Wizards should be better than fighters.

[ebarde]

Realistically speaking fighters straight up shouldn't be in the game, cause there's no way someone with no inherent special abilities would ever kill a dragon for example. Thing is DnD is not supposed to be realistic, it operates on an anime or superhero logic where if you train enough you´re comparable to demigods. Just look the mythologies the game was based on, while many of it's heroes have some sort of explanation to their combat prowess, a lot of them could slaughter entire armies cause they were just that good.

If you wanna play DnD realistically(or at least as realistically as one can be when it comes to magic) don't bother with any martial class as they will be outclassed as soon as people start shooting fire out of their hands or rewriting reality. So why should the fighter's flavor be based around this logic, when it's logical conclusion is the class being useless?

[magicalmagicman]

Some of you made some great points. Some of you went on tangents about something else.

I'm satisfied with the responses so continue to discuss away. Some of you are close to convincing me. Don't have the time to respond properly, but great job. Well argued.

[Psyren]

I don't think the idea of "somebody might not want to have any class features" is particularly good either. If they don't want them, they can feel free to not use them. The opposite can't be said for somebody who wants something that doesn't exist.

By that logic, every class should just have every class feature then. After all, they can always choose to just not use the ones they don't want.

Less facetiously, limitations are as much a part of class identity as capabilities are. The issue with the wizard is that its limitations are too easily circumvented, especially in 3.5, something that 5e took into account when it came time to design theirs. Stacking numerous buffs on yourself is much harder, maintaining them while frontlining is much more difficult, and your slots are far more precious, among other things.

So instead of writing "you get a class bonus on such skills," you want to put a mental asterisk next to the type of roll reading "you get a circumstance bonus because of your class on such skills?"

Edit: I'm asking because I don't see why the answer to my question is "no."

Not quite - because the skill is being used in a specific way that makes sense for the fighter. Like his example of a fighter being able to tell someone is a highly-trained martial and trying to hide it - because there's no dedicated skill just for that, you'd likely use the same skill that you would use to, say, spot a trap, secret door, or hidden magical glyph - but if you just grant a flat class bonus to the skill then you're buffing all those other things too. That's why I think the circumstance bonus (or "mental asterisk" as you call it) is more reasonable, because the GM gets the freedom to decide if it applies to a given situation or not.

Interesting. Think I'll have to agree here.

Even I have said a fighter archtype is someone like Thor or Hercules, but now I'm thinking that was wrong. Even Captain America would not be a fighter. Really, you'd need to go all the way down to Hawkeye. A lot of classic heroes might fit the title of fighter: John Carter, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and up to Rambo, Sam and Dean Winchester, Jason Borne or John Whick.

Though I see the culture thing too. Plenty of people love the story of the everyman fighter type: there is nothing special about them in a physical or magical sense. They are pure human, just tough. A typical Clint Eastwood character, or Bruce Willis character.

But a lot of people also like the beyond normal human being: Hulk, Thor, Hercules, He-Man, and Neo. So it's easy to get the two confused.

In D&D the Hulk is not a fighter with class levels, he is a half troll/half giant/monster of legend.

Cap would not be a pure fighter, no; at the very least he'd have some kind of permanent alchemical bonuses going on. You made a good start with the rest I'd say.

Hawkeye is much closer to pure fighter in D&D terms - but note that he's not expected to keep up with spellcasters and gods purely on his own, he uses gadgets (aka WBL.)

[Psychoalpha]

IMO every class should interact with every pillar in a unique fashion. Not necessarily to the same level of efficacy, but have the ability to bring something unique to the table.

I'd settle for 'ability to bring something even moderately useful to the table', even. Bards and Rogues do this, as do most casters by default more or less, and if a player doesn't WANT to engage those parts of the class that's up to them, but if a player DOES want to engage they can.

(I think you would find it just as hard to replicate the Belgariad, for instance and the way magic works there.)

That's because the Belgariad is basically a Mage game where all the mages have all the spheres, just varying levels of Arete (or whatever crappy nMage used).

And I don't. If you want to be a martial deity while also being a standard human, I genuinely think you're playing the wrong game. We had a very lengthy argument about this in the roleplaying board that I won't rehash here, but suffice to say that I don't think the origins of fictional characters like Odysseus, Achilles, Hercules, Ajax et al., are "human fighters" in D&D terms; they've got something else in their corner that D&D would represent mechanically as being external to the fighter class itself, whether it's a different race, a template, Mythic power, divine rank etc.

Except that's true of virtually every mythic example of a fictional character, martial or otherwise. Meanwhile, casters don't require something external to their class to be a mythic character by high level.

If, as Zarrgon says, the highest you can aspire to be as a martial character without external input is Hawkeye while the caster can be a Doctor Strange or Iron Man type without requiring that external input, I see that as a problem with martials and not with casters. Then again, I'd happily replace Fighters with Warblades and Paladins with Crusaders any day of the week. :p

something that 5e took into account when it came time to design theirs

5E is almost everything I despise about proposed solution to the imbalances and complexity of 3.x, so I'll have to take your word for it.

[Ignimortis]

In D&D the Hulk is not a fighter with class levels, he is a half troll/half giant/monster of legend.

Nope. He's just a barbarian. You can fluff your rage however you want, including "hulking out", although you'd have to pick up that feat that makes you Large when you rage, but that's about it. Basic Hulk set literally comes online at level 1, it's just that crossover version of Hulk where he can't break all the bones in a human body with a single punch or lift a few tons. Over time, you can certainly make your "Hulk barbarian" do that, because 40+ STR actually does let you lift a few tons, and that's quite achievable in 3.5.

[OrbanSirgen]

As a quick example, if the Fighter had the ability to size up the combat prowess of people he sees, that would give him some level of in-class interaction with Social Interaction and Investigation. It is valuable information to know that, ex., the Grand Vizier is hiding the fact that they are a very deadly combatant.

I just would like to point out that page 102 of Complete Adventurer has pretty much that exact use for Sense Motive vs an opponent's Bluff for comparing their CR to your level/HD...

