D&D General What does the mundane high level fighter look like? [+]

[Micah Sweet]

Inconsistent with hp usage, sure for both good and ill.

If a complaint is "Creatures have too much hp, such that the class whose sole focus is on killing things can't efficiently kill things" one solution is to go through and retune every creature's statblock, and all spells and abilities that interact with hp. Easy job, right?

Another is providing some limited way for the "solely focused on killing things" class to bypass hp and actually kill things.

If it is no more complex or unbalanced than existing spell mechanics, I don't see an issue.

As far as complaints about verisimilitude,
1. You haven't made any sort of argument for how such abilities would be problematic
2. People can care deeply about verisimilitude and have different opinions from you about what sorts of game elements should be problematic for it. Framing such a discussion in terms of "cares about verisimilitude" and "does not care about verisimilitude" is unfair and in most cases, simply untrue.

I'd much rather reduce hit points across the board, but your other refutations of my post have merit, and I accept your rebuke.

 

[Gammadoodler]

I'd much rather reduce hit points across the board, but your other refutations of my post have merit, and I accept your rebuke.

I'd likely be ok with a global hp reduction as well.

From the perspective of helping out martials, it kinda suffers from the same issue as 1hp minions, in that it rather benefits aoe casters more than martials, absent significant re-tuning of spell damage and save mechanics.

If there is a Goldilocks zone of creature HP/defenses, martial damage/lethality, and spell damage, I think it'd be awesome to find it. Just not sure how realistic that is.

 

[Tony Vargas]

If there is a Goldilocks zone of creature HP/defenses, martial damage/lethality, and spell damage, I think it'd be awesome to find it. Just not sure how realistic that is.

There can't really be one that takes spell damage into account if spells are n/day, everything else isn't, and days are not of a fixed (or maybe normal distribution average) length.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Inconsistent with hp usage, sure for both good and ill.

If a complaint is "Creatures have too much hp, such that the class whose sole focus is on killing things can't efficiently kill things" one solution is to go through and retune every creature's statblock, and all spells and abilities that interact with hp. Easy job, right?

Another is providing some limited way for the "solely focused on killing things" class to bypass hp and actually kill things.

Or you know, give them (perhaps conditional or limited) ability to deal more HP damage! I really don't get this desire to invent mechanics for things that already have mechanics.

If it is no more complex or unbalanced than existing spell mechanics, I don't see an issue.

But spells that are about dealing damage still do it via hit points.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Or you know, give them (perhaps conditional or limited) ability to deal more HP damage! I really don't get this desire to invent mechanics for things that already have mechanics.

Because sometimes some mechanics aren't one size fits all for the purposes we're working toward.

Like having multiple HP is accepting the possibility the thing won't die when hit.

 

[pemerton]

This is not an issue of class balance. This expression is inelegant for the reasons @Crimson Longinus stated, and has issues with verisimilitude besides.

I know, a lot of people don't care about that. But I certainly do.

That issue with Evasion/Uncanny Dodge is just as much a problem for me as this proposed fighter "fix" would be. I prefer abilities to have a grounding in a coherent setting.

As @Gammadoodler posted, framing this in terms of verisimilitude is a red herring at best. Verisimilitude is about whether the fiction - in tone, theme, implied and express content, etc - "hangs together" as a representation of a fantasy world. It's not about minutiae of mechanical subsystems, or certainly not per se about such things.

Page 29 of the Basic 5e PDF, setting out the wizard class, has the headings "Scholars of the Arcane" and "The Lure of Knowledge", but nothing in the rules requires a wizard to be proficient in Arcana, or even in any knowledge skill (they can start with Insight and Investigate, for instance). A rogue need not have Acrobatics or Athletics (and likewise can start with Insight and Investigate, and say Perception and Performance for their other two).

A fighter can start with low CON yet Second Wind; can have terrible DEX and always attack last yet have Extra Attack; terrible DEX and no Perception or Insight proficiency yet take Protection fighting style; etc. Remarkable Athlete doesn't require any minimum stats or proficiencies. Gating some mooted enhancement of Remarkable Athlete behind a proficiency requirement is imposing a design stricture that does not operate elsewhere in the game.

