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2018-03-02, 01:24 AM (ISO 8601)
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What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
When it comes to wizards, Vow of Poverty, etc., what does a homebrewed non-caster need to be tier 1 without necessarily casting spells? I have some rough elements below, please do chime in.
Travel - flight, teleportation, interplanar travel.
Healing - of hit points, status conditions (poison, disease, negative energy effects,etc.), resurrection.
Social - charm/compulsion effects, skill bonuses (e.g. glibness).
Protection - AC, saves, against energy damage, against status conditions (e.g. death ward, mind blank).
Offense - inflicting energy damage, inflicting status conditions.
Divination & Stealth - scrying, true seeing, invisibility, nondetection.
Summoning, Polymorph - for specialised things you can't do yourself.
Obviously the real power of tier 1 is being versatile, but I'd be happy to end up with a tier 2 non-caster as well. Presumably one that gained psuedo-death ward, psuedo-teleport etc. class features at the same levels that casters gain access to those effects. The trick is writing such class features with as non-magical fluff as possible...
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2018-03-02, 05:35 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
Generally, the main way to get t1 non-spellcasters is to have very open ended abilities, especially ripoffs of t1 powerhouse spells like Summon Monster/(Lesser) Planar Binding or Alter Self/Polymorph/Shapechange. Being able to summon or turn into any creature with a CR of two thirds your level or less is a large chunk of the way to t1, as it gets difficult to find ECL appropriate problems not solvable by some monster at two thirds your level.
In more interesting class design, you pick and choose high-impact abilities. A space-warping class, particularly centered on portal creation, can get the transportation capabilities trivially. You then mess with what portals are to get other tricks, like getting scaling armor and damage by having mirror-portals that act as literally indestructible barriers and arbitrarily sharp indestructible blades and using portals through portals to mess with range restrictions (which is where long-distance transportation comes in). There's shockingly few problems that can't be solved by portals in D&D. Need healing? Portal to Plane of Positive Energy. Want to start a Spawnpockalypse? Plane of Shadow. Facing the legions of hell? Open a portal in front of some angels, they'll probably jump in to help. Sure, you can do little to nothing to direct what happens after it comes out, but being able to open a door to anywhere lets you do many shenanigans.
Summoning, as mentioned, is the toolbox. In fact, the only reason PF's Summoner isn't t1 is because of the limits of the Summon Monster list, it's comfortably at the borderline of t2 and t3 because it lacks the sheer power output needed for t2. Until you get G A T E, anyways. And the floor of Synthesist is hilariously absurd, though sacrifices a lot of ceiling because of action economy concerns. A properly t1 non-caster specialized Summoner needs to make use of the side rules and themes for summoning, like Demonic Possession to get instant "magic" items from any mundane object (as well as Constructs) and stat improvements. Angels and Elementals, as well as other spirits, can substitute as desired (Undead from Negative Energy "Elementals"), with different Weird **** on tap based on the type of entity summoned into the object/creature. Because you control the possessing being, you can replicate Dominate effects by that method, as well as buffing transmutations by summoning them into other people.
Transmutation is only going to get t1 by replicating SLAs or spell-copying Supernatural abilities, so you need to be able to get ahold of them. Instead of just copying existing creatures, though, it'd probably be a mostly-freeform set based on "form points" and a minimum level to get access to various effects, to avoid putting Druids to shame. Then you can develop access by either nomming on (not necessarily lethally) creatures with the qualities, or by learning a set maximum each level automatically, much like Wizards do with spells. Basic ability score bonuses would be expressed as a total your physical scores must add up to, probably 40 to start with, and a maximum they may be, starting at 16 or 4+base, whichever is higher, just to keep it from being entirely silly. And making the form-copying side still get some benefit from the rest, like copying the Tarrasque and getting +10 to every score above it's baseline and immunity to all sorts of energy damage. Maybe extra HD for accelerated BAB and saves to keep up with beatstick needs.
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I'll probably do a separate post on genuinely non-supernatural classes, which are what you're thinking of. After a reply to the thread after this post happens, because double posting.Last edited by Morphic tide; 2018-03-02 at 05:36 AM.
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2018-03-02, 06:20 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
In general, a T1 class doesn't need to be able to do everything, but they should at least be able to give it a jolly good shot. Druids, for example, can't teleport, why should T1 fighters need to be able to? Druids also lack most of the powerful spells which let you have a free pass at the monster manual (and wild shape only partially makes up for this). They almost entirely lack charms and compulsions against anything that isn't an animal - in fact, they miss out on almost everything in your list.
This table gives some of the wizard abilities per level. Obvious things that it makes sense for a mundane character to be better at than a spellcaster include combat (give them a few abilities that just makes shooting people with a minature siege weapon or ramming 5 feet of steel down their throat suitably lethal), survivability (let them shrug off any spell they have thrown at them and make it so that they don't run out of stuff the way casters do), general awareness (make it so they can see through illusion effects without a spell), stuff-destruction (give them a way or several to break through walls), healing (you can't run out of first aid skills, though you can run out of bandages), skills (just give them a bunch of skill points and new uses for skills), and a few other things. Then, anything that the other classes are gonna be better at, give your new class some capability with them - flight via constructing some kind of flying machine, for example - and you end up with, well, the veteran.
(Bear in mind that there's no reason why you should need, for example, to be able to inflict energy damage when slashing will do just as well, or to be invisible when hiding will work fine.)
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2018-03-02, 06:24 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
That's just the thing. Everything is in the fluff. You just need to be able to do the same effect of flying/teleport/battlefield control etc as the spells if you want a non-caster to compete in the same tier with casters, but a lot of people always complain if non casters can do anything more fancy than hitting stuff or hitting stuff in a fancy way. Too magical/too anime/too over the top/not within physical capability enough/whatever. It's been talked to death in this forum.
Last edited by Fri; 2018-03-02 at 06:25 AM.
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2018-03-06, 01:42 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
Thanks for the input everyone!
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2018-03-09, 12:29 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
Kinda forgot I had this in progress...
I've firmly been in the "Screw realism, it isn't anywhere else" camp since the first such thread I saw. Here's where I see it when it comes to hyper"mundane":
1. It can't be arbitrary absurdity. Yes, spells have it, yes, we aren't constrained by realism, but if we're calling it hypermundane, we damn well better confine it to stuff analogous to reality and rooted in first-party (Ex) effects. Fortunately, this includes Ki, which can be refluffed into rampant abuse of life force and soul stuff as beyond-natural (but not Supernatural) self control. Calls of "It's too anime/wuxia/weaboo" are to be summarily ignored or responded to with "THIS ****ER IS SO ANGRY, HIS SOUL REACHES OUT OF HIS BODY SO HE CAN STRANGLE YOU WHILE HE PUNCHES YOU!", or something similar. Tie it into the supernatural and magical elements that are part of the nature of the setting, and explain that it's messing with the body's/soul's normal limits to do stuff not strictly intended by nature, but not beyond the technical capabilities of what's already there.