[Kelb_Panthera]

The Fighter does not keep up with the Wizard in combat at comparable optimization. He just does not do that. You can eventually optimize a Fighter enough that he's useful in combat, but that's only because monsters are kept largely static. At typical levels of optimization, the Fighter does not keep up with printed optimization past mid levels, while the Wizard does.

If you presume that a "fighter" is a human (or other essentially zero effect race) and that his gear is comprised mostly or entirely of +X to Y bonus items so as to maximize the role the fighter class plays in the overall fighter character, sure. That's just dumb though.

The equivalent would be if you built a wizard by picking the most powerful race you could think of (presumably including substantial HD and LA) kitting it out with the most effective gear you can cobble together and then picking your spells randomly out of a hat.

Yes, a GM -could- restrict your race choice and/or be really stingy with loot and shopping options but he could just as easily restrict spell selection or just straight-up ban wizards. Either we're talking about the system as-is or we're not. If we are then race isn't restricted and WBL is a thing and they -are- part of any given character. That race is of minimal importance and WBL is of only moderate to a wizard doesn't mean you get to just pretend they don't exist and then say fighter sucks by ignoring them.

If you want to argue that wizards ability to function in circumstances where those are restricted while class and spells aren't is a powerful feature of the class, I can't really argue against that. No one that's being honest and reasonable can. You can't argue that such circumstances should be taken as the default and then say you're just talking about the system itself though.


That lengthy preamble out of the way now, you don't have to optimize super heavily to make a fighter that can hold his own in combat at any level. Even -just- making smart gear choices goes a pretty good ways. Pick a decent race, don't overspecialize, grab some gear to let you do the things you can't with race or class; done. If you optimize -hard- then you can deal with most things that aren't just an equally optimized caster.

But combat isn't even really the problem. Yes, the Fighter needs to be easier to build effectively. That's totally true, and the class is genuinely insultingly bad as printed. But you can build a Fighter who does things in combat that matter. The problem is that the Fighter straight up does not get non-combat abilities.

That's only a problem if you A) want to do stuff out of combat beyond interact with the rest of your party (not everyone does) and B) you, for some reason, expect all aspsects of your character's ability to be contained within their class.

Seriously, even a wizard isn't -entirely- contained within his class features. The spellbook alone invalidates that idea but, even beyond that, you will -not- survive past low levels on slots alone. Scrolls, wands, pearls, and metamagic rods are all varying degrees of necessary above and beyond basic +X to Y defensive gear. A race with an int bonus rarely goes amiss as long as it comes with minimal LA and no RHD, even if that does only amount to one or two extra spell slots and a similar number of extra points on save DCs most of the time.

Most mythic figures are kinda *****. But that's not the part of them that people want to emulate in D&D. When someone wants to play a character with powers that are "like Zeus", they mean they want to have storm magic that lets them fight titans. They don't mean they want to be able to turn into animals to sexually assault women.

Emulating mythical and pop-culture figures is eminently doable. It's the insistance on doing so with class, only class, and nothing but class that mucks everything up. Thor is a fighter. He's just also a "god" that wields powerful magic arms and armor. If you want to play Thor and you pick human (no template) for your race, you've already deviated from concept.

[Psyren]

Except that's true of virtually every mythic example of a fictional character, martial or otherwise. Meanwhile, casters don't require something external to their class to be a mythic character by high level.

Magic IS external to your character. It can be interacted and interfered with - spells can be disrupted, buffs dispelled, components removed or made impractical, and magic itself can be impeded or disabled. The ability to interfere with magical solutions in exclusive ways, or to make magical solutions less practical than mundane ones, is all a system needs - and D&D has plenty.

If, as Zarrgon says, the highest you can aspire to be as a martial character without external input is Hawkeye while the caster can be a Doctor Strange or Iron Man type without requiring that external input, I see that as a problem with martials and not with casters. Then again, I'd happily replace Fighters with Warblades and Paladins with Crusaders any day of the week. :p

And yet Doctor Strange needs Iron Man and Hawkeye to solve several problems. It's not difficult.

And sure, if you want to dump regular martials in favor of initiators go nuts, but I hardly see it as being necessary.

5E is almost everything I despise about proposed solution to the imbalances and complexity of 3.x, so I'll have to take your word for it.

They solved it by admitting that it can't be solved, at least not perfectly. Casters are generally stronger, but if you try to steal the martials' spotlight you end up being nowhere near as effective as you could be otherwise. In the end, that's what I wanted.

[AntiAuthority]

There's no inherent reason for any class to be superior to another based on realism when we're talking about a fantasy game, you could easily say the opposite is true because "A real-life soldier would destroy a street magician or engineer in a real fight, so it makes sense that Fighters are stronger than Wizards."

But I have two serious two question about this OP. If Wizards are supposed to be superior to Fighters and we're comparing them to real life counterparts...

1. Who wins in a fight between a Navy SEAL and engineer?

2. Why don't we just send in street magicians and engineers onto the battlefield since real life soldiers are apparently inferior?

Also, the examples you listed of real life wizards... Those people are usually nowhere near real battlefields and aren't really capable of defending themselves in a fight against a trained soldier or fighter. They'd usually be completely at the mercy of a random thug who breaks into their house and has a gun, while a real life Fighter would have much better chances of defending themselves... If we want to be keep the real life wizard comparison, Wizards are either an NPC class or they stay faaaaaar away from real combat and sit in shops making weapons and equipment for Fighters to go out and fight wars with, and never see any real violence up close and personal except through scrying/remote viewing (basically recordings/live feeds for a rough comparison). Congratulations, Wizards are now strictly a support class that stay far away from any dangerous encounters -_-.


Thing is, yes, real life Wizards are powerful, they have money (but so do professional fighters) and can create things, while real life Fighters are good at breaking things either under their own power or with the tools the real life Wizard gives them... But 3.5E Wizards are able to create and destroy at a comparable level as the guys that specialize in the art of destroying. It's not really common for intellectuals that usually sit behind desks to also have crazy fighting abilities...


Unless I'm missing the part where Bill Gates could square up Conner McGregor and win... Vladimir Putin is the obvious outlier here, but the guy's clearly taking levels in Fighter or some martial class (look at his work outs and how the KGB were likely trained), so I wouldn't say he counts as to what a real-life Wizard should be capable of doing. EDIT: On second thought, as a later post of mine shows... Putin isn't really an outlier, so much as what a Real Life Fighter has turned into from historic examples, instead of just being a Wizard with Fighter levels.

