D&D 5E Martial Characters vs Real World Athletes

[Tony Vargas]

First off, I don't know why people try to quote random stuff Gygax said in the 70s like it's the word of god.

Gygax didn't write the Basic set. Not that it matters. 2e also gave class examples out of myth and legend (and tellingly, the best it could do with the Cleric was Archbishop Turpin from the Song of Roland, who fought with a sword & lance and never cast a healing spell).

Anyway, it's more than enough that D&D fighters fail to live up to the examples from myth and legend, while D&D casters exceed their sources of inspiration. That it also turns out fighters can't even catch up to actual reality, just gives the lie to the 'realism' argument.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Gygax didn't write the Basic set. Not that it matters. 2e also gave class examples out of myth and legend (and tellingly, the best it could do with the Cleric was Archbishop Turpin from the Song of Roland, who fought with a sword & lance and never cast a healing spell).

Anyway, it's more than enough that D&D fighters fail to live up to the examples from myth and legend, while D&D casters exceed their sources of inspiration. That it also turns out fighters can't even catch up to actual reality, just gives the lie to the 'realism' argument.

1. My point was that a list of names doesn't mean much when there's nothing in the rules or actual gameplay that supports it. Did a 1e Basic fighter have mechanics to help him achieve Herculean tasks? Not really. The Turpin example demonstrates that they were talking out of their butts trying to match their established mechanics (fighter stabs, cleric heals, wizard does whatever he can imagine) to real legends and myths, not vice versa.

2. You're misunderstanding or misrepresenting the "realism argument." The idea is that mundane classes should rival magical classes in power WITHOUT needing any supernatural abilities. If you want a badass with a sword who can shatter castle walls and throw orcs around like rag dolls, I'm right there with you, but that is a different class concept. You want Superman and Hercules, not Batman and Odysseus. Which is cool, and as soon as we can stop arguing over the class name "fighter" and definitions of "magical" or "supernatural" powers, we can start making that happen. Hell, your mythical wall-smashing warrior might work quite well in a party with someone else's mundane-but-balanced fighter.

 

[Stalker0]

Which is cool, and as soon as we can stop arguing over the class name "fighter" and definitions of "magical" or "supernatural" powers, we can start making that happen. Hell, your mythical wall-smashing warrior might work quite well in a party with someone else's mundane-but-balanced fighter.

The crux of the issue, and the argument really, is that balance between mundane and magical (or supernatural) characters can be quite tricky. It stems from the simple fact that magic has "everything" in the toolbox, while mundane is limited to "reality". As such, magic tends to grow long term...which creates the tradition high level problems of caster vs martial. The more people are willing to relax on that "reality" barrier, the easier the balance becomes.


Honestly, the best balance I ever saw between mundane and supernatural was the Buffy RPG....because it balanced them in fundamentally different ways. Slayers got all the good stuff, stronger, faster, tougher, the works. No mundane (or scooby) was their equal. But scoobies got "drama points". They got to alter plot, change the scenes, etc. So even if they weren't as directly powerful, they actually got reality altering power (in an indirect way).

 

[Hussar]

The question in my mind is Hawkeye or Captain America actually a 20th level fighter? I'd say no because a 20th level fighter can do things like kill a dragon that Hawkeye or captain America can't.

And remember, Captain America isn't mundane either. He's already enhanced beyond what any normal human can do.

 

[aramis erak]

Let's actually show our work...

30' base movement.
10' Mobile feat
30' peak monk bonus (Lv 18)
x2 for dashing. (Which isn't actually a dead run, as you're still eligible to react with an attack)

That's 140' in 6 seconds. That's 1400 feet per minute. 88 feet per minute is 1 mile per hour. That's a combat hustle of 15.9 MPH. No con checks to keep it up, either...

A marathon runner goes 26 miles 385 yards... 138435'. The record is 2:03:23 - 7403 seconds. The calculator puts that at 18.7' per second, 1122'/minute, 12.7 MPH, or 112.2' per 6' round. (Rounding to 1 decimal).

Mind you, joe normal, doing a combat dash, is 60' per round with no bonuses, or 80' per round with Mobile. 36000'/hour or 48000'/hour. 6.8 or 9.1 MPH, sustained.

Keep in mind: We have no rules for running!

Remember: 1 mph = 8.8'/round. (=5280/600)

So, for the marathon runner, the world record is a sustained 12.7 MPH. Our Monk can make, without ever breaking into a proper running gait, 15.9 sustained, and Joe Normal can sustain 6.8, while a trained runner (=mobile feat) can hit 9.1 MPH.

Hell, joe walks a sustained 3.4 MPH... just a hair faster than average adult walking speeds of 3.3 MPH. Rick Runner powerwalks 4.5 MPH...

Peak human sprinting speed isn't reflected... but that's because there's no rule for a true run, let alone a sprint. And, for the most part, adventuers aren't going to actually run, so modeling close to the peak human marathon speed is plenty fine.