2. Like it or not, there'll be stuff that's absurd to call (Ex), even beyond desyncing your soul and body to do multiple things at once. Shadow Hand's stuff is almost entirely about stretching your Ki into the Plane of Shadows to make use of shadow-stuff. This act of reaching into other Planes with Ki is how elemental processes, and thus energy damage and resistances, are integrated into an (Ex) form. It's also how you can get access to healing and resurrection abilities, as it's possible to take that interplanar Ki reach and use it to grab and pull back souls, as well as positive energy. With indefinite time period revival being available via heading to the relevant afterlife, finding the soul, then dragging them back to their corpse, no consent required. Silly as hell, yes, but an All (Ex) party needs to be a thing, and storming the gates of hell to reclaim your hellbound friend's soul so you can bring them back to the world of the living can be a sideplot worth having. Sometimes.
3. Dirty fighting is key to the low end and keeping the high end somewhat plausible, outside a handful of weird **** that's tied to the fantastic world D&D exists in. This is best represented by a massively expanded Called Shot system of some kind to spread it out among all the Martials immediately without rewriting any of them. Then classes can be made that specialize in that part of the general rules, abusing Specific Trumps General to reset things to proper class feature territory.
4. In general, preface any such project with a statement of your conceits to absurdity. What you define as (Ex) and how the limits to things work out, including what level you expect real human limits to be irrelevant at to remove the realism argument. In my own case, I'd go with level 7 as the cutoff point, as no amount of dirty trick based mundane fighting within real human limits will let you deal with a guy who can just up and turn into a Dragon. Or turn you into a housecat. Or send 24 skeletons after you. 4th level spells are problematic, is what I'm saying. My own definition of (Ex) is stuff rooted in the natural world, including the metaphysics, such that all pure alchemy is (Ex), all mundane science is (Ex), elemental forging is (Ex), and generally every force that is part of how the world works utterly by default, as long as you're twisting it around by mundane means, is Extraordinary, no matter how high-end the application. As such, all Ki use becomes (Ex), including the currently-(Su) parts of Tome of Battle, thereby excusing some fairly egregious stuff going off of explained examples (like Shadow Hand teleportation being Ki-reach into the Plane of Shadows to pull yourself through)
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From here, I begin describing three possible hyper"mundane" archetypes that can work as fully (Ex), within first party conceits:
Monk: No, I'm not joking. Being perfectly honest, Monk's horribleness comes exclusively from the general problems facing Martial characters in 3.X. Bypass those problems by making Ki more general use (possibly by up-gunning Tome of Battle to stand toe to toe with spellcasting directly, then give Monk an alternate Initiation method that's less combat oriented) and Monk becomes a high-speed, rapidly-regenerating-and-self-reviving, elemental-and-multiplanar-punching monster able to just walk between the Inner Planes and considering a trip to the Outer Planes a casual business meeting. Really, though, this is Swordsage with upgunned Maneuvers that properly replace spell power with endurance on all the vital-to-high-tier fronts.
Alche-smith: Basically an Artificer, the expansion of Extraordinary alchemy to include Elemental effects means that more basic magic item effects are trivial to replicate, while more exotic properties become a matter of fluffing it via elemental interactions. Smithing deserves a mention, as pure and simple weapon design has some surprising room for exotic tricks (did you know the first "magazine" fed rifles were 1700s flintlocks?) and situational items are an entirely unusued space for utility effect as a class focus. If you can make the situational item in ten minutes, then you're not all that badly penalized for the lost wealth. It's a damn sight better than the Wizard's situational WBL use (much lower sunk costs into reserved utilities)! Funnily enough, the idea of making situational metal items on the spot has historic precedence in Bronze Age traveling smiths, who'd keep copper and a specific type of zinc ore (really powdery, excellent for adding to copper mid-forging, caused a lot of archeological headaches because nobody ever made zinc bars) to make whatever bronze mixture was needed for a tool or weapon whenever it came up.
Savage Technologist: What's a Barbarian archetype from Pathfinder doing here? Simple: It's a gish to the Alche-Smith, focused more on the use of equipment than the equipment itself. It has a role of its own because the Savage Technologist can be any sort of technology being used in a primarily martial fashion. As opposed to the primary gadgeteer of the Alche-Smith, the Savage Technologist is the soldier with the cool toys, with the ability to make them being there for mechanical completeness. They prepare utilities long ahead of time, like Wizards, but their utilities are more versatile in use. Long-term flight, short-range teleportation and Fire/Sonic damage can all be done with a "cracked" jetpack forced to do stuff it was never meant to. That magical shield can be repurposed into a source of Force damage by discharging in when you punch people and enable Slow Fall by boosting air resistance when used as a "parachute". More taking the existing dependency on magic items and going "fine, if I'm stuck using my loot, I'm using it like I'm Mac Guyver with flagrant abuse of what's there for vaguely, if at all, related things"
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2018-03-09, 11:20 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
Incidentally, the particular term "Hypermundane" seems to have been used - apart from right now by you - almost exclusively to refer to my trick-using classes (such as the veteran) - and they very much aren't "screw realism my soul slips out of my body and punches you from afar". Punching through walls of force whice are already there is fine, manipulating souls - because, well, they were already there - isn't. The likes of Find Planar Rift are a necessary evil; shadow hand isn't.
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2018-03-09, 11:47 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
Find Planar Rift is more of a handwave than accepting Shadow Hand as A Thing That Is (Ex), because the latter is an explicit first party mechanic for partially-interplanar travel (the obvious implication is that you're taking a step through the Plane of Shadows) that is under an (Ex) label with potential coherent explanations for how this can be the case. Unlike always being able to find a path through extremely rare planar anomalies in a relatively minor distance no matter the situation. As a bonus, accepting Shadow Hand over the totally-not-just-(Ex)-divination that is Find Planar Rift gives you a valid reason for wall bypassing, as well as taking the interplanar connection and running with it to take two conceits (that direct Ki use is (Ex) and can reach to other Planes) and use it to enable a wide variety of things off of a small number of "Unicorns in the Garden" instead of making every "necessary evil" a Unicorn in the Garden in its own right.
Find Planar Rift is plot fiat in the hands of the player, while Shadow Hand is something able to be built from setting rules that can be expanded upon to make more interesting stuff. Shadow Hand is (Ex), therefor we can assume that closely related metaphysical processes can be equally (Ex), like drawing in extraplanar fire through the same procedure, just targeting the Elemental Plane of Fire instead of the Plane of Shadow. Instead of one-off "I need this to make mechanical goals work", fluff should be used to make concessions and build upon them. If you need interplanar travel, come up with a fluff mechanism for it, then use that mechanism as a conceit, then expand upon that mechanism's uses to get more versatility out of the same conceits to better meet higher tiers on equal grounds.
Also, I consider the trick-using classes kinda trashy for the same reason as the Elite casters: They're nothing but lists. There's not any unified mechanical subsystem tying it together or abilities or even proper thematics beyond "Does mundane/magic thing extra/super good". They're only a single step above Mythos in having a coherent baseline, and that's because Xefas somehow thought putting needed number fixes into an option list was a good idea (no, seriously, that's actually accepted advice for making a Mythos class). They're utterly breakable by a slight oversight because of option overdose, and when you're trying to break it in specific ways, you're practically doomed to see unexpected horrors pop out. Just like what happened to Wizards (both the class and Of The Coast).
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2018-03-09, 12:05 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
You can use the same justification to allow people to cast anything up to apocalypse from the sky though. The weave exists, people have a connection to the weave, therefore people can cast spells. Yes, but that doesn't make it nonmagical: walking through magical effects that already exist is nonmagical.
