunter of Orcs, Slayer of Trolls
Lvl 7 - Conan the Conqueror
Lvl 9 - Beowulf, Perseus, Odysseus, Achilles, and other legendary heroes
Lvl 11 - Hercules, the demigod of Strength
Lvl 13 - Richter Belmont, the Vampire Hunter, Enemy of Dracula
Lvl 15 - Every guy ever named Sousuke, blatantly breaking physics
Lvl 17 - Siegfriend and Gilgamesh, Unrivaled Warriors of Immortal stature
Lvl 19 - Sun Wukong the Monkey King, Defier of Gods, Breaker of Fate
Lvl 21 - Goku, the Superest Saiyan, Master of Martials
Lvl 35 - Thanos the Inevitable
Lvl 40 - Saitama, One Punch Man

I think the order might need to be tweaked* and compressed* but that seems reasonable. Sun Wukong for example would be able to do most of my Tier 4 campaign ideas.

*There must be something I don't know about Richter Belmont
*Thanos kinda cast wish once

[Segev]

That's a lame question to ask, because the very story Call of Cthulhu answers that:

You ram it with a ship.

In the story, it was a steam boat, but in a game it could as well be a galleon or other suitably massive ship. Alternatively, you turn the ship and make the abomination eat a full broadside of cannonfire, ballista bolts or whaling harpoons.

If that's conceptually impossible in the game you're playing, then it's not the question to ask. Instead, the question to ask is: if no realistic effort of human co-operation and engineering can do it, why should the parlor tricks of mere mortal magic-users be any more effectual?

Okay, but if you can already drive a steam ship, or travel through plot-provided portals to find the plot-provided macguffin, why would you need to be 20th level?

I'm fine with your "parlor tricks of a mere mortal magic-user" being "ineffectual" by themselves, as long as you're willing to restrict your game to the appropriate levels. It's when you start insisting that everything past some level needs to be nerfed, rather than playing the game at the levels that accommodate your desires, that I take issue.

It seems to me that the answer to most of those who want to nerf magic in order to "keep martials realistic" should be to simply play a lower-level game. I'm not even telling you not to play D&D! Play it! But play it at the levels that support what you want, rather than trying to make higher levels conform to your desires.

[Drascin]

Didn’t Fourth Edition do this? If I recall correctly, it was widely disliked because, among other reasons, it limited a lot of the creativity and utility that people like in spellcasters.

Basically, a lot of the reason people didn't like fourth edition is that it made the spellcasters play by the same rules the non-casters had always operated under. Spellcasters in D&D have, traditionally, worked off a completely different not just ruleset, but meta-ruleset - where the noncasters work off a vague base-options-plus-abilities-improving-them chassis system, casters work off a legalistic exception-based chassis. In 4E everyone went to the modified basics chassis and everyone played with the same ruleset, instead of playing their own, largely separate game.

[paddyfool]

I don't think it can be done unless we're talking mission objectives here. One does not simply punch Cthulhu but one can certainly invade his world through portals and punch out the Cthulhu demons on your way to find the magic Macguffin that lets you seal the portal and save the world. Wizards meanwhile can open those portals but their faces get ripped apart by a few of these eldritch horrors.

But really Fighter doesn't have to be bound in reality, but in folk lore and fantasy legend where wizards already exist.

Leveling up as a fighter should be something like wizard spell tiers, bracketed into another sort of power scale:

Lvl 1 - Soldier
Lvl 3 - Veteran
Lvl 5 - Aragorn, King of the Freefolk, Hunter of Orcs, Slayer of Trolls
Lvl 7 - Conan the Conqueror
Lvl 9 - Beowulf, Perseus, Odysseus, Achilles, and other legendary heroes
Lvl 11 - Hercules, the demigod of Strength
Lvl 13 - Richter Belmont, the Vampire Hunter, Enemy of Dracula
Lvl 15 - Every guy ever named Sousuke, blatantly breaking physics
Lvl 17 - Siegfriend and Gilgamesh, Unrivaled Warriors of Immortal stature
Lvl 19 - Sun Wukong the Monkey King, Defier of Gods, Breaker of Fate
Lvl 21 - Goku, the Superest Saiyan, Master of Martials
Lvl 35 - Thanos the Inevitable
Lvl 40 - Saitama, One Punch Man

Lots of quibbles could be raised with regards to individual positions on this list, considering how varying authors gave people varying power levels, and how even one author's texts can have varying interpretations [starting at the low level, Aragorn led from the front in multiple battles with armies of those orcs and trolls without a mark on him after having been around heroing for many of his 87 years of life, for instance... Numenoreans being slow to grow old and frail].

Overall, though, sure, why not.

[Segev]

Basically, a lot of the reason people didn't like fourth edition is that it made the spellcasters play by the same rules the non-casters had always operated under. Spellcasters in D&D have, traditionally, worked off a completely different not just ruleset, but meta-ruleset - where the noncasters work off a vague base-options-plus-abilities-improving-them chassis system, casters work off a legalistic exception-based chassis. In 4E everyone went to the modified basics chassis and everyone played with the same ruleset, instead of playing their own, largely separate game.

Actually, you're half right. I, personally, disliked 4e because everybody played like a martial adept. There was no difference between what kind of character you were.

I am a big fan of exception-based expandable rule sets, too, so that probably contributes.

But I liked martial adepts in 3e. I liked them for what they were: an expandable, exception-based rule set with its own subsystem and feel that let martial characters play more interestingly than just a simple variation on the base rules, and let them do things that increased in power as they got up in level.

