Opinion: Will D&D ever acheive caster vs martial balance? [Archive]

RandomPeasant

2022-07-25, 10:12 AM

No I don't care about any 'wah 4e doesn't count' arguments. It balanced mundanes and casters. You might not like how it did it, and it's not the only way to do it, but it did it.

I would dispute that, not on the grounds of "balance", but on the grounds of "mundane". In 4e, a Fighter eventually graduates to being a Demigod or a Star-favored Champion or some other manner of superhuman. If you're willing to do that, balancing casters and martials is quite trivial, as the restrictive element is that someone must be "mundane", not that they happen to use a sword. Elric uses a sword. Thor uses a sword (albiet, only briefly, as he mostly uses Mjolnir or Stormbringer). Hell, Harry Potter and Gandalf are wizards, and they both have swords they use to good effect. The idea that "use magic" and "use sword" are non-overlapping magisteria, and we must carefully segregate the sword guys from any power source but swords lest they be polluted by it is a D&Dism that has no support elsewhere in the genre.

The issue comes from the fact you have to do one of three things: empower mundanes, weaken magicians, or have them meet in the middle*.

That's not really the trichotomy. The issue is that you can't have power scaling, mundanity, and game balance. You don't have to empower mundanes, and indeed empowering mundanes won't really get you anywhere. The people who want Fighters to be the guy at the gym are, in fact, completely correct that a regular guy can't match the feats of archmages and demigods. You don't need to give the Fighter the ability to cut a hole between planes. In fact, you shouldn't do that, because that is a violation of his concept.

What you should do is acknowledge that, in a world where you can be a divine being who fights with a sword, "guy who fights with a sword and has no special powers" is simply a low-level concept. The Fighter doesn't get high level powers, he gets a new class that has high level powers within its idiom. The Fighter becomes a Witch King or a Knight Radiant or a Red Sister, and those classes offer capabilities that keep up with the Wizard (who is, in the interest of fairness, probably an Archmage or Effigy Master or a Doomseer at this point). In this respect, 4e very much had the right idea when it presented Fighter as a "Heroic Tier" class that would get upgraded with a "Paragon Path". It just botched the execution.

And I think if you do this, you really can make everyone basically okay. Certainly there are some people who are deeply emotionally attached to writing "20" on their character sheet while still being a mundane warrior, but for everyone else you can over everything. The people who want a game of mundane Fighters and Wizards limited enough not to overshadow them can have that, and they can have adventures that never require the Fighter to have any supernatural abilities in Heroic Tier. The people who want a game of mighty Wizards and sword-wielders able to keep up with them can have that in Paragon Tier. And the people who want a crazy game of dueling gods and cosmic evils can play in Epic Tier and have that.

I'm a big proponent of option number three. Give the martials some new toys, take away some from the casters (mostly by making them specialize, in my opinion, which could also make them more interesting) and while the end result probably wouldn't be perfectly balanced, it could be close enough for my taste.

I think framing it as "meet in the middle" is somewhat dishonest. Like, yeah, you're not going to let people play the Infinite Ice Assassin build or whatever, but when we talk about a "specialized caster" in 3e terms that's like a Beguiler, a class that is only really weaker than (most) Wizards for idosyncratic mechanical reasons. And when we're talking about "buffed martials" we mean "take the ToB classes that are about a strong as D&D martials have ever been, give them more options at all levels, better options at high levels, and an entirely new suite of non-combat abilities". Calling that option three and not option one mostly seems like a symptom of the hivemind that is unable to acknowledge that casters might be well-designed.

You can tell perfectly good stories that have some characters who are significantly more powerful than others (e.g. Nobody would argue that all of the Avengers are equally powerful).

Of course, not all the Avengers get equal screen time or narrative weight. Hawkeye never fights Thanos, but if you tell the guy who rolled an archer that he has to sit out the fight with the big bad because martials aren't meant to be any good, he's not going to be happy with you. So what you get, by and large, are campaigns that are tuned to whatever martials can do. And there's not anything inherently wrong with that, and you can have fun doing that (I have had fun doing that), but it's limited in a way that D&D doesn't need to be. That's the real issue, not that there are a lot of tables where Rachel's Wizard is allowed to go off on cosmic adventures where Dave's Ranger can't follow.

One of the characters I really want to play is a wizard who served as her town's doctor. A mixture of supportive and healing magic combined with skill in herbalism and alchemy to make soothing poultices or headache potions. But D&D is convinced that I shouldn't be allowed to build such a character, which is fine for me because I highly enjoy other systems.

I mean, is that not just a PF Alchemist? I'm sincerely asking that, because I'm not really familiar with PF material, but if you can't build that as an Alchemist, that seems like whoever made the Alchemist screwed up pretty badly. Certainly you can get close with a 3.5 Bard, so I think saying "D&D won't let me do this" is only accurate if it is deeply important to you that this character have "Wizard" written on their sheet.

Telok

2022-07-25, 10:20 AM

Yes, other systems have done it, and 4e did it.

No I don't care about any 'wah 4e doesn't count' arguments. It balanced mundanes and casters. You might not like how it did it, and it's not the only way to do it, but it did it.

The issue comes from....

Truth, given a concept of "balance" that is basically focused on combat equivalency and reducing all noncombat to general skill checks plus weak-ass rituals that exist mainly to provide plot & math utility*.

Personally I don't think the last few development teams have thought about "balance" outside of combat damage, hp, & ac. The fact you can create characters that crush knowledge or social skill checks while, and at the same time, negating many exploration & travel challenges, is indicative of this. The inability to use hit dice for anything but heals and efforts to make everything like ki, spell points/mana, & psi into spell slots is an abdication of creative intent.

* plot & math utility being stuff like the "magic" required for the plot to move forward like water breathing for underwater, opening planar portals to change the fight background scenery, or raise dead to keep playing your character after some bad rolls. Math utility being the bits to break down all the vendor trash magic items into zero weight money and then convert that into magic items you could use.

Anonymouswizard

2022-07-25, 10:29 AM

Just curious, what are the best of those type of systems?

What are you looking for. I could build that character in many systems, and couldn't in many more, and neither makes that system good or bad.

I mean, is that not just a PF Alchemist? I'm sincerely asking that, because I'm not really familiar with PF material, but if you can't build that as an Alchemist, that seems like whoever made the Alchemist screwed up pretty badly. Certainly you can get close with a 3.5 Bard, so I think saying "D&D won't let me do this" is only accurate if it is deeply important to you that this character have "Wizard" written on their sheet.

Both of those attach extra baggage to the character that I don't want. Which is admittedly more of a 'class based system' thing, although I have a particular hatred for D&D's classes that I lack for something like Rogue Trader's classes.

Necrosnoop110

2022-07-25, 10:47 AM

What are you looking for. I could build that character in many systems, and couldn't in many more, and neither makes that system good or bad.
Nothing specific. Outside of D&D and GURPS my TRPG experience is pretty sparse. Just wanted to take a look at systems for magic/fantasy roleplaying that you consider "best in class." Especially with an eye toward ones that balance martials and casters well.

RandomPeasant

2022-07-25, 10:48 AM

Truth, given a concept of "balance" that is basically focused on combat equivalency and reducing all noncombat to general skill checks plus weak-ass rituals that exist mainly to provide plot & math utility*.

If we're going to talk about the balance of 4e, it is also worth pointing out that there totally is imbalance in that combat system, it's just that it's not along clear lines between different types of classes. 4e has exploits like the Yogi Hat Ranger, it just doesn't have a paradigm where people who use swords are systematically worse than people who use sorcerer.

The inability to use hit dice for anything but heals and efforts to make everything like ki, spell points/mana, & psi into spell slots is an abdication of creative intent.

That's probably the thing I dislike most about post-3e versions of the game. Resource system pluralism was good, actually. Characters working in different ways is interesting, and can reinforce class fantasy when done properly.

AvatarVecna

2022-07-25, 10:51 AM

Dame_Mechanus

2022-07-25, 10:54 AM

I honestly think the main factor here is that most actual D&D players are much more like Wizards than Barbarians...

Or at least that's what they think they are. But the point remains, the fundamental assumption that casters should be more powerful than martials. A lot of people have pointed out that by flattening things, 4e achieved some pretty solid parity (and I would be inclined to agree with them, although I never played 4e); 5e also generally seems to have a situation wherein Fights and Paladins are not automatically worse than Wizards and Sorcerers, and frankly the sheer disparity in tier lists of classes, while a touch annoying, does point to a scenario where these classes are more viable.

But, of course, that can also be a bit deceptive. After all, Fighters can be Eldritch Knights and that's going to alter the perception of the class; similarly, Wizards can be Bladesingers and so forth. There are a lot of balance changes in 5e that bring things closer to working nicely, like the fact that the Wizard no longer can cast dozens of buffs per day and walk out prepped to the nines for everything, and yet there are still some high-level spells that can do some really amazing things. You could argue that casters can still reshape reality at level 20 while martials can't, or you could argue that martials get to do all of their stuff for little to no cost while casters no longer even have a bunch of bonus spells to cast.

So at least for me, the real question of balance comes down to whether RAW allows casters and martials in the party to each feel like they get to fulfill their fantasy and have their own strengths without one player or the other agreeing to basically ignore some of their abilities or voluntarily handicapping themselves. I think 5e does a pretty good job of that on a whole, where there are a lot of options so that most parties of Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, and Wizard can go from level 1 to level 20 together without ever feeling like one party member basically keeps the others around as her entourage. But there are always going to be disagreements, and I think that down to the fundamental level people are always going to disagree about what the balance should be like.

Xervous

2022-07-25, 10:59 AM

If fighter is going to be the A-move class could the devs at least label it as such? Some of my main gripes with 5e are rooted in how the books neglect to tell users what things are intended to do.

Anonymouswizard

2022-07-25, 11:11 AM

Nothing specific. Outside of D&D and GURPS my TRPG experience is pretty sparse. Just wanted to take a look at systems for magic/fantasy roleplaying that you consider "best in class." Especially with an eye toward ones that balance martials and casters well.

It still depends on what you want. I like how Cypher handles it, but I also understand that it very much does not have Adept/Everybody Else balance. Savage Worlds is decent, if only because of the relatively small number of powers. Games like Fate don't care how you have Great Rapport or Good Shoot, and The Dark Eye just yanks everybody down to the level of a mundane fighter. And Unknown Armies is just great, with Adepts being generally weaker but shining whenever their magick is actually relevant (meanwhile Avatars have to contend with restrictive Taboos and narrow themes).

In general any game I recommend is going to lean towards the lower end of the power scale, because unless it's Nobilis-based I don't like high power. This makes keeping a rough balance easier, as mages just aren't doing the things which change world's, aren't working on a massive scale, and likely have more limited magical resources. They do however tend to get more mundane skills to compensate.

Necrosnoop110

2022-07-25, 11:16 AM

If fighter is going to be the A-move class could the devs at least label it as such? Some of my main gripes with 5e are rooted in how the books neglect to tell users what things are intended to do.

Sorry, what does A-move class mean? (30 years of D&Ding)

noob

2022-07-25, 11:29 AM

Sorry, what does A-move class mean? (30 years of D&Ding)
Likely attack move, it is a command that can be given to soldiers in some games that makes them move toward a specific location stopping only to attack opponents.

Necrosnoop110

2022-07-25, 11:30 AM

And there's not anything inherently wrong with that, and you can have fun doing that (I have had fun doing that), but it's limited in a way that D&D doesn't need to be. That's the real issue, not that there are a lot of tables where Rachel's Wizard is allowed to go off on cosmic adventures where Dave's Ranger can't follow.

I totally agree that any given group should have the freedom to construct their campaign around whatever they choice to focus on. But doesn't this massive gap between wheelhouses (Rachel's Wizards cosmic adventures vs Dave's Rangers forest romp) show that it is a problem with the balance in the system? Isn't that just a different way to portray the problem of the classic Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit (https://youtu.be/zFuMpYTyRjw) conundrum?

Willie the Duck

2022-07-25, 11:54 AM

People have brought up many of the main points such as 4e already did it (but not how many people wanted it to be done), and that guys at the gym will never outdo casters who can work actual miracles (so if no quarter can be given on either side, you really can't have balance).

However, there are ways of making the situation better (perhaps 'different, and thus balanced in a typical adventuring scenario'). Some components of this might include:

'making things dead' significantly more of a martials-are-better scenario
Magic having a few more limitations and inconveniences (something the game has been moving away from since at least the initial 1e release)
Magic moving from 'it just works' to a more nuanced resolution with rolls or modifiers or requirements (whatever mundane resolution looks like)
A more extensive (and cohesive) set of rules for the vast array of activities outside of fighting and things where magicspellcasting is the only reasonable solution.

The last one probably would be the biggest one -- If all the characters are participating in interesting and engaging social and discovery and survival and solving the mystery and curing an illness by tracking it to the source instead of casting a spell which wipes it away and all sorts of stuff like that, then the times where a caster solves the problems by moving the party to the elemental plane of air and the martial solves the problem of the big fearsome monster will simply not be as big a deal.

RandomPeasant

2022-07-25, 11:55 AM

Shadowrun is a system with a lower power ceiling, and it pulls off caster/non-caster dynamic without much trouble.

To be fair, it's also a system with a much higher power floor. The entry-level summoning in Shadowrun is pretty close to planar binding, and a street samurai is more impressive than any D&D mundane.

There's too many sacred cows, and most of them are baked into the casting system.

I don't think sacred cows are a problem. 3e killed plenty of AD&D sacred cows and it was pretty well received. The issue isn't killing sacred cows. The issue is that you have to do it for a reason, and you have to deliver a product people enjoy. If you'll pardon the metaphor, you can kill all the sacred cows you want as long as you make a burger people will buy.

But if you do that, the balance gets utterly skewed in favor of the per-day abilities if you make your combat days shorter.

That's not necessarily a problem, as long as the system provides avenues for DMs to tweak the at-will characters back up when they change the expected encounters per day in a way that tweaks them down. If you have less encounters than the game expects, but the Fighter finds a cool artifact sword, things can come out okay. But it requires a very detailed attention to balance and understanding of how changes to the game effect it that D&D's designers don't really seem to have.

The final result is a part of why people didn't like 4e, but it's also because how they got there, the mechanics of it, were so un-D&D.

I think this is wrong. "4e isn't D&D" isn't why people didn't like 4e. It's the meme people who didn't like 4e used to dunk on it. Calling that the reason 4e failed is like saying The Office was popular because of the "they're the same picture" memes. 4e was unpopular because it didn't execute well, especially in the initial release. Skill Challenges didn't work. Combat was grindy, especially at high levels and with boss monsters. Classes people liked were discarded. Some classes didn't have the abilities they needed to support all their builds. People accepted THAC0 disappearing from AD&D to 3e. They didn't care about the difference between random treasure and WBL, or the introduction of CR, or standardizing saves, or any number of other changes. The end product matters a lot more than the method, though that's not to say the method matters zero.

If fighter is going to be the A-move class could the devs at least label it as such? Some of my main gripes with 5e are rooted in how the books neglect to tell users what things are intended to do.

I think this has been a problem with D&D for a while. There's nothing wrong with simple classes. There are players (new or not) who want something simple. They don't even have to be dramatically less powerful than complex classes. To give a non-D&D example, in Starcraft II Co-Op Tychus is generally pretty ****-simple to play, but nonetheless a very powerful option. But you need to make sure that A) "simple" doesn't mean "crappy" and B) there are simple options for a wide variety of things. It's often been "martials are simple, casters are complex", but that's a problem on both ends. Some people want to play a fire mage that just blasts stuff with fire. Some people want to play a swordsman who does complex tactical maneuverings to find an edge.

I totally agree that any given group should have the freedom to construct their campaign around whatever they choice to focus on. But doesn't this massive gap between wheelhouses (Rachel's Wizards cosmic adventures vs Dave's Rangers forest romp) show that it is a problem with the balance in the system? Isn't that just a different way to portray the problem of the classic Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit (https://youtu.be/zFuMpYTyRjw) conundrum?

I didn't mean to imply that the system was balanced, I was just speaking to how the imbalance makes itself manifest. There are a great many stories D&D is capable of telling, and many of them don't get told because of the weakness of martials. That's different from martials being massively overshadowed in the games that do happen, but no less harmful I think.

Anonymouswizard

2022-07-25, 12:07 PM

Magic having a few more limitations and inconveniences (something the game has been moving away from since at least the initial 1e release)

I'd love to see D&D embrace the idea that magic is draining. Have spells start draining stats or inflicting fatigue, and then give higher level casters abilities to avoid or mitigate part of the effects. Although I'd also like them to admit that swinging a sword around is tiring and a Fighter cannot just do it all day.

A more extensive (and cohesive) set of rules for the vast array of activities outside of fighting and things where magicspellcasting is the only reasonable solution.

Sadly that one's just against what the target audience wants. I'm not sure 5e even has chase rules.

KorvinStarmast

2022-07-25, 12:18 PM

This is a part of the larger DnD problem - it has no worldbuilding in the system, and tries to do magic. (1) Not actually a problem for over 40 years, other than not explaining how Vancian magic works in the original game. (2) World building is left up to the referee; that's a feature not a bug.

Will it? I'm not sure - so far, WotC has been unwilling to "restrict the creative freedom" of the individual DMs by making hard rules for how magic operates. Personally, I think that's a mistake, the discrete spells system doesn't work well with attempts to make it generic, and doing both halfway (e.g. if you want to heal, you are a religious guy or a nature guy)... Could the magic system be tighter? Yes, the spell list is far too bloated. How it works isn't an actual problem in play until you get to edge cases and contradictory rules statements.

Likely attack move, it is a command that can be given to soldiers in some games that makes them move toward a specific location stopping only to attack opponents. Aah, Starcraft ... :smallsmile:

I'd love to see D&D embrace the idea that magic is draining.
Vancian Magic did a little bit of that, and the 5e evoker class feature does that.
Yes, 5e has chase rules in the DMG.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-07-25, 12:32 PM

I think there are a set of issues here--

Defining balance
Are we talking about MMO-style balance (ie all similarly-geared characters of the same role, played by similarly-skilled players have the same combat numbers, within epsilon)? We might call that "hard" balance. How much of a role do we ascribe to optimization? That is, are we trying to balance things at all possible optimization levels for both "sets"? What metrics are we using to balance things? A "softer" approach to balance might be "can a character of class X and a character of class Y adventure together without the DM having to constantly put their thumb on the scale on the same side? Does the fiction work?" And applying this outside of combat (ie outside of places with nice clear metrics) gets...difficult.

Also, balancing for people who are challenge-and-optimization focused and for people who are aggressively not challenge-and-optimization focused simultaneously isn't necessarily even possible in the abstract. Because frequently their needs are in tension.

Beyond that, there's the philosophical question of "how much balance is needed in a team-based, cooperative game?"[1] I'm willing to stipulate that some level of balance (however defined) is important, but I'm not sure how much most of the things people talk about on these forums really matter outside of very edge case scenarios (relative to the intended aim of the game).

Personally, 5e does best when you accept that each table's "balance" may look different from any other table's balance. Trying for some system-wide hard balance ends up requiring homogeneity in a way that's even worse and even more fragile. And 5e is mostly[2] balanced in this dynamic sense, at least as-applied and outside the extreme optimizer camp.

Magic and Mundane
Assuming we want some sort of meaningful balance across combat and non-combat, the current D&D concept of magic is not helping. Because the current D&D concept of magic is "well, some stuff." There isn't any notion of what spells (a subset of magic) can't do--the entirety of that is "the set of things that don't have a spell printed yet". It's also way easier to print a spell than any other piece of content, because spells are almost entirely self-contained. Printing a new spell requires printing the new entry and updating a set of spell lists, and then all the affected spell casters immediately pick up the changes, especially full-list preparers like clerics, but also wizards (especially). Spells-learned casters are a bit more restricted, but still you can swap out spells on level up. So the time between printing and people using it is small. Spells are also relatively small chunks, so they're thought of as "safe" ways to add content. Which means lots and lots of spells get printed over the course of an edition, which makes the "things spells can't do" list shrink.

Thus, spells are effectively unbounded, both in theory and in practice. The only limit is "we haven't written a spell that does that yet". "Mundane" things are inherently more limited, especially when there's a vocal contingent who wants non-spell-casters to be restricted to only things doable in (at most) an action-hero-realistic setting. You can't balance limited with unlimited. Add to this the extreme pushback from the (very vocal) wizard-supremacist[3] faction at anything that smells anything like a nerf of wizards and their ability to learn all the broken spells, as well as the very vocal high-power contingent (who push for the power cap to be set at or above the strongest option, so any nerfs to anything at all are off the table).

Throw in the large faction of those who dislike any non-button-oriented procedure (desiring that the contributions of characters mostly come from explicit mechanical elements, aka buttons on the character sheet), and you've got a mess.

So no, I doubt that "balance" will come anytime soon. Or if it does, it will irritate a lot of people strongly.

What would be required, in my mind
All of:
1) put magic on a firm theoretical foundation, including (and especially) limits and boundaries. Saying that "magic cannot do X and we will never write a spell that breaks this" and firmly committing to it.
2) Forcing specialization of casters. This might come in the form of "tech tree" style spell learning (must learn X lower level Y spells to learn that new shiny higher level one), rejiggering how spell lists work entirely, or otherwise drastically reducing the horizontal flexibility of casters.
3) Moving a lot of "utility/non-combat" effects entirely outside the spell-casting system, a la 4e Rituals (but done right and not super timidly)
4) Accepting that there's a power break point at which either
4a) advancement stops for everyone
4b) "mundane" people have to start not being so shackled to being mundane.
5) and then accepting that, if we go with (4b), martials are going to end up looking "anime" in some fashion. The extent of that depends on the decisions in (6).
6) setting and committing to a firm "expected power band" for the system. Any option that ends up outside this band will get adjusted either upward or downward. That is, reject relative balancing and commit to an absolute balance point. Instead of saying "class X is weaker than class Y, so buff X/nerf Y", say "class X is weaker than the bottom end of the power band, so buff X" or "class Y is stronger than the upper end of the power band, so nerf Y".

And the constituency for the entire set of these changes is...small.

[1] which is what D&D is supposed to be; pvp/competitive games are a whole 'nother ballgame that does require much more inter-character balance, but importing ideas from one into the other is fraught with difficulty.
[2] except for a few options, such as the Twilight and Peace clerics and scenarios involving minionmancy or simulacrum shenanigans. Or when DMs (wittingly or not) give spells broad leeway to be "creative" and simultaneously keep non-casters in a very cramped, unrealistic Guy at the Gym mode.
[3] and yes, my impression is that it is wizards, specifically. Seriously, I think that 5e's wizards are the front-runners in the "badly designed class" sweepstakes and are the cause of most of the issue; if everyone were more like 5e sorcerers, the gap would be tremendously smaller. The insistence that gishing (in the "9th level spells and fighting like a fighter" sense) be a totally normal thing also causes issues[4].
[4] were it up to me, if you're a full caster, the best you could do martially would be roughly 1/3 of a fighter. Because that's the best spell-casting a fighter can get, and things should be symmetric. That means things like no armor, one attack at most, etc.

Sadly that one's just against what the target audience wants. I'm not sure 5e even has chase rules.

It absolutely does. Are they the best chase rules? YMMV.

clash

2022-07-25, 12:35 PM

Slipjig

2022-07-25, 12:41 PM

PhoenixPhyre

2022-07-25, 12:55 PM

The "Guy at the Gym" thing always made me a little crazy, because it's an inherently low-level concept. Sure, lots of fantasy swordsmen fit that mold (Conan, Aragon, Gray Mouser), but I'd also argue that most of those characters were never higher than level 5. None of them ever go toe-to-toe with a Balrog, they out-fox it or run away.

Leveling up requires learning new skills and abilities. If your guy at the gym just keeps doing curls and running on the treadmill, he's going to top off at some point, and that doesn't mean the system accurately representing him is broken.

My difficulty with it is when the people involved have a particularly cramped interpretation of what is realistic. Like the whole "you can't swim in chainmail" thing. Reality is, well, not very realistic. Lots of crazy stuff happens. So reality should be the floor for what a mid-plus level person can do with good ability scores and proficiency. Especially since the genre isn't "realistic and gritty low fantasy", it's explicitly high fantasy heroes, who are always somewhat larger than life.

I'd say that, even if we set the max power level somewhere low, that Action Hero (and one of the upper-end ones, a John Wick-esque person at that) is the right ballpark. Not Joe Average.

If I were in charge, I'd set the power progression from Action Hero (at the low end, more durable and faster and skilled/lucky than is reasonable for a normal person) to mid-tier super hero (not the Hulk or any of the Avengers, no demigods or world-bending sorcerers, more of the more grounded versions of Batman[1], etc) at the high end. Still very mortal, still very killable, not doing N-dimensional chess/mind games, not casually rewriting reality, but definitely taking on large and dangerous challenges and succeeding more by teamwork and heroic spirit than by sheer personal power.

Honestly, I'd much prefer if the teamwork element were dramatically emphasized. No more "win buttons". A culture where any challenge that can be soloed by anyone and especially by a single action wasn't a level-appropriate challenge to begin with. You should win by working together so that the combined ability of the team >> the straight sum of your individual abilities.

If it takes 10 "points" to solve a level-appropriate challenge, no one should be either a 0 (cannot contribute at all) OR a 10. And most people should be 6-7 in a few areas and 3-4 in a few other areas, with most things being 5-ish. Able to contribute meaningfully, but requiring multiple people to contribute to make progress.

[1] if I have my superheroes right, I'm not much for superhero knowledge. But the concept is right--less "singlehandedly defeating the demonic hordes of the Abyss that the entirety of the devils' armies can't budge" or "casually reshaping society into a post-scarcity regime" and more "can, with pluck, preparation, luck, and teamwork, take down an ancient dragon or demon prince (the latter once allies, etc, have given them an opening to fight the thing more directly, rather than wading through the entire demon army to get there)."

Willie the Duck

2022-07-25, 12:56 PM

Sadly that one's just against what the target audience wants. I'm not sure 5e even has chase rules.

Y'see, I'm not sure we know that. We know 3e and 4e had more expansive skill and general resolution systems*, and we know that 5e is more popular than those editions, but we don't know that that is because of those systems. We also know they made 5e as a return to form with the TSR era and leaned into DM adjudication over rules for everything (and, at least in part, included a vestigial and 'DM will sort it out' style skill system as part of this ethos), and that 5e is hugely popular, but we don't know that individual component X is or isn't wanted.
*honestly not that notable versions of those things, looking at TTRPGs in total.

Overall, my takeaway from places other than forums is that fewer gamers out there than here are all that concerned with caster-noncaster balance than than here, and that's my primary reason why I don't think this will be resolved.

I guess this boils down to I wish I were a fly on the wall of WotC customer research, and knew what they'd determined people really do and don't like about the game. Without that, it's hard to draw solid conclusions.

Anonymouswizard

2022-07-25, 01:06 PM

Urgh, people are getting too caught up on the chase rules thing. It was meant to be more along the lines of '5e is so simplified I'd honestly believe it not having them'.

RandomPeasant

2022-07-25, 01:09 PM

'making things dead' significantly more of a martials-are-better scenario

There are manifold problems with this. The most obvious is the same problem with trying to fix martial/caster balance by partitioning out niches: the genre doesn't treat them as separate concepts. Kaladin is a master spearman, but he can also fly, manipulate gravity, make stuff stick to other stuff, and has extremely powerful magical gear. While "play exactly Kaladin" isn't necessarily something D&D needs to support, a paradigm that demands we throw out every character who is "a little bit martial" and "a little bit caster" doesn't seem workable.

Magic having a few more limitations and inconveniences (something the game has been moving away from since at least the initial 1e release)

Making magic harder to use isn't really a great balancing mechanism. It mostly just makes the game less fun for casters, and sometimes for martials ("protect the queen" gameplay isn't for everyone).

Magic moving from 'it just works' to a more nuanced resolution with rolls or modifiers or requirements (whatever mundane resolution looks like)

Magic "just working" when mundane methods require rolls is fairly rare, and usually justified when it happens. Offensive spells have damage rolls and/or saves, or are limited compared to those that do. Utility spells don't always have rolls, but that's justified by the resource expenditure, or difficult to imagine implementing effectively. I'm not sure what sort of roll teleport could require that would leave it recognizably teleport, and even if you thread that needle, I don't see that offering much traction for purely mundane alternatives.

A more extensive (and cohesive) set of rules for the vast array of activities outside of fighting and things where magicspellcasting is the only reasonable solution.

That doesn't really solve the problem. Could the game have more extensive rules for overland travel? Sure. Should the game have more extensive rules for overland travel? Sure. But at some point you're going to get teleport, and then it doesn't matter how detailed those rules are. The game would benefit from more extensive rules for low-level non-combat challenges. But the high level non-combat challenges that need magic exist too, and if we insist the Fighter be mundane there's nothing to do but tell him to go hang.

And applying this outside of combat (ie outside of places with nice clear metrics) gets...difficult.

I disagree that non-combat situations lack clear metrics. The metrics for combat balance aren't (or shouldn't be) "the character does X damage and survive Y attacks". They're about using abilities to overcome challenges. That generalizes quite nicely to non-combat challenges, provided you've got a rules framework for modeling those challenges.

Trying for some system-wide hard balance ends up requiring homogeneity in a way that's even worse and even more fragile.

This is flatly false. If you look at the parts of 3e that people call "most balanced" (I take a certain umbrage with that term, but that's another issue), they are actually extremely heterogenous. You could fill a PHB with T3 and T4 classes and you wouldn't have to include two that worked the same way.

There isn't any notion of what spells (a subset of magic) can't do

I've never really understood the idea that having well-defined laws of magic implicates balance to any terribly great degree. I mean, look at the rest of the genre. Lord of the Rings has magic that does "whatever" to a pretty large degree. Gandalf never sits down and explains "you weave the magic like this to make fire and like that to make lightning and you can't make acid with magic". But the magic in the story is nevertheless quite compatible with mundane characters sharing significant amounts of screentime. Conversely, Mistborn has extremely structured magic, with well-defined rules and limits, but I wouldn't want to try to play a mundane character in a party with a Mistborn, a full Feruchemist, and a Twinborn Compounder. Let alone someone like the Lord Ruler.

Throw in the large faction of those who dislike any non-button-oriented procedure (desiring that the contributions of characters mostly come from explicit mechanical elements, aka buttons on the character sheet), and you've got a mess.

I really don't understand your opposition that the ability of characters to solve things should be dependent on the abilities those characters have. That seems, in fact, like rather a prerequisite for any notion of "balance" that means anything at all.

2) Forcing specialization of casters. This might come in the form of "tech tree" style spell learning (must learn X lower level Y spells to learn that new shiny higher level one), rejiggering how spell lists work entirely, or otherwise drastically reducing the horizontal flexibility of casters.

This would seem to make 1) rather unnecessary, wouldn't it? Who cares if magic can't do X, Y, and Z if any individual caster is only capable of doing X, Y, or Z.

It absolutely does. Are they the best chase rules? YMMV.

Do you have a citation to those rules?

No. Because people don't want it. Not really. I've seen enough controversy in threads on here alone to indicate that balance can't exist between martials and casters at high level. Too many people play martials to have an ordinary guy hanging out with demi gods. Hawkeye can meaningfully contribute with the other avengers but he's never going to be as powerful as doctor strange or hulk. That's just a fact. So if people want a level 20 "Hawkeye" then it won't be possible to be balanced with the level 20 "doctor strange"

Why does Hawkeye need to be 20th level? If you can have all the abilities you need to be Hawkeye as an 8th level character, what possible benefit is there in insisting that Hawkeye reach 20th level?

If I were in charge, I'd set the power progression from Action Hero (at the low end, more durable and faster and skilled/lucky than is reasonable for a normal person) to mid-tier super hero (not the Hulk or any of the Avengers, no demigods or world-bending sorcerers, more of the more grounded versions of Batman[1], etc) at the high end.

I think you are going to have a very hard time convincing casual fans that "under no circumstances may your Wizard approach the power of the best-known Wizard in contemporary popular culture" (Doctor Strange) is an acceptable constraint, and an even harder time convincing established fans that the kinds of power that has existed (or at least been promised) in every edition of the game must be abolished. And you really don't need to. Writing a combat system that scales from "guy who stabs rats in sewers" to "guy who fights Elder Evils and Demon Princes" is fairly easy. The non-combat stuff is harder, but it's also much more modular.

Honestly, I'd much prefer if the teamwork element were dramatically emphasized. No more "win buttons". A culture where any challenge that can be soloed by anyone and especially by a single action wasn't a level-appropriate challenge to begin with. You should win by working together so that the combined ability of the team >> the straight sum of your individual abilities.

Most people don't want to spend that much time juggling abilities that make their allies better. The guy who wants to play a Fire Mage wants to play a mage that blasts people with fire, not someone who applies a fire-based buff to their allies. It's also much harder to achieve balance if you abandon the notion of testing in isolation. Explicitly-cooperative mechanics should be rare, because it is dramatically easier to write a broken synergy between two disconnected abilities than it is to write an individual ability that is game-breaking.

KorvinStarmast

2022-07-25, 01:12 PM

Will D&D ever acheive caster vs martial balance? My answer to that is mu

1. The presumption that the characters are in competition with each other is a part of the problem here.
2. Another core problem, conceptually, is the "I want to have it both ways" attitude that is best exemplified by the Gish meme. One of the best forms of balance in the early versions was "if you build a magic user it's hard to survive for long enough to become powerful"
I miss that. I also understand why they stopped doing that.
3. Next problem: a trick to this game is to build an effective team. The question you ask doesn't address that.
4. Last problem: spell lists are too long. There is a never ending "we have an app for that" habit (which goes back a few editions) that creates a never ending imbalance on material available for one kind of player. (More toys for casters, coal in the stocking for martials). Until that attitude leaves town the imbalance in 'toys available' will not be addressable.
5. The longer this edition goes on the more Harry Potter the magic system becomes.

6. If you are looking for an answer, then wait for 6th edition and pray that the dev team for that edition isn't yet another case of "we have an app for that" as their working premise.
Not optimistic about that.

7. An idea I have not play tested, but which appeals to me.
Fighters, Rangers, Paladins and Barbarians ought to have a default bonus action of shove (5' or 10 ' but not a 'knock prone' option) from level 1 going forward.

NichG

2022-07-25, 01:31 PM

I don't think its a function of the system, I think its a function of the player base. Different people want different things out of the game, different people play the game in wildly different ways and with wildly different expectations, and while there's a common ground where usually any small group of people can find a compromise, when you take 'the entire player base as a whole' there are irreducible conflicts. One group of six will happily play something without trouble that would have a 7th person in conniptions, and a group with that 7th person in it can find their own balance but may well push out something than one of the first six finds essential about the play experience.

Batcathat

2022-07-25, 01:41 PM

3. Next problem: a trick to this game is to build an effective team. The question you ask doesn't address that.

Indirectly, I think it kinda does. Having all members feel like they're contributing is typically important to team cohesion and well-being. If I was playing in a soccer team where I was only allowed to touch the ball with my left leg while other players were allowed to use both legs, both arms and their head I'd probably be a little annoyed, even if those other players were my teammates.

Vahnavoi

2022-07-25, 01:48 PM

I don't see Wizards of the Coast achieving this anytime soon, unless they dive deeper into the concept that any mechanic can stand in for any concept, which trivializes balance along with most other things: if balance between characters is desired, just hand each player a mechanically identical character and have them pretend that 1d6 damage is a sword strike for one and a fireball to another.

The primary stumbling block for WotC is that the concepts themselves are not balanced, especially not in the way people insist on playing them: people who play magic-users want to use magic and get sad if they can't, people who play fighters want to fight and get sad if there is no fighting, so on and so forth. The end-result is a game where a magic-user has magic to use even when they should be just a hanger-on while everyone else gets stuff only for their dedicated slice.

Vancian format of spellcasting is almost irrelevant to the larger issue; Vancian casting is only as dominant as the available spells. The spells themselves are what would need revising. This was most obvious in 3rd edition, but I don't think the lesson was learned as well as it could've been.

RandomPeasant

2022-07-25, 01:58 PM

1. The presumption that the characters are in competition with each other is a part of the problem here.

Competition between players isn't really the problem. The issue is with game assumptions, and certainly classes not measuring up to them. When you have a situation like that, you can either change the game (typical), change the class (hard), or have the player sit out (not fun). But none of those are great solutions for the player who really does want to play in the way classes have problems with.

2. Another core problem, conceptually, is the "I want to have it both ways" attitude that is best exemplified by the Gish meme. One of the best forms of balance in the early versions was "if you build a magic user it's hard to survive for long enough to become powerful"

That's only a problem if you insist on strict segregation of "magic" and "mundane". If you don't do that, it's just the way an overwhelming majority of fantasy protagonists work. Most characters have some mix of martial and magical skill. And that's fine, as long as you are not trying to protect "purely mundane warrior guy" as a 20th level concept.

3. Next problem: a trick to this game is to build an effective team. The question you ask doesn't address that.

People say this a lot, but it's very rarely the case that a character is bad individually but a key building block of a good team.

4. Last problem: spell lists are too long. There is a never ending "we have an app for that" habit (which goes back a few editions) that creates a never ending imbalance on material available for one kind of player. (More toys for casters, coal in the stocking for martials). Until that attitude leaves town the imbalance in 'toys available' will not be addressable.

Is the problem that spell lists are too long, or that the lists of abilities martial characters get is too short?

I don't think its a function of the system, I think its a function of the player base. Different people want different things out of the game, different people play the game in wildly different ways and with wildly different expectations, and while there's a common ground where usually any small group of people can find a compromise, when you take 'the entire player base as a whole' there are irreducible conflicts. One group of six will happily play something without trouble that would have a 7th person in conniptions, and a group with that 7th person in it can find their own balance but may well push out something than one of the first six finds essential about the play experience.

I think that is a function of the system. A well-designed system is one that is modifiable. Not just in the "the DM decides" way 5e tries to pass off, but in a way of being deliberately designed with an understanding of which parts can be changed and what the effect of changing them is. It's true that you can't support everyone perfectly, but you can make a system that is balanced at its core and has enough insight from the designers to make it easy for DMs (really, for tables) to modify it in the ways they want.

Indirectly, I think it kinda does. Having all members feel like they're contributing is typically important to team cohesion and well-being. If I was playing in a soccer team where I was only allowed to touch the ball with my left leg while other players were allowed to use both legs, both arms and their head I'd probably be a little annoyed, even if those other players were my teammates.

It causes problems going the other way too. Imagine if you were playing soccer and one member of your team decided they were only going to use their left leg for kicks. You'd feel pretty frustrated with them, even if it was a casual game. And there are broader issues too. Imagine if you decided to fix the issue by saying that half of people could use only their left legs and half only their right. That might be fun for some people, but it's not necessarily fun for everyone.

Psyren

2022-07-25, 01:58 PM

Sadly that one's just against what the target audience wants. I'm not sure 5e even has chase rules.

DMG 252-255

Urgh, people are getting too caught up on the chase rules thing. It was meant to be more along the lines of '5e is so simplified I'd honestly believe it not having them'.

Sure, but that highlights another problem - namely that some people (not saying you) will latch onto what they perceive as D&D's flaws without using, or sometimes even being aware of the existence of, the tools it provides to mitigate or eliminate said perceived flaws.

Indirectly, I think it kinda does. Having all members feel like they're contributing is typically important to team cohesion and well-being. If I was playing in a soccer team where I was only allowed to touch the ball with my left leg while other players were allowed to use both legs, both arms and their head I'd probably be a little annoyed, even if those other players were my teammates.

No. Because people don't want it. Not really. I've seen enough controversy in threads on here alone to indicate that balance can't exist between martials and casters at high level. Too many people play martials to have an ordinary guy hanging out with demi gods. Hawkeye can meaningfully contribute with the other avengers but he's never going to be as powerful as doctor strange or hulk. That's just a fact. So if people want a level 20 "Hawkeye" then it won't be possible to be balanced with the level 20 "doctor strange"

I think the problem stems from reconciling these two incompatible points of view. There are some who will believe any level of class disparity means they are playing one-legged with their hands tied behind their back, and there are others who enjoy the challenge of playing Hawkeye and Black Widow alongside Thor and Doctor Strange. D&D has to pick one of these to lean toward, and they appear to have picked the latter.

NichG

2022-07-25, 02:10 PM

I think that is a function of the system. A well-designed system is one that is modifiable. Not just in the "the DM decides" way 5e tries to pass off, but in a way of being deliberately designed with an understanding of which parts can be changed and what the effect of changing them is. It's true that you can't support everyone perfectly, but you can make a system that is balanced at its core and has enough insight from the designers to make it easy for DMs (really, for tables) to modify it in the ways they want.

I mean, most variations of D&D are eminently moddable, if you're working with a small group of people who generally know the game. But people will say 'that doesn't make D&D balanced' and they're not really wrong to say that. They'd just be wrong to say that 'you can't really mod D&D to be suitable to your group, because its bad at being modded'. I've played in low-power games that look like low magic bronze age stuff, high power games where characters end up beyond even overdeities, etc, all on D&D cores. All of those games fundamentally, worked - they were fun, the game didn't break down long after points where I can easily find people who would say 'that must have broken down', etc. But the high power high abstraction gesture to reshape continents games, as awesome as it was, would fundamentally not appeal to someone who wants to play Conan. And the Dark Sun 'oh wow, we get a single metal weapon as a quest reward?!' game just isn't going to cut it for someone who wants to do 4d chess with grab bags of powers.

And someone who wants to play Conan and lands in a group where the standard is god wizards and who is forced to play that is going to be salty about it, and rightfully so. But that'd be just as true for someone who wanted to play supernatural horror and joined a WoD vampire game only to find that the table culture was vampires as comic book supervillains. 'D&D' is so big as to be non-specific, and people assuming 'D&D means my style of D&D' are going to have encounters with groups whose style of D&D is unpalatable to them. That's not the system, that's the scope.

BRC

2022-07-25, 02:12 PM

Yes, other systems have done it, and 4e did it.

No I don't care about any 'wah 4e doesn't count' arguments. It balanced mundanes and casters. You might not like how it did it, and it's not the only way to do it, but it did it.

The issue comes from the fact you have to do one of three things: empower mundanes, weaken magicians, or have them meet in the middle*. Pick option one and you anger the third of the fans who believe that a Fighter should be 'the guy at the gym'. Pick the second option and you anger the third of the fanbase who think that magic should be able to do anything. Pick option three and you're pussing off both groups.

I argued years ago that D&D should be two systems, call them Warriors & Warlocks and Heroes & Hellscapes for the purpose of this discussion. Both use the same core system, but W&W supplies rules and classes for ordinary people and magicians with a handful of tricks, whereas H&H supplies rules for mythical heroes and reality warping mages. You could even publish rules for 'ascending' a W&W character to H&H. It would be much easier than the current attempts to balance them using the same rules at each extreme.

* You have the 4th option of 'get rid of mundanes' which games such as Exalted do, but D&D's never going to go for that.

everything above is correct.

More importantly, I think that the big issue is that the mechanic that is supposed to Balance Casters is just...not a very fun mechanic to engage with.

My understanding is that the early versions of D&D, whose DNA is very much carried through to more recent editions, were built as logistical challenges. The Party was to enter a dungeon, an isolated area with a series of obstacles and dangers, and emerge with as much treasure as possible.

Spell slots and Hit Points were your resources going in. Potions and Scrolls could supplement, but those cost money, every potion or scroll you used decreased your end profit.

So it was fine that a Wizard could do more with a Fireball than a Fighter could do with three rounds of swordplay, because that Fireball represented a valuable resource, one that the party would be loathe to use. Using that Fireball to win the fight NOW meant that was one less fireball you could use LATER, and you pushed as far as you could before needing to retreat with your loot. Meanwhile, the Fighter could do their thing for "Free" as it were.

The issue is that the game has become something very different. Playing the game to drain each caster of spell slots such that they must agonize over each casting just isn't very fun. As the game increasingly shifts it's focus towards Combat, the idea of the Caster needing to parcel out their spell slots for overcoming dungeon obstacles becomes less and less important. I've run a few sessions where the time between rests is such that the casters get drained of spell slots, but it's hard, especially at higher levels, to reach a point where the Wizard will see more combat rounds than they'll have spell slots to use them for. Creating a scenario that actually puts the wizard in that situation of measuring out each spell slot carefully requires a lot of deliberate planning, carefully spacing out the rests so it doesn't become a slog, providing a lot of opportunities for the Wizard to spend spell slots in ways that don't overshadow the party. MUCH harder than just "Here are 3 fights, have fun".

And, like, it's not nearly as fun as just letting people rest up between fights, letting Wizards throw their cool spells around. Sure, some groups may enjoy being pushed to that limit, but that's hardly a guarantee.

Anonymouswizard

2022-07-25, 02:24 PM

More importantly, I think that the big issue is that the mechanic that is supposed to Balance Casters is just...not a very fun mechanic to engage with.

Yeah, it was fine when your prepred spells were what you got until you left the dungeon, but D&D has moved away from that model.

Honestly, assuming you don't want to punish casters for casting (which can be viable game design, but is hard to balance) I think the 5e Warlock has a good system, especially for levels 1-10. You have your two slots which are mainly used for combat spells, but which you'll see refreshed after most combats, while yolur basic noncombat options are covered by Cantrips and Invocations. If you need a big noncombat spell you can do it, but youll start the next fight without as much oomph.

False God

2022-07-25, 02:32 PM

Not with the system they wish to preserve and the world they want to present.

RandomPeasant

2022-07-25, 02:53 PM

More importantly, I think that the big issue is that the mechanic that is supposed to Balance Casters is just...not a very fun mechanic to engage with.

I think that's true to a degree, but mostly the issue is less about fun and more about the very specific and constrained environment that spell slots balance for. There's also the broader problem that talking about "a mechanic" that is supposed to balance casters means constraining your system a great deal. A Binder, a Warlock, a Dread Necromancer, a Psion, a Wizard, and an Incarnate are all "casters" to some degree, but they do not remotely have a single mechanic to balance them.

There are some who will believe any level of class disparity means they are playing one-legged with their hands tied behind their back, and there are others who enjoy the challenge of playing Hawkeye and Black Widow alongside Thor and Doctor Strange.

This is one of those arguments that gets made all the time in theoretical balance discussions, but that I have never once seen made in real life. I've seen people who play Fighters. Some of them complain about the imbalance. Some of them don't, sometimes because they don't notice, other times because they don't care much about how effective their character is. But what I have never once seen is someone who plays a Fighter because it is mechanically inferior to other classes. It's not a thing that happens.

I mean, most variations of D&D are eminently moddable, if you're working with a small group of people who generally know the game. But people will say 'that doesn't make D&D balanced' and they're not really wrong to say that.

That's exactly what I mean by not being adequately moddable. A truly modular system should, to as large a degree as possible, be modifiable without needing deep knowledge. The problem is that making a system like that requires not just that you make a system that is balanced with whatever set of parameters you have tuned it for, but also that you understand what those parameters are, what effect changing them will have on balance, and be able to convey that information effectively to the end user. To use a metaphor, it's one thing to develop JavaScript and HTML, but another thing entirely to develop a WYSIWYG website creator. It's not wrong to say that the former can be used to build a custom website, but the experience is rather different than the one to be had using the latter.

Willie the Duck

2022-07-25, 03:08 PM

There are manifold problems with this. The most obvious is the same problem with trying to fix martial/caster balance by partitioning out niches: the genre doesn't treat them as separate concepts. Kaladin is a master spearman, but he can also fly, manipulate gravity, make stuff stick to other stuff, and has extremely powerful magical gear. While "play exactly Kaladin" isn't necessarily something D&D needs to support, a paradigm that demands we throw out every character who is "a little bit martial" and "a little bit caster" doesn't seem workable.

