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

[Pex]

Sure. That is a way you could do things. But that's not really magic coming out of the skill system. It's just grafting a small failure chance onto martial abilities, or adding some pointless bookkeeping where the Fighter nominally rolls Athletics every time he uses Leap of the Heavens, but can never fail the check. I'm not necessary disputing that you could involve skill checks in high level abilities somehow, I'm asking what the point or benefit of doing that is.

To demonstrate how it is possible to give warriors fantastical abilities that are not magical. It is to satisfy the need to keep warriors mundane yet go beyond Guy At The Gym to be on a more equal footing to spellcasters who can travel 100s of miles in an instant, reshape people into monstrosities, and bring the dead back to life. Rangers and Paladins might have access to their own Medicine check to do CPR.

A great summary of what a Fighter would have to be to keep up with a full caster above level 13 or so. Also, since you're level 16, when that week expires you could probably just burst out of your quick-castle and slaughter a few hundred people before the rest turn tail and run in fear. All the while you're shrugging off 99% of their attempts at harming you. As someone on this forum had said once, a level 20 Fighter should probably just be Horseman War.

Alternatively, you could severely nerf the casters so that they never get to summon tornadoes or meteor showers, or kill people with a single word, or do anything that is beyond level 5 (circle 5, not spellcaster level 5) spells. Then you can limit martials to some very low-wuxia feats like running on walls or throwing your sword and having it return to you like a boomerang (no magic involved). Basically, stuff that monk already does, but somehow nobody else can, despite being just as physically developed. But I feel like this would elicit even more complaints than making high-level martials mythical.

Yeah, then it wouldn't be D&D.

The best of both worlds. Those who hate the high magic end their campaign at level 9 or 10. To be level 7+ is to be among the most powerful people/creatures of the world. No need to get rid of anything. Those who like the high magic can continue on with their campaigns of levels 11 to 20. Just because someone hates high magic doesn't mean everyone else must hate it as well.

[strangebloke]

It's not, but it is a much better reference point for the median person's perception of Batman than the cartoons you specifically grew up with.

More people might be aware of Nolan's batman (who can still overcome a broken spine through raw willpower) but I don't think that its some 'final word' on what the broad concept of "batman" means to people. The DCAU and The Batman series, and Snyder's batman were all incredibly influential, as are, you know, the actual comics, and overall Nolan's batman is by far the outlier in terms of what he's capable of.

All this to say that pretty much any archetypal concept you can list can be implemented at a massively wide range of power levels. Thor can just be a 5th level cleric with call lightning and booming blade. Batman can be a 20th level rogue who takes a meteor to the face but "dodges somehow." Captain America can be a battlemaster of any level, and I would even argue you could make him a lot stronger than a 20th level battlemaster without invalidating the concept.

Thor smites demons with lightning and hits them with a smithy hammer so heavy noone can lift it. Captain Hobo kills demons with a rusty knife and tosses garbage at them.

That's where you hit an issue: the existence of Captain Hobo at level 18 makes Thor of level 18 look less cool. Captain Hobo is better off being level 1. Aragorn is a level 5ish concept, Thor a level 16ish.

Aragorn is more like level 10 or more. Its funny to me that people earlier mentioned Aragorn "not being able to run through moria" when uh. He kind of did after Gandalf's fall, its mentioned that large numbers of orcs were guarding the exit to moria and "fled in terror of his wrath."

This is consistent with how he's presented in the books generally, which is a pretty big upgrade from the movies overall. He runs several hundred miles over the course of a few days with no sleep while pursuing the hobbits for example.

Just once again illustrating that these character concepts are a lot broader (in terms of level) than most people are willing to acknowledge.

Yeah, then it wouldn't be D&D.

Its humorous to me that people say high level wizards are some essential part of the dnd experience when almost nobody plays at that level because its so stinking tedious in large part because of all the tools high level wizards have.

[Ralanr]

Its humorous to me that people say high level wizards are some essential part of the dnd experience when almost nobody plays at that level because its so stinking tedious in large part because of all the tools high level wizards have.

Oh yeah, I'm pretty annoyed by that as well. But people would throw a hissy if suddenly 9th level spells stopped existing or something like that.

God rivaling wizards are D&D. And martial characters that have more options at higher levels are apparently not. Only one special toolbox for this game.

[strangebloke]

Oh yeah, I'm pretty annoyed by that as well. But people would throw a hissy if suddenly 9th level spells stopped existing or something like that.

God rivaling wizards are D&D. And martial characters that have more options at higher levels are apparently not. Only one special toolbox for this game.

