D&D 5E The Door, Player Expectations, and why 5e can't unify the fanbase.

[Underman]

I think what I described is the inevitable consequence of a fighter gaining levels (and rolling average for their hit points).

It doesn't seem all that relevant to me. A high level fighter has the same amount of meat more or less as a lower level fighter. They gain more hti points via fate, luck, skill, grit, etc. That doesn't make it mythic for me. Just action-hero-y. In fact, a very typical Hollywood action movie.

UNLESS the fiction is a demigod fighter or whatever. Then you could say he's supernaturally tough and absorbing the hits directly. But that's not what some people want from their mythically mundane fighter.

I find this defines what a higher level fighter is, ie a mythic figure.

Other people might assign a different weight to this intrinsic characteristic of D&D fighters. All I can say is this is the best reading of the text I can come up with. I'm open to other interpretations.

On the last x pages, people are pinpointing mundane vs mythic fighters, so it seems to me that the bottleneck is not primarily suspension of disbelief with levelling but something else unique to the fighter class.

If fighters levelled faster and higher than all other classes, I guess I'd agree that fighter levelling is somehow mythic.

I have to ask: how does pointing out the ability to endure superhuman amounts of punishment --an ability common to all higher level fighter classes which also a common occurrence for said class members-- amount to cherry-picking?

You referred to the implausibility of anectodes like jumping off 100' cliffs and taking the full brunt of metal-melting fireballs. That's cherry picking to me, because most scenes in D&D allow for a lot more nuance IMO

 

[Underman]

Well Meals did say in the fighter design goal article, the fighter could take a few wizard spells to the face and clobber-charge the squishy if the moron stays in range.

The fighter hurricane-swords the spells away or flutters the fall slower with HP. Sure if the group wants to change and add rules, fine.

That's one interpretation, I never imagined it that way [shrug]

For me, it's what's cinematic. I can't recall any fantasy movies where the fighter hurricane-swords the spells away, seems a bit comic-bookish.

But the default 10th+ level fighters are closer to Marvel Asgardians like Thor and Loki.

Why so sure? Thor calls himself a god. In D&D, you don't even get to be a demigod until levels 20 to 30.

Ya, even in the Thor and Avengers movies, I don't see mundane heroes doing that. I see them leaping out of the way, blocking with a shield, mentally resisting, etc. Stuff that's not all that mythic.

 

[Fifth Element]

It doesn't seem all that relevant to me. A high level fighter has the same amount of meat more or less as a lower level fighter. They gain more hti points via fate, luck, skill, grit, etc. That doesn't make it mythic for me. Just action-hero-y. In fact, a very typical Hollywood action movie.

Action heroes are modern myths. They're the same thing. They do things that normal humans can only dream of doing, and do it with a smile.

 

[Underman]

Action heroes are modern myths. They're the same thing. They do things that normal humans can only dream of doing, and do it with a smile.

Action heroes never smash mountains, leap 500 feet and redirect rivers, which AFAIR is what started the whole 'mythic' interpretation.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Action heroes never smash mountains, leap 500 feet and redirect rivers, which AFAIR is what started the whole 'mythic' interpretation.

The upper branches of mythic are not the whole of mythic, any more than "everyone eventually catches the plague or gets knifed in a dark alley" are the sum of gritty.

We talk about the extremes so that we don't have a 500 post topic arguing about whether James Bond crossed the line when he parachuted off the cliff in the Spy Who Loved Me or ran ahead of space shuttle fumes in Moonraker or had completely crossed the line in the infamous crawling outside the plane stunt in Octopussy. (Bond is an easier example of where that problem lies, since it is a single character straddling the line, over a long, fairly consistent franchise.)

 

[Underman]

The upper branches of mythic are not the whole of mythic, any more than "everyone eventually catches the plague or gets knifed in a dark alley" are the sum of gritty.

I know, but I didn't want to get in world plays about mythic and actions heroes as modern myths, that kind of rhetoric confuses the issue I think.

We talk about the extremes so that we don't have a 500 post topic arguing about whether James Bond crossed the line when he parachuted off the cliff in the Spy Who Loved Me or ran ahead of space shuttle fumes in Moonraker or had completely crossed the line in the infamous crawling outside the plane stunt in Octopussy. (Bond is an easier example of where that problem lies, since it is a single character straddling the line, over a long, fairly consistent franchise.)

Yet if you look at the last x pages, I feel like a whole lot of us are confusing some parts for the whole, and it seems to be causing just as much miscommunication as discussions of less extreme minutiae.