I'm very confused about this. My post has nothing to do with whether caster/martial builds are feasible in the game. My point was about martials (or the martial component of a martial-magic hybrid, I guess) having a vein of activity in which they have dominance. Fighters need to be good at defeating enemies, possibly better (at least in general) than other character options, if that is going to be a defining component of their role. I don't know where you got the rest of this.

Making magic harder to use isn't really a great balancing mechanism. It mostly just makes the game less fun for casters, and sometimes for martials ("protect the queen" gameplay isn't for everyone).

I certainly wouldn't suggest going back to the TSR era paradigm of 'casters are 1) incredibly fragile, 2) must spend all their time hunting for every scrap of paper, 3) lost spells in a heartbeat if someone sneezes on them hard while they are casting, 4) need to prepare each spell slot individually ahead of time (such that only the truly omniscient, or who know their DMs really really well, will ever have the right spells ready), but if they live to mid levels suddenly run away with the game.' There is a reason why the game moved away from those mechanisms. That doesn't mean where we landed is necessarily right either (the continuous churn of threads of this nature kinda speak to the notion that it isn't, at least for some). Something as simple as* making it easier to include the intended amount of resource expenditures per recharge cycle such that a rogue's 'always on' abilities or fighter's 'mostly always-on plus some other' are adequately balanced. Or worse caster at-wills; or a little harder to cast when threatened. I have nothing solid with this, but any one of any number of small tweaks would work on the balance. Of course it would have to go through balancing against the rest of (this theoretical, redesigned) system.
*And let's be clear, I am usually the guy who points out how the DMG is full of discussion and optional rules which do take stabs at this.

Magic "just working" when mundane methods require rolls is fairly rare, and usually justified when it happens. Offensive spells have damage rolls and/or saves, or are limited compared to those that do. Utility spells don't always have rolls, but that's justified by the resource expenditure, or difficult to imagine implementing effectively. I'm not sure what sort of roll teleport could require that would leave it recognizably teleport, and even if you thread that needle, I don't see that offering much traction for purely mundane alternatives.
There are some outliers in the offensive spells where the restriction is a little too toothless or too few creatures have a response or similar, but in general I am talking about OOC effects. Regarding resource expenditures -- yes, this is clearly supposed to be a major component to this, and in groups* where this happens, the notion of caster supremacy is decidedly muted. Teleport actually is a good example, in that it does get this treatment -- you can teleport, but unless it is to your living room or you have the big-bad's teddy bear, you are appearing a significant distance away (likely enough that you have to travel through some or all of the challenges meant to be between you and your goal, such that teleport doesn't obviate entire adventures). This conceptually could be expanded to other spells. Take Remove Curse. Curses** in the game are either completely debilitating because you have no response to them, or trivial because you know at 5th level Cleric, Wizard or Warlock/9th level paladin with the spell Remove Curse known or able to be prepared. If there were a system of checks where this festering curse could be dispelled by a warlock casting with a 3rd level slot or a cleric with a 5th level slot, but anyone with knowledge of cthonic rites could make a DC 15 religion check to remove the curse at the expense of 3 levels of exhaustion (or such a check could just reduce the slot size needed by 1), or some similar kind of interplay, well that would be an interesting interplay between spells, not-spells, and game effects. Even simpler, I think 4e had it where find traps and knock spells simply let you use your caster stat instead of the normal one for trap-finding and lockpicking rolls. That's the kind of interplay that would make noncasters see more parity (alongside, as I mentioned later, some complexity in the non-spell-like resolution mechanics).
*my own in particular -- we generally play a variation of gritty recharge and have in-game reasons why you can't just rest after every challenge, and likewise the class balance issues are relegated to some niche problems. This is mostly ideas for people for whom this is a non-starter.
** Those with some duration, so not from the spell unless upcast

That doesn't really solve the problem. Could the game have more extensive rules for overland travel? Sure. Should the game have more extensive rules for overland travel? Sure. But at some point you're going to get teleport, and then it doesn't matter how detailed those rules are. The game would benefit from more extensive rules for low-level non-combat challenges. But the high level non-combat challenges that need magic exist too, and if we insist the Fighter be mundane there's nothing to do but tell him to go hang.
There's not going to be a single suggestion that covers all the issues, but that does not mean we shouldn't put them forward. High-level play will always be incredibly hard to balance* without pissing off some portion of the base with strongly held beliefs. In the meantime, if a huge chunk of the game were to be spent on in depth social and negotiation rules, chases, survival and travel, figuring out how to get an army across a chasm instead of just a party, and all the other things that fit between fighting and spells, than that last 10% where fighters make things dead better than anyone else and casters solve that narrow slice of problems it's hard to explain mundane means addressing becomes a much more manageable portion of gameplay to have to try to make comparable in effect.
*to be clear again, if we allow casters spells which solve incredibly huge problems just by the spell existing and being cast, then yes the only way to solve that is having non-spellcasters have equally huge effects. My suggestion for this has always been 1) separate being able to address these from the rest of spellcasting and make them available to all, and 2) as someone else mentioned, make two tracks for D&D: one with limited casters and truly mundane martials and then another where both casters and non-casters eventually start moving mountains

Psyren

2022-07-25, 03:15 PM

I mean, most variations of D&D are eminently moddable, if you're working with a small group of people who generally know the game. But people will say 'that doesn't make D&D balanced' and they're not really wrong to say that. They'd just be wrong to say that 'you can't really mod D&D to be suitable to your group, because its bad at being modded'. I've played in low-power games that look like low magic bronze age stuff, high power games where characters end up beyond even overdeities, etc, all on D&D cores. All of those games fundamentally, worked - they were fun, the game didn't break down long after points where I can easily find people who would say 'that must have broken down', etc. But the high power high abstraction gesture to reshape continents games, as awesome as it was, would fundamentally not appeal to someone who wants to play Conan. And the Dark Sun 'oh wow, we get a single metal weapon as a quest reward?!' game just isn't going to cut it for someone who wants to do 4d chess with grab bags of powers.

And someone who wants to play Conan and lands in a group where the standard is god wizards and who is forced to play that is going to be salty about it, and rightfully so. But that'd be just as true for someone who wanted to play supernatural horror and joined a WoD vampire game only to find that the table culture was vampires as comic book supervillains. 'D&D' is so big as to be non-specific, and people assuming 'D&D means my style of D&D' are going to have encounters with groups whose style of D&D is unpalatable to them. That's not the system, that's the scope.

Agreed.

This is one of those arguments that gets made all the time in theoretical balance discussions, but that I have never once seen made in real life. I've seen people who play Fighters. Some of them complain about the imbalance. Some of them don't, sometimes because they don't notice, other times because they don't care much about how effective their character is. But what I have never once seen is someone who plays a Fighter because it is mechanically inferior to other classes. It's not a thing that happens.

You've never come across anyone who wants to play Conan or Aragorn or Caramon or Robin Hood, but also wants to fight mindflayers and balors and dragons? Really? Not once?

Yeah, it was fine when your prepred spells were what you got until you left the dungeon, but D&D has moved away from that model.

Honestly, assuming you don't want to punish casters for casting (which can be viable game design, but is hard to balance) I think the 5e Warlock has a good system, especially for levels 1-10. You have your two slots which are mainly used for combat spells, but which you'll see refreshed after most combats, while yolur basic noncombat options are covered by Cantrips and Invocations. If you need a big noncombat spell you can do it, but youll start the next fight without as much oomph.

Warlock is a fine attempt but it does have some issues I'm hoping get ironed out in 5.5e:

- You mentioned it recovers its big combat spells/nukes after most combats, but that can vary materially by table. Some require a minimum of two combats per short rest if not more, and in those cases the Warlock can feel much more constrained than other casters in that level range as it needs to space them out with cantrips and invocations more.

- The above is compounded if the Warlock is the only full caster in the party and thus they are relied upon for utility spells or healing as well, functions that cantrips do poorly and that may not allow for short rests between their use and a fight breaking out. You tend to feel that pinch much more when a Warlock is the only caster than when the only caster is a Wizard, Cleric or even Bard.

NichG

2022-07-25, 03:22 PM

That's exactly what I mean by not being adequately moddable. A truly modular system should, to as large a degree as possible, be modifiable without needing deep knowledge. The problem is that making a system like that requires not just that you make a system that is balanced with whatever set of parameters you have tuned it for, but also that you understand what those parameters are, what effect changing them will have on balance, and be able to convey that information effectively to the end user. To use a metaphor, it's one thing to develop JavaScript and HTML, but another thing entirely to develop a WYSIWYG website creator. It's not wrong to say that the former can be used to build a custom website, but the experience is rather different than the one to be had using the latter.

But this 'adequate' concept is always relative to personal experience and personal need. For the things where I've used it, I'd rather mod D&D than, say, FATE because I'm intending to take advantage of the fact that D&D has these dense layers of sediment built up over multiple generations of the system in order to have lots of stuff to hook to, lots of weirdness to make things feel mechanically unique, etc. In other cases, I have chosen to use 7th Sea or World of Darkness or FUDGE as a base, or to write something from scratch because I wanted something really specific at all levels.

The problem happens at the moment that someone decides that 'D&D is trying to be X', when really its just this big sprawling thing that lands across a lot of zones of interest. Usually that concept of 'X' ends up way too small to fit everyone who is currently actually managing to make the thing as it is work, so you get proposed 'fixes' which are more like assertions that one style of play should be preferred over others, and then naturally those fixes don't actually take.

Slipjig

2022-07-25, 03:48 PM

No. Because people don't want it. Not really. I've seen enough controversy in threads on here alone to indicate that balance can't exist between martials and casters at high level. Too many people play martials to have an ordinary guy hanging out with demi gods. Hawkeye can meaningfully contribute with the other avengers but he's never going to be as powerful as doctor strange or hulk. That's just a fact. So if people want a level 20 "Hawkeye" then it won't be possible to be balanced with the level 20 "doctor strange"
If a Hawkeye character can do everything in his character concept at level 5, maybe he's just a level 5 character concept, and growing beyond level 5 will require an explanation of where the new power is coming from.

You can be fairly low-level and still be a plausible action hero. You just can't go toe-to-toe with the big scary monsters, but it's worth remembering that fantasy swordsmen generally DON'T go toe-to-toe with the big beasts.

RandomPeasant

2022-07-25, 03:48 PM

Fighters need to be good at defeating enemies, possibly better (at least in general) than other character options, if that is going to be a defining component of their role. I don't know where you got the rest of this.

I suppose I may be reading a more general version of the position into your argument than you personally believe. The issue, as I identify it, is that if you protect the role of "combat" as the reason mundanes are viable, what the hell do you do when someone who proposes a character who is a skilled swordsman, but also has magic? Do you just arbitrarily declare that character can't exist? That doesn't seem great, those characters are all over the genre. Do you require that character to trade off some sword-ing from the mundane cap for their magic? If you do that, you're effectively applying a power cap, and if you do that you don't need any role protection for mundanes, you just set the power cap somewhere they can keep up.

But if the proposal is that Fighters will get some manner of non-mundane capability, and simply have combat as a protected role in general, I still think that's fundamentally flawed. Combat and non-combat are different parts of the game, and trying to balance by trading off between them (rather than balancing with each separately) means that you've created an entirely unnecessary form of balance problem. If the Wizard and the Fighter are balanced in combat and out of combat, an individual game can have whatever ratio of combat to non-combat it has and things are fine. If they're balanced because the Fighter stomps combat encounters and the Wizard stomps non-combat encounters, the game is only balanced if those encounters appear in whatever the expected ratio is. Not to mention higher-order problems like "if the Fighter sucks outside combat, tables will probably skew away from non-combat challenges, meaning the Wizard won't get to do their cool stuff", or expansion problems like "how do you handle the Fire Mage, a class that is both a mage and clearly has combat as its primary niche".

Basically, people really hate being told they have to play a Cleric for healing or a Rogue for traps. Making more of the system like that sounds like a really bad approach to balance.

I have nothing solid with this, but any one of any number of small tweaks would work on the balance. Of course it would have to go through balancing against the rest of (this theoretical, redesigned) system.

I don't really think small tweaks are going to do much to solve such a large problem. And, honestly, combat is the part of the game where casters and martials are closest to fine. In 3e, it was entirely possible to make a martial character who could viably contribute to combat up to mid or even (with optimization and specialized builds) high levels. It just took more work than it should've, and a lot of classes didn't get there. If the modal martial character was a Warblade, combat would be fine.

(likely enough that you have to travel through some or all of the challenges meant to be between you and your goal, such that teleport doesn't obviate entire adventures).

I never understood the "teleport obviates adventures" complaint. teleport obviates low-level adventures, and it allows you to bypass certain challenges. I'll give you that 3e-style Teleport Ambushes are probably too much, but high level play should be different from low level play, and teleport negating travel times is a great example of that. If players are regularly bypassing encounters with teleport, that's a sign you're designing adventures that players aren't engaging with.

Curses** in the game are either completely debilitating because you have no response to them, or trivial because you know at 5th level Cleric, Wizard or Warlock/9th level paladin with the spell Remove Curse known or able to be prepared. If there were a system of checks where this festering curse could be dispelled by a warlock casting with a 3rd level slot or a cleric with a 5th level slot, but anyone with knowledge of cthonic rites could make a DC 15 religion check to remove the curse at the expense of 3 levels of exhaustion (or such a check could just reduce the slot size needed by 1), or some similar kind of interplay, well that would be an interesting interplay between spells, not-spells, and game effects.

It would also create a great deal more mechanical complexity. The system where casters have abilities that do things works. Instead of creating an extremely complicated system of interlocking rules where mundane capabilities can be voltroned together to solve problems, why not just give non-casters abilities that do things?

In the meantime, if a huge chunk of the game were to be spent on in depth social and negotiation rules, chases, survival and travel, figuring out how to get an army across a chasm instead of just a party, and all the other things that fit between fighting and spells, than that last 10% where fighters make things dead better than anyone else and casters solve that narrow slice of problems it's hard to explain mundane means addressing becomes a much more manageable portion of gameplay to have to try to make comparable in effect.

But that stuff already basically works to the degree that it can. Maybe you could use a Skill Challenge system that covered non-combat encounters in greater detail, but skill checks do basically allow you to do human-level stuff. The problem is that it doesn't scale. Because it can't scale, by definition. You can write some curses that can be removed without remove curse, but the stories where curses must be broken with powerful magic are still there, and people need powerful magic to tell those stories.

1) separate being able to address these from the rest of spellcasting and make them available to all

Ah, but there's the rub. Once you declare that non-combat magic is accessible to everyone, you're already down the "there aren't mundanes in high-level play" fork, and we don't need all the mucking about nerfing casters.

2) as someone else mentioned, make two tracks for D&D: one with limited casters and truly mundane martials and then another where both casters and non-casters eventually start moving mountains

It's not really "two tracks". It's two tiers. Because these aren't co-equal things. The tier where everyone is tethered to the power of mundanes is simply less powerful than the one where they are not, and trying to finagle things so that both tiers go to 20 simply means doing more work without allowing the system to support any additional stories. And while tiers are a fine way of approaching things, but they again obviate any need to nerf mages. They can do all the same things, they just write "13th level" instead of "7th level" on their character sheet when they do.

You've never come across anyone who wants to play Conan or Aragorn or Caramon or Robin Hood, but also wants to fight mindflayers and balors and dragons? Really? Not once?

One might reasonably ask what on earth that has to do with the question of people who want to play Fighters because they are bad. Lots of people want to play Conan and fight Mind Flayers. Those are people who want Conan to be good, not people who want him to be bad.

(One might also reasonably ask how someone is squaring the circle of "be Aragorn" and "defeat a creature Aragorn flees from because he cannot fight it", but that's another issue)

If a Hawkeye character can do everything in his character concept at level 5, maybe he's just a level 5 character concept, and growing beyond level 5 will require an explanation of where the new power is coming from.

You can be fairly low-level and still be a plausible action hero. You just can't go toe-to-toe with the big scary monsters, but it's worth remembering that fantasy swordsmen generally DON'T go toe-to-toe with the big beasts.

One thing I will note, and which I think is a fair complaint to make, is that D&D has historically made it fairly difficult to build characters like Conan or Aragorn at the levels where they are effective. Hawkeye is somewhere between 5th and 8th level, depending on how you assess his capabilities and what edition you use, but you'd be hard-pressed to put together a martial character at anywhere in that level range which captures his full set of capabilities. That doesn't mean he needs to be higher level, because he demonstrably does not do the things his higher level allies do (like fight Thanos or have opponents with "God Butcher" as a title), but it does suggest that there are necessary reforms to the martial classes beyond just "make them better at high levels".

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-25, 03:50 PM

Telok

2022-07-25, 03:57 PM

I think the 5e Warlock has a good system, especially for levels 1-10. You have your two slots which are mainly used for combat spells, but which you'll see refreshed after most combats, while yolur basic noncombat options are covered by Cantrips and Invocations. If you need a big noncombat spell you can do it, but youll start the next fight without as much oomph.

That's a good model but the current implementation has issues, especially with the level 11+ stuff, some rather inflexible fluff that's been baked into the spell lists, and serious issues at 3+ combats per rest. It also has an issue with making most of the warlock's actions just dull old spamming EB (unless gish then its the same but with a weapon). Current warlocks get very little variety of action in actual play other than those one to three pact slots, and that pushes players towards the same handful of stronger & multiuse/no save spells like polymorph & company.

I mean, its fine if you want a basic magic archer with one-two spells per combat and a very few very much less impactful at-will 1st/2nd level spells. But... eh, I've found it hard to maintain a set of appropriate & useful abilities past 10th and always seem to need to multiclass out to pick up real utility while staying on theme.

I think the writers are actually afraid of at-will abilities on anyone. Without tying abilites to spending hit dice or gaining exhaustion its hard (for them) to justify nonmagic special moves. You have battle master fighters but zero expanson on maneuvers. Barbarians have x/day rage which is the exact same as an x/day spell effect by mechanical pact (and ki is pretty much the same but magical). They're moving towards prof/day stuff but thats just lipsticking the x/day spell effect mechanic pig again. Rituals are supposed to be balanced on the cast time, but their succes there is arguable and it still boils down to "casters can & martials beg".

MoiMagnus

2022-07-25, 04:07 PM

RandomPeasant

2022-07-25, 04:18 PM

I don't want anime martials. I don't want them to start using ki at some point. I don't want them to be locked out of higher levels unless they unlock super demigod powers, etc.

There's two ways to mean that. Is it that you think "non-anime" (whatever it is you specifically think that means) martials can play at the extremes of power that exist and have existed in D&D, or that you want to drag down high level to something where "non-anime" martials can compete. Because one of those is a much harder sell than the other.

Everyone is convinced that in order to be better they have to become anime demigods and I'm like... we haven't even seen the middle of the spectrum yet.

As I said earlier, I think it is certainly true that martials are underpowered at pre-superhuman levels. But I have a great deal of difficulty imagining a system by which a guy at the gym can keep up with a high level Wizard that does not A) remove the things that make high level Wizards interesting or B) completely shatter any suspension of disbelief.

You don't need to be Avengers level to do something like this;

You don't. But you have to be Avengers level to take on Avengers-level threats. So either martial characters eventually grow up to get there (even if they are also better at low levels), or those threats can't exist in D&D. And that would be a real shame, because they have historically been all over D&D. Your Demon Lords, Princes of Elemental Evil, Elder Evils, Primordials, and whatnot are a big part of D&D, and ejecting them just so someone can play a Fighter 20 without any abilities inappropriate for a 10th level character seems a pointless sacrifice.

Current warlocks get very little variety of action in actual play other than those one to three pact slots, and that pushes players towards the same handful of stronger & multiuse/no save spells like polymorph & company.

This, incidentally, is another issue with trying to achieve balance by nerfing casters (particularly within an existing system, but in general too). If you're not extremely careful, you will end up with casters who are just as powerful, but less diverse and therefore less interesting. Or you'll end up with casters who have too few resources to bother with spells that aren't overpowered, and your efforts to curb optimization just push it to an even larger degree.

I think the writers are actually afraid of at-will abilities on anyone.

The idea of at-will abilities that are any good has horrified D&D's designers for a long time. Even in 4e, where everyone gets at-will powers as a fundamental part of the game, they're weak and uninteresting. I think it's an overreaction based on the daily nature of Vancian casting. It's one of those things that makes me suspect that while this is an eminently solvable problem, the people working on D&D will not manage to solve it.

Psyren

2022-07-25, 04:19 PM

One might reasonably ask what on earth that has to do with the question of people who want to play Fighters because they are bad. Lots of people want to play Conan and fight Mind Flayers. Those are people who want Conan to be good, not people who want him to be bad.

"Play a character who is bad" is your shorthand, not mine. When I say "Some people want to play Conan/Aragorn" I mean "Some people want to play a character with fewer capabilities than Gandalf or Raistlin or Milamber." "Fewer capabilities" does not automatically equate to "character who is bad."

(One might also reasonably ask how someone is squaring the circle of "be Aragorn" and "defeat a creature Aragorn flees from because he cannot fight it", but that's another issue)

That part's easier than you think, magic items exist. In D&D terms for instance, Robin Hood would likely beat Smaug the same way Bard did - with a magic arrow.

KorvinStarmast

2022-07-25, 04:32 PM

The spells themselves are what would need revising. This was most obvious in 3rd edition, but I don't think the lesson was learned as well as it could've been. No, it hasn't, and Phoenix described far better the "we have an app for that" problem and why it keeps getting in the way of a better system for magic.

People say this a lot, but it's very rarely the case that a character is bad individually but a key building block of a good team. You may have missed the recent lore bard thread. The poster had stumbled into that position (and the playgrounders were eager to help).
Is the problem that spell lists are too long, or that the lists of abilities martial characters get is too short? Perhaps a bit of both, but the Battlemaster is a nice set up. Lots of levers to pull.

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-25, 04:53 PM

There's two ways to mean that. Is it that you think "non-anime" (whatever it is you specifically think that means) martials can play at the extremes of power that exist and have existed in D&D, or that you want to drag down high level to something where "non-anime" martials can compete. Because one of those is a much harder sell than the other.
There is no need to drag down high level because high level martials already exist at that level.

I don't particularly care that casters are "stronger" than my barbarian because it doesn't really matter to me. What matters to me is that I have cool and interesting stuff to do, and that I can do those things without tapping into some mystical or supernatural magic power source.

As I said earlier, I think it is certainly true that martials are underpowered at pre-superhuman levels. But I have a great deal of difficulty imagining a system by which a guy at the gym can keep up with a high level Wizard that does not A) remove the things that make high level Wizards interesting or B) completely shatter any suspension of disbelief.
Can you go into what the difficulty is? Because they can do this now.

You don't. But you have to be Avengers level to take on Avengers-level threats. So either martial characters eventually grow up to get there (even if they are also better at low levels), or those threats can't exist in D&D. And that would be a real shame, because they have historically been all over D&D. Your Demon Lords, Princes of Elemental Evil, Elder Evils, Primordials, and whatnot are a big part of D&D, and ejecting them just so someone can play a Fighter 20 without any abilities inappropriate for a 10th level character seems a pointless sacrifice.

But martials can take on those threats now can't they?

And I'm not sure what is the suspension of disbelief. I mean, you're talking about resilience and lethality, combined with some mixture of magic items. What is difficult to understand? Certainly it won't be as incredible as say... manifesting supernatural powers.

This may be me projecting my own take on this issue, but I think the problem is less "the wizard is better than me" and more "why isn't combat more interesting/can't I do interesting stuff?". And I think this goes back to my point about the starting perspective for the devs in the first place as it relates to martials and casters. If I start talking about making martial combat more interesting, people will inevitably tell me it will be too complex and clunky and it needs to be streamlined for the newbs. Meanwhile, every time a caster takes their turn we have to wait through a 14pt decision making process and rules clarifications as they sift through their codex of spells and hit the DM with one hundred potential castings to see which will be best. It's a matter of bias and perspective. The devs are petrified of buffing at-will abilities, but they aren't petrified of giving casters armor proficiencies, weapon proficiencies, Extra Attack, and any other goodies that replicate being a martial. Every knew feat or background or race option comes with spells that can just be baked into a caster class' repertoire of abilities, whereas there isn't really an equivalent for martials in this regard.

The problem is the lens through which the designers view the game. It's casters all the way down baby. Nothing you or I or everyone else here can agree on that will change the absolute love affair the devs have with casters.

Anonymouswizard

2022-07-25, 05:07 PM

RandomPeasant

2022-07-25, 05:16 PM

You may have missed the recent lore bard thread. The poster had stumbled into that position (and the playgrounders were eager to help).

Sure, buffbots like Bards can live in that space. But you'll note that there are 12 classes in the 5e PHB, and only one of them is Bard. Similarly, there are probably 50 classes in 3.5, and while two of them are Bard (and a few more are other species of party buffer), the great majority of them aren't.

"Play a character who is bad" is your shorthand, not mine. When I say "Some people want to play Conan/Aragorn" I mean "Some people want to play a character with fewer capabilities than Gandalf or Raistlin or Milamber." "Fewer capabilities" does not automatically equate to "character who is bad."

"Fewer" does not mean "less powerful". A Sorcerer has fewer capabilities than an Incarnate, but is more powerful. If you don't want me to say "a character who is bad", stop defending the position that some characters should be worse than others.

That part's easier than you think, magic items exist. In D&D terms for instance, Robin Hood would likely beat Smaug the same way Bard did - with a magic arrow.

"Just give the martials magic items" is a common proposal and it works to a degree, but using it to solve the whole problem gets weird. If you hand someone a 1st level Barbarian and tell them that the Avenger they grow up to be is Iron Man, they are going to look at you in confusion. If you give Aragorn a demon-slaying sword and demon-withstanding armor and planar-traveling boots, you've got a Relic Knight, not a mundane Ranger.

There is no need to drag down high level because high level martials already exist at that level.

And they do not contribute appropriately at those levels, constraining the types of adventures that can happen and the types of challenges that exist.

I don't particularly care that casters are "stronger" than my barbarian because it doesn't really matter to me. What matters to me is that I have cool and interesting stuff to do, and that I can do those things without tapping into some mystical or supernatural magic power source.

But you do care some, right? You seem to have rejected "just play a level-capped Barbarian in a tier-based system", despite the fact that such a setup is compatible with your desire to "have cool and interesting stuff to do" and not have a "mystical or supernatural magic power source". So on some level, you are saying that the game should be limited by what you are okay with your character doing. Maybe not at that point, maybe there's some margin by which casters can be better than you without losing you. But you want there to be a limit on the game, and you want that limit defined by what you think is "mundane". I don't want that. I'm not that selfish. I want people to play their games the way they want, even if that means playing characters or campaigns I wouldn't enjoy.

Can you go into what the difficulty is? Because they can do this now.

Can they? Because I see a great many things removed from high-level play in 5e, and I still see very much the same sort of complaints about Wizards that existed in 3e. Perhaps the people making those complaints are wrong now but were right then, but it seems more plausible to me that your way just doesn't work.

And I'm not sure what is the suspension of disbelief. I mean, you're talking about resilience and lethality, combined with some mixture of magic items. What is difficult to understand? Certainly it won't be as incredible as say... manifesting supernatural powers.

Is it incredible when Kaladin uses the lashings of the surge of gravitation to fly? I suppose it is, if your point of reference is a guy at the gym. But if your point of reference is a Windrunner, which is what Kaladin is, it's entirely expected. Conversely, an entirely moral man having the ability to survive in combat with the Mad Titan is quite incredible, to the point that none of the Avengers movies bother to present it as a plausible premise.

This may be me projecting my own take on this issue, but I think the problem is less "the wizard is better than me" and more "why isn't combat more interesting/can't I do interesting stuff?".

I think both problems exist. It is absolutely true that D&D martials have historically not had the ability to model the martial characters from elsewhere in fiction that people want to play. But it is also true that even if you allowed people to build characters that were entirely true to those characters, they would not be adequate to fight in an environment where people are throwing meteors around (and that's not even the end of D&D's power scaling!). Because, in the parts of the fiction where they live, they do not do that. The idea that Aragorn needs to scale to the point that he can fight Demon Princes doesn't hold water, because Aragorn doesn't fight Demon Princes.

Nothing you or I or everyone else here can agree on that will change the absolute love affair the devs have with casters.

But how much of that is a "love affair with casters" and how much is the inherent limits of mundanity? Certainly casters are permitted to be more complex than martials, and I agree that's a problem. But power isn't only a function of complexity. Burn is, you can reasonably argue, the simplest MTG deck ever devised. But it is quite capable of taking wins off of the most immensely complicated of Storm combo decks, and has (at various times in various formats) been better-positioned.

Quertus

2022-07-25, 05:40 PM

I am only asking those of you who think historically in most iterations of D&D there has been a problematic power discrepancy between the "spell" casting focused classes and the more "mundane" martial focused classes: will D&D ever be able to achieve caster vs martial power balance in future editions of D&D? Or is the well so poisoned that it is just not possible fix? Is this something that is so baked into D&D DNA that if you play the game you must accept this imbalance as part of the deal and move on?

Note: Those of you think there is not a significant imbalance or those who think there is an imbalance but that it is not a problem or even a good thing, please ignore this thread.

Edit: I guess one could argue that 4th "did this already" but I would counter that 4E flattened everyone down so much as to be effectively very similar and overly focused on damage. I more talking about can they achieve balance in a D&D game with casters that have robust, creative, dynamic, and open ended spells?

Edit#2: Typo for Martial. Ha!

This is asking the wrong question.

Are most versions of D&D unbalanced? Sure.

Could someone make a balanced version of D&D? Sure. In fact, they already did: 3e was balanced.

“3e”, you ask. “Surely, Quertus, you mean 4e?”

“No, I mean 3e - it was the most balanced edition of D&D I’ve played.” and don’t call me Shirley

“So Quertus,” you say “you’ve clearly lost your mind. Do you have Locate Object memorized to find it?”

There may be a madness to my methods, but there is a method to my madness. Hear me out.

In older editions (including 2e, the best edition), the Wizard was weaker than the Fighter. Playing a Wizard was hard mode.

General consensus is that 3e Wizards are much stronger than 3e Fighters. That concept is at least half wrong, and, senility willing, I’ll circle back to this, but let’s pretend it’s true for now.

So, if 2e Fighter > 2e Wizard, and 3e Fighter < 3e Wizard, then if you draw lines between the two “Fighters”, and between the two Wizards, then those lines *must* overlap.

So, trivially, one should be able to find a combination of features where Fighter and Wizard are balanced, right? Whether that involves adding back in tracking encumbrance and individual spell components, or removing magic item shops to return to random treasure tables (that are heavily weighted to favor the Fighter), or return to rerolling initiative every round and giving spells “casting times” during which any attack disrupts the spell (ie, removing the “concentration” mechanic, or hiding it behind a prestige class or something) while letting fighters one-shot monsters (ie, greatly reducing monsters HP), there must obviously be some combination of features of those two editions that are balanced, right?

Except… notice how the “Fighter” and “Wizard” between editions don’t stand alone? How their effectiveness is dependent on things like monster HP, random item tables, encumbrance rules, etc?

“But Quertus,” you say, “that’s not D&D.”

Note how I’m comparing 3e to older editions? If anything, you could use this information to argue that 3e isn’t D&D.

“Um… but that’s not the game I want to play.”

Well, it’s fine if you don’t want to play D&D, and it’s fine if you don’t want to change your concept of the game you want into something that would actually be balanced. Just remember that that’s on you.

“But… couldn’t we make a newer D&D, that hits newer sensibilities of gameplay, and is still balanced?”

Newer isn’t always better. Just look at the flop that was 4e. Almost nobody wants to play that.

“That’s not a measure of quality, but of popularity.”

Touché.

“So, could we do it? Make something new, and not 4e?”

Well… here’s the thing. We’re probably never going to get everyone to agree why 4e was such a failure. But, just as we’ve pretended before, let’s pretend that the one and only reason why it failed was because it blindly slaughtered sacred cows.

Others have already pointed out, you can’t have all 3 of [Balance, Guy@gym, Dr. Strange].

And… that’s a half truth. After all, if they’re doing surgery, the muggle Dr. Strange is at least as good as his music counterpart. Mystic, I meant mystic. (Darn new movie)

Anyway, 4e was the edition of D&D that nobody wanted. Well, almost nobody. Presumably, it’s the edition of D&D that its designers wanted.

So, we’d just have to figure out what people want out of this “modernized” D&D, futz around with *all* the variables at our disposal, perform massive amounts of number crunching and play testing, and voila (sp?), this mythical game would exist.

“But Quertus,” you say, “that sounds like a lot of work.”

Indeed it is. Fortunately for us lazy folk, many people have already done just that, making house rules for various editions of D&D.

“If only they had done so for the best edition (2e), or the most popular edition (3e)”, you say.

Well, fear not, they did!

“What?!”

Yeah, they did, and it was called “Pathfinder”. It’s got books and books of house rules, obviously made by people who understood how things like Simulacrum and XP costs were broken in 3e, and it has gone down in history as the most perfect, most perfectly balanced game ever to… oh, wait, no, even with all that effort, they made “free infinite Simulacra of yourself” a thing.

“How could anyone be that clueless,” you ask?

Well, here’s the thing: we’re all that clueless. No, really, we are. Hear me out.

Each of us has our biases and blind spots. We each play the game “our way”, and cannot really test playing the game in ways we’re unfamiliar with. We can only think the ways that we can think. A character in a movie or book is only as smart as the one who wrote them. Blah blah blah.

So… if you couldn’t roleplay “Quertus”, couldn’t get into my headspace to understand where I was going with this, then you cannot play the game the way that I do, cannot build or measure a game to be balanced for me.

And the same goes for any pairing of two people.

“Ok, but… how in Faerun does that make 3e the most balanced version of D&D?”

Well, remember how I said that “you can’t have all 3 of [Balance, Guy@gym, Dr. Strange]” was a half truth? Well, let’s circle back to that.

Guy@gym could absolutely, say, best Dr. Strange at a drinking competition.

“So what?”

So, what if all your game was was a drinking competition?

“That… doesn’t sound like much of a game.”

Doesn’t it?

“Ok, it sounds like every weekend night, actually. Lots of fun. But it doesn’t sound like an RPG.”

Sure. Let’s pretend that’s true.

But the question is, what *is* an RPG? What are the scenarios / challenges that the characters will encounter?

And, more to the point, can a party of 4 “Guy@gym” interact with them?

If not, if “Guy@gym” isn’t actually playing the game, then, well, they’re not playing the game.

And that’s the problem with thinking “the Wizard is stronger than the Fighter”. Because that’s not the problem, afaict. The problem is with an incompatibility between “the character” and “the game”.

If we build a gameplay loop where Guy@gym is actually making meaningful decisions that affect the final outcome, where they actually have agency, then we’re in the right ballpark.

And if we ensure that the Fighter and the Wizard have the same amount of agency, then we’ve succeeded. Huzzah! 🎉

Except… if you really stop and think about it, if you realize that the scene might well be, “get goblin children to go to sleep”? There’s a lot of build choices that really don’t matter to that scene. How the GM builds adventures, what the party cares about? Those will impact “balance” too much for the game designers to compensate for (unless they’re building a board game like 4e).

So… no, it’s an impossible dream, for some ivory tower designers to hand you “balance”. You have to make balance for yourself, according to the sensibilities of your table, and the specifics of your encounter design.

And no system gives you a more diverse pallet of tools to choose from, to mix and match to balance each character’s narrative contribution to your table’s individual style and eccentricities, than 3e.

Thus, 3e is the most balanced version of D&D I’ve ever played. Any instances of it being unbalanced are simply user error.

And, because users hate being told that they are at fault, I fear we may never see its like again.

You can tell perfectly good stories that have some characters who are significantly more powerful than others (e.g. Nobody would argue that all of the Avengers are equally powerful).

Absolutely. :smallcool:

On the other hand, I frequently see this argument (specifically the Avengers seems to be the most common example) but I think it doesn't take everything into account. First of all, in a non-interactive medium like a movie or a comic it doesn't really matter if some characters are much more powerful or get more of the spotlight, since they aren't controlled by individual people who might prefer an equal share of attention. Second, while the Hulk and Thor might be better picks than Black Widow and Hawkeye in a fight, I'd prefer the latter two if we're going on a stealthy mission. But unless you're planing on adventuring in a anti-magic zone, D&D casters are frequently (if not always) just better.

Hmmm… the Avengers is a great example, in so many ways.

Not just because Hulk is “well-built Fighter”, not just because Dr. Strange spends the movie hiding in an ER, not just because it’s a great, fun movie.

No, what makes it a great example in this context is that it’s more appropriate to look at the *actors*.

I mean, Natalie Portman would probably have loved to play a Space Viking, right? Everybody would love to play a Space Viking, right? (Ok, fine, I’m biased, because I’m a Viking / of Viking descent irl).

So, how can movies ever be made, if everyone wants to be a Space Viking?

Money. Ok, fine. How can *community theater* ever happen, if everyone wants to be a Space Viking?

Well… not everyone wants a lead role, actually, and, even then, it’s about working as a team to produce something greater than the sum of its parts.

What matters is getting the amount and type of spotlight that you signed up for. If I signed up to play “screaming/running citizen #4”, maybe I don’t want to give a monologue about thermonuclear astrophysics. If I signed up to play a Sentient Potted Plant in the Avengers, maybe I’m leaning heavily into the roleplaying, the strategizing, or the humor aspect of the game. But if I bring a horndog Space Viking? Yeah, you can probably guess what I want my spotlight time to be about, and it probably doesn’t involve eating a whole bushel of apples.

So, movies and plays involve real people who act out roles that are at times highly disparate wrt their impact and capabilities.

And that’s fine.

And it’s fine in RPGs, too, if that’s what you signed up for.

Batcathat

2022-07-25, 05:59 PM

Well… not everyone wants a lead role, actually, and, even then, it’s about working as a team to produce something greater than the sum of its parts.

True. But whether or not people want to play a lead role in the game is probably not connected to whether or not people want to use magic, so I'm not sure how much this relates to the discussion at hand.

And it’s fine in RPGs, too, if that’s what you signed up for.

Also true, but it seems preferable if people can sign up for playing a non-caster without also automatically signing up for the role of "guy who pokes goblins with a stick while the wizard does awesome stuff".

Psyren

2022-07-25, 05:59 PM

If you don't want me to say "a character who is bad", stop defending the position that some characters should be worse than others.

So you think Hawkeye and Black Widow are "bad?" How so?

"Just give the martials magic items" is a common proposal and it works to a degree, but using it to solve the whole problem gets weird.

When the problem is "Kill a dragon/demon" then a magic sword being the answer isn't "weird," it's been a staple of the written word for centuries.

Also true, but it seems preferable if people can sign up for playing a non-caster without also automatically signing up for the role of "guy who pokes goblins with a stick while the wizard does awesome stuff".

This is a failure of narration rather than a system; a martial holding the line while a caster does the things only they can do, can easily be awesome for both. (Wheel of Time example: see most of Moiraine and Lan's fights, starting with the climax of New Spring.)

Anonymouswizard

2022-07-25, 06:10 PM

True. But whether or not people want to play a lead role in the game is probably not connected to whether or not people want to use magic, so I'm not sure how much this relates to the discussion at hand.

Also true, but it seems preferable if people can sign up for playing a non-caster without also automatically signing up for the role of "guy who pokes goblins with a stick while the wizard does awesome stuff".

Remember: Quertus only cares about wizards who do nothing but cast spells.

But yeah, the argument also feels weird because normally the hero is the guy with the sword, not the guy hiding behind the door occasionally throwing fireballs.

Telok

2022-07-25, 06:11 PM

Wizards get fly at level 5, but you're telling me that I can't jump onto a castle's battlements at level 18? I'm stick of anything 'anime' being forced into the monk, it's tiring, it forces all cool warriors into being fragile speedsters, and it's just ignoring that wizards are doing so much more. And that's ignoring the edition(s) where the spellcasters are better warriors!

My rule thumb for the "cool warriors" trope is "can I somewhat faithfully emulate a Dr. McNinja adventure without doing much more than building monsters, vehicles, & maybe scenery mechanics?". I got my answer, working up for another campaign right now.

RandomPeasant

2022-07-25, 06:32 PM

How the GM builds adventures, what the party cares about? Those will impact “balance” too much for the game designers to compensate for (unless they’re building a board game like 4e).

I suppose this is true at the extreme, but it seems somewhat dubious to go from that to "and therefore what do we care about balance". The reality is that most DMs are going to design adventures that are a mix of combat and non-combat encounters drawn closely from whatever the rules provide for that sort of thing. And most players are going to have motivations that amount to "kill things and take their stuff". You really can generate good balance with proper iterative testing, and you can proof that balance against DM tweaks by understand why things are balanced and not engaging in cargo-cult design.

Also true, but it seems preferable if people can sign up for playing a non-caster without also automatically signing up for the role of "guy who pokes goblins with a stick while the wizard does awesome stuff".

Pretty much. The core issue with "well you can balance it with other stuff" is that there's no guarantee that the other stuff will go the way it needs to for balance. You can say "the Fighter can contribute by being good at planning", but what happens when the guy who's good at planning plays a Wizard? You can say "well the guy who plays a Fighter probably is okay with not getting the spotlight", but what if that guy's very favorite character in all the world is Kaladin, who is very clearly a Fighter (or at least some manner of martial), but very much in the spotlight? I agree that you need some mechanisms for handling this general kind of thing. But like the mechanisms for handling DMs modifying the game, they go on top of a mechanically balanced system

So you think Hawkeye and Black Widow are "bad?" How so?

If you don't know, how were you able to connect them up with the soccer analogy?

When the problem is "Kill a dragon/demon" then a magic sword being the answer isn't "weird," it's been a staple of the written word for centuries.

If you want your Fighter to grow up into a Relic Knight, that's fine. That's a viable high-level character. But the idea that Kai'Sa or Iron Man are "mundane" characters in a meaningful sense, or that they are more obvious endpoints for low-level martials than Wonder Woman and Kaladin doesn't pass the smell test for me.

But yeah, the argument also feels weird because normally the hero is the guy with the sword, not the guy hiding behind the door occasionally throwing fireballs.

It's not even really that. It's that, as I've been saying, the distinction between "sword guy" and "fireball guy" is only really as strong as it is in D&D in D&D. Kaladin starts out as a mundane spearman, but graduates to gravity powers and shapeshifting spirit weapons. Gandalf does the majority of the magic that appears on-screen in LotR, but he's also quite handy with Glamdring when he needs to be. Nona Grey has a couple different types of magic, but is also quite capable at simply stabbing people. There are entire genres that don't make a distinction between magical and martial training at all (though many will reject any example from them as "too anime"). In most stories the protagonist simply has some amount of magical power and some amount of martial skill and no one thinks that is weird, or that the "all martial" side of that tradeoff space represents a deeply important niche.

Anonymouswizard

2022-07-25, 06:52 PM

It's not even really that. It's that, as I've been saying, the distinction between "sword guy" and "fireball guy" is only really as strong as it is in D&D in D&D. Kaladin starts out as a mundane spearman, but graduates to gravity powers and shapeshifting spirit weapons. Gandalf does the majority of the magic that appears on-screen in LotR, but he's also quite handy with Glamdring when he needs to be. Nona Grey has a couple different types of magic, but is also quite capable at simply stabbing people. There are entire genres that don't make a distinction between magical and martial training at all (though many will reject any example from them as "too anime"). In most stories the protagonist simply has some amount of magical power and some amount of martial skill and no one thinks that is weird, or that the "all martial" side of that tradeoff space represents a deeply important niche.

True, but I was talking about how weird it is to force the sword guy into the supporting role when they're usually the focus. Whether or not they have magic the hero is in the thick of things, not at the back giving support.

All mundane is seemingly more common in works that identify as science fiction.

RandomPeasant

2022-07-25, 07:09 PM

All mundane is seemingly more common in works that identify as science fiction.

Sort of? I suppose it's technically correct to say that the protagonist of Snow Crash or The Martian doesn't have any magic, but those settings don't contain any magic for the having. It's sort of like defining D&D characters by whether or not they have rayguns. And science fiction, particularly the action-focused stuff, has all sorts of things that would be "not mundane" if they showed up in D&D. No one is mistaking Adam Jensen for Aragorn. And that's without getting into "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" things like the Protomolecule in The Expanse, or the explicit space magic of science fantasy series like Star Wars or the Book of the Ancestor.

Psyren

2022-07-25, 07:10 PM

If you don't know, how were you able to connect them up with the soccer analogy?

You mean the analogy I placed them in opposition of, because I don't see them as "bad?"

If you want your Fighter to grow up into a Relic Knight, that's fine. That's a viable high-level character. But the idea that Kai'Sa or Iron Man are "mundane" characters in a meaningful sense, or that they are more obvious endpoints for low-level martials than Wonder Woman and Kaladin doesn't pass the smell test for me.

Is King Arthur not a martial character worthy of emulation? Or Link? Isildur? Peter Pevensie? Which of those are "Iron Man?"

RandomPeasant

2022-07-25, 07:36 PM

You mean the analogy I placed them in opposition of, because I don't see them as "bad?"

Did that prevent you from understanding it? I am able to understand things with which I do not agree. Is that not typical?

Is King Arthur not a martial character worthy of emulation? Or Link? Isildur? Peter Pevensie? Which of those are "Iron Man?"

Which of those are the same level as Thor or Hulk or Doctor Strange? Which of them do anything remotely comparable to the exploits of those characters, or face challenges like the ones high level D&D has to offer? It would seem to me that the answer is none of them (though who knows, perhaps I missed the release of Zelda: Conquer Hell), leaving me quite puzzled as to what it is you think your questions have to do with anything.

Mechalich

2022-07-25, 07:50 PM

All mundane is seemingly more common in works that identify as science fiction.

This has to do with the nature of the powers at question and the world-building implications of that nature. Specifically personal power versus societal power and the interaction of technology between those two.

Personal Power is how much power a single individual can potentially output. This can naturally range from essentially nothing, ex. a helpless infant, to roughly the maximum level of human capability, ex. the titular 'Guy at the Gym.' Anything about that is some kind of supernatural ability, and of course supernatural abilities can scale to infinity.

Societal Power is the power represented by society, how much force some given societal unit (and its leaders) can muster for a given purpose. This is often proxied as the military strength of that society at full mobilization, though it also includes elements of economic power and in the case that supernatural powers exist, any supernatural abilities explicitly tied to a society as opposed to a person (ex. powers intrinsic to a landform).

An extremely important world-building trait is whether or not Societal Power is capable of suppressing individuals at the maximum level of Personal Power available within a given setting. If Societal Power > Personal Power, then the world functions at least in principle like reality, in that the needs and desires of the masses are ultimately decisive. If Personal Power > Societal Power then instead the world is a mythic reality where the whims of the individuals at the highest tier of personal power make all the choices that matter.

Technology interacts with this pivot point in critical ways. Specifically, while technology can increase personal power - a modern assault rifle is significantly more dangerous than a sword in the same hands with the same level of training - it also increases societal power, because technological achievements can be transferred, copied, and mass produced. The character of Iron Man is highly illustrative here. Tony Stark has a greater level of experience using the Iron Man armor than anyone else and generally defeats anyone else who randomly puts it on with ease, but other people can wear the armor and a handful of people in versions of the armor can, and have, beaten Tony down. Likewise, Tony's not the only one who can build the armor and the technology constantly threatens to leak out to the point that it's only comic book logic that allows Tony to keep plugging those leaks and preventing the nations of the world from putting every soldier on the planet in an exosuit.

