Can we build the math from the ground up? (And does Vancian help or hurt that?)

[johnbragg]

Well, sure, but that goes the other way too. If the Wizard is Merlin, the Barbarian can't be Thor. "Low level characters worse than high level characters" is not really a super meaningful argument about what the system as a whole should be doing.

But in 3X (this is mostly a 3X discussion, it's not as big an issue in any other edition), level is NOT an accurate measure of character power. A 5th level, 10th level, 15th level barbarian is Conan or Hercules or Rambo or Captain America. The only major difference is "+ Numbers." A 5th level, 10th level, 15th level wizard are different genres of fiction.

In 3X, a character who takes 20 levels of full BAB classes (excluding Tome of Battle) never gets beyond Conan or Aragorn.

[Kyutaru]

Early editions kinda sorta did this.

Early editions also had different XP brackets for characters. Fighters needed 1000 xp to hit lvl 2 but Wizards needed 2500 xp. So even D&D recognized that wizards were better than fighters and gave fighters more levels faster to try and compensate.

[Lagtime]

Now, try running that 1-20 game, only Wizards only get their initial 6 spells. They can upcast them with new slots, but they don't get any higher level spells or even any newer low level spells. You'll find that no one wants to play a Wizard. That's because getting new spells is the CORE FUNCTIONALITY of the Wizard class-they have other features, but a Wizard without their appropriate spells is a bad PC.

Odd you say getting new spells is the CORE FUNCTIONALITY of the Wizard class. I sure don't agree. I don't play a wizard sitting on the edge of my seat and saying "so what new spells do I get now"? And does not the wizard want new spells the same way every player of every character wants new abilities? Except the wizard is special and must get free access to all spells?

Same question as above: for which chassis of Wizard, which distribution of contribution, and which paradigm of spells do you recommend this?

Well, again, like D&D before 3E wizards and other spellcasters were limited as to what they could do. Wizards had a couple basic attack spells, a couple defensive ones, and a couple utility....but nothing like the 3E plus lists.

My experiences matches @JNAProductions here. Don't get me wrong - I love 2e, and i think it's the best (ie, the most fun) RPG. But random treasure and random spells guarantees imbalance. And I think that's great. But I don't see how it could lead to better balance. Except that it makes *combining* powers much harder, meaning you almost never get Force Cage plus Cloudkill, or (if they were items) Leap Attack plus Shock Trooper.

Well, my point is more if you limit the things that have a potential for imbalance, you will have less of or no balance problems. To make everything somehow perfectly balanced is impossible: someone will always disagree. But if you limit things, then they don't come up so much in the game. This is the idea also used by rituals: powerful spells that a character can't just 'dodge a troll and cast'.

If a wizard does not have the spells scry and teleport.....then the game effectively does not have to worry about the wizard using the "scry and die" exploit.

@Lagtime, care to explain your reasoning? Because I'd love if ideas from my favorite game were demonstrably beneficial for game balance.

It makes the DM the Balance Gatekeeper. Starting with 3E, with magic mostly, the core idea was "if it's printed in a book the players can automatically use it". Of course, it's enough to say that no system will ever be perfectly balanced. Even if you did try and make your Core rules somewhat balanced...you have no idea what might be published next.

In just about every D&D game ever, every DM has banned something. They just say "X is not in my game, and most every player is just fine with that. So....why not just make that part of the official rules?

Hmmm… this is a huge topic all by itself.

If "skill" can get you up to, say, a +20, and "buffs" can give you up to +5, then the best at, say, stealth, is the character with +20 skill who can give themselves a +5 buff. It means everyone is skilled, and everyone is a mage, or else they're suboptimal.

It also brings up "stacking" issues - he who can stack the most buffs, wins. Which, if the system limits how many of those buffs you can learn or maintain, favors numbers, the same way that action economy does. Is that a good thing?

My idea is magic can only enhance what is already there. If you have no ranks in a skill or no ability, then the magic can only add a very low bonus....like maybe max +5: it's low, but better then zero. If you do have ranks or the ability, then magic can increase it, based on how much you have, like maybe say double what you have. This way keeps all skilled ability characters relevant: they can't be replaced by magic. Magic can enhance what is there, but not create new skill ability from nothing.

You'd tweak the numbers so pure martial skills and abilities were always better then magic. Magic can help a low skilled or low ability character: but they will never be a match for a pure natural character (except for extremes like a 1st level character next to a 20th level character).

2E was also from an age where splatbooks were barely a thing. You had the PHB, maybe a couple of setting books, maybe somebody had a Dragon magazine subscription. But probably not.

2E had plenty of books....2E started the splat book spam. Not only did 2E have tons of soft cover splat books, but most adventure modules had stuff in them too. And Dragon was plenty popular too.

I ... don't really understand the logic of going through the effort of identifying the "broken", troublesome spells, and then....keeping them, in a box labeled "Do not open this box."

If you're putting in the work to identify the troublesome spells, ban and / or replace them.

Well, first off it's doubtful you could fix them "just right". And the trick is you, or a single writer or editor or such, might "think" they are fixed....but they won't be. D&D alone is full of such non fixes...right next to the ton of stuff that is beyond broken and they over look.

You do understand that people gain levels by going on adventures, right? You don't level up for free to begin with.

I'm introducing a new concept here.

Early editions kinda sorta did this.

Even better...in them old editions only fighters and fighter types got more then one attack.

[JNAProductions]

Lagtime, feel free to play a 15th level Wizard knowing only six 1st-Level spells. Let me know how that goes.

[johnbragg]

Odd you say getting new spells is the CORE FUNCTIONALITY of the Wizard class. I sure don't agree. I don't play a wizard sitting on the edge of my seat and saying "so what new spells do I get now"? And does not the wizard want new spells the same way every player of every character wants new abilities? Except the wizard is special and must get free access to all spells?

The academic wizard lusting after new spells, always looking for new magical knowledge, greedily hoarding scraps of arcane information is pretty deeply embedded in the lore of fantasy spellcasters.

Doesn't mean he has to get *free* access, but if he doesn't get *access*, that's a game-design and/or a table problem.

