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  1. - Top - End - #271
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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by Psyren View Post
    I'd put that under (b) honestly. I never said they always win in their stories after all.
    Eh, Achilles's unusual properties weren't really relevant to the example or point, but I can see why you'd categorize it. More so that if we're looking for precedent as to what a fighter should be able to do, we should also consider precedent for the respective capacities between magic users and fighters.
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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by Dienekes View Post
    Now it’s part of the way the system works, of course, doling our little chunks of abilities every level. And clearly the developers did not want to overwhelm the martial players.
    Imo this is why part of the solution has to be improving the basic options available to all characters which martials are better prepared to access via stuff like extra attack and expertise. That way the cavalier can always run people over they just don't superlatively good at it until high level.
    Quote Originally Posted by Dienekes View Post
    Devil’s advocate here, but I could see it just being adamantine. But I’m not exactly committed to that argument. Tolkien’s items of power tend to have fairly vague “make user better” effects.
    Also never missed. Also never was lost. Also instantly killed a frigging dragon.

    IDK man seems like you have to really force the reading that it's not overtly magical.
    Quote Originally Posted by Pex View Post
    Or . . .

    People don't play high level because they start at level one and real life interference ends the gaming group before or just about when those high levels are reached. It takes real world time to reach those levels depending on the individual gaming group. It took two and half years for my barbarian game to start at level 3 and end at level 20 using milestone. My paladin game is still going on. I'm 16th level now. We started at 6th level, in 2014. The DM is stingy with XP, but it's a flaw I can get over because the game is fun. We only meet once every three weeks and there was a huge break because of the Virus Apocalypse, but we're back. My artificer game plays every other week, using XP. We started at level 1. We're level 10 now and just had our 2 year anniversary. I just joined a new group playing a warlock. DM uses milestone. We started at level 1. We're now level 2. He wants the campaign to end at level 15, by June next year because that's when he has to move away for personal good news reasons. I was once in a game playing a Sorcerer. We ended at 9th level because the DM had to move away for personal bad news reasons. I was in another game as a Sorcerer that ended at 9th level because the DM could not be satisfied with the rules and stopped DMing altogether. My first 5E game I quit at 3rd level because I couldn't stand it anymore as the DM was a Tyrant whose quote I still remember "I'm a DM who believes a player should never get what he wants." and too many other players were That Guy.
    If t3 was so great people would start in late T2 to get to the "good stuff" as quickly as possible, but universally this is not how things are done. Games start in early T2 at the latest and sometimes get through t3, with t4 being almost entirely the domain of one shots.
    Quote Originally Posted by Sindeloke View Post
    .

    That's a very good point too. The Captain America/Captain Boomerang/Xena character, who has a signature object that they can chuck at one person and then bounce off multiple subsequent other targets, a pretty low-level concept - well, it straight up can't be modeled accurately in 5e, but, you could get pretty close if you convinced your DM to let you use one of your extra attack attacks for each bounce. In which case you can't even get one bounce until level 5, or two until 11. Which means that something I would consider a level 20 feat for such a character - say, this scene - is completely out of reach, no matter how much preparation you do or how many resources you spend.
    You probably can do it with a build designed precisely for this purpose like a fighter 2 Hunter conclave eleven with whirlwind attack but lol.
    Quote Originally Posted by Psyren View Post

    I agree with all this, with the caveat that Tolkien and Conan likely represent low-magic and possibly even low-level worlds if you port them into D&D.
    i.e. you can't fight a Beholder and feel like a Tolkien character because a Beholder is above the weight class of almost everything in Tolkien except the literal demigods that were running around in the periphery.
    Unless we're talking the silmarillion of course, where running up and challenging a dark God to a duel is absolutely on the table for the party paladin
    Make Martials Cool Again.

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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by Sindeloke View Post
    I assume it comes from the game itself, which has always put forward the exact premise that "skills are how non-magical characters do the things that magical characters do with spells."
    Is it? I'll grant that there's some overlap, because spells are allowed to do anything and anything skills do is by definition a thing, but I don't think I've ever seen any version of the game present the role of skills as "skills are supposed to be where the Rogue's answer to things like teleport, major creation, planar binding, genesis, and scrying come from". Mostly the game seems to just sort of ignore the question of where the Rogue's answer to those things is meant to come from, leading some people to infer that maybe they could come out of skills.

    The 3.5 rogue splatbook introduced the exact concept of "enough ranks in Balance to balance on clouds."
    Sure, but that worked extremely poorly. Did you ever see a Rogue use their Balance check to fly? The good version of "balance on the clouds" was balance on the sky, which was an ability that was separate from the skill system and just allowed you to balance on the sky directly.

