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

[Neonchameleon]

Not necessarily.

I played a more freeform high fantasy setting where magical defense, natural resistances, and spell resistance were so high at high level, using magic to kill anyone of worth was dreadfully inefficient except for extreme specialists.

Stabbing people and shooting them was a hundred times easier. So the strategy was protect the fighter.

But D&D was never like that. And the closest was the older editions with their straight class based save charts.

Indeed. D&D was never like that. The idea that the wizards protect the fighters and the fighters do the dangerous stuff is a good system - but far further from D&D than anything else suggested. It also makes the fighters closer to 3.X or 4e rogues than to fighters - relatively squishy but very, very lethal.

And the balance you propose is something I've proposed a few times. That at low levels fighters protect the wizards - and vise-versa at high level.

Like my comments about a rogue, we have here a mundane character playing with the wizards - but more a finesse character than a brute force one. Not the "simple fighter" that's wanted.

Perhaps the more immediate transition from 19th level (no leaping) to 20th level (leaping 500 ft) is one of the bothers. And other transitions in time and space between various abilities.

This appears to be a matter of implementation rather than an absolute problem. If, for instance, a fighter gained 20% (compound) to his leap distance each level would you have a problem? He's always been good but it's hard to nail down exactly when he blew the curve and kept going.

 

[Zustiur]

All that said, I gather in Vance that memorising a spell is more like the mental subjugation of an alien force

D&D could be much cooler if it used that concept...

This is how I've always understood it. Perhaps not in those words, but definitely in that conceptual vein. By 'memorising' the spell you store it in your mind. As soon as it has been released there is no trace left. It's not like memorising information for an exam. It's using your memory as a container for the magic. Just like a scroll is a container for the magic, and the writing vanishes once the scroll has been used.

I'm quite astonished at the sheer volume of people who don't think of it in those terms...

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

This is how I've always understood it. Perhaps not in those words, but definitely in that conceptual vein. By 'memorising' the spell you store it in your mind. As soon as it has been released there is no trace left. It's not like memorising information for an exam. It's using your memory as a container for the magic. Just like a scroll is a container for the magic, and the writing vanishes once the scroll has been used.

I'm quite astonished at the sheer volume of people who don't think of it in those terms...

I simply don't think that I would describe such a process as "memorizing". If it's a mental struggle, I can imagine myself in a virtual/imagined world trying to wrestle down a spell, but I would just not call that a use of memory.

 

[Underman]

This appears to be a matter of implementation rather than an absolute problem.

I assumed everything in this thread is a matter of implentation or degree, and nothing or very little is an absolute problem (although the "furries" seems to come to close) although some seem to frame it that way in black-and-whites.

If, for instance, a fighter gained 20% (compound) to his leap distance each level would you have a problem? He's always been good but it's hard to nail down exactly when he blew the curve and kept going.

I'm OK with any mechanics that encourages the range of human expression or behavior that is consistent with the underlying fiction.

So as we talked about upthread, a fighter points pool or something is fine. Maybe leaping 500 ft once causes fatigue and you could leap again but you'd suffer a disadvantage. I don't know, just anything other than a mechanical fixation on 1 x day and binary on|off toggles. I'd like to see why a fighter could smash a mountain but not save that potential to smash a villian dead in a boss fight, not just as a mechanical problem of nova'ing and separating combat vs exploration pillars, but how is that differentiated in the fiction: what is the fighter thinking/doing?

The result may not be a perfect match, and that's OK because that's historically forgivable in D&D, but really any honest attempt at doing so is integral to a unifying solution IMO.

Again though, it depends on the fiction. Say a fighter gets a mythical fey boon "You may leap to impossible heights". The fighter, previously capable of Batman-like athletics but unable to jump supernaturally, is now suddenly but plausibly able to jump 500 ft. The fighter still can't do other supernatural athletic feats, like hold their breath for 7 days or smash mountains or whatever, and that's plausible too because the fey boon was very specific.

Anyway, this fighter jumps 500 ft once, and then wanders off to the base of a cliff that he wants to scale to get to the mysterious keep at the top, but he can't leap it to it the 2nd time. He only leaps the usual extraordinary but otherwise mundane height. The fighter probably feels confused and cheated (as any real person would, unless we're roleplaying the fighter in less immersive ways).