Spells, in the form of spellbooks and scrolls, are a physical object and treasure-type in the game. The spell-grubbing wizard searching for more and more arcane knowledge is a core part of the fiction. Fighters accumulating different exotic weapons is not.

It may not be THE core functionality of the class, but if the wizard isn't getting new spells over his career (whether by purchase, by finding them as treasure, getting them at level-up), it's a pretty big departure from most of D&D history.

[Kyutaru]

Well, again, like D&D before 3E wizards and other spellcasters were limited as to what they could do. Wizards had a couple basic attack spells, a couple defensive ones, and a couple utility....but nothing like the 3E plus lists.

I agree in the literal sense but not in functionality. Wizards before 3E effectively had MORE spell potential because a lot of them weren't mechanical but roleplay oriented. The ones that did have mechanics also had compound effects and much less limited restrictions. Polymorph Any Object could do basically anything and players thought of ways to annihilate cities with it. Polymorph itself was quite powerful and Stoneskin blocked virtually anything completely. Stuff back then was few in number but very open in interpretation and versatile. Wizards had other limitations like fewer spell slots, fail chance on scroll learning, and inability to use armor.

[Segev]

If the Fighter they want to play is Thor who can shoot lightning and fly and tear apart castles, or Iron Man who can solve problems with technobabble, then they can play in a high-fantasy campaign along with Loki.

If the Fighter they want to play is Conan, then they're not going to have much to do in a campaign built around the Loki power level. You have to be quite careful deciding what abilities Merlin can and cannot have if he's going to team up with King ARthur as anything close to a partnership.

EDIT: There is definitely room on the shelf for both games. But not at the same table at the same time.

I would argue that you could rephrase the above thusly:

If the Fighter they want to play is level 15+ and can shoot lightning and fly and tear apart castles, or can solve problems with technobabble about his high-magic items, then they can play in a high-fantasy campaign along with Loki.

If the Fighter they want to play is level 7 or lower, then they're not going to have much to do in a campaign built around the Loki power level. You have to be quite careful deciding what level the party wizard can and cannot be if he's going to team up with a level 9 fighter as anything close to a partnership.

EDIT: There is definitely room on the shelf for both levels of PCs. But not at the same table at the same time.

[johnbragg]

I would argue that you could rephrase the above thusly:

I agree with what you sketched out there. It has been famously argued that Gandalf and Aragorn were 5th level. Conan could adventure with those guys and it's a perfectly playable game.

The break is in 3rd edition, where Loki and Dr Strange are reasonably playable concepts at 15th level, while the fighter is still Conan, not Thor. Before 3rd edition, the mid-teens weren't part of the core game--you're supposed to be off running a castle at those levels, your demihumans have hit their level caps, etc. In 5th edition, it works passably well. And I assume that 4th edition, balance-obsessed as it was and mathematically plotted, was the same game at 5th, 15th and 25th level that it was intended to be.

(Side note: Even in Avengers: Endgame, the Hulk is essentially written out of the story, and Thor has a breakdown because solving the Thanos problem beatstick-style was pointless).

[Kyutaru]

And I assume that 4th edition, balance-obsessed as it was and mathematically plotted, was the same game at 5th, 15th and 25th level that it was intended to be.

That edition also highlights the subject matter of this topic and why perfectly balanced games can still be considered awful. Building the math from the ground up can be done. But it shouldn't be done.

[NigelWalmsley]

Odd you say getting new spells is the CORE FUNCTIONALITY of the Wizard class.

You see a whole lot of functionality in the Wizard class that isn't "new spells"? If the Wizard doesn't get new spells on level-up, he gets actual nothing on level-up. The fact that the Wizard can get new spells as treasure is good. It allows for organic character growth, and can make particular campaigns more memorable. But player agency is also important, and Wizards can and should be able to select spells as they level up, just as other characters should be able to select the abilities they get.

Well, again, like D&D before 3E wizards and other spellcasters were limited as to what they could do.

People who have played 3e or read 3e books will note that this is also true in 3e.

If a wizard does not have the spells scry and teleport.....then the game effectively does not have to worry about the wizard using the "scry and die" exploit.

No, it just has to worry about the "Clairvoyance and Dimension Door" exploit, or whatever the next best thing turns out to be. And also you don't get scrying or teleportation, which are both iconic things for Wizards to do with their time. The reason Scry and Die is a problem is because of tactical and strategic incentives. It turns out that the optimal strategy for beating the big bad is very often "pop all your buffs and bum rush him". But if you look at the source material, that's not really the case. In Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship isn't trying to get directly into Sauron's stronghold and stab him in the face, they're trying to sneak around behind his back and undermine his power. If you want to fix Scry and Die, you should be looking at the underlying incentives, not just saying "no Teleport for you".

It makes the DM the Balance Gatekeeper.

Hey, I've got an idea: what if we had professional "Balance Gatekeepers" who designed the game so that it was balanced? We could call them, I don't know, "game designers" or something, and we could pay them to produce balanced rules so that we didn't have to fix things on the fly. I know it sounds like a crazy idea, but I think it could work.

You'd tweak the numbers so pure martial skills and abilities were always better then magic.

Why? There are plenty of characters in the source material who use magic to fight more effectively than normal warriors. Notably: every single superhero ever. What are we getting for declaring that none of those guys are allowed to exist?

I'm introducing a new concept here.

No, you aren't. "What if people went on adventures to get new abilities" is not a new concept, it's the exact way that D&D has always worked in every edition.

The break is in 3rd edition, where Loki and Dr Strange are reasonably playable concepts at 15th level, while the fighter is still Conan, not Thor.

That's not really a fair way of describing it. 3e didn't break things, it just presented a part of the game that has before (and, to be frank, since) been largely excluded. It's not like 2e, 4e, or 5e has a functional system for The Avengers either, they just don't even try.

That edition also highlights the subject matter of this topic and why perfectly balanced games can still be considered awful. Building the math from the ground up can be done. But it shouldn't be done.