And of course, in a science fiction universe where every soldier on the planet is in fact marching into battle in an Iron Man style exosuit (which is quite common), then the amount of personal power from some other source necessary to topple the government is significantly increased. The amount of power necessary to achieve some sort of static goal - ex. taking control of England - is drastically higher in the 21st century compared to the 11th. This actually means that high technology settings can allow more magic than low tech ones without creating balance issues because the threshold for destabilizing personal power is so much higher.

LudicSavant

2022-07-25, 07:52 PM

Zekestone

2022-07-25, 08:09 PM

Is King Arthur not a martial character worthy of emulation? Or Link? Isildur? Peter Pevensie? Which of those are "Iron Man?"

Those are martial characters in generally low magic settings.

In high magic settings, martial characters should be more like Beowulf, Cu Chuhlain or Diomedes, pulling off stunts that go well beyond the abilities of mere mortals.

D&D's problem is too many are welded to the idea that you have to have low magic setting martial characters but high magic setting spellcasters. Despite its flaws, 4e did rectify it, to the chagrin of those who wanted spellcasters to be the be all and end all. I preferred 4e to 3e because it did try and bring balance, even if it still adhered to the dumb fighter stereotype.

Actually, 2e did a good job of balancing it out as well. Spellcasters could be powerful but they had serious drawbacks as well, all of which got dumped in later editions, keeping all of their strengths and none of their weaknesses. And fighters weren't just dumb beatsticks there either. High INT, high CHA, low STR fighters were entirely workable and fun.

Psyren

2022-07-25, 08:55 PM

Did that prevent you from understanding it?

It did not. I disagreed with the premise.

Which of those are the same level as Thor or Hulk or Doctor Strange?

Both of them. Why not? Do you have their official character sheets?

Those are martial characters in generally low magic settings.

I don't agree that e.g. Hyrule is "low magic", nor does it matter. The point is that magic weapons can bridge the gap between a less magical hero and their much more magical villains. That's a valid archetype to want to play.

RandomPeasant

2022-07-25, 09:26 PM

This actually means that high technology settings can allow more magic than low tech ones without creating balance issues because the threshold for destabilizing personal power is so much higher.

This doesn't follow from the rest of your argument at all. The overall geopolitical character of the world is not in any real sense a balance issue.

Those are martial characters in generally low magic settings.

It's not even that. They're just not very powerful. King Arthur fights a bunch of dudes who are basically human. In more powerful incarnations of his mythos people are busting out effects like righteous might, which is a 5th level spell. It's rather like insisting that you be allowed to play year three Harry Potter. No one is particularly saying you can't, but such a character is entirely inadequate to deal with the kinds of challenges faced by high-powered characters, so the question of whether you can is not really pertinent to the topic at hand.

It did not. I disagreed with the premise.

Then perhaps you would be better served by articulating your disagreements with the premise than asking questions to which you know the answers.

Both of them. Why not? Do you have their official character sheets?

Because they are not comparably powerful. I mean, really. Hawkeye's not on the level of those characters, you think replacing his ranged medieval weapon with a melee medieval weapon gets him there?

I don't agree that e.g. Hyrule is "low magic", nor does it matter. The point is that magic weapons can bridge the gap between a less magical hero and their much more magical villains. That's a valid archetype to want to play.

And it is an archetype that turns into Iron Man at high levels. Or Gor. Or Kai'Sa. Or any number of characters which, while entirely reasonable to play at high levels, are not particularly obviously "martial", especially when compared to people like Thor or Anomander Rake. Your insistence on running off a list of low-level versions of the archetype as if that demonstrated that the high level ones were not in it is not responsive, it is simply puzzling.

Pex

2022-07-25, 09:51 PM

They already did, but no one noticed. 3.5E Tome of Battle for warriors + 3.5E Psionics for magic.

Minutiae details need to be tweaked. Healing in Psionics is bad. Stances in Tome of Battle are off kilter in progression. The general game mechanics of both are fun to play and equivalent in power. It's absolutely fine in cases where warriors can do stuff spellcasters can't and spellcasters can do stuff warriors can't. The spellcaster teleports. The warrior is punching through walls. All good.

Spriteless

2022-07-25, 10:12 PM

AD&D did. Casters needed more xp to level up. They were also less likely to survive low levels. It was balanced risk vs reward, but nowadays there's no (or at least less) risk.

Edit: But look if a fighter can suplex a horse when the wizard gets 3rd level spells I'd consider it fair.

Telok

2022-07-25, 11:04 PM

In high magic settings, martial characters should be more like Beowulf, Cu Chuhlain or Diomedes, pulling off stunts that go well beyond the abilities of mere mortals.

Alas D&D has neither rules nor decent guidelines for such basic stunts like ripping off a nonmagic damage immune opponent's arm while wrestling or swimming the Channel while wearing full armor and swording sea monsters the entire way. See next

The reality is that most DMs are going to design adventures that are a mix of combat and non-combat encounters drawn closely from
the rules provide for that sort of thing. And most players are going to have motivations that amount to "kill things and take their stuff".

This bit is super important. Most DMs don't go beyond the rules. Homebrew, beyond monsters & magic items, is very uncommon in actual play if you get out past hardcore forumites. If something doesn't have any rules, examples, of player facing options then as far as most players that thing doesn't exist. Without any player facing rules, widgets, or info that tell players something is even possible they often won't try it. That goes double if there's a roll they can't prep for and a nasty consequence.

Nobody tries stunts? Well the game doesn't tell the players about stunts. There's no character abilities to let you stunt better, more often, or anything. It just tells players "say what you want to do and the DM saus stuff"... except it doesn't. It really says stuff like you have one reaction a round to make an opportunity attack or use a few specific spells/class abilities. You can't fling yourself between a disentegrate ray and an innocent bystander, or catch a falling ally. At least not with the rules. You can tell the DM its what you want to do, but like it was said; "most DMs are going to design adventures that are a mix of combat and non-combat encounters drawn closely from the rules provide for that sort of thing".

I'll reiterate again: this edition, all 10+ years of it, I've never seen any player try to jump further than str score, swing on a chandelier, initiate a chase, or disarm (barring disappointed battlemasters) an enemy because you go off the list of rules supported allowed & given bonuses standard actions, and into DC 15 checks that give your at best +5 to +10 a good chance to not just waste your turn but to in fact make the situation even worse. So the players get a choice of doing the standard on the character sheet murder-hobo attack & damage, or asking to try something where rolling a 4 could dump them in lava or collapse the building on the hostages or such.

Without something like a rule in the player's handbook, in big bold letters, saying you get advantage and +2d6 damage or such when stunting, they you aren't going go bridge the gaps between "the rules say pcs can do these things and not other stuff" and "you get an extra dc 15+ fail chance plus a penalty for trying when asking to stunt" and "the DM can let you try anything".

Zekestone

2022-07-25, 11:13 PM

Talking of stunts, Monte Cook did do a variant 3e system called Iron Heroes which was designed to make martials be able to take on challenges without the need for magic items and or high level spellcasting, which included stunts, an overhauled feat and skill system and the like but was basically compatible with the normal 3e system.

"You are not your magic weapon and armour. You are not your spell buffs. You are not how much gold you have, or how many times you've been raised from the dead. When a Big Bad Demon snaps your sword in two, you do not cry because that was your holy avenger. You leap onto its back, climb up to its head, and punch it in the eye, then get a new damn sword off of the next humanoid you headbutt to death."

It was fun, if a little flawed and unpolished.

Lord Raziere

2022-07-25, 11:17 PM

Psyren

2022-07-25, 11:24 PM

Then perhaps you would be better served by articulating your disagreements with the premise than asking questions to which you know the answers.

I actually don't know the answer, which is why I asked you the question; How do you see Hawkeye and Black Widow as being "bad?"

Because they are not comparably powerful.

Hawkeye took on the entire rest of the team in Avengers 1 (and later grounded the Big Bad), and Black Widow secured and closed the portal. Did they need "comparable power" to Thor and Hulk to do that?

And it is an archetype that turns into Iron Man at high levels. Or Gor. Or Kai'Sa. Or any number of characters which, while entirely reasonable to play at high levels, are not particularly obviously "martial", especially when compared to people like Thor or Anomander Rake. Your insistence on running off a list of low-level versions of the archetype as if that demonstrated that the high level ones were not in it is not responsive, it is simply puzzling.

Your insistence that high level martials inevitably turn into "Iron Man" is even more puzzling, especially since the way to build Iron Man in D&D is not with a martial class at all.

I'll reiterate again: this edition, all 10+ years of it, I've never seen any player try to jump further than str score, swing on a chandelier, initiate a chase, or disarm (barring disappointed battlemasters) an enemy because you go off the list of rules supported allowed & given bonuses standard actions, and into DC 15 checks that give your at best +5 to +10 a good chance to not just waste your turn but to in fact make the situation even worse.

That's... sad to hear. Honestly. Because I see (and allow) this stuff in my games all the time.

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-25, 11:38 PM

And they do not contribute appropriately at those levels...
This hasn't been my experience. And of course, your comment hinges entirely on what you mean by "appropriately".

... constraining the types of adventures that can happen and the types of challenges that exist.
Can you give examples? Is this like the "they can't fight stuff in the air because they can't fly" and "I can't make interplanar games because they can't cast Planar Travel" stuff?

But you do care some, right?
I think I've made clear what matters to me. I don't get offended that the wizard in my party incapacitates half the bad guys with Hypnotic Pattern because it's expected. He plays a wizard, I play a barbarian. If I wanted to have the ultimate power and be able to go into forum threads and complain about how all the martials are constraining my games, I'd play a wizard.

What matters to me is what I said, being able to do cool stuff without having to emulate the strange esoteric mythic heroes that people call upon in these types of threads.

You seem to have rejected "just play a level-capped Barbarian in a tier-based system", despite the fact that such a setup is compatible with your desire to "have cool and interesting stuff to do" and not have a "mystical or supernatural magic power source".
I mentioned hurling an enemy into multiple foes, essentially having an AoE attack based on Strength. I mentioned redesigning abilities like what the Twilight Cleric and Peace Cleric can do as the talents of martial warriors.

If I just cap my levels, where do I get to do that kind of cool stuff? At what levels is 5E combat super cool and dynamic for martials??

Also, you don't get to decide for me what levels are appropriate for play. What an absolute joke lol.

So on some level, you are saying that the game should be limited by what you are okay with your character doing. Maybe not at that point, maybe there's some margin by which casters can be better than you without losing you.
I don't know where you're going with these presumptions... maybe it's hard for you to believe but... I don't care. When we reach level 17 and the caster casts Wish, I'm not going to be pouting. I CHOOSE to play martials, KNOWING where the ends are for both classes. I am truthfully uninterested in pretending to be a wizard.

But you want there to be a limit on the game, and you want that limit defined by what you think is "mundane".
The game can remain as is right now, except also let martials do cool stuff in combat. What part of that is limiting the game?

I don't want that. I'm not that selfish. I want people to play their games the way they want, even if that means playing characters or campaigns I wouldn't enjoy.
Oh. I see. Thank you. It's clear now that this is a conversation between good people, and bad people. And you have been helpful enough to point out that you are the "good people" in this scenario and I am, ipso facto, the "bad people". How convenient for you.

It's laughable that the person saying "You have two options, don't play past certain levels, or you must play demigods." is trying to pass off as not limiting anyone's games. Let's just be clear, there is no difference between you huffing and puffing that your precious casters can't lose any power, and me huffing and puffing that my martials shouldn't have to transform into demigods. You can try to moralize on this, but we all know it's nonsense.

Can they? Because I see a great many things removed from high-level play in 5e, and I still see very much the same sort of complaints about Wizards that existed in 3e. Perhaps the people making those complaints are wrong now but were right then, but it seems more plausible to me that your way just doesn't work.
So are you talking about a different game?

Is it incredible when Kaladin uses the lashings of the surge of gravitation to fly?
Ah, a name I don't recognize, meant to invalidate all of the heroic swordsman I do know about. Once I understand what the "lashings of the surge of gravitation" is, I'll be prepared to answer this question.

I suppose it is, if your point of reference is a guy at the gym. But if your point of reference is a Windrunner, which is what Kaladin is, it's entirely expected.
My point of reference is a bunch of other heroes from a bunch of other sources. I don't know who or what Kaladin or Windrunners are and I don't care because I'm not interested in playing one.

Conversely, an entirely moral man having the ability to survive in combat with the Mad Titan is quite incredible, to the point that none of the Avengers movies bother to present it as a plausible premise.
Is this a reference to Cap being the last man standing against Thanos before reinforcements arrive? Because I'm not quire sure what you mean here. Or even how it is relevant.

I think both problems exist. It is absolutely true that D&D martials have historically not had the ability to model the martial characters from elsewhere in fiction that people want to play.
Yeah that's my issue, as I've said.

But it is also true that even if you allowed people to build characters that were entirely true to those characters, they would not be adequate to fight in an environment where people are throwing meteors around (and that's not even the end of D&D's power scaling!).
Firstly, that's not true nor is it necessarily true. There is no reason that an edition couldn't be built where the numbers are there to make it work.

Secondly, you are ignoring how much has been taken away from fighters since the first editions of D&D, and how much has been given to casters since the first editions of D&D. You don't want casters to lose ANYTHING, even though originally it took them more than a round to cast spells, they couldn't wear any armor, they had to track components, they leveled up more slowly, etc.

Now, any caster can be a martial-lite + a full caster + crib spells off any other spell list through backgrounds, feats, races, etc. And you're like "THIS is the standard".

Because, in the parts of the fiction where they live, they do not do that. The idea that Aragorn needs to scale to the point that he can fight Demon Princes doesn't hold water, because Aragorn doesn't fight Demon Princes.
So what? Gandalf can't directly meddle in the affairs of Middle Earth either. So I guess the idea that wizards should be adventuring around and just curbstomping encounters with all of their l33t spells doesn't hold water either because at most they should be providing a light source and talking to moths...

Aragorn is a concept. D&D contains a framework for game. I want to take this concept and play it through that framework.

But how much of that is a "love affair with casters" and how much is the inherent limits of mundanity?
It's entirely a love affair with casters. I feel like you might have glossed over my initial point and it seems to me you're suffering from the same sort of perspective bias I am accusing the devs of having. You can't even imagine making martials more interesting or dynamic. It seems that for you, the system exists as it does because it's not possible to do more, whereas it's clear to me that the devs are simply not interested in doing more.

RandomPeasant

2022-07-25, 11:43 PM

Alas D&D has neither rules nor decent guidelines for such basic stunts like ripping off a nonmagic damage immune opponent's arm while wrestling or swimming the Channel while wearing full armor and swording sea monsters the entire way.

First one, sure. Modern D&D has largely abandoned the idea that you should have explicit rules for dismemberment. But the second one is totally doable. You just make a bunch of swim checks (with a penalty from your full armor) and fight some krakens or whatever with the underwater combat rules.

Without something like a rule in the player's handbook, in big bold letters, saying you get advantage and +2d6 damage or such when stunting, they you aren't going go bridge the gaps between "the rules say pcs can do these things and not other stuff" and "you get an extra dc 15+ fail chance plus a penalty for trying when asking to stunt" and "the DM can let you try anything".

You can look at that optimistically though. If you want players to stunt more, you can get that by offering a pretty minor bonus for making an easy skill check with your attack. If stunting gave you +2 and took a DC 15 check, people would do all kind of stunting and you could just price it in.

Hawkeye took on the entire rest of the team in Avengers 1 (and later grounded the Big Bad), and Black Widow secured and closed the portal. Did they need "comparable power" to Thor and Hulk to do that?

If they aren't of comparable power, why do they need to be the same level? "Play a low level character in a high level game" is another one of those things that no one is going to stop you from doing. But if Hawkeye is not as powerful as Thor, insisting that he must be the same level is simply declaring your opposition to "level" as a word that has meaning. As someone who prefers that words have meaning, I can't really get on board with that.

Your insistence that high level martials inevitably turn into "Iron Man" is even more puzzling, especially since the way to build Iron Man in D&D is not with a martial class at all.

That's not what I said at all. What I said is that the "get power from items" path turns you into Iron Man, because that is exactly where Iron Man gets his power. There are plenty of other ways to be a high level martial. You could be Thor. That's a high level martial that's nothing like Iron Man. You could be Anomander Rake. Another high level martial, and very much not Iron Man. But "regular guy who competes because of items" is exactly Iron Man. If your argument that you are not Iron Man is that, unlike Iron Man, you can't make your own gear and therefore have no way of ensuring that you can contribute at high levels... well, you can make that argument, but I don't think it suggests the character you're describing belongs in a high level game.

Psyren

2022-07-26, 12:18 AM

But if Hawkeye is not as powerful as Thor, insisting that he must be the same level is simply declaring your opposition to "level" as a word that has meaning.

Level does still have a meaning. It means "other factors being equal, a party of characters who have attained {this number} faced with a typical encounter rated at {the same number} will be moderately challenged." Nothing in that meaning says that a given class at level X is or should be equal in power to every other class at level X.

That's not what I said at all. What I said is that the "get power from items" path turns you into Iron Man, because that is exactly where Iron Man gets his power.

Iron Man is one conceptual permutation among many of a protagonist who derives power from items, and as I mentioned, it's a permutation that you essentially need a casting class to pull off in the latest version of D&D anyway. It's not some singularity that all D&D martials inexorably reach - especially in 5e, unless you're implying Iron Man can only equip three gadgets in a given day.

There are plenty of other ways to be a high level martial. You could be Thor. That's a high level martial that's nothing like Iron Man. You could be Anomander Rake. Another high level martial, and very much not Iron Man. But "regular guy who competes because of items" is exactly Iron Man. If your argument that you are not Iron Man is that, unlike Iron Man, you can't make your own gear and therefore have no way of ensuring that you can contribute at high levels... well, you can make that argument, but I don't think it suggests the character you're describing belongs in a high level game.

Thor* is almost certainly not a martial in D&D terms. Putting aside the calling lightning and flight, he's shown to be capable of feats like bestowing his power onto others and changing the weather. The most likely analogue for him is actually a cleric, though even that falls short of his divine heritage.

*Marvel, not mythology, which we can't discuss here.

Pex

2022-07-26, 12:19 AM

First one, sure. Modern D&D has largely abandoned the idea that you should have explicit rules for dismemberment. But the second one is totally doable. You just make a bunch of swim checks (with a penalty from your full armor) and fight some krakens or whatever with the underwater combat rules.

You can look at that optimistically though. If you want players to stunt more, you can get that by offering a pretty minor bonus for making an easy skill check with your attack. If stunting gave you +2 and took a DC 15 check, people would do all kind of stunting and you could just price it in.

Those are your solutions, but not every DM everywhere is you. Some DMs will not allow stunts because there are no defined rules for them. They deny the stunts for fear of letting a PC be too powerful to do it anytime the player wants to do it. Other DMs set the DC so high it won't work more than half the time so why bother. Still further DMs will gate permission behind Proficiency of which players get so few and didn't know at character creation level 1 they would have needed it to do the stunt at level 7 ten real world months later. Not done there, even further DMs will apply a conditional penalty upon failure of doing the stunt you're worse off than if you didn't try. Not one of these DMs are playing the game wrong because there are no defined rules. The game tells the DM to make it up, so that is exactly what they're doing. "Rulings not rules" fails here, but some people treat it as blasphemy to propose there be defined DCs for skill use even though there are defined DCs for everything else in the game.

What's the DC to jump farther than your ST score? Whatever the DM feels like. In two previous threads I offered the idea of having the DC be 10 + 1 for every 1 ft beyond your ST score, and another poster went to hysterics metaphorically yelling at me about it in both threads. If two people here can't agree on it how is every other DM elsewhere supposed to agree? Personally I'm not even fully happy with having the base number start at 10. The DC being 5 + 1 for every 1 ft beyond your ST score feels reasonable.

Ignimortis

2022-07-26, 12:25 AM

Thread question: no, I don't think it will. Nobody at WotC is interested in that, they've tried to do it the only way they saw how in 4e and that killed sales and popularity, so they will forever avoid anything that looks even remotely 4e. Conversely, the unbalanced 3e and 5e were the high points for D&D's success, thus they will keep imitating them (5e in general being a scaled-down imitation of early 3e plus some bits from other editions).

Shadowrun is a system with a lower power ceiling, and it pulls off caster/non-caster dynamic without much trouble.
Shadowrun still has a problem of "casters can do basically everything but damage, and can even do damage where other people can't" and "caster can pull out a replacement for your street samurai out of nowhere". It got worse with editions, but it was always there. In 5e, a mage can just whip up a F8 spirit which will be better than the chargen street samurai at anything combat-related, and, with decent spell picks, solve most non-combat problems in ways that non-mages cannot counter or match at all. Drain is less of an issue when you can play safe and still get the desired results 99% of the time and use Edge for the 1% when it goes south.

You might notice that these three desires - wizards that don't get worse, fighters that don't get better, and a balanced system - are incompatible unless the system is already perfectly balanced. Which it isn't. That's not a contradiction, because while there's overlap between these groups to an extent, nobody is in all three simultaneously, not unless they're deluding themselves. [/I]
You'd be surprised at how many I see. They just claim that "balance" is that Fighter is decent at lower levels and Wizard has to get through the first five levels without dying, but Fighter being terrible after level 5 is fine, because that's balanced.

The "Guy at the Gym" thing always made me a little crazy, because it's an inherently low-level concept. Sure, lots of fantasy swordsmen fit that mold (Conan, Aragon, Gray Mouser), but I'd also argue that most of those characters were never higher than level 5. None of them ever go toe-to-toe with a Balrog, they out-fox it or run away.

Leveling up requires learning new skills and abilities. If your guy at the gym just keeps doing curls and running on the treadmill, he's going to top off at some point, and that doesn't mean the system accurately representing him is broken. A higher-level martial who can plausibly stand alone against a horde or go toe-to-toe with anything CR 15 is going to be somewhat superhero-ish. A high-level martial is going to look more like Thor or Hercules than Conan.
Pretty much this. Anyone who actually wants to stay mundane should stay level 7 tops. I don't buy being completely mundane and somehow facing off against a dragon that can melt stone with its' breath and crush towers with one hit of their claws, or demon lords that command armies of fiends through being the most powerful of them. After that, you can be martial, but you'll have to be superhuman and therefore not mundane - even if your power source is transcendent skill or sheer rage, which usually don't count as magical.

Honestly, I'd much prefer if the teamwork element were dramatically emphasized. No more "win buttons". A culture where any challenge that can be soloed by anyone and especially by a single action wasn't a level-appropriate challenge to begin with. You should win by working together so that the combined ability of the team >> the straight sum of your individual abilities.
I have a Pathfinder 2e book to sell you. Personally, I dislike the fact that the game feels almost unplayable without a full party that has most capability boxes ticked (healer, support character, frontline, etc). The only way to fix that would be to tear down the classes and write whole new ones on the same ruleset, but a lot of people seem to like the current thing.

RandomPeasant

2022-07-26, 12:43 AM

Can you give examples? Is this like the "they can't fight stuff in the air because they can't fly" and "I can't make interplanar games because they can't cast Planar Travel" stuff?

My go-to example for what people should be fighting at the very high end of D&D is the Xixecal (https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Xixecal). It's a walking glacier that causes an apocalyptic winter just by showing up, can summon dragons, and has all sorts of nasty magic and defenses. That's the sort of thing where "regular guy" is just plainly inadequate, even if that guy happens to be particularly well-trained or equipped with a very nice sword.

What matters to me is what I said, being able to do cool stuff without having to emulate the strange esoteric mythic heroes that people call upon in these types of threads.

By "esoteric mythic heroes" do you mean "a character from the largest movie franchise in history who had a movie come out this month"? Because people have been talking about Thor, and that's the Thor we're allowed to talk about here.

At what levels is 5E combat super cool and dynamic for martials??

If it's not super cool and dynamic at any existing level, why do we have to wait until high levels to make it super cool and dynamic? Why not just make it that at all levels? If what you want is stuff that won't break the game at 10th level, why would you want to wait until 20th level to get it?

The game can remain as is right now, except also let martials do cool stuff in combat. What part of that is limiting the game?

The game can remain as it is now, but high level martials get cool stuff to do outside of combat. What part of that is limiting the game?

It's laughable that the person saying "You have two options, don't play past certain levels, or you must play demigods." is trying to pass off as not limiting anyone's games.

If you don't want to play a demigod, why do you want to play at the levels that contain challenges appropriate for demigods?

Let's just be clear, there is no difference between you huffing and puffing that your precious casters can't lose any power, and me huffing and puffing that my martials shouldn't have to transform into demigods.

Except there is. If you nerf casters, you have removed something from the game. If you have purely mundane characters exist at specific levels, all the same things are in the game. They simply exist at a specific level range, exactly like every other character concept does. Suppose what you wanted was not to play a purely mundane Barbarian, but to play a Barbarian who never gained Indomitable Might. Would you rage against the designers who forced you to play a character who could be no higher than 17th level? Or would you, perhaps, accept that because you had defined your character by the abilities it did not have, there would necessarily be some point at which you had to stop gaining abilities because you had the ones you were okay with having?

Is this a reference to Cap being the last man standing against Thanos before reinforcements arrive? Because I'm not quire sure what you mean here. Or even how it is relevant.

I suppose "mortal" might not have been the best word to use there. I meant it in the sense of "normal" not strictly "not a god". Cap is superhuman, and by the time he is fighting Thanos he has been further empower by Mjolnir. What I was getting at is that neither Infinity War nor Endgame bothers to pretend that "Hawkeye v Thanos" or "Black Widow v Thanos" ends with anything other than a bloody smear where the hero used to be.

There is no reason that an edition couldn't be built where the numbers are there to make it work.

It's not the numbers that don't make it work. It's the getting hit with a meteor that doesn't make it work. Mundane people don't survive that.

Secondly, you are ignoring how much has been taken away from fighters since the first editions of D&D

Well, yes. Because it's not relevant. I am sure there is some point on the fuzzy margin where a better attack routine or nicer saves or whatever it is that whatever AD&D fanboy thinks made Fighters the real deal way back when is enough to push mundane past magic. But it is plainly obvious that such pushing cannot continue forever. At some point, you fight the Xixecal. And there is no mundane warrior who can carve apart a glacier.

You don't want casters to lose ANYTHING, even though originally it took them more than a round to cast spells, they couldn't wear any armor, they had to track components, they leveled up more slowly, etc.

Again, not relevant. I think, depending on what you consider to be your starting point, there are plenty of things it would be reasonable to have casters lose. But "cast spells quickly", "wear armor", and "not track components" are all things casters do in the source material, and I think it is entirely reasonable for characters to do those things. I would (within reason) accept that there might be levels at which they don't do those things, or types of casters that don't do those things. But at some point the Wizard should damn well grow up to be Doctor Strange.

Gandalf can't directly meddle in the affairs of Middle Earth either.

And if I wanted to play Gandalf, that would be an entirely reasonable objection. Of course, I don't particularly want to play Gandalf, so it's a somewhat less reasonable objection to the position I actually hold.

Aragorn is a concept.

Aragorn is a character. If you think there is a character with the same concept that covers Aragorn that scales up to where Doctor Strange lives, give me that guy as an example. But all this business about this or that character whose most impressive battle is with a CR 7 monster or a caster who can barely throw around 5th level spells or a large-ish group of orcs means nothing about high level play because those are not high level adventures.

You can't even imagine making martials more interesting or dynamic.

On the contrary, it's you who won't imagine martials that do more than you want them to. I can name many martial characters D&D doesn't handle well that I would like it to handle better. I have done so in this very thread.

Level does still have a meaning. It means "other factors being equal, a party of characters who have attained {this number} faced with a typical encounter rated at {the same number} will be moderately challenged." Nothing in that meaning says that a given class at level X is or should be equal in power to every other class at level X.

And that meaning implies balance, within some margin. After all, if balance is not achieved, it will be possible to select some set of four characters such that they are trivially or overwhelmingly challenged by a typical encounter rather than moderately.

Imagine, by way of analogy, a game of numbers. You get to pick four numbers from a list of numbers of my devising. My goal is to ensure that the sum of the numbers you pick adds up to 20. Your goal is for it to add up to any other number, and you may pick whichever items from the list you wish, with no limits about repetition. Is there any way (for a reasonably long list, say twelve items) for me to prevent you from achieving your goal other than making every number on the list 5?

It's not some singularity that all D&D martials inexorably reach

Well, yes. Most D&D martials can't go on Iron Man's adventures. That does not make the limiting case of "gear power" something else.

Thor* is almost certainly not a martial in D&D terms.

Well that's the chicken and the egg, isn't it? Is Thor not a martial because "muscular guy who mostly fights with an axe but sometimes uses lightning bolts" is inherently a non-martial concept, or because D&D martial classes are inadequate? I know which one I'd bet on.

Those are your solutions, but not every DM everywhere is you.

I think you're misunderstanding what I said.

In the first case, I'm not making any special allowances. Well, actually, I might be under 5e rules, I don't actually know. If I am, I consider it a rather damning strike against the game, because 3e lets you do all that stuff with core rules. You can swim with swim checks and there are rules for fighting in the water. It might be difficult to build a character that can pull off the specific stunt, but it is something that can be done with a robot DM that follows the rules exactly and makes no allowance for creativity. I suppose you can argue that a DM would houserule against the rules to make it impossible, but in that case I think it's rather difficult to conclude much of anything as a DM could theoretically change any rule at any time for any reason.

In the second case, I'm suggesting that the designers could make that as a direct change to the rules, and it would have the effect of causing people to do a bunch of stunts. I agree that it doesn't mean much of anything for an individual DM to do it, but I wasn't particularly proposing that.

You'd be surprised at how many I see. They just claim that "balance" is that Fighter is decent at lower levels and Wizard has to get through the first five levels without dying, but Fighter being terrible after level 5 is fine, because that's balanced.

There are a great many terrible arguments made about balance, but that might be the worst. No, making your game unbalanced twice does not secretly make it balanced.

Pretty much this. Anyone who actually wants to stay mundane should stay level 7 tops. I don't buy being completely mundane and somehow facing off against a dragon that can melt stone with its' breath and crush towers with one hit of their claws, or demon lords that command armies of fiends through being the most powerful of them. After that, you can be martial, but you'll have to be superhuman and therefore not mundane - even if your power source is transcendent skill or sheer rage, which usually don't count as magical.

I think perhaps the worst thing for D&D's balance in the long term has been the way "martial" and "mundane" have been so tightly bound that people will argue that the space viking can't possibly be martial because he has the abilities of a high level character.

Mechalich

2022-07-26, 01:02 AM

I think perhaps the worst thing for D&D's balance in the long term has been the way "martial" and "mundane" have been so tightly bound that people will argue that the space viking can't possibly be martial because he has the abilities of a high level character.

It's a little more involved than that. While 'martial' ultimately just means 'has the characteristics of a warrior' it's commonly considered that 'martial' archetypes utilize some form of technique in combat, as in 'martial arts.' The problem is that at high levels of power all abilities become genericized. An extremely powerful martial character might claim to utilize the 'Heavenly Demon Sword Technique' or 'Ninefold Spear Mastery' or any number of other abilities, but these are just BS and they don't actually amount to anything because it's all just blur-fighting in the end.

Many aspects of combat that people find important or interesting like weapon choice and fighting style only really matter at low-levels of power. Once the gauge cranks up, all the differentiation disappears. In shounen anime, which does this a lot, once the power treadmill really revs up basically everyone uses the same base moves and characters are only differentiated by whatever super-move they happen to possess. Now, the same thing is true of characters who are magic-based, or technology-based, or any other form of phlebotinum you might wish to include in a setting. Sufficiently advanced powers are indistinguishable from each other.

And this is also what we see in 4e. You can achieve balance between the groups by eliminating the differences between them but doing so renders the exercise rather pointless.

Batcathat

2022-07-26, 01:04 AM

I think the problem stems from reconciling these two incompatible points of view. There are some who will believe any level of class disparity means they are playing one-legged with their hands tied behind their back, and there are others who enjoy the challenge of playing Hawkeye and Black Widow alongside Thor and Doctor Strange. D&D has to pick one of these to lean toward, and they appear to have picked the latter.

First of all, having some types of classes automatically coming with more of a challenge than others seems like bad design, since there are very likely players who want to play a martial but don't enjoy the challange of trying to keep up with the casters. Second, as already pointed out, there are situations where Hawkeye or Black Widow are superior to Thor or Doctor Strange, mostly in relation to stealth and intelligence gathering (Age of Ultron has a good if very brief example of this, where Thor clearly doesn't have the skill or patience to do the research) but outside of very specific circumstances, that's not really the case in D&D, since there are spells for basically everything.

This is a failure of narration rather than a system; a martial holding the line while a caster does the things only they can do, can easily be awesome for both. (Wheel of Time example: see most of Moiraine and Lan's fights, starting with the climax of New Spring.)

Sure, except that the caster can probably spend a few moments summoning something that does the job almost as well as the fighter (exactly how true it is depends on the specific builds, summons and circumstances, but I think it's fair to say the martial is unlikely to have any abilities that comes anywhere near replacing the caster in a situation). But even if we ignore that, that's one specific role where the martial might be able to shine, which the caster can likely do in a bunch of different situations.

Psyren

2022-07-26, 01:04 AM

If two people here can't agree on it how is every other DM elsewhere supposed to agree?

Why should they? I don't care about what "every other DM elsewhere" thinks, I care about mine.

Thread question: no, I don't think it will. Nobody at WotC is interested in that, they've tried to do it the only way they saw how in 4e and that killed sales and popularity, so they will forever avoid anything that looks even remotely 4e. Conversely, the unbalanced 3e and 5e were the high points for D&D's success, thus they will keep imitating them (5e in general being a scaled-down imitation of early 3e plus some bits from other editions).

While I agree with your overall point here, 5e is fundamentally different from 3.5, especially when you get to foundational things like skill investment and concentration.

And that meaning implies balance, within some margin. After all, if balance is not achieved, it will be possible to select some set of four characters such that they are trivially or overwhelmingly challenged by a typical encounter rather than moderately.

5e is within that margin. You can take any four level 10 PCs and pit them against any proper CR 10 encounter, and assuming the PCs aren't throwing then they will most likely win with some amount of resource expenditure.

Imagine, by way of analogy, a game of numbers. You get to pick four numbers from a list of numbers of my devising. My goal is to ensure that the sum of the numbers you pick adds up to 20. Your goal is for it to add up to any other number, and you may pick whichever items from the list you wish, with no limits about repetition. Is there any way (for a reasonably long list, say twelve items) for me to prevent you from achieving your goal other than making every number on the list 5?

If I'm reading this analogy correctly, this is actually the crux of the issue. I assume my wider possibility space makes me the party's caster and therefore you the party's martial, correct? If that's the case, why do you and I have different goals? D&D is not a PvP game.

Well, yes. Most D&D martials can't go on Iron Man's adventures.

That depends on the Iron Man adventure. "Beat up a monster/alien" is fairly common, and attainable for all sorts of D&D characters, martials included. "Invent a plot device" by contrast is indeed not something D&D classes do as well as he, but it's not really supposed to in the first place.

Well that's the chicken and the egg, isn't it? Is Thor not a martial because "muscular guy who mostly fights with an axe but sometimes uses lightning bolts" is inherently a non-martial concept, or because D&D martial classes are inadequate? I know which one I'd bet on.

How do you define "mostly?" His body count with his magically-produced energy far exceeds that of his weapons in most engagements, much like a blaster.

I think perhaps the worst thing for D&D's balance in the long term has been the way "martial" and "mundane" have been so tightly bound that people will argue that the space viking can't possibly be martial because he has the abilities of a high level character.

If you think "shoots lightning, changes the weather and flies = martial," then your continued disappointment with D&D makes a lot of sense - but I can pretty much guarantee you and the designers won't ever be on the same page, so another game (or homebrew) genuinely looks to be your best option.

Telok

2022-07-26, 01:28 AM

You can look at that optimistically though. If you want players to stunt more, you can get that by offering a pretty minor bonus for making an easy skill check with your attack. If stunting gave you +2 and took a DC 15 check, people would do all kind of stunting and you could just price it in.
+2 and a 15 check is crap. We're dumping a freaking at-will short range 30-60 foot tactical group teleport magic ring on the open market in our D&D game because of a DC 13 save vs stun on the allies you use it on. Why? Because nobody's bonuses are high enough (at 13th level) to make the risk worth it in combat. DC 15? You expect a 5th level pc with maybe +7 to take a 1 in 3 prat fall **** up chance for a piddly +2?

See that DtD40k7e game in my sig? Codified rules giving non-trivial bonuses for stunting plus an archetype that got more bonuses to ensure stunts and that archetype got essentially powerups from stunting. I had two long time D&D players plus a novice gamer rpg all with that archetype. In two weeks (RL blows some times I miss the guy) the novice stunted more than the two D&D vets did in a whole year of playing. We're talking +50% dice pool & free called shot effrcts & scenery editing (add your own chandelier to swing from without asking DM permission) & archetype more bonus dice recharging, in exchange for sometimes a DC 10-15 check in a system where they were throwing average 4d10+9 at it.

D&D rules encourage DMs kicking pcs in the (metaphorical... usually) crotch with spike toed boots for trying stunts. They have for 20 years now and its not getting any better with pissant +2s. D&D has beaten & traumatized stunting out of every primarialy D&D player I've ever played with. And the rules totally support that by not making any damn decent guidelines or advice on stunts, especially with zero player facing ones. Hell, just last Sunday we discovered two people in our group thought that the only possible way to escape anything was by having a faster move speed. The chase rules, as bad as they are, effectively didn't exist for the last decade because these people are players and don't trawl the DMG for optional rules.

I finally started breaking through those D&D players conditioning by taking an npc of their archetype and doing some stunts, working through the bonuses & rolls aloud. It took Chundar the Boobarian, ork cyber-ninja & award winning* Elvis impersonator with an unhealthy addiction to counterfit magitech fake breasts, picking up a space marine in power armor and called shot throwing them at someone else's head for more damage than a full auto laser rifle. I could practically see the thoughts going "thats my archetype... i can make those rolls... i can do that!".

* hey, it was fair, they had a chance to enter the competition and better chances too, Chundar even offered to lend them his costume. They stayed at the bar. Chundar got an insane exploding die on his roll 4 keep 2. Honestly not a turn of the story I would expect. Fun tho.

Psyren

2022-07-26, 01:37 AM

First of all, having some types of classes automatically coming with more of a challenge than others seems like bad design, since there are very likely players who want to play a martial but don't enjoy the challange of trying to keep up with the casters. Second, as already pointed out, there situations where Hawkeye or Black Widow are superior to Thor or Doctor Strange, mostly in relation to stealth and intelligence gathering (Age of Ultron has a good if very brief example of this, where Thor clearly doesn't have the skill or patience to do the research) but outside of very specific circumstances, that's not really the case in D&D, since there's spells for basically everything.

1) There are advantages and disadvantages to going with either, especially in 5e. There is also strategic and tactical depth that comes from them not being equally good at all the same things. That's good design.

2) "There are spells for basically everything" (which requires ignoring any/all the downsides those spells have) does not = "the party caster can do everything." Spells known, spell slots, and above all concentration are all finite resources with steep opportunity costs.

Sure, except that the caster can probably spend a few moments summoning something that does the job almost as well as the fighter (exactly how true it is depends on the specific builds, summons and circumstances, but I think it's fair to say the martial is unlikely to have any abilities that comes anywhere near replacing the caster in a situation). But even if we ignore that, that's one specific role where the martial might be able to shine, which the caster can likely do in a bunch of different situations.

Case in point - this paragraph might have been the case in 3.5, but summons have been toned down considerably in 5e. With Conjure X spells, the player has little to no control over the quantity or quality of the creatures they get, while with Summon X spells what you get is far weaker than an even moderately optimized martial. And better still, both options take up your valuable concentration. The DM has a lot of freedom with many spells to make them helpful, even impactful, without enabling the caster to run roughshod over everyone else. And that's before we get into the countermeasures or defenses that the monsters have access to.

Tanarii

2022-07-26, 01:40 AM

AD&D did. Casters needed more xp to level up. They were also less likely to survive low levels. It was balanced risk vs reward, but nowadays there's no (or at least less) risk.
Also Fighters got a small army for their followers and in BECMI were the only ones that could become rulers of a domain.

The question isn't if D&D will ever achieve caster vs martial balance.
It is: Will WotC D&D ever achieve caster vs martial balance again, like TSR D&D had.

5e is close. Martials roundly dominate in Tier 1 & Tier 2 when compared to arcane casters. They're balanced pretty well in Tier 3. But if you use the commonly used optional rule of Multiclassing, that goes out the window pretty quick.

Batcathat

2022-07-26, 01:55 AM

1) There are advantages and disadvantages to going with either, especially in 5e. There is also strategic and tactical depth that comes from them not being equally good at all the same things. That's good design.

I absolutely agree, casters and martials shouldn't be equally good at the same things. What I want is for them to be (roughly) equally good at the same number of things. I don't mind if there are situations where my character (whether caster, martial or some combination) is barely contributing compared to other party members, as long as the opposite is true as well.

2) "There are spells for basically everything" (which requires ignoring any/all the downsides those spells have) does not = "the party caster can do everything." Spells known, spell slots, and above all concentration are all finite resources with steep opportunity costs.

True, but even if a caster end up with entirely the wrong spells for a given situation, they can adapt given time. That's not really the case for their mundane friends (or at least, it'll take far longer for the mundanes). And yes, they are finite resources but balancing things strictly around that rarely works well in my experience.

Case in point - this paragraph might have been the case in 3.5, but summons have been toned down considerably in 5e. With Conjure X spells, the player has little to no control over the quantity or quality of the creatures they get, while with Summon X spells what you get is far weaker than an even moderately optimized martial. And better still, both options take up your valuable concentration. The DM has a lot of freedom with many spells to make them helpful, even impactful, without enabling the caster to run roughshod over everyone else. And that's before we get into the countermeasures or defenses that the monsters have access to.

Yes, that makes the imbalance less noticeable in some situations, but it hardly removes it. And again, even if the caster can't just create something to replace the fighter as meatshield, that's still one specific situation where the fighter can contribute, compared to quite a bit more than that for the caster.

Satinavian

2022-07-26, 03:18 AM

It will be difficult to balance this out. And there are a couple of problems.

One of these already shows in how the question is formulated : martials vs casters ? Not mundanes/nonmagical vs casters/magical types or martias vs. blasters. No it is martials vs casters.

But a martial is someone specialized for fighting and a caster is not. That is why caster will always include all the other specialities. However, casters specialized for combat still do exist and should be able to compete with martials. That is how we always get both "casters should be way more flexible than martials" and "casters should not be weaer an combat". In combination that leads to casters being stronger and to all our problems.

So, what to do :

1) Don't reduce people without magic to martials. This means building an actuall robust mundane skill/ability system that you can reasonably specialize in. The sorry excuse of current and past D&D skill systems just doesn't cut it. It is extremely swingy with the D20 and nothing you want to rely on. It produces lots of ridiculous results that makes people handwave instead of using the rules. It is utterly overshadowed by items. And in the edition where you could get reliable successes, you were instantly in exploit-territory.

If you can build a nonmagical, noncombat skillmonkey and have a useful and viable character, you are a huge step towards solving your problem.

2) Wizards are not specialized enough. Thematic casters are nice, but if a guy who can do anything stands next as an alternative, they will never get enough traction. This stems from "magic-user" having been a catch all class long ago and the habit of making spells be a standalone abilities that you mix and match. Further, traditionally the wizard pays with being fragile, but that doesn't really work in the modern environment were you play characters for a long time. And by being useless without spells. But those disadvantages just reinforce the need for more spells, both for defense and for being able to contribute. There also once was the cost of being weak first for power later but that is just bad design and thus got scrapped a long time ago.

I don't think we can salvage the D&D-wizard and keep its themes. The cleric existed for ages as well and while it was quite powerful in many incarnations, it didn't trigger remotely as many balancing discussions. Because it had more direction (buffing, healing, anti undead) even if still quite versative. And arguable because it didn' have to rely on magic all the time.

Mechalich

2022-07-26, 04:08 AM

2) Wizards are not specialized enough. Thematic casters are nice, but if a guy who can do anything stands next as an alternative, they will never get enough traction. This stems from "magic-user" having been a catch all class long ago and the habit of making spells be a standalone abilities that you mix and match. Further, traditionally the wizard pays with being fragile, but that doesn't really work in the modern environment were you play characters for a long time. And by being useless without spells. But those disadvantages just reinforce the need for more spells, both for defense and for being able to contribute. There also once was the cost of being weak first for power later but that is just bad design and thus got scrapped a long time ago.

Most of the traditional means used to balance wizards and other casters revolved around trying to impose some kind of trade-off rather than imposing any sort of limit on the powers themselves, which is probably a consequence of D&D's class based system. The full power package of a D&D character is class+level (which includes WBL) and therefore the incentive is to try and balance the entire package. If the package has fewer variables, as in 5e and the early editions, this is almost possible. Multi-classing (including the 2e version, which gave advantage to Gishes) throws a whirlwind of variability at that and rips it apart. Likewise high-level play, which in D&D doesn't just boost overall numbers as a JRPG might but adds one new ability after another also balloons out the variables and makes it impossible to balance a package because the class+level combinations gradually lose any coherent meaning.

With regard to high-powered characters it generally makes more sense to try and balance out powers. This is, however, still very difficult, especially with regard to out-of-combat abilities. Effects-based systems can balance combat abilities well enough, mostly by treating things that are aesthetically totally different as mechanically exactly same, ex. cast fireball = throw grenade, but the out of combat stuff has always been a mess. Worse a number of the archetypical abilities associated with fantasy magic-users are on the list of 'stupidly hard to value properly' abilities like Demon Summoning, Illusions, Mind Control, and Shapeshifting (one good way to judge if an ability is hard to adjudicate, see how much a video game adaptation shackles/eliminates it).

It is highly likely that, in high-powered systems, any attempt to balance out abilities will lead to some small number of build combinations that absolutely shreds all the others totally outside the anticipation of the developers. This happens all the time in video games, and if the game is anything other than strictly single-player (and sometimes even then) the developers subsequently come in with the nerf bat. But the TTRPG market can't really function that way.

Anonymouswizard

2022-07-26, 04:10 AM

animorte

2022-07-26, 05:48 AM

People were talking about Black Widow and Hawkeye. They are generally a bit lower on the technical battlefield level, both having unique tricks of their own to make up for it. They also strike me as a bit more skill-focused than some of the others, though everyone has proven their utility in various ways.

Somebody also mentioned Avatar: The Last Airbender… Benders overall have an easier time than otherwise, but even then literally all of them are limited to their specific element except one, the Avatar. It is shown clearly that tools and weapons of varying degrees are created to deal with benders. In the AtLA, chi-blocking is primary. In LoK, basically shocking grasp makes itself known with those stun gloves. Not to mention nets, shackles, removing the element in question from their surroundings, big bad mech suits.

Benders can unlock more skills, maneuvers, and sub-bending. They’re also not restricted from hand-to-hand or weapon usage, as made very evident with Zuko several times. Though he doesn’t have the additional fancy chi-blocking or gadgets to bridge the gap.

My point being that within that world, the martial vs caster balance just feels a lot closer strictly because the benders (aka casters) don’t have access to the other elements, but every single element still has ALL kinds of tricky utility even with that limit.

——————————

So, do I think D&D will bridge the gap? No.
Because casters have ultimately been spoiled with this concept of needing access to all different elements of gameplay. It’s a lot harder to remove that when it’s been the standard for decades.

However, I do think D&D has recently done a bit better to allow martial classes more access overall.