[ebarde]

I honestly really disagree that fighters vs wizards can never be solved, tons of other systems did it. The problem is that DnD at this point probably will always suffer from sins of the father, which kinda results in the fighter still being the class that hits stuff and not much else, even though the game has evolved to a point where social encounters and exploration sometimes occupy sometimes a majority of the session time. My fix would honestly make the fighter not a hit stuff hard kinda guy, and more like a master of the art of War that is proficient both on the battlefield and also in a leadership and negotiator position.

You can say skills do this, and to some extent I guess you'd be right but like...realistically speaking your party is always gonna have a skill monkey or at least someone more skill oriented, or a spellcaster that with a single spell can make whatever problem the party is facing go away.

I also think fully accepting that the martial classes should be just as absurd as any spellcasters would go a long way

[AntiAuthority]

I honestly really disagree that fighters vs wizards can never be solved, tons of other systems did it. The problem is that DnD at this point probably will always suffer from sins of the father, which kinda results in the fighter still being the class that hits stuff and not much else, even though the game has evolved to a point where social encounters and exploration sometimes occupy sometimes a majority of the session time. My fix would honestly make the fighter not a hit stuff hard kinda guy, and more like a master of the art of War that is proficient both on the battlefield and also in a leadership and negotiator position.

You can say skills do this, and to some extent I guess you'd be right but like...realistically speaking your party is always gonna have a skill monkey or at least someone more skill oriented, or a spellcaster that with a single spell can make whatever problem the party is facing go away.

I also think fully accepting that the martial classes should be just as absurd as any spellcasters would go a long way

Agreed, let martial classes do crazy stuff like shatter boulders and intimidate enemies so much they have a mental breakdown/heart attack. Or be a competent military leader who could disarm conflict before it begins.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Agreed, let martial classes do crazy stuff like shatter boulders and intimidate enemies so much they have a mental breakdown/heart attack. Or be a competent military leader who could disarm conflict before it begins.

...

Warrior classes -can- do those things. Just not generally all at once.

I thoroughly lament the fact that all of the knowledge of optimizing non-casters has been lost to time and message board wipes when I see stuff like this. All that made it to the present is chargers.

[ebarde]

I mean, depends on edition. And to do that you always have to jump through a bunch of hoops, dip into stuff and honestly it rarely feels worth it

[AntiAuthority]

...

Warrior classes -can- do those things. Just not generally all at once.

I thoroughly lament the fact that all of the knowledge of optimizing non-casters has been lost to time and message board wipes when I see stuff like this. All that made it to the present is chargers.

I'm not too focused on optimization myself, so don't take my lack of knowledge as a sign of the usual here lol. But I was more agreeing that if one class gets to be absurd with what they can do, everyone should be able to instead of being held to realism.

[Peat]

I think most of the points about the shortcomings of real life 'wizards' in terms of producing what the OP says they produce has been pointed out but I'd just add/reiterate that D&D isn't about who can make the biggest advances in the science of killing in the next five years, its who can stay alive in a series of small deathtraps of various natures. If this were to be realistic, then pretty much nobody without serious levels of both brain and brawn would be going in there, as the brain without brawn would all be in labs and the brawn without brain would all lack the relevant skills.

As for what everyone has said about this being a game about a non-realistic world - yes. And the short version is that it is the designers' choice to have a world where the wizards have very few limitations and are about as powerful as can be compared to the general gamut of source material, where as fighters have a lot of limitations and (in terms of native class power) are pretty middle of the road compared to the general gamut of source material, not any dictates of realism. And while there's a bunch of caveats to that and how it works in the actual game due to how the game is designed, there's a reason a lot of people are annoyed by it. And truth be told, "use a different system" probably is the best answer.

[AntiAuthority]

Thinking about the premise of this thread more... It doesn't quite work. Even real life warriors tend to have some form of a formal education and can get to a high position of power. And no, I don't think anyone in the real world would qualify as a Fighter, much like I don't think anyone in the real world would qualify as a Wizard because PC classes aren't real, and any such being would be superhuman by our standards, but I'll continue to use the word for comparison's sake.

Spartans were taught science and math.

Alexander the Great was a Real Life Fighter who was a brilliant tactician, skilled warrior, had an education in science and politics and was a king with a vast empire.

Samurai received high quality educations by the standards of their time, such as learning about Confucianism and Chinese history.

Soldiers in the US military were offered benefits of having the military pay for their college education as part of why they should join the military. Even then, they're also trained mentally as well to handle the stress of war and cooperate with their comrades, which can serve them in their civilian lives.

Then there are US soldiers who go on to work as Secretary of Defense, as the majority of them were basically Real World Fighters as they mostly served in the armed forces.

Continuing from the last one, nearly half of the US Presidents were in the armed forces at some point, along with George Washington being first US President, so they'd qualify as Real Life Fighters.

If anything, Real Life Fighters tend to have brains + brawn + charisma, as they tended to have skills outside of just stabbing and shooting people that can lead them to positions of power like founding/leading a country or something along those lines.

With this in mind, it doesn't quite make sense that Fighters are portrayed as dumb as they are in the game (so few Skill Points when plenty of warriors throughout history had skills and knowledge outside of just cutting people), and they should have more power to reflect the reality that warriors in the real world can and do have intelligence and can wind up in positions of power, so they should be on a relatively equal field as Real Life Wizards.

If Wizards are the people making inventions, Fighters are the people using those inventions to deadly effect, leading armies, keeping up morale, winning wars, keeping the peace, founding countries and leading the people in times of said peace with the knowledge they gained. But once again, this is a fantasy game, there's no inherent reason for one class to be superior to another based on realism.

[DragonclawExia]

I think - and not unrelated to the thread topic - LotR is not actually low-level, it's actually pretty high level, it just doesn't have the overt magic that D&D does. (Which is why RM is a good model for it, to be honest, it's pretty easy to not worry too much about casters in RM.) The magic in play is just so fundementally unlike D&D the twain don't mesh. (I think you would find it just as hard to replicate the Belgariad, for instance and the way magic works there.)