    In a system with strongly themed classes and strongly themed backgrouds stapled further onto it, do we need an elaborate skill system to say "this person is proficient in diplomacy" when you can instead just go "obviously a rogue with a merchant background is good at bribes, add your proficiency bonus to your Cha check", or "this person isn't proficient in water vehicles" when instead you can just go "you're a blacksmith who's never been outside the light-polluted big city in your life, you do not add proficiency to your Int check to navigate by the stars"?
    What you are describing is a skill system. It's just one where skills are bought in large, homogenous packages and adjudicated with a hefty helping of arguing with your DM. I find that less than appealing for obvious reasons.

    If you're doing that without magic, you're doing it either by being Batman, who has always conveniently studied exactly the obscure text that would have forced him to learn this language, or by being Reed Richards, who is so impossibly smart that he figured out how to translate it just by Knowing How Language Works or building a translator out of his pocket calculator in five minutes or something.
    Or you do it by Daniel Jackson, who lives in a universe where the dead languages in ancient tombs are related enough to one another that you can reasonably expect a guy who studied Ancient Egypt to be able to get the gist of what they mean. Or perhaps the runes are a magical equivalent to wiring and follow consistent rules, such that a skilled expert can make inferences about the behavior of the system with sufficient study.

    Quote Originally Posted by Pex View Post
    Why do spellcasters have spell slots? Why do bards have inspiration dice? Why does any class have any game mechanic?
    But again, the suggestion is that it not be a class mechanic. The suggestion, as it is being presented, is that you have this thing that is part of the skill system that classes get managed access to in order to make up for the disparities in their class kits. How is that not just an excessively complicated set of epicycles layered on top of "write some class abilities for Barbarians that are good"? What is the substantive benefit for declaring that "climb a tree" and "climb to the heavens" are meaningfully part of the same system?

    The skill system is simply a convenient already existing game mechanic that is understood how it works to demonstrate a means to show warriors doing fantastic things.
    But the proposal seems to be for something that works differently from the existing skill system. The skill system is "you have a bonus that grows as you advance and use it to make checks". If you add "and also when that bonus hits specific thresholds, you get bonus powers", you aren't benefitting from an existing game mechanic. You are adding a new one.

    Quote Originally Posted by Pex View Post
    People don't play high level because they start at level one and real life interference ends the gaming group before or just about when those high levels are reached.
    That's a big one too. I suspect if you mathed it out, there'd be relatively little correlation between how long campaigns lasted and what level they started at. If anything, I'd expect starting at a higher level to weakly correlate with lasting longer, because I'd expect the people who start at mid or high levels to mostly be established groups that are less likely to fall apart after a couple sessions. I mean, really, if a campaign doesn't get to 20th level, it seems a bit silly to blame that on whatever flaws you see in 20th level play. They didn't get there!

    However, sometimes "too powerful" isn't really "too powerful".
    Power is a really complicated consideration that tends to get boiled down to "I don't like, pls nerf". Reasonably often, what is described as "over powered" is simply a necessary component of the game that should be made easier to access, or the only appropriately-powerful option in a sea of mediocrity. This is especially true when people conflate "this class is over/under tuned" with "the way this class works is bad".

  4. - Top - End - #274
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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by strangebloke View Post
    If t3 was so great people would start in late T2 to get to the "good stuff" as quickly as possible, but universally this is not how things are done. Games start in early T2 at the latest and sometimes get through t3, with t4 being almost entirely the domain of one shots.
    Point in favor of this interpretation--T3 levels were intentionally shortened (XP-wise) to make them below-trend and faster. The word of devs intent is that T1 goes by quite fast, T2 lingers, T3 is again fast, then T4 is the big hurrah (if you get there). Effectively, you have two segments:

    * The "main game" : 1-10.
    * The "secondary game" : 11-20

    And 1-4 and 11-16 have the same feel--introducing you to the style there but not being the meat.
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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by RandomPeasant View Post
    Summons are overpowered because Bounded Accuracy as a design choice dramatically increases the impact of minions of all sorts. You could just not make that choice, and summoning things would instantly become more reasonable. As summoning in 3e mostly is. summon monster doesn't break anything, and neither do most uses of things like animate dead or animate objects. It's just that the things that were broken were so broken they shattered the entire game.
    Missed this earlier.

    So this would mean that in 3.5, where bounded accuracy wasn't in play, summoning was super weak, right?

    Right?

    Riiiiiight?