I didn't like losing all the subsystem differences in 4e.

[Vahnavoi]

Okay, but if you can already drive a steam ship, or travel through plot-provided portals to find the plot-provided macguffin, why would you need to be 20th level?

Two completely different questions. The first is "if you can already drive a steam ship... why would you need to be 20th level?" The answer to that is: because it's never about just driving the ship. When you're 1st level, you are a disposable crew member, who maybe gets to drive the ship when the captain, the first mate and everyone else worth of note is dead. When you're 20th level, you bought the ship, its armaments and its crew and you command where it goes and what it does. There's a neat, common sense progression of wealth, resources and authority required that can be measured in money, XP and levels. The only point of contention is how much wealth, resources and authority 20th level should represent.

The second question is "if the plot, AKA the GM is going to hand you the means to win, because they want you to win, why'd you need to be 20th level?" The honest answer to that is, you don't. But what's the epitome of "plot-provided" anything? Magic. The magic-user doesn't have to be of any specific level either to fight an eldritch abomination, it's all fundamentally arbitrary. So what are you asking for?


I'm fine with your "parlor tricks of a mere mortal magic-user" being "ineffectual" by themselves, as long as you're willing to restrict your game to the appropriate levels. It's when you start insisting that everything past some level needs to be nerfed, rather than playing the game at the levels that accommodate your desires, that I take issue.

It seems to me that the answer to most of those who want to nerf magic in order to "keep martials realistic" should be to simply play a lower-level game. I'm not even telling you not to play D&D! Play it! But play it at the levels that support what you want, rather than trying to make higher levels conform to your desires.

You got it the wrong way around.

If the question is "how can a realistic fighter punch an eldritch abomination in the face?" and "ram it with a ship" is not an admittable solution, it is the fighter who is being nerfed.

Why? Because "a ship" can be a physically massively powerful thing. It is a force multiplier that potentially increases the fighter's output by orders of magnitude. If none of that matters because the ship doesn't belong in the box you've arbitrarily labelled "magic" - if the magic-user can affect the abomination by shouting made-up words at it yet tons of wood or steel at ramming speed can't - maybe you're being a bit unfair.

The talk about "appropriate levels" is nonsense, because there never was and never will be any universally agreeable for what should be the level for, say, "punching an eldritch abomination in the face". If Cthulhu is 20th level and ramming it with a ship works, then ramming it with a ship is viable 20th level strategy, even if controller of the ship has no superhuman or magical abilities. Simple as that.

[AntiAuthority]

Like, what would even be the example of fighters in high fantasy media? I can't think of many characters from high fantasy and mythology that isn't way more impressive than any fighter. Probably also cause the fighter is like extremely hyper specialized into doing one thing, while if you look at say Aragorn from LOTR he was a ridiculously good swordsman and also a better tracker than the elf in their party, all the while being proficient in a bunch of random skills and abilities.

Someone, I believe it was PairO'Dice Lost, mentioned that the original Fighters were supposed to be infantry based on the Chainmail game, possibly explaining why they're so narrowly focused... Something about them being fodder and being best represented by the nameless extras and such that the real heroes of a standard fantasy novel would slay.

As to what a fighter in high fantasy would look like... I'm with OldTree, a lot of mythological heroes would probably not get too much higher than Level 10 (except maybe Sun Wukong). Such a character would probably resemble Hakumen, Sol Badguy, Saitama, 616 Thor or something along those lines.




Well let's start with Aragorn, then level up to Conan, then to Cú Cuchulain, then to Beowulf, then to Heracles, then to Gilgamesh, ...
then to 9th level :smallbiggrin:.


As for imagining high level high fantasy I have the following method:
1) Where is the adventure? How can they get there, survive being there, and be able to act while there. If I tell your 20th level fighter to invade the moon, how do they do it?
2) What are they facing? What obstacles are meant to be trivial by now? If I tell your 20th level fighter to defeat a lich somewhere in the planes, how do they deal with the lich's obscurity, mobility, and defenses?

A simple combined example I am still working on is the Great Red Wyrm inside the submerged magma tunnels of their lair in one of the peaks of gehenna.
1) I have ideas, but not enough ideas about how high level travels to other planes. I can improve on that.
2) I have ideas for dealing with highly mobile long range enemies.
3) I have ideas for dealing with extreme heat, but I am still struggling with imagining fighting in lava. I can improve on that.

For 1, it could be them punching through space-time. For 2, it would be aggroing the enemy in some form or hitting them with something very difficult to be dodged. For 3... Only thing I can imagine is something akin to Blindsight and Blindsense to know where the enemy is while submerged in lava.


So the question to ask is: if you want to punch out eldritch abominations, how do you see your "believable, reality-bound" fighter doing that?

Well, the eldritch abomination could be very, very, very weak as an explanation for why they can be punched out like this on a daily basis, but at that point it's not that impressive if your character can beat them...

[OldTrees1]

For 1, it could be them punching through space-time. For 2, it would be aggroing the enemy in some form or hitting them with something very difficult to be dodged. For 3... Only thing I can imagine is something akin to Blindsight and Blindsense to know where the enemy is while submerged in lava.

Yeah this is more an exercise about stretching my imagination in depth (level) and breadth (different ways to achieve that level). Practice makes perfect, or at least progress.
1) Yeah, that is usually one of the first 3 answers. Force open a portal, know the path to walk the planes, and having minions are the first 3 that come to mind. And rule of 3 is fine for clues, but for game design I would prefer a rule of 7.
2) Yup. Having high mobility yourself is another.
3) Oh, I was still working on the massive damage and the heavy "liquid" parts. To which I have basically only 1 answer each. That is a good point about tactical sense. Even if it were not true blindsight, it could be simply "I am predicting you are roughly over there because that is where you would have moved in this situation based on tactical reasons XYZ".