I(f you really wanted to try, you'd probably have to just straight disallow casters aside from half-casters like rnagers and paladins (there's an arguement, Gandalf being mechanically a (flavour-stripped) paladin, not a wizard...! Be honest though, does it not actually fit reasonably well?))

But just because batman wizard paradigm doesn't exist, it doesn't mean everything is automatically E6 level.

But it is not entirely unreasonable for a player to want to have Gilgalad/Elendil/Fingolfin sort of paradigm in D&D, so going "well, you have to suck because you didn't want to play what ostensibly amounts to a shonen anime protagonist (because, let's be brutally honest, that's fundementally the sort of ludicrousness a high-level primary caster IS)" - and spoken as a person who pretty frequently does for the caster-type - is being kind of an asshat.



Now, I am among the first to say "fighter class wasn't good enough;" one of the very first major changes I made to 3.5 was to give fighters a freat every level. (As of the latest revision of 3.Aotrs and the folding in of large chunks of 3.5 thereinto, I basically gave the fighter everything the PF fighter has AND a feat at every level, plus an extra one at 1st level for good measure. Still left them with 2 skill points though.) But I also only regard class as a metagame construct, so I expect Fighter 20 to really be something used by someone that really doesn't want a lot of extra complexity and is quite happy to Roll Dice Until Enemy Dead (or for NPCs); otherwise, splashing around in stuff to get the mechanical outcome you want is encouraged. (With help from the DM and other players who know the rules better always cheerfully on hand to help you do that if you're not so good yourself.) The point being that you can have Fighter 20 and not expect to be rendered useless or vastly overshadowed. (And the furthest we ran one game was to low-Epic, which contained a Fighter 20 (pre-PF update) and Monk, though admittedly she splashed the last five levels or so into Swordsage at the time; they were both still pretty murderous in the paradigm of that campaign.)

Honestly, you might be right. Maybe there was an innate Protection from Arrows buff we didn't know from some kind of Magic we can't possibly comprehend.


Maybe Gandalf casted that without us knowing. Then Galadriel recasted it on everyone except Boromir (Because LoL, Human.)


I'm not sure what's going on as far Magic goes in the LOTR. Maybe it's all Nonverbal with no hand movements. All Mental Stuff like Psionics. Maybe there's alot of Racial Bonuses for the Dunedain and Hobbits that's far more powerful than we accounted for.

The only character that probably would have felt like a normal 3.5 D&D character was poor Level 5 Boromir. Though after reading the books, we're not sure how he was going to keep speaking after being shot with 20 arrows. We never got that far anyway to find out anyway.


Honestly though, I'm not gonna try again. It was an interesting novelty, but as is, I don't really don't think D&D and LOTR should be used as comparison in anyway or form. They're just too different.

[Aotrs Commander]

Honestly, you might be right. Maybe there was an innate Protection from Arrows buff we didn't know from some kind of Magic we can't possibly comprehend.


Maybe Gandalf casted that without us knowing. Then Galadriel recasted it on everyone except Boromir (Because LoL, Human.)


I'm not sure what's going on as far Magic goes in the LOTR. Maybe it's all Nonverbal with no hand movements. All Mental Stuff like Psionics. Maybe there's alot of Racial Bonuses for the Dunedain and Hobbits that's far more powerful than we accounted for.

The only character that probably would have felt like a normal 3.5 D&D character was poor Level 5 Boromir. Though after reading the books, we're not sure how he was going to keep speaking after being shot with 20 arrows. We never got that far anyway to find out anyway.


Honestly though, I'm not gonna try again. It was an interesting novelty, but as is, I don't really don't think D&D and LOTR should be used as comparison in anyway or form. They're just too different.

A lot of it would be best modelled not as active abilities, but passives, I think. So, very little active casting going on at all. (But probably a lot of UMD...!) Hell, there's almost an arguement you could make that HeroQuest and the earliest editions of D&D had it right; on Middle-Earth, your race IS your Class, and everyone is essentially having Monster Classes.



I think the argument for Boromir not being 5th level is that he DID tank loads of arrows, and still lived long-enough to make his final speech. That right there, is beyond human normal (or E6...!) and that was the one dude that actually DIED...!

[GloatingSwine]

And yet Doctor Strange needs Iron Man and Hawkeye to solve several problems. It's not difficult.

In noninteractive fiction, yes.

In D&D it's very hard to consistently and regularly build problems that Doctor Strange can't fix without Hawkeye.

And since for logistical reasons of all being around the table and trying to get the game done in a reasonable amount of time everyone is generally always together working on the same problems, that's what you need to do.

(This is where the comparison to noninteractive fiction falls over, because that can easily have characters working separately on problems with similar stakes* because it doesn't have the constraint of real people sitting around the same table having to do it).


* This is the problem with "put extra things in for the fighter to fight", because that doesn't affect the overall stakes of the encounter, even if the wizard is really squishy if those things got next to them the fighter is still just playing bodyguard to the person on whom the actual stakes rest.

[NigelWalmsley]

I don't think the arrow thing proves much. Boromir gets hit by a bunch of arrows, but he's wearing armor at the time. "You get hit, but it does only superficial damage" is a reasonable model of "attack misses by less than armor bonus" in D&D, so it seems possible that only a much smaller number of the arrows actually did any damage to him.I think the number of hits he takes is exaggerated in the movie vs what the text actually says, but I'm not sure. Also, he survives long enough to say some dying words, but I don't think there's any real indication he could recover. That's a twist on the death and dying rules, but I don't think it really makes him higher level.

[Blackhawk748]

When it comes to Mythical figures who aren't gods, yet who do super badass stuff everyone seems to have forgotten Beowulf (who kills a troll barehanded and kills a dragon when he's old as dirt.) And pretty much everyone in Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Many of them could be called Fighters or Fighter/Barbarians and yet, you couldn't make them with that cuz the Fighter has so few abilities that let them do things like, say... Lead an army

[Aotrs Commander]

I don't think the arrow thing proves much. Boromir gets hit by a bunch of arrows, but he's wearing armor at the time. "You get hit, but it does only superficial damage" is a reasonable model of "attack misses by less than armor bonus" in D&D, so it seems possible that only a much smaller number of the arrows actually did any damage to him.I think the number of hits he takes is exaggerated in the movie vs what the text actually says, but I'm not sure. Also, he survives long enough to say some dying words, but I don't think there's any real indication he could recover. That's a twist on the death and dying rules, but I don't think it really makes him higher level.

