D&D 5E Casters vs Martials: Part 2 - The Mundane Limit

[DND_Reborn]

Doing that. Making my own game instead of one shackled by tradition-bound bad design.

Great! When you're done share it, maybe others will want to use it as well.

It's not taking stabs. It's accurately describing the crowd that kool-aid man's their way through the wall whenever someone tries to make a strong fantasy martial.

And who is that then? Maybe people in the other thread simply said "No way, man, that is lame," but I don't recall anything like it...

 

[DND_Reborn]

Yeah how 4e attempted to solve the "caster vs martial" gap was really in the "if you can't beat them...join them", through the use of rituals.

Most of the spells we traditionally associate with "casters can do things martials can't do", ala divinations or scrying or teleports....were rituals in 4e, and rituals could be done by anyone with a feat.

So in 4e, if you were a high level fighter and didn't want to get whacky....you didn't take ritual caster. If you were a martial that wanted to do stuff like caster did, you took the feat and then could choose various magical effects.


This was an effective system, I just think a lot of people didn't like how rituals were implemented in 4e. Honestly a more polished ritual system could have been a great way to do it in 5e, and would have given a lot more balance between casters and martials.

So, via rituals martials in 4E basically just became a different form of caster???

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

So in 4e, if you were a high level fighter and didn't want to get whacky....you didn't take ritual caster. If you were a martial that wanted to do stuff like caster did, you took the feat and then could choose various magical effects.

This was an effective system, I just think a lot of people didn't like how rituals were implemented in 4e. Honestly a more polished ritual system could have been a great way to do it in 5e, and would have given a lot more balance between casters and martials.

It also hinged on grid combat powers not being so open ended mechanically.

In a sense, the base chasis of spellcasters was nerfed (although they often got ritual caster for free) such that "normal spells" were much more mechanically limited.

However, from a fiction stand point I think they still captured a lot of the flavor of of those abilities you want to embody in a high level mythical combat. You still had people polymorphing, creating walls of fire, teleporting, summoning, etc.

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

So, via rituals martials in 4E basically just became a different form of caster???

4e basically seperated all the big narrative effecting spells into rituals -- long range teleport, overland flight, planar travel, divination, long lasting water breathing, permanenet wall building, etc. Rituals took longer to cast.

Traditional spell casters got "regular spells" that allowed them to do some things rituals could do but in a more limited manner -- short term flight, short range teleport, short duration walls, etc.

You only needed the Ritual Caster Feat and usually trained in Arcana, Religion, or Nature depending on the type of ritual to cast Rituals (and sometimes expensive ingrediants). Many traditional spellcasters got Ritual Caster for free, so normally no one else really needed to get it.

Martials could get trained in Arcana and get the Ritual Caster Feat fairly easily if they wanted to. Totally by choice of course.

So, yes this would turn them into a specific kind of spellcaster. They wouldn't be strictly martial then anymore, although all their combat power would basically still be martial.

This was to allow access to these narrative spells regardless of party composition. Of course, it would be trivally easy to restrict Ritual Caster to traditional spell caster classes for a different flavor.

In the PH, I don't think there were any automatically gained rituals at higher level either. So the choice of what Rituals to include in your game was entirely up to the DM / table consensus.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So, via rituals martials in 4E basically just became a different form of caster???

Depends on what you mean by "a different form of caster." Here's the feat text from 4e's Ritual Caster feat.

Heroic Tier
Prerequisite: Trained in Arcana or Religion
Benefit: You can master and perform rituals of your level or lower. See Chapter 10 for information on acquiring, mastering, and performing rituals. Even though some rituals use the Heal skill or the Nature skill, the Arcana skill or the Religion skill is required to understand how to perform rituals.

So, you had to already have training in the skills related to magic. (Keep in mind that, in 4e, all skills were intentionally very broad: being trained in Arcana meant being both informed about arcane magic and able to interact with it to some extent.) Once you have the Ritual Caster feat, you can spend money to learn rituals, which then only cost you the material cost for performing it. Anyone, even people who don't have the Ritual Caster feat, can use a ritual written onto a scroll, but ritual scrolls have a higher gold cost than learning a ritual so you can cast it yourself.

If "trained in Arcana or Religion" and "able to perform non-combat forms of magic, at some financial cost" qualifies a person as "becom[ing] a different form of caster," then yes, you're correct. I would note, though, that classes traditionally associated with spellcasting--Wizards, Clerics, Druids, and Bards--all got both the Ritual Caster feat for free as a class feature, and Wizard and Bard could even ignore the ritual component cost of casting a ritual (but not other costs, like the diamonds for resurrection) at least once a day.