    In reality, no. DND's always been built around conceits like HP, status effects, and action economy, and summon spells have always broken all three over their knees. Bounded accuracy makes high-quantity low-quality summons better against high level targets but it also makes high-quality low-quantity summons worse against low level mobs. Overall its a wash, and either way the wizard is providing the party with a massive wall of HP and taking five actions a turn while the party barbarian got CC-ed by a single bad saving throw.
    Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
    Point in favor of this interpretation--T3 levels were intentionally shortened (XP-wise) to make them below-trend and faster. The word of devs intent is that T1 goes by quite fast, T2 lingers, T3 is again fast, then T4 is the big hurrah (if you get there). Effectively, you have two segments:

    * The "main game" : 1-10.
    * The "secondary game" : 11-20

    And 1-4 and 11-16 have the same feel--introducing you to the style there but not being the meat.
    Yep. This isn't to say that's how every game plays out because of the ubiquity of milestone xp (the system I myself use) but I'm pretty confident in arguing that there's a general trend of people feeling "done" with a campaign when it hits that T3 stretch.
    Make Martials Cool Again.

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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by strangebloke View Post
    So this would mean that in 3.5, where bounded accuracy wasn't in play, summoning was super weak, right?
    It was. Casting summon monster as a combat tool was a waste of your time. Getting a Vrock or Greater Elemental on a 15th level battlefield was not something anyone particularly cared about. planar binding was broken, but that's because it let you summon things that were individually stronger than your entire party. Once again, you don't seem to have any real understanding of how 3e worked in practice or what the dynamics of play actually were.

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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by strangebloke View Post

    If t3 was so great people would start in late T2 to get to the "good stuff" as quickly as possible, but universally this is not how things are done. Games start in early T2 at the latest and sometimes get through t3, with t4 being almost entirely the domain of one shots.
    Or . . .

    People like the low level stuff too. They wanted and intended to have a complete game of 1-20 but real life got in the way. There's also the feeling that level 1 is the start of the game. A subset are willing to start at level 3 because they feel level 1 is too weak and don't want an unlucky crit to kill a PC. Even when levels 16-20 are played as one-shots they are in fact being played, and those players don't seem to mind wizards teleporting and polymorphing into dragons while the barbarian does "hulk smash".

    Quote Originally Posted by RandomPeasant View Post


    But again, the suggestion is that it not be a class mechanic. The suggestion, as it is being presented, is that you have this thing that is part of the skill system that classes get managed access to in order to make up for the disparities in their class kits. How is that not just an excessively complicated set of epicycles layered on top of "write some class abilities for Barbarians that are good"? What is the substantive benefit for declaring that "climb a tree" and "climb to the heavens" are meaningfully part of the same system?
    You are determined not to like this idea and dismiss all responses. Your question was answered several times already even when the goalposts were moved. You don't have to like this system, but you have your answer on why it was proposed, how it does what it does, and why it does what it does.

    Quote Originally Posted by strangebloke View Post


    Yep. This isn't to say that's how every game plays out because of the ubiquity of milestone xp (the system I myself use) but I'm pretty confident in arguing that there's a general trend of people feeling "done" with a campaign when it hits that T3 stretch.
    Perhaps because it took two real world years or some other significant length of time to get there and players are ready for something new, not the alleged atrociousness of high level power.
    Last edited by Pex; 2021-10-09 at 10:07 PM.
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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    I think im more on favor of tying supermartial abilities to tier or prof bonus rather than an each-level basis
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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by RandomPeasant View Post
    It was. Casting summon monster as a combat tool was a waste of your time. Getting a Vrock or Greater Elemental on a 15th level battlefield was not something anyone particularly cared about. planar binding was broken, but that's because it let you summon things that were individually stronger than your entire party. Once again, you don't seem to have any real understanding of how 3e worked in practice or what the dynamics of play actually were.
    Planar binding is a summoning spell, the least version of which comes online at level 5 for wizards. I don't know why its irrelevant to discussion of the power of summoning in 3.5.

    ...And I don't claim to be an expert in "optimal(tm)" 3.5 play, but something can be "strong" and still be "not the best option for the strongest classes in the game."
    Quote Originally Posted by Pex View Post
    Or . . .

    People like the low level stuff too. They wanted and intended to have a complete game of 1-20 but real life got in the way. There's also the feeling that level 1 is the start of the game. A subset are willing to start at level 3 because they feel level 1 is too weak and don't want an unlucky crit to kill a PC. Even when levels 16-20 are played as one-shots they are in fact being played, and those players don't seem to mind wizards teleporting and polymorphing into dragons while the barbarian does "hulk smash".
    My claim wasn't that players hated high level play, but that DMs do. It takes me 3-4 times as long to prepare for my 10th level group as it does for my 1st level group, and a lot of this is driven by me having to account for their numerous magic items and abilities. It's a lot harder to tune in the difficulty and manage rewards at that level, as well as manage the flow and information of the campaign.

