D&D 5E Fixing the fighter (I know...)

[Undrave]

The obvious answer is that people don't want that. In every one of these discussions, there are lots of people who don't want every single class in the game to do supernatural things.

Supernatural things? What supernatural things? I was responding to the part that said "Also solves some problems through engineering. And political intrigue. Then again conan is certainly not a dummy either but heracles is known for his cleverness until recent times. There is more to these characters than brawn."

Why isn't the Fighter more clever or political?

 

[Tony Vargas]

Why isn't the Fighter more clever or political?

I probably shouldn't, but here's my pet history-of-the-game theory:

Way back in the dark mists of time, like, the 60s & 70s, Arneson &co were playing what would become RPGs, Braunstien, or whatever, Blackmoor, just mak'n it up for the most part. And, I'm guessing the idea that the PC had skills/wits/cunning/personal-relationships/etc different/distinct from those of it's player may not have gelled yet. Because, when 0D&D first hit, there weren't really skills, even though there were mental stats. If your character did some schmoozing or politicking, even though he had a CHA score, you likely just schmoozed or politicked the DM some, in character. For that matter, if you looked for traps, you described probing the floor ahead of you with a 10' pole & the like (thus 10' pole being on every equipment list).

Then came the Thief, with Special Abilities that were essentially skills, as its raisin debt, and the fighter was perforce cut off from having skills (those skills, at first), and a precedent set that /if you could have non-combat skills you had to suck at combat and vice-versa/. That precedent was broken, eventually, by 3.0 giving the Rogue decent combat options, and the Rogue is actually fine, now, in combat - but still not as tough, nominally, as the fighter (I mean, a hp or so per level and a point of AC if he keeps his DEX maxed, nothing like the gulf back in 1e), but still significantly better with skills out of combat (Expertise, Reliable Talent, etc).

Really, skills should have been formalized in Greyhawk Supplement II, and given mainly to the Fighter, and the Thief/Rogue should never have existed. We wouldn't have so much of a problem, now, if the Fighter, as the main non-caster, had been /both/ the meatshield, and the skill-miester.
It's not like it'd've been remotely OP.

 

[Undrave]

I probably shouldn't, but here's my pet history-of-the-game theory:

Way back in the dark mists of time, like, the 60s & 70s, Arneson &co were playing what would become RPGs, Braunstien, or whatever, Blackmoor, just mak'n it up for the most part. And, I'm guessing the idea that the PC had skills/wits/cunning/personal-relationships/etc different/distinct from those of it's player may not have gelled yet. Because, when 0D&D first hit, there weren't really skills, even though there were mental stats. If your character did some schmoozing or politicking, even though he had a CHA score, you likely just schmoozed or politicked the DM some, in character. For that matter, if you looked for traps, you described probing the floor ahead of you with a 10' pole & the like (thus 10' pole being on every equipment list).

Then came the Thief, with Special Abilities that were essentially skills, as its raisin debt, and the fighter was perforce cut off from having skills those skills, and a precedent set that /if you could have non-combat skills you had to suck at combat and vice-versa/. That precedent was broken, eventually, by 3.0 giving the Rogue decent combat options, and the Rogue is actually fine, now, in combat - but still not as tough, nominally, as the fighter (I mean, a hp or so per level and a point of AC if he keeps his DEX maxed, nothing like the gulf back in 1e), but still better with skills out of combat (Expertise, Reliable Talent, etc).

Really, skills should have been formalized in Greyhawk Supplement II, and given mainly to the Fighter, and the Thief/Rogue should never have existed. We wouldn't have so much of a problem, now, if the Fighter, as the main non-caster, had been /both/ the meatshield, and the skill-miester.
It's not like it'd've been remotely OP.

Seems plausible. Also, the invention of the nebulous 'Ranger' class probably didn't help either...

Really, the way the Rogue is designed, proves you don't have to suck at one pillar to be good at the other. The Rogue doesn't even lack in terms of defence with all the features designed to avoid getting hit!

Every class in the game should be of the same standard as the Rogue (and maybe the Bard).

 

[TheCosmicKid]

No, the smilies were because of the points that were made earlier which I found rather funny.