Find Planar Rift is plot fiat in the hands of the player, while Shadow Hand is something able to be built from setting rules that can be expanded upon to make more interesting stuff. Shadow Hand is (Ex), therefor we can assume that closely related metaphysical processes can be equally (Ex), like drawing in extraplanar fire through the same procedure, just targeting the Elemental Plane of Fire instead of the Plane of Shadow. Instead of one-off "I need this to make mechanical goals work", fluff should be used to make concessions and build upon them. If you need interplanar travel, come up with a fluff mechanism for it, then use that mechanism as a conceit, then expand upon that mechanism's uses to get more versatility out of the same conceits to better meet higher tiers on equal grounds.
Also, I consider the trick-using classes kinda trashy for the same reason as the Elite casters: They're nothing but lists. There's not any unified mechanical subsystem tying it together
or abilities or even proper thematics beyond "Does mundane/magic thing extra/super good".
They're utterly breakable by a slight oversight because of option overdose, and when you're trying to break it in specific ways, you're practically doomed to see unexpected horrors pop out. Just like what happened to Wizards (both the class and Of The Coast).
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2018-03-09, 12:27 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
Moving this quote to the more-appropriate thread..
(Ex) is (Ex) because it's utterly non-magical. Not because it's mundane, that's why it's Extraordinary. The mechanical point is that it's not shut down by AMF, like Supernatural abilities are. And, as I quoted directly from the SRD, Supernatural abilities are still magical. And what's mundane to us isn't the limits of the mundane in a fantasy universe, where there are explicitly ways to literally walk to the afterlife and punch evil Gods to death for the souls of your ******* friends, something your own Hyper"mundanes" can do via Find Planar Rift. "Mundane" in D&D-land involves ten ton lizards with a wingspan under 100 ft. flying at 50 ft. per second. It involves Animal-categorized birds flying off with elephants as prey animals.
You're following the Guy At The Gym fallacy when the SRD itself disagrees with that view. Don't.
The real delineation is the mechanical fact of how they interact. Supernatural abilities can be shut down by AMF, (Ex) abilities can't.
...okay, I didn't think when I mentioned using the same logic to justify all spellcasting that that was your actual intent. By your logic, wizard is mundane.
Tricks are a subsystem. There's a unified set of rules for learning and using them and how many you get. Elite spells are a subsystem that just latches on nicely to another one.
I mean... yes, all classes are based around the notion of doing the thing that they do.
Blah blah blah Snowbluff Axiom blah blah blah. Yes, hypermundanes allow mundanes to have nice things: that is literally the point of them. You're also complaining that the deliberately-T1 classes can break the game. You're pretty much complaining that the T1 classes are T1.
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2018-03-09, 12:42 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
"Mundane", in the context that I'm using it, means "Of, or existent in, the real world," hence nonmagical. ("of this earthly world rather than a heavenly or spiritual one." "of or relating to this world or earth as contrasted with heaven; worldly; earthly: mundane affairs" "of, relating to, or characteristic of the world").
The mechanical point is that it's not shut down by AMF, like Supernatural abilities are. And, as I quoted directly from the SRD, Supernatural abilities are still magical. And what's mundane to us isn't the limits of the mundane in a fantasy universe,
You're following the Guy At The Gym fallacy when the SRD itself disagrees with that view. Don't.
"Mundane" in the same way that electronics are mundane to us today. It's an accepted part of what's real and expected to be possible, far from natural and it interacts with things differently from most others... Fortunately, Extraordinary is, you know, Extraordinary. Not mundane, it explicitly, in the bloody Players Handbook/DMG, is allowed to break the laws of physics.
Veteran lists Veteran Trick at every level, not in a column of "Tricks Known" (it's an ability entry that doesn't exist on the table at all for the Mundane Trickster), nor are there anything like Trick Levels or Trick Categories to divide them between subsets for abilities to attach to for improvements or alterations.
Neither is there much in the way of list overlap, as all of them mention {Class} tricks, not tricks from the {Class} list that is overlapping and centrally contained.
Not what I mean. The Maker is just an Extra Good Conjuerer. That's it. The Elite Casters in general are just a spell list extension with an ego, I can't recall any mechanics you've made for Elite Spells that actually care about anything particular to the methodologies involved. For all intents and purposes, it's just a set of spell lists with a special tag. The Berserker is just a Super Good Barbarian.
I'm complaining that they're too easy to make t1 in unintended ways on accident, like accidentally turning a BFC Wizard-lite into a CoDzilla-lite. And that you're trying to make something t1 while obeying an approximation of real world physics in a world where ten-ton lizards fly at 50 ft. per second and utterly-mundane birds (Rocs are Animal typed!) weighing multiple tons hunt and carry off elephants.
That's the thing, when people ask "How can we make a T1 mundane?" they almost universally don't mean "How can we make a T1 class that we can cheat and call mundane by using the fact that the (ex) tag is stupid and shadow hand is stupider?", they mean "How can we make a T1 class that obeys the laws of physics in the real world?" Saying "Oh, well we can stretch the definition of mundane..." is not only ignoring the spirit of the question, it's deliberately trampling on it.
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2018-03-10, 04:05 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
Did you fail to notice that I have Hyper"mundane" with mundane in quote marks every single time? And expressed by central conceit as using the clearly fantastic mundane of D&D and the fact that Ki is an (Ex) power source as the springboard for needed absurdity for t2 and t1.
But there are spells in the D&D world too...
No, I'm saying that if something isn't possible it's magaical. "Guy at the Gym" means "If the guy at the gym can't do it, no-one can do it" not "if no-one can do it, it's magical". What's your definition for magic here?
If you're trying to make mundane characters, then making them break the laws of physics and putting (ex) tags on is therefore not the way to do it!
That's literally just the way the table is laid out. You could do the same for the wizard's spells if you wanted.
There is quite a lot of list overlap.
Yes, the classes that are meant to be good at the things are good at the things! Can we move on?
Some people like playing T1 characters who are actually mundane. That, irrespective of the ridiculousness of the (ex) tag, is the entire freaking point. Yes, they are meant to be T1 while obeying real world physics in a world where wizards and dragons don't. I'm aware that wizards and dragons don't. That's why they're magical, and they do not need a tag that says they're magical to prevent them from being mundane.
That's the thing, when people ask "How can we make a T1 mundane?" they almost universally don't mean "How can we make a T1 class that we can cheat and call mundane by using the fact that the (ex) tag is stupid and shadow hand is stupider?", they mean "How can we make a T1 class that obeys the laws of physics in the real world?" Saying "Oh, well we can stretch the definition of mundane..." is not only ignoring the spirit of the question, it's deliberately trampling on it.
Also, I listed three options. You are focusing entirely on the "Monk/Swordsage" option which is all about taking what is first-party (Ex) and both grounding it (pinning down limitations) and expanding it (taking the possibilities left and going further with them), without any mention of the other two. The Alche-Smith idea is partly based on the historical precedent of traveling smiths making the exact alloys they need for specific tools or weapons on short notice, carrying easily forged ores and long-lasting ingots as materials. In a more fantastic world, where elemental forces of the Fire, Water, Earth and Air sorts exist in forms you can use for forging metal and mixing the right herbs lets you make high explosives and poisons that literally make people's faces melt off, this concept can be expanded into a high-tier form with the only conceit to fantasy, beyond taking what's doable IRL and inflating it to absurdity, being that they're using some of the fantastic materials of the world they live in.