The math in 4e isn't actually very good though. For all the "the math just works" buzzphrases, the game is not actually balanced, and is miserable to play in ways that are completely unrelated to class balance. Using 4e as an argument against balancing things falls apart when you realize that it's just a badly constructed game.

[johnbragg]

That's not really a fair way of describing it. 3e didn't break things, it just presented a part of the game that has before (and, to be frank, since) been largely excluded. It's not like 2e, 4e, or 5e has a functional system for The Avengers either, they just don't even try.

True. It's only 3E where it became a vaguely real possibility.

The math in 4e isn't actually very good though. For all the "the math just works" buzzphrases, the game is not actually balanced, and is miserable to play in ways that are completely unrelated to class balance. Using 4e as an argument against balancing things falls apart when you realize that it's just a badly constructed game.

OK, I'm just trying to be fair (retroactively) to a game I never wanted to play. You saying that 4E isn't balanced is like hearing that a tree isn't wooden enough.

But I think 4E taught that "balance" is not the only consideration in game design. You have to pay some attention to balance, or you have 3E-type problems. You have to, er, balance it against other consideration. But it's not the only thing.

[JNAProductions]

OK, I'm just trying to be fair (retroactively) to a game I never wanted to play. You saying that 4E isn't balanced is like hearing that a tree isn't wooden enough.

But I think 3E and 4E taught that "balance" is not the only consideration in game design. You have to, er, balance it against other consideration.

As someone with a moderate amount of 4E experience, it's not perfectly balanced. They got some of the numbers wrong-really only noticeable at high levels, and they did make fixes. Not the best fixes, but they're there.

Also, I like 4E. It's fun. I wouldn't want it to be the base for a hypothetical 6E, but I would enjoy it as a base for a tag-along D&D Tactics game.

[Cluedrew]

So suppose - say, for 6th edition - people wanted to build the game from the ground up, build the math from the ground up to make all D&D classes "balanced", by which I mean "able to contribute, and occasionally shine", and no more "linear Fighter, quadratic Wizard".

Sure, you can do that - many systems already have - but you have to be willing to make real changes and that really seems to be the issue. Marketing the system has time and time again won out over making a good system.

And really its not the math that is the problem, its the paradigms involved. Mechanically speaking there are three power sources: strikes, skills and spells. OK I messed with the name of attack bonus, save values and HP to get some alliteration going. Maybe fighter, rogue and wizard would be better labels as a representative of the three groups. As a fighter grows they get better at killing and harder to kill, but you could already kill things and could avoid getting killed so that isn't anything new. As a rogue your skill modifiers go up, which allow you to pass more and more skill checks... and depending what those skill checks are it can effect things. As a wizard though you get new rules which open up new options, including some that hard negate the standard abilities on others or give you them.

You cannot fix this problem with math. They exist on different levels and one kind of overrides the other. If you fix that then we can we can start working out the details.

[NigelWalmsley]

You saying that 4E isn't balanced is like hearing that a tree isn't wooden enough.

It is pretty balanced. The broader/more important point is that 4e has a bunch of problems that are totally unrelated to class balance (e.g. Skill Challenges don't work, Solos are a miserable grind, resource management is unsatisfying), so saying "this is what you get when you try to balance the game" is a less plausible explanation of it's failure than "this is what you get when you design a game that is bad".

Also, I like 4E. It's fun. I wouldn't want it to be the base for a hypothetical 6E, but I would enjoy it as a base for a tag-along D&D Tactics game.

I actually think there are a lot of things 6e should borrow from 4e. 4e's notions of monster categories, tiers, and skill challenges are all things that, if better executed, would work very well for D&D. The issue is that they're all just kinda bad.

The notion of a game with a single unified resource management mechanic is also interesting, though I think it's a very bad fit for D&D specifically. Also, 4e's incredibly limited multiclassing really gimped what you could do with a system like that. It's something where Open Multiclassing could actually work.

And really its not the math that is the problem, its the paradigms involved. Mechanically speaking there are three power sources: strikes, skills and spells. OK I messed with the name of attack bonus, save values and HP to get some alliteration going. Maybe fighter, rogue and wizard would be better labels as a representative of the three groups. As a fighter grows they get better at killing and harder to kill, but you could already kill things and could avoid getting killed so that isn't anything new. As a rogue your skill modifiers go up, which allow you to pass more and more skill checks... and depending what those skill checks are it can effect things. As a wizard though you get new rules which open up new options, including some that hard negate the standard abilities on others or give you them.

But doesn't the way you're describing those things reveal that your argument is fundamentally flawed? "BAB, Saves, HP" isn't a "pick two" situation (let alone "pick one"), everyone gets all those things. So if the problem is that the Wizard is getting cool new abilities and unlocking new options, isn't the solution to just let everyone do that? There are something like a dozen reasonably-balance casting classes in 3e, and it would be trivial to write more. It would even be fairly easy to write classes that got new abilities or worked in different ways at roughly that level.

[johnbragg]

Sure, you can do that - many systems already have - but you have to be willing to make real changes and that really seems to be the issue.

There are sacred cows that have to be either slaughtered, neutered or somehow dealt with. "Charm Person", for example, is a sacred cow as a first level spell. But almost nobody is willing to DM a table where a first level spell does what "Charm Person" says on the tin. Etc etc.

And really its not the math that is the problem, its the paradigms involved. Mechanically speaking there are three power sources: strikes, skills and spells. OK I messed with the name of attack bonus, save values and HP to get some alliteration going. Maybe fighter, rogue and wizard would be better labels as a representative of the three groups. As a fighter grows they get better at killing and harder to kill, but you could already kill things and could avoid getting killed so that isn't anything new. As a rogue your skill modifiers go up, which allow you to pass more and more skill checks... and depending what those skill checks are it can effect things. As a wizard though you get new rules which open up new options, including some that hard negate the standard abilities on others or give you them.

You cannot fix this problem with math. They exist on different levels and one kind of overrides the other. If you fix that then we can we can start working out the details.

But you have to pay attention to the math, and you can use the math to identify problem spots, and make and use design guidelines. "Caster-strike << Unbuffed Martial strike << Buffed Martial strike", and "Skill-negating-spell << Unbuffed skillmonkey << Buffed skillmonkey."