 

[Savage Wombat]

The question in my mind is Hawkeye or Captain America actually a 20th level fighter? I'd say no because a 20th level fighter can do things like kill a dragon that Hawkeye or captain America can't.

Don't know about 20th level fighter, but Hawkeye should be able to kill an "ordinary" dragon with one arrow to the eye. Especially Ultimate Hawkeye.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

It's not supposed to model reality, it's supposed to approximate it (and only just enough to make a game work.)

Not to mention, a "Dash" is not a 100-yard sprint in Nikes. It's a combat-run (as fast as you can while ducking, covering, and weaving.) What the game pulls off seems like a pretty good approximation to me.

Others have pointed out that the long-jump and high-jump can be done in armour. (Sure, maybe it's weird that it doesn't make a difference if the same guy takes his armour off or not, but whatever... it's an approximation.)

I would say that if your character was to try to win a 100-yard dash, or a long-jump or high-jump competition, there would probably be some athletics checks involved. "Problem" solved, because the rules call-out that these limits can be exceeded by skill-checks. How much can you beat the limits by? It's up to the DM. Gimme a DC30 and you can break the world record!

 

[Aloïsius]

Gimme a DC30 and you can break the world record!

No, you can't. There is no chronometer precise enough in D&D world for that.

I mean, what is important is not the precise time you need to run 100 meters, but if you are able to escape the owlbears or to catch the thief runing away with your purse. Even if the PC ends up in a sort of olympic game, the only thing that matters is the ranking order.

 

[babomb]

I don't think the issue is antipathy toward fighters. I also don't think it's really about "realism". (I don't think that word should be used when talking about fantasy settings anyway; "verisimilitude" is a better word, but I don't think that's quite the issue either.)

One issue is differing playstyles: Some people may want their character to be Hercules, but maybe others want to play someone who doesn't have magic, like Hawkeye or Batman*. Someone proposed a tier list for level ranges, but I think people have different ideas about where to draw the lines and what the top end should be, and I think none of them are necessarily wrong. Perhaps this can be addressed to some extent by picking a different class or subclass.

The other issue is narrative justification. Why can a wizard create a fireball? Well, she's spent her life studying magic. Maybe you think at level 20, she's too powerful compared to the fighter, and that's fine, but she's breaking the rules of physics as we know it from level 1, with the lowliest cantrip.

But, HP wonkiness aside, the fighter at level 1 generally doesn't break any rules. Why, at level 20 can he suddenly cleave a mountain in half or divert a river? For a lot of people, the answer seems to be mostly "because it would be unfair if he can't do cool things like the wizard", and they are content to handwave it. And that's fine! But some people are not content with this explanation, and that's also fine! (And maybe being somewhat better than a normal person doesn't need an explanation, but to completely outclass normal people does. And different people may draw this line at different points.) Hercules, the answer is that he's a demigod; Superman is an alien who gets powers from our yellow sun; Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider. The explanation doesn't have to be terribly "realistic", but for some people it needs to be there nevertheless.

I don't think people on either side are "wrong"; they have differing tastes, so let's try to keep the recriminations and snark out of this, yeah?

It's true that sticking to the relatively mundane makes balancing more difficult, but it's not insurmountable. For example, in 1E Fighters had better saves than wizards of the same level in most cases. ("Enduring...through sheer force of will" is the justification given for fighters making saves in the DMG, if you're wondering.) Only fighters (and rangers and paladins) could get the full HP benefits of a high CON or (if they were lucky/cheating) have percentile strength. And only they could eventually attack twice per round.

I might suggest, for example, rather than stopping wizards from casting meteor storm, placing more limitations on casting it. Suppose most spells take at least a full round to cast (meaning it goes off at the beginning of your NEXT turn); Meteor Swarm might take 2 or 3. Any damage taken during that time has a chance to interrupt the spell, not only making the action wasted, but also wasting the use of the spell, and having a chance to trigger a roll on the Spell Mishap Table. Perhaps make it more difficult to learn new spells, especially high level ones, with scrolls and spellbooks of that level difficult to find and requiring substantial research otherwise.

*In a sense, Batman can leap much higher than a normal person--using a Batrope. He can glide. He can repel sharks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJlHjf_E--4). He's also probably at least partly a rogue or something, but that's beside the point.

 

[Uchawi]

The difficulty is mental tasks or spells should be as taxing as physical activity. But if realism or modeling some type of physical reality is not a concern, then a martial character can do extraordinary things. But the biggest disparity, as others have mentioned, is not having a toolbox that can be expanded. There is little hope for a martial character to discover an ancient tomb of war, or similar item, unless it is a magical item. Where casters expand with every new adventure path that is released, supplement, etc. And I honestly think they did not want to offer a toolbox mechanism, because people will argue that is too similar to casters, when it is quite easy to make martial ability and spells distinct. So tradition, or developer bias, has relegated the fighter or similar classes to being a bygone relic.