The Roc, an Animal, breaks our reality quite severely. It is a bird weighing 8,000 lbs. with an 80 ft. wing span and a 30 ft. beak-to-tail length. It hunts elephants, so it can carry a load of some 12,000 pounds while flying, meaning a total lift of around ten tons. This is an example of what is entirely non-magical in D&D. To get a tier 1 mundane, you must stretch the definition of mundane. And I choose to stretch it by making a small number of explicit conceits that enable a wide variety of abilities to get the high tier effects, rather than having a bunch of handwave one-offs for those effects.
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2018-03-10, 08:41 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
Honestly, the only absurdity needed to be T2 is being extremely good at a bunch of stuff, which is totally within mundane possibility.
We are talking about a world where mundane physics explicitly include multi-ton birds that fly while carrying elephants. If the bloody natural and mundane wildlife flagrantly shatters how things work IRL, we shouldn't be stuck holding to realism because the entire setting doesn't hold to realism anyways! There's no room for a plausible high-tier Fighter-type character that's "mundane" past level 7, because the higher tiers rely more and more on flagrant absurdity via magic. So we need to accept a source of flagrant absurdity that can be expanded upon to permit varied effects from highly limited conceits in order to have coherent high-tier "mundane" characters.
But there's also Psionics, which are explicitly something separate from magic in-universe. Just because something isn't possible IRL, doesn't mean it has to be magic. Magic is Magic, it draws on the power the Weave orders in Faerun, it comes from the Outer Planes for Divine spellcasters, it's a specific facet of reality with its own rules. Psionics is a different facet of reality, while Incarnum and Martial Initiation are two more facets of reality, each interacting with the world at large differently and operating on different parts of in-universe physics. The thing you are failing to understand is that D&D 3.5 actually does differentiate between types of mystical forces, and some of those are (Ex). Extraordinary, beyond mundane.
I'm trying to make (Ex) characters, not so much mundane, and they're breaking our laws of physics, but operating entirely within the physics of their own universe, where people who are brutally murdered can linger as ghosts and revenge-kill their own murderer, or a person can, with the right arm flailing and babbling, make use of an exotic energy field to warp reality to create a Company of soldiers to spontaneously burst into flames.
The standard for such things is that they be in a column next to the ability listing. See Powers Known in Psionics, or Essentia and available Binds for Incarnum. The subsystem mechanics are usually placed into table columns that give a clear lookup table for how much of the thing you have at each level.
Well, sorry if I don't have a habit of memorizing extensive lists that aren't centralized at all to denote what classes have which thing. There's a reason spells have the list specification in them for most versions of D&D. If you had a unified list that had that sort of notation, I'd be able to actually identify it without digging and checking each class.
My issue is that they're classes that exist solely to be better at another class's/character's thing without actually having much mechanical changes to the class/character mechanics. The Berserker exists solely to be a better Barbarian, using the exact same themes and very little changes in fundamental mechanics.
The Maker is singularly about being a better Conjurer, using only a retargeted, not even mechanically different, version of Sorcerer spell access, without anything making them a better Conjurer outside of having better spells. Literally just better versions of the spells the Conjurer already has, not even anything new that's better, like being able to summon a possessing Fiend to make stuff based on the possession rules to use Conjuration in replacement of Transmutation/Enchantment.
The problem is that it ends up covered in handwaves because you aren't permitting any versatile conceits to make it cohesive at higher tiers.
You aren't having crazy technology access to explain flight, and D&D is a world where "Guy Who Swings Swords Good" was, for earlier editions that made the standards, explicitly stated to only be relevant in their capacity to keep the reality-warping scholar safe as he casts his spells to warp reality.
For a mundane character to get past tier 3, you have to have an extremely powerful smith with a robust and versatile mundane crafting system that makes inclusions of the fantastic reality around them for bizarre effects like interplanar travel. Mundane is e6, D&D expressly does not have a place at 7th level and up because you have to begin enacting strong handwaves over and over again because you refuse a single central conceit to fantasy to enable weirdness of the high-tier variety.
Also, I listed three options. You are focusing entirely on the "Monk/Swordsage" option
The Roc, an Animal, breaks our reality quite severely. It is a bird weighing 8,000 lbs. with an 80 ft. wing span and a 30 ft. beak-to-tail length. It hunts elephants, so it can carry a load of some 12,000 pounds while flying, meaning a total lift of around ten tons. This is an example of what is entirely non-magical in D&D.
To get a tier 1 mundane, you must stretch the definition of mundane.
And I choose to stretch it by making a small number of explicit conceits that enable a wide variety of abilities to get the high tier effects, rather than having a bunch of handwave one-offs for those effects.
That's the thing: you can say that wanting a genuinely non-magical (non-psionic non-truespeak non-su non-ex-that-breaks-the-laws-of-physics) character is something that we shouldn't want, but some of us do want that, and saying "Why not create a bunch of abilities that break the laws of physics and put an (ex) tag on them?" falls flat. Diablo II's assassin is both very fun to play and explicitly not a Magic user, but if I want to play an actual non-magical character I'll play the barbarian. I should have the option to play the barbarian and not the swordsage, the berserker and not the mindwielder, in high-powered 3.5 games.
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2018-03-10, 09:39 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
No, being t2 means having a selection of plot bypasses. The different between t2 and t1 is purely how many problems you can wave aside. If you wave aside everything that isn't combat, then you're t1 because the only thing you can't casually solve with arbitrarily little effort is combat.
Well, if that feels mundane to you, that's fine. I'll be here giving nice things to people who don't want their mundane characters flying by their own power and lobbing fireballs at everything.
Mundane still doesn't means what you think it does. And I'm using magic to mean magic, not Magic (and not MAGICTM )
I mean, that's easy. In fact, rferries already did it: take a bunch of abilities that are obviously outside of our laws of physics, then stick an (ex) tag on them.
This stuff will be sorted out in SvS, but a little patience with me (or some help, if you really want to see SvS released quickly) would be nice. It's literally just some formatting that I'll get around to.
I mean, yes. But barbarian isn't viable in T1-2 games, so it's essentially adding an entire new class to the high power level that didn't exist at that power level previously.
I mean... yeah. Elite spellcasters exist to have some viable PrCs that do something fairly interesting (I, and apparently quite a few other people, think that the Maker's spells are interesting) rather than just oh look incantatrix ooh there's a planar shepherd oops did you play a fixed-list caster by mistake woah there look it's rainbow servant.
If you meant to write "Concepts" then yes, I am permitting versatile concepts. If you really meant "Conceits", then no, I'm not making any conceits in order to make my concepts. I'm just making people good at fighting via sword+throat=death, not willpower+woo=fire.
Ask him to travel a thousand miles in a day, he can't. Full stop, literally impossible for him and characters based on him to do. Meanwhile, that Lich he'd casually dismantle the works of could do it in about ten seconds.
Well aren't we glad that we've got beyond that point.
Oh, you did mean conceit. Yeah, that's the whole point of mundane: I'm not making conceits to fantasy. That is literally the entire point of making mundane characters.
I mean, it's not like the veteran can't craft stuff and lob bombs at people, but irrespective, "Forge earth, air, fire and water into magic" doesn't ring true as a mundane character.
I make it 7456 by the actual rules, but more to the point, this is another example of something that is magical, but just not Magical.
Not... really? In fact, just "No" as I've shown over and again.