KorvinStarmast

2022-07-26, 08:04 AM

Sure, buffbots like Bards can live in that space. But you'll note that there are 12 classes in the 5e PHB, and only one of them is Bard. Also, there are 12 classes and only 3-6 PCs in a given party. (I don't count Artificer, but that makes 13 I suppose). More classes we don't need, but more options that scale seems to be your direction of argument.
As an aside, one of the thing that bugs me about the Scaling of cantrips and Fighter attacks is that the "you get 4" happens for a caster at 17 but "you get 4" gets delayed to 20th for the fighter. They need to get that 4th attack at 17, and the capstone needs to be something in the demigod approaching capability. (See the Druid level 20 ability for a good example, albeit an over the top one, or the various Paladin Capstones).

"Just give the martials magic items" is a common proposal and it works to a degree, but using it to solve the whole problem gets weird. Beyond the bloat of spells, the bloat of magic items is another matter that has created its own problems over the years. The initial game's coolest gizmos (before attunement, before WBL, etc) were swords; swords were sometimes intelligent, they could have spells and other abilities, they could have personalities ... and they didn't have to be an artifact to have such properties. The other cool gizmos were mostly rings. Magic swords and magic rings. Magical Armor and Magical shields were only available for Fighters and in some cases Clerics. While the idea that 'you don't need magic items to play in 5e' is often floated, it's only really valid for spell casters as a model.

Using magic items as a balancing point is a means to an end, but the way they have currently implemented that is not going to get there.

But how much of that is a "love affair with casters" and how much is the inherent limits of mundanity?
Probably a bit of both. The higher level D&D Fighter maybe needs to morph into a Super Hero (Which ironically was the level name at 8th level in the original game).

D&D's problem is too many are welded to the idea that you have to have low magic setting martial characters but high magic setting spellcasters. "We have an app for that" is a part of the latter issue (in my view) but also powerful spells are all to often 'a snap of a finger' whereas in a lot of fiction very powerful spells require time to cast or are part of a ritual ... but that can create a playability problem depending on how it is implemented.

Actually, 2e did a good job of balancing it out as well. Spellcasters could be powerful but they had serious drawbacks as well, all of which got dumped in later editions, keeping all of their strengths and none of their weaknesses. Didn't play enough high end 2e to comment on that.

AD&D did. Casters needed more xp to level up. They were also less likely to survive low levels. It was balanced risk vs reward, but nowadays there's no (or at least less) risk. The choice not to do that was probably a psychological one. If your PC dies often enough at low level will you give up the game and want to play something else?

Without any player facing rules, widgets, or info that tell players something is even possible they often won't try it. In some cases, yes. Depends on the player.

You can't fling yourself between a disentegrate ray and an innocent bystander, or catch a falling ally. At least not with the rules. You can tell the DM its what you want to do, but like it was said; "most DMs are going to design adventures that are a mix of combat and non-combat encounters drawn closely from the rules provide for that sort of thing". Yes, this is a thing that has frustrated any number of DMs (see falling rules, made even worse in Xanathar's). I'll go and find the homebrew falling scheme a friend of mine dreamed up, it's pretty darned good and accommodates what you allude to there.

I've never seen any player try to jump further than str score
I have but it's rare

swing on a chandelier,
Seen that, as well as an innovative 'slide down the jib to knock the pirate off of the focs'l by the Barbarian in Salt Marsh (me DM), and it worked (Athletics check)

initiate a chase
We have done quite a few chases, my first one was in Chult

, or disarm (barring disappointed battlemasters)
Used the DMG rule on that a few times. Most recently in Max Wilson's forum based game versus a nasty Iron Golem with a big old halberd.

So the players get a choice of doing the standard on the character sheet murder-hobo attack & damage, or asking to try something where rolling a 4 could dump them in lava or collapse the building on the hostages or such.

... you aren't going go bridge the gaps between "the rules say pcs can do these things and not other stuff" and "you get an extra dc 15+ fail chance plus a penalty for trying when asking to stunt" and "the DM can let you try anything". Likely true for many groups.

That's not what I said at all. What I said is that the "get power from items" path turns you into Iron Man, because that is exactly where Iron Man gets his power. There are plenty of other ways to be a high level martial. You could be Thor. That's a high level martial that's nothing like Iron Man.
Hmm, Thor is a deity, so I'd suggest using a different example unless you are playing the I version of BECMI. I agree with your Iron Man point, though.

+2 and a 15 check is crap. We're dumping a freaking at-will short range 30-60 foot tactical group teleport magic ring on the open market in our D&D game because of a DC 13 save vs stun on the allies you use it on. Why? Because nobody's bonuses are high enough (at 13th level) to make the risk worth it in combat. DC 15? You expect a 5th level pc with maybe +7 to take a 1 in 3 prat fall **** up chance for a piddly +2? I try DC 15ish stuff all the time, and so do players I DM for.

As I don't play WH40K stuff, no comment on stunts. But if that's what you are suggesting for Tier 3 and 4 play for Fighters and Barbarians, I'm interested.

There is also strategic and tactical depth that comes from them not being equally good at all the same things. Yes.

2) "There are spells for basically everything" (which requires ignoring any/all the downsides those spells have) does not = "the party caster can do everything." Spells known, spell slots, and above all concentration are all finite resources with steep opportunity costs. Particularly in a multi encounter adventure day, or in an adventure where resources are constantly stressed.

With Conjure X spells, the player has little to no control over the quantity or quality of the creatures they get, while with Summon X spells what you get is far weaker than an even moderately optimized martial. And better still, both options take up your valuable concentration. The DM has a lot of freedom with many spells to make them helpful, even impactful, without enabling the caster to run roughshod over everyone else. And that's before we get into the countermeasures or defenses that the monsters have access to. Like counterspell. (Yeah, I know, that's a different thread). :smallsmile:

It is: Will WotC D&D ever achieve caster vs martial balance again, like TSR D&D had. Probably not, since the conceptual approach is different.

5e is close. Martials roundly dominate in Tier 1 & Tier 2 when compared to arcane casters. They're balanced pretty well in Tier 3. But if you use the commonly used optional rule of Multiclassing, that goes out the window pretty quick. MC does that due to front loading at low levels.

But a martial is someone specialized for fighting and a caster is not. That is why caster will always include all the other specialities. So far so good.
However, casters specialized for combat still do exist and should be able to compete with martials.
No, they should not. That's the problem, or as I will assert in this thread, that is the problem with the gish mentality in general. It's "I want a free lunch" or "I want all that but I don't want to have to pay a price/opportunity cost for that" (5e Hexblade is but one of the major offenders here)

Satinavian

2022-07-26, 08:11 AM

No, they should not. That's the problem, or as I will assert in this thread, that is the problem with the gish mentality in general. It's "I want a free lunch" or "I want all that but I don't want to have to pay a price/opportunity cost for that" (5e Hexblade is but one of the major offenders here)
Ideally a caster specialised for combat to the same degree a martial is a combat specialist, would have to give up the same amount of utility/other abilities and be no more useful outside combat than the martial is. That is actually the easiest kind to balance because both can do pretty much exactly the same, only by different means.

But combat casters are just a very small subset of all potential caster themes, while all martials are combat martials.

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-26, 08:48 AM

By "esoteric mythic heroes" do you mean "a character from the largest movie franchise in history who had a movie come out this month"? Because people have been talking about Thor, and that's the Thor we're allowed to talk about here.
There's a lot I want to say here but I'll limit this to just reiterate my point.

Take a look at the Storm Herald subclass. By 20th level, you get:

1. Bonus Action - cause an enemy within 10ft to make a DC ~21 Dex save for 4d6 Lightning Damage
2. Lightning Resistance, Swim Speed, Can Breathe Underwater
3. Grant allies within 10ft Lightning Resistance
4. When you hit an enemy within 10ft with an attack, force a DC ~21 Str save to Knock Prone

There is no reason for this martial subclass to be as anemic as it is when you are thinking of a Herald of the Storm. The Tempest Cleric gets a fly speed. The Storm Sorcerer gets a fly speed. Why not the Storm Barbarian? Why not have the ability to grant any weapon you wield the Thrown property and have it return to your hand immediately after each attack? Add thunder and lightning damage too. Maybe a bonus action attack to shoot lightning, maybe it chains to other enemies. Maybe throw on push/pull effects or remove their Reaction for a turn or even Stun. Add Con to Intimidation checks, give an AoE shout effect that deals Thunder damage and Frightens. Ignore difficult terrain while flying, spend reaction to negate Shove/Knock Prone. Now we're approximating what Thor does in the movies.

There's a bunch of stuff you can do that would make a barbarian Storm Lord interesting and impactful. But the devs didn't do that. So my point is before you throw the baby out with the bath water and say everyone needs to be demigods in order for the game to work, maybe consider that the devs haven't even tried to accomplish anything interesting with Martials. That "martial" is synonymous with "balance point, this is the bottom rung from which all other interesting things rise".

If it's not super cool and dynamic at any existing level, why do we have to wait until high levels to make it super cool and dynamic? Why not just make it that at all levels? If what you want is stuff that won't break the game at 10th level, why would you want to wait until 20th level to get it?
I didn't say this and I'm not sure how you got that from what I said. My point is that martial features and martial combat is largely streamlined, simplified, and uninteresting. So imposing an arbitrary and selfish level cap on martial characters, as you want to do, would not solve any problem except enforce your ideal of martial/caster disparity.

The game can remain as it is now, but high level martials get cool stuff to do outside of combat. What part of that is limiting the game?
Huh? Your repeated dodging of questions makes a conversation with you more and more confusing.

I want martials to do cool stuff.

If you don't want to play a demigod, why do you want to play at the levels that contain challenges appropriate for demigods?
Answer: Because I want to face higher level threats and deal with higher level challenges.

Question: Why do you think people need to be demigods at higher levels?

Except there is. If you nerf casters, you have removed something from the game.
Removing high level mundanes from the game is also removing something from the game. You don't have a high ground here, try as you might.

If you have purely mundane characters exist at specific levels, all the same things are in the game. They simply exist at a specific level range, exactly like every other character concept does. Suppose what you wanted was not to play a purely mundane Barbarian, but to play a Barbarian who never gained Indomitable Might. Would you rage against the designers who forced you to play a character who could be no higher than 17th level? Or would you, perhaps, accept that because you had defined your character by the abilities it did not have, there would necessarily be some point at which you had to stop gaining abilities because you had the ones you were okay with having?
Lets have casters at high level play.

Lets have Kalading-dong and Cthulhu-loincloth at high level play.

Lets have mundane badass martials at high level play.

Who is removing anything??

I suppose "mortal" might not have been the best word to use there. I meant it in the sense of "normal" not strictly "not a god". Cap is superhuman...
D&D martials are superhuman too, as they can survive falls from ridiculous heights, submersion into lava, repeated monsters attacks, etc. Cap is a D&D martial.

... and by the time he is fighting Thanos he has been further empower by Mjolnir.
An artifact weapon? You don't say...

What I was getting at is that neither Infinity War nor Endgame bothers to pretend that "Hawkeye v Thanos" or "Black Widow v Thanos" ends with anything other than a bloody smear where the hero used to be.
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The last three left fighting Thanos were a mundane guy with a magic suit of armor, a mundane guy with a magic shield, and Thor (a Storm Herald barbarian with a Dwarven Thrower and a magic item that lets him fly).

And Thanos proved to just have super high hit points. And then the party beat him with the mcguffin. And that was after the AD&D fighter called in his army to fight Thanos' army.

I don't see the point you're trying to make.

It's not the numbers that don't make it work. It's the getting hit with a meteor that doesn't make it work. Mundane people don't survive that.
They do in D&D. Better than casters even.

Well, yes. Because it's not relevant. I am sure there is some point on the fuzzy margin where a better attack routine or nicer saves or whatever it is that whatever AD&D fanboy thinks made Fighters the real deal way back when is enough to push mundane past magic. But it is plainly obvious that such pushing cannot continue forever. At some point, you fight the Xixecal. And there is no mundane warrior who can carve apart a glacier.
So everyone has to be forced to play as a supernatural demigod because you are dangling some CR 36 monster from a previous edition above our heads? Lol, very compelling...

Again, not relevant. I think, depending on what you consider to be your starting point, there are plenty of things it would be reasonable to have casters lose. But "cast spells quickly", "wear armor", and "not track components" are all things casters do in the source material, and I think it is entirely reasonable for characters to do those things. I would (within reason) accept that there might be levels at which they don't do those things, or types of casters that don't do those things. But at some point the Wizard should damn well grow up to be Doctor Strange.
It is relevant. Your insistence on Thor is the point. Thor can fly, summon lightning, plane shift at-will, etc. Casters can do that. If you also let casters wear armor, get Extra Attack, and weapon proficiencies, why not just play Thor as a caster? Why look to martials to do something the casters can already do?

As casters get more and more goodies, and bleed over into martial territory, it becomes a meaningless discussion. You're already getting what you want, which is "martials" that can keep up with casters. It just so happens these "martials" are also casters...

And if I wanted to play Gandalf, that would be an entirely reasonable objection. Of course, I don't particularly want to play Gandalf, so it's a somewhat less reasonable objection to the position I actually hold.
*rolls eyes*

Gandalf is also a concept. He is a wizard archetype. Aragorn is also a concept and archetype. You are limiting Aragorn to his story beats in the books, and then turning around and saying wizards are not equally limited by Gandalf's story beats in the books.

On the contrary, it's you who won't imagine martials that do more than you want them to. I can name many martial characters D&D doesn't handle well that I would like it to handle better. I have done so in this very thread.
You're arguing with someone else that you think is me. You can have your demigods in the game. It doesn't bother me. I just also want what I want in the game. I want to play a knight up until level 20 without you telling me "well, at this point you start being able to lash gravitational surges so that you can fly and travel through time, just like a wizard". Not interested, but I don't mind if someone else wants to play that.

Ignimortis

2022-07-26, 09:38 AM

You're arguing with someone else that you think is me. You can have your demigods in the game. It doesn't bother me. I just also want what I want in the game. I want to play a knight up until level 20 without you telling me "well, at this point you start being able to lash gravitational surges so that you can fly and travel through time, just like a wizard". Not interested, but I don't mind if someone else wants to play that.

How are they demigods if a non-superhuman knight can keep up with them without even transcending mundanity? It's a Captain Hobo problem.

Slipjig

2022-07-26, 09:43 AM

There is no need to drag down high level because high level martials already exist at that level.

I don't particularly care that casters are "stronger" than my barbarian because it doesn't really matter to me. What matters to me is that I have cool and interesting stuff to do, and that I can do those things without tapping into some mystical or supernatural magic power source.

Can you go into what the difficulty is? Because they can do this now.

But martials can take on that threat now?
Yes, they can, but the fact that your martial can attack six times as fast as a normal human and soak a punch from a giant without being turned into a bloody smear means that he is ALREADY manifesting superhuman abilities. It may not be accompanied by an anime-style lightshow, but he's clearly no longer a Guy-at-the-Gym.

You seem to be really hung up on the term "demigod", but I think we're talking about different things. Most demigods in mythology are significantly LESS powerful than a high-level D&D martial. Theseus, Asclepius, and Bellerophon would not survive swimming in lava. Demigods don't manifest miracles or throw lightning, they are generally just faster and stronger than normal humans. If they have any clearly supernatural abilities, it's generally from a magic item gift from their divine parent.

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-26, 09:44 AM

How are they demigods if a non-superhuman knight can keep up with them without even transcending mundanity? It's a Captain Hobo problem.
You can label them whatever you want. For my part, a knight that is tanking hits from an archfiend and slaying demon princes is pretty superhuman, even if he isn't shooting fireballs from his eyes and teleporting around the battlefield.

Ignimortis

2022-07-26, 10:01 AM

You can label them whatever you want. For my part, a knight that is tanking hits from an archfiend and slaying demon princes is pretty superhuman, even if he isn't shooting fireballs from his eyes and teleporting around the battlefield.

If they do it by the virtue of "having a lot of HP and the archfiend doing damage that you can survive with just a lot of HP", it is certainly an issue. Either they have so much HP they can survive falling from orbit and taking a dip in lava, and then they're clearly not mundane, or they can't, and then pretty much anyone can tank an archfiend.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-07-26, 10:03 AM

The definition that high-level must be demigods is rather...assuming the conclusion. "High level" can mean whatever the developers want it to mean. There's no intrinsic reason that a level 1 character must be a chump OR that a level 20 character must be a world-warping demigod. In fact, if you play 3e as it seems to have been intended, neither of those is true. And 5e even less so. Sure, you're individually relatively powerful. But individuals aren't soloing any demon princes, unless you throw them against a fresh, high-op PC in a white room with all the advantages and favorable rulings stacked on the PC's side. Even a team should struggle to actually face a demon prince...because demon princes rarely are alone.

D&D is not either a generic fantasy simulator (which removes all the "but I want to be Gandalf! or Aragorn! or whatever other fantasy characters you can name" complaints) nor a super-hero simulator. No, you can't be Thor. Or any reasonable approximation. You can't build Gandalf. D&D wizards =/= generic fantasy wizards. D&D wizards are D&D wizards, and that alone. D&D fighters are not Captain America, heroes of real-world myth, nor anything else. And that's a lot of the issue here--people insist on treating the game as if it's designed as "fantasy dress up, build your favorite characters!". <rant>For what it's worth, I've never had anyone exhibit the desire to play Dr Strange. Or even someone on their level. Why? Because that doesn't fit the world at all. In fact, high-end comic book heroes (or the equivalent) can't exist in a coherent setting at all. You actively have to disregard the fact that the worlds they inhabit don't actually work on their own terms. And similarly for "demigod" D&D characters--a world where that's normal is a world that does not work to get them there. It's full of contradictions.</rant>

But not only the worldbuilding falls apart--the game systems you need for demigod play and the game systems you need for action hero play are entirely dissimilar. Shoving them both into the same mechanical framework means neither one is done well and you mostly just have a mess. There's a reason that most "build a bear" systems don't have strong vertical progression--it puts so much stress on the system that tiny differences become enormous. That doesn't mean you need no (or very little) vertical progression--a class/level system, because of its inherently limited build variety[1] can handle more vertical progression than a build a bear system, because it can tie the "jumps" in power together and ensure everyone gets something. At least if done right.

Yes, attaining something like balance is going to have to make wizards (and yes, primarily wizards) weaker and less "I cast all the spells" and only "I cast all the spells". They'll need actual class features, with the limits that come along with those. And have their bloated, ever-growing spell list[2] cut down to something meaningful and thematic. On the flip side, it would also require one of
a) chopping the game off at lower levels (ugh)
b) accepting that, while not demigods, non-spell-casters aren't just Joe Average. They're better than that, whether by supernatural power[3], by Charles Atlas superpowers[4], or whatever. "Guy who is just like all the other guys, decent with a sword, but nothing special" isn't a sustainable path beyond very low levels. Even if the end point isn't demigods.

[1] and that's a very good thing, IMO. Limits are some of the most important things for creativity. "Do anything" isn't actually very useful.
[2] ever notice that every new spell (unless it heals, and even then sometimes) ends up on the wizard list, even if it's way more thematic for everyone but wizards (all those draconic spells in 5e's Fizban's)?
[3] not all supernatural/extraordinary power is spells. That's another myth that's crept in, that if you can do anything but what absolutely average people do, you're a "sword mage".
[4] and yes, "I worked out so much that I can punch out mountains" is absolutely a superpower. No, Captain America is not, in any coherent world, just "peak human". Nor is Batman. Despite what the writers say (cf the part above about incoherent superhero settings). I'm sorry, that dog won't hunt.

Xervous

2022-07-26, 10:07 AM

This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The last three left fighting Thanos were a mundane guy with a magic suit of armor, a mundane guy with a magic shield, and Thor (a Storm Herald barbarian with a Dwarven Thrower and a magic item that lets him fly).

A genius who has catapulted through so many technological breakthroughs in a few years they could very well bring about industrialization if they were dropped in Ancient Rome. One who has crafted multiple pieces of equipment that went on to become pivotal plot pieces and/or doomsday devices. Tony Stark reflected in a fantasy setting is a legendary smith toting his array of personally crafted sentient armaments.

Captain America vs Thanos is skewed by Odin’s statement that “blah blah worthy holder of hammer has powers of Thor.” His serum enhanced body would lose to hulk, and it’s only through the power of plot that he gets a temporary power up to fight Thanos.

In matters of scope there’s Thor restarting the star forge, Thor handling a single large invasion craft in a matter of moments.

It’s really a question of what point past human limits you set the allowances of mundane. If, without explanation, such acts are decidedly mundane, what then does that say of the world at large?

Morgaln

2022-07-26, 10:31 AM

I think a major problem is that D&D is incredibly focused on combat and not much else. Classes (and by extension characters) define themselves primarily by what they can contribute in combat. Everything else is secondary. This comes back to Satinavian's excellent post about how important a robust skill system is. I would add to that the ability to create non-combat challenges that are just as involved as combat is and can run parallel to that.

Movies have an easier time with that because they don't worry about not splitting the party; they can have one group fighting Thanos, another defending Wakanda and the third forging a new weapon somewhere completely different. But RPGs can do the same; you can have the combat-focused characters deal with the enemy while the tech-savvy ones try to deactivate the doomsday device and the charismatic characters are busy evacuating the innocent bystanders. There are many systems out there that make this split easy and give everyone a potential role to play. There are even systems out there that specialize in that kind of structure. Unfortunately, D&D is not one of them. If everything you get is a hammer combat bonus, every problem will be a nail combat. And while you can certainly do non-combat challenges in D&D, characters will always attempt them despite the class features they have, not because of them.

NichG

2022-07-26, 10:37 AM

The definition that high-level must be demigods is rather...assuming the conclusion. "High level" can mean whatever the developers want it to mean. There's no intrinsic reason that a level 1 character must be a chump OR that a level 20 character must be a world-warping demigod. In fact, if you play 3e as it seems to have been intended, neither of those is true. And 5e even less so. Sure, you're individually relatively powerful. But individuals aren't soloing any demon princes, unless you throw them against a fresh, high-op PC in a white room with all the advantages and favorable rulings stacked on the PC's side. Even a team should struggle to actually face a demon prince...because demon princes rarely are alone.

People are committing the fallacy of arguing a point of preference as a point of logic, without just saying 'actually, this is my preference'. Preferences matter though. In some sense, they're the only thing that matters in something like an entertainment-driven hobby, and logic takes a back seat to that.

What it comes down to isn't that 'high level must be demigods', its that 'I want to play demi-gods dealing with demi-god stuff; I can do that in what we currently have, but I can't do that in the proposed balanced-downwards versions; therefore, even if you make a balanced-downwards version, I won't want to play it'.

Similarly, it doesn't 'make sense' to think of iconically powerful action heroes as the guy at the gym, but if someone's preference is to play something that extols the virtues of someone who focuses on pumping iron and putting in honest effort over those who deal in tricksy abstract conceptual BS, well, whether it 'makes sense' or 'conforms to fictional tropes' or whatever doesn't matter - that's what they want, there are contexts in which they can have that thing, and there are proposed changes (like just standardize around Tome of Battle and stop talking about Fighters) that would ruin that fantasy. So even if ToB martials can legitimately keep up with the average caster-as-played, well, they won't be satisfied by that solution.

Some people want D&D to be a squad of people with different sets of five to ten moves on their action bars taking on tactical combat scenarios. Some people want to become ascended beings capable of personally toppling empires and only forced to get together with other similarly ascended beings to deal with issues like 'the conceptual underpinnings of reality are being shoved out of the way by new laws' or 'Death itself was assassinated and now someone needs to do something about the 100 billion souls stuck in their unliving-but-not-dead corpses'.

Any kind of argument that 'you shouldn't be able to have your kind of fun with D&D' or 'D&D isn't for you, play Nobilis' doesn't actually go anywhere because for the people who have been having fun doing those things with D&D it's sort of like a stranger coming to your house, banging on your door, and insisting you implement KonMarie.

Want balanced martials and casters? There are dozens of solutions now, and they all work. But we still end up talking about it because each of those solutions sacrifices something that subgroups of players find more important than 'balance'. E6 balances martials and casters. Tome of Battle balances martials and casters. 4e D&D balances martials and casters. Gestalt where everyone has a martial class and a casting class balances martials and casters. Those all achieve balance, but they trample on specific fantasies or styles of play that people want to engage in. So having them as an option at hand is great and in practice I think fully resolves the problem, but trying to standardize any of them and saying 'this is now D&D, everyone should play this way' just doesn't work.

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-26, 10:38 AM

I have no interest in walking backwards from the game. The game has rules for HP and other mechanics that set the standard. If I want to play a more mundane type, I accept that the game lets me walk through fire and shrug it off.

That doesn't mean that my knight has to transform into something else later on.

Wizards in The Dresden Files are explicitly called out as being tougher than normal humans. But apart from that, I don't know that wizards are supposed to also be able to walk through fires or fall from heights and shrug it off. But they can in D&D. It's just a function of HP, not something to hone in on as pivotal to determine whether mundane archetypes should be shot out of a cannon.

b) accepting that, while not demigods, non-spell-casters aren't just Joe Average. They're better than that, whether by supernatural power[3], by Charles Atlas superpowers[4], or whatever. "Guy who is just like all the other guys, decent with a sword, but nothing special" isn't a sustainable path beyond very low levels. Even if the end point isn't demigods.
This can be fine, for me, depending on what everyone thinks the sustainable path looks like. I don't look at the end game and think "Ok, in order to play at high levels, I need to fly natively, I need to teleport natively, I need to plane shift natively, I need to ignore elemental damage natively, etc etc". So if that's what people are thinking, then no thanks. I don't want to become an elemental force of nature. Worldbuilding D&D so that every fighter, rogue, and barbarian mutates into a flying earthquake hurling avatar is super lame.

For me, it's simple stuff like "This warrior is so proficient not even the toughest hide of any monster can turn his blows". That translates to any attack made by this martial bypasses resistance. Why is this "supernatural"? Why does this have to be "magical"? Instead of all martials needing a magic weapon at some point, you can just say they're so lethal and competent that they can harm monsters that normally shrug off weapon attacks.

Think about tropes like beast mounts/companions, and magic items, and grappling feats, and how 5E just completely guts these things. Then people turn around and say "mundanes can't work at high levels" and it's like... well maybe they can if you lean into some of those tropes. Perseus was gifted with magic items to slay his foes, and a flying horse that didn't die when the monster sneezed. Magic items in 5E are pretty terrible, and you need to play a Ranger or Paladin to have a mount that's got a shot at surviving combat for a round... In actual combat you can mostly just attack and shove someone 5ft... Grappling them lets you drag them around, and I think this is a very useful thing martials can do in combat, but it ends just about there. Want to defend yourself with a shield? Well, you don't get to really block against arrow attacks, but if your DM allows feats and you get to the level where you can get a feat you can take Shield Master and then if the attack doesn't target anyone else you can add +2 to your save... Wow, amazing...

Sorry, but I can't get on board with any discussion that doesn't first try to beef up martials before immediately leaping to the "they must turn anime" option.

RandomPeasant

2022-07-26, 10:44 AM

The problem is that at high levels of power all abilities become genericized. An extremely powerful martial character might claim to utilize the 'Heavenly Demon Sword Technique' or 'Ninefold Spear Mastery' or any number of other abilities, but these are just BS and they don't actually amount to anything because it's all just blur-fighting in the end.

This is not really true. If you look at a series like Cradle, high level combatants do very different things. Some people fight with swords. Some people fight with archery. Some people fight with fire and death. There's a whole range of things going on, and if you see all high-level combat as "blur-fighting", I'd suggest that reflects either bias on your part or poor choice in media.

Many aspects of combat that people find important or interesting like weapon choice and fighting style only really matter at low-levels of power.

I don't think that's true. High power levels have meaningful weapon choice. It's just that you're choosing between Mjolnir and Dragnipur, not between a longsword and a halberd.

Why should they? I don't care about what "every other DM elsewhere" thinks, I care about mine.

Empathy is a valuable life skill.

If I'm reading this analogy correctly, this is actually the crux of the issue. I assume my wider possibility space makes me the party's caster and therefore you the party's martial, correct? If that's the case, why do you and I have different goals? D&D is not a PvP game.

It's not an analogy to playing the game, it's an analogy to balancing the game. I could as easily have phrased it as a single-player game. But the point remains: a meaningful notion of level implies a reasonable degree of balance.

That depends on the Iron Man adventure. "Beat up a monster/alien" is fairly common, and attainable for all sorts of D&D characters, martials included. "Invent a plot device" by contrast is indeed not something D&D classes do as well as he, but it's not really supposed to in the first place.

And yet, the characters who are as you wish D&D martials to be demonstrably do not go on Iron Man adventures like "fight Thanos on Titan". The Avengers movies themselves make no pretense that the purely mundane Hawkeye or Black Widow is the equal of Iron Man. Hawkeye doesn't even claim that, he has his whole speech about how he's a guy with a bow and he's there because it's the right thing to do, not because he measures up to Thor and Hulk.

How do you define "mostly?" His body count with his magically-produced energy far exceeds that of his weapons in most engagements, much like a blaster.

Thor blasts through mooks, sure. But he fights the big, named enemies up close and personal with hammer and axe.

Also, there are 12 classes and only 3-6 PCs in a given party. (I don't count Artificer, but that makes 13 I suppose). More classes we don't need, but more options that scale seems to be your direction of argument.

You don't need any classes at all. Shadowrun gets by just fine without them. But that's not an argument for not adding more. If people want to play Scouts or Fire Mages or Binders, more power to them.

There is no reason for this martial subclass to be as anemic as it is when you are thinking of a Herald of the Storm. The Tempest Cleric gets a fly speed. The Storm Sorcerer gets a fly speed. Why not the Storm Barbarian?

I don't understand why you think this would be something I'm opposed to. I also don't understand how you could look at a guy who is throwing around a weapon that does lightning damage and consider that compatible with your desire for a purely mundane character.

Question: Why do you think people need to be demigods at higher levels?

Because there are adventures that are appropriate for demigods.

Removing high level mundanes from the game is also removing something from the game. You don't have a high ground here, try as you might.

No, it's not. Level is just a yardstick. A particular set of capabilities isn't a different thing if you get it at 20th level rather than 10th.

D&D martials are superhuman too, as they can survive falls from ridiculous heights, submersion into lava, repeated monsters attacks, etc. Cap is a D&D martial.

Cap is martial, but he is very explicitly not mundane. He gets a "super-soldier serum". In the fight with Thanos he gets lightning blasts. If you're okay with that, I don't have an issue, because that is a character who is very much upgrading to demigod levels when he faces challenges that require him to do so.

And that was after the AD&D fighter called in his army to fight Thanos' army.

That's very explicitly not what happens in the movie. Cap thinks he is lost, and is surprised when Strange gates in reinforcements. Certainly some of those guys are Cap's crew (Sam, Bucky), but the great majority of them are the soldiers of Wakanda (who serve the explicitly superhuman Black Panther) or wizards or other superheroes. After the first movie, Cap never has any kind of military command. He has a party that he's a part of, but it's like four people, and at least one of them has her own independent adventures while Cap is still around.

They do in D&D. Better than casters even.

No they don't. The martials that survive getting hit with meteors are not "mundane". You can call them that, but it only makes you wrong.

So everyone has to be forced to play as a supernatural demigod because you are dangling some CR 36 monster from a previous edition above our heads? Lol, very compelling...

Wait, did someone move this thread to the 5e forum and not tell me? Because I thought we were having a general discussion. Certainly, if you want to say that D&D shouldn't include Xixecals, that's fine. But if you say that, you've got to stop claiming you don't want to exclude anything from the game.

You are limiting Aragorn to his story beats in the books, and then turning around and saying wizards are not equally limited by Gandalf's story beats in the books.

Yes, because there are other wizards that do things that Gandalf does not do. What's the Aragorn archetype? What's the example of it that's on the level of Doctor Strange? If you can't find that, maybe it doesn't actually scale.

I want to play a knight up until level 20

Do you also want an amp that goes to 11 so it's louder?

The definition that high-level must be demigods is rather...assuming the conclusion.

"We don't support the type of play where mundanes are obsolete" is certainly a way to square the circle of having purely mundane characters. But it is one that is incompatible with the "I don't want to exclude anything from the game" argument. Gonzo high level play has been a part of D&D since it's inception. If you want to cut that out, fine. But don't go telling me that my position of "low power and high power characters can exist in the same system" is the exclusionary one.

D&D is not either a generic fantasy simulator (which removes all the "but I want to be Gandalf! or Aragorn! or whatever other fantasy characters you can name" complaints)

D&D is absolutely a kitchen-sink fantasy game. That's different from "generic", but not by so much you'd really notice. And simply saying "I don't care if you can play Aragorn or not" doesn't solve the problem of people wanting to play Aragorn. If you pitch D&D to someone as "you can play fantasy heroes", their expectation that they can play a character like their favorite fantasy hero is entirely reasonable. Does it need to be an exact match? No. But if your vision of D&D requires people to divorce it entirely from the rest of the fantasy genre, your vision of D&D is a failure.

In fact, high-end comic book heroes (or the equivalent) can't exist in a coherent setting at all. You actively have to disregard the fact that the worlds they inhabit don't actually work on their own terms. And similarly for "demigod" D&D characters--a world where that's normal is a world that does not work to get them there. It's full of contradictions.

And yet, it is demonstrably the case that the largest movie franchise of all time is about (yes, not entirely) exactly those types of characters. The idea that no one is interested in stories about Doctor Strange is rather hard to credit when a story about Doctor Strange made $900 million not three months ago.

But not only the worldbuilding falls apart--the game systems you need for demigod play and the game systems you need for action hero play are entirely dissimilar.

Not really. The combat engine scales just fine, and the things you could do to make it scale better (mostly making more stuff relative rather than absolute) are a good idea in general. It's true that there are different non-combat systems at those scales, but your non-combat systems are always going to be modular. You don't build your chase rules out of the same things as your research rules, so having an additional set of kingdom management rules or vasty rituals of mighty power rules is not going to destabilize anything.

Anonymouswizard

2022-07-26, 10:51 AM

Also I'm fairly certain that the Marvel Universe is an open table and Hawkeye's player keeps forgetting to bring his high powered character.

5e on particular has a weird issue where martials are very strong, but lack defined breadth. They're probably roughly balanced with casters in a combat focused campaign, but outside of combat balance falls apart as the Rogue's lockpicking is subject to the whims of the GM whereas the Wizard's Knock/Dimension Door/Gaseous Form/Whatever just works. A GM can throw a DC45 lock in front of the party that the Rogue straight up cannot pick, and the Wizard still can deal with it (although this scumbag is mostly hypothetical, I suspect in practice we wouldn't be looking at a DC higher than 35 in actual play). Whether or not this is a problem depends more upon your opinion and group than anything else. This forum cares, but this forum also likes Batman Wizards, a reference I'm not sure even your average 3.5 player got.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-07-26, 11:06 AM

This can be fine, for me, depending on what everyone thinks the sustainable path looks like. I don't look at the end game and think "Ok, in order to play at high levels, I need to fly natively, I need to teleport natively, I need to plane shift natively, I need to ignore elemental damage natively, etc etc". So if that's what people are thinking, then no thanks. I don't want to become an elemental force of nature. Worldbuilding D&D so that every fighter, rogue, and barbarian mutates into a flying earthquake hurling avatar is super lame.

For me, it's simple stuff like "This warrior is so proficient not even the toughest hide of any monster can turn his blows". That translates to any attack made by this martial bypasses resistance. Why is this "supernatural"? Why does this have to be "magical"? Instead of all martials needing a magic weapon at some point, you can just say they're so lethal and competent that they can harm monsters that normally shrug off weapon attacks.

Think about tropes like beast mounts/companions, and magic items, and grappling feats, and how 5E just completely guts these things. Then people turn around and say "mundanes can't work at high levels" and it's like... well maybe they can if you lean into some of those tropes. Perseus was gifted with magic items to slay his foes, and a flying horse that didn't die when the monster sneezed. Magic items in 5E are pretty terrible, and you need to play a Ranger or Paladin to have a mount that's got a shot at surviving combat for a round... In actual combat you can mostly just attack and shove someone 5ft... Grappling them lets you drag them around, and I think this is a very useful thing martials can do in combat, but it ends just about there. Want to defend yourself with a shield? Well, you don't get to really block against arrow attacks, but if your DM allows feats and you get to the level where you can get a feat you can take Shield Master and then if the attack doesn't target anyone else you can add +2 to your save... Wow, amazing...

Sorry, but I can't get on board with any discussion that doesn't first try to beef up martials before immediately leaping to the "they must turn anime" option.

While I agree that you don't have to be super-flashy about things, I have some quibbles.

I would say that if a monster has "is resistant to non-magical attacks" and you ignore that resistance...that's magic. By definition. Because the alternative is that you have this non-magic magic that acts like magic except it doesn't say it's magic. But magic =/= spells. Mechanically, I'm totally fine with saying that you could get a class feature like "your attacks become magical". Meaning "they get the game tag that says they bypass resistance." How this manifests in-universe may just be some extraordinary power.

As far as magic items/mounts/etc, I'm fine with them...but they should absolutely be part of the character if they're going to be part of balancing. Not things that can be
a) not granted
b) taken away
c) traded away for other things
d) etc.

So if you got a class feature of "flying mount" that was just part of your class, or got the ability to make your sword get all fiery, that's one thing. Relying on the DM to have to distort the story so you just, "magically", happen to always have those things (or distort the setting to ensure you have a magic mart where you can always buy such things) is...less to my taste.

As far as not being able to block things...I totally agree. That's an iconic action that you should be able to do even at low levels. Including blocking (at least partially) a dragon's breath or a fireball.

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-26, 11:32 AM

I don't understand why you think this would be something I'm opposed to.
I don't.

I also don't understand how you could look at a guy who is throwing around a weapon that does lightning damage and consider that compatible with your desire for a purely mundane character.
I don't.

I'm trying to demonstrate my original point, which is that any semblance of balance is impossible without the devs being interested in it. You can certainly create a subclass that lets you fly at high levels and call lightning and throw weapons, but the devs didn't go there. They let you ping one enemy for damage within 10ft of you, no damage if they make their save.

Because there are adventures that are appropriate for demigods.

"Demigods" is just a term though. What does your comment mean?

No, it's not.
Lol

Me: Can I play this fighter at level 17?

You: No, but don't worry, I'm not removing anything *wink wink*

Me: Lol, sure whatever you say *wink wink*

Cap is martial, but he is very explicitly not mundane. He gets a "super-soldier serum".
In D&D you don't need a super soldier serum. A human fighter can grapple the Mad Titan. A human fighter can tank a punch from the Mad Titan, serum not needed.

"Mundane" is meaning action hero. Fights through physicality with body and weapons. Doesn't use magic attacks, etc. D&D blurs this because it's constrained by needing mechanics, but I think this is a relatively simple concept to grasp.

In the fight with Thanos he gets lightning blasts.
From a magic item. Yeah, that's fine. It's a staple of fantasy.

No they don't. The martials that survive getting hit with meteors are not "mundane". You can call them that, but it only makes you wrong.
It's a function of the game. Wizards don't mutate into avatars either. They learn how to cast spells. This doesn't have an impact on their body, but they can also tank a meteor. It's just how HP works.

Wait, did someone move this thread to the 5e forum and not tell me? Because I thought we were having a general discussion. Certainly, if you want to say that D&D shouldn't include Xixecals, that's fine. But if you say that, you've got to stop claiming you don't want to exclude anything from the game.
Ah, I see.

Mention AD&D --> labeled "fanboy"

Hinge your position on a 3.0 epic level monster --> perfectly normal conversation

While I agree that you don't have to be super-flashy about things, I have some quibbles.

I would say that if a monster has "is resistant to non-magical attacks" and you ignore that resistance...that's magic. By definition. Because the alternative is that you have this non-magic magic that acts like magic except it doesn't say it's magic. But magic =/= spells. Mechanically, I'm totally fine with saying that you could get a class feature like "your attacks become magical". Meaning "they get the game tag that says they bypass resistance." How this manifests in-universe may just be some extraordinary power.

I'm ok with that. I played a 14th level Totem Barbarian and described his Eagle Totem fly speed as Hulk-like giant leaps, because that better fits the aesthetic I prefer. Similarly, I'd just skin it as I described it, a warrior so competent he can pierce the toughest hides. If it needs to be labeled magical, I don't like it, but it's just a label.

But making the same ability work because you "magically imbue the weapon with a shining light that sheds radiance in x feet and deals 1d6 radiant damage" wouldn't cut it for me (no pun intended lol).

As far as magic items/mounts/etc, I'm fine with them...but they should absolutely be part of the character if they're going to be part of balancing. Not things that can be
a) not granted
b) taken away
c) traded away for other things
d) etc.

So if you got a class feature of "flying mount" that was just part of your class, or got the ability to make your sword get all fiery, that's one thing. Relying on the DM to have to distort the story so you just, "magically", happen to always have those things (or distort the setting to ensure you have a magic mart where you can always buy such things) is...less to my taste.
Yeah, I'm not sure how this would work. I understand that in previous editions it was just part of your class features, but not everyone wants to play a fighter that gets a keep and followers etc, so I'm not sure what the solution is here except perhaps making it into a subclass? I don't know, but I get your point about the DM having to force it otherwise in each campaign, and I tend to agree.

As far as not being able to block things...I totally agree. That's an iconic action that you should be able to do even at low levels. Including blocking (at least partially) a dragon's breath or a fireball.
Agreed. Even parrying. And combat can go even further of course.

meandean

2022-07-26, 11:54 AM

Cap is martial, but he is very explicitly not mundane. He gets a "super-soldier serum".Oh my gosh... what is the problem supposed to be, then? Captain America has super strength and reflexes because he took a made-up "serum" that could never actually exist. Hawkeye has super strength and reflexes because he trained really hard in a way you could never actually do. These are both patently ridiculous origins! They're excuses to justify the end result of a guy who gets to do what they can do! Why would you not allow the second one? It's just flavor! They're both dumb!!

Psyren

2022-07-26, 11:55 AM

Empathy is a valuable life skill.

Expecting "every DM elsewhere to agree" has nothing to do with empathy, it's just an unrealistic expectation to hold.

It's not an analogy to playing the game, it's an analogy to balancing the game. I could as easily have phrased it as a single-player game. But the point remains: a meaningful notion of level implies a reasonable degree of balance.

But your analogy still implies there is a reason for us to be competing. It's not "you're trying to make me hit 20 and I'm trying to hit anything else." Rather it's "If you hit your numbers and/or I hit mine, we both win the game." Whether I have a larger possibility space for a given game or you do, the result is the same - we work together.

And yet, the characters who are as you wish D&D martials to be demonstrably do not go on Iron Man adventures like "fight Thanos on Titan". The Avengers movies themselves make no pretense that the purely mundane Hawkeye or Black Widow is the equal of Iron Man. Hawkeye doesn't even claim that, he has his whole speech about how he's a guy with a bow and he's there because it's the right thing to do, not because he measures up to Thor and Hulk.

You missed the point of Hawkeye's speech to her - he felt like he might be out of his depth, but without all of them working together they would fail. And they would have definitely failed without Black Widow, who tipped them off to the Big Bad's location in time (using their skill checks because the "caster's" scrying internet was unusable.)

Thor blasts through mooks, sure. But he fights the big, named enemies up close and personal with hammer and axe.

So which did he use on Hela here, hammer or axe? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpStWh5fmts) Or does the Goddess of Death not count as a "big, named enemy?"

Black Jester

2022-07-26, 12:11 PM

This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but: parity between warriors and magic-users isn't desirable, because, conceptually, magic users are by no means interesting or relevant enough to be anything but clearly inferior to warriors. This thematic discrepancy between heroic protagonists and spellcasting sidekicks should be reflected by the rule set as well.

Heroic Fantasy, like D&D, does not exist in a vacuum or independently of the greater canon of human stories and legends. It is based, in a direct line, on fantastic tales (the original Appendix N and various updates over the years), which, on the other hand, are based on a tradition of heroic sagas, epics, and folk tales, primarily from a historical European background. These historic tales form a collective human experience and ideal, surviving for hundreds, if not thousands of years in tales of idealized heroics: from ancient Gilgamesh, over the Homeric heroes of the Iliad to the early medieval sagas and songs about Roland and Beowulf, to the chivalric tales of Chretien de Troyes or Wolfram von Eschenbach.

These tales reflecting the idealized figure of the era they are written in, and the target group – mostly members of the warrior-elite themselves, but they also represent an almost universal ideal of heroism, that bridges time, culture and technology: you can still become fascinated by the bloodshed at the walls of Troy, despite being over 2,500 years apart from Homer’s tale about the wrath of mighty Achilles, sharing very different cultural values (have you ever had a quarrel with your boss because he decided to take your favourite sex slave as his personal spoil of war? Have you flown into a murderous rage because some dude killed your gay lover while he was dressed as you?) and the whole Homeric dactylic hexameter is very alien to modern English (and, I suppose, you are not a native speaker of Ancient Greece).

This is what the platonic ideal of a heroic figure, an adventurer truly is: a conquering hero, a warrior-king, a slayer of beasts and men who is sometimes cunning, sometimes an personification of moral ideals, but always courageous and capable in a battle. There is a reason, why, linguistically heroic deeds are very often linked with struggle and war. We have firefighters, physicians battling against diseases and Freddy Mercury fighting to survive in a world with the darkest powers. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEJ8lpCQbyw)

Characters like Robin Hood, Lancelot du Lac, Heracles, Robin Hood, Rostam, Sigurd, Aeneas, El Cid, Sinbad or Beowulf, are all, in D&D terms, warriors, or fighting men, if you are staying true to the original terminology. We could argue if Robin Hood is a fighter or a ranger or if Heracles might qualify as a barbarian instead, but those semantics are only minor adjustments, born out of the imperfections and restraints of a class-based character creation system.

Consequently, this type of character is the natural protagonist of a fantasy epic. One might deviate from it, and many tales are, focusing more on a cunning hero than on a more straightforward archetype, but two traits are necessary: tenacity, and martial prowess. Why? Because being able to take a beating and handing one out is, in essence, awesome.

On the opposite end, we have the sorcerer, or witch, or wizard, a character common in lore, but almost never central. Merlin might be the archetypical western wizard, but he is only a sidekick to the warrior king Artus (and disappears completely in later chivalric tales of the round table). Robin Hood is the main hero and protagonist of countless folk tales, not Friar Tuck. The sorcerer appears as a sidekick, a counsellor to the protagonist who might support him and offer advice, but he is ultimately too weak (either mentally or physically) to overcome the challenge himself.

More often, the sorcerer (or sorceress) is a villain to be defeated by the hero and as such, is shown as an opposing force: deceptive and manipulative where the hero is straightforward and honourable, cowardly where the hero is courageous, frail where the hero is mighty. The connotations are clear: The true essence of those who use magic is their inferiority, which they can only overcome by cheating, and breaking the code of conduct. This is, what magic effectively always is: A short hand for deceit, illicit manipulation and the inability to compete fairly. Magic is the tool of the sadist, the coward and the weakling.

Now, you might dismiss this as a pre-modern notion of heroics and honour, but that assumption would be wrong. The code of heroes being straightforward and physical, and able to suffer through hardships is well alive in contemporary fiction, and even non-fictional narratives. The same way wrestling matches have cheating, cowardly tricksters using illicit exploits (what is the devastating green mist of the wrestling ring but a blinding spell?) children’s stories pitch deceptive, cheating villains against upright heroes. Space Jam’s villainous aliens having to steal their talents to overcome their own inferiority, before being defeated by the heroics of brave Sir Michael Jordan. The Emperor has to throw around lightning bolts, and the toad-shaped crime lord has to rely on his minions, because they physically no match for the jedi knight. Even in Harry Potter, a franchise explicitly about idealizing wizards, the most heroic moment in the whole tale comes when the previously bullied side character slays a giant snake with a sword.

