D&D General One thing I hate about the Sorcerer

[Zubatcarteira]

Give me an example of such a thing.

The Rogue's Evasion ability lets them dodge point blank dynamite explosions with no cover, lightning bolts from clouds and hails of bullets from automatic rifles.

 

[Micah Sweet]

What about "I was born an orc"?

Orcs can lift heavier things than a human of equivalent "strength". What else makes them supernatural?

 

[Micah Sweet]

The Rogue's Evasion ability lets them dodge point blank dynamite explosions with no cover, lightning bolts from clouds and hails of bullets from automatic rifles.

Good point. I actually hate evasion as written, but taking away player power that right there in the book is a dangerous proposition, and often not worth it socially.

 

[Maxperson]

But martials DID have power in that system right? Quite a bit of it, Is there any reason WHY you couldn’t establish powerful AEDU martials in 5e alongside the current spellcasters as they are?

4e gave martials non-traditional magic to explain the increase in power beyond the mundane.

 

[Maxperson]

At the risk of sounding single-minded, this reminds me of the way the presence of wizards makes clerics and warlocks feel weird to me.

You can either learn to do a thing on your own, or you can learn to do a thing with extra help - but the extra help doesn't actually make you any better at doing the thing than you would have been if you had learned to do the thing on your own.

Clerical magic isn't something that can be learned on your own, so needing the outside help makes sense. As for wizards vs. warlocks, the way I do it is that in my game the vast majority of people are incapable of learning magic. They don't have that inborn spark that it takes to make them capable of learning spells. Sorcerers are those rare people for whom the spark is a bonfire, so the magic just comes to them intuitively and they don't need to learn it.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

This is close, but not quite on target.

" 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."

The bolded is untrue of the vast majority of us. We are just saying that once you exceed those limits, the ability becomes supernatural. Exceeding natural limits is by definition supernatural. We're fine with martials honing their skills through mundane means and then transcending into the supernatural. It's just that the ability to cut a person in half with a sword swing from 20 feet away with a sword swing is never going to be a mundane ability.

 

[TwoSix]

Clerical magic isn't something that can be learned on your own, so needing the outside help makes sense. As for wizards vs. warlocks, the way I do it is that in my game the vast majority of people are incapable of learning magic. They don't have that inborn spark that it takes to make them capable of learning spells. Sorcerers are those rare people for whom the spark is a bonfire, so the magic just comes to them intuitively and they don't need to learn it.

Agreed, that's definitely the way I view the general class concepts for D&D-like settings.

I always think it's important to remember that the choices that are open to you, the player, are NOT the choices that are open to NPCs, or even PCs, within the fiction. Characters within the setting have backstories and restrictions that will often preclude them from becoming most, or even all, classes.

If your PC isn't a wizard (or EK or AT), it's a plausible (and even probable) backstory that your character could never have become a wizard, because they don't have the "gift".

 

[Maxperson]

Even Batman is a superhero, maybe in the tier of 9 thru 12. He might even be multiclass, Fighter, Rogue, maybe some Monk, plus levels in a tech-flavor Artificer.

A funny line in the Spiderman movies is Peter asking Batman what his superpower is. He answers, "Im rich." But this tracks with 5e too, with the total character level corresponding with wealth.

All of those tech gadgets that let Batman be the equal of superheroes with powers are the equivalent of supernatural abilities. He throws a gadget that explodes instead of a fireball. Both of those are beyond what someone can do naturally no matter how hard they train. Neither of them are mundane abilities.

 

[TwoSix]

The bolded is untrue of the vast majority of us. We are just saying that once you exceed those limits, the ability becomes supernatural. Exceeding natural limits is by definition supernatural. We're fine with martials honing their skills through mundane means and then transcending into the supernatural. It's just that the ability to cut a person in half with a sword swing from 20 feet away with a sword swing is never going to be a mundane ability.

Yea, I agree here.

I'm with @EzekielRaiden in that I'm totally good with a farmboy growing up into a demon-slaying badass who can swing a sword and destroy boulders with the shockwave. No problem with having One-Punch Man in D&D. I love the whole general idea of "martial power."

But being able to do those things is obviously supernatural. The terminology problem I have is that people often equate "supernatural" with "derived from magic, especially arcane magic". Being able to chop through boulders with your sword is not something that can be counterspelled, or removed by an antimagic field.

Within the fiction, the type of magic used by wizards, clerics, warlocks, etc., is only a small fraction of the expanse of magical and supernatural abilities that exist within the default D&D setting.

 

[CreamCloud0]

This is close, but not quite on target.

" 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."

The bolded is untrue of the vast majority of us. We are just saying that once you exceed those limits, the ability becomes supernatural. Exceeding natural limits is by definition supernatural. We're fine with martials honing their skills through mundane means and then transcending into the supernatural. It's just that the ability to cut a person in half with a sword swing from 20 feet away with a sword swing is never going to be a mundane ability.

i'd rather martials were designed to be 'extraordinary' rather than 'supernatural', an exaggeration of what's possible with real world physics, you can produce wind pressure by swinging a sword IRL if only a little, enhancing that to produce a tangible damaging effect feels like it should be possible in fantasyland without justifying it with some form of magic to me.

again, ancient dragons manage to exist without using magic to prevent themselves crumpling under their own weight, i don't see why martials don't get that same fantasy world suspension of disbelief for their strength and abilities.