Your "Explicit conceits" include magic being a fine ability for a mundane to have so long as there's enough woo to pseudo-justify it.
That's the thing: you can say that wanting a genuinely non-magical (non-psionic non-truespeak non-su non-ex-that-breaks-the-laws-of-physics) character is something that we shouldn't want, but some of us do want that, and saying "Why not create a bunch of abilities that break the laws of physics and put an (ex) tag on them?" falls flat. Diablo II's assassin is both very fun to play and explicitly not a Magic user, but if I want to play an actual non-magical character I'll play the barbarian. I should have the option to play the barbarian and not the swordsage, the berserker and not the mindwielder, in high-powered 3.5 games.
You can't have Conan the Barbarian actually be worth having around in an all-out fight against The (Silver Age) Sorcerer Supreme without extreme amounts of asspull. You have Conan the Barbarian fighting side by side with, say, Harry Dreadson, then you have Son Wukong or one of Charlemagne's Paladins (guys who can shatter major landmark mountains on accident in a drunken stupor) being the sword-guy who fights alongside The Sorcerer Supreme.
This idea of having a high-tier mundane character out past level 7 is a result of a stubborn refusal to accept the innate fact that D&D has tiering of play for every edition, dictated by the tools the casters have. At level 6, the Sorcerer has access to reliable flight, which utterly invalidates melee enemies who can't jump at least a hundred feet in the air, or who lack flight. Because they can be shooting Magic Missiles and Fireballs down at the ground-bound target.
Mundane characters are a low level concept in D&D. The Guy At The Gym fallacy is in full effect because the refusal to permit reality breaking prevents standing on equal terms with the Wizard at high levels, because they break reality so obscenely hard that you must break reality to rise up to meet them. The only Tier One "Mundane" character concept is Iron Man (Batman fits the definition better, but is too grounded). A guy with tools to keep up with all those magical effects, a superheroic engineer able to make Weird Stuff Happen by means tangentially, but firmly, related to what is possible IRL, or at least the divergences that are firmly part of the normal for the setting.
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2018-03-10, 10:29 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
Yeah, and veterans can "Wave aside" combat by throwing steel at it, "Wave aside" damage by being good at healing, "Wave aside" social situations with insane diplomacy skills...
But you have to be able to fly under your own power and lob high damage AoEs from long range to actually keep up past level 7 in a high-tier game. Especially given the extreme proliferation of flying enemies, or enemies otherwise more mobile than the standard PC's default, at higher levels.
Then don't use the word magic. The idea of magic is both extremely closely tied to spellcasters in D&D and doesn't actually cover all weird stuff in mythology. Magic covers most of it, but does not actually apply to manipulation of the elemental components of matter to alter material properties. Alchemy is one of the major mystical things that is decidedly not magic, by actual definitions, because it's specifically not supernatural means of altering nature. It's using the edge cases of nature to alter nature.
The reason Barbarian, and even Warblade, isn't viable in t1-t2 games is because the concept of Angry Melee Dude doesn't function at that level. You have to alter the concept to enable the necessary abilities without covering the class in asspull. Although in the case of a high-tier Barbarian,
You know what I consider an interesting PRC? One that lets you use spells for entirely different roles than what they're intended. Ones that give you changes to how you decide your spell preperation. Ones that actually change what your spellcaster is doing, instead of just making them better at
When I say "versatile conceits", what I refer to is taking exceptions to our reality that permit a wide variety of things. Again, Sword Guy doesn't work as a high-tier character concept. James Bond can work, as he can be getting ever cooler gadgets to handle the high-tier utility effects. Conan the Barbarian can't, because he's largely defined quite specifically by bypassing the exotic tricks of others with cleverness (funny how a major Guile Hero is the one to inspire Barbarians as a class). Ask him to down an ancient Lich with a legion of skeletal soldiers, he'll bash through half the legion without the other half ever knowing he was there, then slip right past all the tricks the Lich set up and bash its skull in.
Ask him to travel a thousand miles in a day, he can't. Full stop, literally impossible for him and characters based on him to do. Meanwhile, that Lich he'd casually dismantle the works of could do it in about ten seconds.
The problem is that the design for the spellcasters and martials in 3.0, and then 3.5, was basically entirely unchanged from 2e, so the spellcasters still have the power literally made to invalidate Sword Guy as anything other than a meatshield. You have to alter your character concept for Sword Guy to include some conceit for flagrantly breaking the limits of our reality.
When you are in a world where solidified fire exists, taking that fire and forging it into a sword that is then permanently aflame is mundane.
...How is an extremely large bird magical? It flies with its wings, like any other bird, it's just too large for our physics to permit it.
My point with hyper"mundanes"/Extraordinary classes is that they shouldn't, and cannot logically, be constrained to what's doable in real life,
because the game falls apart without the effects that "Dude Who Swings Sword Good" can't have.
D&D isn't our world, and not everything that violates our physics has to be little-m magic. The Guy At The Gym fallacy is about gating off mundane characters from effects solely because we can't do stuff to get those effects. Here's a thread about it.
Can you actually explain how the high-tier effects, particularly teleportation, work with a mundane character? To be tier 1, or even tier 2 (tier 2 is defined by having considerable plot breakage, but not as varied as t1. They have roughly the same power, t1s just can do more things), past level 10 requires either frequent handwaving or bending what mundane is to expand what works.
What effects are consistently held by every T1-2 class without using splats that the class isn't written in? Healing hit points of others? Nope, psions can't, at least not in core+XPH. Does that mean that core+XPH psions aren't T2 because they can't do something that the T2 favoured soul and T1 cleric and T1 veteran can? No, that's silly. The veteran has high-tier effects coming out of his ears: you can't tell me that Heroic Killing Blow isn't the kind of ability which pushes you at least partway into the high tiers. How does HKB work mundanely? Well, you ram several feet of steel into someone and then they die. How does healing hands work? You perform emergency first aid on someone and then they live. How do other effects work? You put someone in a glider with a propeller and then they fly. You send someone a message via firework and then they know stuff. You climb up and down Yggdrasil and then you end up in Asgard.
It's the high level part. D&D does not function with high-power, high-level mundane characters without mountains of handwaving. You can make it work in e6, which is actually a major part of the point for e6 existing. That's just how the system works. I'm not saying you shouldn't want it, I'm saying it cannot make sense to have it.
You can't have Conan the Barbarian actually be worth having around in an all-out fight against The (Silver Age) Sorcerer Supreme without extreme amounts of asspull. You have Conan the Barbarian fighting side by side with, say, Harry Dreadson, then you have Son Wukong or one of Charlemagne's Paladins (guys who can shatter major landmark mountains on accident in a drunken stupor) being the sword-guy who fights alongside The Sorcerer Supreme.
This idea of having a high-tier mundane character out past level 7 is a result of a stubborn refusal to accept the innate fact that D&D has tiering of play for every edition, dictated by the tools the casters have. At level 6, the Sorcerer has access to reliable flight, which utterly invalidates melee enemies who can't jump at least a hundred feet in the air, or who lack flight. Because they can be shooting Magic Missiles and Fireballs down at the ground-bound target.
Mundane characters are a low level concept in D&D.
The Guy At The Gym fallacy is in full effect because the refusal to permit reality breaking prevents standing on equal terms with the Wizard at high levels, because they break reality so obscenely hard that you must break reality to rise up to meet them.