My ""fav"" are the people who insist that summoning monsters as powerful as their fellow party members is an essential part of the DND experience and constantly whine that planar binding isn't in 5e in its old form.

Like, summons are already so brokenly overpowered in this edition that the only thing holding them back is the social contract at most tables and yet you'll still get people (mostly online) complaining that they can't play their (utterly gamebreaking) character concept.

[Ralanr]

My ""fav"" are the people who insist that summoning monsters as powerful as their fellow party members is an essential part of the DND experience and constantly whine that planar binding isn't in 5e in its old form.

Like, summons are already so brokenly overpowered in this edition that the only thing holding them back is the social contract at most tables and yet you'll still get people (mostly online) complaining that they can't play their (utterly gamebreaking) character concept.

I've seen summoning ruin game balance in enough games to believe that it has no place in a multiplayer team based game.

Single player game? Sure, have fun with it.

In a team game? Necromancy already stretches it based on keeping track of everything. But having demons or elementals replace your frontline players? That's a big middle finger most of the time.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I've seen summoning ruin game balance in enough games to believe that it has no place in a multiplayer team based game.

Single player game? Sure, have fun with it.

In a team game? Necromancy already stretches it based on keeping track of everything. But having demons or elementals replace your frontline players? That's a big middle finger most of the time.

I'm ok with very limited summoning. I mean...at level 7 ish, summoning 2 dire wolves isn't so bad.

That said, there's a name for the guys who summon and control hordes of disposable mooks and/or demons/devils/etc. Bad Guys.

Beyond that, summoning takes spells and raises it to another level. Consider this:

A martial character has access to features from
* Race
* Class
* Feats
* General rules

A non-summoning, non-polymorphing spell-casting character has access to
* All of the above
* Plus spells (roughly doubling the number of pages he can interact with)

A summoning and/or polymorphing spell-casting character has access to
* All of the above
* plus most of the monster manual. And any other monster books ever printed.

That's, frankly, not balanceable, even in the abstract. Throw in the distorting effects of having more actions, and you've got a mess.

[Kuu Lightwing]

I think it's possible to make a summoner balanced in DnD, however it shouldn't be a Wizard spell or a subclass, it should be a separate class, with most of its power budget tied to summoning. Not "I can summon a Fighter-Equivalent Entitiy (FEE) and also cast Fireball". Have summons be specific monsters/entities that either act on their own, or grant the Summoner some abilities as long as they are summoned. Maybe you can have a summon possess you temporarily? And of course summon list should be balanced and not left to DM with very vague wording that you can maaaybe read as if "it's actually DM who chooses the summons, we totally intended that reading"

[Ralanr]

I'm ok with very limited summoning. I mean...at level 7 ish, summoning 2 dire wolves isn't so bad.

That said, there's a name for the guys who summon and control hordes of disposable mooks and/or demons/devils/etc. Bad Guys.

Beyond that, summoning takes spells and raises it to another level. Consider this:

A martial character has access to features from
* Race
* Class
* Feats
* General rules

A non-summoning, non-polymorphing spell-casting character has access to
* All of the above
* Plus spells (roughly doubling the number of pages he can interact with)

A summoning and/or polymorphing spell-casting character has access to
* All of the above
* plus most of the monster manual. And any other monster books ever printed.

That's, frankly, not balanceable, even in the abstract. Throw in the distorting effects of having more actions, and you've got a mess.

I think a trouble with it is that D&D has it so spells are universal. Anyone can use them, and when villains summon a bunch of demons, you need to create a demon summoning spell.

I think it's possible to make a summoner balanced in DnD, however it shouldn't be a Wizard spell or a subclass, it should be a separate class, with most of its power budget tied to summoning. Not "I can summon a Fighter-Equivalent Entitiy (FEE) and also cast Fireball". Have summons be specific monsters/entities that either act on their own, or grant the Summoner some abilities as long as they are summoned. Maybe you can have a summon possess you temporarily? And of course summon list should be balanced and not left to DM with very vague wording that you can maaaybe read as if "it's actually DM who chooses the summons, we totally intended that reading"

I disagree. The summoner in pathfinder had to be nerfed in the unchained version, and even if you removed the spells of a summoner and focus it entirely on summoning, then you're just playing a separate creature. And that creature has to be strong to warrant being the only thing you can do (or the creatures).

Limited summoning can work I guess. But strong summons really do not belong in players hands imo.

