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Are you happy with the Battlemaster and Fighter Maneuvers? Other discussions as well.
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<blockquote data-quote="Chaltab" data-source="post: 6288502" data-attributes="member: 6775806"><p>It's at the heart of D&D now, yes. This was not always the case.</p><p></p><p></p><p>You're not wrong about this.</p><p></p><p></p><p>You're oversimplifying things. Nothing one individual character within the fiction could do was ever as intricate as the spell system, but again, Fighters and other classes had other resources than "I hit it with my sword." </p><p> </p><p>The d20 system collapsed a lot of mechanical cruft into a unified mechanic, but every class still has class features. There are things that you can only get with twenty levels of a given class, even if that's simply the extra Feats the Fighter gets. 3.X also made spell aquisition much easier, which drastically broke the power curve between casters and fighter.</p><p></p><p>You're right when you say that the 'magic is different than everything else' paradigm leads to lopsided game design, but...</p><p></p><p></p><p>I don't see how you're measuring the radicalness of these alternatives. If anything they're equally drastic changes, and I'd argue there's far more precedent for exception-based-design all around the board than their is for the reverse.</p><p></p><p>But even accepting your calculus, what I don't get is this: You want a game without classes and niche protection. You want a unified core mechanic that's the same for everyone. There have been games with these things for decades--but D&D only came close to this with 3E and backed away from the lack of niche protection with 4E. </p><p></p><p>But <em>4E did unify the mechanics</em>--everyone rolls Attack vs Defense instead of a defensive saving throw to mitigate a spell effect. A lot of people <strong>*did not like this*</strong> though I'm not one of them. Clearly more than a few players want physical attacking and spellcasting to have a different mechanical representation. To think that something even more divorced from the history of D&D like free-form magic as opposed to distinct spells would go over just doesn't bear up.</p><p></p><p>So the question remains: why not play something that does what you want it to? If 4E was rejected by a large portion of the D&D community, what hope could D&D Next have if you take it further (or just as far, from your perspective) in the opposite direction?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Chaltab, post: 6288502, member: 6775806"] It's at the heart of D&D now, yes. This was not always the case. You're not wrong about this. You're oversimplifying things. Nothing one individual character within the fiction could do was ever as intricate as the spell system, but again, Fighters and other classes had other resources than "I hit it with my sword." The d20 system collapsed a lot of mechanical cruft into a unified mechanic, but every class still has class features. There are things that you can only get with twenty levels of a given class, even if that's simply the extra Feats the Fighter gets. 3.X also made spell aquisition much easier, which drastically broke the power curve between casters and fighter. You're right when you say that the 'magic is different than everything else' paradigm leads to lopsided game design, but... I don't see how you're measuring the radicalness of these alternatives. If anything they're equally drastic changes, and I'd argue there's far more precedent for exception-based-design all around the board than their is for the reverse. But even accepting your calculus, what I don't get is this: You want a game without classes and niche protection. You want a unified core mechanic that's the same for everyone. There have been games with these things for decades--but D&D only came close to this with 3E and backed away from the lack of niche protection with 4E. But [I]4E did unify the mechanics[/I]--everyone rolls Attack vs Defense instead of a defensive saving throw to mitigate a spell effect. A lot of people [B]*did not like this*[/B] though I'm not one of them. Clearly more than a few players want physical attacking and spellcasting to have a different mechanical representation. To think that something even more divorced from the history of D&D like free-form magic as opposed to distinct spells would go over just doesn't bear up. So the question remains: why not play something that does what you want it to? If 4E was rejected by a large portion of the D&D community, what hope could D&D Next have if you take it further (or just as far, from your perspective) in the opposite direction? [/QUOTE]
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Community
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Are you happy with the Battlemaster and Fighter Maneuvers? Other discussions as well.
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