(Pierced by) "many," is what the text says, in the two places I could find. "Many" indicates more than the three the movie used (as you don't usually say "many" when you been "three," - and they defintiely don't on the speech-patterns of LotR), so the movie was, if anything, under-playing the book.

You could make an arguement (especially given the aforementioned speech-patterns) that "many" is likely less than "dozens" or "scores" so it might be fair to say it likely would have seemed like less than twelve to the hobbits (they would not, of course, have been counting), but that's still far more than enough to kill a regular human outright.

[AntiAuthority]

When it comes to Mythical figures who aren't gods, yet who do super badass stuff everyone seems to have forgotten Beowulf (who kills a troll barehanded and kills a dragon when he's old as dirt.) And pretty much everyone in Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Many of them could be called Fighters or Fighter/Barbarians and yet, you couldn't make them with that cuz the Fighter has so few abilities that let them do things like, say... Lead an army

Adding onto this, there's also Thjalfi from Norse Mythology, who managed to do pretty well in a footrace against the personification of thought itself... He's not really a warrior, just some farmer's son Thor and Loki brought with them on their journey.

And Diomedes, who injured a demi-god and made Aphrodite (said demi-god's mother) come to rescue him then (possibly with the help of Athena, not too sure if she actually helped his damage or was just there for moral support, as I remember one version being Athena did it so that Diomedes could see the invisible gods that were his enemies) scared off Ares by injuring him.

And finally, there's Ferdia from Celtic Mythology who wasn't a god, but had nigh impenetrable, thorny skin. He was trained alongside Cu Chulainn, becoming his foster brother, and... Was apparently the only man capable of having a 1 on 1 duel with the incredibly strong, fast, agile, precise, blessed demi-god for several hours, and overtook him at one point. If I'm remembering correctly, it seems Cu Chulainn only won because of his magic spear...

I don't think divine lineage matters too much, you don't see 100% mortal, mythological wizards (or even full gods) being able to pull off the same stuff you see high level magic users pull off. A Level 20 Wizard is not a mythological Greek God. A Wizard can replicate Zeus' feats (shape shifting, baleful polymorph) at Level 10, a Level 20 Wizard would be OP by the standards of Greek Gods if given enough prep time. Odin would probably get laughed at for sacrificing his eye when a Wizard could just craft magic items (or cast Wish + Permanency) to boost their Wisdom... Or the Wizard would just try to possess the guardian of the well because, "I'm not gouging my eye out for this stupidity." Or just jumped into another body (with two eyes) after receiving the knowledge. You don't see stories about completely mortal Level 20 Wizards in mythology, because they would overshadow the gods.

It stands to reason that a mortal Level 10 Fighter, at the same scale, would be capable of replicating Hercules' feats (splitting a continent, lifting the sky that a Titan was holding up, etc.), while a Level 20 Fighter... I'm not aware there's any examples of Level 20 Fighters in mythology that are completely mortal... Or divine for that matter.

Characters from (real world) mythologies don't seem to have the same level of power as a quadratic, Level 20 character (martial or magic) in 3.5E. They'd be too OP.

[Psyren]

In D&D it's very hard to consistently and regularly build problems that Doctor Strange can't fix without Hawkeye.

It's not hard at all:

1) The GM has full freedom to design encounters, they don't have to be perfectly symmetrical or easy for the party. Think of the Avengers fighting in New York - Iron Man, Thor AND the incumbent Sorcerer Supreme were present, yet they still wouldn't have won that fight without Hawkeye and Black Widow for a variety of reasons - sheer numbers, tougher enemies that needed teamwork, enemy caster leader that needed to be countered/neutralized, specialized tasks that needed to happen during the fight, and so on.

2) Magic itself has asymmetrical counters, meaning you can make things harder for casters without making them impossible for martials. The most obvious of these is antimagic, but I personally view this as the least creative. Long before you get there, you have things like dispels, counterspells, silence, negating components, or even environmental concerns like the need to be quiet making verbal components impractical (few casters silence every spell unless they're psychic/psionic for example.)

* This is the problem with "put extra things in for the fighter to fight", because that doesn't affect the overall stakes of the encounter, even if the wizard is really squishy if those things got next to them the fighter is still just playing bodyguard to the person on whom the actual stakes rest.

Part of your job as the GM is to rotate the spotlight so that everyone has a chance to shine in various ways. That includes deciding where the "stakes rest." Maybe in one encounter, it is appropriate that the wizard has the stakes, and they're chanting a ritual while the other party members run interference for them. Maybe in another, the rogue is fiddling with complicated ancient machinery, and everyone else has to protect them. In yet another, everyone has something important to do for the group to succeed. Designing encounters is your job - be creative.

[Crichton]

Many of them could be called Fighters or Fighter/Barbarians and yet, you couldn't make them with that cuz the Fighter has so few abilities that let them do things like, say... Lead an army

A) D&D isn't (primarily) a game about leading armies, and nothing in the Fighter class entry would lead you to believe that it's a class intended to have that capability, so why are you expecting it to? But even so, a Fighter absolutely can do that, just like any other class can. That's what the Leadership feat is all about.

B) Does what you're describing sound even a little similar to this little snippet? "Sometimes it is not enough to be a conquering warrior, a champion of all that’s right, an experienced sellsword, or an elite foot soldier. Sometimes the circumstances require a solid commander of soldiers and situations."

If so, you're not looking for a Fighter. You're looking for a Marshall, which is where that bit of text comes from.



I think in all the back and forth in this thread, people forget that the Fighter isn't the only martial class out there. There are a lot of them, with widely varied capabilities, so why all the emphasis on the idea that the Fighter should be able to do all the things?

I admit the Fighter is a poorly implemented class that could be done a whole lot better, but frankly, it does what it advertises: it Fights. It could (and should) be built to do that better than it is, but it's not like it ever makes the claim that it can do more than that.