    You have not know true terror until a player just says "yeah, actually I have teleport lets just go to [place you haven't remotely prepared yet] right now."
    Last edited by strangebloke; 2021-10-10 at 07:45 AM.
    Make Martials Cool Again.

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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by Kane0 View Post
    I think im more on favor of tying supermartial abilities to tier or prof bonus rather than an each-level basis
    I can definitely agree with this, I feel like a fair bit of the more generic systems really should have there calculations preformed outside of Class Level, ASI's being the prime example in 5e. It's honestly a big part of why I loved Path of War and most other product lines that publisher did, they did a fantastic job accounting for Multiclassing in a fair and balanced way that I wish WotC would bring to 5e.

    You see, Path of War (not sure about Tomb of Battle) had this mechanic where Maneuvers keyed of there own Leveling system similar to Caster Levels, except they had one major difference in the fact that you still got progress towards your Maneuvers even if you multiclassed into a Class that didn't get them at a rate of half progression. as an example if you were a Path of War Class 5 and Base Class 6, you'd have Maneuvers the same as an 8th level character. or to put it into 5e terms if you made a Wizard 10/Cleric 10 you'd have Spells Known as if you were 15th level in each class (Or access to 8th level spells in both classes). this to me would be a huge improvement as it would allow for more flexibility when trying to make concepts that don't have an easy subclass option.

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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by Slider Eclipse View Post
    You see, Path of War (not sure about Tomb of Battle) had this mechanic where Maneuvers keyed of there own Leveling system similar to Caster Levels, except they had one major difference in the fact that you still got progress towards your Maneuvers even if you multiclassed into a Class that didn't get them at a rate of half progression. as an example if you were a Path of War Class 5 and Base Class 6, you'd have Maneuvers the same as an 8th level character. or to put it into 5e terms if you made a Wizard 10/Cleric 10 you'd have Spells Known as if you were 15th level in each class (Or access to 8th level spells in both classes). this to me would be a huge improvement as it would allow for more flexibility when trying to make concepts that don't have an easy subclass option.
    I have mixed feelings about it, personally. On one hand it does make it easier to pick up tier appropriate abilities, but on the other it leads to weirdness where the specific order you level in becomes important. For example: all else being equal, a Level 9 Fighter who takes a level in an Initiating Class is somewhat better than someone who starts as a level 1 Initiator then takes 9 levels in fighter, and putting power discrepancy aside it's just kind of a bookkeeping headache.

    That said, if it was easier to swap out old maneuvers for newer better ones that would be easily fixable, so maybe my real issue is that PoW limits you to swapping to maneuvers of the same level. Which is weird; the number of high level maneuvers you can have is already limited by their prerequisites.
    Last edited by Hytheter; 2021-10-09 at 11:46 PM.

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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    What would people think of martial abilities like:

    Flash of Foresight:
    You recognize the moment things would go wrong just before they happen. Once per short rest, when you see the results of a proficiency check you just made within the last minute, you may choose to cancel that action. You never took that action and all costs or dangers associated with it are ignored. You may not use the approach you used for that check again when dealing with that specific block.
    It's an ability for a home brew assassin class I've been messing around with, which is why it has some weird wording. Basically when I run 5e costs are things like time that characters have limited amounts of, dangers are what happens on a failed proficiency check, and blocks are just the things the characters are trying to overcome. I formalized them to make it easier to write abilities dealing with them.

    I came up with this idea after playing a bunch of stealth games and realizing that in those games I and many others constantly abuse save and reload mechanics to try different approaches to situations.

    My question is: would this be something that those that want non-magical martials be interested in?
    Last edited by Jakinbandw; 2021-10-09 at 11:48 PM.

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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by strangebloke View Post
    My claim wasn't that players hated high level play, but that DMs do. It takes me 3-4 times as long to prepare for my 10th level group as it does for my 1st level group, and a lot of this is driven by me having to account for their numerous magic items and abilities. It's a lot harder to tune in the difficulty and manage rewards at that level, as well as manage the flow and information of the campaign.

    You have not know true terror until a player just says "yeah, actually I have teleport lets just go to [place you haven't remotely prepared yet] right now."
    That's not a problem of teleport but of the common DM problem of when you plan for A, B, or C players will choose D. Some DMs can improvise. Others cannot. If the DM cannot and the players are insisting on doing this then tell the players the session is over until he can prepare something. If the players resent that and have a conniption fit then there is a gaming group problem, not the wizard casts teleport problem.