[Slider Eclipse]

I disagree. The summoner in pathfinder had to be nerfed in the unchained version, and even if you removed the spells of a summoner and focus it entirely on summoning, then you're just playing a separate creature. And that creature has to be strong to warrant being the only thing you can do (or the creatures).

Limited summoning can work I guess. But strong summons really do not belong in players hands imo.

To be fair to Pathfinder's Summoner, the main reason it had to be nerfed was less because of the Eidolon being busted (though they did some adjustments that nerfed that as well, mostly due to stuff like the floating ball of tentacles people sometimes made) and more because they had the bright idea of taking major spells like HASTE and letting the Summoner take them at lower spell levels than normal. It was basically the equivalent of if 5e had a Sorcerer Subclass that let you take Fireball as a 1st level spell.

[Ralanr]

To be fair to Pathfinder's Summoner, the main reason it had to be nerfed was less because of the Eidolon being busted (though they did some adjustments that nerfed that as well, mostly due to stuff like the floating ball of tentacles people sometimes made) and more because they had the bright idea of taking major spells like HASTE and letting the Summoner take them at lower spell levels than normal. It was basically the equivalent of if 5e had a Sorcerer Subclass that let you take Fireball as a 1st level spell.

I didn't know that specifically and wow that is hilariously dumb.

[Kuu Lightwing]

I disagree. The summoner in pathfinder had to be nerfed in the unchained version, and even if you removed the spells of a summoner and focus it entirely on summoning, then you're just playing a separate creature. And that creature has to be strong to warrant being the only thing you can do (or the creatures).

Limited summoning can work I guess. But strong summons really do not belong in players hands imo.

I'm not familiar with pathfinder (I assume 1e) enough, but is the nerfed version balanced now? Something that had to be nerfed doesn't mean that the concept itself is impossible to balance after all. There could be various approaches to summoning too, my idea was not "summon monsters from monster manual", I imagine something along the lines of 3.5e Binder maybe.

I think you can balance it. Imagine it like without using spell slots a Wizard only has his cantrips, an is pretty underwhelming. Summoner could be the same without summoning, and all the "interesting" abilities could be tied to summons.

[Slider Eclipse]

I didn't know that specifically and wow that is hilariously dumb.

Yea it was rather crazy some of the spells they got early access to, some particularly notable ones besides Haste were

Greater Invisibility
Black Tentacles
Baleful Polymorph
Overland Flight (basically Fly but it lasted 8 hours in exchange for slightly less movement)

[PhoenixPhyre]

To be fair to Pathfinder's Summoner, the main reason it had to be nerfed was less because of the Eidolon being busted (though they did some adjustments that nerfed that as well, mostly due to stuff like the floating ball of tentacles people sometimes made) and more because they had the bright idea of taking major spells like HASTE and letting the Summoner take them at lower spell levels than normal. It was basically the equivalent of if 5e had a Sorcerer Subclass that let you take Fireball as a 1st level spell.

I'll say that the whole "some lists get certain spells earlier" thing was one thing that I'm very glad 5 ditched..except for bards. Who can pick up paladin and ranger exclusives spells before the regular class can.

[Kuu Lightwing]

I'll say that the whole "some lists get certain spells earlier" thing was one thing that I'm very glad 5 ditched..except for bards. Who can pick up paladin and ranger exclusives spells before the regular class can.

It is still a thing for half and third casters, though. Surely all spells have the same level now, but full casters get the spells way earlier because of their progression.

[PhoenixPhyre]

It is still a thing for half and third casters, though. Surely all spells have the same level now, but full casters get the spells way earlier because of their progression.

That's different. Fireball takes a 3rd level slot no matter how you learn it.

[Kuu Lightwing]

That's different. Fireball takes a 3rd level slot no matter how you learn it.

Yes, and Bard who steals a Paladin or Ranger spell uses the same slot as Paladin or Ranger. Problem is that they get them earlier, isn't it?

[Slider Eclipse]

I'm not familiar with pathfinder (I assume 1e) enough, but is the nerfed version balanced now? Something that had to be nerfed doesn't mean that the concept itself is impossible to balance after all. There could be various approaches to summoning too, my idea was not "summon monsters from monster manual", I imagine something along the lines of 3.5e Binder maybe.

I think you can balance it. Imagine it like without using spell slots a Wizard only has his cantrips, an is pretty underwhelming. Summoner could be the same without summoning, and all the "interesting" abilities could be tied to summons.

It's about as balanced as a Summoner could be in the system, the only real breaking point Pathfinder 1e Unchained Summoner has is the fact they get effectively two turns a round and Action Economy is by far one of the most powerful things you can get an advantage on in any TTRPG.