You know, I typed that out, and it applies to what I'm doing. But it only applies to low(ish) levels, where hit point damage and skill DCs are relevant considerations. In high level 3X, those are at best speed bumps. For that game, you probably need to openly ban "pure-martials", and mandate that PCs above level X acquire abilities beyond Conan-level abilities through templates or prestige classes or divine rank or whatever mechanics to advance Conan to Hercules/the Hulk to Thor.

[Lagtime]

[QUOTE=johnbragg;24652988It may not be THE core functionality of the class, but if the wizard isn't getting new spells over his career (whether by purchase, by finding them as treasure, getting them at level-up), it's a pretty big departure from most of D&D history.[/QUOTE]

It's not a departure, it's going back to the roots. In the D&D's before 3E a wizard had to find any and all spells they wanted in game play. There was no rule, like in 3E and after where a wizard gets free spells every level.

I agree in the literal sense but not in functionality.

Well, you aslo had the DM is God effect. A DM could just say something did not work, or at least did not work as the player intended. It's a concept that 5E has brought back to the game.

You see a whole lot of functionality in the Wizard class that isn't "new spells"? If the Wizard doesn't get new spells on level-up, he gets actual nothing on level-up. The fact that the Wizard can get new spells as treasure is good. It allows for organic character growth, and can make particular campaigns more memorable. But player agency is also important, and Wizards can and should be able to select spells as they level up, just as other characters should be able to select the abilities they get.

Though everyone agress that spells are far, far, far, far more powerful then most skills, feats or abilities any other class might get, right? That does mean they should be treated differently. And, like I suggested, there could be a small list of common simple spells for a wizard to pick from.

No, it just has to worry about the "Clairvoyance and Dimension Door" exploit,

Well, you just go down the esploit list and check them off one by one until they are all gone.

Hey, I've got an idea: what if we had professional "Balance Gatekeepers" who designed the game so that it was balanced? We could call them, I don't know, "game designers" or something, and we could pay them to produce balanced rules so that we didn't have to fix things on the fly. I know it sounds like a crazy idea, but I think it could work.

I doubt it could ever work. The game designers just don't get it. Just look at exhibit A of every single edition of D&D starting with 3E. They have had four chances to fix it...and just look at what they did.

Why? There are plenty of characters in the source material who use magic to fight more effectively than normal warriors. Notably: every single superhero ever. What are we getting for declaring that none of those guys are allowed to exist?

Well, you do know D&D is not a superhero game, right? And plenty of super heroes use no "magic", like for example Captain America and Batman and Black Widow and Hawkeye.

And anyway I was saying that magic could only greatly enhance those that already had the skills and abilities. So Dr. Strange could cast a spell on Captain America to make him a better fighter, but if Dr Strange cast the same spell on himself he would only be able to get to the level of like "a normal agent mook of SHIELD. And a fighter/mage type (can't think of a good superhero to fit here) could only get to about the Nomad/Free Spirit/Jack Flagg level.

No, you aren't. "What if people went on adventures to get new abilities" is not a new concept, it's the exact way that D&D has always worked in every edition.

My suggestion was that the character needs to personally do a specific task, not just go on an adventure.

There are sacred cows that have to be either slaughtered, neutered or somehow dealt with. "Charm Person", for example, is a sacred cow as a first level spell. But almost nobody is willing to DM a table where a first level spell does what "Charm Person" says on the tin. Etc etc.

This is not true. Just ask anyone of us that still plays the older style of D&D.

[NigelWalmsley]

Though everyone agress that spells are far, far, far, far more powerful then most skills, feats or abilities any other class might get, right?

Yes. Which is why other classes should get better abilities. The problem is not that the Wizard is too good. The Wizard is, with a few exceptions, in line with what Wizards in the source material can do. Someone like Quick Ben, Doctor Strange, Anasûrimbor Kellhus, Arachne Tellwyrn, or The Hierophant would not be at all out of place in a high level D&D party. Conversely, martial classes consistently fail to measure up to what powerful martial characters can do. You can't build Thor as a Barbarian. You can't build Kaladin as a Fighter. You can't can't build Kylar Stern as a Rogue. There is a mismatch here, and if you look at the kinds of stories D&D is trying to emulate, it is very clearly with the martials.

Well, you just go down the esploit list and check them off one by one until they are all gone.

So we're going to remove every single effect in the game that allows you to consistently attack with the advantage of surprise? I feel like maybe your proposal has some issues.

Well, you do know D&D is not a superhero game, right? And plenty of super heroes use no "magic", like for example Captain America and Batman and Black Widow and Hawkeye.

If you think Thor, Doctor Strange, and Wonder Woman aren't source material for D&D (especially now), I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding what people are expecting from the fantasy genre.

Captain America has a magic artifact shield, super-strength, and gets lightning powers in Endgame. Batman is, particularly in incarnations where he teams up with Superman, basically a near-Epic Artificer. Black Widow and Hawkeye are basically sidekicks for most of the movies they're in, and at no point are they treated as being as important as the likes of Thor, Iron Man, and Doctor Strange to the heroes'

[johnbragg]

It's not a departure, it's going back to the roots. In the D&D's before 3E a wizard had to find any and all spells they wanted in game play. There was no rule, like in 3E and after where a wizard gets free spells every level.

OK, I misunderstood you. We understood you as suggesting a wizard who didn't learn new spells at all (whether the spells were obtained as treasure, purchased, exchanged with other wizards or earned by researching and gained at level up).

And anyway I was saying that magic could only greatly enhance those that already had the skills and abilities. So Dr. Strange could cast a spell on Captain America to make him a better fighter, but if Dr Strange cast the same spell on himself he would only be able to get to the level of like "a normal agent mook of SHIELD. And a fighter/mage type (can't think of a good superhero to fit here) could only get to about the Nomad/Free Spirit/Jack Flagg level.

I think the best counterparts to fighter-mages in superhero comics are Iron Man and Batman.

This (No one would play with Charm Person as a first level spell) is not true. Just ask anyone of us that still plays the older style of D&D.