You will find the same distribution of sympathies between the honest, straightforward guy suffering through pain and hardships in many, many non-fictional narratives as well: Greg LeMond, the only American who ever *legitimately* won the Tour de France, did so for a third time after surviving a shotgun blast to the chest. A true warrior. He later campaigned hard against doping in his sport, bringing him into opposition to then media darling Lance Armstrong.
As we know now, Armstrong wasn’t quite good enough to compete fairly and had to rely on the magic of modern medicine to compete. While also posturing a lot about cancer awareness, and doping and healthy living. A liar, a cheat, a wizard.
Both Sasha Grey and Bill Cosby had sex with dozens of people. One had to rely on, ahem, magic potions, to achieve that goal and is now pretty much despised (and rightfully so). The other one worked hard (hey, sex work is work) and persevered. So yeah: Sasha Grey: warrior. Bill Cosby: wizard.

To truly capture this discrepancy of respectability and intrinsic worth as a character, spellcasters should be as mechanically inferior to warriors as they are thematically inferior. From the perspective of the narrative in its historical context, a spellcasting character isn’t even more important than the hero’s horse. They are merely a sidekick at best, a distraction from the main attraction at worst and should probably be understood as something like the comic relief character in a Shakespearean play: beloved for a scene or two, but should never overstay their welcome (and should be the butt of the joke, when humiliation is on the menu).

It really doesn’t help that D&D’s convenience-based magic system with its almost guaranteed effectiveness, little to no risks or drawbacks and, in newer editions, infinitely spammable low key spells isn’t just extremely boring, its inclusion in the game makes it as a whole less interesting by turning something that could – and rightfully should – be something mystical and wonderful into a mere commodity.

KorvinStarmast

2022-07-26, 12:17 PM

You don't need any classes at all. Shadowrun gets by just fine without them. Fascinating, but the topic under discussion is D&D.

Because there are adventures that are appropriate for demigods. But that isn't the balance zone the game (current one) is aimed at. BECMI had the I package that was kind of a different game.

Someone earlier mentioned Bellerophon as a demigod, and he wasn't one during his adventures: he was a hero or a superhero. But (depending on the story version) he, like Heracles, eventually ascended into demigodhood.

No they don't. The martials that survive getting hit with meteors are not "mundane". You can call them that, but it only makes you wrong. Agree.

Anonymouswizard

2022-07-26, 12:18 PM

Oh my gosh... what is the problem supposed to be, then? Captain America has super strength and reflexes because he took a made-up "serum" that could never actually exist. Hawkeye has super strength and reflexes because he trained really hard in a way you could never actually do. These are both patently ridiculous origins! They're excuses to justify the end result of a guy who gets to do what they can do! Why would you not allow the second one? It's just flavor! They're both dumb!!

Captain America's exact status depends on continuity. In 616 he is explicitly not super, in the MCU I believe he is, and in 1602 he has to have at least an anti-aging power. Which makes him a really annoying character, because his abilities don't vary that much.

In other words most Marvel (and DC) media assumes that nobody alive comes close to 'peak human'.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-07-26, 12:19 PM

I'm ok with that. I played a 14th level Totem Barbarian and described his Eagle Totem fly speed as Hulk-like giant leaps, because that better fits the aesthetic I prefer. Similarly, I'd just skin it as I described it, a warrior so competent he can pierce the toughest hides. If it needs to be labeled magical, I don't like it, but it's just a label.

But making the same ability work because you "magically imbue the weapon with a shining light that sheds radiance in x feet and deals 1d6 radiant damage" wouldn't cut it for me (no pun intended lol).

Yeah, I think we're basically in agreement. Non-casters should be powerful (which, yes, may involve extraordinary, in the 3e-sense abilities), but shouldn't need to be flashy and obviously, overtly magical about it. Some can be, but it's the core capability that's necessary, not the visual/overt effects.

Yeah, I'm not sure how this would work. I understand that in previous editions it was just part of your class features, but not everyone wants to play a fighter that gets a keep and followers etc, so I'm not sure what the solution is here except perhaps making it into a subclass? I don't know, but I get your point about the DM having to force it otherwise in each campaign, and I tend to agree.

Yeah, not sure. It's why I prefer to take other routes. Solving this via magic items/mounts seems like it's orthogonal to the class design. And IMO your core, system-assumed capabilities should always come exclusively from your non-missable class features.

Agreed. Even parrying. And combat can go even further of course.

I've got thoughts around things like a shield block and other "weapon talents" as a parallel advancement track that is basically inversely related to your spellcasting. More spell casting? Fewer weapon talent options. But it needs a lot of work. Plus some things should just be baseline. Anyone proficient in a shield should be able to shelter someone else from arrows or a cone of fire in more meaningful ways than a +2 bonus to AC/saves (which doesn't even need a shield). Some people (say fighters) should be able to do it better, but I'm a fan of most such things just being baseline capabilities for people who know what they're doing.

Telok

2022-07-26, 12:21 PM

I try DC 15ish stuff all the time, and so do players I DM for.

As I don't play WH40K stuff, no comment on stunts. But if that's what you are suggesting for Tier 3 and 4 play for Fighters and Barbarians, I'm interested.

Well Dungeons the Dragoning 40k 7e v1.2 isn't actually a Warhammer thing. Its a unholy love child of D&D, White Wolf games, Exalted, WH40k, with some Shadowrun, Battletech, Paranoia, and... well it's an bastard mutant love child. That works.

Its also a game where having a starting character with slightly above average (3/5) in all stats and training/prof in all skills, tools, and saves but not proficient with any weapons or armor is... a perfectly good (if odd sort of min/max) starting character that can easily contribute in combat and keep up with the spellcasting starship captain character.

The rest of it was pointing out, not that you can't make a DC 15 check like an untrained cr zero dirt farmer commoner, but that an 18 stat & +4 prof higher level hero has a big enough chance of regular & repeated failures at that check to make the "do something stunt-like" as run by the majority of D&D tables a bad choice in the eyes of the players. Not saying there aren't people on these boards who in the last decade have had a game where they used a rule tucked into the DMG. I am saying that there are a good number of not-hardcore-DMG-rereading-on-the-weekends players who won't even ask to try things in those DMG optional rules because the player's books imply to them that asking the DM "can i run from the thing with 5 more feet of move than my pc" is on the same level of DM fiat & probable permission as asking "DM can my character flap his arms and fly to the moon".

The game rules system presented to players does not encourage anything beyond using the has-a-hard-rule-in-the-PH options. It may not always specifically & explicitly ban something, but that is not an invitation to try those things. And in the rules in the books there is a very strong message to DMs & players that things like a class ability or spell should not be alliwed with "just" a check, and if they are then it should be a DC higher than "normal" and with a penalty for failure. If you don't think that's "right", that's fine. But under "rulings not rules" and ambiguous or imprecise "plain language" things like a DM calling for a climb check because there's a listed DC in the module or never calling for less than a DC 15 ability check are also playing the game right. Maybe not playing it well, but its also right. The result of this common occurance among players & DMs who don't hang out on forums & work out best practices that aren't in the books, is to effectively & regularly punish players for trying anything not based on a decently hard rule in the PH.

So if people want to advocate balancing big & flexible list casters vs non-casters (outside of basic attack & damage as the be all & end all of the game) by stunting or the ability/skill check system... you're just going to have to put options & rules & character abilities for it in the PH so players know about it, plus really hamner home in the DMG with solid on the math guidelines & examples how the game is intended to be run.

Xervous

2022-07-26, 12:31 PM

KorvinStarmast

2022-07-26, 12:35 PM

Cutting down to the simplest question. If a character is ‘mundane’ and performs grand feats, what is it that draws the line between them and pot belly farmer Joe? What stands in the way of Joe becoming a L20 fighter? Farmer Joe is an NPC commoner, according to the game. An adventurer isn't a Commoner, they are someone with 'something special' beyond their wanderlust/desire to travel/adventure/dare dangerous things.

As to the balance discussion, the broader the scope the harder it is to balance. What I'd like to offer is the idea that Bounded Accuracy, as a tool, allowed the game to define playable and usable balance zone that is a lot like an aircraft's Center of Gravity limits - it is for sure not a balance point, but a zone.
(A couple of CG plots here for a fixed wing aircraft that hopefully gets the idea across: http://www.collinsaerospace.com/what-we-do/industries/business-aviation/flight-support-services/arincdirect-flight-planning-and-weather or this one http://www.aviationchief.com/uploads/9/2/0/9/92098238/g450-zfw-cg-envelope-g450-wbm-para-2-4.png?1062)

LibraryOgre

2022-07-26, 12:37 PM

Yes, other systems have done it, and 4e did it.

No I don't care about any 'wah 4e doesn't count' arguments. It balanced mundanes and casters. You might not like how it did it, and it's not the only way to do it, but it did it.

Pretty much this.

4e Balanced them. I was there. It worked. Might not have been how everyone wanted it done, but if we had two Strikers, they were going to do similar damages under their individual ideal circumstances. Two leaders would heal about the same damage. Two defenders were about as tough as each other.

Xervous

2022-07-26, 12:44 PM

Farmer Joe is an NPC commoner, according to the game. An adventurer isn't a Commoner, they are someone with 'something special' beyond their wanderlust/desire to travel/adventure/dare dangerous things.

Pardon me for terming this the most anime thing I’ve heard in the thread.

What’s the in universe explanation?

Batcathat

2022-07-26, 12:56 PM

Now, you might dismiss this as a pre-modern notion of heroics and honour, but that assumption would be wrong. The code of heroes being straightforward and physical, and able to suffer through hardships is well alive in contemporary fiction, and even non-fictional narratives. The same way wrestling matches have cheating, cowardly tricksters using illicit exploits (what is the devastating green mist of the wrestling ring but a blinding spell?) children’s stories pitch deceptive, cheating villains against upright heroes. Space Jam’s villainous aliens having to steal their talents to overcome their own inferiority, before being defeated by the heroics of brave Sir Michael Jordan. The Emperor has to throw around lightning bolts, and the toad-shaped crime lord has to rely on his minions, because they physically no match for the jedi knight. Even in Harry Potter, a franchise explicitly about idealizing wizards, the most heroic moment in the whole tale comes when the previously bullied side character slays a giant snake with a sword.

You will find the same distribution of sympathies between the honest, straightforward guy suffering through pain and hardships in many, many non-fictional narratives as well: Greg LeMond, the only American who ever *legitimately* won the Tour de France, did so for a third time after surviving a shotgun blast to the chest. A true warrior. He later campaigned hard against doping in his sport, bringing him into opposition to then media darling Lance Armstrong.
As we know now, Armstrong wasn’t quite good enough to compete fairly and had to rely on the magic of modern medicine to compete. While also posturing a lot about cancer awareness, and doping and healthy living. A liar, a cheat, a wizard.

You are correct that the idea of the "honorable", "just" hero who not only does the right thing but does it the "right" way is a very common one. It is, however, not the only one and as such it shouldn't be built into the mechanics of a game that is clearly intended to portray several different kinds of hero, from paladins to rogues to sorcerers.

As for cheating, what that is defined as in a life or death adventure (or if it even exists there) is a very subjective question. Tour de France have very specific rules, saving the world typically don't.

Personally, I loathe the concept of the hero who puts their honor ahead of their goal. The "hero" who refuses to use magic or attack the villain from behind or when they're unarmed or whatever because it would be "dishonorable", despite innocent lives or the world itself being on the line, is a selfish idiot who deserves to lose, in my opinion. But since that is just my opinion, I don't think it should be coded into D&D's rules, but neither should the idea that a fighter "deserves" to be more powerful.

meandean

2022-07-26, 01:02 PM

What’s the in universe explanation?Here it is: They're really good.

Do you want an explanation of how the tensile strength of their muscles differs from other humans or something? Is that how you think stories work? That you start with establishing the laws of physics, biology, etc. in your world, and then create your plots and heroes?

Maybe Tolkien did something akin to that, but stories in the Big Damn Hero genre like D&D (now) is, don't. Stan Lee had an idea for a hero with "spider powers". So he made up a silly reason how that could happen, in order to get to the interesting part, a hero with spider powers. Star Trek comes up with a story concept, and then they backfill some nonsense about reversing the tachyon polarity of whatever, so that they can tell that story. Do you think they write the technobabble first, and then ponder "what tales can be spun in this world where you can reverse the tachyon polarity?"

Ignimortis

2022-07-26, 01:29 PM

Also, there are 12 classes and only 3-6 PCs in a given party. (I don't count Artificer, but that makes 13 I suppose). More classes we don't need, but more options that scale seems to be your direction of argument.
And yet a lot of them play very similarly. If those 12 classes represented truly different playstyles, then yes, maybe we wouldn't need more.

This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but: parity between warriors and magic-users isn't desirable, because, conceptually, magic users are by no means interesting or relevant enough to be anything but clearly inferior to warriors. This thematic discrepancy between heroic protagonists and spellcasting sidekicks should be reflected by the rule set as well.
I mean, this is an interesting point of view (and certainly true from a historical perspective). Wonder if anyone ever made something like Ars Magica, but for fighter-type heroes.

And yet, I figure playing the sidekick shouldn't be a thing unless the game says so from the outset, clearly labelling sidekick and hero classes.

Tanarii

2022-07-26, 01:29 PM

Pardon me for terming this the most anime thing I’ve heard in the thread.

What’s the in universe explanation?
Narrative Causality. Discworld style.

BRC

2022-07-26, 02:05 PM

Cutting down to the simplest question. If a character is ‘mundane’ and performs grand feats, what is it that draws the line between them and pot belly farmer Joe? What stands in the way of Joe becoming a L20 fighter?

One thing to remember is that, at least according to most D&D settings I've seen (as close as we can get to "Canon") Being a Wizard requires no innate difference. Much like being a brain surgeon or rocket scientist, it is a matter of training, education, and experience. There is, theoretically, nothing stopping Farmer Joe from becoming a 20th level wizard except that he lacks that training, education, and experience.

It's the same with Fighters. Training, Education, and Experience.

In a Fantasy World, somebody with the right Training, Education, and Experience can conjure a wall of flame.

The question at hand is, is it okay to let somebody whose Training, Education, and Experience is focused on swordsmanship be similarly fantastical.

Or is the cap of a Fighter whatever we imagine The Best Swordsman In History could do?

Psyren

2022-07-26, 02:46 PM

Captain America's exact status depends on continuity. In 616 he is explicitly not super, in the MCU I believe he is, and in 1602 he has to have at least an anti-aging power. Which makes him a really annoying character, because his abilities don't vary that much.

In other words most Marvel (and DC) media assumes that nobody alive comes close to 'peak human'.

And even if MCU Cap is purely "peak human," he still proves the point. Give the peak human a magic shield and/or magic hammer, and he keeps up with magic users and evil demigods just fine. That's an appealing fantasy for many people, a number of which reside within D&D's target demo.

Cutting down to the simplest question. If a character is ‘mundane’ and performs grand feats, what is it that draws the line between them and pot belly farmer Joe? What stands in the way of Joe becoming a L20 fighter?

I would imagine the same thing that keeps every Librarian Larry from becoming Elminster. To become a high-level adventurer takes a combination of talent, training, luck, and even providence. Simply reading some books or hauling some sacks of grain doesn't make you a PC class.

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-26, 02:50 PM

The question at hand is, is it okay to let somebody whose Training, Education, and Experience is focused on swordsmanship be similarly fantastical.

Or is the cap of a Fighter whatever we imagine The Best Swordsman In History could do?
My idea of "fantastical swordsmanship" would be being able to harm fantasy monsters, being able to block/parry fantasy monster attacks, moving fast enough to keep up with them or evade them, etc.

In other words, I am okay in thinking that by virtue of going toe to toe with these threats and harming them and surviving them, my fighter has achieved fantastical levels of swordsmanship.

I think that goes beyond "what The Best Swordsman In History could do", but it also isn't walking on air or splitting my sword into a million blades and directing them with my hands. (I don't know exactly what people imagine when they think of what martials should be like at these levels, I know it differs from person to person.)

PhoenixPhyre

2022-07-26, 02:56 PM

I would imagine the same thing that keeps every Librarian Larry from becoming Elminster. To become a high-level adventurer takes a combination of talent, training, luck, and even providence. Simply reading some books or hauling some sacks of grain doesn't make you a PC class.

The way I see it, some people in the fiction are "special" for whatever reasons (different reasons for different folks). And in different ways. And not all of those map onto what we normally think of as such. PCs aren't special because they're PCs (ie narrative causality), PCs are PCs because they're special. If they weren't, we'd be following other people who did end up being special. Because it's a game about fantasy heroics, people going beyond the norm in lots of ways. Not either a universe simulator or an average joe simulator.

And, personally, I don't think that the "anyone could be a wizard if they practiced" thing makes for coherent settings. Every other spell-casting class is limited (in 5e at least)--most priests are not Clerics. Most warriors/guards/etc are not Fighters. Not everyone who gets angry has Rage or is a Barbarian. Sorcerers arise by bloodline or accident of birth. Not all minstrels, even the best ones, create magic with their music. People with PC classes are few and far between (a change from 3e).

And this makes sense in real life--being a Wizard or Cleric isn't like being a burger flipper. It's more like being an astronaut or pro sports player. Even if it doesn't take an inborn "spark of magic" (just like it doesn't take an innate "spark of astronauthood" to be an astronaut), it still requires massive quantities of talent, genetic luck, and specialized training. Such that if you tried to put an "ordinary" person through it, they'd fail. Same with being a Fighter or Wizard. It has prerequisites that effectively rule out all the "ordinary" people.

awa

2022-07-26, 03:04 PM

Satinavian

2022-07-26, 03:08 PM

The question at hand is, is it okay to let somebody whose Training, Education, and Experience is focused on swordsmanship be similarly fantastical.
Probably not.

Just having fantastical abilities one could train does not mean every ability one could train should be fantastical. Otherwise the world becomes pretty arbitrary and it does not really matter what people train because magic, swordmanship and ikebana can more or less do the same.

However, D&D does more than just say a wall of fire and swordmanship are things you can achieve via training. It also says that having learned swordmanship makes learning walls of fire harder and vice versa. And that having trained creating walls of fire makes leaning how to create cones of cold pretty easy somehow

D&D is a class system, not a point buy system where you can buy wall of fire and swordmanship. And because of that you can't just balance abilities, you have to balance classes. Otherwise you could just make swordmanship less expensive than magic and call it a day.

BRC

2022-07-26, 03:21 PM

My idea of "fantastical swordsmanship" would be being able to harm fantasy monsters, being able to block/parry fantasy monster attacks, moving fast enough to keep up with them or evade them, etc.

In other words, I am okay in thinking that by virtue of going toe to toe with these threats and harming them and surviving them, my fighter has achieved fantastical levels of swordsmanship.

I think that goes beyond "what The Best Swordsman In History could do", but it also isn't walking on air or splitting my sword into a million blades and directing them with my hands. (I don't know exactly what people imagine when they think of what martials should be like at these levels, I know it differs from person to person.)

Probably not.

Just having fantastical abilities one could train does not mean every ability one could train should be fantastical. Otherwise the world becomes pretty arbitrary and it does not really matter what people train because magic, swordmanship and ikebana can more or less do the same.

However, D&D does more than just say a wall of fire and swordmanship are things you can achieve via training. It also says that having learned swordmanship makes learning walls of fire harder and vice versa. And that having trained creating walls of fire makes leaning how to create cones of cold pretty easy somehow

D&D is a class system, not a point buy system where you can buy wall of fire and swordmanship. And because of that you can't just balance abilities, you have to balance classes. Otherwise you could just make swordmanship less expensive than magic and call it a day.

I think "Fantastical" was the wrong word. "Effective" might be better.

For example, if a low level fighter can Tripping Strike a Knight by knocking them off-balance with a well placed blow, a High-level fighter can shatter a giant's kneecap, tripping them.

So, I think part of the idea is that Combat is pretty Flat in 5e. There are not a lot of levers to be pulled, not a lot of things to be done beyond attacking and taking hits.

This is fine as a core system, but part of the problem is that they are generally unwilling to Layer additional mechanics on top of that, keeping Fighters pretty contained in the Attack+move+reaction realm, with very limited ability to break the rules.
Part of me wonders if the problem is, ironically enough, The Battlemaster.

The Battlemaster is GREAT, it's a version of the fighter that gets to play in a similar sandbox to casters while still feeling distinct. Superiority Dice feel great to use, and they nicely add a new layer to the basic combat mechanics while still feeling like they're about Your Character Being A Good Fighter, instead of Sword-Wizardry. It doesn't even feel especially "Anime" as some would say, but they have mechanical power and depth. Unfortunetly, they made the whole mechanic a subclass-specific thing, so now every other martial subclass starts over from 0.

If Manuevers were a general mechanic, they could serve as a great springboard. You could even add another layer onto it by handing out free maneuvers in different situations. "Take a -5 penalty on your attack roll, if you hit, perform a free Maneuver". "If your final attack result exceeds 20, perform a free Maneuver". My eternal quest for giving some love to Daggers could be helped by "If you roll maximum or minimum damage on your weapon die, free Maneuver" or something to that effect. But anyway....

I feel like Manuevers exist as the ideal solution to the "Guy at the Gym" fallacy. Abilities that are mechanically impactful and play well with the idea that they are extensions of mundane fighting skill, and have a fun to engage with mechanic. You just need to let them break the rules a bit more and get a bit more creative with what you want to let them do and let them break the rules a bit more, and let them scale a bit more. Part of the thing holding Maneuvers back is that they have no innate scaling, they're all built to work at 3rd level. Unlike spellcasting, there's no inbuilt scaling to them, they just hit a bit harder and have a higher DC the more you level up.

Take, for example, the Riposte Manuever. If an enemy misses you, spend a superiority die and your reaction to make a counterattack. It's mechanically powerful, and fits within the theme of "Skilled Swordsman" without going full anime Sword Wizard.

Scale it up a little, let it break the rules. It's not a single Riposte, it's "Counterattack Stance", every time an enemy misses you with a melee attack that round you get to do a counter, sell the idea of a single swordsman turning away a flurry of blows and retaliating with expert skill.

Let a high-level fighter spend multiple superiority dice to give an enemy disadvantage, letting you REALLY hit hard with that tripping attack so you can bring down a Dragon, whose strength save would normally make tripping strike laughable. The Fighter leaps off a flying steed and slams a sword into the Dragon's wing, sending int tumbling to the ground.

I don't know, I just feel like Manuevers are one of the centers of most unrealized potential in 5e.

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-26, 03:31 PM

KorvinStarmast

2022-07-26, 03:32 PM

That's an iconic action that you should be able to do even at low levels. Including blocking (at least partially) a dragon's breath or a fireball. If you try to block a flame thrower or a Fuel Air Explosive, you still get burned or blowed up. The saving throw, an abstraction, accounts for that.
Yes, in the movie Dragonslayer the protagonist using a shield made of dragon scales was able to block the srtream of dragon's breath, but D&D isn't trying to emulate that movie.

KorvinStarmast

2022-07-26, 03:39 PM

Pardon me for terming this the most anime thing I’ve heard in the thread. Pardon me for finding that comment to be inane.
Roll 4d6drop1 and you will usually get someone who is above average. The PHB points out that the PCs are indeed unusual, which is very similar to the narrative 'specialness' of the protagonists of most Swords and Sorcery and Fantasy stories, shows, movies, books, etc.
While I am at it, going up in level isn't something a commoner can do. (I am using the 5e model here). So that's another way that PCs are not your average denizen of the game world.

What’s the in universe explanation? This isn't a comic book, it's a game, so that's a pointless question that isn't relevant to the topic. Balance has no In Universe explanation either; the topic of this discussion is centered around balance (yeah, of course there is some drift, it's GiTP) which is a game design issue.

And yet a lot of them play very similarly. If those 12 classes represented truly different playstyles, then yes, maybe we wouldn't need more. We don't even need 12.

InvisibleBison

2022-07-26, 03:42 PM

And this makes sense in real life--being a Wizard or Cleric isn't like being a burger flipper. It's more like being an astronaut or pro sports player.

It seems to me that this is not an inherent part of the game but just a way a given setting might work. There's no reason why having a PC class has to be that difficult. The fact that you don't like a given worldbuilding choice doesn't make it incoherent.

BRC

2022-07-26, 03:45 PM

@Black Jester

I tend to agree with your sentiment. More and more, D&D is flipping this notion on its head. Everything is becoming more magical, and so the heroes are just more magical. As can be seen in this thread, some don't see there to be any room for the person that is operating on grit and will and values, with sword and shield in hand.

Instead, the hero is someone that can waggle his fingers around and bend reality. Wow... so heroic.

Oh look, a demon prince that can hurl waves of fire, enchant you with its gaze, shift through the various planes of reality, and command demonic minions to do its bidding. Who will save us from this monstrosity? Oh, the wizard, that also... hurls waves of fire, can enchant you with its gaze, plane shift, and command summoned minions. Wow, how interesting...

To add on to the sentiment on Black Jester's post, and emphasize the way D&D flips this on its head... in stories and movies, the heroic warrior is the one that imposes many conditions. There are the obvious ones like shoving someone, knocking them prone, or grabbing them. But warriors also blind their enemies with cuts, gouges to the eyes, reflective shields/mirrors/sword blades. They stun them with brutal attacks or pressure points. They incapacitate them with head strikes or choke holds. They cause bleeding wounds. They exhaust them by dancing around, evading attacks, and wearing them down. They poison them. They inflict save-or-sucks like decapitating their enemies or chopping limbs off.

Martials are the heroes of so much of the media we consume and they do a lot of different things without being wuxia or fantastical. In D&D, they do virtually none of these things. Imposing conditions is almost the sole purview of casters and their spells.

And this is why I say that before we can agree on anything, we need the devs to want to bring the martials up from where they are.

One interesting thing to note is the progression of published Martial subclasses.

in the PHB we have 2 mundane Fighter subclasses: Champion and Battlemaster, and one Magic subclass, Eldritch Knight.
For Barbarians, we have 1 mundane (Berserker) and one Magical (totem). TBH the Totem barbarian can be fluffed to be mundane pretty easily, but whatever.

In Xanathars, all three Barbarian subclasses are Magical. Fighters get 2 mundane (Samurai and Cavalier) and one Magical (Arcane Archer)

In Tashas, both Barbarian subclasses are magical (Beast and Wild Magic), and both Fighter subclasses are Magical (Psi warrior and Rune Knight).

There seems to be this idea that high level mundane characters shouldn't be allowed to get any new tricks, just improve old ones.

Like, there's no "Blinding Strike" maneuver, even though that makes perfect sense, because all the maneuvers are calibrated around what they're willing to let a 3rd level fighter pull off. The idea that, say, a 10th level fighter might be able to reliably blind her opponents with precision strikes goes against a design ethos.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-07-26, 04:00 PM

It seems to me that this is not an inherent part of the game but just a way a given setting might work. There's no reason why having a PC class has to be that difficult. The fact that you don't like a given worldbuilding choice doesn't make it incoherent.

In 5e, it is absolutely encoded in the PHB descriptions. And it's incoherent because otherwise settings would devolve into "everyone's a wizard and a fighter at the same time". Basically, if it's just a matter of small amounts of training, there shouldn't be competition. You should be able to level up in Fighter and Wizard alongside all your other classes just by spending downtime. Which, yeah, doesn't happen. You can multiclass, but that takes the place of one of your regular levels. Which are things that (in 5e) most people don't even have.

The books present PC classes as being special things, attained only by a few. And specifically do not assume that "leveling up" is a normal thing people do. Most people, instead, from both the fiction as presented in the adventures and in the game itself, plateau in power basically at adulthood, with possibly small rises later. You don't see anything like the meteoric rises that adventurers go through. Hence, PCs must be special. Doesn't mean they're special because they're PCs, but that they're drawn from the population of special people.

If you try to block a flame thrower or a Fuel Air Explosive, you still get burned or blowed up. The saving throw, an abstraction, accounts for that.
Yes, in the movie Dragonslayer the protagonist using a shield made of dragon scales was able to block the srtream of dragon's breath, but D&D isn't trying to emulate that movie.

Then why has the box and cover art included scenes of people blocking dragon's breath with shields since, like, forever? It's encoded hard into D&D itself.

Mechalich

2022-07-26, 04:05 PM

Martials are the heroes of so much of the media we consume and they do a lot of different things without being wuxia or fantastical. In D&D, they do virtually none of these things. Imposing conditions is almost the sole purview of casters and their spells.

A lot, and I mean a lot of of the martial heroes in fantasy stories are quite fantastical, it's just that they are implicitly fantastical as opposed to be explicitly so. Specifically, media regularly allows 'martials' to do things that the human body simply can't do. In a fun example, Jon McClane needs four lives to survive Die Hard (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnHKv2G0wCw), and the original Die Hard is a massive restrained action film by modern standards.

D&D, like many fantasy settings, includes a huge array of creatures that un-augmented human beings simply cannot take on straight up. For example, if you parry the attack of a Hill Giant, what actually happens is that you break both arms and wrists in multiple places. Of course, that doesn't happen in game, because the game spots characters superhuman strength, durability, and even speed. Now, one of the problems D&D has is that this isn't actually in the rules anywhere, it's just implicitly pushed into the system by mechanical choices involving things like HP and AC, and because of that al characters benefit from it. A wizard has less HP than a fighter, perhaps not even a tenth as much, but they still survive a sword to the gut.

If you want completely non-fantastical heroes that imposes a soft cap on how powerful anything in that world can be. Note that technology, as I mentioned upthread, influences this. In a no-magic Stone Age scenario something like T-Rex is a terrifying threat, whereas in the 21st century it's just a big target for someone with an elephant gun.

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-26, 04:08 PM

I can only speak for myself but I like the badass martial trope. I don't need to play "perfectly normal person with nothing extraordinary about them slotted into a heroic fantasy setting".

I want my martial to be the medieval fantasy version of John McClane. Famously, John McClane can't fly or charge his gun with electricity :smallamused:. But he can take a crap ton of punishment and eradicate helicopters and jets that are attacking him :smallamused:.

EDIT:
Like, there's no "Blinding Strike" maneuver, even though that makes perfect sense, because all the maneuvers are calibrated around what they're willing to let a 3rd level fighter pull off. The idea that, say, a 10th level fighter might be able to reliably blind her opponents with precision strikes goes against a design ethos.
Exactly. And that's why my answer to the OP is you need to talk to the devs first. Even if we agree on some metric for martials v casters, it wouldn't matter if the devs don't think a skilled martial should be able to regularly do much more than roll an attack roll or Athletics check.

Slipjig

2022-07-26, 04:13 PM

Someone earlier mentioned Bellerophon as a demigod, and he wasn't one during his adventures: he was a hero or a superhero. But (depending on the story version) he, like Heracles, eventually ascended into demigodhood.
Poseidon was Bellerophon's father. Anybody with a divine parent is by definition a demigod.

BRC

2022-07-26, 04:25 PM

In 5e, it is absolutely encoded in the PHB descriptions. And it's incoherent because otherwise settings would devolve into "everyone's a wizard and a fighter at the same time". Basically, if it's just a matter of small amounts of training, there shouldn't be competition. You should be able to level up in Fighter and Wizard alongside all your other classes just by spending downtime. Which, yeah, doesn't happen. You can multiclass, but that takes the place of one of your regular levels. Which are things that (in 5e) most people don't even have.

The books present PC classes as being special things, attained only by a few. And specifically do not assume that "leveling up" is a normal thing people do. Most people, instead, from both the fiction as presented in the adventures and in the game itself, plateau in power basically at adulthood, with possibly small rises later. You don't see anything like the meteoric rises that adventurers go through. Hence, PCs must be special. Doesn't mean they're special because they're PCs, but that they're drawn from the population of special people

I think that part of it is that DND, despite being a crunchy system, is at best an extremely soft simulation.

Deadlands, for example (It comes to mind because that's the much more simulationist game I'm in) uses explicit Wound rules. There are rules for blocking and dodging, rules for wearing armor, rules for being resistant to pain so you take fewer penalties, and rules for spending meta resources to say you don't actually get hit even though the other rules said you do, but when you DO get hit, the result is explicitly modeled. You take a wound in a certain location, and have to deal with the effects of that wound.

Similarly, in Deadlands, while a starting character can mean a lot of things, there is a rough understanding of how different levels in different skills translate to the narrative. The rulebook lists it as
1 Rank is a Beginner
2 ranks is an Amateur
3 ranks is an Apprentice
4 ranks is a Professional
5 ranks is an Expert.

So if you're making your character, and you put 5 points into a skill, you are saying "My character is an Expert in this skill". You shouldn't put 5 ranks into Swordfighting if your character's backstory doesn't account for them being an expert swordsman.

D&D doesn't have any explicit narrative connection between character level and ability. A 1st level fighter can be a veteran soldier or a farmboy who practiced with his father's sword. Monster statblocks are fairly disconnected from PC stats, so there's no point of comparison. The "Veteran" statblock doesn't resemble any level of PC fighter, so you can't say "Your character can't be a Veteran until their stats roughly resemble X".

Heck, the Backstory mechanic outright declares that your 1st level fighter can be a trained Knight and still be 1st level.

Because D&D isn't about simulating anything, it's about creating a story. The power of a 1st level character is calibrated around "how weak could somebody be and STILL potentially do Fantasy Hero Stuff and be recognizably This Thing".

So of course any world building without explicit narrativium is going to fall apart unless you impose strict limits on 1st level characters.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-07-26, 04:40 PM

I think that part of it is that DND, despite being a crunchy system, is at best an extremely soft simulation.

Deadlands, for example (It comes to mind because that's the much more simulationist game I'm in) uses explicit Wound rules. There are rules for blocking and dodging, rules for wearing armor, rules for being resistant to pain so you take fewer penalties, and rules for spending meta resources to say you don't actually get hit even though the other rules said you do, but when you DO get hit, the result is explicitly modeled. You take a wound in a certain location, and have to deal with the effects of that wound.

Similarly, in Deadlands, while a starting character can mean a lot of things, there is a rough understanding of how different levels in different skills translate to the narrative. The rulebook lists it as
1 Rank is a Beginner
2 ranks is an Amateur
3 ranks is an Apprentice
4 ranks is a Professional
5 ranks is an Expert.

So if you're making your character, and you put 5 points into a skill, you are saying "My character is an Expert in this skill". You shouldn't put 5 ranks into Swordfighting if your character's backstory doesn't account for them being an expert swordsman.

D&D doesn't have any explicit narrative connection between character level and ability. A 1st level fighter can be a veteran soldier or a farmboy who practiced with his father's sword. Monster statblocks are fairly disconnected from PC stats, so there's no point of comparison. The "Veteran" statblock doesn't resemble any level of PC fighter, so you can't say "Your character can't be a Veteran until their stats roughly resemble X".

Heck, the Backstory mechanic outright declares that your 1st level fighter can be a trained Knight and still be 1st level.

Because D&D isn't about simulating anything, it's about creating a story. The power of a 1st level character is calibrated about "how weak could somebody be and STILL potentially do Fantasy Hero Stuff and be recognizably This Thing".

Crunch / simulation are completely orthogonal. But the rest is about right. In fiction, there are many knights (in-fiction title) who are not Fighters. Just like there are many priests who are not Clerics, despite having (possibly) magical powers and many Clerics who have never been priests and have no substantial knowledge of religion, having been called "from the fields", so to speak. D&D classes are an abstraction, a bundling of adventuring-relevant powersets that are reminiscent of an archetype into a set of discrete features and mutually-incompatible progression paths. They're not in-universe things, even if the archetypes they are attempting to evoke are very much in-universe things. Someone who calls themselves a paladin may or may not be a Paladin and have, say, the Divine Sense feature. And not all people with the Divine Sense feature call themselves (or would even consider themselves) fictional paladins.

Point buy systems are better at simulating things; as a side effect, they tend to tamp down on vertical progression.

Basically, I'm not one for "realism". I'm fine with taking the archetypes and finding thematic and in-character ways of doing cool things. However those things should fit whatever power level the system's designers are shooting for, which is entirely separate from the implementation of those concepts outside of the game. A D&D Fighter is not Thor or John McClaine. And never will be. He can chart his own path.

Personally, I find settings that try to either do "high level characters are reality warpers" OR "if you don't cast spells you're just an average joe with some training that anyone can do, but spells can do anything" to be unsatisfying as a result. The first because trying to maintain coherence when people are throwing planets around or casually warping time becomes really really hard, if not impossible. The latter because it's just so narrow of a thought process and ends up with one of
a) everyone of any note casts spells (CF Wheel of Time, where the non-channelers got progressively sidelined or shoehorned in awkwardly, even if they had fantastic abilities)
b) if the setting insists that these regular joes can keep up with the reality warpers, the logic starts breaking down hard (for me). If all it takes is a little training, then why aren't all those guards doing it? How can you have academics who aren't powerful wizards (if all it takes is studying magic).

Also, if studying magic is enough to become a wizard, why can you have a thief rogue with expertise in Arcana and decent int (say +2, minimum check result of 24 at level 17+, maximum of 34 without magic) who can't cast a single spell...yet have a wizard capable of casting wish with a minimum check result of 0-6 and a maximum of 19-25 (no proficiency, ability scores of 8-20)? That is, the minimum knowledge of the rogue is nearly the same as the maximum of the wizard, and the wizard hasn't improved since about level 8. Knowledge is not enough, obviously.

Anonymouswizard

2022-07-26, 04:40 PM

D&D just sucks at consequences as well. Many actions have no cost and no ability to push yourself, 'wounds' just make a number go down, and magic doesn't even regularly consume material components anymore. I suppose it comes from originally just needing to know of a figure was still well enough to fight when you had a hundred per player.

Like the first one kind of annoys me, because so many games let you spend luck and/or fatigue to do better at a task in exchange for not having it later. And I REALLY like the idea of 'you can do it, but it'll wear you out'.

I suppose it's why I like Cypher. It's not too detailed a simulation, but it lets you put effort in and damage means something. Because your ability to improve your rolls and absorb damage comes from the same pool of points, so taking a hit (or having your focus broken) actually makes you worse at acting down the line. Sure, Adepts/Nanos/Paradoxes basically sidestep all of that by running off Intellect and only Intellect, but there's ways around that (and you can always just not take that type and still be a caster).

Psyren

2022-07-26, 04:56 PM

It seems to me that this is not an inherent part of the game but just a way a given setting might work. There's no reason why having a PC class has to be that difficult. The fact that you don't like a given worldbuilding choice doesn't make it incoherent.

It's a useful way to describe or think through the default worldbuilding choices though. In most published settings, PC classes are indeed rare, and the spellcasting ones are a fraction of even that. There are certainly settings like Black Clover where everyone and their mother has a spellbook or MHA where everyone and their mother has a Quirk, but D&D doesn't assume that.

Exactly. And that's why my answer to the OP is you need to talk to the devs first. Even if we agree on some metric for martials v casters, it wouldn't matter if the devs don't think a skilled martial should be able to regularly do much more than roll an attack roll or Athletics check.

You can get a surprising amount done with an Athletics check at my table, especially after T1.

D&D just sucks at consequences as well. Many actions have no cost and no ability to push yourself, 'wounds' just make a number go down, and magic doesn't even regularly consume material components anymore. I suppose it comes from originally just needing to know of a figure was still well enough to fight when you had a hundred per player.

Like the first one kind of annoys me, because so many games let you spend luck and/or fatigue to do better at a task in exchange for not having it later. And I REALLY like the idea of 'you can do it, but it'll wear you out'.

You can do this in D&D just fine though. Just because the designers don't expect you to track a dozen additional resources on every character doesn't mean you can't bolt that on yourself. There's bound to be a Stamina or Adrenaline system on DMs Guild somewhere if you don't feel like designing it yourself.

LibraryOgre

2022-07-26, 05:07 PM

D&D just sucks at consequences as well.

A long time ago, D&D was loosely a sword-and-sorcery simulator, built off a wargame.

For the past 30-40 years, though, I'd say it's mostly a D&D simulator, designed primarily to allow people to play D&D games, which is a genre of games with its own considerations, which people adapt to a variety of uses.

Black Jester

2022-07-26, 05:22 PM

not certain how much satire if any is intended in this post.

Me neither.

but it certainly makes me want to run a game centered on extra normal champions aka illiad or Beowulf, With casters only in the back ground .

Do it. If only as a pallet cleanser between two more conventional campaigns. It's fun (let me tell you about the awesome Sword Sisters Campaign sometimes).

You are correct that the idea of the "honorable", "just" hero who not only does the right thing but does it the "right" way is a very common one. It is, however, not the only one and as such it shouldn't be built into the mechanics of a game that is clearly intended to portray several different kinds of hero, from paladins to rogues to sorcerers.

But that's the point. A "heroic sorcerer" is an oxymoron. You could just as well talk about a gentle torturer, or an honest liar.

As for cheating, what that is defined as in a life or death adventure (or if it even exists there) is a very subjective question. Tour de France have very specific rules, saving the world typically don't.

Saving the world is a pretty big issue... the vast majority of epics and games will have a scope that is magnitudes lower in total risk. The traditional game of D&D is about adventurers who are motivated by getting rich and who are willing to go to dangerous places to loot and plunder. The vast majority of epic heroes are doing stuff because a) it is the right thing to do, b) they are capable to do these things, c) they are personally scorned, see an opportunity to improve their personal lot in life (the repeating leitmotiv of "I am supposed to be king") or d) bragging rights.

D&D can't even truly decide if it wants to treat combats as a a sport or as a life-and-death war (for the PCs, at least. With bad enough Dungeon Masters, the NPCs' motivation and survival doesn't matter). Which works perfectly fine once you understand that , with some rules, even invisible rules in place, fights don't have to be about total annihilation of one side. Warfare, even total war, is also supposed to have rules. And things turn truly ugly if these rules are violated.

Personally, I loathe the concept of the hero who puts their honor ahead of their goal. The "hero" who refuses to use magic or attack the villain from behind or when they're unarmed or whatever because it would be "dishonorable", despite innocent lives or the world itself being on the line, is a selfish idiot who deserves to lose, in my opinion. But since that is just my opinion, I don't think it should be coded into D&D's rules, but neither should the idea that a fighter "deserves" to be more powerful.

That has almost nothing to do with the things I explained, but for the sake of a friendly conversation: "Honour" is a shorthand for a being able to live by the social mores and standards of your society while being in a a situation of crisis. There are some very specific ideas involved with that. For instance, you simply don't abandon your friends or comrades at arms in a time of danger. You are also true to your word, because your reputation for honesty is valuable and nobody is going to trust an oathbreaker, you are not betraying those who are kind to you because that is known as an "******* move". In any pre-industrial society, you can hardly be great, and anonymous. If you want to belong to the cool guys and be treated like a peer, your reputation is your most important property.

Honour applies to combat in a specific circumstance, namely while battling other honourable foes. It doesn’t apply to dishonourable opponents any more than it does to wild animals (and even then, hunters have a sense of hunting sportsmanship and fair chase rules that is quite important to those who hunt regularly. Hunters using particularly cruel or cowardly methods will be ostracized in some circles (and rightly so. I despise cruelty against animals).
If you were a member of the warrior elite, will have a lot more in common with our fellow warriors, even when you are fighting on different sides and this familiarity proves worthwhile, especially if your side might not be victorious. It is a lot easier to negotiate a ransom or a retreat if you haven't raped the enemy's horses, killed their family or did something else usually considered to be beyond the pale. As long as this respect is mutual, there are overall chances to keep the conflict from escalating to a level of burnt earth on all sides. Which is good, because you probably have loved ones you really, really don’t want to become involved in this whole “total war” affair.
Once your opponent has proven to be dishonourable however, you are no longer bound to treat them with respect, are you? Poisoners, sorcerers, necrophiliac- it is a lot easier to just murder a guy if they are really, really disgusting. This is also why you don't want to be a poisoner, sorcerer, or necrophiliac: the opposition will be a lot more motivated to end you if they feel righteous in their motivation to end you.

From a gaming perspective, it is really, really important on the player level not to play horrible people. One of the invisible rules of pretty much any RPG is that PCs have each other’s’ back, and is really presumptuous to assume that the other players are okay with supporting a vile person, like a cold-hearted casual murderer, or a jerk who would even steal from their comrades.
Ask yourself: Do you feel comfortable playing with another PC that is deliberately created as a sex pest? Would you like to join forces with a guy who is eager to enslave those who oppose them (or even better, their non-combatant protégés) and sell them on the flesh market, or someone who drowns kittens or puppies for fun? For the vast majority of players, the correct answer would probably be "hell, no." It is quite uncomfortable to stand shoulder to shoulder with someone you despise and it is a natural action to despise someone who is that disgusting.
Therefore, the safe bet is always, always to play characters who are at their core, decent persons. Because doing otherwise is actually an act of violating the implicit social contract around the table.

So yeah, you want to play an honourable character, mostly because you want the other players to play honourable characters as well. The same social rules that form a social contract in a pre-industrial society (which, basically boil down to "Don't be a penis", with some cultural specifics, like the Greek tales are very specific about not violating the rules of hospitality in particular) also apply to your fellow players. It might be a more abstract thing than “stealing from the other PCs”, but forcing your fellow players into accepting a character who violates the social rules is an act of aggression (and in my personal case would probably trigger a direct, violent in-game response. I don’t think I am able to play any character who wouldn’t try to intervene when another PC would murder a guy in cold blood or try to torture or rape somebody).

I mean, this is an interesting point of view (and certainly true from a historical perspective). Wonder if anyone ever made something like Ars Magica, but for fighter-type heroes.

There is Pendragon (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/165085/King-Arthur-Pendragon-Edition-52), which assumes that all PCs are chivalrous knights doing knightly stuff while dealing with sorceresses, faeries, the occasional giant or dragon and evil knights who take hostages and are, by all means really mean. There is also the way more historical Mythic Britain (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/139443/Mythic-Britain) using the - truly excellent - Mythras rule set. However, these are set in a real world (well, the real world as seen through the eyes of a medieval troubardour who wants to capture his audience) butapply to very different approaches to the same setting - Pendragon approaches the whole thing from a perspective of heroic tale and is very good for something like a largee than life epos, while Mythic Britain is closer to a Bernard Crommwell approach to Dark Age Britain - not truly historical (there are magical druids and supernatural creautrews, after all), but the overall society as presented in game is much closer to something historical. Both deal with real world religions though, so caveat emptor, I suppose.

Even strictly within the boundaries of a D&D game, there is nothing wrong with simply banning spellcasting characters. You can have a great campaign with only a bunch of fighters, and rogues. The OSR indy-games circle offers an abundant source of nearly anything you want (i am personally quite fond of Whitehack (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/348152/Whitehack-Third-Edition), if you want to feel how less rules can actually do more, or Low Fantasy Gaming (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/231747/Low-Fantasy-Gaming-Original)if you want something that is free, and more close to 5e.

There is also an abundance of Conan RPGs, if you want to go more into a Sword and Sorcery direction. There is no shortage whasoever of heroic RPGs, focusing on heroic RPGs. They are just less popular than mainline D&D, but what RPG isn't?

And yet, I figure playing the sidekick shouldn't be a thing unless the game says so from the outset, clearly labelling sidekick and hero classes.

Yes, certainly. It would be nice if any of the WOTC editions of D&D had implemented that suggestion.

Anonymouswizard

2022-07-26, 05:22 PM

You can do this in D&D just fine though. Just because the designers don't expect you to track a dozen additional resources on every character doesn't mean you can't bolt that on yourself. There's bound to be a Stamina or Adrenaline system on DMs Guild somewhere if you don't feel like designing it yourself.