So to be clear for myself:
- "Realistic" = real life people
- "Normal and mundane" = common fantasy folk
- "Extraordinary and mundane" = adventuring fantasy heroes visualized as action heroes
- "Mythic" = anything exceeding the above without magic or other pseudo-rational explanation -- perhaps someone else can come up with a more precise interpretation

 

[Mallus]

On this point, I really, really, really like the idea (I don't remember whose it was, Herreman I think???) that hit points are a privilege (not a given) and throwing yourself off a 100' cliff, just because you can according to the RAW, would negate that privilege. Kinda like being exceptionally lucky in life, and then dying abruptly when you decide to get off the destiny track by foolishly testing exactly how lucky you are.

I like that idea... privilege.

But that doesn't apply to my examples. I wasn't talking about PCs jumping off cliffs for the heck or it, or being immolated by magical fire as part of their nightly exfoliating routine.

I was talking about the common situations adventures find themselves in while adventuring.

It doesn't seem all that relevant to me. A high level fighter has the same amount of meat more or less as a lower level fighter.

As the Borg might say, meat is irrelevant. The PC can eat the damage (without any outside assistance). Even it you're defining this as 'luck' or 'grit' -- it's mythic luck, mythic grit. It describes a person and a world which is wholly unrealistic/not-mortal-as-we-know-it.

They gain more hit points via fate, luck, skill, grit, etc. That doesn't make it mythic for me. Just action-hero-y. In fact, a very typical Hollywood action movie.

For the first few levels, I agree with you. But by 10th, the fighter is John Carter on Mars or maybe Rama, not your average above-average Bruce Willis character.

Also, your typical Hollywood action hero can usually be sucker punched/caught unaware/knocked out by a single blow.

Your typical 10th level fighter cannot, ever, by knocked out by a surprise blow from behind. Even if it's a blow from a Titan --as per AD&D 2e-- out of Greek myth. Unless, of course, the fighter just fell off a 100' cliff (or two).

There are, you must admit, some differences, between Central Casting in Hollywood and Greyhawk.

You referred to the implausibility of anectodes like jumping off 100' cliffs and taking the full brunt of metal-melting fireballs. That's cherry picking to me, because most scenes in D&D allow for a lot more nuance IMO

I was describing the kinds of things that tend to happen to 10th level PCs. Do you disagree with this?

 

[Mallus]

Action heroes never smash mountains, leap 500 feet and redirect rivers, which AFAIR is what started the whole 'mythic' interpretation.

Yes, but John McClane never fought Set, or the Kraken, or Arioch. Nor did the makers of the Die Hard movies ever claim to draw inspiration from mythology -- as far as I know...

What surprises me is isn't that some people want mythic D&D fighters, it's that we still don't have rules for them, as we head into 5e. Back as far as AD&D 2e you had the PHB offering up famous characters out of world mythology as examples of PC classes in the chargen section.

Prior to that, in AD&D, they were offered as monsters for the players to kill and loot, cf. Deities and Demigods.

 

[Fifth Element]

Action heroes never smash mountains, leap 500 feet and redirect rivers, which AFAIR is what started the whole 'mythic' interpretation.

As I posted pages ago, there's significant excluded middle between poking things with a pointed object, and cutting mountains in half. Herakles may have redirected a river, but he never smashed a mountain, and his other labours were basically killing/capturing monsters or retrieving items. Beowulf may have been one hell of a swimmer, but he never leapt 500 feet that we know of.

Edit: As pointed out above, there are always matters of degrees.

 

[Underman]

Yes, but John McClane never fought Set, or the Kraken, or Arioch. Nor did the makers of the Die Hard movies ever claim to draw inspiration from mythology -- as far as I know...

I don't know what else to say. In D&D, heroes have tended to be warriors of skill and fate, like just action heroes are heroes of skill and improbability. That's the only quality I can compare them.

Of course, I cannot directly compare the context in which action heroes operate to the context in which fantasy heroes operate.

But nobody thinks twice to pull characters from myths and plunk them into D&D like a fish out of water, without a 2nd thought about stripping out the context in which those mythical characters were pulled from, even though D&D lacks the same mythical dream logic characteristics, and much of the supposed D&D "mythicalness" is actually just the awful way the mechanics meet the fiction and not particularily intentional at all, like a bad silly plot device that makes no sense, vs real-life myths that came out of a non-scientific irrational era. So call it an unfair double standard?