    However, I would also question why the player chose to do this in the first place. If it's a pure sandbox game and the players can truly do anything or go anywhere then the DM has no one to blame but himself. If there's an actual Plot, even if it was a sandbox created Plot, but the player wants to abandon it then I would question why the player wants to disrupt the game like that.

    DMing takes effort. That is not a shock.
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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by Hytheter View Post
    I have mixed feelings about it, personally. On one hand it does make it easier to pick up tier appropriate abilities, but on the other it leads to weirdness where the specific order you level in becomes important. For example: all else being equal, a Level 9 Fighter who takes a level in an Initiating Class is somewhat better than someone who starts as a level 1 Initiator then takes 9 levels in fighter, and putting power discrepancy aside it's just kind of a bookkeeping headache.

    That said, if it was easier to swap out old maneuvers for newer better ones that would be easily fixable, so maybe my real issue is that PoW limits you to swapping to maneuvers of the same level. Which is weird; the number of high level maneuvers you can have is already limited by their prerequisites.
    Yea that was always the one awkward part about PoW's system that I wish they'd have fixed before the publisher shut down. It's just such a strange oversight that I tend to completely forget it's even a thing when building a PoW character. I'd hope that, if 5e did borrow the concept they'd avoid having that issue, even something as simple as "You can change your Maneuvers Known during a Long Rest" would go a long way towards making things less pointlessly complex and more enjoyable.

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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by Pex View Post
    That's not a problem of teleport but of the common DM problem of when you plan for A, B, or C players will choose D.
    This isn't as well-tested as I would like, but a method I've had some success with is to simply ask players ahead of the session what they intend to do so I can prepare for that in particular. Sure, in the middle of the game the players might suddenly realise they want to do A after all and force you to improvise, but at least you didn't waste time preparing B and C or get blindsided by their initial choice of D.

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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by Jakinbandw View Post
    What would people think of martial abilities like:



    It's an ability for a home brew assassin class I've been messing around with, which is why it has some weird wording. Basically when I run 5e costs are things like time that characters have limited amounts of, dangers are what happens on a failed proficiency check, and blocks are just the things the characters are trying to overcome. I formalized them to make it easier to write abilities dealing with them.

    I came up with this idea after playing a bunch of stealth games and realizing that in those games I and many others constantly abuse save and reload mechanics to try different approaches to situations.

    My question is: would this be something that those that want non-magical martials be interested in?
    It would be a headache. There are consequences to a result, pass or fail. How do you know how you would act differently for something that happened a minute ago. You succeed at climbing a tree and notice a campfire to the west. You go west, fight bad guys, and a PC is badly injured. Do you then decide not to climb the tree? How do you know you wouldn't have gone west? What happens when it's during a combat and bad guys reacted to your success or failure of a roll? The whole combat could have gone differently.

    There were spells in past editions and Pathfinder where you can undo your previous round and do something else. It could still cause problems of retcon because a lot can happen in a round, but at least it was only for that round so in theory would be manageable. Changing the ability to undo your previous round would be easier to manage than having to account for a minute's worth of actions everyone did.
    Quote Originally Posted by OvisCaedo View Post
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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by Psyren View Post
    I agree with all this, with the caveat that Tolkien and Conan likely represent low-magic and possibly even low-level worlds if you port them into D&D.
    Yeah, that's true. What was that old blog post, "Gandalf is a 4th level druid"? Conan does a lot of dungeon delving, too, so less worries about rest balancing.

    Quote Originally Posted by strangebloke View Post
    Unless we're talking the silmarillion of course, where running up and challenging a dark God to a duel is absolutely on the table for the party paladin
    Eh, Fingolfin got in one hit and then got super, super dead. Beren and Luthien are the guys who actually scored a win, which goes to show that what you really need for the true Silmarillion experience is an extremely OP bard.

    Quote Originally Posted by Slider Eclipse View Post
    You see, Path of War (not sure about Tomb of Battle) had this mechanic where Maneuvers keyed of there own Leveling system similar to Caster Levels, except they had one major difference in the fact that you still got progress towards your Maneuvers even if you multiclassed into a Class that didn't get them at a rate of half progression.
    That was a thing in ToB, yeah. Fighter/paladin/ranger gave you 1:2 uh... adept levels? Whatever they called the maneuver equivalent of caster levels. Can't recall if you got maneuvers too, or just the ability to pick better ones with your maneuver class levels. Edit: Shadowmonked, you didn't. Either way, I remember it caused a lot of debate over whether warblade was actually the first martial class that could truly stand on its own or if it benefited more from the same 2-level fighter dip that every other martial wanted than going the full 20.
    Last edited by Sindeloke; 2021-10-10 at 01:31 AM.