You're right. It works okay in older editions because magic-users have a lot fewer spells, so one Charm Person a day is what a first-level gets.

[Kyutaru]

Captain America has a magic artifact shield, super-strength, and gets lightning powers in Endgame. Batman is, particularly in incarnations where he teams up with Superman, basically a near-Epic Artificer. Black Widow and Hawkeye are basically sidekicks for most of the movies they're in, and at no point are they treated as being as important as the likes of Thor, Iron Man, and Doctor Strange to the heroes'

Perhaps the DIRECTOR didn't treat them as important in your eyes but the characters valued each other's skills very much and mourned losses equally. A thief and a logistics agent aren't going to be on the frontline hammering the bad guys as effectively as the giant mutant and the literal god but that's because the latter has combat as their role focus. D&D is not a combat game and if you treat anyone who isn't explicitly geared for smashing dragons as bad then you're missing the point. This was much more apparent in AD&D when the thief and cleric made due playing second fiddle during battle as the supports they were while fighters and mages wreaked havoc. Not everyone can be the quarterback but he's not the most OP position on the team either, not without his linebackers and running back. The game may make it seem like he's the most important position due to the rules but he almost never scores a single point. Dependence on the team and allies to carry the workload should show people that it's not a one man operation and that other roles are not bad simply because they aren't center stage.

A balanced game isn't one where every class can smash Cthulhu in the same number of rounds. Some classes can't touch him at all and have to rely on their friends to do that part of the adventure while they cheer from the sidelines or perform "more important" tasks while he's distracted.

I think the best counterparts to fighter-mages in superhero comics are Iron Man and Batman.

Yep, and also good examples of why martials/nonmagicals/Muggles are heavily gear dependent. Casters progress by acquiring arcane knowledge while warriors progress by acquiring equipment and training. The whole point of saying "XXX can't wear armor or use fancy weapons" is to highlight the fact that there is someone else who can.

[NigelWalmsley]

Perhaps the DIRECTOR didn't treat them as important in your eyes but the characters valued each other's skills very much and mourned losses equally.

They also mourned Coulson. Are you going to suggest that "mid-level employee of an intelligence agency" is a character concept we should consider to be balanced with "god of thunder"?

D&D is not a combat game and if you treat anyone who isn't explicitly geared for smashing dragons as bad then you're missing the point.

Oh, definitely. That's why one of the three core rulebooks is entirely dedicated to non-combat encounters. Wait, no, it's the opposite of that and has been for the entire time that D&D has existed. My bad.

[Kyutaru]

Oh, definitely. That's why one of the three core rulebooks is entirely dedicated to non-combat encounters. Wait, no, it's the opposite of that and has been for the entire time that D&D has existed. My bad.

*looks at the DMG* How can you be right on your first point and then recant it so easily?

D&D has been about the roleplaying for so long that I still remember when most spellcaster spells had no numbers in them at all, just a bunch of words describing what silly effects they had on the terrain or some NPC miles away from them. There's an entire branch of magic called Divination that until recently had near no combat value at all. The DM exists to direct the story and the combat, not to adjudicate as referee of the rolling.

I mean hell we have skill checks despite most of them being utterly useless in any sort of combat situation. There is literally no point to half of what's on a character sheet without the roleplay focus of the game. This is NOT Chainmail or a tactics miniature game. The NPCs didn't even have tactics until recently when 4th and 5th tried to tell people how they are supposed to fight.

In fact, in AD&D, which we seem to be talking about a lot today, three of the stats had no mechanical value for the majority of the classes! Only Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution actually mattered! So why have three useless stats in a "combat" game before we even had Charisma-based casters?

[NigelWalmsley]

*looks at the DMG* How can you be right on your first point and then recant it so easily?

By not being right? Like, the DMG is factually not a book full of purely non-combat stuff. Certainly not mechanical non-combat stuff in the way that the MM is mechanical combat stuff.

I mean hell we have skill checks despite most of them being utterly useless in any sort of combat situation.

Look at the rules for skill checks. Now look at the rules for combat. Now tell me with a straight face that those are things the designers intended as equally important parts of the game.

This is NOT Chainmail or a tactics miniature game.

Except that's literally the exact thing it is. That's where D&D came from. D&D is, at it's core, a bunch of other stuff stapled onto a combat engine. That other stuff can be important, but the combat engine is still the core of what's going on. It's like how action movies having character development doesn't make them not action movies. The fact that John Wick finds emotional catharsis and adopts a new dog doesn't magically make John Wick a drama about getting over personal loss and finding meaning in the world.

So why have three useless stats in a "combat" game before we even had Charisma-based casters?

Wait, you're telling me that AD&D was a confusing and poorly designed mess that had things that don't make sense? And this from the game that brought us such tightly-designed mechanics as "variable level XP", "racial level limits", and "THAC0"!

The fact that AD&D doesn't make sense unless you make some assumption or other isn't an argument that those assumptions are foundational to it, it is an acknowledgement that the game doesn't make sense. If 3e fans demanded their game get half the leeway AD&D grognards expect as a matter of course, they'd get laughed out of every single argument about D&D ever.

[Kyutaru]

By not being right? Like, the DMG is factually not a book full of purely non-combat stuff. Certainly not mechanical non-combat stuff in the way that the MM is mechanical combat stuff.

Considering the PHB is where the combat rules are, I disagree and find the DMGs to be much more fluff-oriented. Especially the 2nd edition one which was primarily about world-building, not from a mechanical perspective but from a fluff one.

Look at the rules for skill checks. Now look at the rules for combat. Now tell me with a straight face that those are things the designers intended as equally important parts of the game.

The designers intended equality. You're assuming you CAN quantify skill checks better without being exclusionary or forcing DMs to accept check results that hurt them. Much of the game is abstracted because roleplaying itself is an abstract artform. When writing rules related to it one cannot be overly strict or exacting, which FYI was tried before in past editions and subsequently abandoned, because allowing the DMs more freedom works better in practice. Combat, on the other hand, can easily have exact formulas laid down for the purpose of STREAMLINING the process and keeping it from bogging down the campaign for literal hours with the back and forth rolling. Let math solve what math can solve and let liberal arts handle what liberal arts handles best.