[Segev]

Two completely different questions. The first is "if you can already drive a steam ship... why would you need to be 20th level?" The answer to that is: because it's never about just driving the ship. When you're 1st level, you are a disposable crew member, who maybe gets to drive the ship when the captain, the first mate and everyone else worth of note is dead. When you're 20th level, you bought the ship, its armaments and its crew and you command where it goes and what it does. There's a neat, common sense progression of wealth, resources and authority required that can be measured in money, XP and levels. The only point of contention is how much wealth, resources and authority 20th level should represent.

The second question is "if the plot, AKA the GM is going to hand you the means to win, because they want you to win, why'd you need to be 20th level?" The honest answer to that is, you don't. But what's the epitome of "plot-provided" anything? Magic. The magic-user doesn't have to be of any specific level either to fight an eldritch abomination, it's all fundamentally arbitrary. So what are you asking for?



You got it the wrong way around.

If the question is "how can a realistic fighter punch an eldritch abomination in the face?" and "ram it with a ship" is not an admittable solution, it is the fighter who is being nerfed.

Why? Because "a ship" can be a physically massively powerful thing. It is a force multiplier that potentially increases the fighter's output by orders of magnitude. If none of that matters because the ship doesn't belong in the box you've arbitrarily labelled "magic" - if the magic-user can affect the abomination by shouting made-up words at it yet tons of wood or steel at ramming speed can't - maybe you're being a bit unfair.

The talk about "appropriate levels" is nonsense, because there never was and never will be any universally agreeable for what should be the level for, say, "punching an eldritch abomination in the face". If Cthulhu is 20th level and ramming it with a ship works, then ramming it with a ship is viable 20th level strategy, even if controller of the ship has no superhuman or magical abilities. Simple as that.
The game supports what you want at levels 5-10 fairly easily, without ever going to 20. There is no need to say, "Mages at 20 need to be nerfed," to get the games you describe. However, if one follows the advice implicit in the statement, "Mages at 20 need to be nerfed," one must needs prevent games from being run where high-powered characters face off with their own raw power against the cosmic threats.

On the other hand, saying, "Fighter-types should be increased in power to keep up with mages at 20," does not in any way prevent the games you want from happening at the levels that already support them. It also solves the problem of fighter-types not 'keeping up' at level 20.

So the thrust of my point behind the questions is: why insist that level 20 be nerfed when level 10 or level 5 can already handle the kinds of games you're requesting? Why not just play at level 5 or 10, and beef up those who aren't keeping up at level 20?

[Cluedrew]

Like, what would even be the example of fighters in high fantasy media? I can't think of many characters from high fantasy and mythology that isn't way more impressive than any fighter.Have you read Norse mythology? If not let me say this: There is a reason Thor got turned into a superhero. And Marvel's version appears to be significantly weaker. For some second hand examples: Conan could run on spears and the Knights of the Round Table all had super-powers.

And although you might not be saying this I must say: If you are saying "We shouldn't do this because their aren't classic fighters that look like this." I must point out. Classic wizards do not look like this either. Personally I do thing D&D magic should be redone (while understanding its not likely to happen) not to power them down but because... I don't want to play a "wizard". I want to play an illusionist, an enchanter, a shaman, an elementest, a storm-magic, a witch-doctor or a medium. In other words I want to play a character that has more flavour than celery. And there is some flavour text to the D&D's academic wizard, but it has never come across in play for me.

So fix that and power up martials. And make non-combat skills interesting. And... well there are days I think D&D should be eliminated and replaced entirely. (And I was just reading about a rules-light system that has me really excited so today is one of those days.)


Lvl 1 - Soldier
Lvl 3 - Veteran
Lvl 5 - Aragorn, King of the Freefolk, Hunter of Orcs, Slayer of Trolls
Lvl 7 - Conan the Conqueror
Lvl 9 - Beowulf, Perseus, Odysseus, Achilles, and other legendary heroes
Lvl 11 - Hercules, the demigod of Strength
Lvl 13 - Richter Belmont, the Vampire Hunter, Enemy of Dracula
Lvl 15 - Every guy ever named Sousuke, blatantly breaking physics
Lvl 17 - Siegfriend and Gilgamesh, Unrivaled Warriors of Immortal stature
Lvl 19 - Sun Wukong the Monkey King, Defier of Gods, Breaker of Fate
Lvl 21 - Goku, the Superest Saiyan, Master of Martials
Lvl 35 - Thanos the Inevitable
Lvl 40 - Saitama, One Punch ManI have nothing to add other than I support the general tone here, but I wanted to do that and its been enough posts I figured I needed a quote.

[Kyutaru]

I have nothing to add other than I support the general tone here, but I wanted to do that and its been enough posts I figured I needed a quote.
Thanks, the idea just being that we have martial heroes that scale that we can use to come up with game mechanics for as DMs. Or even just by being a little looser when it comes to skill checks and letting those Jump checks really go wild when they reach 20+ ranks. In general, more power, more speed, more resilience tends to be the way martials progress in fiction. Once you reach the top tier martials they basically can destroy a planet, move at the speed of light, and take hits that can level mountains. Wizards can make reality their plaything but a Fighter can make reality second guess itself.