 

[Maxperson]

The problem is, they tried that. And now people crow about how terrible a decision it was. How it ruined the game. How it made Fighters able to shoot lightning bolts out of their hindquarters or Warlords able to shout hands back on or whatever other nonsense they felt like spewing about 4e. (That last one actually got used by an actual designer--Mearls--in an actual, official podcast about D&D Next. He immediately said he was joking, or rather "I'm being ridiculous," but for God's sake, did he need to repeat tired, naughty word edition-warring on official channels?)

You can't put this genie back in the bottle. There's a too-vocal, and too-influential, minority of players that really do want spellcasters to simply be more powerful than non-spellcasters--or, at the very least, to be more innately, by the rules powerful, because (as they assert) the DM should always be able to fix any and all intra-party imbalance, and if they can't, well, they're just not a good enough DM yet.

I think it's less that they wat spellcasters to be more powerful than non-spellcasters and more that a martial type who gets so good that his effects are clearly supernatural, should have those effects labelled supernatural. A lot of the abilities on the list the OP put forth would be fine as abilities where the marital character transcends the natural, but not as a purely mundane ability. There is no purely mundane ability that's going to create an earthquake if you hit the ground.

 

[Stalker0]

A lot of the abilities on the list the OP put forth would be fine as abilities where the marital character transcends the natural, but not as a purely mundane ability. There is no purely mundane ability that's going to create an earthquake if you hit the ground.

And this right here is exactly what this thread is about, finding where that line between mundane and supernatural. So you feel that the "earthquake" like effect crosses the line of "mundane"....perfect. What other effects do you think push the line just a bit too far?

 

[DND_Reborn]

Thanks @bert1001 fka bert1000 and @EzekielRaiden for the explanations!

usually trained in Arcana, Religion, or Nature

LOL, ok this is scary (but understandable) since in the 5E mod my group's been developing for nearly a year, we made Arcana, Nature, and Religion the spellcasting skills! In summary your spellcasting proficiency bonus is based on your bonus in these skills (which ranges from +2 to +12).

Wizards, Bards (now a half-caster), EK and AT use Intelligence (Arcana)
Clerics and Paladins (half-caster) use Charisma (Religion)
Druids and Rangers (half-caster) use Wisdom (Nature)

Although I don't think the "ultra-ease via rituals" magical bend of 4E would appeal to me, I think a lot of the concepts match up to what we've been working on for months, so that is pretty cool. I know linking those skills is no great insight or anything, but still cool.

If "trained in Arcana or Religion" and "able to perform non-combat forms of magic, at some financial cost" qualifies a person as "becom[ing] a different form of caster," then yes, you're correct. I would note, though, that classes traditionally associated with spellcasting--Wizards, Clerics, Druids, and Bards--all got both the Ritual Caster feat for free as a class feature, and Wizard and Bard could even ignore the ritual component cost of casting a ritual (but not other costs, like the diamonds for resurrection) at least once a day.

Yes, I would call it a "different form of caster", but after hearing how it works not to the extent I was imagining before.

 

[Asisreo]

It's funny. I went back and looked at the high level Fighter powers in the Player's Handbook and Martial Power 1 and 2 and they are a lot more mundane than I remember actually.

"Come and Get It" and 1 higher level version of it are the only powers I could find that stretched beyond even the heroic idea.

Yeah, I feel like people advocating for 4e as the pinnacle of bridging the gap between martial and caster either haven't played high-level 4e or never noticed alot of their abilities aren't actually as epic as they say 5e should be.

I feel like people confuse it with Pathfinder 2e where your martials do get these spell-less unique and "legendary" feats. Like how Rogues can simply be undetected by anything using special senses.

And PF2E is an excellent system in its own right. But most people can attest that it isn't exactly D&D.

You could attempt to port the system into 5e, but it's alot harder than just a direct translation of one feat from PF2E to 5E. The system has training prerequisites for some feats and class specific feats. This is a bit harder to implement because there's no degree of skill learning in 5e beyond none, skilled, and expertise (maybe JoAT). But those are also usually class-specific beyond skilled. The reason there's no more granularity is because a semi-recent design philosophy for 5e is to have bonuses as simple as proficiency bonus or advantage.

Pf2e is a harder system to play and run if you have a hard time adjusting to very dynamic situations. 5e's simplicity is a boon and a curse depending on the observer.

 

[Minigiant]

So, via rituals martials in 4E basically just became a different form of caster???

In laymans term, 4e made noncombat magic into basically scrolls. Rituals were basically expensive scrolls anyone could use.

You could take a feat to learn to them and do them.

So it was more like Use Magic Device than being a spellcaster.