Except that's literally the exact thing it is. That's where D&D came from. D&D is, at it's core, a bunch of other stuff stapled onto a combat engine. That other stuff can be important, but the combat engine is still the core of what's going on. It's like how action movies having character development doesn't make them not action movies. The fact that John Wick finds emotional catharsis and adopts a new dog doesn't magically make John Wick a drama about getting over personal loss and finding meaning in the world.

I know D&D's origins but what you're claiming is like saying 2nd edition is the same as 3rd edition. Origins mean nothing to a new edition where everything is up for change. Old D&D was based off wargames but had roleplay as its focus, it was not just another wargame, there was neither sense, nor need, nor even the exact and in-depth rule system that those wargames had. Players didn't have to ask the DM's permission in Chainmail, they already knew all the things they were permitted to do. There were charts of them all with exact costs and penalties. Some of it carried over to D&D but was replaced instead with the theatrics and mental imagery with players solving encounters through clever thoughts rather than hard rules. As we moved away from the wargame origins, those detailed charts began to fade away and be replaced with -- nothing. Not a damn thing, now it's purely up to how the DM wants to handle it. Not because the game is becoming less but becomes it's removing the limitations on the imagination of the game's designer, the real designer, the one you actually play with for whom rules are merely guidelines and suggestions than actual law.

Wait, you're telling me that AD&D was a confusing and poorly designed mess that had things that don't make sense? And this from the game that brought us such tightly-designed mechanics as "variable level XP", "racial level limits", and "THAC0"!

No, quite the opposite, and people who found subtraction harder than addition were the only ones who complained about THAC0. It's literally the same thing and actually slightly better from a geek perspective because it eliminates one of the steps in quickly determining odds. If you want to do that today you still have to resort to subtraction after the fact, which is just redundant when it could have built into the system like THAC0 was. But I totally get why it was changed for normal people who didn't understand how math and probability worked.

The fact that AD&D doesn't make sense unless you make some assumption or other isn't an argument that those assumptions are foundational to it, it is an acknowledgement that the game doesn't make sense. If 3e fans demanded their game get half the leeway AD&D grognards expect as a matter of course, they'd get laughed out of every single argument about D&D ever.

No, the fact that AD&D makes perfect sense to me is a sign that I'm aware of its roleplaying and abstraction values that are a far cry from 3E's hard-coded nonsense and blatant RAW abuse. 3rd edition was the joke of an edition where two equally leveled characters of the same class could be radically different tiers of power purely because of some non-class features they exploited. You think different classes have different XP progression was laughable while I found 3e's spiked chains denying melee entry to even worse. D&D broke as a game when it gave in to 3e's munchkins and finally realized the mistake that was stat stacking and feat spam when they moved on to the newer editions.

[Segev]

I agree with what you sketched out there. It has been famously argued that Gandalf and Aragorn were 5th level. Conan could adventure with those guys and it's a perfectly playable game.

The break is in 3rd edition, where Loki and Dr Strange are reasonably playable concepts at 15th level, while the fighter is still Conan, not Thor. Before 3rd edition, the mid-teens weren't part of the core game--you're supposed to be off running a castle at those levels, your demihumans have hit their level caps, etc. In 5th edition, it works passably well. And I assume that 4th edition, balance-obsessed as it was and mathematically plotted, was the same game at 5th, 15th and 25th level that it was intended to be.

We agree on the part I wanted to make clear, good. Because my position is that of those who say, “Buff fighters; don’t nerf mages.”

That’s not to say I oppose all possible nerfs to mages, but I feel focusing on that as a solution is both a doomed endeavor and diminishing the game.

People will gripe that buffing fighters denies them the game where they play Conan. I disagree. Conan is 5th to 10th level (as a ballpark). Buffing fighters so they keep up with mages can leave Conan perfectly playable at the levels he operates. If you’re playing at levels 11+, though, Conan isn’t a viable concept for the same reason that he isn’t a viable character in Dragonball Z.

In other words, the understanding of what levels represent certain concepts cleans up objections to buffing fighters to keep up with mages by pointing out that you’re not denying the lower-“magic” concepts by buffing fighters, but the players need to know at what level they want to play to have the characters they want.

[Kyutaru]

People will gripe that buffing fighters denies them the game where they play Conan. I disagree. Conan is 5th to 10th level (as a ballpark). Buffing fighters so they keep up with mages can leave Conan perfectly playable at the levels he operates. If you’re playing at levels 11+, though, Conan isn’t a viable concept for the same reason that he isn’t a viable character in Dragonball Z.

Hear, hear!

Seriously, it's alarming that I keep seeing the same sorts of character tropes used as the staples for warriors when many of them relate to low level campaigns. I mean no one in Conan was dimension dooring into battle with three abjurations up to disable the horde of orcs with a single sleep spell. Why is there this huge gulf between Aragorn/Conan and some like Goku? There are clearly examples in between in folklore and mythology that D&D has apparently forgotten about because the only thing fighters deserve is slightly better stabbing DPS.

[Ignimortis]

The martials pretty much need an Author twisting the plot in their favor though.

Because we've played 3X, and we've seen what rogues with +30 to skills can do compared to what casters can do with a few 1st-3rd level spell slots?

The issue is precisely in not having high-level skill applications that would be worthwhile. As in, a bad equivalent of Fly is a DC120 (IIRC) Balance check. One of those is a 3rd level spell. The other requires hyper-optimization towards to be achievable even at level 20. That is because the game didn't think there should be a reasonable point where skills should be able to replicate magic at-will. That is a good design consideration. Personally, I think it's perfectly fine for skills to get at-will "magic" effects a few levels later. At-will Flight or something closely resembling it (jumps 50 feet high, standing on air until your next turn, etc.) at level 9 shouldn't break the game, you've had Flight for 4 levels now and for 2 levels it hasn't been in the highest spell slot anyway.

I dunno, it worked out okay for 5th edition. It may not be your game, but it supplanted 4th Edition and Pathfinder as the market-dominant least-common-denominator game.