The only Tier One "Mundane" character concept is Iron Man (Batman fits the definition better, but is too grounded). A guy with tools to keep up with all those magical effects, a superheroic engineer able to make Weird Stuff Happen by means tangentially, but firmly, related to what is possible IRL, or at least the divergences that are firmly part of the normal for the setting.
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
Druids, to be clear, aren't bad: they're certainly a lot more effective than wizards or sorcerers in a lot of areas while not being quite as able to do everything to some extent (and even wizards are missing out on a lot of stuff that clerics and druids are capable of). But the entire point is that even being T1 doesn't mean that you have to be able to do everything.
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
I didn't think they were- tier 2 is still really good.
Also I know that the Tier-chart isn't the end-all and be-all of character assessment; I kind of feel like the Druid maybe just doesn't fit well with the existing ratings. Like a Druid is tier 2.5, or maybe it just needs a different scale altogether. Wizards are Tier 1, Sorcerers are Tier 2, Druids are Tier B, etc etc etc.
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2018-03-10, 05:32 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
Diplomacy skills and stealth aren't Sword Guy. The Fighter is the Knight in Shining Armor, the guy who comes in and wrecks people in the face. Not skulking around, that's explicitly the Rogue's job. And yes, this arbitrary separation of capabilities is a problem.
No, see, that's two possible solutions to a problem that you must be able to overcome. For example, wielding a bow and getting multiple attacks per round or even per second (say what you will about how powerful Lars Anderson's shots are or aren't if he's firing that fast, I still don't want to get hit by one of them) should, theoretically, be able to clear a bunch of flying creatures even if they aren't all conveniently within a fireball-able area. All you have to do is give a high-level fighter the ability to make his bow attacks a little more powerful than nerf darts, and bam, flying creatures dealt with.
If by "Alchemy" you mean "Chemistry", then sure, it's using the edge cases of nature to alter nature. Alchemy where you stuff the four elements into a bottle and make liquid lightning is magic, by the standard definition of magic which intellectually honest people use, even if it's not called "Magic" by the game.
Originally Posted by Google definition
I really assume that there was meant to be the rest of a sentence here; you might want another pass at it.
Again, you seem to be missing part of a sentence here, but I'm pretty sure that you can use elite spells for what they're not intended for, potentially also in ways that the nonelite version can't do.
The veteran has kinda evolved from "Sword guy" and honestly, Conan's way of handling the lich seems perfectly fine to me. Of course, he has to be able to do a bunch of other things than whacking liches, but we can work with that.
Surprisingly close to possible with enough good enough horses, but just because they can't do everything, doesn't mean they aren't T1. Hells, most clerics can't do that.
Or I need to alter my character concept for sword guy to make him competent at common soldier skills (and being the kind of special-forces guy that a player character pretty much is by default, why is the fighter not even good at stealth and perception?) and competent at other abilities. It's martial, and not mundane, that's really squashing the viability of character concept. You need to be less sword-man and more possible-man. Sword-man locks you into only combat, whereas possible-man not only allows you to be good at combat anyway (almost every weapon I have ever seen tested has every right to be able to one-shot a dude wearing no armour and waving his arms around chanting) but also allows you to be good at other things.
Making a "Possible-Man" leaves you with a class that has no identity, worse so than the Wizard which at least is stuck with something like a spell book. A gadgeteer class has more room, as it has a plausible center to having a wide variety of abilities, much like the Wizard's use of the handwavium incarnate that is Magic.
Not really - that's like saying "When you are in a world where magical energy exists, taking that magical energy and forging it into spells is mundane".
Welcome to the Department for Answering Your Own Question!
If you refuse to accept that Rocs are not magical, then your own Veteran is pretty strongly magical past level 10 because he has notable odds of surviving a fall at terminal velocity with no protection. Just because that's what the baseline rules have. Realism doesn't work in D&D, the basic ruleset just doesn't permit it to a reasonable degree at higher levels. A level 20 Commoner with no protection can survive a minute in a bonfire and walk away from it.
Mundanes are by definition constrained to what's doable in real life.
Martial and mundane are not the same thing.
Guy at the gym is a fallacy about assuming that things are impossible because the guy at the gym can't do them, not assuming things are impossible because they violate the laws of physics.
So the fallacy is about refusing to allow things we cannot do, because the lower levels are constrained to what we can do.
How do high-tier effects work with a mundane character? What are high-tier effects?
What effects are consistently held by every T1-2 class without using splats that the class isn't written in? Healing hit points of others? Nope, psions can't, at least not in core+XPH. Does that mean that core+XPH psions aren't T2 because they can't do something that the T2 favoured soul and T1 cleric and T1 veteran can? No, that's silly. The veteran has high-tier effects coming out of his ears: you can't tell me that Heroic Killing Blow isn't the kind of ability which pushes you at least partway into the high tiers. How does HKB work mundanely? Well, you ram several feet of steel into someone and then they die. How does healing hands work? You perform emergency first aid on someone and then they live. How do other effects work? You put someone in a glider with a propeller and then they fly. You send someone a message via firework and then they know stuff. You climb up and down Yggdrasil and then you end up in Asgard.
I don't know exactly who your examples are, but if your character cannot pull out a ranged weapon and shoot people that's actually committing the real Guy at the Gym fallacy.
And they're a low-level and high-level concept in SvS, just by grafting some high-level mundane abilities onto D&D.
Veteran.
You forgot the veteran, though he certainly also uses tools and basic chemistry to help him.Last edited by Morphic tide; 2018-03-10 at 05:34 PM.
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2018-03-10, 06:31 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
To make a T1 non-caster, the thing to do is to give the character lots of options (i.e T3) and then make all of those options really good, some of them even outside of combat. WOTC could probably make the fighter decent this way by improving/remaking combat maneuvers to be worthwhile, and then changing those to "combat styles" instead of "bonus feats", but I digress.
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2018-03-11, 07:37 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
It's one with a relatively easy solution, though.
It's actually the act of utterly avoiding a fight against a sizable variety of enemies or fighting from an unassailable position (and participating in three-axis movement), rather than dealing with them in face to face combat. Also getting through certain areas, though wall jumping and wall running are things that exists IRL as difficult edge cases.
As the D&D world has elemental forces in tangible forms as a natural, rather than supernatural, force, the literal definition of magic does not apply in this case. Also, alchemy had the idea that life force was a mundane thing. Alchemy is fantastic chemistry, as in the chemistry of fantastic worlds where stuff that are supernatural to us is just part of ordinary physics. When the classical elements are a mundane facet of your reality, forging them into a sword to make it forever be on fire can happen by mundane means. You take the already-mystical materials and reshape them into a stable sword using their properties through mundane methods.
I was going to type "Although for Barbarian, jumping a hundred feet in the air is within the archetype". However, because falling speed rules exist, sufficiently high jumps (and sufficiently fast downhill runs, if you want to nitpick at it) have time before you come back to the ground.
From my casual glance over, the vast majority of it is just upgrading a normal spell into an Elite version. Nothing like Elite Planar Binding letting you bind things into items instead of summoning them normally to use the item possession rules to replicate item creation (or Dominate Person through the creature possession rules). What I was going to type was "instead of just making them better at the exact same thing they already do".The point is that Conan does combat, stealth and magic bypass well, but doesn't to travel of any sort well. And his social capacity is rather lacking.