I'm not gonna dive in to the wider discussion of this thread though, because frankly I find it bit silly to argue over, but I will offer this:

The game offers a huge variety of differing classes, which have a massively broad spectrum of power and versatility levels.

That's on purpose, so that we as players and DMs can play a wide variety of campaign types.

To claim that the system is broken or dysfunctional because one of the most powerful and most versatile and most (literally) fantastic classes is more powerful and versatile than one of the most mundane and realistic classes is pretty silly. Of course it's more powerful and versatile! Of course a magic user can do things a soldier can't do.

If that's not something you want in your campaign, the game system offers you plenty of tools to make that happen.
It's your campaign, you get to set the parameters.

But others want to play campaigns where the characters reach reality-bending levels of power and scoff at the laws of physics, or whatever. The game system offers the tools to do that, too.

To claim that one is 'over' powered or the other is 'under' powered is a purely subjective thing; a judgment call; a decision for the power level you want your campaign to be at.

It's not a perfect game system -we can all agree on that- but it is one that intentionally offers a wide range of options, and claiming that some of those options are 'too good' on an absolute, objective level is to claim that the game should only ever allow the playstyle that you yourself deem 'right' or 'worthy' and I don't have time for that kind of 'my way or the highway' style of gatekeeping.



TL;DR version - It's your campaign, you get to set the parameters for your campaign. But it's our (the entire community) game system, so you (any one individual) don't get to decide what's 'over' or 'under' powered for everyone else's campaign or playstyle

[AntiAuthority]

To claim that the system is broken or dysfunctional because one of the most powerful and most versatile and most (literally) fantastic classes is more powerful and versatile than one of the most mundane and realistic classes is pretty silly. Of course it's more powerful and versatile! Of course a magic user can do things a soldier can't do.

There's not really much logic for a class to be superior to another because magic. It's pretty subjective and depends on the tastes of the designers, not an objective truth. This a fantasy, what makes sense to your sense of fantasy is not the same as what makes sense to me.

Magic doesn't exist in the real world (until proven otherwise, then I'll retract this statement), so there's no reason to say something that doesn't exist is inherently superior to something that doesn't exist. If ,"Fighters are mundane because they're mundane in the real world", I could easily apply the same logic to, "Wizards should only be able to perform elaborate illusions through smoke and mirrors because that's all they can do in the real world."

Or do you believe street magicians are inherently superior to and more powerful than trained soldiers because one of them knows magic?

One of them is getting upgraded with fantastic abilities (streets magicians), the other (soldiers) isn't because people don't want it to and is arguably nerfed compared to a real life warrior in ways (not many skills, can only attack 4 times in 6 seconds with a weapon). There's no reason to restrict a fantasy class of a fantasy race to the realms of reality beyond a personal preference, and that's ok. That's your opinion. My opinion is that martial characters should be fantastic as well, breaking free from the restraints of reality like every other class and race in the game. Humans reading spell books won't let anyone in the real world become/surpass Zeus (like a Wizard can), neither will a human perfecting the art of battle let anyone in the real world become/surpass Thor (like a properly scaled Fighter would)... But these aren't set in our worlds, so there's no real reason to to use realism as a defense for why X should be better than Y.

[sandmote]

By that logic, every class should just have every class feature then. After all, they can always choose to just not use the ones they don't want.

Less facetiously, limitations are as much a part of class identity as capabilities are. The issue with the wizard is that its limitations are too easily circumvented, especially in 3.5, something that 5e took into account when it came time to design theirs. Stacking numerous buffs on yourself is much harder, maintaining them while frontlining is much more difficult, and your slots are far more precious, among other things.

I think there's an ambiguous "any" in Rynjin's comment. I'm pretty sure it was "any," meaning "at least some," rather than "any," meaning "whichever ones you want." You know, considering the preceding sentence:

The only point is that things can (and should have been) done to give the Fighter some kind of utility (and for that matter identity) besides "guy who fights", which fits every other "guy who fights" in the game just as well.

It wouldn't really give the fighter much of an identity for the fighter to just steal someone else's.

Not quite - because the skill is being used in a specific way that makes sense for the fighter. Like his example of a fighter being able to tell someone is a highly-trained martial and trying to hide it - because there's no dedicated skill just for that, you'd likely use the same skill that you would use to, say, spot a trap, secret door, or hidden magical glyph - but if you just grant a flat class bonus to the skill then you're buffing all those other things too. That's why I think the circumstance bonus (or "mental asterisk" as you call it) is more reasonable, because the GM gets the freedom to decide if it applies to a given situation or not.

First, the "mental asterisk," is in reference to how you keep track of where the bonus applies. That's why the bonus itself is mentioned in the text of the "mental asterisk:"

"you get a circumstance bonus because of your class on such skills?"

Although I suppose "on such skills," might be better written an "on these types of rolls." Wasn't a distinction between the two cases as I described them though, so its not like this changes what I'm asking about.

Still, you're saying a specific class should get a quantified bonus on something, and I don't see how it stops being homebrew if it's the DM going "here's the written rule for how that works," instead of "know you get a general bonus on the subject." As adjunct rule if the player thinks of it it mid-game? Sure; an adjunct ruling, and likely based on character background rather than class. But as an understood bonus innate to a particular class beforehand? I don't see how it avoids being homebrew.

I'd also like to note "X bonus to Y skill only for Z use already exists. The SRD has this for half the skill synergy table, i addition to case like the following two examples:

+2 racial bonus on Appraise checks that are related to stone or metal items.

At 1st level, a ranger may select a type of creature from among those given on Table: Ranger Favored Enemies. The ranger gains a +2 bonus on Bluff, Listen, Sense Motive, Spot, and Survival checks when using these skills against creatures of this type.

So it isn't as if a bonus must apply to all uses of a given skill. It would just be "At Nth level, a fighter gains a +X bonus on Gather Information, Listen, and Spot checks made to determine a creature's CR/fighting ability/ect." Unless you make it due to the player's backstory, in which case it's not tied to a being a fighter.