But, again, why? Why should Conan and Heracles (good examples I think) be different classes? It's not like they really do anything particularly different, just different in scale. Conan does amazing feats of strength, for a mortal. Heracles holds up the world for Atlas for a while.

In a system where every other class goes from lowly to supernatural, why should fighters get left out?

Fighters are not getting "left out". It's a character class, not a person. You can't hurt its feelings. But you can leave out players. And if every class goes supernatural, but some players want to play characters like Conan, that's exactly what you're doing. There need to be classes for them too. (For emulating Conan in particular, It's the barbarian, not the fighter, but set aside that quibble.) Conan is not, in D&D terms, a low-level character. He is a highly experienced adventurer with a long career, and has the skill and tenacity to take on large monsters and whole groups of foes. The sorts of things he accomplishes are exactly the sorts of things a RAW 20th-level fighter (or barbarian) can accomplish: he can survive ridiculous amounts of punishment and kill absolutely anything that gets in reach of his blade, but he's not bench-pressing mountains or leaping across oceans. And no matter how much experience he gains, he never will be.

Because Heracles isn't just a high-level Conan. Heracles is accomplishing superhuman feats of strength in the crib. What you're talking about is not just a difference in scale, it's a qualitative difference in character archetype. And I can't help but notice that throughout this thread you've been complaining that the problem with the fighter is that it merely scales up, and advocating a much more qualitative difference between low levels and high levels. So for you to turn around and claim "just a difference in scale" at this point strikes me as... surprising.

Then again, 3e gave us Book of 9 Swords which basically did exactly what you are talking about, so, maybe it's not that far fetched. Eldritch Knight adds casting onto a fighter, so, yeah, I could see how a sub-class of "Mythic Hero" might not be a bad way to go.

The mechanical reason I suggested a full class rather than a subclass is that the base fighter class gets four attacks and Action Surge, which limits the amount of power you can put into other features. If you build a new class around a special Strength progression that eventually gets them to 30 Strength the same way you build the rogue around Sneak Attack, I think you can fulfill the mythic fantasy better. Four attacks and 30 Strength just ain't happening.

 

[Garthanos]

Supernatural things? What supernatural things?

Wrestling with the embodiment of death to save his friends dying wife? I think there were some in there but they werent usually early career.

 

[Ratskinner]

Seems plausible. Also, the invention of the nebulous 'Ranger' class probably didn't help either...

A lot of stuff came in early like that (Rogues, Rangers, Dwarfs, etc). It made sense at the time. A good portion of the players still looked upon characters as more like game-pieces in a tomb-robbing/murderhobo not-quite-board game, so statting up abilities to differentiate them made sense. For playing through adventure stories...not so much.

Really, the way the Rogue is designed, proves you don't have to suck at one pillar to be good at the other. The Rogue doesn't even lack in terms of defence with all the features designed to avoid getting hit!

Every class in the game should be of the same standard as the Rogue (and maybe the Bard).

A friend of mine and I sometimes kick around the idea that (if you wanted to get closer to adventure fiction, not necessarily myths) a game should have two superclasses: Hero and Companion.:

Heroes would be Fighter++ or Rogue++ I suppose. They are competent and capable of a wide variety of stuff (probably you'd pick some packages for specialization/flavor). Companions would get much more focused abilities like bestial strength (think Chewbacca or Ookla the Mok) or magic. Companions would also come with a severe limitation or deficiency to which Heroes are not subject.

For additional narrative/story interest...Heroes each have a Heroic Task to pick (Destroy Vader, unite the clans, fend off the orc invasion, avenge my parents, whatever.) Possibly they should have a villainous Archenemy or Nemesis to represent the task. A Hero cannot die until this task is at the point of climax/success, perhaps not even then unless its a fight with the archenemy. Fall off a cliff? Nope, the hero is dangling from a root. Overwhelmed in battle? You're not left to die on the battlefield, you were knocked out or pinned under a horse. Whatever happens, the hero cannot die. At worst he will be captured and taken back to the villainous archenemy. Maybe even include some kind of lasting "Trauma" that the hero has to work off later, kind of like a mini-Heroic Task. (Optionally, you could include a "Vulnerability" which would be a person, situation, or enemy that is the only actual threat to the hero.)