So the fighter goes back to the faerie patron and demands an explanation. The reply is "Aah, silly mortal, the magick is like a fruit, once eaten, it is gone, and only replenishes at dawn" (or whatever).

So the fighter goes back to the cliff, decides if he wants to go to the long way round, scale the cliff the hard way, or maybe just camp for the night and wait until dawn to leap the easy, magical way.

And maybe that fighter, when he feels up to the task (ie. higher level), goes back to the faerie creature and threatens to bash its head in unless the faery grants him another boon or maybe stronger magick so he can leap thrice a day or whatever.

That's just an example from the top of my head. The point is for me, the explanation (which is supposedly just fluff according to some people or irrelevant or not needed) is not just a side thought for me, but part of the foundation for the mythic mechanics at its inception.

Edit: removed the reference to testing the 1st jump

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

This reminds me of something -I seem to remember the devs tinkering with some kind of stamina system. I am not sure that it will make it in as core or if it's a module or just a random thought, though.

But there's your "fighter pool points" idea, I think. That could be something that covers extra actions per day (already in the game), 500 ft jumps and travelling to any place in the world in 24 hours. It may not quite cover ripping out your arm to reach the monster's heart, but I'd be okay with that.

Say, a fighter has stamina equal his level.

• Fighter's Recovery (1st Level): Spend one point to regain one hit die.
• Fighter Surge (3rd Level): Spend one point to take one extra action.
• Fighter Sprint (5th Level): Spend one point to move four times your speed and jump 4 times higher and longer.
• Fighter's Awe (6th Level): Spend one point to force all enemies that can see you to make a Charisma Save. If they fail, they cannot attack you or your allies unless attacked first. They can take an action to make a new save each round. A target that has already saved can also spend his action on behalf of another target to allow him making save (representing him talking him back into the fight).
• Fighter's Evasion (7th Level): Spend one point to take half damage from all attacks and spells for one round.
• Fighter's Training (8th level): If you have spend at least one day training or fighting alongside an ally, you can spend up to 3 points of stamina each day to grant him an equal number of stamina points. He can use any 6th level or lower Fighter ability with these points.
• Fighter's Death Mark (9th Level): Spend one point to mark a target for death with an attack (regardless of whether succesful or failed). If the target gains his 3rd mark of death and the you with that attack or a subsequent attack, the target must make a Constitution Save. If it succeeds, it takes triple damage and loses all death marks, if it fails the save or dies from the damage of the attack, it dies in a manner as spectacular you desire.
• Fighter's Contacts (10th level): Spend three points and 1d4 hours s to gather any information that may be available in a settlement you currently are in. You gain a +10 bonus to any Charisma, Wisdom or Intelligence related check required for this purpose.
• Fighter's Legendary Burst (11th Level): Spend three points to move 12 times your speed and jump 12 times higher and longer, or move 2 times your speed and jump 2 times higher for an hour.
• Fighter's Resilience (13th Level): Spend three points to automatically succeed one saving throw and gain temporary hit points equal to your level.
• Fighter's Whirlwind Strike (15 Level): Spend three points to move twice your speed and make an attack against every enemy you are adjacent to during the move.
• Fighter's Army (17th Level): Spend ten points to train 10 + CHA + INT allied creatures (PCs, NPCs, animals and so on) for one day. As long as you can hear or see them or otherwise stay in contact with them (via telepathy magic for example), you can spend up to 10 points of stamina each day on their behalf, granting them the benefits of any Fighter stamina ability of 6th level or lower. If you haven't been in contact with any of these individuals for at least 3 days, the benefit is lost for that individual.
• Fighter's Reputation (20th Level): Within a city or village Spend ten points and 1d6+6 hours. After this time, you can attract mercenaries and volunteers worth up to 20 levels, with the highest possible level among them 15+CHA. These allies may require special financial compensation or expect favors, as agreed on between you. These agreements should occur within the timeframe and may influence who you'll gather, and be determined by appropriate ability checks. You gain a bonus to all ability checks in these negotiations equal to 10 - the target's level (but never a penalty). Provided the settlement is of sufficient size, you will always get enough suitors to get the 20 levels, but you may not be guaranteed to get allies of the levels you desire.