[NigelWalmsley]

The whole notion that there's a sharp distinction between "Wizards" and "Fighters" is largely an artifact of D&D. In Lord of the Rings, Gandalf is a Wizard and has a sword. He uses it to kill goblins, and no one thinks that is at all weird. Conversely, Aragorn is a ranger, but eventually levels up into commanding an army of ghosts because he is the rightful heir to the throne of Gondor. In The Chronicles of Amber, the same people who walk between worlds run around killing each other (and running through armies) with swords. The Knights Radiant from the Stormlight Archive wear full plate, wield swords, and have enormously powerful magic. I could spend days naming examples. It's simply not weird for a character who starts out as a mundane sword, spear, or axe man to reach the endgame of their story with explicitly magical powers. In general, when the sword guy doesn't end up with magical powers, it's because no one gets any particularly impressive magic.

[Vahnavoi]

The game supports what you want at levels 5-10 fairly easily, without ever going to 20. There is no need to say, "Mages at 20 need to be nerfed," to get the games you describe. However, if one follows the advice implicit in the statement, "Mages at 20 need to be nerfed," one must needs prevent games from being run where high-powered characters face off with their own raw power against the cosmic threats.

On the other hand, saying, "Fighter-types should be increased in power to keep up with mages at 20," does not in any way prevent the games you want from happening at the levels that already support them. It also solves the problem of fighter-types not 'keeping up' at level 20.

So the thrust of my point behind the questions is: why insist that level 20 be nerfed when level 10 or level 5 can already handle the kinds of games you're requesting? Why not just play at level 5 or 10, and beef up those who aren't keeping up at level 20?

Throwing around arbitrary level benchmarks continues be nonsense when, per the title, we're discussing how a game should be, not how past versions of it may have been with all their intended and unintended imbalances.

The actual point I'm making is that the supposed ineffectuality of realistic methods is based on an arbitrary decision of "magic must defeat magic" : on the game designer or GM saying that no, you don't get to defeat Cthulhu by ramming it with a ship, no matter how big and fast your ship is.

Once you realize how many people are happy to play like that, you'll realize that no, "the game" often doesn't support "what I want" at ANY level. Recall the huff-huff about 5e's bounded accuracy, it creates arguments of exactly this sort. "Oh no! By the rules, an army of N+1 commoners could kill Asmodeus, this is not cool!" So on and so forth. In games run by these kind of people, you don't ever get to ram Cthulhu with a ship or face Asmodeus with an army of commoners, not in a way that works, regardless of whether you're 1st or 20th level.

[Cluedrew]

The whole notion that there's a sharp distinction between "Wizards" and "Fighters" is largely an artifact of D&D.Sure, I can accept that fighter, wizard, ranger, monk and rogue are all just building blocks for a character. That doesn't mean that some of those building blocks should be terrible. I do reject the "everyone becomes magic at high level" solution for the simple reason it makes high level characters more uniform than low level characters. That just seems kind of boring, so if varied high level characters exist in tradition, I'll create them.

[Vahnavoi]

The observation only holds because in 1st Edition AD&D (f. ex.), the distinction between Fighter and Magic-User wasn't "doesn't have magic versus has magic", it was "magic armaments and feats of strength versus spellcasting and feats of intellects".

The idea of a high-level Fighter getting a magic weapon was much more significant when Magic-Users didn't get to use those weapons.

[NigelWalmsley]

I do reject the "everyone becomes magic at high level" solution for the simple reason it makes high level characters more uniform than low level characters.

Why? Are Thor and Doctor Strange really less different than Gandalf and Aragorn? If anything, making everyone magic increases diversity, because it allows characters to have abilities that are actually exclusive. Nothing's stopping you from having a wizard who uses a sword or is sneaky, but if you have a particular type of magic, other people don't have that type of magic. The fact that Kaladin (from the Stormlight Archive) is good with a spear is something Vin (from Mistborn) could learn to do. His surgebinding (and, conversely, her Allomancy) isn't.

[Kyutaru]

The observation only holds because in 1st Edition AD&D (f. ex.), the distinction between Fighter and Magic-User wasn't "doesn't have magic versus has magic", it was "magic armaments and feats of strength versus spellcasting and feats of intellects".

The idea of a high-level Fighter getting a magic weapon was much more significant when Magic-Users didn't get to use those weapons.

That's a particularly valid point especially since some AD&D subclasses were not permitted magic items at all or severely limited in which they could take. You had to sacrifice magical items to gain specialization in fighter. Magic users meanwhile rarely had more than staff and wand and scroll stuff that simply produced even more spells, a feat replaceable by the party thief. You had to sacrifice spell schools to gain more spells through specialization, just as the thief had to sacrifice thief skills to specialize as something like assassin.

Every class used to have a unique identity and something that was irreplaceable. Fighters were the tour de force that just multiplied in effectiveness with every wizard buff, something wizards themselves could not reproduce. It did place a heavier emphasis on multi and dual class effectiveness though since it merged the benefits of both worlds.

[Vahnavoi]

In any case, the lesson to be learned from there is not "there is no sharp distinction between fighters and wizards", it's "magic is not synonymous with spellcasting and having non-spellcasting types of magic doesn't make you a wizard".

[NigelWalmsley]

Sure, there's a distinction. But the point is that it's like the distinction between "Wizard" and "Cleric" or "Barbarian" and "Fighter" where it's entirely plausible for characters to have overlapping abilities. The idea that you need to come up with non-magical stuff for Fighters to be doing, or that Fighters can't have personal magic, is entirely an artifact of D&D. In the vast majority of the source material, and sufficiently awesome swordsman can simply do magic.