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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    It sorta followed BAB as 'caster level'

    Edit: if modelling off say Prof bonus, you would unlock new martial-powers at levels 1, 5, 9, 13 and 17 for the categories (skills?) You are proficient in.
    It would be interesting to see what it would be like if possessing spellcasting delayed your power progression, like for example you 'effective' prof bonus for powers was reduced for every spell level for which you had slots (so a full martial could still get cantrips, racial and feat casting without issue)
    Last edited by Kane0; 2021-10-10 at 12:44 AM.

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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by Kane0 View Post
    It sorta followed BAB as 'caster level'

    Edit: if modelling off say Prof bonus, you would unlock new martial-powers at levels 1, 5, 9, 13 and 17 for the categories (skills?) You are proficient in.
    It would be interesting to see what it would be like if possessing spellcasting delayed your power progression, like for example you 'effective' prof bonus for powers was reduced for every spell level for which you had slots (so a full martial could still get cantrips, racial and feat casting without issue)
    I think I'd rather do it as "you can choose X number of skill powers" where X is determined by your class, and is higher for non-casters. I'm not really fussed if a cleric can reach the same heights of shenanigans with Religion or a wizard with Arcane as a fighter or rogue with those same skills. Or, honestly, even if a wizard with the thief or urchin background wants to go hard into Stealth. As long as the flippy gymnast Acrobatics specialized warlock is only specialized in Acrobatics and still has to spend invocations and spell slots on Diplomacy, while the dexadin can have both through skills and the barbarian war leader can have both through skills and Survival skill powers on top of that, it still feels like a fair system to me.

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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by strangebloke View Post
    Planar binding is a summoning spell, the least version of which comes online at level 5 for wizards. I don't know why its irrelevant to discussion of the power of summoning in 3.5.
    The lesser version of planar binding comes online at 5th level (well, as a 5th level spell, but let's give you the credit for meaning that). And it's also not particularly broken in the sense of being mechanically overpowered. A 6HD outsider at 9th level is often not all that big of a deal. It's not until regular planar binding (where the HD threshold is higher than the level at which you get it) and greater planar binding (where just within Core, you can bind something that is stronger than your entire party at the level at which you get it) that the spells become problematic. And most uses of those spells aren't broken at all. Using planar binding to recruit outsiders as subcontractors is fine.

    What is broken is specifically the fact that a spell allows you to get something that is intentionally and explicitly stronger than your entire party. But that's not really anything to do with summoning. It's like looking at the d2 Crusader and declaring "melee attacks are broken!". One overtuned thing does not make a category of options broken. When summoning is tuned appropriately, such that you are summoning things that are at a power level where they are "minions" and not "boss monsters", it is basically fine. Because having a bunch of extra dudes on your team is only broken when the game makes assumptions (*cough* Bounded Accuracy *cough*) that make having a bunch of extra dudes on your team an optimal strategy.

    Where you do have a point is that minionmancy has basically always been very annoying to deal with because having one guy control a whole bunch of characters is a big time cost. That's totally an issue, and while you can mitigate it by having minions show up in small groups, I don't have a great solution to that problem.

    It takes me 3-4 times as long to prepare for my 10th level group as it does for my 1st level group, and a lot of this is driven by me having to account for their numerous magic items and abilities. It's a lot harder to tune in the difficulty and manage rewards at that level, as well as manage the flow and information of the campaign.
    It sounds like you really would have benefited from a design process that aggressively tested and iterated to ensure that consistent balance targets were hit throughout the game and communicated those targets to players and DMs effectively.

    You have not know true terror until a player just says "yeah, actually I have teleport lets just go to [place you haven't remotely prepared yet] right now."
    How is that different from "let's go poke at the bits of scenery in town that you haven't designed"? What happens when you thought the players were going to go deal with the Thieves Guild, but they decide that the Town Guard is the thing to interact with instead? teleport and plane shift open up vast new vistas of adventure, but even the vistas of adventure that exist in a small city are far vaster than any DM can explicitly prepare.

    Quote Originally Posted by Slider Eclipse View Post
    It's honestly a big part of why I loved Path of War and most other product lines that publisher did, they did a fantastic job accounting for Multiclassing in a fair and balanced way that I wish WotC would bring to 5e.
    Not really. PoW/ToB multiclassing is better than general multiclassing, but it's still not great. Having a Warblade 6/Crusader 6 come in as a 9th level Warblade + a 9th level Crusader is better than having them come in as a 6th level Warblade + a 6th level Crusader, but it's still really hard to properly balance. Better, I think, to do one of two things.

    First, embrace open multiclassing completely. Make classes extremely light and let people combine abilities basically however they want. Want to smite like a Paladin on eldtrich blasts like a Warlocks? Just take the "Smite" activated ability and the "Eldritch Blast" basic attack ability and go for it.