Long distance travel at high speed is something all the t1 classes have trivial access to. Most Clerics can't, but they're one or two feats or a single PRC level away from it. They can also fly for a full day at something like 30 miles per hour off of one spell.
Making him competent at stealth is breaking the Fighter's role as the heavily-armored knight, though I again state the arbitrary separation of roles is annoying and problematic.
You're committing the Guy At The Gym fallacy by assuming that D&D-land runs on physics even vaguely similar to ours, and thus that, because we can't do it IRL, it can't be done in D&D-land. A sufficiently high-level Wizard can, in fact, survive an artillery shell (most certainly not past 20d6, which means there's a decent chance pre-Epic) to the face. Point blank, no protections. Let alone a mere sword.
Not "The idea that if no-one can do it, no-one can". That's not a fallacy, it's a flaming tautology.
Making a "Possible-Man" leaves you with a class that has no identity, worse so than the Wizard which at least is stuck with something like a spell book. A gadgeteer class has more room, as it has a plausible center to having a wide variety of abilities, much like the Wizard's use of the handwavium incarnate that is Magic.
You're still refusing to differentiate between our world and the D&D settings. You're refusing the idea of the guy who takes the little-m magical (according to you, anything that isn't possible IRL, which is explicitly The Guy At The Gym fallacy) parts of the things he kills and uses them through mundane crafting to make Cool Stuff as a mundane option.
If you refuse to accept that Rocs are not magical, then your own Veteran is pretty strongly magical past level 10 because he has notable odds of surviving a fall at terminal velocity with no protection. Just because that's what the baseline rules have. Realism doesn't work in D&D, the basic ruleset just doesn't permit it to a reasonable degree at higher levels. A level 20 Commoner with no protection can survive a minute in a bonfire and walk away from it.
Yes, and Mundane shouldn't exist past 5th level. Because at that point you start breaking our reality from surviving stuff that's physically impossible for IRL humans, like warpicks to the unprotected face.
No, it's about rebutting the suggestion to give unrealistic powers by saying they're unrealistic. Literally from the OP to the thread I linked:
So the fallacy is about refusing to allow things we cannot do, because the lower levels are constrained to what we can do.
In the second instance, if you can't argue properly and have to throw fallacy-words at people rather than explain what you actually mean (which it turns out is "Making swords out of fire isn't magic just because it's impossible!" which I guess sounds a bit weaker than "Guy at the Gym Fallacy" even if it's closer to your actual argument) then you're already having problems.
High-tier effects are stuff like teleportation, summoning from a decently-versatile list (or a single type that's fairly versatile), generally things that bypass a variety of challenges as a single ability.
Psions actually can heal (they're arguably better at it than Clerics, with the right build, thanks to Metapsionics being able to reach higher efficiency), psionic healing exists right on the SRD.
> Body adjustment.
MFW.
Stabbing Liches doesn't accomplish much if you can't find their phylactery, as they just come back.
When the base rules of the game explicitly include becoming more able to survive being shot in the face with arrows, being mundane is on a time limit. And mundane, if you constrain it to what's actually possible IRL, doesn't get you very far because you have to exaggerate stuff farther and farther.
Who snaps reality and plausibility over his knee to keep up. Unless you consider the massive jumps/absurdly fast climbing for pseudo-flight (the mobility is needed at some point) and ability to fix physically having your eyes explode out of your skull (Some of the stuff for Blindness is goddamn terrifying]) in under a minute to be mundane. Or does Veteran not do condition-level healing?
That's the thing, the veteran doesn't need "Combat mobility" or "The ability to regrow people's eyes". It needs the ability to shoot people in the face long before they start casting. It needs the ability to win combat. Being able to win combat with energy admixtured fireball and also being able to win it with death by thorns and also being able to win it by buffing yourself up and waling on people in close combat isn't real versatility: you're still doing the win combat thing. Veterans can fundamentally do the win combat thing. It doesn't need absurd jumps (I'm sure you can build a veteran who does jump insanely high, but I just assume that no-one will actually do that in a real game so no actual veteran character will be in breach of the mundane æsthetic).
The problem is that there's a pretty hard limit to how far you can go as a "mundane" character without either throwing actual mundane limits to the scale of things out the window (even then, you're still pretty limited in variety of thing) or having extensive tool use. The desire to have a high-level mundane character makes no sense in D&D because the fundamental game system does not permit mundane characters at higher levels, as the ordinary results of leveling distance one further and further from reality. Even the Commoner is blatantly superhuman at high enough levels, being able to put every athletic record IRL to utter shame.
"This is the part of your post that doesn't quite work for me. You already acknowledged earlier in your post that our ideal mundane would be able to do the kinds of things that we think of as possible, just way better (at high levels, at least) than anybody in real life can do them. A pouncing barbarian is just another example of that stuff. And that's exactly as it should be.
What I mean by "as it should be" is that the quote you have from Psyren at the beginning of your post isn't a fallacy. He hasn't misunderstood anything about D&D, or mis-applied any logic. He's just saying, essentially, "it's nice to be able to play a character who does realistic-ish stuff but is just a whole lot better at it than normal people, and fixes for mundanes that step outside that framework leave me feeling unsatisfied, because they don't feel mundane anymore." And, of course, the natural extension of that sentiment is, "it would be nice to be able to play a character like that and not suck.""
The veteran is an attempt to keep the genuinely-mundane or at least mundane-adjacent æsthetic intact. Essentially, a lot of people who ask for mundane characters are not looking for "Like magic, but with excuses". They're not looking for flaming swords which are "Mundane" because "The laws of physics are different in this setting". They're looking for the genuine Badass Normal character, the kind who doesn't rely on superpowers, even "Justified" superpowers. They're not looking for the Guy at the Gym, they're looking for the Guy in Reality - they don't want to play a gym rat: they want to play a shaolin monk, a roman legionnaire, a knight, a samurai, a ninja, a hashishin and a military tactitian all rolled into one.
But none of that is the kind of thing that shouldn't be available at high-level, and it's not the sort of thing that can't be T1:
Originally Posted by JaronK
None of what the veteran did here really breaks the mundane æsthetic: he stabbed some stuff, found some stuff, shouted, talked, sneaked, disgused, and did generally human-y things, and yet he still took out a dragon and an army. Hey, there are people who've done pretty well for themselves trying to solo armies, it's not entirely unreasonable (the famed viking at Stamford Bridge probably took out a CR 9 encounter on his own. ) that the veteran should be able to.
Guy in Reality isn't a fallacy, it's an æsthetic. And in fact, the thread you linked is full of people saying that they want that æsthetic, and "But Dragons!" (I can use fallacy-words too, see) doesn't really cut it.
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2018-03-11, 09:54 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
Okay, let me actually point out some of the key details of JaronK's tier system, and how it means less than it looks:
1. Tier 1 and Tier 2 are differentiated by versatility, not power. A hypermundane can reach tier 2 reasonable well, lacking flagrant reality warping, but solving enough problems to avert tier 4 (which covers crippling overspecialization more than a lack of power) and having enough power to keep up when it comes time for heavy lifting situations. Veteran is easily t2, but the lack of transportation, healing, multi-location problem solving and other stuff that basically comes down to "Conjuration does nearly everything" territory means it has enough gaps for me to seriously think it does not reach t1.