[Kyutaru]

D&D I think went away from its roots to promote diversity in builds and encourage multi-classing to create any character you can conceive. There should be no character you can think of that the rules don't accommodate in some way. Splatbooks add even more options and are a big selling point for what amounts to little more than added flavor. It's like selling cosmetic skins in a video game.

Should we continue down this path of annihilating class boundaries to create a free-form character creation system where you can be anything you want?

Or should we go the way of JRPGs where casters are little more than Support classes who enhance and synergize with the Fighter of the party?

A big part of these discussions came from the move to later editions where Wizards suddenly found themselves wearing armor, using swords, and buffing their own strength. They basically took the job of martials and did it better too. Clerics did the same, especially in the old days, and could temporarily surpass the party warrior with divine buffs. But when have you ever seen a Fighter do the Wizard's job?

[Cluedrew]

To NigelWalmsley: Right I didn't phrase that very well, let me try again. Making every class more like a caster will reduce diversity. You could also go with fighter or rogue if you wanted to this isn't supposed to be a complex statement about varieties of magic as compared to other abilities. If you have two pools of distinct options and put them together the resulting pool of options will be bigger. So what I'm saying is I would like the variety to not drop off as power level increases. Not in terms of major archetypes in a game that is about climbing through those power-levels.

To Kyutaru: Your experience with character building must be very different than mine. Last time I played D&D I walked right into a character concept that did not work by the rules. The GM did some patching to help but it didn't work so well.

[Kyutaru]

Your experience with character building must be very different than mine. Last time I played D&D I walked right into a character concept that did not work by the rules. The GM did some patching to help but it didn't work so well.
I have no idea what you're referring to given how vaguely you worded this obstacle. This was a problem in older editions but 3rd and onward introduced Prestige Classes and easier multi-classing rules and Feats to tailor characters continuously. You can now be an armored wizard with ease, as per my example.

[JNAProductions]

I have no idea what you're referring to given how vaguely you worded this obstacle. This was a problem in older editions but 3rd and onward introduced Prestige Classes and easier multi-classing rules and Feats to tailor characters continuously. You can now be an armored wizard with ease, as per my example.

Armored Mage being possible is not the same as allowing for ANY concept.

D&D is vastly more flexible than it originally started. It still ain't GURPS or M&M.

[Kyutaru]

Armored Mage being possible is not the same as allowing for ANY concept.

D&D is vastly more flexible than it originally started. It still ain't GURPS or M&M.
I'm aware, I didn't say it was as flexible as GURPs or other systems. You can create a character with whatever fluff you want with the current rules, what you're arguing over is the mechanics and viability of said character. It's something D&D has been continually trying to improve on in a rigid system that doesn't promote cherry-picking powers from its origins. What I actually asked was whether we continue down this route of further opening up customization options or return to limits and role specialization which serve to balance the classes innately. It's this intermingling of character concepts that demonstrates the weakness of certain classes by showcasing how you can do their jobs better by not going pure (inevitably adding magic along the way). The additional options added over the years permit Wizards to mimic Fighters without the reverse role being possible, and even back then the best multi-class was Anything/Mage.

Stop getting away from the argument to pursue this tangent. Class overlap: Yes or No? With it, we have challenges, without it we have uniqueness.

[Vahnavoi]

3.x. was a massive excersize in redundancy and from what little I know of 5e, it's only slightly better.

Prestige classes and free mix'n'match multiclassing were and are overrated concepts - majority of the possible combinations never saw and never will see play.

So definitely less overlap and definitely less combinations. But even beyond that, people need their character creation habits shaken a bit. The leading cause of "my character concept isn't supported by the system!" is that you came up with your concept completely outside of the system. The simplest solution to that is to stop high-concept character making and let the system provide you with your character.

[NigelWalmsley]

I have no idea what you're referring to given how vaguely you worded this obstacle. This was a problem in older editions but 3rd and onward introduced Prestige Classes and easier multi-classing rules and Feats to tailor characters continuously. You can now be an armored wizard with ease, as per my example.

And this is a problem because? If your game balance only works by excluding character concepts, it doesn't work.

[Kyutaru]

So definitely less overlap and definitely less combinations. But even beyond that, people need their character creation habits shaken a bit. The leading cause of "my character concept isn't supported by the system!" is that you came up with your concept completely outside of the system. The simplest solution to that is to stop high-concept character making and let the system provide you with your character.
I agree that the players are part of the problem. Old D&D didn't have such well-defined class flavors. A "magic-user" was basically anything. 2nd edition updated it only to Mage and it covered everything from wizard to necromancer to warlock to sorcerer to shaman to wugenja to whatever sort of magic caster you can think of. They were all represented and abstracted by the same class. Likewise, all the martial classes we have today came from the same class. Fighter remains a class to this day despite Barbarian, Monk, Ranger, even Paladin originating as subclasses of this wholly generic warrior. One does not need the rules to give you a Samurai. People would just rename Paladin to Samurai or use some form of Fighter as their eastern swordsman.

The classes and the fluff were not hard defined but served to promote extremely unique roles at the core and then you branch out with specialization. Fighters for weapons, Mages for arcane, Cleric for divine, and later Thief for skills. The subclasses began as the basis for PRCs allowing players to branch out of the core class and take some of the features of other classes in hybrid fashion. Without them, you can only cast arcane spells as a Mage, no ifs, ands, or buts. But that was okay because these classes were intentionally generic and all encompassing.

