Wizards should be better than fighters.

[Kelb_Panthera]

I'll agree they're not a special forces guy... But this article provides reasoning for why the best in our world would probably only hit Level 6. So I suppose a Navy SEAL would be around Level 3-5. Even at Level 1, that's no reason for them to have so few skill points or Class Skills warriors would need to be remotely effective beyond, "Imma a button masher."

My issue with the bolded part is that what you're describing sounds more like the Warrior NPC class. If we want to bring in 2E for a moment, a Fighter was called a Veteran at Level 1... Even then, I think this becomes a moot point by the time they hit Level 4-5 and are still, mechanically, so inept that these fantasy badasses would get laughed out of real world armies for how incompetent they are. The 3.5E Fighter fits more in line with a dumb henchman than anything...

The -entire- difference between the fighter PC class and the warrior NPC class is that talent. The former is a little tougher, a little more prone to figuring out the tricks of the trade, a little luckier perhaps. The same XP gets you the same number of levels and their training is in the same field. What else would you use to explain why one gets a larger HD and -way- more combat competency?

The issue is that Fighters need to multi-class to be able to function at all beyond dumb brutes. The D&D Fighter was inspired by characters such as Conan the Barbarian, who could sneak and had high perceptive abilities.

That goes back to my commentary on CC skills. You're not -forbidden- to put ranks in skills that aren't class skills. You're not forbidden from having a high int score (virtually all of mine have at least a 14 for combat expertise). You -choose- whether or not to do those things. A fighter that's put max cross-class ranks in hide and move silently has used the exact same number of skill points as one who has put max ranks intimidate and ride. He's not as good as an equal level rogue at stealth but why should he be?

The question isn't whether or not he -can- sneak, you don't need ranks at all for that. The question is whether he has enough to succeed at stealth often enough. That doesn't take much when the overwhelming majority of foes and creatures are only gonna have a few points of overall bonus to their spot and listen checks. Conan never had to sneak past a grell so why would you expect a fighter to? Being stealthy enough to pick a copper piece out of an old red's scales is the design space for the skirmisher types like rogues and scouts. The fighter's design space is running the beast through and prying that copper out with a crow-bar after. He can be sneaky enough to get past its kobold minions without a fight though.

Let's put some numbers to it, just to really hammer the point home.

Human thug fighter 20 with int 14 and dex 12. Really wants to be a proper sneak so he takes the feats guerrilla scout and guerrilla warrior.

7 skill points a level means he can have just about max ranks in each of spot, listen, hide, and move silently and 5 other skills. About level 9 or so, he picks up darkstalker, just to be safe.

So at 20, he has 11 ranks in all 4 of those skills and still has plenty of points left over to also have, let's go with know (local), gather info, tumble (skilled city-dweller article), intimidate, and jump. He's even picked up a couple of skill tricks since he could only advance the other 4 on every other level.

Let's go ahead and give him greater boots and cloak of elvenkind for +10 to each and a set of gloves of dexterity +4

So that's 11 ranks, +10 competence, +3 dex for a total bonus on stealth rolls of +24. For comparison, most of the spot/listen modifiers at the same level on the SRD only have that beat by about 5 points. The 20k spent on these skills is chump change from the 760k that a level 20 character gets and that's not even close to the highest bonus you can get without epic items. It's also only 3 feats out of the character's 18 total.

You can lean even harder into stealth without being any less of a fighter with another feat or two and a few 10's of thousands more gold if you want but I think the point is made here and the same is true for -most- skills. If your fighters are big, dumb brutes then it's because that's how you build them.

A Fighter can't do what even basic fantasy (or real world) warriors would be capable of without multiclassing or being very careful with what skills they pick, let alone step into the realms of the gods like a Wizard can (I admit, a Fighter can hit stuff REALLY hard... Hercules can also do that, and much harder... So can Thor...). Fighters don't scale in damage too well unless you pick the right feats (Power Attack, Vital Strike) and even then, they can't move more than 5 feet to do a Full Attack... While Wizards can cast higher level spells as a Standard Action and move, along with the bit about their spells increasing in damage automatically with level (by a d6 or so). Wizards get to be potentially everything at once, Fighters get to be the henchman of the Wizard is why people like me have a problem.

There's nothing really left to say on this except to repeat my theses. Don't look to class alone to make your character everything you want him to be. The caster archetype is more limited and the non-casters less so than they're given credit for in these discussions.

There are plenty of ways to move and full attack and get damage up to decent levels as well as do a whole host of other things. A spell you can have ready in 15 minutes doesn't do you a lick of good if you need it right now.

I contest this for a number of reasons, namely that this simply an argument to box in the creativity of identity for the fighter and serves to minimize the potential for a Fighter. While I am sure you would absolutely never declare that



I do not believe this is fair to limit characters who are supposed to be heroes in such constrained ways. There is a MASSIVE gap in strength between the bog standard Commoner and even the Warrior and the Fighter.

Your little blurb doesn't match mine. You forgot the all important "first level" phrase from your wizard description. If it's placed at the beginning of the first sentence, as it was with my fighter description, then I absolutely would describe a first level wizard that way.

First level characters have not yet had any adventures. They have the minimum competence as described in their class entries; armor and weapon proficiencies and their first level class features. For a fighter, that's one more combat trick than the next guy. For a wizard it's a bare handful of slots and a book with next to nothing but cantrips in it. They're more talented than warriors and magewrights and capable of growing to far greater heights but they're not there yet and there's no reason their backstory should say different.

Both wizards and fighters are -far- too customizable to make any definitive statement of what they are much beyond first level but at first level they're barely competent nobodies.

Same goes for pretty much all of the classes to one degree or other. Favored souls and sorcerers are special at level one by virtue of having their powers invested in them by something greater than themselves but pretty much everybody else had to work for it and they're barely off the starting line yet at level 1.

You want to be a super-special snowflake at level one, you're gonna have to come up with a peculiar race. Elans used to be something but are no longer. An incarnate effigy of something humanoid shaped and with only one HD is definitely not something you see every day. You could be a failed mind seed implanted in the clone of a cerebremancer as an experiment. End of the day though, you're still a level 1 nobody that's barely competent now and you've got to earn being something by leveling and accomplishing feats and deeds.

You can be as creative as you want but there's gonna be narrative and cognitive dissonance if your creativity outstrips your actual character's abilities.