2. Owing to how much breaking the game is important to defining the tiers and how much it comes down to optimization, a tier 3 character can function perfectly fine in a tier 1 party, so long as they cover something the party has less effectiveness at. For example, a Bard can work perfectly fine in a party with everyone else being t1, as long as the party otherwise lacks as strong a Diplomancer and as effective a healer, or gets a lot of usefulness from the Bard's buffing capacity. The Bard remains versatile enough to participate in most situations and has their own specialist niche within the party that the rest don't do as effectively.
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My problem is that you're saying that you've made tier 1 mundane characters and believe they should exist, which requires far too much handwaving because there can be very, very few gaps before you're booted down to t2. Sorcerer has all the same game breakers as Wizards, with a grand total of two fewer spells automatically. And those scrolls Wizards use to get more versatility wrack up cost fast enough for build changing rules and spells known addition mechanics to pick up the same slack at very similar prices. And stuff like Shadow Conjuration covers up vast chunks of the gap with extremely few spells covering massive numbers of problems.
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2018-03-11, 07:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
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2018-03-11, 08:26 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
Overall I think it starts to come down to what you personally decide counts as "magic" vs. "not magic". Personally I think that asking to play an all-powerful but magic-less character in a high-magic setting is sort of like someone saying they want to play a quadrapalegic character who makes it onto the Olympic basketball team. At some point you're going to have to do things that mimic most of what the "magic" does, and calling it "not magic" or "not spells" is just being pedantic.
Also, the ToB stuff is referred to at least once as "Blade Magic", so go figure out where that falls.Last edited by Deepbluediver; 2018-03-11 at 09:23 PM.
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2018-03-11, 09:10 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2013
Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
The big thing is that there's a lot of stuff you can get done with very limited breaks in reality. A lot of the most impressive spells are ultimately highly esoteric means of killing people. Cut out the hoo-ha and the specialness and you can ground the mechanical capacity quite well. To quote a post of mine over on Spacebattles, where I'm having a more ranty mood:
But the thing is that I'm wondering what the core functionality of all those tricks is, then figuring out how far down the fantasy ladder you can go before it shatters verisimilitude. Ultimately, the vast majority of spells center on some mode of killing people, which is Sword Guy's entire shtick. Phantasmal Killer can be replaced with Sword Guy (in this case more Sneaky Knife Guy) slipping the lightest of touches coated in untraceable poison, acting as an assassin who, as a backup, can just shank the guy and make the who and why of the killing unknown with the how abundantly clear. Meanwhile, Phatasmal Killer fails, the Wizard has to use another ability and lost that resource for the day. A t1 mundane, when it comes to the many, many subsets of killing things, will have a nearly inexhaustible supply of backup options to get some kind of kill where a kill is needed, if not the right kind. The real trick is everything that isn't killing, and getting on site to apply killing capacity.
Necromancy, Golem-building and Outsider-summoning all solve the same problems of having direct influence on things in multiple places at once, and cover one's own gaps with slightly-external capabilities that don't bog down the character choices directly by nesting them. A mundane character can do this via Leadership, or a similar ability, to grab the tricks they can't have as a mundane character which prove genuinely needed and act as external agents to perform multiple simultaneous acts. To have the utter loyalty needed to truly treat the minion(s) as extensions of the character is actually an (Su) effect, because Fanatics willing to be turbo-murdered for you (the example is "will stand in front of onrushing dragon") is apparently a blatantly magical effect sufficient to warrant being labeled Supernatural. Even though that sort of person exits in real life on occasion, sometimes in large enough quantities to form entire armies out of. It's just the result of a skill check in D&D, though, so it's well within what a mundane should have permitted (repeating that we have such minions IRL, so of course a mundane character in D&D can have some).
Teleportation, and really high-tier transportation in general, is a major gap in any mundane character. But Wizards are utterly abysmal at providing healing (even their Conjuration options for it are woefully below curve in comparison to the bloody Paladin), Druid's long distance rapid response is hardly worth mentioning and Clerics have severe issues dealing with long-ranged enemies faster than them. Artificers are so obscenely preparation dependent that the proximity to their optimization ceiling needed to be t1 in practice is too much to actually categorize them as t1. Sorcerers are farther from their ceiling when they accomplish peak Artificer activities (the build swapping mechanism is basically trivial to them). Infusions are crazy, but not good enough to keep up with Wizards at the same level of effort. Tier 1 characters usually have a somewhat large gap in their response capacity covered significantly better by much weaker characters, and I don't see why a t1 class can't have mobility as the central gap in competency. Of course, to have that be the only major gap requires some fantastic conceit to fill in the others. The Sword Guy aesthetic, or at least variations on it, can work all the way to tier two, but the limits on how many gaps you can have is very, very small, limited to one big one where you're not up to snuff.
I think the most important thing to do for a t1 Extraordinary-but-not-mystical character idea is to take the various limiting mechanisms throughout the ruleset for casters and force them to be relevant, basically making an anti-caster assassin as a significant amount of options or even baseline features. Striking at a Wizard's hands forces them to either have Still Spells prepared, or have them face significant spell failure chances from the interruption to somatic components. Sorcerers and Spirit Shamans, as spontaneous casters, can work around this, but have to burn Full Round Actions on those Stilled spells, meaning their otherwise-insurmountable mobility advantage is severely impacted. And once the Grapple hits, it's game over for the spellcaster because you can make the Concentration DCs skyrocket beyond any reliable chance of recovery. Save maybe a Druid in a particularly beefy Wildshape. Force in on Psions, too, even if they normally aren't subject to the rule. Mage Killer just stops them from getting to even start casting anything to begin with, so I don't see why utterly-shut-down-equal-level-and-seriously-screw-higher-level is unacceptable, especially as both are (Ex) effects. And the Concentration bloat is more grounded in both reality and the existing rules.
I did mention making it less overtly mystical, didn't I?
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2018-03-12, 12:54 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
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2018-03-12, 06:00 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2013
Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
I was going to engage in this thread, but thought better of it. But my main insight: We could choose to call that "countermagical." The essence of the high-level mundane is the ability to throw around greater, lesser, least, major and minor AMFs/Dispel Magic. Personal AMF "nopes" spell targeting him. AMF as a touch attack works as a Dispel Magic. AMF as a ray (arrows), as a character-centered burst, and at 20th level, Disjunction.
Not T1, but an asset to a high-level T1 party. May run into the healbot problem of being repetitive and boring in play though.Last edited by johnbragg; 2018-03-12 at 06:02 AM.
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2018-03-12, 07:01 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2011
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Re: What are the elements for a Tier 1 non-caster?
Yeah, I don't really get that. It's like...
P1: "So I've got a fighter who's so good at combat that he can effectively teleport, and make his sword burst into flames, and slay weaker characters with a glance, etc."
P2: "Oh, you mean like some kind of magic swordsmen?"
P1: "No it's not magic, he's just really really good!"
P2: "But my wizard can teleport, and shoot fireballs, and kills creatures with a glance."
P1: "Yeah but you need special words and hand gestures and other mystic mumbo-jumbo."
P2: "Don't you also need special actions and techniques to also activate your spells- sorry, I meant "manuevers"; and you need to rest and recover or reset them, and you can only use some of them at a time, just like I do?"
P1: "Ok, yeah, but it's different!"
P2: "Alright, how, then?"
P1: "Because it's NOT MAGIC!"
P2: *shakes head*
This is the kind of vibe I'm getting from this argument.