D&D 5E Can mundane classes have a resource which powers abilities?

[Jester David]

And how do you balance that over the course of only two rounds? This edition isn't the sort of tactical combat game where you can spend resources and still have time to recover them later before using them again in the same combat.

You can’t.
This kind of design would have been great for 4th Edition, where a certain number of rounds were built into the game and tactical combat was the norm. It would have been easy and interesting to have a certain number of “rage points” needed for a fighter to use his Daily powers.
It’s harder in D&D5, as that edition is balanced around the adventuring day and not the encounter. There’s few assumptions made regarding individual encounters. And we don’t know how many short rests they’re expecting to have during an adventuring day, if there’s any assumptions.


However, a resource could be based around the adventuring day, where the character slowly gains “fury” or “adrenaline” until the expend a power or take a short rest. So they get more powerful as they adventure without a break. You could certainly build a fighter subclass around that idea.


* * *


Non-magical resources can work, but they should generally make sense in the narrative. Fighters don’t have innate magic and thus shouldn’t have any powers that replicate the mechanical effects of magic (unless said power is designed to mimic something a fighter can do).


If they can only do something once per short rest there should be a reason. If they can only make two Super Attacks per day before getting “tired” but they know two different Super Attacks, it’s odd that they can only perform each once rather than choosing which arrangement of SA to perform.

 

[Wulfgar76]

That isn't a special resource that powers abilities, though. That's just hit points. In D&D terms, the fighter is simply damaging himself in order to produce extra effort. Show me that cleanly implemented for D&D and I'll sing its praises.

Burst of Stamina: spend a Hit Dice to make an extra melee attack. This power recharges when you take a short or long rest.

Is it really that much worse than a Wizard who rests his brain for 8 hours to memorize some arcane formulas?

 

[Ahnehnois]

Burst of Stamina: spend a Hit Dice to make an extra melee attack. This power recharges when you take a short or long rest.

I would say that spending the hit die should get you a bonus to attacks (and saves, and possibly other actions) and be an action available to everyone in the combat chapter. Extra attacks take more time out of game and tend to break things in the game.

Then, some barbarian options should involve increasing the bonus gained from the burst, while perhaps some fighter feats would reduce the cost in some way, and some sorcerer ability would cause the burst to add to magic attacks as well as regular stuff. At that point, it all works.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

From the bard thread: alcohol.

 

[EnglishLanguage]

I would say that spending the hit die should get you a bonus to attacks (and saves, and possibly other actions) and be an action available to everyone in the combat chapter.

That right there's always been the problem for the Fighter. Everytime he gets a unique mechanic beyond "more feats," people start demanding every other class gets it.

That said, multiple attacks don't really slow the game down all that much more than the Wizard looking through his 20 spells figuring out which he wants to cast this turn, and the multiple attacks is really all the Fighter has right now.

 

[Wulfgar76]

I would say that spending the hit die should get you a bonus to attacks (and saves, and possibly other actions) and be an action available to everyone in the combat chapter. Extra attacks take more time out of game and tend to break things in the game.

I guess you could package it as a fighter-exclusive ability by saying only Fighter's have the discipline, training and martial focus to do it effectively.

I think your point has more to do with the fighter having unique 'stuff' that others don't get, rather than the idea of nonmagical resources.

 

[Wulfgar76]

Extra attacks take more time out of game and tend to break things in the game.

Not nearly as much as quickened spells and other metamagic tricks, IMO.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Not nearly as much as quickened spells and other metamagic tricks, IMO.

True. My observation has often (but not always) been that the fighter's turn is faster than the spellcaster's. To me, this would be a positive feature of the fighter that we would want to port over to the spellcaster.

I guess you could package it as a fighter-exclusive ability by saying only Fighter's have the discipline, training and martial focus to do it effectively.

I think your point has more to do with the fighter having unique 'stuff' that others don't get, rather than the idea of nonmagical resources.

Well, the thread's question comprised both of those. I think it's nonsense to have a fighter have some resource that no one else has discovered (or any nonmagical class to have this, for that matter). However, it's entirely possible to have him utilize existing system resources more effectively (like the action economy and hit points) or to expand the system to create new design space to do that (say, with a vp/wp split that allows us to play around with vp more than we could with hp). The same is true for any nonmagical class; exclusivity doesn't make sense and has gradually been dying off and should be killed off completely. We don't say that bards are the only people that can sing or that rogues are the only ones that can sneak, and so on and so forth.

Resources for magical classes are justifiable (in that your god will only indulge his petitioners' requests to a point, or that a wizard charges up with supernatural powers at the beginning of the day and gradually uses them up), though I think the way in which this has classically been implemented has not worked all that well.

That right there's always been the problem for the Fighter. Everytime he gets a unique mechanic beyond "more feats," people start demanding every other class gets it.

Besides feats or skills or bonuses to some variant of the above. Yes, this is a problem. That's why the best fighter was the one that just got feats!

The next step would be to take all the other class abilities (sneak attack, bardic music, etc. etc.) and make them feats (or skills), make all the other classes look like the fighter, and focus their bonus feats within their classic sphere of influence. Then people wouldn't complain that the fighter is different.

 

[EnglishLanguage]

The problem has never been that the Fighter's "different".

The Fighter's problem's been is that it's completely generic to the point where it has no identity of it's own and, as you helpfully demonstrated, any unique feature it does get is taken away to be handed out to everyone else. "More feats, the class" is boring as hell, and my only experience with the "Feats: The Class" Fighter was 3.x, where the class was pretty garbage when you had Superman god-killing Wizards, Clerics who could fight in melee just as well as the Fighter while also bringing a spell list of useful buffs and heals, and the Druid who could Wildshape into a better Fighter at no penalty(and could cast spells as a better Fighter once he got Natural spell), summon a better Fighter, and got a free better Fighter as a class feature all at the same time.

This is why I liked the 4e Fighter. It gave it an identity as the tanky-man who locks down enemies and makes attempts to attack anyone but the Fighter a living hell, and didn't pass everything it had out to everyone else because everyone else already has their own neat things they get to do and stuck to it's gun on letting the Fighter have it's identity and unique mechanics that wasn't completely invalidated just because someone opened the PHB and decided "Oh hey, this class lets me turn into a T-Rex."

 

[howandwhy99]

Fatigue is in OD&D for melee and running (sprinting) with penalties accruing after 3-5 rounds of each.

Outdoor Survival rules in OD&D measured LLI (Life Level Index) for tracking food and water requirements for living creatures. There were multiple, even severe penalties for starvation and dehydration.

Spirit
Blood
Concentration and Intelligence are already being used for Wizards, but they could be incorporated into other classes as well.
Lifespan
Class level / level drain mechanics

There are all sorts of resources in D&D which might be incorporated into a mundane class. (oops, maybe not spirit then)