That being said however, creating a Summoner Class in 5e would lose this one big breaking point because we already have a mechanic in place thanks to Battle Smith Artificer and Beastmaster Ranger. Making them a Half Caster with a Support themed Spell List and a specialized Summon Feature that can only take actions in exchange for your Bonus Action would work pretty well.

[Kuu Lightwing]

It's about as balanced as a Summoner could be in the system, the only real breaking point Pathfinder 1e Unchained Summoner has is the fact they get effectively two turns a round and Action Economy is by far one of the most powerful things you can get an advantage on in any TTRPG.

That being said however, creating a Summoner Class in 5e would lose this one big breaking point because we already have a mechanic in place thanks to Battle Smith Artificer and Beastmaster Ranger. Making them a Half Caster with a Support themed Spell List and a specialized Summon Feature that can only take actions in exchange for your Bonus Action would work pretty well.

You can even give summons powerful abilities that are, well, powerful, but will require you to use your action to activate them. And put them on Recharge too. Actually Summoner could even interact with recharge if they want to - like something like "1/short rest, action: recharge the rechargable ability of your summon".

I think the concept is workable, the problem is that Wizards would never make it, cause they think in terms of subclasses and subclasses only.

[Dienekes]

More people might be aware of Nolan's batman (who can still overcome a broken spine through raw willpower) but I don't think that its some 'final word' on what the broad concept of "batman" means to people. The DCAU and The Batman series, and Snyder's batman were all incredibly influential, as are, you know, the actual comics, and overall Nolan's batman is by far the outlier in terms of what he's capable of.

All this to say that pretty much any archetypal concept you can list can be implemented at a massively wide range of power levels. Thor can just be a 5th level cleric with call lightning and booming blade. Batman can be a 20th level rogue who takes a meteor to the face but "dodges somehow." Captain America can be a battlemaster of any level, and I would even argue you could make him a lot stronger than a 20th level battlemaster without invalidating the concept.

So, to sort of riff on this notion. Can I mention how strange the flow of powers are in 5e?

In real life, I’m a swordsman. I’m not a good swordsman, at all actually. But I have picked up a few things. So, it is odd to me looking through the Battlemaster features and thinking that I personally can do about 7 of the Battlemaster’s maneuvers. This would make me level 10.

I am not a level 10. I’d be surprised if I was level 2.

And there are other examples as well, take the Cavalier the subclass that’s supposed to represent mundane knights. They can’t even overrun opponents until level 15. This is the basic thing a Knight is supposed to be able to do. It’s kind of the entire point of shock cavalry.

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.

But the end result is to even begin to feel like the badass martial type you’ve always imagined your character as you have to be moderately high level. Which is when everyone is saying you need to be superhuman. This is a fair bit of a disconnect in expectations, I feel.

[Psyren]

No, the black arrow wasn't magical in any overt way.

I don't agree with that. I don't see how an unbreakable arrow forged by the King Under The Mountain and passed down Bard's family line could be anything but a magic item in D&D terms.

John Henry, Paul Bunyan, Cuhullan. Lots of famous warriors/folk heroes with supernatural abilities.

And yet people think things need to be 'realistic' in D&D.

The problem is that these fables and folktales invariably tend to either be about (a) people that are not fully human, (b) people that did acquire magic of some kind, or (c) people who were entirely human but that ultimately didn't do anything all that outlandish by D&D martial standards anyway. That belies the assertion that D&D martials can just do enough pushups to eventually equal casters.

For example, Cuhullan would have a divine rank in D&D terms.
Paul Bunyan according to his stories was a giant even from birth, needing 5 storks to be delivered. In D&D that would be represented by a template of some kind, not merely a class.
And John Henry outperformed a drilling machine then promptly died from the stress. (Wow, such martial.)

[Dienekes]

I don't agree with that. I don't see how an unbreakable arrow forged by the King Under The Mountain and passed down Bard's family line could be anything but a magic item in D&D terms.

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.

[SharkForce]

At some point, it seems like the only thing that would still be D&D is keeping the current status quo of "wizards rule, martials drool".

Not even sure I should highlight that one, because apparently a lot of people think that it should be like this. I've seen enough arguments that magic should be better than anything non-magic to last me a lifetime (not in this thread, and generally not on this forum).

modern D&D seems to be that way. 2nd edition D&D is mostly not (unless you play the CRPGs that pit the group against enemies with bad AI while allowing a 5-minute workday, multiple attempts at every fight with the potential for perfect planning and preparation, that is).