 

[Remathilis]

But as I've said before in this thread: Batman isn't a fighter. He's a brawny rogue. Especially on the JLA.

Fighters are the biggest and toughest people on the team and get into toe to toe slugging matches. Superman is the JLA fighter. (And is about the only JLA member stronger than a high level D&D wizard - and then only if he speed-blitzes). If Batman tries to take JLA enemies in a pounding slugfest he loses. Badly.

Having rogues behaving like Batman and walking the line with plausible deniability isn't a problem. Having big smashy humans trying to take the role of the incredible hulk just leads to Darwin Awards.

You can not behave like a fighter and be a mortal in a high level D&D universe unless you're borrowing Iron Man's armour and it's the armour doing most of the heavy lifting.

The simple "I hit it"/"I take the blow" approach is fundamentally incompatable with an ordinary human trying to fight a large dragon. ("I sneak and then shank it in the balls when it is looking the other way" is not).

Ok, let me explain using visuals.

The first clip is Batman fighting Bane (the villain of the movie, but this is from The Animated Series)

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zaJdLb07NU]Batman vs. Bane - YouTube[/ame]

The second is when Superman had to impersonate Batman to find what happened to Bruce.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlcXA_iokPc]SUPERMAN (dressed as Batman) vs. Bane (FULL FIGHT!) - YouTube[/ame]

I can buy a fighter growing up to fight Bane like Batman did. I don't want him growing up to fight Bane Like SuperBatman did.

 

[pemerton]

That must have been a pretty scary experience for everyone involved.

Yes, although probably worse for my partner, who actually knew what was going on!

I just remembered that my mother actually had a tiny amnesia experience - while ice skating she fell on her head and suddenly didn't remember a few things - nothing major, but she had forgotten for example that she had written an application for a job a few days back. As her son it wasn't necessarily a scary experience in that case, as she didn't lose anything significant, but it was definitely a very weird and unreal experience.

It is definitely strange. It feels slightly surreal looking back on it.

D&D could be much cooler if it used that concept...

I simply don't think that I would describe such a process as "memorizing". If it's a mental struggle, I can imagine myself in a virtual/imagined world trying to wrestle down a spell, but I would just not call that a use of memory.

Doesn't Vance talk about Turjan "impressing the spell upon his brain"? I'm not sure if that is memorisation or not. Is there any more Vance-ian description that makes it clear whether it's memorisation in any normal sense?

 

[pemerton]

I also like those, as I wrote beforehand, but those are the kinds of explanations (or at least a foundation for explanations) that I thought you said weren't needed.

This was the one in particular that I meant:

"Hero of Legends": You have tapped into an inner power that only few before or after you will ever reach, giving you strength, stamina and toughness that just seems impossible. You will become the stuff of legends, someone to be remembered centuries or millenia after you reached the zenith of your power - some may downplay your achievements, or believe them exaggerations or even outright fabrications, stories for children or easily impresssed - but the legends of you will keep being told despite - or maybe in spite - of the doubters.

If that's enough foundation for explanation for you, then maybe we've converged. "Inner power" is, for me, sufficiently nebulous or tautologous that I can just gloss over it and get to the bits about legendary deeds.

You immersed yourself as the wizard with spell memorization. You imagined what it was like and you gave a couple of explanations. I thought both were very compelling and could be added to rich texture of D&D genre. But you see what you did, you drew upon real human experience to humanize the wizard. That's very powerful. You also already had a platform (the Vancian fiction) upon which to build upon.

How to do the same for purely martial abilities? The whole courage-and-will fighter concept brings up a lot of behavioral-related questions (especially when the mechanics meet the fiction in awkward ways).

I've never done anything very courageous, or physically impressive, so maybe I'm the wrong person to be trying to think about this.

There are historical examples of courage, including physical courage, that move me greatly, but it's hard to discuss many of them because of the "no politics" rule.