Lowest common denominator is right. 5e is precisely what people expect from D&D through pop-culture osmosis. But the problem is, 5e didn't even try to solve the martial-caster imbalance outside of combat. They're just better balanced in combat, as in, casters don't steal the spotlight as hard as they did in 3e.

Part of the issue is, you can't have a game where Conan and Dr Manhattan are anything like equally contributing party members. If you're playing a game with Conan, you have to limit the casters accordingly. If you're playing Elric Stormbringer or Kaladin or Thor, your big beatstick guys need to do magic.

I will assume that you meant "they need to be explicitly supernatural and non-mundane", because "do magic" to me sounds like "spellcasting". Spellcasting shouldn't be the only way to fantastic powers.

Sure. Which is why there should be more effects in the game. The problem isn't that the Wizard has a variety of abilities and can do something useful in most situations. I mean, seriously, read those words and tell me with a straight face that you're describing a problem. It's that the Fighter doesn't and can't. If you look at the source material, there are plenty of characters who are competitive with mid or high level Wizards at reasonable optimization. This problem is really not nearly as hard as the "nerf Wizards" crowd seems to believe. Read something by Sanderson or Zelazny and you'll quickly discover that it's entirely possible to have both incredibly powerful characters and meaningful stakes.

How can you add more effects to the game? What sort of interaction with basic mechanics is still not covered? Summoning, HP damage, debuffs, buffs, ability damage, level damage, you name it (except healing/damage removal), Wizard has access to it by default. It's very hard to invent something new in that space. I can potentially name Iron Heart Surge (or at least what it intended to do) as a semi-new effect, and maybe White Raven Tactics too. Everything else has a spell version of it, and wizards have access to one of the biggest spell lists ever.

I've read a lot of stuff by Zelazny (I love it, tbh), and in the end most of his characters did things either through melee/ranged combat amped up to 11 (Creatures of Light and Darkness, Lord of Light, Lord Demon), general melee/ranged combat with magic item use (first five to eight books of Amber), or pure combat magic force (Amber, latter half of Merlin cycle when he has the spikard). Almost every important character in the books has innate Plane Shift and a deck of Teleport without Error cards hard-locked onto certain people or places, which helps a lot with storytelling, especially for Corwin, who simply doesn't do magic at all.

But nobody in those books could summon a few fervently loyal creatures instantly, resurrect the dead, heal damage magically, or do half the stuff Wizards actually get up to. Sure, they could do some things (obtain resources, in time, with hard work and knowledge and their innate Plane Shift to find stuff which they want to find), they by default had superhuman strength/stamina/regenerative powers/longevity, and some of them (but not all) could use magic effectively - which was still mostly low-level D&D spells like Invisibility or Scorching Ray or Slow Fall instead of Meteor Swarm and so on. The essaying of Pattern/Logrus basically applied a souped-up (or even equal) version of Heal.

Why not start with that? If we're going to buff martials anyway, why not start with that and see where it gets us? People don't like having their toys taken away, but they do like having new toys. Therefore, it behooves us to try a great deal of the latter before insisting on the former, rather than cramming a bunch of nerfs down the Wizard's throat and giving the Fighter some new toys as an afterthought. Until I can play Kaladin (Stormlight Archive), Thor (Marvel), Karsa Orlong (Malazan), and Ranger (A Practical Guide to Evil) in D&D, I see no reason that we need to do anything to nerf the Wizard.

I'd say that while Fighters should grow up to be Thor, that doesn't put them on equal footing with high-level D&D Wizards. That just means that they don't need to be buffed to do their thing, and they do their thing so well that a Wizard cannot really compete with it. If that's what it is, you're gonna have to deny a Wizard some way to participate in certain challenges, since they can't actually contribute. And if they can, then why do we have Thor again, if we can have another Doctor Strange to bend reality into a donut again? Comic book writers are pretty much like DMs - they have to show hard favoritism and use plot devices to avoid those situations. Also, there aren't any more Doctor Stranges, there's only one, but in a game like D&D you can have five. In the same party, even.

In 5th edition, it works passably well.

Only because 5e was designed around HP damage as the primary resolution to everything combat-related, and a lot of stuff that made beatsticks poorly suited for combat at higher levels (monster abilities, mostly) was removed. 5e desperately tries to stay the same game in the 8-20 segment as it was in 1-7 - just beat the target to death with very few hangups outside of flying and possible resistances (that magic weapons bypass).

In other words, the understanding of what levels represent certain concepts cleans up objections to buffing fighters to keep up with mages by pointing out that you’re not denying the lower-“magic” concepts by buffing fighters, but the players need to know at what level they want to play to have the characters they want.

This. D&D has never thought hard enough about what a Fighter or a Rogue past level 7 should look like. 3e tried with Prestige Classes (which were usually bad), 4e tried with Paragon Paths, but somehow 5e didn't do anything reasonable - even level 20 capstones are bad or wouldn't look out of place at level 11-13 narratively.

My solution to that would be somewhat similar to 4e - divide the game into tiers more directly. No more 20-level Fighter tables.

Tier 1 is levels 1-4, you have your Fighter, your Rogue, your Apprentice (why is a level 1 caster able to learn any of the level 1 spells, again?), your Devout, etc.
At level 5, they graduate to several other paths - your Fighter is now a Warlord, or an Armsmaster, or an Eldritch Knight. Your Rogue is an Assassin, or Archaeologist Tomb Raider, or an Arcane Trickster. Your Apprentice is now an Evoker, or an Abjurer, etc. Devouts graduate to proper Clerics of their god and domain.
At level 11 they graduate again - your Fighter 4/Armsmaster 6 is now a Sword Saint, or Conqueror, or Magus. Your Rogue is now a Shadowdancer, or Dread Pirate, or Nightblade. Your Evoker can now actually call himself a proper Wizard, or they can branch off and become a Blood Mage or High Summoner or something. Your Cleric is now a Herald, or Sunlight Blade, or something.
At level 16 you get the final advancement, and your Fighter isn't really the same Fighter you played 10 levels ago - because you're not supposed to be playing the same game. Instead you're a Godslayer or Warmaster or Seven-Curse Blade. Rogues are straight Soulstealers or Living Shadows or Grand Tricksters, and Wizards are now Archmages or Worldsages, and Clerics are just <god> Incarnate.

