D&D General The Crab Bucket Fallacy

[CreamCloud0]

i think this thread is an example of the very phenomenon, people aren't advocating to improve non-bear barbarians or create the 'fighter+support' warlord and improve the fighter in it's own ways, they're saying to bring them down to the level of the rest of the weaker options.

 

[Umbran]

No I think the name is apt because the people using that argument are using a bad argument.

In the world of actual logical fallacies: the Fallacy fallacy - the assumption that, if the argument used to support a conclusion is fallacious (or otherwise wrong/poor) then the conclusion itself is false.

Folks can be entirely correct, but present poor arguments to support their positions.

 

[Clint_L]

Whether it's a fallacy or not, I think the basic issue the OP is getting at is just the entrenchment of the Martial/Caster Gap (npi). People are able to claim, with a straight face, that the Fighter (or Rogue or Barbarian) is equal to the Wizard (or Cleric, Druid, etc)...

So, this is my problem: the implication, in your post and that of the OP, that those of us who don't agree with your position must be stupid, confused, or lying. Is it even remotely possible that intelligent people might have the same facts as you and come to a different conclusion?

That's why this argument keeps going in a cycle: instead of accepting that their opinion is just an opinion, a lot of folks come from a place of absolute rightness and won't accept the possibility that they are wrong.

My opinion might be wrong. But you aren't going to convince me by insulting me.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

It's not promising when a thread starts with a straw man argument, as Snarff pointed out. I don't even want to talk about a warlord class, as that's just not happening. As for fighters and wizards...we have plenty of threads on that already. Suffice to say that not all of us see the massive disparity that some very active posters on the subject do.

The reason why I provide only a paraphrase of the argument is because I did not save every instance of the argument I saw used. Next time I run into the argument I will post a copy to this thread so people can stop talking about it being a straw man.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

The reason why I provide only a paraphrase of the argument is because I did not save every instance of the argument I saw used. Next time I run into the argument I will post a copy to this thread so people can stop talking about it being a straw man.

There is always an example of someone, somewhere, making an argument. That said, you lead with, and concentrated on, the martial/magic "divide." Here's the OP-

I've been planning on making this thread for a while ever since I binged martial/caster balance discussions over a few weeks and read about 300 pages of discussion on the subject. ...

The entirety of your post (other than a single sentence aside at the end) was devoted to this subject. And as people tell you, the reason for the objection is because ... some people don't want magic in their martials. And some people do. And that's okay. It's fine to have different preferences.

It's less fine to dress up this difference of opinion as a logical fallacy in order to call people you disagree with as arguing in bad faith, or irrational.

As for the issue of balance, people can also say, in good faith, that they don't want everything balanced. Or that they want to use a different set of comparators than you do (for example, they want all the fighter subclasses balanced with each other, but don't see the need to balance monk subclasses perfectly with sorcerer subclasses). Again, this isn't a fallacy of logic (either formal or informal), it's just a difference in how they approach the issue.

 

[overgeeked]

The reason why I provide only a paraphrase of the argument is because I did not save every instance of the argument I saw used. Next time I run into the argument I will post a copy to this thread so people can stop talking about it being a straw man.

It won't help. You could provide a mathematical proof and they'd still argue.

 

[Tony Vargas]

First of all, I don't understand the conversation you were having with yourself in the first part there. Both TSR's and 4e's solutions solve the problem, they just aren't popular. Personally, I felt 4e's method made magic less cool because it worked exactly the same as not magic, but that's just my preference.

Secondly, I agree that multiple options should be supported. But unless there's some verbiage in the book that makes it clear everything isn't core simultaneously, people will assume it is, especially if it's in the main book, and you'll have that extra fun experience of explaining to your players that they can't use everything in the PH just because it's there.

In reverse order:

IDK, I have no problem with that conversation. "This is the setting & campaign I want to run, these options fit it, these others don't. Would you rather play something else, I have quite the backlog? Or one of you could run..." "oh? No? OK...."

But, yeah, the point I wasn't making too well, was TSR didn't fix the martial/caster gap - it had balance, of it's own sort from the beginning... magic-users were under-powered and fragile at low levels, wildly OP at high levels, and in-between the grew from contributing to dominating. Overall, the whole MU experience, was arguably balanced.

3.0 broke that by making Casters OP all the time.

So, this is my problem: the implication, in your post and that of the OP, that those of us who don't agree with your position must be stupid, confused, or lying. Is it even remotely possible that intelligent people might have the same facts as you and come to a different conclusion?

That's why this argument keeps going in a cycle: instead of accepting that their opinion is just an opinion, a lot of folks comes from a place of absolute rightness and won't accept the possibility that they are wrong.

My opinion might be wrong. But you aren't going to convince me by insulting me.

Insulting eachother, even being impolite, is against the CoC. Being stupid, confused, or lying, is not.

And, no, I don't agree that's the implication. There shouldn't be an implication about the people making an argument, the argument should be judged on it's merits. The OP pointed out a potential flaw in reasoning, whether it meets the definition of a fallacy or not, and tried for a catchy label.

Anyway, yes, intelligent people can look at the facts of the Martial/Caster Gap (itself, just another catchy label) and reach different conclusions: that it's not a problem, that it's a highly-desireable feature because casters should be superior, that the DM can just compensate for it, or that it should be fixed in a variety of very different mutually-incompatible ways that may well cause issue of their own.

But just denying it, like, "no, casters do not get a large number of varied and powerful daily resources" or, "sure, but martials also get a large number of varied and powerful daily resources?" No. Nobody does that.

 

[overgeeked]

You can buff the non-casters without giving them magic. Just sayin'.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The thing I mostly see regarding Warlords is people insisting it is just a Fighter sub, but if you let it do everything a Warlord should be able able to do on top of the core Fighter abilities, they say "Whoa! That's kind of OP, dude."

Yeah I feel like that hits on an additional fallacy, but I don’t have a pithy name or definition for it yet.

I imagine there is already a named fallacy for the argument that thing a is newer than thing b, and they have some notable similarities, so thing a is actually just a subset of thing b, but that isn’t the whole thing, either.

But yeah the warlord really isn’t a subclass concept. You can get some of it with BM and PDK, but not the whole deal. PDK probably looks better with the UA7 Fighter, but that’s even more tangential.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The entirety of your post (other than a single sentence aside at the end) was devoted to this subject. And as people tell you, the reason for the objection is because ... some people don't want magic in their martials

I don't see how that can be it, at all.

For one thing, 5e already gives you magic in your martials, in the PH alone, we have the EK, the AT, all the monks except the Open Hand (and that's iffy), and the Totem Barbarian. There's totally magic in the martials.

That neither satisfies people bothered by the Martial/Caster Gap, nor does it outrage those who support it.

The Warlord concept is basically non-magical. There's room in for some magic, like, via MCing or feats or a sub-class like EK, but the concept - and all the implementations of the only official example we have, the 4e Warlord - gains no magical class abilities at all.