Likewise for insisting that a fighter player can only kill by dealing hp damage, while other classes (eg the wizard's Power Word Kill) do not conform to any such requirement.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

As @Gammadoodler posted, framing this in terms of verisimilitude is a red herring at best. Verisimilitude is about whether the fiction - in tone, theme, implied and express content, etc - "hangs together" as a representation of a fantasy world. It's not about minutiae of mechanical subsystems, or certainly not per se about such things.

Page 29 of the Basic 5e PDF, setting out the wizard class, has the headings "Scholars of the Arcane" and "The Lure of Knowledge", but nothing in the rules requires a wizard to be proficient in Arcana, or even in any knowledge skill (they can start with Insight and Investigate, for instance). A rogue need not have Acrobatics or Athletics (and likewise can start with Insight and Investigate, and say Perception and Performance for their other two).

A fighter can start with low CON yet Second Wind; can have terrible DEX and always attack last yet have Extra Attack; terrible DEX and no Perception or Insight proficiency yet take Protection fighting style; etc. Remarkable Athlete doesn't require any minimum stats or proficiencies. Gating some mooted enhancement of Remarkable Athlete behind a proficiency requirement is imposing a design stricture that does not operate elsewhere in the game.

Whilst some of those might be questionable, none of these are representing mastery in a skill the character doesn't have by giving autosuccess in that skill.

Likewise for insisting that a fighter player can only kill by dealing hp damage, while other classes (eg the wizard's Power Word Kill) do not conform to any such requirement.

Even that takes hit points into account.

 

[Micah Sweet]

As @Gammadoodler posted, framing this in terms of verisimilitude is a red herring at best. Verisimilitude is about whether the fiction - in tone, theme, implied and express content, etc - "hangs together" as a representation of a fantasy world. It's not about minutiae of mechanical subsystems, or certainly not per se about such things.

Page 29 of the Basic 5e PDF, setting out the wizard class, has the headings "Scholars of the Arcane" and "The Lure of Knowledge", but nothing in the rules requires a wizard to be proficient in Arcana, or even in any knowledge skill (they can start with Insight and Investigate, for instance). A rogue need not have Acrobatics or Athletics (and likewise can start with Insight and Investigate, and say Perception and Performance for their other two).

A fighter can start with low CON yet Second Wind; can have terrible DEX and always attack last yet have Extra Attack; terrible DEX and no Perception or Insight proficiency yet take Protection fighting style; etc. Remarkable Athlete doesn't require any minimum stats or proficiencies. Gating some mooted enhancement of Remarkable Athlete behind a proficiency requirement is imposing a design stricture that does not operate elsewhere in the game.

Likewise for insisting that a fighter player can only kill by dealing hp damage, while other classes (eg the wizard's Power Word Kill) do not conform to any such requirement.

I think it should operate elsewhere in the game. Throughout the game, in fact. That's my preference. Isn't that all we're talking about here?

 

[Tony Vargas]

Likewise for insisting that a fighter player can only kill by dealing hp damage, while other classes (eg the wizard's Power Word Kill) do not conform to any such requirement.

I've opined before that hp, abstract and occasionally odd as they may be, are one of the D&Disms that have held up relatively well compared to what other games have done (ie to model plot armor and the like in a playable way).
Bypassing hp does undermine that, and Save-or-die has always had the potential to do so -though, early on, there was a pretty consistent correlation between a class having high HP and having a good save vs things like poison.

IMHO, to take best advantage of using hp, D&D should avoid bypassing them, as entirely as possible. Not just no SoD, but no de-facto SoDs, like debuffs that render the victim outright helpless, for instance.

That said, an attack vs a hp threshold that considers current hp isn't exactly bypassing hp, even if it doesn't technically inflict them or accumulate damage if it fails... it'd just need to be used carefully to synergize with other damage-dealing.

 

[Gammadoodler]

Or you know, give them (perhaps conditional or limited) ability to deal more HP damage! I really don't get this desire to invent mechanics for things that already have mechanics.



But spells that are about dealing damage still do it via hit points.

I'm not too concerned one way or the other with "have them do more hp damage" vs. "bypass hp entirely if certain parameters are met" if the end result is reasonably certain to kill creatures within a reasonable CR range.

It's just easier to guarantee and future-proof a result with one vs. the other.

And PWK already exists. doesn't have a tohit roll to worry about, and doesn't concern itself with resistances and immunities.

Having some martial version of that effect seems reasonably cromulent to me as long as it's tuned properly.