Magic IS external to your character. It can be interacted and interfered with - spells can be disrupted, buffs dispelled, components removed or made impractical, and magic itself can be impeded or disabled. The ability to interfere with magical solutions in exclusive ways, or to make magical solutions less practical than mundane ones, is all a system needs - and D&D has plenty.

Here, I'll add emphasis:

Except that's true of virtually every mythic example of a fictional character, martial or otherwise. Meanwhile, casters don't require something external to their class to be a mythic character by high level.

Sure, class features can be considered external to your character. Although if you add a homebrew rule preventing fighters from being interfered with in the equivalent manner for their class, that sounds like a useful change to me.

2) Magic itself has asymmetrical counters, meaning you can make things harder for casters without making them impossible for martials. The most obvious of these is antimagic, but I personally view this as the least creative. Long before you get there, you have things like dispels, counterspells, silence, negating components, or even environmental concerns like the need to be quiet making verbal components impractical (few casters silence every spell unless they're psychic/psionic for example.)

Hypothetically... sure. In practice the relative amount of effort needed to do this for casters is significantly higher then the effort needed to temporarily knock the martials out of the spotlight, which basically amounts to "don't give the caster extra puzzles they need to deal with."

---

Independent of Psyren, a lot of the argument I see for why the wizard isn't already miles ahead of the fighter assume the fighter gets opportunities to pick racial or other non-class options the wizard doesn't. If you're comparing the classes to each other, I'm pretty sure it falls into the Oberoni fallacy to say there isn't an issue because the wizard can be restricted from choosing an equally strong race.

For the argument wizards should be miles ahead of the fighter... first, experts aren't wizards and the real world experts aren't people you'd prefer to have adventuring instead of the soldiers. This is independent of the fact magicalmagicman's listed examples weren't done by a single person. The closest we've ever come are likely the early scientists/pilosphers/ect (many of whom were also credited with the work their later students and a bunch of people passed down the information from their students) or the designers of early assembly lines (and were still coming up with a way to have a bunch of people do something else more effectively, instead of even having to do it themselves). You still don't want them in a battle role, cause their "wizarding," doesn't help very much. And you'd probably gave a good argument for most of them being an artificer (ex: Archimedes), a fighter (ex: Aristocles), or something else (ex: expert) than a wizard.

I think this bit should be looked at a bit more:

If you live in america, chances are you have consumed something like Iron Man, Die Hard, or Captain America. In each of these, there's an undercurrent of One Man who can do what it takes, how One Man! can solve the problem, stop corruption, or make a suit of power armor. But ultimately, reality doesn't let one man do any of these things. And while this fantasy is fun, it's also directly counter to making a game for multiple people to play. condensing the power of (1) up to 140 years of cumulative experience (2) Multiple billions of dollars of infrastructure and classes, (3) Up to 5 years of practice and experimentation, and (4) The experience of multiple soldiers into one individual pushes the edge of disbelief, to the point where, after removing the One Man! trope, it breaks like a thousand pieces of glass.

Honestly, this is mostly rambling at this point, as it's far too late to have this argument, but my point is that, as Americans in the west, we tend to idolize the idea of the individual who can do everything, when that's what really stretches the lines of credulity. Wizards can hand-wave away such pesky things as infastructure, society, wealth, and time through magic, while martials have no such tool to handle these problems without breaking suspensions of disbelief.

Unlike a dragon's breath, a martial is denied being magical because they aren't magic. IRL, no one breaths a 60' cone of acid, but we still don't treat such thing as magic in the setting. But for someone reason, wizards are "supposed to be," better than fighters because the wizards get to be both magical and magic, but some people can't suspend their disbelief to allow fighters to be either and won't let the people who can do this have a character that's useful by default.

Conveniently while writing, someone wrote out the opposing argument:

To claim that the system is broken or dysfunctional because one of the most powerful and most versatile and most (literally) fantastic classes is more powerful and versatile than one of the most mundane and realistic classes is pretty silly. Of course it's more powerful and versatile! Of course a magic user can do things a soldier can't do.

The feeling is "the fighter is mundane," or even "martials in general are mundane." You can make some assumptions; you pretty much need to be able to respond without asking "and what does that mean," for every word said. But "martials are restricted to the mundane," doesn't work at higher levels. Martials can do magical things anyway (look at how fast they can swing a weapon and what attacks they can survive) so saying "that, that is magic, so you can't do it," is necessarily cherry picking.

Note: "that, that is magic," and "that, that isn't something a character of X class could do" aren't equivalent. Cleaving through 6 people with one greatsword in as many seconds is something the fighter can do, but isn't mundane. Martial classes need some form of utility, non-damage features to keep up, because they aren't purely mundane either.

[digiman619]

I'd personally argue that while some abilities should be clearly magic, they shouldn't be spells. Incantations and rituals make more sense for big stuff like raising people from the dead, rather than just a 5th level spell slot or whatever, as there are some dumb 5th level spells that are apparently just as powerful as raising the dead.

[Psyren]

I think there's an ambiguous "any" in Rynjin's comment. I'm pretty sure it was "any," meaning "at least some," rather than "any," meaning "whichever ones you want." You know, considering the preceding sentence:

It wouldn't really give the fighter much of an identity for the fighter to just steal someone else's.

Opposed skill checks are a game mechanic, not an "identity." They're a system every class can use, and one that isn't unique to any of them.

First, the "mental asterisk," is in reference to how you keep track of where the bonus applies. That's why the bonus itself is mentioned in the text of the "mental asterisk:"

Although I suppose "on such skills," might be better written an "on these types of rolls." Wasn't a distinction between the two cases as I described them though, so its not like this changes what I'm asking about.

Still, you're saying a specific class should get a quantified bonus on something, and I don't see how it stops being homebrew if it's the DM going "here's the written rule for how that works," instead of "know you get a general bonus on the subject." As adjunct rule if the player thinks of it it mid-game? Sure; an adjunct ruling, and likely based on character background rather than class. But as an understood bonus innate to a particular class beforehand? I don't see how it avoids being homebrew.

I'd also like to note "X bonus to Y skill only for Z use already exists. The SRD has this for half the skill synergy table, i addition to case like the following two examples:



So it isn't as if a bonus must apply to all uses of a given skill. It would just be "At Nth level, a fighter gains a +X bonus on Gather Information, Listen, and Spot checks made to determine a creature's CR/fighting ability/ect." Unless you make it due to the player's backstory, in which case it's not tied to a being a fighter.