    Second, remove open multiclassing entirely. Don't try to figure out how to make Sorcerer 4/Barbarian 3/Druid 3 balanced with Wizard 5/Fighter 5 or Rogue 10. People get a class, and multiclassing is accomplished through subclasses, with Feats and Backgrounds providing additional customization.

    Personally, I lean towards the second one, because it's easier to preserve class identity and create evocative class fantasies if classes work in genuinely different ways, and that's incompatible with freely combining abilities between classes.

    Quote Originally Posted by Jakinbandw View Post
    What would people think of martial abilities like:
    That seems like it would be really annoying to adjudicate. Also it seems weird that you only get flashes of insight from making proficiency checks? Do you never realize "hey, wait, the room behind this door is full of angry ogres, I shouldn't open it"?

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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by Pex View Post
    It would be a headache. There are consequences to a result, pass or fail. How do you know how you would act differently for something that happened a minute ago. You succeed at climbing a tree and notice a campfire to the west. You go west, fight bad guys, and a PC is badly injured. Do you then decide not to climb the tree? How do you know you wouldn't have gone west? What happens when it's during a combat and bad guys reacted to your success or failure of a roll? The whole combat could have gone differently.

    There were spells in past editions and Pathfinder where you can undo your previous round and do something else. It could still cause problems of retcon because a lot can happen in a round, but at least it was only for that round so in theory would be manageable. Changing the ability to undo your previous round would be easier to manage than having to account for a minute's worth of actions everyone did.
    To be fair there are two reasons that wouldn't happen. 1) 5e uses result to mean the immediate result (look at all the abilities that say 'after you roll but before you lean the result'). So the result of the check to climb the tree would be the successful climbing of the tree. When the player learned this they would have to choose to use this ability or not. 2) Movement and climbing speeds are slow. A round going back down the tree would probably take 2 or 3 rounds depending on the size of the tree. Then you'd need to get to the fire, so the fire would have had to be would have to be within 60 yards (240 feet), and that's not even leaving time for combat to start. At that distance the party should already be able to see the light through the trees and hear people moving around. If the bush is denser then they have to deal with difficult terrain, and the distance the fire can be away shrinks to only 30 yards, making it even easier to hear.

    That said I did write another higher level ability that falls more into what you're asking about, but it also gives a very clear answer to what happens. (Note that that this class has effort equal to half their level that recovers during a long rest).

    Perfect Plan
    You are able to craft the perfect plan with the help of your allies. At the end of a long rest you and your allies craft a plan to accomplish some goal. This is a theoretical approach which plays out as if you were taking each action. During this planning, you may go back to earlier times in the plan to remove or change situations at your current place in the plan. If a check is failed, a new approach can be attempted if you spend a point of effort with no dangers or costs being paid. Alternatively you may spend 3 effort to replace the result of any proficiency check with your proficiency bonus+15.
    Once the plan is complete, or if a check is failed and effort is spent to negate it, or a combat doesn’t end during the surprise round you may not alter the plan any more. You may discard the plan, or put it into action, moving directly to the point before the failed check or the start of combat, or directly after the completion of the plan.
    You may also delay the plan and put it into action at any point in time before your next long rest, as long as there are no new blocks that would hinder you from doing so (as judged and shared by the GM).
    Either way, the question I was asking is: are these types of abilities things that peoples that want mundane characters would enjoy? These abilities aren't magical, and are meant to be a result of extreme competence like batman. They also don't result in any superhuman actions like lifting cars or cutting through buildings. That said I feel that they are very powerful, and arguably stronger at what they do than what a spellcaster can accomplish.
    Last edited by Jakinbandw; 2021-10-10 at 08:46 AM.

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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by RandomPeasant View Post
    It was. Casting summon monster as a combat tool was a waste of your time. Getting a Vrock or Greater Elemental on a 15th level battlefield was not something anyone particularly cared about. planar binding was broken, but that's because it let you summon things that were individually stronger than your entire party. Once again, you don't seem to have any real understanding of how 3e worked in practice or what the dynamics of play actually were.
    It might have sucked in 3.5, but in Pathfinder summoning is really good. Your Vrock for example was moved down from SM8 to SM7, so now it's showing up on a CR 13 battlefield with the same to-hit it had before. Since CR 13 monsters have an average AC of 26, with Augment Summoning that means it hits on a 9 with all 5 of its attacks, and that's before things like flanking or its heroism buff come into play.