Today we have layers of redundancy and specific mechanical benefits to classes that previously were merely abstracted under the basic rules. Now for some reason it doesn't feel like a Samurai unless it has a specific set of abilities that give it Samurai-ness. Even though those abilities are horribly inconsistent across editions and not at all iconic. You can slap together a new set of abilities for anybody and establish a new class that must be played according to what special uniqueness you decided they get. This goes beyond the rules into the splatbooks that do precisely that, giving players exact options like a freaking Lightning-based Fireball or a Cold-based Fireball when you could have just recolored the existing Fireball. They're not mechanically distinguished just because they deal different element types.

Where 2nd edition gave sample spells and said "go nuts expanding and cloning" with even RULES for creating your own, 3rd and up focuses on just giving players those options in explicit detail and creating this perception that you can't be a thing unless the fluff says you are.


And this is a problem because? If your game balance only works by excluding character concepts, it doesn't work.
That's an incorrect view of the argument. The balance comes from limiting customization, not from excluding character concepts. Character concepts of all forms can exist -- as their own separate class with their own separate balance in line with the rest. Customization is what allows people to break the boundaries of the roles by mixing and matching what they want without a class constructed around that specific set of abilities. Individually balanced classes maintain an import aspect of class balance -- CLASS WEAKNESSES. You can't be a "do everything" guy if you're severely limited by the restrictions built into your class. Fighter vs Wizard balance was much less of an issue when Wizards were not permitted to use all the armor, weapons, and magical goodies that make Fighters strong. Yet now, a few feats or multi-class picks means you can steal advantages and eliminate weaknesses by gaming the system. The system wasn't balanced around this, it was balanced around classes with specific roles and functions and innate weaknesses to balance them.

[Morphic tide]

The observation only holds because in 1st Edition AD&D (f. ex.), the distinction between Fighter and Magic-User wasn't "doesn't have magic versus has magic", it was "magic armaments and feats of strength versus spellcasting and feats of intellects".

The idea of a high-level Fighter getting a magic weapon was much more significant when Magic-Users didn't get to use those weapons.
There's actually a lot of work that could be done here by cracking the spines of the PF2e playtest (Resonance) and Iron Magic, alongside designing items with mundane capability dependence as emergent properties of their ability interacting with what Martials do. Per-hit damage is the usual example, but one might also have magic items that scale with innate movement, or rely on the user making saving throws that are poor for the casters. Really, the general thing would be magic items that scale and/or stack with a mundane property the Martials are good at, with Martials having explicit mechanics in-class to better use items in certain ways.

[Kyutaru]

There's actually a lot of work that could be done here by cracking the spines of the PF2e playtest (Resonance) and Iron Magic, alongside designing items with mundane capability dependence as emergent properties of their ability interacting with what Martials do. Per-hit damage is the usual example, but one might also have magic items that scale with innate movement, or rely on the user making saving throws that are poor for the casters. Really, the general thing would be magic items that scale and/or stack with a mundane property the Martials are good at, with Martials having explicit mechanics in-class to better use items in certain ways.
If this is akin to giving martials innate abilities that basically say "+3 to Magic Items Effectiveness" then that's a good idea for scaling weapons and armor better for them.

[Morphic tide]

If this is akin to giving martials innate abilities that basically say "+3 to Magic Items Effectiveness" then that's a good idea for scaling weapons and armor better for them.

The Resonance mechanic is more "can use X amount of Magic Gubbins", and it scaled with Charisma. Iron Magic is more about jailbreaking magic items into greater breadth, such as taking any Transmutation item to SLA a Flight effect. They're not particularly class-locked, to my understanding, but implementing them as such a thing, making them the Big Sell of the Martial classes, could easily bring back the direction mentioned as the assumption of AD&D.

[Segev]

Throwing around arbitrary level benchmarks continues be nonsense when, per the title, we're discussing how a game should be, not how past versions of it may have been with all their intended and unintended imbalances.

The actual point I'm making is that the supposed ineffectuality of realistic methods is based on an arbitrary decision of "magic must defeat magic" : on the game designer or GM saying that no, you don't get to defeat Cthulhu by ramming it with a ship, no matter how big and fast your ship is.

Once you realize how many people are happy to play like that, you'll realize that no, "the game" often doesn't support "what I want" at ANY level. Recall the huff-huff about 5e's bounded accuracy, it creates arguments of exactly this sort. "Oh no! By the rules, an army of N+1 commoners could kill Asmodeus, this is not cool!" So on and so forth. In games run by these kind of people, you don't ever get to ram Cthulhu with a ship or face Asmodeus with an army of commoners, not in a way that works, regardless of whether you're 1st or 20th level.

My point is that the game should support both low-level “realistic” fighters and high-level mythic fighters, and can do so by having the former happen at lower levels and the latter at higher levels.

All without having to “nerf mages” or worse nerf high-level characters.

[Kyutaru]

The Resonance mechanic is more "can use X amount of Magic Gubbins", and it scaled with Charisma. Iron Magic is more about jailbreaking magic items into greater breadth, such as taking any Transmutation item to SLA a Flight effect. They're not particularly class-locked, to my understanding, but implementing them as such a thing, making them the Big Sell of the Martial classes, could easily bring back the direction mentioned as the assumption of AD&D.

Alright, cool. I'm going to look up those two and see if I can't find some useful bits from them. Meanwhile I can definitely see how it should make little sense that a fighter and a wizard both hitting with the same sword can do so with similar effectiveness. I know martials have extra attacks and better accuracy and higher strength and some class perks/feats that enhance their damage but it's all at the class level instead of actually making their weapons better by the simple fact that they are masters of stabbing people with them. A sword shouldn't do 1d8 damage in a fighter's hands, he knows how to maximize its potential.