I didn't get to play as much of anything before then (maybe an hour or two at most when I was a kid), nor did I get to play as many video games based on earlier edition rules, but they seemed to similarly limit the wizard.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Yes, and Bard who steals a Paladin or Ranger spell uses the same slot as Paladin or Ranger. Problem is that they get them earlier, isn't it?

That was the one exception I called out. And yeah, not too fond of it.

[RandomPeasant]

You don't need to have a failure chance, really. Just tie the abilities to proficiency tiers, and let martials have more skill advancement.

But at that point, any association to skills is essentially meaningless. Like, yeah, you could declare that Super Jump is a result of Athletics proficiency rather than a selectable Barbarian class feature. But what does that actually get you? How

The reason for putting it at least partially into the skills system is simple. Skills do not scale properly in 5e and didn't do that even in 3e, despite the ELH stuff.

I disagree. The skill system scales just fine, and I would even argue that in some respects it scales better 5e. You don't need "Epic Level Cakemaking" or "Epic Level Wilderness Survival" or "Epic Level Use Rope". Trying to do that will always be dumb, because the idea of "Epic Level Use Rope" is inherently dumb. Just let the rules for cakemaking handle making regular cakes, and the rules for wilderness survival handle navigating by the stars and foraging, and the rope-using rules handle the various contexts in which you can tie knots. Then people can get whatever high level abilities they need to get, and you don't have to say things like "you get planar travel because your character is a woodsman" or "you can't get scrying because you didn't put points in being a mundane scout".

But other casters also get access to the same spell, so by making things work through a shared subsystem, you can make things easier for everyone and save on page space.

I'm not saying the abilities have to be unique to classes (though I think in many cases that is appropriate for utility options). I'm saying that I don't see the benefit of trying to unify your "basic human-level tasks" system and your "epic level mythic tricks" system. Those are systems with very different goals, trying to share things between them does not seem to me to have any obvious benefit.

To demonstrate how it is possible to give warriors fantastical abilities that are not magical. It is to satisfy the need to keep warriors mundane yet go beyond Guy At The Gym to be on a more equal footing to spellcasters who can travel 100s of miles in an instant, reshape people into monstrosities, and bring the dead back to life. Rangers and Paladins might have access to their own Medicine check to do CPR.

But again, what does that have to do with the skill system? What makes "you get mundane raise dead-alike from enough Heal investment" better than "there's a mundane raise dead-alike that characters can pick with slots they get". Because it sort of seems like the answer is just "martials need to get abilities in a different way from casters to satisfy people who complain about martials being too much like casters", and my take on that is that you can't really satisfy those people.

Its humorous to me that people say high level wizards are some essential part of the dnd experience when almost nobody plays at that level because its so stinking tedious in large part because of all the tools high level wizards have.

No one plays at that level because the martials can't play at that level. The tools the Wizard has are not the problem. The problem is the tools the Fighter doesn't have. Also the total lack of support for playing at that level, and lack of consideration for it by designers. There is absolutely demand for high-level stories and characters (see: Endgame making more money than any previous movie).

Like, summons are already so brokenly overpowered in this edition that the only thing holding them back is the social contract at most tables and yet you'll still get people (mostly online) complaining that they can't play their (utterly gamebreaking) character concept.

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.

[Kuu Lightwing]

That was the one exception I called out. And yeah, not too fond of it.

To be honest there's not much diffrence between Bard being able to cast Aura of Vitality earlier than Paladin and Wizard being able to cast Fireball earlier than Eldritch Knight. It only feels wrong because Aura of Vitality is supposedly a Paladin exclusive spell. I'd say 3.5e system was more flexible by allowing granting certain spells earlier to certain classes, which helps the part-time casters.

[Pex]

Its humorous to me that people say high level wizards are some essential part of the dnd experience when almost nobody plays at that level because its so stinking tedious in large part because of all the tools high level wizards have.

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.

To be fair to Pathfinder's Summoner, the main reason it had to be nerfed was less because of the Eidolon being busted (though they did some adjustments that nerfed that as well, mostly due to stuff like the floating ball of tentacles people sometimes made) and more because they had the bright idea of taking major spells like HASTE and letting the Summoner take them at lower spell levels than normal. It was basically the equivalent of if 5e had a Sorcerer Subclass that let you take Fireball as a 1st level spell.