So Fighter is kind of simplistic - but that lasts for four levels, for you to get your bearings. And Apprentice isn't much better, they've got like three cantrips and five spells total, so there isn't much complexity there either. But at level 5 Fighter gets maneuvers and better skill use, Rogues get some new tricks and massively better skill use (probably replicating level 1 spells by now, and level 3 spells by the end of the tier), and casters actually get slots to do their thing more often, as well as higher-level slots and some minor features to supplement them. And that continues through the tiers - everyone gets level-appropriate abilities and ways to overcome previous tier's challenges somewhat easily.

[Mechalich]

Comic book writers are pretty much like DMs - they have to show hard favoritism and use plot devices to avoid those situations. Also, there aren't any more Doctor Stranges, there's only one, but in a game like D&D you can have five. In the same party, even.

Comic book writers also have to deploy endless work-arounds, plot-devices, and just outright cheating (known collectively as 'comic book logic') to hold their worlds together. Most superhero universes fundamentally do not function from a world-building perspective and this deeply compromises certain storylines and renders others flatly impossible unless they're played purely for comedy.

The various fantasy worlds that people often mention as having high-powered 'martial' types tend to be superhero universes and they tend to have the same sort of world-building problems.

There's nothing wrong with doing fantasy superheroes, of course, but many D&D players are deeply resistant to that idea and certainly much of the media upon which D&D is based is likewise based on fantasy worlds where things like armies and fortifications actually matter.

[Ignimortis]

There's nothing wrong with doing fantasy superheroes, of course, but many D&D players are deeply resistant to that idea and certainly much of the media upon which D&D is based is likewise based on fantasy worlds where things like armies and fortifications actually matter.

Then that hypothetical 6e that caters to that perception should probably have maybe 10 levels, with casters outright not getting anything cooler than Raise Dead and Teleportation Circle (instead of Teleport). Fireballs are still devastating to armies, but there aren't any Meteor Swarms to level city blocks and castles and break an army in half. Fighters can still die from one or two hundred archers all focus firing on one Fighter. As it is in 5e, we have people with powers far beyond what such a setting entails, and then we have Fighters who still die from being stuck with lots of arrows, and it's always been this way (maybe 4e avoided it, I haven't played it enough to know).

[Segev]

Just going to chime in that I think “do magical things” need not mean “cast spells.” The fighter who, in 3.5, used Supreme Cleave to literally murder his way from one end of a city to the other in 6 seconds may have been (Ex) in game terms, but qualifies as “doing magical things” for purposes of discussions where the “mundane” is defined by “The Guy At The Gym.”

I tend to push for Extraordinary features to be up there in power at appropriate levels. I also push for non-casters to have more spell-like and especially Supernatural abilities, too, as they get higher level.

An Incarnum user doesn’t feel like a spellcaster. But definitely is doing magical things.

[Mechalich]

Then that hypothetical 6e that caters to that perception should probably have maybe 10 levels, with casters outright not getting anything cooler than Raise Dead and Teleportation Circle (instead of Teleport). Fireballs are still devastating to armies, but there aren't any Meteor Swarms to level city blocks and castles and break an army in half. Fighters can still die from one or two hundred archers all focus firing on one Fighter. As it is in 5e, we have people with powers far beyond what such a setting entails, and then we have Fighters who still die from being stuck with lots of arrows, and it's always been this way (maybe 4e avoided it, I haven't played it enough to know).

Sort of. E6/E8 and similar mods are things that exist, as are settings like Eberron and Golarion which institute a sort of soft level cap for NPCs and monsters (though they tend to violate them in adventure paths). And even going back to the earlier editions of D&D it was originally intended that gameplay would change drastically at around the level 10 mark and characters would largely cease traditional adventuring and become a part of the game world backdrop. That didn't actually happen, of course. Instead, we got the BGII model, where gameplay remains functionally the same even as levels reach near to 40+ and the powers simply grow flashier and the numbers bigger but nothing fundamental actually changes (which is the approach taken by nearly all video games ever, where a character might be able to deal 10 billion damage to an NPC, but is completely incapable of breaking through even a thin wooden barrier or climbing over anything higher than their knees. That was kind of the approach 4e took and it was not interesting to most of the player base.

Ultimately, it is certainly possible to math-hammer out a version of D&D that is balanced in combat 4e and 5e both have ways of mostly doing this and a more robust practice of mathematical modeling during the design phase could certainly refine things better. The real problem though, is outside of combat. Video games, after all, have achieved excellent balance with wide-ranging forms of combat powers and interacting subsystems for some time now both in MMOs and in co-op games like Path of Exile (though they do have the considerable advantage of being able to adjust the mechanics post-launch). However, once you leave the fairly restrictive scenario of combat you enter into a realm of exponentially greater inputs and outputs and no system can ever model everything properly.

Heck, even if characters don't have any explicit out-of-combat powers at all, when you actually let players use their combat abilities in a full-integrated interactive environment and do things like start forest fires with fireball or use summoned creatures for labor (it's amazing what even a few seconds of physical labor from something capable of lifting many tons without mechanical assistant can achieve) you start having all kinds of issues.

One thing I feel game design needs to acknowledge is that there's a soft ceiling on how much power any individual in a world can have, and how many how-powered individuals there are overall, before that world ceases to function according to anything other than comic book logic. Now, intriguingly, D&D actual has a solution to this issue: the multiverse. It generally should be that most characters (and powerful monsters too since this is just as applicable to NPCs) leave the Prime Material and run around pursuing goals in crazy alternative realities that are explicitly magical and do not need to make sense after hitting some threshold. I think this is something that, rather than just being a sort of implicit inducement as it has been to date, needs to be explicitly built into the mechanics. Like you need to leave the Prime Material to upgrade into your 'paragon class' or whatever, otherwise you're forever stuck at level 10.