[NigelWalmsley]

Fighter vs Wizard balance was much less of an issue when Wizards were not permitted to use all the armor, weapons, and magical goodies that make Fighters strong.

Except that the reasons Wizards are better than Fighters involve using precisely zero Fighter toys. The Fighter isn't sad because the Wizard can now wear armor (it can't) or use weapons (it mostly can't). He's sad because the Wizard gets meaningful abilities at high levels and he doesn't. And this was actually true in AD&D too, the game just kind of shoved it to the side and pretended it didn't exist.

[Cluedrew]

I have no idea what you're referring to given how vaguely you worded this obstacle. […] You can now be an armored wizard with ease, as per my example.Yeah that is because this particular problem is not related to magic or any of the main topics, so I wasn't going to go into detail. Anyways the conversation has mostly treat well worn paths so I have nothing new to add.

[Kyutaru]

Except that the reasons Wizards are better than Fighters involve using precisely zero Fighter toys. The Fighter isn't sad because the Wizard can now wear armor (it can't) or use weapons (it mostly can't). He's sad because the Wizard gets meaningful abilities at high levels and he doesn't. And this was actually true in AD&D too, the game just kind of shoved it to the side and pretended it didn't exist.
You misconstrued my position again. You're citing it as though it's the only reason when it is in fact a reason that the discrepancy exists when wizards can completely replace fighters while still doing everything they can do. There's even the Tenser's Transformation spell which steals the base attack bonus advantages and gives it directly to the caster for the duration in addition to other perks that effectively make the wizard a fighter. AD&D brought around weapon specialization and sufficiently powerful weapons/armor in an edition where a casual hit from some enemies could end your character. The edition was brutal and fighters were capable of outputting far more damage than wizards could while having better saves against the deadly effects, nevermind the extra level progression. I must remind people that this was also in a single action system and part of what broke wizards was being able to cast multiple spells per round in later editions. Cpncentration checks instead of the old automatic spell failure on being damaged certainly didn't help either, nor did the loss of spell casting times that left wizards VULNERABLE to said spellcasting disruption without a meatshield in their way. I already went over this with class uniqueness from back then, there was no overlap between the core classes which left each having something the rest didn't. The fighter was able to meaningfully contribute to the game in his own unique way and progressed by collecting a small armory of swords and axes of differing types while wizards progressed through their spell acquisitions. Sure, wizards were able to do things fighters couldn't but the same applied in reverse because that's how the system was meant to be. Fighters even had the advantage of not needing to choose their loadout in advance because switching to a different weapon was easily done, and back then you needed the right tool for the right job or the monster was effectively immortal (way too many immunities in AD&D).

You can argue all you want about how wizards would be potent even without being able to exactly replicate the fighter's stats and abilities but that little feature is the eyesore I'm more concerned over. Having different tools for different jobs was much less of a problem, as I stated in your quote. Fighters were quite valuable in AD&D despite being simplistic in usage and that only changed when 3E came around. Oh, and the wizards now CAN wear armor if they choose, which was the central point around the whole customization expansion of the latter editions. Treading on other classes' toes is what leads to these disgruntled topics, not being able to do something cool that I cannot because you're literally a different class.

[NigelWalmsley]

There's even the Tenser's Transformation spell which steals the base attack bonus advantages and gives it directly to the caster for the duration in addition to other perks that effectively make the wizard a fighter.

If you think this is relevant, you are fundamentally misunderstanding the issues 3e has. I have literally never seen a Wizard cast Tenser's Transformation. The only time I've seen a Wizard learn Tenser's Transformation is on a technicality when someone presents a cheese build that knows all spells. 3e has problems, but none of them have anything to do with Tenser's Transformation.


AD&D brought around weapon specialization and sufficiently powerful weapons/armor in an edition where a casual hit from some enemies could end your character. The edition was brutal and fighters were capable of outputting far more damage than wizards could while having better saves against the deadly effects, nevermind the extra level progression.

Casters in AD&D could still do minionmancy that got them troops on par with what a Fighter was able to put out. The endgame of AD&D is pretty much as imbalanced (if not more so) than the endgame of 3e, you just weren't really expected to get there (it was basically treated like Epic in 3e). If you play AD&D at the levels where 3e has the problems people complain about, it manifests almost exactly the same problems.

[Kyutaru]

If you think this is relevant, you are fundamentally misunderstanding the issues 3e has. I have literally never seen a Wizard cast Tenser's Transformation. The only time I've seen a Wizard learn Tenser's Transformation is on a technicality when someone presents a cheese build that knows all spells. 3e has problems, but none of them have anything to do with Tenser's Transformation.It's unfortunate that you're not aware of how popular gishes are or how easily Tenser's enables them but I've had far different experiences from you, especially over on the WOTC boards.


Casters in AD&D could still do minionmancy that got them troops on par with what a Fighter was able to put out. The endgame of AD&D is pretty much as imbalanced (if not more so) than the endgame of 3e, you just weren't really expected to get there (it was basically treated like Epic in 3e). If you play AD&D at the levels where 3e has the problems people complain about, it manifests almost exactly the same problems.Another difference in experience here then as the slew of disadvantages casters faced (interrupted easily, casting times on spells, one spell per round, no selected spells on level up, terrible proficiency list) made them far from the solopwnmobiles they would later become without ample preparation. Minions were never even close to what the fighter could dish out as fighters were the magic item dependent class and magic items were obscenely powerful in AD&D due to muted class advantages and a nerfed late game progression system. The extra fighter level progression granting even more THAC0 and saving throws and HP (which wasn't limited by a CON of 14) made them head and shoulders above what the casters or their minions could attempt to imitate. Tack on grandmastery and haste boots and you have a fighter that can attack 10 times per round. Wizards who weren't buffing the fighter or using control spells were wasting their time and spells doing something inefficiently.