This I can agree with. Despite what I said previously I'm not opposed to the idea that some thing can be too powerful. I played a game where someone was a Summoner. He cast Haste at its 2nd level a lot which was a big deal. The DM was bothered a bit by the power of the Eidolon, but the players weren't. I also note the original Summoner had Teleport as a 4th level spell. That meant the Summoner could, theoretically, make a Wand of Teleport. It would be expensive to make because it was 4th level, but it was possible. The new Summoner had a more reasonable spell list. Haste was back at 3rd level and Teleport at 5th.

However, sometimes "too powerful" isn't really "too powerful". It's perfectly fine, but it's the burden of the individual who just can't stand it. His tolerance level doesn't like it, but that doesn't mean other people must not like it too. Those people who like the Summoning and Polymorphing and all the power of wizards people are harping about are not wrong to like it, and D&D is not wrong to have it.

[Sindeloke]

This came up in the last thread, but I've never understood the desire for supernatural stuff to pop out of skills.

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." The wizard has invisibility, the rogue has so many ranks of hide and move silently that she's harder to find than the wizard when she wants to be. The bard can use her magic to entrance the king and compel him to obey her, sir Bearington can dump enough points in disguise that the whole kingdom gets outraged if you accuse him of being a bear. The wizard can cast Jump or Foresight, the champion gets half his proficiency to jumping and initiative checks. The 3.5 rogue splatbook introduced the exact concept of "enough ranks in Balance to balance on clouds."

It didn't work in 3.5 because only rogues got skills, and it doesn't work in 5e because vague mealy-mouthed target DCs and bounded accuracy break the skill system to the point of uselessness, but it is clearly the design intent, and there are already weak hooks built into the existing game to build off of. That makes it fundamentally more appealing to homebrewers than creating a new system from scratch that may or may not be flexible across multiple classes.

The game needs a system for handling human-level tasks like "read the ancient runes in the lost temple" or "chart a course using the stars" or "get the palace guard to accept a bribe".

Does it, though? Particularly in 5e, where even wizards get d6 hit dice and +6 to hit with a stick by level 20, even if it's a waste of their time to try, because a certain baseline of competency across all human-level tasks is assumed for adventurers? 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"? The whole point of 5e skills is that if it's not a particularly extraordinary thing to do, anyone can try to do it, which pretty starkly limits the need to know in deep granular detail who's better at it. The system literally already tells you to fudge it and give proficiency if it seems like a character should have it, or change up the associated attribute (which is the exact same advice in reverse). What's the point of a list of skills on top of that, if everything mundane and attemptable-by-anyone is already covered by "ability check, and throw proficiency on top if it seems appropriate"?

And, if you look at it, that last task you set isn't even mundane; "read the ancient runes" (presumably written in a long-dead language?) is something you do with a spell, Comprehend Languages. 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. Both of those are actually blatantly superpowers, and in fact Tongue of the Sun and Moon is straight up classified as (ex) in 3.5! If you want to do that with an Arcana or History check, you're already saying, yourself, that you expect skills to let martials do superpower, magic-equivalent things, albeit at that point relatively low-level ones.

Not saying the solution has to be skills -in fact, if you couldn't tell from that little diatribe, I think the skill system in this edition is such useless crap that wrangling it into something functional for elevating martials would basically be equivalent to building a system from the ground up anyway - just saying, that's where the impulse comes from. The fact that the system itself is halfheartedly trying to pretend to you that that's how it works already.

It's a special arrow with history that was forged by some of the greatest smiths alive and was notably given as a gift and also never missed and was always returned. The Dwarves wouldn't consider such a thing 'magic' but the elves wouldn't consider heathline or lembas or miruvor to be 'magic' either.

While it's true that Bard is definitely using an artifact weapon against Smaug, I think there's also an unfortunate disconnect with the idea of using Tolkien (or Conan, or even some superhero stories) as a basis. Because while superficially, there's a resemblance there, the fact is, D&D is very much not designed to emulate anything remotely like Tolkien or Conan.

Because in Tolkien, the good guys are the underdogs who spend more time losing fights, barely driving off enemies and then running for their lives, and hiding for their lives, than they ever do winning. In fact, the actual climax of LotR is the good guys losing, not just losing but failing spectacularly, and victory being achieved only by pure luck/divine providence. The climax of the Hobbit is Biblo preventing violent conflict through theft and betrayal, which is then followed by a completely offscreen violent conflict that he has no part in. Nobody ever just casually kills a monster; one hit to the Witch-King takes Merry and Eowyn to the brink of death for weeks and only supernatural healing even gives them a chance to begin to recover, Sam only manages to drive Shelob off using an elven blade and the light of a freaking Silmaril and Frodo is sick for days afterward, they only manage to buy themselves a few hours of breathing room with the Nazgul at Weathertop and Frodo is out of commission for a month turning into a wraith as a consequence, Bard gets probably the only good kill in the legendarium and he still loses half his town first. This is totally incompatible with (the last thirty years at least of) D&D, the fundamental premise of which is "fight monsters and comprehensively win, repeatedly, using the junk we found on the ground as we went."

