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D&D General One thing I hate about the Sorcerer

Yaarel

He Mage
That's where I want to move to, personally. I don't enjoy zero to hero. It has gotten played out for me because it's the default not just for games, but for most media. I much more enjoy starting as someone who is competent and then becomes great.
I probably agree with you.

I arrive there, because I want level 1 to be able to actualize an intended character concept. ... And "zero" isnt enough design space for a character concept.

With 2024, the combination of species, background, and class, are each and together substantial design spaces to flesh out an interesting concept. ... But it is no longer a "zero" character.
 

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Could Batman punch a T-Rex to death? I don't think so,* but a high level D&D martial can.

* (I'm sure someone will soon cite a comic where this happened. Comics are often silly.)
 

Minigiant

Legend
Supporter
Could Batman punch a T-Rex to death? I don't think so,* but a high level D&D martial can.

* (I'm sure someone will soon cite a comic where this happened. Comics are often silly.)
He throw a batarang an OHKO a trex.

That's the thing. A T3 mundane would have so many attacks and deal so much damage per hit the game would be not be fun. And T4...
 

Remathilis

Legend
Such things were more prevalent.

In the edition that must not be named.

Floating ruin-cities and shards of ancient evil and fairy-rings that take you to another world and the plain fact that all that is, is alive and the universe itself growing an immune system to fight off Things That Should Not Be and...

It's quite possible to do it. And as soon as you do, particular people start complaining.
Believe me, that was my favorite thing any Nentir/PoL land. It felt freaking magical and dark simultaneously. A little tweaking and it would have been my favorite.

(Note this is regardless of the edition it was released for.)
 

James Gasik

We don't talk about Pun-Pun
Supporter
Unfortunately, this is where we run into an almost-surely irreconcilable conflict.

To you (and to me, and various others), there's nothing wrong with this. Someone can be "mundane" and still do things that are the stuff of myth and legend, because they're Just That Good. Such characters truly are still mundane. They've just refined mundane skill until it becomes something legendary, something that can spit in the eye of IRL physics.

To others--including several people in this thread--such an idea is not merely implausible, it is inherently self-contradictory. To be "mundane" IS to be absolutely, inherently incapable of feats of myth and legend. To be "mundane" is simply...to have really hard limits* and never, under any circumstances, any ability to exceed those limits. Exceeding those limits is what defines being supernatural, and exceeding them by simply accumulating enough mundane skill is a contradiction in terms, like saying one could assemble enough dryness to produce water or enough darkness to produce light.

As stated, I think this conflict is irreconcilable. Some folks just cannot, under any circumstances, accept "mundane skill that transcends the limits we normally ascribe to mundanity," even in a world where non-magical beings are doing things that aren't possible by Earth physics. In their eyes, there is a bright, hard, absolutely uncrossable line between "mundane" and "supernatural," and nothing, genuinely nothing whatsoever, can cross over that line without having an explicitly and inherently supernatural explanation for doing so.

Unfortunately, that group has almost always been both very vocal and very motivated, and often has had folks on their side actually doing the leadership of D&D design. As a result, their opinion usually wins out, and we're left with the unhealing wound of martial/caster disparity.

*Often, these limits are even harsher than the actual limits of IRL physics, as in, they're limits real live humans could break or have already broken. But that's a can of worms for another thread.
A good example of this was Epic skill uses in 3e, where a grandmaster of a mundane skill could accomplish legendary feats. I know a lot of people who looked at something like this and immediately cried foul. Of course it didn't help that 3e was built in a way that optimizers could say "what's that? A DC 60 Diplomacy check? Hold my ale!"

EDIT: hit save by accident too early.
 






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