Or, and this is a crazy idea, I could use a system that incorporates it.

The worst part is D&D 5e could have this by using it's Inspiration or Fatigue systems, but the two interact with the actions PCs take so rarely I've never seen either used (especially as Fatigue is very punishing).

A long time ago, D&D was loosely a sword-and-sorcery simulator, built off a wargame.

Yeah, I'm fully aware that Chainmail is the reason there's so few consequences. It makes no sense to track individual injuries for every figure in a pitcher battle. In fact a lot of D&Disms make more sense from that perspective.

For the past 30-40 years, though, I'd say it's mostly a D&D simulator, designed primarily to allow people to play D&D games, which is a genre of games with its own considerations, which people adapt to a variety of uses.

And most days I wish the designers of D&D (or most games really) would bother to write down their core assumptions.

ETA: in terms of historical fighter focused games I'm pretty fond of Le Septeme Cercle's stuff (yes, I realise I'm missing accents). The systems aren't great, each includes magical character options, and the English versions aren't in print anymore last time I checked, but very good historical backgrounds. Keltia is my personal favourite King Arthur RPG, because it goes for a more historical/Warlord Chronicles approach instead of the Chivalric romance that Pendragon uses. It even has discussion as to theories on who Arthur was and why they're using the version they are. Plus magicians are much closer to just having a handful of tricks, instead of the grand power of Ars Magica magi.

LibraryOgre

2022-07-26, 05:31 PM

And most days I wish the designers of D&D (or most games really) would bother to write down their core assumptions.

It's a federal crime to pass critical information to the enemy.

Besides, it's like Wolverine's background. Until you write it down, he might be a 17 year old operative of the Canadian government, he might be a mutant wolverine, he might be from the first human migration into North America. Once everyone knows that your ideal of a fighter is Conan the Barbarian, no, not that version, the other version, then he's just some dude from 19th century Canada.

RandomPeasant

2022-07-26, 07:39 PM

And yet a lot of them play very similarly. If those 12 classes represented truly different playstyles, then yes, maybe we wouldn't need more.

I still don't really understand why it's about "need" at all. All you need is an "Adventurer" class. You have more classes because there are people who enjoy playing a specific class or having a specific set of mechanics attached to their character or whatever. D&D is a kitchen sink fantasy game, the question to ask isn't "why" but "why not".

And yet, I figure playing the sidekick shouldn't be a thing unless the game says so from the outset, clearly labelling sidekick and hero classes.

Again, I think this is sort of the wrong question. You don't really need a "sidekick" class. Sidekicks come from all sorts of occupations in the source material. Sometimes they're the guy with the sword who hacks at some enemies and asks questions that provoke exposition from the magical expert. Sometimes they're the clumsy mage who's antics provide comic relief. Sometimes they're the thief who steals things at every opportunity. "Sidekick" isn't a class, it's just a character who is A) not a co-equal protagonist and B) generally lower level.

A lot, and I mean a lot of of the martial heroes in fantasy stories are quite fantastical, it's just that they are implicitly fantastical as opposed to be explicitly so.

A great many of them are explicitly fantastical too. I've said it before and I'll say it again, but the notion that there's some cleanly-enforced distinction between "martial" and "caster" is all but exclusive to D&D. Even a great many of the examples people give of "mundane" heroes have some sort of magic. For all the noise about an "Aragorn archetype" that progresses through gear and personal badassery, the thing Aragorn does when he pulls out a trump card at the climax of LotR isn't "upgrade to better magic gear" or "train really hard and master a new fighting style". It's "rally an army of ghosts". That dude was like, two, adventures away from being exactly the type of "demigod" hero people insist martials aren't supposed to be.

Besides, it's like Wolverine's background. Until you write it down, he might be a 17 year old operative of the Canadian government, he might be a mutant wolverine, he might be from the first human migration into North America. Once everyone knows that your ideal of a fighter is Conan the Barbarian, no, not that version, the other version, then he's just some dude from 19th century Canada.

That's like saying Batman is "just some dude who lost his parents and was raised by his butler". Having well-defined backstories for characters is good. The fact that DC has enough fidelity to consistent canon that a C-tier Batman villain like Mr Freeze has a recognizable backstory (loved a woman, she got a horrible disease, froze her to save her) makes the DC universe much richer and makes it much easier to contextualize things within it.

Psyren

2022-07-26, 08:39 PM

Or, and this is a crazy idea, I could use a system that incorporates it.

That's fine too!

The worst part is D&D 5e could have this by using it's Inspiration or Fatigue systems, but the two interact with the actions PCs take so rarely I've never seen either used (especially as Fatigue is very punishing).

I assume you mean Exhaustion for the latter - but you don't have to go that far. Inspiration is literally just advantage, so the opposite would be disadvantage.

That's like saying Batman is "just some dude who lost his parents and was raised by his butler". Having well-defined backstories for characters is good. The fact that DC has enough fidelity to consistent canon that a C-tier Batman villain like Mr Freeze has a recognizable backstory (loved a woman, she got a horrible disease, froze her to save her) makes the DC universe much richer and makes it much easier to contextualize things within it.

Both DC and Marvel have plenty of characters with consistent and inconsistent backstories. Joker's is far less defined than Wolverine's for instance.

Pex

2022-07-26, 10:14 PM

I think you're misunderstanding what I said.

In the first case, I'm not making any special allowances. Well, actually, I might be under 5e rules, I don't actually know. If I am, I consider it a rather damning strike against the game, because 3e lets you do all that stuff with core rules. You can swim with swim checks and there are rules for fighting in the water. It might be difficult to build a character that can pull off the specific stunt, but it is something that can be done with a robot DM that follows the rules exactly and makes no allowance for creativity. I suppose you can argue that a DM would houserule against the rules to make it impossible, but in that case I think it's rather difficult to conclude much of anything as a DM could theoretically change any rule at any time for any reason.

In the second case, I'm suggesting that the designers could make that as a direct change to the rules, and it would have the effect of causing people to do a bunch of stunts. I agree that it doesn't mean much of anything for an individual DM to do it, but I wasn't particularly proposing that.

Yes, it is a strike against 5E. I've been arguing about it for years. I don't expect them to fix it. They had two chances with Xanathar and Tasha. They sort of did with Xanathar giving DCs for tool use. There's never been a UA on it, so I don't expect them to do it at all, certainly not with 5.5E in 2024. I want them to. I won't like they won't, but they won't. Those who would yell at me for wanting it cheer.

The issue with 3E is the complaint (fair in my opinion) that warriors and fighters especially don't get enough skill points. It's exacerbated with the cross-class penalty of non-class skills. Take 10/Take 20 help but not enough for many people. I've heard argument it's not as bad as people say, but that's when the detractors argue back "but magic" makes it all obsolete anyway. Personal opinion I find Pathfinder 1E improved the warrior's lot with skill use, Having not play 3E since 4E came out and only playing Pathfinder since then for the same system in addition to 5E I can forget the skill point difficulties. I would agree 3E does not fall apart into an unplayable mess if 3E had given warriors more skill points.

Why should they? I don't care about what "every other DM elsewhere" thinks, I care about mine.

Because if enough groups/people who are not you are not having fun with the game the game will go away. See 4E. It's also a matter of empathy for other people. "I got mines to heck with anyone else" is not conducive.

Psyren

2022-07-26, 10:45 PM

Because if enough groups/people who are not you are not having fun with the game the game will go away. See 4E. It's also a matter of empathy for other people. "I got mines to heck with anyone else" is not conducive.

My "why should they" was asking why you expect/demand "every DM everywhere else" to agree on anything. As I said before, that has nothing to do with empathy, rather it's you clinging to an impossible standard.

Also, 4e hasn't gone anywhere, you can play it right now if you really want to.

RandomPeasant

2022-07-26, 10:56 PM

The issue with 3E is the complaint (fair in my opinion) that warriors and fighters especially don't get enough skill points. It's exacerbated with the cross-class penalty of non-class skills.

Certainly a fair criticism. But it's a criticism that, I think, falls mostly in the "D&D doesn't model Conan well at the levels where he's appropriate" side of things, rather than the "mundanes don't keep up at high levels" side of things. The Wizard does just fine with only two skill points per level, because the class gets class abilities that work for it at high levels. Similarly, classes like the Rogue and the Ranger can attest that simply getting a broad swathe of skills is insufficient to keep up in a high power environment. So I tend to think that, while Fighters deserve more skills than they typically get, it's a relatively small piece of the "how should we go about improving the game" puzzle.

Pex

2022-07-26, 11:22 PM

Expecting "every DM elsewhere to agree" has nothing to do with empathy, it's just an unrealistic expectation to hold.

Of course it's realistic for every DM everywhere to agree on how a set of rules work. They do so now. Every DM everywhere agrees a long sword in one hand deals 1d8 damage, plate mail armor gives AC 18, and a class ability that utilizes a saving throw has a DC of 8 + proficiency bonus + appropriate ability score modifier. Had WOTC chosen to provide DCs for stunts using the skill system every DM everywhere would agree that's how they would work. Since WOTC has not done that every DM everywhere has their own version of how to do it and too bad for those players with the DM who don't allow them, either directly forbidden or passive aggressively don't allow them by allowing it with such a large amount of work/penalties it's not worth trying.

Certainly a fair criticism. But it's a criticism that, I think, falls mostly in the "D&D doesn't model Conan well at the levels where he's appropriate" side of things, rather than the "mundanes don't keep up at high levels" side of things. The Wizard does just fine with only two skill points per level, because the class gets class abilities that work for it at high levels. Similarly, classes like the Rogue and the Ranger can attest that simply getting a broad swathe of skills is insufficient to keep up in a high power environment. So I tend to think that, while Fighters deserve more skills than they typically get, it's a relatively small piece of the "how should we go about improving the game" puzzle.

Wizards do fine because they pump Intelligence to get more skill points. No one complains about clerics having low skill points because they have spells.

Mutazoia

2022-07-27, 12:10 AM

Batcathat

2022-07-27, 12:36 AM

But that's the point. A "heroic sorcerer" is an oxymoron. You could just as well talk about a gentle torturer, or an honest liar.

It's only an oxymoron according to one very specific, very subjective definition of "heroic". I'm fairly confident that most people would base it on what a person does, rather than how they do it.

Saving the world is a pretty big issue... the vast majority of epics and games will have a scope that is magnitudes lower in total risk. The traditional game of D&D is about adventurers who are motivated by getting rich and who are willing to go to dangerous places to loot and plunder. The vast majority of epic heroes are doing stuff because a) it is the right thing to do, b) they are capable to do these things, c) they are personally scorned, see an opportunity to improve their personal lot in life (the repeating leitmotiv of "I am supposed to be king") or d) bragging rights.

D&D can't even truly decide if it wants to treat combats as a a sport or as a life-and-death war (for the PCs, at least. With bad enough Dungeon Masters, the NPCs' motivation and survival doesn't matter). Which works perfectly fine once you understand that , with some rules, even invisible rules in place, fights don't have to be about total annihilation of one side. Warfare, even total war, is also supposed to have rules. And things turn truly ugly if these rules are violated.

It doesn't really matter whether it's saving the world, saving the village or just looting a dungeon, my point was that you can't really "cheat" in adventuring in the same way you can cheat in Tour de France. If I find a shortcut to the goal during Tour de France, that's wrong. If I find a shortcut to the necromancer's inner sanctum in a dungeon, that's just clever.

That has almost nothing to do with the things I explained, but for the sake of a friendly conversation: "Honour" is a shorthand for a being able to live by the social mores and standards of your society while being in a a situation of crisis. There are some very specific ideas involved with that. For instance, you simply don't abandon your friends or comrades at arms in a time of danger. You are also true to your word, because your reputation for honesty is valuable and nobody is going to trust an oathbreaker, you are not betraying those who are kind to you because that is known as an "******* move". In any pre-industrial society, you can hardly be great, and anonymous. If you want to belong to the cool guys and be treated like a peer, your reputation is your most important property.

Fittingly, this has very little to do with what I explained. Yes, obviously it's an advantage to be known as a respectful and upstanding person who treats others honorably, so you'll hopefully be treated the same way in return. However, if you're fighting the Big Bad over the fate of innocent people and you lose because it was dishonorable to attack him from behind (or use magic or whatever), I maintain that's selfish and stupid, rather than heroic or honorable.

Ignimortis

2022-07-27, 01:08 AM

We don't even need 12.
In that case, we need a better subclass system that would pretty much override the class system for the most part. I.e. Fighter chassis gets Extra Attack (but only one), a d10 hit die and proficiency with martial weapons/armor up to medium. Everything else would be a subclass feature, and thus you'd need a lot of subclasses.

I still don't really understand why it's about "need" at all. All you need is an "Adventurer" class. You have more classes because there are people who enjoy playing a specific class or having a specific set of mechanics attached to their character or whatever. D&D is a kitchen sink fantasy game, the question to ask isn't "why" but "why not".
If there aren't mechanics tied to your class, you don't need classes. Classes are boxes to put certain features in, for ease of balancing and comprehension. I am perfectly fine with classless systems (frankly, I prefer them to class systems to an extent), but classes do make it easier for players to learn the game by having a compartmentalized set of rules that apply to their character, and such design allows one to apply radically different mechanics to each class. As such, I do see 5e classes as somewhat lacking, since they generally differentiate themselves by pulling from a rather shallow pool of abilities that could frankly be dumped into a subclass if subclasses had two more features over 20 levels.

Again, I think this is sort of the wrong question. You don't really need a "sidekick" class. Sidekicks come from all sorts of occupations in the source material. Sometimes they're the guy with the sword who hacks at some enemies and asks questions that provoke exposition from the magical expert. Sometimes they're the clumsy mage who's antics provide comic relief. Sometimes they're the thief who steals things at every opportunity. "Sidekick" isn't a class, it's just a character who is A) not a co-equal protagonist and B) generally lower level.
It was mostly an ironic framing of how martials, mechanically, lose narrative traction at higher levels. In a game where equal level does mean equally good capabilities, a sidekick would indeed be just a lower level character with less plot importance than PCs.

Mechalich

2022-07-27, 01:09 AM

Telok

2022-07-27, 01:58 AM

The caster vs martial imbalance started to be a problem in 3.X when everyone used the same XP chart, as well as ditching casting times, doing away with damage causing spell interruption, adding a free "5-foot step" out of turn to get out of melee range, etc.

One weird non-intuitive swift kick to the martial's groin I've run across is, amazingly, 5e hit dice.

See, the martials are mostly melee and tend to suck down more attacks & damage where the casters have range + defensive reactions + occasional non-ac extra defenses + concentration buffs on the martials because they need them, which causes them to use hit dice faster than the casters. Your adventuring day is soft limited by spell slots, but hard limited by hit points. So in groups where the casters are managing slots (or warlocks or the martials are being stupid & soaking extra damage for no use) then the martials end up running through hit dice much faster than casters. And you get all your magic back on a long rest, but only half hit dice.

So in the (rare but has happened to us a couple times) instance where you're hard fighting for 2+ long rests in a row the "buff tough healthy" martials end up starting the day without full allotments of hit dice, and therefore hit points. But the casters are still running at full. And gods forbid the exhaustion mechanic is in play, casters can change tactics to save & support spells while the melee chimp is stuck with their one decent trick getting knee-capped.

Pex

2022-07-27, 02:36 AM

Pre-3e did it fairly well with the different XP progressions for different classes. Sure, a caster had phenomenal cosmic power but he had an itty bitty living space (slower level progression) as well as other mechanics such as casting times (start casting on your initiative number and then the spell goes off a number of turns later depending on the casting time) for example.

The caster vs martial imbalance started to be a problem in 3.X when everyone used the same XP chart, as well as ditching casting times, doing away with damage causing spell interruption, adding a free "5-foot step" out of turn to get out of melee range, etc.

That's not a good solution, and I question the balance. Be bad now to be awesome later or be awesome now and be bad later. Whatever the level of the game, someone is bad while another is awesome. Why can't everyone be awesome all the time?

One weird non-intuitive swift kick to the martial's groin I've run across is, amazingly, 5e hit dice.

See, the martials are mostly melee and tend to suck down more attacks & damage where the casters have range + defensive reactions + occasional non-ac extra defenses + concentration buffs on the martials because they need them, which causes them to use hit dice faster than the casters. Your adventuring day is soft limited by spell slots, but hard limited by hit points. So in groups where the casters are managing slots (or warlocks or the martials are being stupid & soaking extra damage for no use) then the martials end up running through hit dice much faster than casters. And you get all your magic back on a long rest, but only half hit dice.

So in the (rare but has happened to us a couple times) instance where you're hard fighting for 2+ long rests in a row the "buff tough healthy" martials end up starting the day without full allotments of hit dice, and therefore hit points. But the casters are still running at full. And gods forbid the exhaustion mechanic is in play, casters can change tactics to save & support spells while the melee chimp is stuck with their one decent trick getting knee-capped.

I house rule you get back all HD on a long rest. As it happens, anecdotally, every DM I played with did the same thing, and I don't think they knew it was a house rule. I doubt anyone I play with knows you're only supposed to get back half HD spent. It hasn't broken the game. The players are happy to have full hit points, and the DMs aren't bothered at all. The game functions fine.

Schwann145

2022-07-27, 06:40 AM

What do you mean by "balance?"

Consider 2e AD&D vs 5e: The magical classes were far more powerful than today's iteration. Even though today's casters have all sorts of interesting class features, as well as infinite cantrips, to go along with their spells, the difference in the power of actual spells is so vast that 2e still has the advantage. And non-casters were significantly weaker. The addition of class abilities and self-healing options makes today's Fighters far outshine yesterdays version.

But I'd argue that 2e AD&D was actually more balanced than 5e is.

When you take into consideration how hard it was for a magic user to defend themselves, and how easy it was to interrupt a spell, and how few hit points such characters had, it doesn't matter so much that they wield such incredible power, because it was so much easier to rob them of that power long enough to gain the advantage. Today, just dip a level of something with armor proficiency and you're basically "fighter but better" as a magic user. This absolutely screams "imbalanced" so loudly that I'm frankly shocked today's design decisions made it into the final game (and get worse with each new release, to boot!)

Pre-3e did it fairly well with the different XP progressions for different classes. Sure, a caster had phenomenal cosmic power but he had an itty bitty living space (slower level progression) as well as other mechanics such as casting times (start casting on your initiative number and then the spell goes off a number of turns later depending on the casting time) for example.

The caster vs martial imbalance started to be a problem in 3.X when everyone used the same XP chart, as well as ditching casting times, doing away with damage causing spell interruption, adding a free "5-foot step" out of turn to get out of melee range, etc.
Actually, that staggered XP progression did almost nothing for balance.
Everyone remembers how the Thief gained levels so much faster than others, but if you look closely, the difference between Fighter and Wizard is negligible, and sometimes even favors the Wizard's progressions with the Fighter having the harder time!
It was a kinda neat idea in theory, but it totally failed in execution.

Now, casting times and spell interruption? Definitely contributed to balance, as I argue above. :)

Eldan

2022-07-27, 07:14 AM

* You have the 4th option of 'get rid of mundanes' which games such as Exalted do, but D&D's never going to go for that.

There's also a sort of 5th option I've suggested before, which is: use the level range. The "guy at the gym" is level 5, max. The typical D&D wizard who throws fireballs around, can fly, etc. is at least level 5, probably level 8 plus.

So make the guy at the gym, or Aragorn, or Conan, for that matter, adventure with a wizard who is more "smart guy who knows a few tricks and secrets". Your wizard can break a curse, and knows ancient languages, can heal, casts a blessing over the party, etc. Your fighter has a sword and hits people with it, and is pretty good and climbing and kicking down doors. That's your low-level game.

In your high level game, you have your Elminsters and so on. Plane-travelling, fireball-throwing, demon-summoning powerhouses. Don't make them adventure with Sir Roland, who just bought his fullplate +1 and is pretty proud of his new extra-shiny horse. Make them adventure with Thor, Hulk or Heracles.

KorvinStarmast

2022-07-27, 07:17 AM

Then why has the box and cover art included scenes of people blocking dragon's breath with shields since, like, forever? It's encoded hard into D&D itself. Which box? Which cover? Holmes Basic didn't have that (heck, the warrior had a bow). 1e PHB doesn't have that. IIRC, AD&D 2e didn't have that. (Happy to be shown error, though). 5e PHB doesn't have that?
Examples would be nice. (Was that a 4e thing? I didn't do 4e).

Poseidon was Bellerophon's father. Anybody with a divine parent is by definition a demigod. I don't think using modern English semantic arguments about ancient folk lore is gonna fly. The dalliances with mortals thing was a widely exploited trope in those stories (Europa, anyone) {and we won't get into the origins of the Minotaur}. Demigod status in AD&D and in D&D is what a mortal ascends to; the context of our discussion is still D&D, and Bellerophon behaved, in general, as a mortal does/did.

Bellerophon is a hero of Greek mythology. He was "the greatest hero and slayer of monsters, alongside Cadmus and Perseus, before the days of Heracles", and his greatest feat was killing the Chimera, a monster that Homer depicted with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail: "her breath came out in terrible blasts of burning flame."

Bellerophon is also known for capturing the winged horse Pegasus with the help of Athena’s charmed bridle, and earning the disfavour of the gods after attempting to ride Pegasus to Mount Olympus to join them. On the other hand, both he and Heracles are good examples of high level warrior/fighter archetypes who are for sure not Joe from The Farm (Heracles killing the two serpents sent to kill him being but one example)

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-27, 07:25 AM

"Honour" is a shorthand for a being able to live by the social mores and standards of your society while being in a a situation of crisis.
To add to this, this is why the hero is typically a person of action, and seeks wisdom, specifically, from a mentor or guide. We value people that get things done and don't shy away from the work. And we value our own traditions and cultures and mores, which are encapsulated by wisdom.

Conversely, the villains are generally the intelligent types, because intelligence (through creativity) allows the villain to justify breaking away from the social norms and traditions, and engaging in acts that are considered evil or heinous or aberrant.

The hero or person of action opposes the villain (genius, mastermind, wizard, etc), and in times of crisis, the voice of wisdom reminds the hero why they are fighting/must continue fighting/what's at stake.

The villains are "playing god" by wielding terrible forces that allow them to act out their will on reality.

Now in D&D, your actions don't necessarily reflect the values that we hold. Bravery? Do you need courage to go in and sling save-or-die spells? Or send an army of summoned minions at your enemy? Or to fight a pit find with your own bound pet pit fiend? What about loyalty? Do the "stand back, this isn't a place for martials mortals you" type arcane one-man-armies know what loyalty is? They are so concerned with their own power and being able to do everything, they can only accept martials in the game if they are mere clones of themselves, lest they lose a little bit of their supremacy. A fighter with a keep and bannermen has to comport himself in such a way as to keep loyalties and service, and people fed, etc. A wizard with a summoned permanent structure and an army of Unseen Servants can do whatever they want.

It's the pure power fantasy of being above and disconnected from others, slotted in as the hero archetype. Obstacles? I fly. Distance? I teleport. Other dimension? I plane shift. Traps? I send in my familiar/summon. Need information? I scry/augury/divine/read minds/charm. Danger? I Banish/Force Cage/Meteor Swarm/Polymorph. Huh? You can't keep up? Don't you know that being a hero is having a bunch of buttons you can press to instantly solve your problems on your own with no one's help? Now worship me slave!

You can get a surprising amount done with an Athletics check at my table, especially after T1.
Psyren when do I get to play at your table?! :smallbiggrin:

KorvinStarmast

2022-07-27, 07:40 AM

The worst part is D&D 5e could have this by using it's Inspiration or Fatigue systems, but the two interact with the actions PCs take so rarely I've never seen either used (especially as Fatigue is very punishing). Are you referring to Exhaustion?

Yeah, I'm fully aware that Chainmail is the reason there's so few consequences. You get hit you die is a consequence. (Arneson and his grous discovered that they needed something a bit different for the play to be enjoyable).

In that case, we need a better subclass system that would pretty much override the class system for the most part. I.e. Fighter chassis gets Extra Attack (but only one), a d10 hit die and proficiency with martial weapons/armor up to medium. Everything else would be a subclass feature, and thus you'd need a lot of subclasses. I disagree with the part I italicized, but yes, reducing the number of classes would allow us to remove that :smallfurious: {censored} of Charisma as a spell casting stat and you are correct that the heavy lifting would be done by sub classes.
Which is fine.
AD&D 2e did a decent job of organizing that, but I am sure that it could be improved upon.

What do you mean by "balance?" ... Now, casting times and spell interruption? Definitely contributed to balance, as I argue above. :) Yes. I have a couple of players who are still annoyed at the switch from 3.x to 5 as regards how spells fizzle, and opportunity attacks against any caster trying to cast in melee (which would screw up shocking grasp, among other things).

And as a last note, the multiclassing cheese that allows an arcane caster who is not a fighter first (Arcane Knight, Paladin) to dip into Fighter or Cleric for heavy armor needs to be reigned in. :smallfurious: Let the Arcane Knight be the Notable Exception to the general rule that "No, you can't cast arcane spells in Heavy Armor" ... but that might take a bit of a rescrub on multiclassing.

Psyren

2022-07-27, 09:08 AM

Of course it's realistic for every DM everywhere to agree on how a set of rules work. They do so now.

Have you been to... uh... any D&D forum?

Sure there are some things in a ruleset we can agree on, but many, many, many areas where table variation is not just possible, but encouraged. And that's okay.

Had WOTC chosen to provide DCs for stunts using the skill system every DM everywhere would agree that's how they would work.

Yeah, just what we need, piles and piles of DCs all over the books that DMs need to internalize just like in 3.5. That would have really grown the hobby to its current levels.

One weird non-intuitive swift kick to the martial's groin I've run across is, amazingly, 5e hit dice.

See, the martials are mostly melee and tend to suck down more attacks & damage where the casters have range + defensive reactions + occasional non-ac extra defenses + concentration buffs on the martials because they need them, which causes them to use hit dice faster than the casters. Your adventuring day is soft limited by spell slots, but hard limited by hit points. So in groups where the casters are managing slots (or warlocks or the martials are being stupid & soaking extra damage for no use) then the martials end up running through hit dice much faster than casters. And you get all your magic back on a long rest, but only half hit dice.

So in the (rare but has happened to us a couple times) instance where you're hard fighting for 2+ long rests in a row the "buff tough healthy" martials end up starting the day without full allotments of hit dice, and therefore hit points. But the casters are still running at full. And gods forbid the exhaustion mechanic is in play, casters can change tactics to save & support spells while the melee chimp is stuck with their one decent trick getting knee-capped.

I house rule you get back all HD on a long rest. As it happens, anecdotally, every DM I played with did the same thing, and I don't think they knew it was a house rule. I doubt anyone I play with knows you're only supposed to get back half HD spent. It hasn't broken the game. The players are happy to have full hit points, and the DMs aren't bothered at all. The game functions fine.

We're fine with the standard half-HD (and I'm curious to see what 5.5 will look like because they appear to be moving towards letting us spend HD on more things besides HP recovery judging by recent UAs.) But then, in most of my games we can simply buy healing potions.

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-27, 09:33 AM

The hit dice is an interesting point because if we start gaining mechanics that burn hit dice, but casters are still on the backline not losing as many hit points, they will have yet another system advantage.

Telok

2022-07-27, 10:24 AM

Which box? Which cover? Holmes Basic didn't have that (heck, the warrior had a bow). 1e PHB doesn't have that. IIRC, AD&D 2e didn't have that. (Happy to be shown error, though). 5e PHB doesn't have that?
Examples would be nice. (Was that a 4e thing? I didn't do 4e).

AD&D, magic armor adds to some saves, acid sprays as an example. Following the natural language use (as it was an era before the current tags & everything as officially defined game terms) and some dragon breaths being acid sprays it's a decent match. https://adnd2e.fandom.com/wiki/PHB_Ch9_The_Saving_Throw#:~:text=Magical%20armor%2 0does%20extend%20its,is%20allowed%20in%20this%20ca se).

3.5 with the shield mastery feats could add to saves if I recall correctly. Possibly a ToB counter, although my memory is iffy on that and I'm afb. 4e shields improved reflex defense that some dragon breath rolled attacks against.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-07-27, 10:32 AM

And as a last note, the multiclassing cheese that allows an arcane caster who is not a fighter first (Arcane Knight, Paladin) to dip into Fighter or Cleric for heavy armor needs to be reigned in. :smallfurious: Let the Arcane Knight be the Notable Exception to the general rule that "No, you can't cast arcane spells in Heavy Armor" ... but that might take a bit of a rescrub on multiclassing.

I agree (cough Jo'Vasha cough). My current thought is "cast in what brung ya". You can only cast spells as class X in armor with which class X is proficient at level 1. So you want to cast wizard spells? No armor for you (and rework bladesinger). But if you're a wizard/cleric, you can cast cleric spells in your armor. Just not wizard ones.

Personally, I think the concept of a full-casting, full-"martial" gish is an abomination. If you want to cast like a full-caster, you should be limited in martial prowess to roughly 1/3 of a martial. Because symmetry is good, and the martials-with-casting cap at 1/3 casting. Options would be

* Full caster + casting features in subclass, no significant martial prowess.
* Full caster, subclass gives 1/3 martial (ie weapon proficiency, maybe some limited form of Extra Attack) but no casting boosts
* Half caster, half martial prowess (Extra Attack and weapon proficiency, but no access to things like fighting styles or weapon-related feats)
* 1/3 caster (subclass based, no martial boosts in that subclass), full martial prowess
* no class-based casting, full martial prowess + martial boosts in subclass.

And this should include multiclassing. Or better yet, level by level multiclassing should just not be a thing, because it's inherently borked and always has been and always will be. 2e-style multi-classing might work if rebuilt for the xp differences; 4e-style hybrid or feat-based "multiclassing" might work if properly built. Or, even better, DMs should get comfortable (and the system should make it easier) creating custom 1-off subclasses for a particular person.

Radical idea--the game (especially the DM resources) should make homebrew, especially table-specific homebrew around subclasses much easier and "safer", mainly by making the process more clearly defined as to expectations. Full classes are a pain to get right, but you should be able to whip up a "divine knight" (1/3 casting cleric/fighter hybrid) without substantial risk or effort.

Sneak Dog

2022-07-27, 10:57 AM

Schwann145

2022-07-27, 10:59 AM

In your high level game, you have your Elminsters and so on. Plane-travelling, fireball-throwing, demon-summoning powerhouses. Don't make them adventure with Sir Roland, who just bought his fullplate +1 and is pretty proud of his new extra-shiny horse. Make them adventure with Thor, Hulk or Heracles.

The problem is that D&D just isn't designed, or suited, to support characters like Thor, Hulk, or Heracles.
A level 20 Barbarian with maxed Str/Con is... Captain America-adjacent? (Less than, actually, as Cap would have better Dex, Int, and Wis). Heck, a character with a Belt of Storm Giant's Strength comes nowhere near powerful enough to be a "Thor" or "Hulk." Go even further and deck a character out with all the "Thor" items (aforementioned belt, Gauntlets of Ogre Power, and Hammer of Thunderbolts), you're still a very pale imitation.

D&D doesn't do Superheroes well. It never has and it likely never will.

But that's not the only thing to consider; everyone works under the assumption that spellcasters drastically outclass martials based on level. That's demonstrably untrue. An 18th level Wizard who takes certain spells is leagues above an 18th level Wizard who avoids certain spells. Class level has nothing to do with it.
A Wizard who chooses Astral Projection is significantly weaker than one who chooses Meteor Swarm, and they're both *drastically* weaker than one who takes Wish.
Mordenkainen's Sword is shockingly weaker than Forcecage, yet they're the same level.
These spell power discrepancies are all over the place. The entire spell list needs a massive overhaul/rework.

Tanarii

2022-07-27, 11:00 AM

That's not a good solution, and I question the balance. Be bad now to be awesome later or be awesome now and be bad later. Whatever the level of the game, someone is bad while another is awesome. Why can't everyone be awesome all the time?
Even later / at higher levels, TSR magic-users were kept in check by casting times and spell interruptions, plus a lack of followers. They still needed a party to operate, because they were glass cannons.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-07-27, 11:02 AM

The problem is that D&D just isn't designed, or suited, to support characters like Thor, Hulk, or Heracles.
A level 20 Barbarian with maxed Str/Con is... Captain America-adjacent? (Less than, actually, as Cap would have better Dex, Int, and Wis). Heck, a character with a Belt of Storm Giant's Strength comes nowhere near powerful enough to be a "Thor" or "Hulk." Go even further and deck a character out with all the "Thor" items (aforementioned belt, Gauntlets of Ogre Power, and Hammer of Thunderbolts), you're still a very pale imitation.

D&D doesn't do Superheroes well. It never has and it likely never will.

But that's not the only thing to consider; everyone works under the assumption that spellcasters drastically outclass martials based on level. That's demonstrably untrue. An 18th level Wizard who takes certain spells is leagues above an 18th level Wizard who avoids certain spells. Class level has nothing to do with it.
A Wizard who chooses Astral Projection is significantly weaker than one who chooses Meteor Swarm, and they're both *drastically* weaker than one who takes Wish.
Mordenkainen's Sword is shockingly weaker than Forcecage, yet they're the same level.
These spell power discrepancies are all over the place. The entire spell list needs a massive overhaul/rework.

Agreed. Personally, the spell list (and the whole spell-casting framework) needs an overhaul. And wizards need actual class features. having them be "spell list, the class" isn't conducive to anything useful except brokenness. Especially when they get all the spells, including all the broken ones by default.

Mechalich

2022-07-27, 11:13 AM

Even later / at higher levels, TSR magic-users were kept in check by casting times and spell interruptions, plus a lack of followers. They still needed a party to operate, because they were glass cannons.

Also by Magic Resistance and flat saves. 3e SR is a marginal limitation at best, since a decently built caster taking on level appropriate foes will generally be able to ignore it. Comparatively in 2e spells just had a flat % chance to fail against many high level enemies, sometimes 50% or more. Coupled with the flat save progression and the lesser number of spell slots overall (because no bonus spells for high stats) this meant that a 20th level wizard could absolutely nova against many enemies and do...nothing (the most blatant example is the Skeleton Warrior, which had a 90% MR, making it the anti-caster, and a go-to wizard killer in BGII).

However, even when they failed in this manner, wizards could usually just teleport to safety.

Psyren

2022-07-27, 11:22 AM

Until I can imagine / be told what feats of strength differentiate a level 5 barbarian from a level 15 barbarian, what feats of expertise differentiate a level 5 fighter from a level 15 fighter, and what feats of magic differentiate a level 5 wizard from a level 15 wizard, all without referring to mechanics or what enemies they can beat while being similarly impressive (very roughly), I don't expect this balance will be achieved.

I think the balance isssue is primarily one of a lack of appropriate non-combat features for martials relative to a wealth of one for casters. So even if a D&D 5e fighter can beat up the same enemies as a D&D 5e wizard can (not sure if they can, don't care), they're still not balanced. D&D is about more than just combat.

One thing I liked about 4e, was that its proficiency mechanic included a degree of scaling based on level for non-proficient characters. A level 15 barbarian and a level 5 barbarian with the same ability score making a check with that ability didn't have the same bonus. That would be trickier to pull off with 5e's bounded accuracy but not impossible.

The problem is that D&D just isn't designed, or suited, to support characters like Thor, Hulk, or Heracles.
A level 20 Barbarian with maxed Str/Con is... Captain America-adjacent? (Less than, actually, as Cap would have better Dex, Int, and Wis). Heck, a character with a Belt of Storm Giant's Strength comes nowhere near powerful enough to be a "Thor" or "Hulk." Go even further and deck a character out with all the "Thor" items (aforementioned belt, Gauntlets of Ogre Power, and Hammer of Thunderbolts), you're still a very pale imitation.

D&D doesn't do Superheroes well. It never has and it likely never will.

You can't build superheroes from our world 1:1, but you can still be inspired by them. I refuse to believe the barbarian from 3e onward was not based at least partially on Hulk, the Soulknife has always been based on Psylocke, etc.

More importantly - PCs may not be the superheroes from our world, but they can absolutely be the superheroes in theirs. Paragons not only of virtue and valor, but with capabilities that set them apart from the masses - that is the default expectation for all of them, even a Champion Fighter or Thief Rogue.

Telok

2022-07-27, 11:24 AM

Radical idea--the game (especially the DM resources) should make homebrew, especially table-specific homebrew around subclasses much easier and "safer", mainly by making the process more clearly defined as to expectations. Full classes are a pain to get right, but you should be able to whip up a "divine knight" (1/3 casting cleric/fighter hybrid) without substantial risk or effort.

No no no. Wouldn't be prudent. Can't let the proles know the secret design rules. That way lies point buy and player empowerment.

Well, maybe sarcasm instead of snark. Its fair obvious they have no real design guides around subclasses. Honestly tho it goes back to 3.5 prestige classes (that being functionally what subclasses are) where the DM was supposed to create custom for their own campaign and the wotc book ones were in the DMG as examples. Which good idea as it was got ditched in the first splats and they turned into vehicles for power creep. Like 5e subclasses; players assume by default all published player facing options allowed, ignore trash ones, usually gravitate to newest power options, and many many DMs don't make them because they don't like unbalanced homebrew and have no good guidance in the books.

Seriously they'd need actual guidance about intended power levels at each point. Examples of good & bad plus explanations. Assuming they wanted to do it well and not just ditch it all on "DM make **** up" & assuming the DMs will go spend hours researching best practices on the internet before starting.

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-27, 11:52 AM

But that's not the only thing to consider; everyone works under the assumption that spellcasters drastically outclass martials based on level. That's demonstrably untrue. An 18th level Wizard who takes certain spells is leagues above an 18th level Wizard who avoids certain spells. Class level has nothing to do with it.
A Wizard who chooses Astral Projection is significantly weaker than one who chooses Meteor Swarm, and they're both *drastically* weaker than one who takes Wish.
Mordenkainen's Sword is shockingly weaker than Forcecage, yet they're the same level.
These spell power discrepancies are all over the place. The entire spell list needs a massive overhaul/rework.
This is an excellent point, because it is very possible for a wizard to be built in such a way that they too would not be desired in high level encounters by the people that think high levels should look a certain way and exclude certain classes.

It's entirely possible to build a wizard that can't contend with the aforementioned xixecal. And so what we see is that some people expect a certain level of optimization, especially in higher tiers, and because some classes can't attain the same ceiling that wizards with perfect spell selection and planning can, those classes need to be transformed. Nevermind that we're really talking about certain casters with very specific spells known and prepared...

PhoenixPhyre

2022-07-27, 12:00 PM

This is an excellent point, because it is very possible for a wizard to be built in such a way that they too would not be desired in high level encounters by the people that think high levels should look a certain way and exclude certain classes.

It's entirely possible to build a wizard that can't contend with the aforementioned xixecal. And so what we see is that some people expect a certain level of optimization, especially in higher tiers, and because some classes can't attain the same ceiling that wizards with perfect spell selection and planning can, those classes need to be transformed. Nevermind that we're really talking about certain casters with very specific spells known and prepared...

Exactly. A sorcerer or wizard who never learned teleport can't teleport. Despite being level 20. Etc.

So the "high level == reality warping" idea presupposes a lot of non-guaranteed optimization. It's why I said that even 3e, if you play it as seemingly intended, doesn't actually have as much imbalance as it does if you play it by forum standards. If the wizards are mostly blasting and the clerics mostly healing/support, the discrepancies aren't as apparent. Are they 0? Probably not. There are still some utterly broken spells, but it seems (to me at least) that they were mostly (in the developers' minds) expected to be used by NPCs (for whom balance is a completely different matter). Still broken and should be ameliorated, but shouldn't be promoted to "this is the new baseline that everyone should be expected to meet." Because even many possible T1 characters don't actually become an issue.

So the first step (moving to 5e because I know it better) is to fix the broken spells. They've done part of that (without actually fixing things, because WotC) by printing the Summon X line (to replace the Conjure X line). Because summoning spells are a big chunk of the "usually broken because splat-diving" problem. Others would be the polymorph line (basing it off of CR = Level is just flat wrong) and especially simulacrum and wish (when used to remove components and lengthy cast times, mostly). Forcecage and wall of force are on my "I don't like how that works" list, but they're more just annoying rather than flat broken.

Edit: if the system is going to assume that people of level X have capability Y, then having that capability needs to be mandatory (at least unless you actively anti-optimize). You should have to work to avoid that capability, not actively seek it out. If teleporting (to pick one example) is part of the definition of high-level play, then everyone (or depending on details, at least every possible party) needs to have teleport baked in as a default thing-you-can-do. If the system assumes flight, the same applies. If the system assumes that the numbers look like ABC at level X, then those shouldn't be hidden in (optional) feats, magic items, buffs, etc. There should not be optional-but-really-mandatory "taxes".

Psyren

2022-07-27, 12:03 PM

PhoenixPhyre

2022-07-27, 12:05 PM

Is "Divine Knight" really that hard? Start from EK, make Wis- or Cha-focused, pick spells from cleric and paladin lists. Weapon Bond, War Magic, Eldritch Strike, and Improved War Magic stay the same. About the only feature I'd change is Arcane Charge.

I'd say that those features you said stay the same aren't incredibly thematic. Especially since cleric cantrips suck.

I'd expect something like picking a domain (possibly broader-strokes than clerics) and getting thematic features from that.

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-27, 12:12 PM

It's why I said that even 3e, if you play it as seemingly intended, doesn't actually have as much imbalance as it does if you play it by forum standards.
I tend to agree. Back in 3rd edition, I used to make fighter builds. And I contended that the fighter wasn't as weak as people thought if you play by the DMG rules. If NPCs are NPCs with less wealth per level, lower stats, and NPC classes, the fighter can contend with the spell DCs and pose a threat. The spell DCs weren't above 50% for his low saves unless you were optimized, but they weren't auto-fails.

The premise was lambasted on the forums because optimizers wanted to run their party against optimized NPCs with PHB classes and splat prestige classes using cool and broken spell combos, etc. So when you pit the PHB martials against that, they struggle. They thought I was trying to move goal posts to show the fighter was amazing. But you're changing the game. The devs didn't assume your wizard villain was going to dip into 4 prestige classes and grab every broken feat and item combo. Then the forum mantra becomes "martials suck" and it's just taken at face value. It's not to say there weren't issues, but it's valuable to take a step back and reflect on the assumptions you're operating on when you come to these conclusions.

Forcecage and wall of force are on my "I don't like how that works" list, but they're more just annoying rather than flat broken.
I'm currently playing a wild soul barbarian and in our first encounter I rolled for the effect that turns your weapon into a force weapon. I was already thinking about how strange it was that these wild soul effects didn't really scale, and it struck me that one way to do that would to allow this force weapon to interact with force effects somehow, by damaging/destroying Wall of Force or Force Cage, or even blocking Magic Missile.

Telok

2022-07-27, 12:22 PM

especially simulacrum and wish (when used to remove components and lengthy cast times, mostly).

Could always revert Wish to something like the old AD&D format. Escape, heal, and rez were explicitly ok. Everything else drained strength and mandated 2d4 days of total bed rest before adventuring again. Plus the 5 year aging thing and taking an hour & half just to mem the spell each time you want it. No copying any 8th or lower spell from the whole game everyone's lists for free each day.

I seem to recall, from among the muntudinous versions across 4-5 system rewrites, it taking a while to cast & needing like 5kgp in junk as material comp. in most siruations. But I may be mis-remembering.

Elves

2022-07-27, 12:37 PM

I argued years ago that D&D should be two systems, call them Warriors & Warlocks and Heroes & Hellscapes for the purpose of this discussion.
It is those two systems. It's called low levels vs. high levels.

The hitch in the question is what's meant by "caster vs. martial".
Does it mean magical vs. nonmagical? Then no, not really.
Does it mean wizard vs. warrior? Then yes, you just have to accept that fantasy warriors gain supernatural powers at high levels. The "guy at the gym" is a fine concept to play, but it's a low-level concept that doesn't have a place in a high-level game. If you keep playing him into high levels he'll eventually become a superhero.

If doing a system rehaul you could try to balance magic by making it all strictly support, leaving martials a niche in combat. Or maybe spells all take a minute+ to cast, so that in the typical game encounters it doesn't play a role. These don't change the fact that the wizard can break the laws of reality and the muggle can't, but it does achieve one form of balance by segregating their roles -- at different points, one will be able to contribute while the other can't.

An example of how underrated the good ideas in 4e are is that it does both of the above. Paragon paths and epic destinies give all martial characters supernatural powers on top of their nonmagical base class. And more powerful magics are split off into rituals that take too long to use in combat -- the only in-combat spells are weaker ones that are comparable in effect to martial attacks.

Psyren

2022-07-27, 12:52 PM

I'd say that those features you said stay the same aren't incredibly thematic.

Sure they are. EK's features are, in order:

- 1/3 casting
- I can summon weapon(s) to my hand
- I can bonus attack and use a cantrip on the same turn
- My spells with saves are stronger against creatures I hit
- I can teleport when I action surge
- I can bonus attack and cast a spell on the same turn

Of those, only the teleport isn't "thematic" for a divine caster, and you can actually make it thematic simply by having it move you to an ally like Peace Cleric does.

Especially since cleric cantrips suck.

Disagree. Toll the Dead and Sacred Flame may not be BB or EB, but they don't suck either., and everyone likes having Guidance.

I'd expect something like picking a domain (possibly broader-strokes than clerics) and getting thematic features from that.

I'm not against that idea (I never wanted domains to be cleric subclasses), but it's hardly necessary to make a "DK."

PhoenixPhyre

2022-07-27, 04:06 PM

Sure they are. EK's features are, in order:

- 1/3 casting
- I can summon weapon(s) to my hand
- I can bonus attack and use a cantrip on the same turn
- My spells with saves are stronger against creatures I hit
- I can teleport when I action surge
- I can bonus attack and cast a spell on the same turn

Of those, only the teleport isn't "thematic" for a divine caster, and you can actually make it thematic simply by having it move you to an ally like Peace Cleric does.

Disagree. Toll the Dead and Sacred Flame may not be BB or EB, but they don't suck either., and everyone likes having Guidance.

I'm not against that idea (I never wanted domains to be cleric subclasses), but it's hardly necessary to make a "DK."

I guess it depends on what you mean by "DK". Which was, to be fair, a completely off-the-cuff example. The point was (originally) that it should be relatively simple (ideally) to create a new subclass that's "X + 1/3 Y" for just about any combination. A sneak-attacking, skillful fighter (Fighter + 1/3 rogue). A thuggish rogue (Rogue + 1/3 fighter). Etc. But it's not.

@Dr.Samurai about forecage/etc. I've got a houserule I'm thinking of implementing (still working on exact wording and number):

Tiny Hut, Wall of Force, and Forcecage have additional language: "The barrier created by this spell is an object with (10+spell level) AC and a damage threshold of 5+(spell level/2), resistance to non-magical attacks, and immunity to fire, cold, poison, lightning, radiant, psychic, and necrotic damage. If the barrier takes damage in excess of its threshold, the caster must make a Constitution saving throw as if they had taken the damage while concentrating on the spell (even if it does not require concentration), except that the minimum DC increases by 2 for every time it is triggered for the duration of the spell. On a failure, the spell ends. Note: if the spell does not require concentration normally, this does not occupy your concentration, and does not benefit from things like War Caster (or other sources of advantage on Concentration saves). Disintegrate still automatically ends the spells as well.

Forcecage specifically: It loses the "immune to all damage" line.

Basically, someone strong enough or hitting fast enough can break through a "force barrier" effect by forcing the caster to save as if using concentration (not adding concentration to the spell, because that doesn't solve the issue as the caster isn't actually being hit, and breaks Tiny Hut).