Now, Conan doesn't have that problem, he frequently wins his fights, but he does have a second issue that is also a thing in a lot of superhero comics, part of why people like Batman can so often punch above their weight class - that being that magic users that are actually beatable by "normal guys" are complete glass cannons. Thoth-Amon can summon a terrible demon that can only be killed by an enchanted sword! But he himself is literally just some guy and you could shank him with a sharpened toothbrush and kill him. Zatanna is in theory the most powerful person on some variants of the Justice League in terms of just how much she could wreck if she tried, but a 9-to-5 white collar guy with dad bod could take her out with a single punch if he got close. These unbelievably powerful magicians are... actually just not that powerful. They could die in a car crash or get thrown from a horse or choke on a shrimp tail. They don't have volcanic lairs full of toxic gases that only they could live in, or sky castles staffed with djinn and aaracokra, they need to take a moment to perform their rituals and incantations to power themselves up or they're incredibly vulnerable.

And while the mage in your party in D&D is... similar, to that (you can still build yourself a pretty impenetrable demiplane, but the immortal layered contingencies of 3e are gone, wizards are much more fragile these days), your enemies are manifestly not. The dragons don't fly over your village past a nice high guard tower, they sulk in sulfur pools that you literally can't exist in for more than thirty seconds without magical protection. The guy summoning a wave of demons to hold you off isn't some old man in a bathrobe, he's another freaking demon with at-will teleporting and three-digit hit points whose hide can't be pierced by mortal weapons. And there is absolutely no mechanical contingency for "target its weak spot and one-shot it." To fight a beholder, you cannot just dodge its eyebeams long enough to make one good javelin throw into its center eye or one good leap with a dagger in hand, the game is simply not designed in a way that allows that and never has been. You must, instead, be able to continue to resist its attacks, continue to get to it, and continue to hit it for multiple rounds even as it disables your magic boots and ducks through sheer vertical tunnels too smooth for any normal person to climb. You must be able to chase the teleporting demon-summoning demon around the icy fragment of hell spilling out of the nether portal that's dealing 3d8 cold damage every turn. You must be able to chase the Roc Lord into his floating fortress through sheets of gale-force wind and constant lightning while rain elementals pelt you with their searing steam breath.

Now, you can absolutely do that while being a "fighter," in ways that don't feel like casting spells. But you cannot do that and feel anything like a Tolkien character, and you cannot do it and not be clearly superhuman.

So, to sort of riff on this notion. Can I mention how strange the flow of powers are in 5e?
[...] the end result is to even begin to feel like the badass martial type you’ve always imagined your character as you have to be moderately high level. Which is when everyone is saying you need to be superhuman. This is a fair bit of a disconnect in expectations, I feel.

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.

[Pex]

But again, what does that have to do with the skill system? What makes "you get mundane raise dead-alike from enough Heal investment" better than "there's a mundane raise dead-alike that characters can pick with slots they get". Because it sort of seems like the answer is just "martials need to get abilities in a different way from casters to satisfy people who complain about martials being too much like casters", and my take on that is that you can't really satisfy those people.

Why do spellcasters have spell slots? Why do bards have inspiration dice? Why does any class have any game mechanic? It just is. It's the game mechanic proposed to manipulate the ability. If a DM cares enough to give an in game campaign reason why spell slots exists, special skill uses exist, hooray for the DM, but it doesn't matter. There doesn't need to be a reason. 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. It exists so that the person who originated the idea didn't have to make up his own game mechanics to express the desired intent. It doesn't have to be the skill system as the Only One True Way to express warriors doing fantastic things. It was simply an idea of one way it could be done as opposed to the 3E Tome of Battle maneuver system, which even though they weren't spells for some people they were close enough to be like spells it ticked them off and wanted something else. Using the skill system is the something else idea of how it could work.

[Brookshw]

The problem is that these fables and folktales invariably tend to either be about (a) people that are not fully human, (b) people that did acquire magic of some kind, or (c) people who were entirely human but that ultimately didn't do anything all that outlandish by D&D martial standards anyway. That belies the assertion that D&D martials can just do enough pushups to eventually equal casters.

