D&D 5E Dwarves: too good as fighters?

[BASHMAN]

Barbarians don't get heavy armor. Also Plate Armor is super expensive.

Ahem, let me repeat

It gets even better. A dwarven Barbarian eventually gets faster movement (35') which isn't affected by armor and by 4th level can take the Heavy Armor feat that gives them Damage Reduction equal to their Constitution bonus. That combined with the raging giving Resistance to Bludgeoning/Piercing/Slashing damage is sick. With your 18 Constitution you get hit for 10 damage, which gets dropped to 5 because of rage, then gets dropped to 1 because of your plate armor.

That feat also gives proficiency with Heavy Armor as well as DR.

 

[Mouseferatu]

That feat also gives proficiency with Heavy Armor as well as DR.

Yes. But as I pointed out, it does not alter the rules, given in the barbarian entry, that say the barbarian gains none of the benefits of rage or fast movement while wearing heavy armor.

Edit to add: Actually, no. The feat that grants DR in heavy armor is a separate feat from the one that grants proficiency. Heavy Armor Master grants DR 3; Heavily Armored grants proficiency. So even if the barbarian didn't explicitly disallow this, it'd take two feats to do it.

 

[BASHMAN]

Yes. But as I pointed out, it does not alter the rules, given in the barbarian entry, that say the barbarian gains none of the benefits of rage or fast movement while wearing heavy armor.

Edit to add: Actually, no. The feat that grants DR in heavy armor is a separate feat from the one that grants proficiency. Heavy Armor Master grants DR 3; Heavily Armored grants proficiency. So even if the barbarian didn't explicitly disallow this, it'd take two feats to do it.

Oh you are right, didn't remember about the "cannot rage in heavy armor" thing.

 

[Storminator]

Mearls loves dwarves. Always has . . .

PS

 

[outsider]

The fighter doesn't look very tanky to me in 5th. You are better off using your resources on things that will allow you to kill stuff faster, imho.

If I was going to build a tank, it would be a Barbarian Totem Warrior(bear features).

 

[Henry]

Flavour takes second place to fun, and it's not fun for a player to see their otherwise identical character outclassed ab initio.

So you're saying flavor isn't as fun as statistical advantage? To some, but not to others (myself included). And one fighter having a 10 or 20 hit points more than me isn't exactly a world apart, considering i'm not so statistically disadvantaged that i'm not contributing to party success. It's not a "race to be better" to me.

I'm not so sure. A +2 to one stat at the start is far better than two +1s - looking at the Basic Rules I'd eyeball it at three.

But going back to the fun part, non-humans get fun abilities like darkvision and Lucky and poison resistance and proficiencies. Humans don't get any of that fun stuff. Even choosing the alternative of one +2, a feat, and a proficiency still leaves them behind (and I'll remind you that the Basic Rules lacks feats).

It also leaves them as the majority race in the setting (any published setting, anyway), moving faster, being smarter, wiser, and more charismatic than said dwarf, which matters in non combat skills.

And, as I said before, if I don't want to play a bearded, thick-set slow-footed runt, i'm not picking dwarf, i'm picking human. Just like if i don't want to play some gigantic clumsy oaf, i'll play halfling.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Flavour takes second place to fun, and it's not fun for a player to see their otherwise identical character outclassed ab initio.

While I agree, under some circumstances, with your second clause, I couldn't disagree more with the first.

Second place to fun? Flavor is the fun. Mechanical goodies are nifty, but without a cool character, a cool setting, cool description, it's all just math. (Obviously I'm speaking for myself and the people I game with, not for every gamer ever. But I do feel strongly about it.)

 

[Quartz]

Second place to fun? Flavor is the fun.

Flavour is part of the fun. That's an important distinction. Another part of the fun is achieving things, overcoming obstacles. And if PC combo A is much better at achieving things than PC combo B, that's less fun for the player of PC combo B, is it?

 

[Phaezen]

Mearls loves dwarves. Always has . . .

PS

Now all we need is someone to photoshop the proof....

 

[Ruin Explorer]

While I agree, under some circumstances, with your second clause, I couldn't disagree more with the first.

Second place to fun? Flavor is the fun. Mechanical goodies are nifty, but without a cool character, a cool setting, cool description, it's all just math. (Obviously I'm speaking for myself and the people I game with, not for every gamer ever. But I do feel strongly about it.)

I've heard people say this sort of thing a lot, and I think it's a real half-truth.

My personal experience is that, in-game, if you have a character who is, thematically/flavour-wise "cool", as you put it, but who is in actual practice, ineffective/mediocre/bad-at-what-he-is-supposedly-good-at, then that actually curdles the "flavour"-fun. Nothing like having a PC who is supposedly great at unarmed combat (fr'ex), but who proves, due to the rules, to be a pretty bad combatant (see this in a number of systems). It's disappointment in it's purest form.

Similarly with "cool description" on powers and the like - if the flavour for a power is great, but in practice it's pretty worthless or doesn't really do what it says, then that, in my experience, leads directly to disappointment and disillusionment. Further, players tend very much to blame the game/system. They're not stupid. They know that it's not them, or the DM, or the adventure that made this thing suck, they know it's the rules attached to it. I've heard players say that they do not want to play specific systems for reasons that are essentially flavour/mechanics mismatches plenty of times (it's probably one of the most common "Ugh let's not play that!" reasons, after "The rules are too complicated!" - which is admittedly the most common reason by far - in my experience).

I've personally experienced it a number of times, especially when I was younger, where I've had an awesome PC concept, seemingly supported by class or setup in the game, only to find, actually, that just doesn't work very well, or worse, that class literally can't do the thing it's described as doing*. This is a problem even if the class is actually very good at something else, because it's not what you signed up for, it's not the fantasy you wanted to live out. Indeed this is one of the big reasons I got interested in actual mechanics and how they function in practice.

So flavour absolutely is a significant part of fun - but when flavour and mechanics mis-match, that can actively harm fun more than if there was no or weak flavour (if they align perfectly, that's awesome, of course - some of 5E's classes/subclasses certainly do - but only some - I'd actually say the October playtest generally had better flavour/mechanics alignment).

* = Bard in 5E is an example of this - they can't support the party in the way the cool flavour-text describes - simply don't have the abilities for it (they easily could have, with a couple of songs-as-spells, but WotC didn't bother). Rogues were often victims of this in pre-4E editions, where they're often written up as fearsome killers, but actually, even when the stars align, they're only keeping pace with people making far less effort (4E fixed this, 5E looks to be close to 4E rather than previous editions on it). 4E certainly had plenty of problems in this department, though, especially in the awkward PHB1-2 period.