    Even in 3.5, a force multiplier like a bard or the right battlefield control could make summons pretty handy.
    Quote Originally Posted by The Giant View Post
    But really, the important lesson here is this: Rather than making assumptions that don't fit with the text and then complaining about the text being wrong, why not just choose different assumptions that DO fit with the text?
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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by Pex View Post
    DMing takes effort. That is not a shock.
    As the number of powerful narrative-impacting tools increases, the number of potential issues the DM has to account for increases, and the difficulty of balancing encounters and apportioning loot increases. In my own experience and in the experience of other DMs I've talked to, this is a serious factor in preparing notes and a pretty common cause for not being able to get things together for a session.

    It's not the only reason a session falls apart, but at least IME I still play with everyone I ran my first 5e campaign with. They're all still in the area and still playing and they all still get along with me. But we're on our third campaign together because the earlier campaigns had gotten too exhausting for me so I gave them a proper ending.
    Quote Originally Posted by Sindeloke View Post
    I think I'd rather do it as "you can choose X number of skill powers" where X is determined by your class, and is higher for non-casters. I'm not really fussed if a cleric can reach the same heights of shenanigans with Religion or a wizard with Arcane as a fighter or rogue with those same skills. Or, honestly, even if a wizard with the thief or urchin background wants to go hard into Stealth. As long as the flippy gymnast Acrobatics specialized warlock is only specialized in Acrobatics and still has to spend invocations and spell slots on Diplomacy, while the dexadin can have both through skills and the barbarian war leader can have both through skills and Survival skill powers on top of that, it still feels like a fair system to me.
    I mostly just feel like the skill system isn't balanced enough to be used for a 'powers' system like this. Other than maybe having proficiency being a prereq for taking a power.
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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by strangebloke View Post
    I mostly just feel like the skill system isn't balanced enough to be used for a 'powers' system like this. Other than maybe having proficiency being a prereq for taking a power.
    That's a proficiency gating I could accept. Since the idea is to give this to warriors the question is if the current system of having only four proficiencies enough? However, there's no need to dwell on this. It's just theory crafting.
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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by strangebloke View Post
    As the number of powerful narrative-impacting tools increases, the number of potential issues the DM has to account for increases, and the difficulty of balancing encounters and apportioning loot increases. In my own experience and in the experience of other DMs I've talked to, this is a serious factor in preparing notes and a pretty common cause for not being able to get things together for a session.

    It's not the only reason a session falls apart, but at least IME I still play with everyone I ran my first 5e campaign with. They're all still in the area and still playing and they all still get along with me. But we're on our third campaign together because the earlier campaigns had gotten too exhausting for me so I gave them a proper ending.
    As the Player Agency increases the GMing prep requirements increase. This can lead to the GM changing prep methods to a more efficient method for that volume, or to the GM doing more prep, or the GM having more holes in their prep.

    As the number of powerful narrative-impacting tools increases, the Player Agency tends to increase.

    Personally I have found sandboxes are not hurt by higher levels nearly as much as more linear games (like the barely linear node based games). This is because the increased numbers of tools ends up having a smaller relative increase on each dimension of the player agency despite having a greater marginal increase. (Increasing the dimensions of a box by 1 inch each increases the volume increases the bigger box by more volume but the increase is smaller in proportion to the starting volume).

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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Is it my imagination, or is this thread really about turning 5e into 4e?

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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by paladinn View Post
    Is it my imagination, or is this thread really about turning 5e into 4e?
    It is your imagination, yes.
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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by paladinn View Post
    Is it my imagination, or is this thread really about turning 5e into 4e?
    Just in case Morty's answer didn't suffice, I believe the issue you are having here is an example of the Association Fallacy; X being associated with a Y that is not widely regarded does not itself mean that X is to not be widely regarded.

    If the aspects being discussed in this thread were included in 4e (I never played it, cannot confirm), it does not mean these aspects are themselves 4e or to be associated in the same manner.

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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    Quote Originally Posted by paladinn View Post
    Is it my imagination, or is this thread really about turning 5e into 4e?
    It's your imagination. If anything, this thread has mostly suggested fixes that would make 5e an unholy (or sacred) amalgamation of 5e, later 3.5, 4e and both editions of PF. Which is completely understandable, since every one of these that wasn't 5e actually tried to tackle the core question of martial powers and what they should be able to do outside of "I attack, and I roll a skill that completely lacks anything beyond mundane level 3-ish applications".
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    Default Re: Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

    That having been said, one thing 4E did that any serious attempt at accomplishing this thread's goal need to take into account is take martial characters seriously and stop giving casters preferential treatment. Everyone has their own list of powers and gets to use them. Whatever we think about the result, 5E goes right back to "awesome casters and their reliable sidekicks". The change of attitude is palpable.
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