D) There existed mythical heroes that couldn't handle magic thrown against them, and needed the magic of others to survive (e.g., Achilles, despite having what we could probably parallel as the benefits of a magical location, was really great at hitting people, but when Scamander throws a wave at him, he's screwed and gets saved through divine intervention).

[Psyren]

D) There existed mythical heroes that couldn't handle magic thrown against them, and needed the magic of others to survive (e.g., Achilles, despite having what we could probably parallel as the benefits of a magical location, was really great at hitting people, but when Scamander throws a wave at him, he's screwed and gets saved through divine intervention).

I'd put that under (b) honestly. I never said they always win in their stories after all.

While it's true that Bard is definitely using an artifact weapon against Smaug, I think there's also an unfortunate disconnect with the idea of using Tolkien (or Conan, or even some superhero stories) as a basis. Because while superficially, there's a resemblance there, the fact is, D&D is very much not designed to emulate anything remotely like Tolkien or Conan.

Because in Tolkien, the good guys are the underdogs who spend more time losing fights, barely driving off enemies and then running for their lives, and hiding for their lives, than they ever do winning. In fact, the actual climax of LotR is the good guys losing, not just losing but failing spectacularly, and victory being achieved only by pure luck/divine providence. The climax of the Hobbit is Biblo preventing violent conflict through theft and betrayal, which is then followed by a completely offscreen violent conflict that he has no part in. Nobody ever just casually kills a monster; one hit to the Witch-King takes Merry and Eowyn to the brink of death for weeks and only supernatural healing even gives them a chance to begin to recover, Sam only manages to drive Shelob off using an elven blade and the light of a freaking Silmaril and Frodo is sick for days afterward, they only manage to buy themselves a few hours of breathing room with the Nazgul at Weathertop and Frodo is out of commission for a month turning into a wraith as a consequence, Bard gets probably the only good kill in the legendarium and he still loses half his town first. This is totally incompatible with (the last thirty years at least of) D&D, the fundamental premise of which is "fight monsters and comprehensively win, repeatedly, using the junk we found on the ground as we went."

Now, Conan doesn't have that problem, he frequently wins his fights, but he does have a second issue that is also a thing in a lot of superhero comics, part of why people like Batman can so often punch above their weight class - that being that magic users that are actually beatable by "normal guys" are complete glass cannons. Thoth-Amon can summon a terrible demon that can only be killed by an enchanted sword! But he himself is literally just some guy and you could shank him with a sharpened toothbrush and kill him. Zatanna is in theory the most powerful person on some variants of the Justice League in terms of just how much she could wreck if she tried, but a 9-to-5 white collar guy with dad bod could take her out with a single punch if he got close. These unbelievably powerful magicians are... actually just not that powerful. They could die in a car crash or get thrown from a horse or choke on a shrimp tail. They don't have volcanic lairs full of toxic gases that only they could live in, or sky castles staffed with djinn and aaracokra, they need to take a moment to perform their rituals and incantations to power themselves up or they're incredibly vulnerable.

And while the mage in your party in D&D is... similar, to that (you can still build yourself a pretty impenetrable demiplane, but the immortal layered contingencies of 3e are gone, wizards are much more fragile these days), your enemies are manifestly not. The dragons don't fly over your village past a nice high guard tower, they sulk in sulfur pools that you literally can't exist in for more than thirty seconds without magical protection. The guy summoning a wave of demons to hold you off isn't some old man in a bathrobe, he's another freaking demon with at-will teleporting and three-digit hit points whose hide can't be pierced by mortal weapons. And there is absolutely no mechanical contingency for "target its weak spot and one-shot it." To fight a beholder, you cannot just dodge its eyebeams long enough to make one good javelin throw into its center eye or one good leap with a dagger in hand, the game is simply not designed in a way that allows that and never has been. You must, instead, be able to continue to resist its attacks, continue to get to it, and continue to hit it for multiple rounds even as it disables your magic boots and ducks through sheer vertical tunnels too smooth for any normal person to climb. You must be able to chase the teleporting demon-summoning demon around the icy fragment of hell spilling out of the nether portal that's dealing 3d8 cold damage every turn. You must be able to chase the Roc Lord into his floating fortress through sheets of gale-force wind and constant lightning while rain elementals pelt you with their searing steam breath.

Now, you can absolutely do that while being a "fighter," in ways that don't feel like casting spells. But you cannot do that and feel anything like a Tolkien character, and you cannot do it and not be clearly superhuman.

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.