What I'll do is give an example from actual play instead, which for me could be the starting point for extrapolation. The paladin in my 4e game has the paragon path Questing Knight, which gives him the encounter power "Strength of Ten". This is a close burst weapon attack that does force damage and pushes the targets. But I've never really payed attention to the "force" aspect of it (force is not a damage type that becomes relevant very often, at least in my game). I think of it as the paladin striking literally with the strength of 10 ordinary warriors, and pushing back a horde of foes. The power was particularly evocative for me in a couple of fights against hobgoblin phalanxes. I had statted these up as paragon-level swarms, including the swarm vulnerability to close and area attacks. So when the paladin was attacking these phalanxes with the Strength of Ten, I had a mental image of this lone but glorious fighter, singlehandedly holding of a hobgoblin phalanx and knocking them back with great sweeps of his sword.

I think of the mythic fighter, drawing on "inner power", as like this only, at least at higher levels, even moreso.

I don't know, just anything other than a mechanical fixation on 1 x day and binary on|off toggles.

<snip>

Anyway, this fighter jumps 500 ft once to test it, and then wanders off to the base of a cliff that he wants to scale to get to the mysterious keep at the top, but he can't leap it to it the 2nd time.

<snip>

The point is for me, the explanation (which is supposedly just fluff according to some people or irrelevant or not needed) is not just a side thought for me, but part of the foundation for the mythic mechanics at its inception.

This seems to be a more general objection to metagame rather than ingame resource rationales - I get the impression from this that you wouldn't/don't like martial dailies even if they weren't mythic.

One feature of any metagame-driven resource rationale has to be that a use only counts when it matters. So a PC using the abilities "just to test it" doesn't expend a usage. (This is a variant on the principle of "say yes or roll the dice" - if you're going to say yes, there is no need to roll the dice or, in this case, put a cross next to the power.)

 

[Neonchameleon]

I assumed everything in this thread is a matter of implentation or degree, and nothing or very little is an absolute problem (although the "furries" seems to come to close) although some seem to frame it that way in black-and-whites.

Interesting. Because that really wasn't my reading. Mine was that there were people (e.g. [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] or [MENTION=7635]Remathilis[/MENTION]) who seem unhappy with the very idea of a fighter being more than mundane. There are other people (e.g. me or @pmerton) who think that the fighter can not fulfil the fighter archetype if they remain merely mundane - instead they become messy red smears at high level.

On the Batman tangent, yes Batman does use a lot of brute force against Killer Croc, Red Hood, and Bane. But fundamentally in D&D terms, Croc and Bane are effectively about the power of ogres - and Red Hood is a near mirror match. Batman's personal villains in his own universe are written at the power level where you can do that - I think the only one of Batman's recurring villains who won't go down to being hit round the head with a sledgehammer is Clayface, and none of them have the physical power even of a young red dragon.

On the other hand Batman behaves very differently on the Justice League because hitting his enemies wouldn't get him very far. He'll take out White Martians. But the concept of getting in a slugging match with them would be silly.

And this reaches to the core of the issue. To @pmerton and myself, fighters are defined by the way they behave. A fighter is the big strong guy who leads from the front - tough, heavily armoured, and highly skilled. But most of all front, centre, and taking the battle to the enemy in an extremely obvious and destructive manner. And if the fighter fails to allow this to work as a playstyle then the fighter fails as a class. To the other side the fighter is defined by who he is - and defined by mundanity at that. If the fighter can't do his job then the attitude appears to be "sucks to be you" - especially as the fighter can't really do any other job either.

 

[Animal]

I would love to see a new game. Not a frankensteined mix of every previous edition.
I mean folks who currently only play 4ed. used to play 3ed (and maybe even earlier editions) before 4ed was introduced. Why should we assume that they won't adopt 5ed. if it's really cool? For them to like it, it doesn't have to resemble 4ed., just like 4ed. was fairly different from 3.5.
Same with hardcore 3ed. players - they didn't adopt 4ed. not just because it was mechanically different, but because it strayed away from previous edition in the department of the "feel" and style of play.
You can't create a game which will feel similar both to 4ed. and previous editions. If frankenstein's monster had a face of a handsome man, arms of a strong one and legs of a quick one, he wouldn't come out as strong, fast and definitely nor pretty.
Unifying playerbase is not only about "building on the past", but more about giving them a new better game.
What can spark interest in everyone is completely new stuff, not old stuff tossed in one melting pot.