Instead of XP, there is a list of Heroic Achievements. Achieve one and you level up, done. Companions only level up when their associated hero does. While heroes always improve with level. Companions also get closer to retirement, and so they weaken or flanderize as the story goes on.

 

[Garthanos]

Ballad of Davy Crockett - kilt him a be 'are when he was only three Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier!

Legendary figures are often prodigies... how that is invoked is often over the top. Even if Davy isnt a Demi-god.

I think D&D characters going from heroic to epic in nothing flat also evokes that some but in a less absolute sense.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Legendary figures are often prodigies... how that is invoked is often over the top. Even if Davy isnt a Demi-god.

Of course not. He's a demi-horse demi-alligator (with a little touch of snapping turtle).

 

[Ratskinner]

Ballad of Davy Crockett - kilt him a be 'are when he was only three Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier!

I think that's the first time I've ever heard that taken seriously, rather than a nod towards American braggadocio.

'course, I guess that's how legends develop.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Fighters are not getting "left out". It's a character class, not a person. You can't hurt its feelings. But you can leave out players. And if every class goes supernatural,....

First of all, it's not if: every class in 5e has at least one sub-class with supernatural powers. There's just 3 classes that also that have some non-supernatural sub-classes.

Because Heracles isn't just a high-level Conan. Heracles is accomplishing superhuman feats of strength

Sure, but super-human needn't mean super-natural. Strangling a snake is not supernatural, for instance. Snakes breath, you constrict them hard enough, they die. Perfectly natural.

It is true that there's a lot of archetypes out there that specifically /don't/ call for supernatural powers. But, where you put the line between supernatural and extraordinary or superhuman is an issue. There's a tendency - most evident in all the martial-hate/fighter-cast-spells propaganda of the edition war - to draw a line even more restrictive than scientific realism, and label anything that crosses it "supernatural." That tendency needs to be resisted, because /forcing it on others does very much leave out players/, while tolerating different visions of what's supernatural or not doesn't leave anyone out, it just asks them to politely let other people build and play characters to concept, and to engage in this game of the imagination, while, imaginatively. That's not too much to ask.

Wrestling with the embodiment of death to save his friends dying wife?

Well, that's dealing with a supernatural challenge. But, there's nothing supernatural about wrestling. Heroes dealt with supernatural challenges using non-supernatural means all the time.

There need to be classes for them too.

To be fair, not-supernatural does not need to imply mechanical inferiority nor lower-level. Low-level can be used /in place of strict mechanical inferiority/, though, if that's what's desired. If the story calls for a doughty halfling accompanying a mythic wizard, the one can be 5th and the other 17th - BA is even meant to help with that, a bit ( the halfling can roll a natural 20 to guess a secret door's password, that has eluded the wizard, for instance).

The sorts of things he accomplishes are exactly the sorts of things a RAW 20th-level fighter (or barbarian) can accomplish

Well, except for the whole big pile of dead bad guys, and the nettling old issue of being high-STR focused w/o heavy armor. But, that's just one vision of Conan, and not the most authentic. Well, that and Conan also went on to become a victorious general, and a king. It'd be a little tough to be a maxed-STR, high-DEX, high-CON, barbarian, /and/ accumulate stats/skills to be a credible thief, pirate, general and king. Not much easier even if you went with Fighter for the extra ASIs.

The mechanical reason I suggested a full class rather than a subclass is that the base fighter class gets four attacks and Action Surge, which limits the amount of power you can put into other features. If you build a new class around a special Strength progression that eventually gets them to 30 Strength the same way you build the rogue around Sneak Attack, I think you can fulfill the mythic fantasy better.

That's a very specific solution, and probably not the only way (the game /could/ more generally allow for higher stats, without making it necessary everyone take them, for instance - via diminishing returns, perhaps), but it's the right general kind of idea. The fighter class has to be changed fundamentally, or obviated - the way it's designed now, it's too hyper-focused on minimal-versatility DPR to /add/ things to or merely tweak things with a sub-class. (It's not a worse design than any other class, just asked to do too much.) Either that, or you could present alternatives to the way it uses extra attack & Action Surge...