[NigelWalmsley]

It's unfortunate that you're not aware of how popular gishes are or how easily Tenser's enables them but I've had far different experiences from you, especially over on the WOTC boards.

It doesn't enable them. Tenser's Transformation is not a good spell for a gish. And while gishing is better than being a Fighter, it is far from the best thing you can do as a Wizard. I'll grant that it probably makes Fighters sadder than other things Wizards can do, but that doesn't actually make it a bigger balance problem. If "Tenser's Transformation too good" rates on your list of problems with 3e, you have so fundamentally misunderstood the character of the edition as to make your opinions on it meaningless. It's like starting your complaints about 4e with "going from 20 to 30 levels ruined everything".


Another difference in experience here then as the slew of disadvantages casters faced (interrupted easily, casting times on spells, one spell per round, no selected spells on level up, terrible proficiency list) made them far from the solopwnmobiles they would later become without ample preparation. Minions were never even close to what the fighter could dish out as fighters were the magic item dependent class and magic items were obscenely powerful in AD&D due to muted class advantages and a nerfed late game progression system. The extra fighter level progression granting even more THAC0 and saving throws and HP (which wasn't limited by a CON of 14) made them head and shoulders above what the casters or their minions could attempt to imitate. Tack on grandmastery and haste boots and you have a fighter that can attack 10 times per round. Wizards who weren't buffing the fighter or using control spells were wasting their time and spells doing something inefficiently.

The Wizard's minions could be Fighters. It fundamentally doesn't matter how personally impressive you are when the other guy can have four of you as pets.

[Kyutaru]

If "Tenser's Transformation too good" rates on your list of problems with 3e, you have so fundamentally misunderstood the character of the edition as to make your opinions on it meaningless.
When you start resorting to ad hominems and trashing my opinion, I stop finding reasons to continue addressing you.

[Segev]

When you start resorting to ad hominems and trashing my opinion, I stop finding reasons to continue addressing you.

It’s not technically ad hominem, but it was phrased rudely, so I understand your sentiment, here. I am being pedantic because mid-claiming lo go cal fallacies tends to undermine debate. I apologize if my pedantry annoys.

But ad hominem would be saying something implying you are a bad person for reasons unrelated to this discussion, and that therefore your views and arguments are invalid. What he’s done here is said that he finds one of your views that is related to this topic so off-base that he doesn’t feel you could possibly have any good views on the topic. This is also fallacious unless he can show that your view he denigrates truly does stand at the heart of the debate and thus all your views must be wrong if they are consistent with the one he denigrates. But it is not ad hominem; he is basing this on a topical viewpoint.

As an example, ad hominem would be Alice stating, “Bob eats his own boogers, so you shouldn’t listen to him when he says that d20s have a uniform distribution. Therefore, I’m right and they have a bell-curve distribution.”

This is closer to Alice saying, “Bob thought a +1 on a d20 was a 20% increase, so he’s obviously wrong about d20s having a uniform distribution.” Now, I’m not saying you’re as obviously wrong as our hypothetical Bob, here, so please don’t read into that. I just needed a grossly obvious example where Bob is wrong on one point here for clarity.

[Kyutaru]

But ad hominem would be saying something implying you are a bad person for reasons unrelated to this discussion, and that therefore your views and arguments are invalid. What he’s done here is said that he finds one of your views that is related to this topic so off-base that he doesn’t feel you could possibly have any good views on the topic. This is also fallacious unless he can show that your view he denigrates truly does stand at the heart of the debate and thus all your views must be wrong if they are consistent with the one he denigrates. But it is not ad hominem; he is basing this on a topical viewpoint.
That's an interesting take but I was taught to view attacks on the person making the argument rather than the argument itself to be an underhanded debate strategy and will defer to my signature. It's a sign of a desperate individual to lash out against the one making the case rather than try to argue against the case itself and in doing so put the opponent on the defensive position. People do the same in abusive relationships and it's a form of manipulation meant solely to exercise control. If we cannot have these discussions with respect for the participants then they should not be had at all.

[Segev]

The reason I object to “ad hominem” being called is because he didn’t attack you, but a position you hold (or at least that he believes you do), and used that as a judgment of your general level of analysis of D&D. It’s not quite attacking you, hence my objection. I’ll stop here, though. I do understand why you are irked.

[NigelWalmsley]

When you start resorting to ad hominems and trashing my opinion, I stop finding reasons to continue addressing you.

If you consider "that's not how the system works" to be an ad hominem, I'm not sure what argument I could make against your position that wouldn't qualify. You are simply factually wrong about the issues that 3e has and their significance. That's not a personal insult to you, any more than it would be personally insulting for me to be told I don't know very much about the flaws of Exalted or Vampire (systems I, factually, do not know very much about).

[Jay R]

He's confusing, "Your argument is incorrect; therefore you don't understand the game" with "You don't understand the game, therefore your argument is incorrect.

The first is what was actually said. Only the second is technically "ad hominem" argument.

But the difference doesn't really matter here. The essential fact is the presence of the insult, which distracted from the point.

The logically valid way to phrase the argument without the distraction would be to carefully explain why Tenser's Transformation doesn't cause problems, and leave off any comment about understanding the game.