Could always revert Wish to something like the old AD&D format. Escape, heal, and rez were explicitly ok. Everything else drained strength and mandated 2d4 days of total bed rest before adventuring again. Plus the 5 year aging thing and taking an hour & half just to mem the spell each time you want it. No copying any 8th or lower spell from the whole game everyone's lists for free each day.

I seem to recall, from among the muntudinous versions across 4-5 system rewrites, it taking a while to cast & needing like 5kgp in junk as material comp. in most siruations. But I may be mis-remembering.

I'd be fine with it just being "anyspell". Doesn't remove any requirements, components, or change the cast time. Just lets you cast any spell (of levels 0-8) on your list as if you had it prepared. Done. No other features, no catspaw, no drain, nothing. Get rid of the whole "If I weasel-word it well enough, I can get anything from the DM" issue as well as the DM's screwing you over. Divine Intervention is then stronger (it can replicate any cleric spell by default and doesn't take any components or cast time), but has a slower recharge time (1/week if it works, not 1/day).

Pex

2022-07-27, 06:40 PM

RandomPeasant

2022-07-27, 08:19 PM

If there aren't mechanics tied to your class, you don't need classes.

That's true, but the mechanics don't always need to be the motivation for the class. I view all of "I think this is a cool conceptual idea", "I think this is a cool mechanical idea", and "I think this is a good marriage of mechanics and concept" are reasons to have a class. Sometimes you say "it seems like a bunch of devices that you build at the start of the day and fire off throughout the day would be a good fit for a Gadgeteer". Sometimes you say "it'd be cool to have a class that spends actions in combat building up to big finishers, I guess that could be a way for a Bard's music magic to work". Sometimes you say "some people want to play Scouts, I guess they can use at-will powers". Every class should have associated mechanics, but the mechanics aren't always (or even especially often) why you have a class. Most classes are a concept that gets whatever mechanics are to hand attached to it, and that's fine. The game is certainly better if the Necromancer has unique mechanics that feel Necromancer-y, but not by such a margin that you should delay allowing people to play Necromancers until you've found some.

that could frankly be dumped into a subclass if subclasses had two more features over 20 levels.

I think to some degree the distinction between class and subclass is effectively arbitrary. In 3e, the Warmage is written up as a class of its own, rather than a subclass of Sorcerer or an Evocation-specialized Wizard. Is that better? Worse? Does it really matter? Someone gets to play their blasting-focused mage, and I don't know that what you call the way to get there is all that important. My big issue with subclasses (as they are implemented in 5e) is that they take forms of specialization that should often be class-agnostic and associate them with a specific class. You shouldn't need multiple "gish" subclasses to allow all the various martial classes to weave in a little bit of spellcasting. Just write one and let anybody take it.

The disparity was still there in 1e and 2e, it was simply less pronounced. Elminster was still way more powerful than Drizzt in the 80s and 90s, he just became exponentially more powerful in the 00s.

AD&D was supposed to be imbalanced in both directions at different times. The Wizard was a "carry" who you had to protect until they became effective. That's a fine mechanic in a MOBA where games fit into a fixed play pattern, but it's not a good idea for a TTRPG where the game can cover level ranges that don't include the "Wizards are weak" levels or the "Wizards are strong" levels.

all without referring to mechanics or what enemies they can beat while being similarly impressive (very roughly)

I agree that referring to specific mechanics is a bad way of approaching balance, but I pretty strongly disagree that you shouldn't refer to enemies. Challenges are a very good way of communicating how powerful characters are expected to be. Saying "a manticore is an appropriate opponent at level X" communicates that people at level X need some way of dealing with a flying opponent who never needs to close to melee distance. Saying "traveling to hell is an appropriate challenge at level Y" communicates that people at level Y need some way of traveling between planes. To achieve balance, you need to work backwards from the challenges.

Seriously they'd need actual guidance about intended power levels at each point. Examples of good & bad plus explanations. Assuming they wanted to do it well and not just ditch it all on "DM make **** up" & assuming the DMs will go spend hours researching best practices on the internet before starting.

This is exactly the sort of thing I mean when I say that you need to understand your system really well before you try to make it modular and customizable. DMs are not game designers. Simply saying "you can make stuff up" and turning them loose isn't being helpful. DMs can always make stuff up, and there is no rule you can put in a book that will bind a table that does not agree to be bound by it. To be helpful you need to think deeply about your system until you are able to give thoughtful and accurate advice as to how to go about changing it in various directions.

It's why I said that even 3e, if you play it as seemingly intended, doesn't actually have as much imbalance as it does if you play it by forum standards.

That's a bit circular. Obviously the game was not intended to be imbalanced, and it is entirely possible for spellcasters to sandbag enough not to overshadow martials. But that's a standard by which no system is ever imbalanced, so it's not really a useful approach.

The premise was lambasted on the forums because optimizers wanted to run their party against optimized NPCs with PHB classes and splat prestige classes using cool and broken spell combos, etc.

So you presented an optimized Fighter, explained that it could beat up on un-optimized NPCs, and the people who told you that wasn't much of an achievement were the ones being unreasonable? A corollary to the deep power imbalances that exist in 3e is that you can optimize virtually any class to hit any static target. It doesn't mean some classes aren't weaker or stronger than others.

There's also a sort of 5th option I've suggested before, which is: use the level range. The "guy at the gym" is level 5, max. The typical D&D wizard who throws fireballs around, can fly, etc. is at least level 5, probably level 8 plus.

It is those two systems. It's called low levels vs. high levels.

It's really quite baffling how deep the opposition to "if you want to play at different power levels play at different literal levels" seems to run. And the weird thing is that it only seems to go in one direction. If you say "I should be able to play Doctor Strange, with no constraints he doesn't have, at 1st level", people quite rightly tell you that's nuts. But if you say "I should be able to play Conan, with no capabilities he doesn't have, at 20th level", that's a sacred cow that can never be killed.

animorte

2022-07-27, 08:48 PM

I really wanted to participate in this thread but everybody is writing their own novel here and having tons of fun. I can't keep up!

Anyway, here's my point again:

Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra have an interesting example of Martial/Caster balance.

First and foremost: There is literally only one person allowed to have access to most manner of spells, the Avatar.
Chi-blocking, gadgets, and weapons all have proven to make up the difference in many circumstances.
Sub-bending and environment are both magnificent ways to differentiate benders.
Yes, often mundane tasks are easier for benders based on creativity and experience, but everybody requires a lot of training to be good at multiple things instead of always having the right tool for the job.

These are ways D&D could have approached balance. I do not believe we will attain that balance strictly because casters have been spoiled for decades and suddenly limiting that in any way is... controversial. Although, I think 5e has done a good job of closing the gap a little.

Cluedrew

2022-07-27, 09:26 PM

I've seen a lot of Martial/Caster threads in my day, started more than a few myself, and this is actually an interesting version of it. Ne seem to be drifting into some of the more standard versions of the topic, but I'm going to focus on the main question:
will D&D ever be able to achieve caster vs martial power balance in future editions of D&D? Or is the well so poisoned that it is just not possible fix? Is this something that is so baked into D&D DNA that if you play the game you must accept this imbalance as part of the deal and move on?Depends how many editions D&D goes. I think as editions go on the problem will probably be reduced as the system improves and incorporates more good ideas. After 4e the designers seem kind of afraid to make any drastic changes so it might take a while.

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-27, 10:29 PM

So you presented an optimized Fighter, explained that it could beat up on un-optimized NPCs, and the people who told you that wasn't much of an achievement were the ones being unreasonable?
Yeah, I was like "look at this super duper strong fighter I made and look how easy he kills these puny level 1 wizards!! OMG shower me with adoration and praise!!

It was a core-only fighter. The point wasn't to beat wizards. It was to match up stats vs NPCs how the DMG suggests you build them. It was to show that "hey, fighters aren't totally pwned if you don't assume they should be fighting the Wish and the Word all the time."

And it wasn't that I was trying to impress the forum and they weren't impressed. It was that the forum was offended at the idea that their NPCs would be constrained by some sort of system logic. That they couldn't simply take the latest broken optimized class/prestige class/item/feat/spell combos from every splat released to date and slot them in as BBEGs in their game because that might somehow not jive with the expectations in the books.

A corollary to the deep power imbalances that exist in 3e is that you can optimize virtually any class to hit any static target. It doesn't mean some classes aren't weaker or stronger than others.
Not the point I was making, as you know from reading the entirety of my post.

It's really quite baffling how deep the opposition to "if you want to play at different power levels play at different literal levels" seems to run. And the weird thing is that it only seems to go in one direction. If you say "I should be able to play Doctor Strange, with no constraints he doesn't have, at 1st level", people quite rightly tell you that's nuts. But if you say "I should be able to play Conan, with no capabilities he doesn't have, at 20th level", that's a sacred cow that can never be killed.
It shouldn't be that baffling to be honest. The impact of a 20th level wizard at level 1 is very obviously game-breaking. The impact of a 20th level martial at level 20 is very obviously not.

Your xixecal standard is irrelevant. It requires specific builds, not classes. It would probably exclude the majority of D&D players from playing at your table at those levels, even if they were playing wizards.

@Cluedrew: I think if the editions continue in this direction, the problem will simply get worse. Casters will essentially be "Martials+Full Spellcasting" and martials will just be martials without spellcasting, exasperating the problem.

Mutazoia

2022-07-27, 10:57 PM

The disparity was still there in 1e and 2e, it was simply less pronounced. Elminster was still way more powerful than Drizzt in the 80s and 90s, he just became exponentially more powerful in the 00s.

Elminster was a special case. He was a DMPC with maxed-out Cleric and Wizard levels (as well as thief and fighter levels), was the chosen representative of the goddess of magic on Faerun, and could convert one type of magic to another at will (he could convert a wizard spell slot into a cleric spell slot and vice-versa). You can't use him as the gold standard of casters in any way, shape, or form.

RandomPeasant

2022-07-27, 11:04 PM

That they couldn't simply take the latest broken optimized class/prestige class/item/feat/spell combos from every splat released to date and slot them in as BBEGs in their game because that might somehow not jive with the expectations in the books.

The expectations in the books aren't the sample NPCs. The expectations in the books are the monsters (of which sample NPCs are only a very small fraction), and the CR/EL guidelines. Did you work from those, or did you just decree that combining pieces provided by the system in ways that made the Fighter bad was a violation of some unspoken "system logic"?

It shouldn't be that baffling to be honest. The impact of a 20th level wizard at level 1 is very obviously game-breaking. The impact of a 20th level martial at level 20 is very obviously not.

Ah, but I didn't say "20th level Wizard". I said "Dr. Strange". Much as you said "Aragorn" and not "20th level martial". Perhaps you feel that Dr. Strange is disruptive to the way you imagine the game should be at 1st level. But if you won't accept the exact same argument as a reason you ought to upgrade from Aragorn at 20th level, it's hard to see how there's any principled reason you could give for demanding that someone downgrade from Dr. Strange at 1st level.

Your xixecal standard is irrelevant.

I don't know if you know this, but I didn't write the Epic Level Handbook. Blame Andy Collins, or maybe Bruce Cordell. I certainly think that the Xixecal is not something that should be removed from the game, and that people should reach a level of power where they can reasonably aspire to fight it. If you don't want to reach that level of power, you are saying that there are some power levels you don't want your character to reach. There are only two possible conclusions to draw from that. One is that you think there should be a level limit on your character. The other is that you think things that involve being more powerful than your character concept shouldn't be allowed to exist in the game.

Tanarii

2022-07-28, 02:41 AM

I've seen a lot of Martial/Caster threads in my day, started more than a few myself, and this is actually an interesting version of it. Ne seem to be drifting into some of the more standard versions of the topic, but I'm going to focus on the main question: Depends how many editions D&D goes. I think as editions go on the problem will probably be reduced as the system improves and incorporates more good ideas. After 4e the designers seem kind of afraid to make any drastic changes so it might take a while.
We went from magic-users are so weak no one wanted to play them without either: a very large group of Fighters between them and the enemy, Multiclassing (usually elf or half elf), or spellcasting and survivability house rules ... and even then skipping to high levels or power leveling is a good idea (AD&D) to Specialist Wizards are worth looking at twice due to new easier spellcasting rules (2e) to WotC's Quadratic Wizards!* (3e) to everyone is finally a balance but there are some game assumption and math problems and actual play is slow and complicated (4e) to ... eh, arcane casters suck hind t a bit until at least level 5-8ish, but apparent can take off some time after 13th, but don't even think about allowing Multiclassing dips for armor unless you want to break that entirely. (5e).

We've had exactly one edition where casters (and it wasn't just Wizards in that edition) got handed the keys to domination.

So D&D is already close. If you play in the normal level range that most tables already play in, and don't use the all too common Multiclassing dips for Medium or Heavy Armor, it's even already there.

*while Fighters simultaneously got gutted.

Batcathat

2022-07-28, 02:46 AM

So D&D is already close. If you play in the normal level range that most tables already play in, and don't use the all to common Multiclassing dips for Medium or Heavy Armor, it's even already there.

I think that depends on how we define balance. If it's pure combat power then yeah, you might be right. But if we include versatility in and out of combat, I don't think it's very close.

Tanarii

2022-07-28, 02:55 AM

I think that depends on how we define balance. If it's pure combat power then yeah, you might be right. But if we include versatility in and out of combat, I don't think it's very close.
Rogues, dominate ability checks the same way that Fighters, Barbarians and Paladins dominate combat. Monks and Rangers can often do quite well. The Martials as a group hold their own against arcane casters out of combat.

Also worth noting that 5e D&D is a combat oriented game, with very few game structures to support non-combat play. So unless it's restructured to be Cities & Intrigue, being strong in combat is very important. Secondary to that are features that will help in adventuring site exploration, and things aren't horribly out of whack on that front.

Local_Jerk

2022-07-28, 03:02 AM

Batcathat

2022-07-28, 03:03 AM

Rogues, dominate ability checks the same way that Fighters, Barbarians and Paladins dominate combat. Monks and Rangers can often do quite well. The Martials as a group hold their own against arcane casters out of combat.

Meaning that if a fighter and a rogue works together, they might equal one caster. Which doesn't sound super balanced. Of course, it depends on what spells the caster has, but changing those is usually a lot easier than a martial changing their abilities.

Also worth noting that 5e D&D is a combat oriented game, with very few game structures to support non-combat play. So unless it's restructured to be Streets & Intrigue, being strong in combat is very important. Secondary to that are features that will help in adventuring site exploration, and things aren't horribly out of whack on that front.

Sure, that's probably the reason for combat being the focus of most balance discussions, but it's not the only thing. Not to mention that casters are often more versatile in combat too.

Tanarii

2022-07-28, 03:09 AM

Meaning that if a fighter and a rogue works together, they might equal one caster. Which doesn't sound super balanced. Of course, it depends on what spells the caster has, but changing those is usually a lot easier than a martial changing their abilities.No, that's not what it means at all. It means Rogues are better at them, excepting possibly Bards. And Bards are quite a weak class overall.

Sure, that's probably the reason for combat being the focus of most balance discussions, but it's not the only thing. Not to mention that casters are often more versatile in combat too.
It takes spell slots to gain that supposed versatility. It's a limitation that has very real effects on how often they can be 'versatile' in resource requiring encounters (both combat and non) in 5e. Unless you're running a 5MWD.

Local_Jerk

2022-07-28, 06:09 AM

It takes spell slots to gain that supposed versatility. It's a limitation that has very real effects on how often they can be 'versatile' in resource requiring encounters (both combat and non) in 5e. Unless you're running a 5MWD.

But the thing is that they can be. It takes spell slots, but spending said spell slots allows a caster to be really good at something, then change around what they're really good at the next day. It's still a classic case of a limitation being overcompensated for, making a class broken.

Sneak Dog

2022-07-28, 06:43 AM

I agree that referring to specific mechanics is a bad way of approaching balance, but I pretty strongly disagree that you shouldn't refer to enemies. Challenges are a very good way of communicating how powerful characters are expected to be. Saying "a manticore is an appropriate opponent at level X" communicates that people at level X need some way of dealing with a flying opponent who never needs to close to melee distance. Saying "traveling to hell is an appropriate challenge at level Y" communicates that people at level Y need some way of traveling between planes. To achieve balance, you need to work backwards from the challenges.

I put this in because D&D has higher level enemies that don't really act like one might expect when their frame of reference does not yet include D&D. D&D is both a kitchen sink and its own thing. A dragon is scary because it's big, strong, and has a firebreath. But then D&D has a dragon for every party with its age categories. So what a dragon is, is now vague. Giants are big, strong and scary, but a hill giant and a storm giant are significantly different in challenge. A royal guard could be level 2, level 19 or anything in between. So saying you can slay a D&D manticore tells me weirdly little.
Moreover, the 5th edition of D&D has this weird thing where it decouples your combat prowess from your non-combat prowess. A level 15 barbarian can single-handedly slay foes a level 5 barbarian has no chance against, but isn't much if any better at lifting heavy rocks. (This wouldn't be a problem if the same applied to other classes, but spells do scale rather impressively both in and out of combat.)

So saying you can travel to hell (without dying) is somewhat more informative. Or that you can climb a mountain in two days. Or that you can cleave a tavern in twain. Or that you can face a thousand soldiers in melee combat. (It doesn't matter how scary one soldier is for that last one, it's about endurance.)

So I do think until we get a power fantasy for a level 5 and level 15 martial similar to the ones we have for casters, we're not going to get balance out of combat. Because there is no goal to aim for.

The weirdest part about the guy at the gym fallacy is not obvious not only from looking at modern movies' and games, but also at old myths around the world. There are so many mythologies and legends where martial characters are/can become superhumanly powerful, sometimes to ridiculous degree, and the creators of DnD were not only inspired by, but overexaggerated the works of Tolkien, who in turn seems to have been inspired by Arthurian myths, one of the mythologies that depowers martials the most.
Even Arthurian myth is filled to the brim with supernatural powers depending on the writer you go with. Invulnerability, growing to giant size, talking to animals, sun-fueled superstrength, superhuman strength and speed, destroying three countries with one stroke. Though I'll admit a lot of it also has magic items in the mix.

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-28, 07:28 AM

The expectations in the books aren't the sample NPCs. The expectations in the books are the monsters (of which sample NPCs are only a very small fraction), and the CR/EL guidelines. Did you work from those, or did you just decree that combining pieces provided by the system in ways that made the Fighter bad was a violation of some unspoken "system logic"?
I leave you to jump to your worst conclusions. The point remains for everyone else prepared to receive it.

Ah, but I didn't say "20th level Wizard". I said "Dr. Strange". Much as you said "Aragorn" and not "20th level martial". Perhaps you feel that Dr. Strange is disruptive to the way you imagine the game should be at 1st level. But if you won't accept the exact same argument as a reason you ought to upgrade from Aragorn at 20th level, it's hard to see how there's any principled reason you could give for demanding that someone downgrade from Dr. Strange at 1st level.
1. I don't know why mentioning Aragorn means I want to literally play Aragorn. I don't know why you can't have this conversation in the context of D&D. Aragorn runs from a Balrog in the books. In D&D, a high level fighter can grapple a Balor and survive it's fire aura.

The point about Aragorn is that he doesn't have supernatural powers, and nothing suggests that if he continues to face greater threats, he will suddenly start lashing together gravitational surges. I hope this is clear now.

2. What do you mean by "Dr. Strange"? Do you mean the one with the Eye of Agamotto? The Book of Vishanti? The Cloak of Levitation? The Darkhold? The Sling Ring? Wouldn't you call that a "Relic Wizard", to use your own phrasing? Do you just mean the Dr. Strange that can conjure hard light stuff? Because I don't think that's hard to replicate, especially with simply describing your spell effects as such.

I don't know if you know this, but I didn't write the Epic Level Handbook. Blame Andy Collins, or maybe Bruce Cordell. I certainly think that the Xixecal is not something that should be removed from the game, and that people should reach a level of power where they can reasonably aspire to fight it. If you don't want to reach that level of power, you are saying that there are some power levels you don't want your character to reach. There are only two possible conclusions to draw from that. One is that you think there should be a level limit on your character. The other is that you think things that involve being more powerful than your character concept shouldn't be allowed to exist in the game.
I'm not talking about removing it from the game. The point is that it only exists in the game if you put it there. The point is that "must defeat Xixecal without being a relic knight or help from allies" is not a useful standard because not everyone intends to play the game that way. The xixecal is there for anyone that wants to use it, such as yourself. But it is not there to serve as a metric for how classes should be designed. It's possible to go up against a xixecal with 6 wizards and none of them have the required spells necessary to defeat it. Wizards simultaneously pass and fail your test, depending on how they are built, so the metric is not helpful.

Cluedrew

2022-07-28, 07:34 AM

@Cluedrew: I think if the editions continue in this direction, the problem will simply get worse. Casters will essentially be "Martials+Full Spellcasting" and martials will just be martials without spellcasting, exasperating the problem.Entirely possible, I cannot see the future. but 4th shows they know it is a problem and there seems to be some steps towards solving it in 5th as compared to 3rd so if that trend continues things should get better.

So D&D is already close. If you play in the normal level range that most tables already play in, and don't use the all too common Multiclassing dips for Medium or Heavy Armor, it's even already there.The things I noticed when I last played (5e) were more utility options. Like how many skill points do you need to be able to compete with the mending spell? It has been a while so I actually don't know the answer.

Xervous

2022-07-28, 08:24 AM

Like how many skill points do you need to be able to compete with the mending spell? It has been a while so I actually don't know the answer.

Just ask your GM

KorvinStarmast

2022-07-28, 08:52 AM

if the system is going to assume that people of level X have capability Y, then having that capability needs to be mandatory (at least unless you actively anti-optimize). You should have to work to avoid that capability, not actively seek it out. I don't think that the system is that tightly structured; whether or not it should be is a matter of taste.

If teleporting (to pick one example) is part of the definition of high-level play, then everyone (or depending on details, at least every possible party) needs to have teleport baked in as a default thing-you-can-do. I am not sure that the system assumes that: white room optimization does.

If the system assumes flight, the same applies. Ditto.

If the system assumes that the numbers look like ABC at level X, then those shouldn't be hidden in (optional) feats, magic items, buffs, etc. System assumes feats are optional, but that appears to be undergoing a change as 5.5e approaches.

There should not be optional-but-really-mandatory "taxes". While I agree, the perception of what constitutes a 'tax' gets to be quite subjective.

RandomPeasant

2022-07-28, 08:57 AM

A dragon is scary because it's big, strong, and has a firebreath. But then D&D has a dragon for every party with its age categories. So what a dragon is, is now vague.

But "dragon" is vague in the source material too. In The Gods are Bastards, dragons are scary because (in addition to the size and strength and fire) they're masters of magic. In the Pit Dragon series, dragons are psychic. A Practical Guide to Evil has pretty standard dragons, but also drakons that are nigh-unkillable embodiments of primordial hunger. I'll give you that, in non-D&D sources, dragons mostly only breathe fire, but there are exceptions (like Temeraire books, where there are a number of non-standard breathe weapons). There's a whole trope (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OurDragonsAreDifferent) about the wild inconsistencies between types of dragons. So I'll give you that you need to define your terms, but you need to do that anyway.

So saying you can slay a D&D manticore tells me weirdly little.

I agree that it doesn't tell you everything. But it tells you something. You just need multiple examples at every level, so that you can see a detailed picture. If the game says "at this level you need to be able to deal with centipede swarms, hordes of zombies, werewolves, harpies, and ogres" that starts to build up a more detailed picture of what capabilities are necessary.

Moreover, the 5th edition of D&D has this weird thing where it decouples your combat prowess from your non-combat prowess. A level 15 barbarian can single-handedly slay foes a level 5 barbarian has no chance against, but isn't much if any better at lifting heavy rocks. (This wouldn't be a problem if the same applied to other classes, but spells do scale rather impressively both in and out of combat.)

That's not really a 5e thing, it's a "martials don't get non-combat powers" thing. You see largely the same thing in 3e. I think ASIs are optional in 5e in a way that they weren't there, but it's not like "and now your Strength is five points higher" is transformative power comparable to the characters who do get non-combat progression.

I leave you to jump to your worst conclusions. The point remains for everyone else prepared to receive it.

You still haven't explained what that point is. What is the "system logic" you're talking about? It doesn't seem to be the CR system. It certainly doesn't seem to be "use the pieces provided by the system in the way the system allows you to". As far as I can tell, it's "if there exists a way to not make the Fighter sad, you must do that". Which is really just assuming the conclusion.

The point about Aragorn is that he doesn't have supernatural powers, and nothing suggests that if he continues to face greater threats, he will suddenly start lashing together gravitational surges. I hope this is clear now.

No, the point is that Aragorn doesn't continue to face greater threats. Aragorn runs away from the Balrog. Where is the example of the "Aragorn archetype" that fights the Balrog? Because somehow you are going from your one non-D&D example of the archetype being a character that doesn't do something to insisting that the archetype must be able to do that thing. And all your D&D examples are circular, because the only reason we have to believe that the Fighter must continue to be in this "Aragorn archetype" at high levels is your say-so.

What do you mean by "Dr. Strange"?

I mean the guy with interstellar teleportation, the ability to trap his enemies in alternate dimensions, and the ability to command the spirits of the dead. Among plenty of other things. The fact that he has magic items doesn't mean he's just mindlessly using them. The Sling Ring, for instance, requires technique, training, and possibly, per Far From Home, some sort of specific talent (though that I dunno that that completely jives with how it's presented in the original Doctor Strange).

I'm not talking about removing it from the game. The point is that it only exists in the game if you put it there.

I do not understand how you can put these two sentences together and see it as anything other than a direct contradiction.

It's possible to go up against a xixecal with 6 wizards and none of them have the required spells necessary to defeat it. Wizards simultaneously pass and fail your test, depending on how they are built, so the metric is not helpful.

This is a false point and a trivial point.

The false point is that a test that is both passed and failed is bad. A test that contains passes and fails for an individual element is good. That's how you can tell that things are on target. Imagine you set up your test so that everyone passed all of it. How can that test tell you what options are overpowered? How can it tell you which are underpowered? Your test target should include some failures (so that when an element fails more than usual you can tell that it's probably underpowered) and some successes (so that when an element succeeds more than usual you can tell that it's probably overpowered). So, yes, some Wizards (at the level where it is appropriate to fight the Xixecal) should fail against it. But they should succeed against other things.

The trivial point is that you can build, or play, a character at such a level of incompetence that they fail against level-appropriate opposition. This is, of course, true. But it is true whatever type of character you choose to talk about and whatever opposition you define as level-appropriate. So to accept it as relevant is to reject the notion of level-appropriate opposition entirely, and therefore to abandon balance as a goal. By the premise of the thread, I don't think this is something to do.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-07-28, 09:55 AM

I don't think that the system is that tightly structured; whether or not it should be is a matter of taste.
I am not sure that the system assumes that: white room optimization does.
Ditto.
System assumes feats are optional, but that appears to be undergoing a change as 5.5e approaches.

Those were hypothetical statements, not positive or normative statements about what any particular system does or should assume.

IF a system chose to assume that flight (or teleportation, or planar access, or picking your nose as a weapon or whatever) was a necessary component of X-level play, THEN the system should (IMO) provide a built-in way for everyone to access flight (or whatever) by X'th level. IF the system does not choose that assumption, THEN it doesn't matter.

Personally, I don't believe that 5e makes those assumptions. In fact, the only assumptions I can find that 5e makes about characters that aren't given in the classes are
1) by level 12 or so you've got a +4 to your primary stat. The system gives you plenty of rope to get there, but doesn't enforce it. And if you fall short of this, it's not a huge deal. You're less effective, but not incapable.
2) you're using proficient armor and weapons.
3) you're not intentionally sandbagging. Which systems that allow any build flexibility can't stop, so it's kinda moot.

5e does not assume flight, teleportation, or even always-on magical weapons[1]. So from my standards, the system itself[2] fits fairly well within what I said.

While I agree, the perception of what constitutes a 'tax' gets to be quite subjective.

I'm speaking strictly of system assumptions. What the core math (including the math used to create monsters) says. 4e, for instance, had both feat taxes (the Weapon/Implement Focus feats were required--if you didn't take them at level 1, you were permanently behind the curve to a degree that left you struggling) and gear taxes (unless you played with the built in progression, and even then there were effects for each build that were to some degree mandatory), as well as trap options (not as many as 3e, but there were powers and Paragon Paths that left you well behind the expected curve).

5e only has a couple trap options--true strike and witch bolt (and the latter to a lesser degree, as it functions and is thematic but is just extremely weak) come immediately to mind as "things that just don't do what they say they do". Plus part of the Grappler feat IIRC?

[1] it assumes that as you level, you will have more opportunities to deal magical damage. Either from features, from someone casting magic weapon or the like on your weapon, or from an actual magical weapon. There's even some verbiage in a sidebar confirming this.
[2] not the forum zeitgeist on what the system should assume, but the actual system as set out in the PHB, DMG, and MM. Which is a very different beast. And the same goes for 3e--you can best any "level appropriate" core challenge with a core-only, no super optimization fighter, rogue, healy-cleric, and blasty-wizard, without minionmancy or abuse of shapeshifting[3]. Assuming proper WBL and access to gear, because that's part of the system assumptions. 3e does have buckets of trap options, some of which are intentionally trap options[4], at least if the developers are to be believed.
[3] and if you can't, then the system is entirely broken. Either the monsters are wrong or the classes are wrong. Or, more probably, both.
[4] for purposes of making system mastery be more prestigious, IIRC Skip William's quote correctly.

Telok

2022-07-28, 10:12 AM

Rogues, dominate ability checks the same way that Fighters, Barbarians and Paladins dominate combat. Monks and Rangers can often do quite well. The Martials as a group hold their own against arcane casters out of combat.

Question. Do you mean rogues are good at dex checks and, depending on specific build + feat + maybe magic item or multiclass choices, at investigation & athletics & perception checks?

Because my experience is that while those checks are among the most common they are also among the least impactful. Of course that's heavily dependent on the combat-as-sport default game style of 5e where combat is normally a series of 99.999% certain victories in static arenas. The checks that are more plot/campaign oriented than fight oriented* are often informative and social in nature which, outside specific builds for specific skills, rogues don't seem to be significantly better at than most other classes. I will add though, that most of my experience with rogues is levels 1 to 10 where, outside specific focused stat+feat+expertise to boost one or two check builds the d20 is still the real determinator over a 3-4 point bonus difference.

* considering most stealth/perception is a surprise, extra easy fight, or add/subtract some mooks. most athletics/acrobatics is saving a level 1-2 spell or 1 turn of movement. most investigation is extra treasue/fights or a variant perception check. the magic items or plot important info can't be missed or mistaken. and there is no real chance to not find the next intended dungeon/mission/npc.

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-28, 10:49 AM

You still haven't explained what that point is.
Funny, my point was in agreement with a similar point someone else said, and then mine was quoted with someone else agreeing with it.

As I said, the point is there for those ready to receive it.

No, the point is that Aragorn doesn't continue to face greater threats. Aragorn runs away from the Balrog. Where is the example of the "Aragorn archetype" that fights the Balrog?
Are we all on the same page that this debate is largely about aesthetics for a lot of people? Like... Aragorn is, once again, meant to represent a mortal warrior that fights with a sword and shield and bow and arrow. One that doesn't summon magic light shows and command the forces of nature. And that nothing in his nature assumes he will transform into something very different from that.

Aragorn is just a very well known example of a warrior like that. But there are mortals that fight and kill balrogs in the Tolkien-verse. And they are elves, but apart from being "strong of spirit", they don't use any magical powers from what I can tell. They're just super deadly with the sword and axe. You know... like a high level D&D fighter would be.

Because somehow you are going from your one non-D&D example of the archetype being a character that doesn't do something to insisting that the archetype must be able to do that thing.
I mentioned Aragorn one time lol. You act as if there aren't examples of knights slaying dragons, or elves slaying balrogs, or Beowulf slaying serpents.

And all your D&D examples are circular, because the only reason we have to believe that the Fighter must continue to be in this "Aragorn archetype" at high levels is your say-so.

High level martials already exist and don't need to be justified. Go speak to the devs about why they're there.

I mean the guy with interstellar teleportation, the ability to trap his enemies in alternate dimensions, and the ability to command the spirits of the dead. Among plenty of other things. The fact that he has magic items doesn't mean he's just mindlessly using them. The Sling Ring, for instance, requires technique, training, and possibly, per Far From Home, some sort of specific talent (though that I dunno that that completely jives with how it's presented in the original Doctor Strange).
Interesting... magic items on a martial turns them into "relic knights" according to you, and that somehow changes things. But with Dr. Strange it means... nothing.

I can't help but feel like I've called out several double standards in your posts at this point.

I do not understand how you can put these two sentences together and see it as anything other than a direct contradiction.
When you say "remove it from the game", you mean that I would want the creature stricken from the epic level handbook. I don't.

When you say "martials must beat this standard", I say "why? not everyone will use the xixecal, or even use it in the same way that you would".

These are not the same thing.

This is a false point and a trivial point.

The false point is that a test that is both passed and failed is bad. A test that contains passes and fails for an individual element is good. That's how you can tell that things are on target. Imagine you set up your test so that everyone passed all of it. How can that test tell you what options are overpowered? How can it tell you which are underpowered? Your test target should include some failures (so that when an element fails more than usual you can tell that it's probably underpowered) and some successes (so that when an element succeeds more than usual you can tell that it's probably overpowered). So, yes, some Wizards (at the level where it is appropriate to fight the Xixecal) should fail against it. But they should succeed against other things.
Pass/fail is concerned with numbers. Do heroes always make their saving throws? Is the monster impossible to hit? Etc.

But if you require certain choices to be made, that's a different thing. The tired argument about being able to fly or plane shift cuts at wizards that don't choose fly or plane shift as spells. That has nothing to do with "balance".

The trivial point is that you can build, or play, a character at such a level of incompetence that they fail against level-appropriate opposition. This is, of course, true. But it is true whatever type of character you choose to talk about and whatever opposition you define as level-appropriate. So to accept it as relevant is to reject the notion of level-appropriate opposition entirely, and therefore to abandon balance as a goal. By the premise of the thread, I don't think this is something to do.
Again we're honing in on the "one true way" to play. I'm not saying a wizard is incompetent. Are you saying that a wizard that doesn't grab the auto-pick sky blue best spell of each level is incompetent? You may as well strip the choice away from them and just award them with the appropriate spells at each level. Because that's really what you're talking about.

Psyren

2022-07-28, 11:12 AM

Aragorn runs away from the Balrog.

Gandalf is a Solar; Aragorn is indeed lower level than that. That doesn't mean a higher level version of Aragorn who could fight a Balrog and still feel like Aragorn is impossible to conceive. I'm willing to bet that Ar-Pharazon, Elendil, or perhaps even Isildur would not have "run from the Balrog" given that they were willing and able to face down Sauron, and none of them would be spellcasters in D&D terms.

* considering most stealth/perception is a surprise, extra easy fight, or add/subtract some mooks. most athletics/acrobatics is saving a level 1-2 spell or 1 turn of movement. most investigation is extra treasue/fights or a variant perception check. the magic items or plot important info can't be missed or mistaken. and there is no real chance to not find the next intended dungeon/mission/npc.

Even if this ceiling for ability checks were true at every table (it's not), a level 1-2 spell you can use at-will can be a big deal in 5e. But yes, if your DMs don't allow players to do anything interesting with ability checks then they won't be interesting, that's not a revelation.

Willie the Duck

2022-07-28, 11:28 AM

The weirdest part about the guy at the gym fallacy is not obvious not only from looking at modern movies' and games, but also at old myths around the world. There are so many mythologies and legends where martial characters are/can become superhumanly powerful, sometimes to ridiculous degree, and the creators of DnD were not only inspired by, but overexaggerated the works of Tolkien, who in turn seems to have been inspired by Arthurian myths, one of the mythologies that depowers martials the most.

This could easily turn into a bickering match over what Gary and Dave 'really thought' about Tolkien (and in particular how much Tolkien EGG wanted in D&D compared to Conan, Cugel the Clever, and Grey Mouser) or what D&D 'is,' so please don't read into my point more than what I say. Regardless, I think it is important to note that D&D was not initially intended to let people play characters from Tolkien stories or Arthurian myth. Gary and Jeff Perren created a military-guy wargame which included an optional fantasy overlay (which included dragons and elves and a bunch of creatures straight out of Tolkien, to be sure). Dave Arneson used it and invented a dungeon-crawling minigame for actions taken while mining under castle walls to his wargame campaign; whereupon he discovered that people enjoyed it more than the war happening above it. Point is it was first and foremost a soldier-guy wargame that just happened to have a fantasy overlay. 'Superheroes' in Chainmail (which ended up being Level 8 fighting men in oD&D) had the mythic qualities of... having the bravery to not immediately run from the sight of a dragon, sense hidden opponents, cause enemies to make morale checks, boost the morale of friendly troops, take eight normal soldiers (L1 fighters) or the equivalent number of upscaled opponents striking them the same round for them to fall, and being able to attack 8 normal soldiers (not an equivalent amount of upscaled opponents) in the same round -- all very mundane effects, other than being perhaps preternaturally in terms of damage dealt and taken (which D&D/AD&D fighters get), and stuff which more look like 'high powered soldier dude' than 'characters from myth and legend.' For that reason, I'd say the creators were undershooting Arthur (who honestly has some superhuman martials, depending on which versions you read) and Tolkien.

Meaning that if a fighter and a rogue works together, they might equal one caster. Which doesn't sound super balanced. Of course, it depends on what spells the caster has, but changing those is usually a lot easier than a martial changing their abilities.
Sure, that's probably the reason for combat being the focus of most balance discussions, but it's not the only thing. Not to mention that casters are often more versatile in combat too.

No, that's not what it means at all. It means Rogues are better at them, excepting possibly Bards. And Bards are quite a weak class overall.
It takes spell slots to gain that supposed versatility. It's a limitation that has very real effects on how often they can be 'versatile' in resource requiring encounters (both combat and non) in 5e. Unless you're running a 5MWD.

But the thing is that they can be. It takes spell slots, but spending said spell slots allows a caster to be really good at something, then change around what they're really good at the next day. It's still a classic case of a limitation being overcompensated for, making a class broken.

I think you're all right, depending on exactly how much teeth spell slot usage (and not getting to re-prepare spells in short order) actually has. If using up a 2nd level spell slot is not a significant loss, than definitely spiderclimb(which just works) will trump a climbing rogue; and if having to re-prepare spells and come back the next day with the right spells on tap isn't a big deal, than yes it will likely outpace a skill-monkey martial (who at best gets to up their skills at next level, depending on edition).

Elves

2022-07-28, 11:47 AM

The point about Aragorn is that he doesn't have supernatural powers, and nothing suggests that if he continues to face greater threats, he will suddenly start lashing together gravitational surges. I hope this is clear now.

Obviously not, Middle-earth doesn’t have the concept of level progression that’s baked into D&D.

BRC

2022-07-28, 12:02 PM

I feel like all the comparisons about Aragorn, Hawkeye, or any given example kind of fall apart is that 1) The story is built to specifically give them a chance to shine, and 2) The standard for such stories is "Contributes" rather than "Contributes Evenly with all other heroes".

In the big battle at the end of the Avenger's Movie, Hawkeye Contributes, sure. He does some cool stuff taking out aliens. Thor and the Hulk each take out at least one giant flying space whale. Thor also whips up a thunderstorm that kills a bunch of Chitari.

Meanwhile, Black Widow actually shuts down the portal, and Iron Man catches a nuke to blow up the fleet on the other side.

Through the magic of Cinema, they get equal focus on their heroics, so it comes out as "The Avengers Fight Off The Chitari And Save New York".

In a tabletop context it would be

Hawkeye: Makes a few attacks, kills a bunch of Chitari soldiers over the course of the entire fight.

Thor: Casts Lightning Storm, killing a giant space whale and 20 Soldiers in a few rounds.

Black Widow: Makes some skill checks to close the portal.

Iron Man: Uses his class features and some skill checks to catch the nuke and throw it through the portal. saving the Day.

Similarly with Aragorn, he's good with a sword, but he's generally got entire armies at his back. In the big scale of things, his biggest contribution is Staying Alive and Looking Heroic while the hobbits make enough stealth checks and wisdom saves to destroy the ring. The story he's in isn't one where The Fighter contributes equally to The Rogue.

Meanwhile, stories like Conan don't generally have Conan teaming up with wizards who can make explosions happen. Conan teams up with other martials.

Psyren

2022-07-28, 12:19 PM

Hawkeye: Makes a few attacks, kills a bunch of Chitari soldiers over the course of the entire fight.

Hawkeye was the only one with both the range and accuracy to take down the BBEG's flying vehicle, putting him in melee with the Hulk, who neutralized him via grapple.

Black Widow: Makes some skill checks to close the portal.

After being the only one capable of stealthing past most of the army to reach the artifact maintaining it, taking down the few backline defenders remaining by herself, and non-lethally disabling the mind-controlled Dr. Selvig.

I feel like all the comparisons about Aragorn, Hawkeye, or any given example kind of fall apart is that 1) The story is built to specifically give them a chance to shine, and 2) The standard for such stories is "Contributes" rather than "Contributes Evenly with all other heroes".

1) Yes, stories are built around their characters, much as games are designed around the people playing them. That's a feature, not a bug.

2) Remove any of the non-casters above from the equation and the Avengers would have either had far more casualties (whether among themselves or among the civilians they were protecting) and possibly even lost outright. Why does that contribution not matter to you?

Telok

2022-07-28, 12:27 PM

Even if this ceiling for ability checks were true at every table (it's not), a level 1-2 spell you can use at-will can be a big deal in 5e. But yes, if your DMs don't allow players to do anything interesting with ability checks then they won't be interesting, that's not a revelation.

Non sequitur? I asked a question. There wasn't anything about skill check ceilings (where does that come from anways?) or interesting (what? to who?) things to do with checks.

Players trying to do stuff with checks is not really how 5e is supposed to work anyways. They're supposed to tell the DM what they do and the DM makes a ruling and may call for a check if they want to. All the DMs I've played 4e & 5e with have stuck close to what the books say & example doing with checks. That you go beyond that is nice for your players but doesn't change anything for those DMs following the written guidelines & examples.

BRC

2022-07-28, 12:55 PM

2) Remove any of the non-casters above from the equation and the Avengers would have either had far more casualties (whether among themselves or among the civilians they were protecting) and possibly even lost outright. Why does that contribution not matter to you?

Oh, it does, 100%, but it doesn't translate especially well to white box discussion of balance in tabletop games where the only thing that can be assumed is "There are Enemies that you must Defeat".

The two most significant contributors in the battle of New York are Black Widow (Closes the portal) Iron Man (Catches the Nuke). Neither contribution is a function of their direct Ability to Inflict Harm.

Hawkeye's shot knocking Loki off his flyer was a critical moment. But in a whitebox discussion, Iron Man, Thor, and The Hulk could all, theoretically, have taken out Loki's flyer.

And that's what this is about. The question is not "Can Fighters Contribute". They Can, It's a good thing that Hawkeye was there.

But the question we're grappling with isn't "Did Hawkeye help" it's "Would it have been better to have Hawkeye, or a second Thor?"

Also, notably, with the Battle for New York, the "GM" as it were developed a scenario where Raw Combat Power was not the end-all-be-all. Most discussions assume that the scenario is a big brawl between heroes and villains that goes until one side runs out of bodies, because that's how most combat encounters go.

Hawkeye had less power, but his ability to precisely focus that power was relevant since it let him disable Loki's flyer. Black Widow's stealth and cunning were relevant because it allowed her to reach the portal without getting swarmed. Cap's leadership skills were relevant because it allowed him to organize the first responders in an orderly evacuation to save civilians. The scenario allowed each of their unique abilities to shine.

But not every combat encounter has a weak point that must be reached via stealth, or locals to rally, or an enemy that needs to be precisely targeted and knocked down so the heavy hitters can get to them. The only thing connecting all combat encounters is There Are Enemies To Defeat. So, balance discussions go to the Hulks and Thors of the world.

Taking things back to tabletop games, part of the issue with d&D anyway is that while Martials are defined by what they do (Combat and skills), Casters are defined by HOW they do it (Spell Slots). As mentioned before, the balancing factor of spell slots doesn't really work out, but the result is that anything a hypothetical martial can do, a hypothetical caster can probably do more reliably, at least in theory.

Black Widow needs to sneak to the portal? Doctor Strange could make a portal there.

Hawkeye can blast Loki off his speeder? Doctor Strange could summon the Crimson Bands of Cytorrak to yank Loki to the ground.

In D&D contexts there's the question of "Is this the best use of Strange's spell slots", or even "Doctor Strange is squishier, is it worth dedicating resources to keeping him alive throughout the fight compared to the more resilient Hawkeye and Black Widow", but those fall apart in Whitebox discussions.

Edit: Think about it like this

There was only one truly irreplaceable character on the Hero side: Dr Selvig, who told Black Widow that she could use the staff to shut down the portal. Everybody else could theoretically have been replaced by somebody else in the wider Marvel roster.

That doesn't mean that a physicist is an equally balanced character build to a master spy (Hawkeye/Black Widow), or a Magic Space Warrior (Thor).

Edit II:

Balance will mean either 1) Carving out a niche for martials that casters cannot fill
2) Making Martials Better at some stuff than casters
or
or 3) Actually making spell slots limited enough that "Doing stuff worse, but forever" is balanced with "Doing stuff Better but only a few times".

Psyren

2022-07-28, 01:21 PM

Non sequitur? I asked a question. There wasn't anything about skill check ceilings (where does that come from anways?) or interesting (what? to who?) things to do with checks.

I was responding to this, which was not the question but your response to the question:

Because my experience is that while those checks are among the most common they are also among the least impactful. Of course that's heavily dependent on the combat-as-sport default game style of 5e where combat is normally a series of 99.999% certain victories in static arenas. The checks that are more plot/campaign oriented than fight oriented* are often informative and social in nature which, outside specific builds for specific skills, rogues don't seem to be significantly better at than most other classes. I will add though, that most of my experience with rogues is levels 1 to 10 where, outside specific focused stat+feat+expertise to boost one or two check builds the d20 is still the real determinator over a 3-4 point bonus difference.

* considering most stealth/perception is a surprise, extra easy fight, or add/subtract some mooks. most athletics/acrobatics is saving a level 1-2 spell or 1 turn of movement. most investigation is extra treasue/fights or a variant perception check. the magic items or plot important info can't be missed or mistaken. and there is no real chance to not find the next intended dungeon/mission/npc.

You're placing a ceiling of "add/subtract some mooks", "save 1 turn of movement" and "save a level 1-2 spell" on what Athletics/Acrobatics can do in a combat situation.

Players trying to do stuff with checks is not really how 5e is supposed to work anyways. They're supposed to tell the DM what they do and the DM makes a ruling and may call for a check if they want to. All the DMs I've played 4e & 5e with have stuck close to what the books say & example doing with checks. That you go beyond that is nice for your players but doesn't change anything for those DMs following the written guidelines & examples.

The written guidelines and examples of what checks can do are more open-ended than you imply. They say things like:

"Jump higher than you normally can"
"Jump an unusually long distance"
"Climbing a slippery vertical surface or one with few handholds"
"Pull off a stunt midjump"
"Tip over a statue or stop a boulder"
"Acrobatic stunts like dives, rolls, somersaults and flips"

There's a lot of design space in these written statements for doing cool things in combat, even things that can completely turn the tables on a battlefield.