Your bold portion is exactly the reason why I'm against specifically codifying it - because I don't want to enumerate beforehand every possible knowledge or perceptive situation where a fighter's training should give them an edge, as well as how big or small that edge should be. Even you didn't, because you resorted to "etc" rather than continue exhaustively listing such situations. However many there are, they're nuanced enough that an on-the-fly judgement is perfectly fine; one thing 5e did right is making players and GMs much more comfortable with making and accepting that sort of judgement for efficiency of play. My only real issue with 5e in this regard is that they combined it with bounded accuracy, which I heavily dislike.

Sure, class features can be considered external to your character. Although if you add a homebrew rule preventing fighters from being interfered with in the equivalent manner for their class, that sounds like a useful change to me.

I'm not saying class features are external, rather being able to use them in every situation is. You can have all the spell slots in the world, and they won't do jack if you're not on a plane with the Magic trait - but you still have the "spellcasting" class feature.

Hypothetically... sure. In practice the relative amount of effort needed to do this for casters is significantly higher then the effort needed to temporarily knock the martials out of the spotlight, which basically amounts to "don't give the caster extra puzzles they need to deal with."

I disagree with that. Any enemy with half a brain is going to know that the magic users are the more dangerous threat in the party and will plan for that - whether it's having casters of their own who can counter and dispel things, archers who can try to harry them from afar, or even just using sneaky tactics so they can catch the caster unprepared. And there are plenty of monsters who simply rely on their own innate defenses to handle magical threats too, like SR - defenses that a canny caster can certainly overcome, but every spell they prepare to do that is one they're not preparing for some other challenge. Make that tradeoff matter and you'll find that the martial classes' stock value increases.

Independent of Psyren, a lot of the argument I see for why the wizard isn't already miles ahead of the fighter assume the fighter gets opportunities to pick racial or other non-class options the wizard doesn't. If you're comparing the classes to each other, I'm pretty sure it falls into the Oberoni fallacy to say there isn't an issue because the wizard can be restricted from choosing an equally strong race.

For the argument wizards should be miles ahead of the fighter... first, experts aren't wizards and the real world experts aren't people you'd prefer to have adventuring instead of the soldiers. This is independent of the fact magicalmagicman's listed examples weren't done by a single person. The closest we've ever come are likely the early scientists/pilosphers/ect (many of whom were also credited with the work their later students and a bunch of people passed down the information from their students) or the designers of early assembly lines (and were still coming up with a way to have a bunch of people do something else more effectively, instead of even having to do it themselves). You still don't want them in a battle role, cause their "wizarding," doesn't help very much. And you'd probably gave a good argument for most of them being an artificer (ex: Archimedes), a fighter (ex: Aristocles), or something else (ex: expert) than a wizard.

1) Oberoni Fallacy doesn't apply here, because I'm not trying to argue that the system is balanced. Rather, I'm saying it IS unbalanced in the casters' favor, but that is a far less important consideration than verisimilitude - therefore I don't have a problem with it (and judging by 5e's success and 4e's failure, neither do most people.)

2) I'm not the one arguing for "miles ahead" - just "ahead." I think 5e, and PF with all its supplemental material, hit the sweet spot (or at least came damn close) - casters are ahead of martials in several respects, but martials can still contribute to the group's overall success without being warped into pseudo-casters themselves.

[Segev]

But you don't have to replace anything - assuming level-appropriate challenges and wealth, the fighter might not be on par with the wizard but they should be on par with whatever the party is fighting (at least in PF). If he's not, then either the encounter level or the wealth/itemization is to blame, both of which represent a failure to apply the rules of the game properly. And beating the monster is what matters, this isn't a PvP game.

But if a level-appropriate challenge for a fighter is much harder for that fighter than a level-appropriate challenge for a wizard is for the wizard, we have a problem.

If the party as a whole is facing a "level-appropriate challenge," but the wizard is carrying the team, there's a problem. We're not playing BMX Bandit and Angel Summoner.

While Achilles and Hercules and Thor are brought up as examples, there are other examples of characters who are superhuman, but started as human, and got superhuman through nothing but grit and training. Sanji and Zoro from One Piece can do things on par with those Greek heroes, and they've got nothing but technique and pure training. Same with Krillin, in fact. You can argue that "chi is magic," and that's fine, but I'm arguing that higher-level characters should be unlocking such things if they're what's needed to make them actually be high-level.

Heck, Batman and Robin can put their fists and boots into concrete walls and leave divots when kicking over superhumans. And both can take hits from superhumans, bounce their backs off of the wall or floor, and kip back up to fight again (after perhaps groaning about how much that hurt). And they're "normal humans."

But arguing that a fighter basically has to live by the Guy and the Gym's rules because them's the breaks if you don't start with a level adjustment race is...flawed. And the claim that "they're keeping up with level-appropriate challenges" is questionable. Are they, really, or are they a little kid pressing buttons on a controller with no batteries, sitting next to Papa Wizard who has a real controller who's actually winning the fights?

I actually argue that, in practice, you're right, but that's because the overpowered nature of wizards is overblown by theorycraft, and that they don't come off as that brokenly omnicapable in all things all the time when brought to a table and played.

I find this "Level A should = Level A" claim to be far too simplistic to be useful in practice. There are many more factors besides level that determine a character's power, even within the same class; compare a wizard 20 using normal optimization to a wizard 20 who prepares nothing but Read Magic in every slot - same level and even same class, yet drastically different power and problem-solving ability. The cited XP progression rubric certainly thinks they're equals, but you and I know better; blindly adhering to that as evidence of intended parity is beyond flawed.

You're also utterly missing my point.

If they're not equals, then they shouldn't have the same XP requirements. That's my point. There are lots of metrics, yes, but you should be able to find a point where you can say, "Within this band of levels, a fighter is roughly as powerful as a wizard within this band of levels." If those bands of levels don't overlap significantly between the two classes, you should seriously be adjusting the XP requirements to make it so that at least the statements could be made about bands of XP.