And yes, absolutely you should be saying what you want to do and have the DM tell you if it's possible. But there's a middle ground between restricting yourself to simply asking for things that a guy at the gym can do, and trying to use ability checks to become Superman. Find that middle ground with your DM and martials become a lot more fun to play.

But in a whitebox discussion, Iron Man, Thor, and The Hulk could all, theoretically, have taken out Loki's flyer.

Even if this is true (doubtful, none of them are as fast or as easy to underestimate as an arrow) it means everyone can contribute. So what's your complaint?

But the question we're grappling with isn't "Did Hawkeye help" it's "Would it have been better to have Hawkeye, or a second Thor?"

That question is completely irrelevant because there IS no second Thor. If two people sit at your table and say "I want to play a Rogue and a Ranger," do you honestly yell at them to kick rocks until they come back as another Cleric and Wizard? Because that is quite a donkey cavity approach if so.

Also, notably, with the Battle for New York, the "GM" as it were developed a scenario where Raw Combat Power was not the end-all-be-all. Most discussions assume that the scenario is a big brawl between heroes and villains that goes until one side runs out of bodies, because that's how most combat encounters go.
...
But not every combat encounter has a weak point that must be reached via stealth, or locals to rally, or an enemy that needs to be precisely targeted and knocked down so the heavy hitters can get to them. The only thing connecting all combat encounters is There Are Enemies To Defeat.

You mean climactic encounters have to be designed? Gasp!

And no, I'm not saying every combat encounter needs a weak point or locals or any of that. But some should. If every fight in your campaign including the boss is smashing action figures together, then it's not a good campaign.

Black Widow needs to sneak to the portal? Doctor Strange could make a portal there.

Hawkeye can blast Loki off his speeder? Doctor Strange could summon the Crimson Bands of Cytorrak to yank Loki to the ground.

The Sorcerer Supreme WAS in that fight - not Doctor Strange, but The Ancient One - remember? And she had her hands full too, with no time to yank Loki or teleport or any of it. Because the encounter was designed to be challenging for the whole group. That is, shockingly, the GM's entire job.

In D&D contexts there's the question of "Is this the best use of Strange's spell slots", or even "Doctor Strange is squishier, is it worth dedicating resources to keeping him alive throughout the fight compared to the more resilient Hawkeye and Black Widow", but those fall apart in Whitebox discussions.

You declaring this does not make it so. If you don't feel like designing any of your encounters that's fine, but that's not aligned with the designers' expectation.

Batcathat

2022-07-28, 02:12 PM

Because the encounter was designed to be challenging for the whole group. That is, shockingly, the GM's entire job.

Sure, a good enough GM could design an encounter where the entire party was both challenged and contributing equally, even if that party was a 1st level Commoner, a 10th level Fighter and a 20th level Wizard, just as there are Superman stories where Jimmy Olsen saves the day.

So yes, with the right GM the difference in power might be barely noticeable (just as pretty much any dysfunctional rule or wonky setting), but I don't think that's an excuse for not having more balanced classes.

BRC

2022-07-28, 02:12 PM

Even if this is true (doubtful, none of them are as fast or as easy to underestimate as an arrow) it means everyone can contribute. So what's your complaint?

I have three points, and they are contradictory.
Point the first: Discussing characters in non-improvised media does little to actually shed light on the way systems actually work. Hawkeye Contributing in the movie doesn't mean that, had the same scenario played out on a tabletop, Hawkeye's player would have felt like knocking Loki off his speeder meant his character was as useful as Hulk.

Point the second : Just because a character can contribute in a specific scenario does not mean the system they are in is designed to make them a balanced contributor over the course of a campaign.

While there are plenty of scenarios where a martial character CAN match a Caster's contribution, it does not mean that there are not very complaints to be made about a system like D&D that limits one class to "What could a guy do if he was really good at swords" and lets another reach a point where something like Fireball is a trivial expenditure of resources.

Somebody who complains that Martials are overshadowed by caster's isn't wrong to complain.

The third point is that the very nature of whitebox balance discussions overemphasizes the power of casters vs actual table experience, because any given scenario almost certainly has a spell that is better for dealing with it than any mundane solution if you remove all other context.

That said, this whole approach does give me a thought for a form "Guy at the Gym" Compliant high level martial abilities can take. Take a page from more narrative-focused games and build in abilities that let the player declare something about the world rather than forcing the GM to prebuild scenarios with opportunities for Martials to shine.

Like, a Barbarian maybe can't cast Fireball, but what if at high levels they got an ability to declare that some terrain piece (A tree, Column, big stalagtite, ect) was weak enough for them to knock over doing AOE damage in a line, without the DM needing to build in an explicitly destroy able piece of terrain. Rogues with AoE Crowd Control as they vanish from site, forcing a bunch of enemies to spend a turn looking around in confusion.

Telok

2022-07-28, 04:14 PM

I was responding to this, which was not the question but your response to the question:

You're placing a ceiling of "add/subtract some mooks", "save 1 turn of movement" and "save a level 1-2 spell" on what Athletics/Acrobatics can do in a combat situation.....

....The written guidelines and examples of what checks can do are more open-ended than you imply. They say things like:

"Jump higher than you normally can"
"Jump an unusually long distance"
"Climbing a slippery vertical surface or one with few handholds"
"Pull off a stunt midjump"
"Tip over a statue or stop a boulder"
"Acrobatic stunts like dives, rolls, somersaults and flips"

Ah, ok. You missed part of the quote, and that was explanation of my point of view not an answer to any question. Thats what threw me off. You also assume I'm talking in absolutes, like 'a perception check can never be more than surprise or a few mooks'. I intended to indicate more as "in my experience the vast majority of these checks are like this example". I'm also talking & interested much more about out of combat stuff. You're combat focusing in your stuff I think.

Also, those things you italicized aren't guidelines or examples any more than "you can make a phone call" is an example of how to put out a fire or "you can program a computer to make music by having the speakers activate" is a guideline to writing an AI music generating program. A guideline would be more like:
"If your game is more on the anime/wushu side jumping twice as far as normal may be an average hero task (and impossible for normal people) with failure meaning you only jump your normal distance, but if you have a grim & gritty game jumping a few feet further than normal might be a very hard task for everyone where failure means you only jump half your normal distance and have to check to see if you stumble & fall."

Psyren

2022-07-28, 05:13 PM

Ah, ok. You missed part of the quote, and that was explanation of my point of view not an answer to any question. Thats what threw me off. You also assume I'm talking in absolutes, like 'a perception check can never be more than surprise or a few mooks'. I intended to indicate more as "in my experience the vast majority of these checks are like this example".

Also, those things you italicized aren't guidelines or examples any more than "you can make a phone call" is an example of how to put out a fire or "you can program a computer to make music by having the speakers activate" is a guideline to writing an AI music generating program. A guideline would be more like:
"If your game is more on the anime/wushu side jumping twice as far as normal may be an average hero task (and impossible for normal people) with failure meaning you only jump your normal distance, but if you have a grim & gritty game jumping a few feet further than normal might be a very hard task for everyone where failure means you only jump half your normal distance and have to check to see if you stumble & fall."

They don't need to set forth requirements or thresholds for "wushu vs. gritty." The DM can make that determination themselves.

Sure, a good enough GM could design an encounter where the entire party was both challenged and contributing equally, even if that party was a 1st level Commoner, a 10th level Fighter and a 20th level Wizard, just as there are Superman stories where Jimmy Olsen saves the day.

So yes, with the right GM the difference in power might be barely noticeable (just as pretty much any dysfunctional rule or wonky setting), but I don't think that's an excuse for not having more balanced classes.

Right - so now D&D's job is to arrive somewhere between these two extremes.

Extreme 1: Power doesn't matter because the encounter has been tailored so minutely that removing any one player regardless of who they are and what they're doing makes the whole thing collapse. Everyone including Jimmy Olsen is critical to the group's success.

Extreme 2: Power is all that matters, so the player who wants to be Hawkeye is told they need to reroll to another Thor or get out. Not just Jimmy Olsen, but also Black Widow is a grease stain as soon as initiative is rolled.

I think we can agree that neither of these is particularly desirable, but 5e isn't either of these anyway.

I have three points, and they are contradictory.
Point the first: Discussing characters in non-improvised media does little to actually shed light on the way systems actually work. Hawkeye Contributing in the movie doesn't mean that, had the same scenario played out on a tabletop, Hawkeye's player would have felt like knocking Loki off his speeder meant his character was as useful as Hulk.

Point the second : Just because a character can contribute in a specific scenario does not mean the system they are in is designed to make them a balanced contributor over the course of a campaign.

While there are plenty of scenarios where a martial character CAN match a Caster's contribution, it does not mean that there are not very complaints to be made about a system like D&D that limits one class to "What could a guy do if he was really good at swords" and lets another reach a point where something like Fireball is a trivial expenditure of resources.

Somebody who complains that Martials are overshadowed by caster's isn't wrong to complain.

The third point is that the very nature of whitebox balance discussions overemphasizes the power of casters vs actual table experience, because any given scenario almost certainly has a spell that is better for dealing with it than any mundane solution if you remove all other context.

1) If all your fights are "improvised" then you should expect unexpected or undesirable results. At some point active DMing is required, and that includes encounter design.
2) If balance is your only or even primary concern then I suggest you give 4e a go. For the rest of us, balance is just one consideration among many.
3) This point I agree with, but the designers are making the game to be played, not to be "whiteboxed." So if whiteboxes are overemphasizing casters then that's not exactly useful.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-07-28, 05:29 PM

3) This point I agree with, but the designers are making the game to be played, not to be "whiteboxed." So if whiteboxes are overemphasizing casters then that's not exactly useful.

Going to just say "this" on this point. Forum theory craft isn't the primary purpose and many scenarios break it that work fine (within limits) in actual play. But that's the theory's problem. Theory should fit the facts, not vice versa.

Pex

2022-07-28, 06:07 PM

They don't need to set forth requirements or thresholds for "wushu vs. gritty." The DM can make that determination themselves.

They absolutely should because that's the point of a DMG, teach someone how to DM. It is up to the DM to decide on running a wushu game or gritty game. The DMG's job is to help the DM know the difference on how that style affects the rules/game mechanics of running the game.

Vahnavoi

2022-07-28, 06:14 PM

Sure, a good enough GM could design an encounter where the entire party was both challenged and contributing equally, even if that party was a 1st level Commoner, a 10th level Fighter and a 20th level Wizard, just as there are Superman stories where Jimmy Olsen saves the day.

So yes, with the right GM the difference in power might be barely noticeable (just as pretty much any dysfunctional rule or wonky setting), but I don't think that's an excuse for not having more balanced classes.

If you honestly believe a good game master can do that, then the overarching question should be "is there a way to make every game master that good?"

Or, put differently: quality advice for how a game master should handle unequal characters reduces the need to have equal characters, and vice versa. There are probably multiple balance points to that equation, with a trivial case of course being the one where all allowed characters are mechanically equal.

---

In any case, I feel this discussion is lacking in acknowledging there are multiple different paradigms, and at least two different types, of balance.

Let's get the two types out of the way first: these are roughly the same as equality of opportunity, versus equality of outcome. The first only assures players start with equal play power (=ability to influence game events), with outcomes varying dynamically based on player action. The second assures (or tries to) that the outcome for each player is the same, with play power adjusted dynamically to prevent anyone from cutting ahead or being left behind.

Paradigms, I'm naming after popular games that use them:

Snakes & Ladders balance: there is really only one action players do: roll dice. And then they roll some more dice until the dice tell the game has ended. Regardless of what the rolls supposedly stand for, everyone gets their turn and the math is set up so that everyone has roughly equal chance of being the star of the day. Any apparent differences in play power or outcome are normalized by just playing more games.

Chess balance: every player has the same set of moves at the beginning. Number and quality of moves made dynamically alters moves available in the future. Players with more skill tend to dominate. Balance can only persist between equal players.

Poker balance: starting hands are random and wildly variant in play power; however, this normalizes across multiple games because eventually every player handles every card. Skillful play gains an edge, but still occasionally loses to dumb luck.

Rock paper scissors balance: every strategy is strong against some other strategies and weak against others, ensuring there is no single dominant strategy and players are forced to cycle. In theory, collapses to random, in practice, may depend on skill to predict and metagame an opponent.

Pokemon balance - Smogon rules: game designers throw whatever crap they want on a wall; the wall, that is, a mass of players then playtests the crap to see what sticks. Infinite loops, intentionally broken and over-centralizing options are filtered out; remaining options are then sorted to tiers based on usage. The subset of most dominant options becomes the first tier and are banned from the second tier; this process repeats for as many tiers as there are options to fill and players to play. After a lot of work, you have a number of sets of options that are reasonably balanced against each other. In theory, collapses to one of chess, poker or RPS above, in practice may cycle through all of them as players innovate strategies and popularity changes usage.

People who want their actions to, you know, matter, don't like the first. People who don't want player skill to matter don't like the second. People who don't want random character generation and regularly changing characters don't like the third. People who don't want to shift strategies and occasionally lose due don't like the fourth. People who don't want to do a lot of work and statistics don't like, or even understand, the fifth.

This list isn't exhaustive; if you can think of a paradigm of balance distinct from any of these, feel free to state it. The question is, though: which type and paradigm do you actually mean when you say "balance"? Which are the ones you'd actually be fine with?

Mechalich

2022-07-28, 06:35 PM

They absolutely should because that's the point of a DMG, teach someone how to DM. It is up to the DM to decide on running a wushu game or gritty game. The DMG's job is to help the DM know the difference on how that style affects the rules/game mechanics of running the game.

Also, because the system has limited scalability, mathematically, it's going to handle one end of the graph better than the other end. GURPS, for example, does 'gritty' better than 'wushu' because it's mechanics are properly balanced at the lower end of the point scale. You can theoretically play 1000 or even 10000 point GURPS games, but the result is absurd.

Martial/Caster disparity happens in D&D because the different classes have different growth rates, the classic 'linear vs. quadratic' comment being very accurate on that score, and this disparity doesn't even come into existence until each class has a handful of levels under their belt. The disparity can be eliminated by providing every class with the same growth rate. The problem is that many of the toys in the traditional 'D&D caster' toy box are so stratospherically powerful that putting everyone on a sluggish linear growth rate in line with traditional martials means you never get to use them. This means that in a game where you have a fighter progression that goes from Farmboy to Conan, the wizard progression simply won't allow for a huge percentage of the things D&D wizards have been traditionally allowed to do to ever come online.

Considering this it seems the obvious solution is to just put everyone on the quadratic full caster progression. The problem is that if you do that, the game breaks. It hits a point, precisely where depends on edition (in 3.X it was ~level 12, which is probably the low point), where character power - and the power of the monsters needed to challenge the characters - overwhelms the capability of the system to actually produce a viable tabletop experience (it's worth noting that cRPG versions of the exact same system can actually push past this point because they can run hundreds of calculations in the same time it takes live players to do a single one, which is why BGII was able to operate very successful way past the 2e break point).

It you really want high-level play, with characters who approximate the ability of superhero-level characters, whether martial or magical, you need a system geared to accommodate that, which is something D&D has never been.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-07-28, 07:01 PM

Also, because the system has limited scalability, mathematically, it's going to handle one end of the graph better than the other end. GURPS, for example, does 'gritty' better than 'wushu' because it's mechanics are properly balanced at the lower end of the point scale. You can theoretically play 1000 or even 10000 point GURPS games, but the result is absurd.

Martial/Caster disparity happens in D&D because the different classes have different growth rates, the classic 'linear vs. quadratic' comment being very accurate on that score, and this disparity doesn't even come into existence until each class has a handful of levels under their belt. The disparity can be eliminated by providing every class with the same growth rate. The problem is that many of the toys in the traditional 'D&D caster' toy box are so stratospherically powerful that putting everyone on a sluggish linear growth rate in line with traditional martials means you never get to use them. This means that in a game where you have a fighter progression that goes from Farmboy to Conan, the wizard progression simply won't allow for a huge percentage of the things D&D wizards have been traditionally allowed to do to ever come online.

Considering this it seems the obvious solution is to just put everyone on the quadratic full caster progression. The problem is that if you do that, the game breaks. It hits a point, precisely where depends on edition (in 3.X it was ~level 12, which is probably the low point), where character power - and the power of the monsters needed to challenge the characters - overwhelms the capability of the system to actually produce a viable tabletop experience (it's worth noting that cRPG versions of the exact same system can actually push past this point because they can run hundreds of calculations in the same time it takes live players to do a single one, which is why BGII was able to operate very successful way past the 2e break point).

It you really want high-level play, with characters who approximate the ability of superhero-level characters, whether martial or magical, you need a system geared to accommodate that, which is something D&D has never been.

I agree with this. Which is why my preferred solution is to kinda...meet in the middle. Make things mostly linear, but shift the low end up (so level 1 isn't "farm boys") and shift the high end down (so the fastest-scaling people end up down where things are livable). Does that mean chopping out a lot of the "high end" stuff people seem to want casters to do? Yes. Absolutely. And the game is better for it. Especially since most of that involves (in 5e at least) abusing variant features like multiclassing and straight-broken things like summoning/binding and simulacrum.

A straight-classed wizard who eschews minionmancy and shapechange in 5e is powerful, don't get me wrong. But the scale of power involved isn't game no longer works well. Which it quickly becomes once any substantial[1] amount of minionmancy is involved, and certainly once you start having people stacking full armor + shield + other defenses to basically become unhittable and don't ever fail concentration saves, or are doing the magic jar dance.

It also involves saying no to a lot of the "if you're not a caster, you don't get to play" stuff (like forcecage, which says "unless you can teleport, you're stuck"). And yes to spreading the wealth of abilities. Personally, I want to move most, if not all, of the non-immediate magic into something accessible by anyone (at a cost). Basically, if you don't need to cast it now, it shouldn't be a spell-from-spell-slots. It should be one of
1) not a thing
2) a "ritual-esque" thing anyone can learn, with costs such as long cast times, expensive components, explicit cooldowns, etc as balancing factors instead of spell slots
3) an ability check

[1] and it doesn't take much--things bog down really fast by level 5 if you're summoning 8 velociraptors consistently. Just from the action clog alone. A single "beatstick" summon isn't bad, but having a simulacrum of yourself, so you now have 2x the actions of a full caster? Yeah, that's an utter slog.

Telok

2022-07-28, 07:34 PM

Theory should fit the facts, not vice versa. A theory on how something happens in order to predict results should be based in evidence. It then needs testing & subsequent correction if found to be inaccurate. Problem with rpg theory is, as always, people and a lack of very large numbers of accurately represenitive samples.

They absolutely should because that's the point of a DMG, teach someone how to DM. It is up to the DM to decide on running a wushu game or gritty game. The DMG's job is to help the DM know the difference on how that style affects the rules/game mechanics of running the game. I wish. Apparently the DMG is mostly for ootional rules, vague platitudes, random tables, and some world building & campaign stuff.

Considering this it seems the obvious solution is to just put everyone on the quadratic full caster progression. The problem is that if you do that, the game breaks. It hits a point, precisely where depends on edition (in 3.X it was ~level 12, which is probably the low point), where character power - and the power of the monsters needed to challenge the characters - overwhelms the capability of the system to actually produce a viable tabletop experience

I don't think it "breaks", given I ran & played in a number of perfectly functional & fun d&d 3.5 games in the 12-18 range. It is however noticably more difficult to efficently manage the plethora of different widgets for both the players & dm. And mismanagement causes bigger issues faster at higher levels in that system. In 5e my DM & one of our cleric players are, at 13th level, beginning to exhibit similar (although lesser) symptoms of the same thing as happened in 3.5.

For the player picking decent & appropriate spells & tactics has become difficult (yeah, I know, not a expert player). He's taken basically a big leo's hut sprll as his only 7th for the last 5 games. Despite that we've been in a simple, no-respawn, & only undead dungeon and can take a 45 minute trip back to our perfectly safe flying castle every night. He gets option paralysis for his 7th slot in this situation. A casual gamer has reached his complexity limit at 13th 5e cleric level.

For the DM he's having issues going between fights & challenges we have the spells & high rolls for (stupidly easy time wasting fights or spell=win stuff), and fights & challenges we don't roll high on or have the right spells for (we've made zero meaningful arcana checks and one nat-20 of maybe 5-7 useful history checks this dungeon because wrong spells picked or nobody has more than +5 and we keep rolling under 10-13). Plus he's getting pissy about the new caster stat blocks not being caster enough and having to swap all the spells or have several he thinks are pretty useless each time.

5e isn't cracking as much as 3.5 did at the same post-10th levels, but for our group they're still there and pretty much the same.

Mechalich

2022-07-28, 07:56 PM

[1] and it doesn't take much--things bog down really fast by level 5 if you're summoning 8 velociraptors consistently. Just from the action clog alone. A single "beatstick" summon isn't bad, but having a simulacrum of yourself, so you now have 2x the actions of a full caster? Yeah, that's an utter slog.

Expanding on this, I think there's a strong argument that 'minionomancy is the game killer' in terms of live tabletop play. Unfortunately, many forms of minionomancy, or minionomancy-adjacent abilities like mind control and bardic-style inspiration abilities (which are obviously more useful the more people you can attach them too), are absolutely iconic abilities and if you take them away you're basically eliminating whole concepts. I mean, a necromancer who can't unleash the legions of the undead is...well I'm not sure exactly, but it's not something anyone wants to play. People want summons, and animal companions, and squires, and demonic servants, and mind slaves, and the list just goes on and on. Heck, even in completely magic-free science fiction games the problem rears its head. How do you break the action economy of Eclipse Phase? You build a super-wealthy character who buys a dozen combat drones to follow her around as bodyguards.

This is a tough problem. Ultimately one of the fundamental ways to solve a problem in a plot is just adding more assets to your side, and disallowing that is limiting to the narrative. Lots of tactical RPGs do this (you get only four dudes, never any more, ever!) and it feels weird even there, to say nothing of the at least supposedly more open framework of tabletop.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-07-28, 08:10 PM

Expanding on this, I think there's a strong argument that 'minionomancy is the game killer' in terms of live tabletop play. Unfortunately, many forms of minionomancy, or minionomancy-adjacent abilities like mind control and bardic-style inspiration abilities (which are obviously more useful the more people you can attach them too), are absolutely iconic abilities and if you take them away you're basically eliminating whole concepts. I mean, a necromancer who can't unleash the legions of the undead is...well I'm not sure exactly, but it's not something anyone wants to play. People want summons, and animal companions, and squires, and demonic servants, and mind slaves, and the list just goes on and on. Heck, even in completely magic-free science fiction games the problem rears its head. How do you break the action economy of Eclipse Phase? You build a super-wealthy character who buys a dozen combat drones to follow her around as bodyguards.

This is a tough problem. Ultimately one of the fundamental ways to solve a problem in a plot is just adding more assets to your side, and disallowing that is limiting to the narrative. Lots of tactical RPGs do this (you get only four dudes, never any more, ever!) and it feels weird even there, to say nothing of the at least supposedly more open framework of tabletop.

Having one ally works fine. Until it's one per PC. And if they're super simple and basic, 2 total might work. Anything more causes super slog, even with motivated and fast players.

And that's not even touching the action economy mess.

Personally, I'm totally fine with saying that "necromancer is an NPC archetype." As is "I dominate you". And "I'm just a regular joe, it's my pet/combat drones/etc that are the real characters." I don't value breadth of supported archetypes/concepts as much as some--in fact, I find the dress-up-doll style of play (where most of the focus is on building the mechanical bits of the character and having those be unique) to be a net drag on the part of the game I do enjoy, which is mostly the exploration of how a character interacts with the world and changes (and changes the world) as a result. But YMMV.

I've got a homebrew class at my current table (my fault entirely here, but it's playtest) where it's a boy and his dragon-ish pet. Doesn't help that the player is terminally indecisive. And I've pared down the pet's action economy a much as possible--unless you spend master actions, it can only do a (weak, not very scaling) attack. But it's still way slower of a character than the full-up wizard.

RandomPeasant

2022-07-28, 08:21 PM

And that nothing in his nature assumes he will transform into something very different from that.

And nothing in his nature assumes that he will eventually fight a Balrog. So if our example is "Aragorn" and our target is "a thing Aragorn doesn't do", isn't there kind of a gap between where you are and where you want to go? Why is the parsimonious assumption "Aragorn definitely scales in a way the stories about Aragorn don't depict" and not "Aragorn caps out at about the level he is described as capping out at"?

And they are elves, but apart from being "strong of spirit", they don't use any magical powers from what I can tell.

Yes, I agree that, apart from literally being superhuman they do not demonstrate any superhuman abilities.

Interesting... magic items on a martial turns them into "relic knights" according to you, and that somehow changes things. But with Dr. Strange it means... nothing.

I don't understand what you think this argument is supposed to get you. Yes, I think that a martial character that relies on magic items for power is different from a mundane character. Let's grant the premise that Doctor Strange's magic items A) explain most of his power and B) don't require any personal effort or skill from him (neither of these is true). If that means he is a "Relic Wizard", that's you admitting that the high-level martial who relies on magic items isn't mundane anymore.

When you say "martials must beat this standard", I say "why? not everyone will use the xixecal, or even use it in the same way that you would".

Sure, not everyone is going to have an adventure where they fight CR 36 monsters. Do you know what that means? That not everyone's campaign is going to reach 36th level. You know, exactly like the solution I suggested and you said was completely unacceptable. The double standard here is yours, not mine.

But if you require certain choices to be made, that's a different thing.

This is a distinction without a difference. You can build a Wizard who knows no combat spells. Does that mean the Wizard is imbalanced? I doubt you would say so. So where exactly is the bright line here? Why is "you need some combat spells" an acceptable choice to force, but "you need some utility spells" not?

Obviously not, Middle-earth doesn’t have the concept of level progression that’s baked into D&D.

The thing is, it's not even true. When Aragorn gets a power-up, it's not a better magic sword. It's an army of ghosts. Aragorn simply does not progress in the way the people talking about an "Aragorn archetype" suggest that he should. If you've got one example of your thing, and it's not an example of your thing, maybe your thing doesn't need to define the game for everyone.

So yes, with the right GM the difference in power might be barely noticeable (just as pretty much any dysfunctional rule or wonky setting), but I don't think that's an excuse for not having more balanced classes.

That's the thing. If you want to make an imbalanced game from a balanced system, that's really easy. Making a balanced game from an imbalanced system is much harder. The ask here is to make the game harder for everyone who has slightly difference preferences from you so that you don't have to do any work, and I just can't back that.

Point the first: Discussing characters in non-improvised media does little to actually shed light on the way systems actually work. Hawkeye Contributing in the movie doesn't mean that, had the same scenario played out on a tabletop, Hawkeye's player would have felt like knocking Loki off his speeder meant his character was as useful as Hulk.

The tradeoff is also different in a TTRPG than a movie. In The Avengers, Hawkeye is there because S.H.I.E.L.D. has a bow guy, and you might as well send in the bow guy if the alternative is loosing New York. But in TTRPG, you don't just have a Hawkeye. You could have a Hawkeye. But you could also have Dr. Strange, or a Scarlet Witch, or another Thor. Hell, you could have a Reed Richards or a Nova. You really think Hawkeye is doing something none of those guys can? Because I'm pretty sure the lady who was soloing Thanos until he nuked her from orbit does more than the bow guy.

The problem is that if you do that, the game breaks. It hits a point, precisely where depends on edition (in 3.X it was ~level 12, which is probably the low point), where character power - and the power of the monsters needed to challenge the characters - overwhelms the capability of the system to actually produce a viable tabletop experience (it's worth noting that cRPG versions of the exact same system can actually push past this point because they can run hundreds of calculations in the same time it takes live players to do a single one, which is why BGII was able to operate very successful way past the 2e break point).

This is not really true. A lot of things break in high level D&D, but the combat system isn't really one of them. Insofar as something breaks there, it's the variance in character power, not the absolute level of it. The issue isn't that you can't have a reasonable fight with a Beholder. It's that you can have three "optimized" parties, for which that same Beholder is a pushover, a reasonable fight, and an overwhelming challenge.

And, honestly, a lot of the stuff that you could do to make combat scale better is stuff you kinda want to do anyway. Using a proportional damage system rather than hit points doesn't just make it easier for you game to go from "starting adventurer" to "epic adventurer", it means you never have to ask people to track 8 damage off a monster with 300 HP that ends up getting overkilled by 30 anyway. That's just better. While I won't call abstracted positioning as clear a win, it does offer a big advantage over grid squares for online play.

Psyren

2022-07-28, 08:55 PM

They absolutely should because that's the point of a DMG, teach someone how to DM. It is up to the DM to decide on running a wushu game or gritty game. The DMG's job is to help the DM know the difference on how that style affects the rules/game mechanics of running the game.

What guidance are you looking for exactly? "If you're running a wushu game, jumping to the moon should be a DC 25 check, whereas if you're running gritty, consider not allowing it." Seriously, what?

Also, because the system has limited scalability, mathematically, it's going to handle one end of the graph better than the other end. GURPS, for example, does 'gritty' better than 'wushu' because it's mechanics are properly balanced at the lower end of the point scale. You can theoretically play 1000 or even 10000 point GURPS games, but the result is absurd.

Even 100 points would be beyond what D&D should be doing, at least if you care about accessibility.

I agree with this. Which is why my preferred solution is to kinda...meet in the middle. Make things mostly linear, but shift the low end up (so level 1 isn't "farm boys") and shift the high end down (so the fastest-scaling people end up down where things are livable). Does that mean chopping out a lot of the "high end" stuff people seem to want casters to do? Yes. Absolutely. And the game is better for it. Especially since most of that involves (in 5e at least) abusing variant features like multiclassing and straight-broken things like summoning/binding and simulacrum.

A straight-classed wizard who eschews minionmancy and shapechange in 5e is powerful, don't get me wrong. But the scale of power involved isn't game no longer works well. Which it quickly becomes once any substantial[1] amount of minionmancy is involved, and certainly once you start having people stacking full armor + shield + other defenses to basically become unhittable and don't ever fail concentration saves, or are doing the magic jar dance.

It also involves saying no to a lot of the "if you're not a caster, you don't get to play" stuff (like forcecage, which says "unless you can teleport, you're stuck"). And yes to spreading the wealth of abilities. Personally, I want to move most, if not all, of the non-immediate magic into something accessible by anyone (at a cost). Basically, if you don't need to cast it now, it shouldn't be a spell-from-spell-slots. It should be one of
1) not a thing
2) a "ritual-esque" thing anyone can learn, with costs such as long cast times, expensive components, explicit cooldowns, etc as balancing factors instead of spell slots
3) an ability check

[1] and it doesn't take much--things bog down really fast by level 5 if you're summoning 8 velociraptors consistently. Just from the action clog alone. A single "beatstick" summon isn't bad, but having a simulacrum of yourself, so you now have 2x the actions of a full caster? Yeah, that's an utter slog.

I'm fine with banning simulacrum and nerfing conjure X, and forcecage should be possible to break out of physically like it is in Pathfinder. So I think there are tweaks that could be made, the system isn't perfect as-is.

Pex

2022-07-28, 10:39 PM

What guidance are you looking for exactly? "If you're running a wushu game, jumping to the moon should be a DC 25 check, whereas if you're running gritty, consider not allowing it." Seriously, what?

What I've always wanted. Defined DC tables for skill use, but Telok said it better and he didn't even suggest defined numbers. He just said for wushu jumping double your distance would be an average skill but gritty jumping even a couple of feet more than max would take effort. Don't just tell the DM to make it up. Show the various styles and how they affect the rules, explain the pros and cons of each, and reinforce the idea PCs are supposed to be able to do these things. Also be blunt. No PC can use Athletics to jump to the moon, but don't let that mean a PC can't jump onto the back of a dragon when he does a flyby.

Mechalich

2022-07-28, 11:46 PM

What I've always wanted. Defined DC tables for skill use, but Telok said it better and he didn't even suggest defined numbers. He just said for wushu jumping double your distance would be an average skill but gritty jumping even a couple of feet more than max would take effort. Don't just tell the DM to make it up. Show the various styles and how they affect the rules, explain the pros and cons of each, and reinforce the idea PCs are supposed to be able to do these things. Also be blunt. No PC can use Athletics to jump to the moon, but don't let that mean a PC can't jump onto the back of a dragon when he does a flyby.

Making such variable scaling work is challenging, especially because of the Normal People Problem.

Specifically the game has to have rules to represent what a bog standard human being with average abilities is capable of doing, even when this category doesn't include any PCs or significant NPCs. Because a setting is going to have normal people in it, the only alternative is a bizarro world that poses even worse challenges. This, in turn, produces a floor for what the minimum numbers in a system must represent. Whatever the ultimate power ceiling is, it has to scale up from said 'normal person' floor (in many games it's actually from lower, if you want to represent weaker-than-human entities like giant rats). This is a big part of the inherent mathematical challenge for high-power games, especially in tabletop where the number of increments that can plausibly be placed between floor and ceiling is limited by the simplified math available (cRPGs can, and do, utilize much larger ranges).

This is a problem that has long existed in many games, not just D&D. White-Wolf struggled with it immensely, and managed to create mechanically horrific systems three different times (Aberrant, Exalted, and Scion), when they kicked the power ceiling above what the storyteller system's dicepool structure could handle.

Pex

2022-07-29, 12:06 AM

Making such variable scaling work is challenging, especially because of the Normal People Problem.

Specifically the game has to have rules to represent what a bog standard human being with average abilities is capable of doing, even when this category doesn't include any PCs or significant NPCs. Because a setting is going to have normal people in it, the only alternative is a bizarro world that poses even worse challenges. This, in turn, produces a floor for what the minimum numbers in a system must represent. Whatever the ultimate power ceiling is, it has to scale up from said 'normal person' floor (in many games it's actually from lower, if you want to represent weaker-than-human entities like giant rats). This is a big part of the inherent mathematical challenge for high-power games, especially in tabletop where the number of increments that can plausibly be placed between floor and ceiling is limited by the simplified math available (cRPGs can, and do, utilize much larger ranges).

This is a problem that has long existed in many games, not just D&D. White-Wolf struggled with it immensely, and managed to create mechanically horrific systems three different times (Aberrant, Exalted, and Scion), when they kicked the power ceiling above what the storyteller system's dicepool structure could handle.

It's the game designers' job to do that work, not bump it off to the DM to make it up. If it is exactly that, so challenging, how do you expect all the DMs out there to do it? That's why you get DMs who don't allow stunts or make then so hard to do no one bothers, ergo spellcasters rule warriors drool because spells are defined on how they work as well as PCs only do whatever their class buttons allow them to do and nothing more, which was Telok's issue.

If I got my way and there were defined DC tables, the people here who yell at the idea of the game telling them what to do can still do whatever it is they do. If they don't need tables hooray for them. Ignore them. The tables are for the gaming groups who do need them. Just as there are variant rules for resting there can be variant rules for the tables. Have a sentence offering the idea if you want a grittier game increase the DCs by 5 and for wushu games decrease the DCs by 5. Whatever the math is to make it work, that's the game designers' job to figure out. I don't need to provide the numbers.

Batcathat

2022-07-29, 01:34 AM

If you honestly believe a good game master can do that, then the overarching question should be "is there a way to make every game master that good?"

Or, put differently: quality advice for how a game master should handle unequal characters reduces the need to have equal characters, and vice versa. There are probably multiple balance points to that equation, with a trivial case of course being the one where all allowed characters are mechanically equal.

Yes, I think it's possible (even if the hypothetical party in my example would be quite the challenge, I suspect). No, I don't think everyone can do it. Which was kind of my point, a good enough GM can handle almost any problem with the game, but with a better design not every GM needs to be that good.

I also suspect that better balance would put less strain on the suspension of disbelief, since a party might notice that every major battle just happen to include something to do for the party members with fewer and weaker tools.

Satinavian

2022-07-29, 01:43 AM

Making such variable scaling work is challenging, especially because of the Normal People Problem.

Honestly, i prefer if games know what they want and provide that.

The idea that a single game should be able to do everything is what leads to discussions like thing. Because pretty much inevitably it will get a playerbase that has very different ideas about what they even want to achieve and rules will never bridge that.

Lord Raziere

2022-07-29, 02:01 AM

Telok

2022-07-29, 02:03 AM

Making such variable scaling work is challenging, especially because of the Normal People Problem.

Specifically the game has to have rules to represent what a bog standard human being with average abilities is capable of doing, even when this category doesn't include any PCs or significant NPCs. Because a setting is going to have normal people in it, the only alternative is a bizarro world that poses even worse challenges. This, in turn, produces a floor for what the minimum numbers in a system must represent.

Champions has a bit of an issue with that, in that normal people can fall off 3 storey buildings almost continuously and keep walking away from it. That actually works out pretty well when you low ball for a street level hero game as long as you keep focus on the pcs & equal point value villians, but you can still get the occasional "rubber ball hostage" on accident. That system is set for supers and the normal people ended up with extra physical padding. But its mostly just a rare artifact in combat since super punches, killing attacks like guns, & long falls still have the correct results, and skills/non-combat aren't affected. I have found a couple systems that do fine, but they don't claim everything and the kitchen sink or try to do everything from "young Conan can barely defeat a skeleton" to "which elder god are we beating up this week".

You can fit things two ways. Define your dice system stats, fit normal people stats to that, then figure out what bonuses to give pcs & villians to reach the desired power level. Or define normal people & pc/opfor stats to get your desired spread before designing your dice system to give appropriate results. I guess you could calibrate the dice system & pcs then figure stats for normal people from that too.

The bad thing to do is define all three in isolation from each other, which is about what 5e has. They inherited an assumption about normal people stats (10s), took an existing dice system & idealized a "bounded accuracy" thing without putting rigorous boundaries on it, and designed pcs & monster separate from both of them (no consideration what 18+prof vs 10+0 should be except less than a 12 point spread). Then they could only jigger the proficency bonus to fit the "bounded accuracy" thing. Naturally they immedately went and busted out spells & effects that let casters semi-reliably blow "bounded accuracy" on ability checks to crap. It works ok if a DM knows stats, doesn't use the core mechanic much outside combat, and you fiat a lot of autosuccess & autofail to keep the d20+0 uneducated dirt farmers from showing up the level 20, int 20 wizards in magic trivia contests and the like. Actually thats a bit extreme, about only 8% dirt farmer wins if the quickie math was right.

But still the d&d 5e DM still has to know statistics & have a solid idea of thier intended style in order to stop the system from giving out bad results. You get one that thinks three 33% chances = a 99% chance, or one doesn't know how setting dcs baseline 10 versus baseline 15 changes outcomes at low levels, or they call for a lot of rolls because they can't decide if pcs should auto-succeed/fail so they trust the "professional designed system" to decide. Groups just fell apart with those because the game was all whacked out.

Mechalich

2022-07-29, 02:29 AM

It's the game designers' job to do that work, not bump it off to the DM to make it up. If it is exactly that, so challenging, how do you expect all the DMs out there to do it? That's why you get DMs who don't allow stunts or make then so hard to do no one bothers, ergo spellcasters rule warriors drool because spells are defined on how they work as well as PCs only do whatever their class buttons allow them to do and nothing more, which was Telok's issue.

If I got my way and there were defined DC tables, the people here who yell at the idea of the game telling them what to do can still do whatever it is they do. If they don't need tables hooray for them. Ignore them. The tables are for the gaming groups who do need them. Just as there are variant rules for resting there can be variant rules for the tables. Have a sentence offering the idea if you want a grittier game increase the DCs by 5 and for wushu games decrease the DCs by 5. Whatever the math is to make it work, that's the game designers' job to figure out. I don't need to provide the numbers.

I was not suggesting that GMs should do that work, rather that there need to be entirely different games for different purposes. D&D tries to do too much, in practically every parameter, not just math scaling, and the one edition that is mostly balanced, 4e, is also the one that massively pared back what the system attempted/pretended it was capable of accomplishing. One of the many problems 4e faced was that, unfortunately, people liked having things attached to the game more than they liked having all of those things work - also not a solely D&D problem, the second most popular TTRPG ever was VtM, and that had all kinds of things in it that fundamentally did not function (to the point that even White-Wolf recognized and blew up some of them, ex. the True Black Hand madness) but that many fans howled at the very idea they could be removed.

Actually thats a bit extreme, about only 8% dirt farmer wins if the quickie math was right.

Even an 8% win rate is a big problem though. That's not sufficient infrequent that you can brush it off as a data artifact. It's a roughly 1 in 12 chance, which is common enough to happen once per session if the GM calls for a lot of checks. A system that outputs anomalous results on a regular basis has problems.

Dr.Samurai

2022-07-29, 08:48 AM

Tanarii

2022-07-29, 09:01 AM

There's no requirement that a games resolution system has to be able to represent what normal people can do. Nor NPCs that are effectively on par with the PCs, for that matter. They can have a totally different resolution system, or even no system at all. D&D 5e could in theory be considered a combination of both, although it breaks down when opposed checks are required. For a good example of the latter, see AW.

NichG

2022-07-29, 09:35 AM

@Random Peasant: I don't think further exchanges will be very productive. I seem to be having difficulty conveying my meaning to you, and having to explain it again each time is frustrating me, so to stay positive, I'm abandoning this particular part of the conversation.

If we ignore the concept that mundane martials don't deserve to exist at high levels and simply accept that the game has had them since the very beginning and continues to have them, what do people think martials need to "keep up" at those levels?

Is it any of the following or some combination or both or something else I haven't listed?

1. Ability to navigate different terrain. (Altitude, underwater, hazardous, other dimension, etc.)
2. Ability to debilitate the enemy other than through HP damage.
3. Ability to contribute outside of combat. (On a par with utility spells? Differently?)
4. Ability to withstand enemy attacks/abilities?
5. Ability to reshape the battlefield?

For the highest-end play I've participated in in a D&D campaign, here are the sorts of things that can stonewall a character if they have no answer or way of getting an answer to these needs:

Ability to interact with and influence abstract, conceptual, and nonphysical forces: plagues, curses, extreme weather, corruptive energy, alterations to the state or nature of souls, transformations of body or mind, time, subjective reality, etc.

Ability to adapt to alien environments: continuously harmful places, places that remove some aspect necessary to life or function (airless, timeless, zero-g, null magic, planes that actively suppress hope or purpose or sanity...)

Ability to scale one's impact on a situation with time or resources, and to make impacts which stick or persist or grow even when the character is no longer there. Not just defeat a criminal in battle, but have the tools to create an empire without crime. Not just heal someone from a disease, but render someone forevermore immune to disease.

Ability to get information about how to accomplish goals or pursue ends that almost no one else in the setting knows or can conceive of doing, and to analyze and understand new creatures, phenomena, etc Someone has to figure out which of a billion alternate realities the true cosmic artifact was hidden in. Someone has to figure out the properties of the new toxic energy entering the multiverse and where it came from. At high enough levels, that's the party's job.

You could of course ignore all of this and just be 'the combat guy', but in my experience that risks having entire sessions where you sit on the sidelines. You don't need all of these things in the same character, but you probably do need at least one.

For reference, for the campaign I'm basing this from was heavily modded 3.5e D&D. I was playing a swordsage (so primary schtick was martial) but who went heavily into magic item crafting to be able to make things to solve particular needs and also diversified into Cleric casting and eventually basically having all spells available via Spell domain -> Anyspell + Miracle + other shenanigans, as well as a ton of custom high-end stuff from that particular campaign. Outside of combat considerations, that character had to do things like halt an asteroid impact, retrieve something from the core of an operating antimatter reactor, navigate home from the paradox plane that created plausible but false versions of reality, rebalance the alignment distribution of the planes as a whole, communicate and then negotiate peace with a sentient zombie-apocalypse-causing disease, deal with an exponentially growing incurable corruption that spread memetically through populations, etc. As far as combat went, an important part of his schtick was being able to self-resurrect up to three times in a row, allowing him to deal with things that made HP totals and defenses irrelevant. I think by the end of the campaign he was Lv33.

So that's my image of 'what do I want high level play to handle/be like'

RandomPeasant

2022-07-29, 10:09 AM

This is a big part of the inherent mathematical challenge for high-power games, especially in tabletop where the number of increments that can plausibly be placed between floor and ceiling is limited by the simplified math available (cRPGs can, and do, utilize much larger ranges).

It is a challenge for certain types of math. HP scaling over that range is a huge pain to handle. But 1d20 + 5 isn't really much different than 1d20 + 25 or even 1d20 + 45. It can be painful if there are a lot more situational bonuses at high level, but that strikes me as bad design. There are other things that are hard to scale (like going from "human speed" to "the Flash speed", especially on a fixed grid), but D&D has gotten by just fine having speed scale relatively little.

Honestly, i prefer if games know what they want and provide that.

The idea that a single game should be able to do everything is what leads to discussions like thing. Because pretty much inevitably it will get a playerbase that has very different ideas about what they even want to achieve and rules will never bridge that.

The issue is that "scale from low to high power levels" is a valid thing to want and the thing that D&D has historically been. For all that people will pretend that D&D has "always been" the game where the Fighter never had to be more than a guy at the gym, that's just not remotely true. The I in "BECMI" stands for "Immortals", not "Is Mundane". D&D is a zero-to-hero, kitchen sink, epic fantasy game. That's what it is. And the people who want it to be something else are the ones who want to remove things from D&D, no matter how much they protest to the contrary.

@Random Peasant: I don't think further exchanges will be very productive. I seem to be having difficulty conveying my meaning to you, and having to explain it again each time is frustrating me, so to stay positive, I'm abandoning this particular part of the conversation.

The past exchanges weren't productive because you didn't explain yourself. We're how many pages in and the "Aragorn Archetype" is still one example that doesn't do the things you claim the archetype does. Do you know what the Avenger who is most closely associated with a specific magic item is? Thor! The guy who is obviously not mundane, and somehow claimed as "not martial" by your side.

what do people think martials need to "keep up" at those levels?

To not be mundane. As they are demonstrably not when they survive having meteors thrown at them. You still haven't explained how your totally mundane character is supposed to interact with a Xixecal. I understand you don't want to defend your position, but that makes your position wrong, not something we can all simply assume.

You could of course ignore all of this and just be 'the combat guy', but in my experience that risks having entire sessions where you sit on the sidelines. You don't need all of these things in the same character, but you probably do need at least one.

The real risk of not having those things, IME, is that it means that they simply aren't made the focus of the campaign. So by insisting you be allowed to simply opt out of them, you're (in practice) saying they shouldn't be a part of the campaign for anyone. And that can be fine at the level of a table, I think the game probably should allow you to have a campaign that is "just" the combat minigame plus maybe some basic exploration, but kicking them out of the game in general to preserve your vision of what your character should be is a level of selfish I just don't understand.

For reference, for the campaign I'm basing this from was heavily modded 3.5e D&D. I was playing a swordsage (so primary schtick was martial) but who went heavily into magic item crafting to be able to make things to solve particular needs and also diversified into Cleric casting and eventually basically having all spells available via Spell domain -> Anyspell + Miracle + other shenanigans, as well as a ton of custom high-end stuff from that particular campaign. Outside of combat considerations, that character had to do things like halt an asteroid impact, retrieve something from the core of an operating antimatter reactor, navigate home from the paradox plane that created plausible but false versions of reality, rebalance the alignment distribution of the planes as a whole, communicate and then negotiate peace with a sentient zombie-apocalypse-causing disease, deal with an exponentially growing incurable corruption that spread memetically through populations, etc. As far as combat went, an important part of his schtick was being able to self-resurrect up to three times in a row, allowing him to deal with things that made HP totals and defenses irrelevant. I think by the end of the campaign he was Lv33.

This is the exact sort of thing that the high end of D&D should be. And, no, this is not his table being weird there are official D&D adventures and enemies that scale this much as well. It's fine to scale less, but dealing with this is what it should mean to hit the top end of D&D's level range.