I think that's bad design. You shouldn't be able to be good at everything. With 3 pillars, there should one you are good at, one you are decent at, and one that you poor at. Having classes with strengths and weaknesses makes for more fun in my opinion. It also allows others to shine where you are weak and vice versa.
There is a difference between "strengths and weaknesses" and being flatly GOOD or BAD at things.
A character can, in fact quite easily, be good at every pillar of the game while having strengths and weaknesses. For example, in DW, even a player who consistently rolls very well must almost always choose things to give up, ignore, or leave behind; these are weaknesses, despite the character involved having great ability regardless of the situation at hand.
Being just flat
bad at a vital part of play goes way beyond "weakness." It goes into "you get NOTHING, good DAY sir!" territory.
And I feel that's at least partly an attitude issue. Sure enough, if you don't choose anything for your character that would be useful outside of combat, whose fault it really is then if they're useless outside the combat?
What did the Wizard, Druid, or Cleric choose other than baseline class?
Why does the Fighter HAVE to make these tradeoffs, while a caster can have their cake, eat it too, and get a third bonus cake on the side?
So what would you want? What would that identity of fighter outside of combat be? What sort of mechanics you would want to have to support that?
Survivor; you don't get through fighting bird-grizzly hybrids and mobile acidic jello cubes and ten-ton flying firebreathing iguanas without having an ability to endure the weirdest crap and keep trucking. Where the Ranger is a hunter and an expert of living off the land, the Fighter is the one you turn to when you need someone who can walk into fire and poison and not falter. That has plenty of useful non-combat potential.
Reconnaissance man. If the Fighter has fought things as tough to kill as rust monsters, black puddings, and trolls, she must be observant enough to know that an attack is ineffective and creative enough to test novel techniques until one works. Where the Rogue is a thief, assassin, and/or B&E specialist, the Fighter is someone who collects information about the land, the disposition of the forces or people (stuff 4e would have called "Streetwise"), and the potential dangers and resources. A Warlord should be turning to the Fighter for tactical advice and sitreps.
Doer of mighty deeds. Fighters (excluding EKs) are the non-caster class that generally prioritizes Str/Dex and Con. Let them do things in the direction of the exploits of Odysseus (who straddles the line of Fighter, Rogue, and Warlord), Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, Atalanta, etc. The Fighter has gone on adventures of comparable difficulty to the Twelve Labors. Let her do astounding feats of prowess and precision that wouldn't be possible in real life: clearing stables with rivers and leaping hundred-foot chasms like it ain't no thang.
I'm sure I could suggest more if I weren't suffering from insomnia.
I am also a tad confused how people who complain that fighter is just a dumb jock want to separate anything that is not a dumb jock from the fighter and make them into their own classes to make it super sure that conceptually fighter can never be anything except a dumb jock...
Not at all. I want the class to be free to be awesome at specifically Fighter-y things that go beyond the edge of the battlefield, and by giving the Warlord the space for ITS awesome things separately, both concepts can get full expression, instead of each getting half served (or less).
I think this is more of a concession.
Many D&D fans think the fighter will never be separated from the dumb jock base. Therefore they request a new class that had is a warrior that is not based on being a dumb jock
Ultimately 5e was built on being nostalgic and simple. So mechanics and class features that would allow for incentives for mental fighters were not included outside of just giving fighters spells.
I don't see it as a concession. I see it as giving both concepts enough "room" to actually be themselves and be supported by real, effective mechanics.
Agreed on the rest though. It's why hearing 5e's designers say certain things during the playtest was such an enormous red flag. Doubly so when "tradition" mostly means doing things the 3e way, the edition where Fighters were at their weakest.
This is the main issue I think. Classes have meaning and their skills and abilities reflect that meaning. What would a Fighter be good at outside of combat? Stuff related to his fighting obviously, which doesn't really bode well for the exploration and social pillars.
See above. We can extrapolate from what combat things a Fighter must have done in order to merely
survive the monster-festooned hellscape that is most D&D worlds. These extrapolations can then reveal non-combat applications of combat-derived skills. Like the reverse of the archetypal ninja, who took non-combat tools (trowels, rakes, etc.) and learned how to use them as deadly weapons.
There's some leeway with the subclasses, because those also have meaning. Samurai and Knights traditionally had other non-combat skills. Etiquette and Poetry for example.
These are also valid, I just don't want to restrict "you're allowed to meaningfully participate in non-combat events" to specifically "martial nobility" types.
Subclasses should be part of the solution. But they won't be enough on their own.
It all comes down to players wanting things that contradict each other.
There is just TOO MUCH D&D fans want the single fighter class to do narratively and mechanically.
It can't be a simple class for noobs and tired folk, a raw roleplay class for skilled play crowd, and a tactical class for strategists that include every single warrior from real world and fantasy.
Exactly. Hence my above statement that giving Warlord and Fighter their own classes actually FREES the Fighter, by letting it cover an actually-coverable subset of the things "Fighter" may have meant in previous editions.
Not if all of those are subclasses. It's when they try to apply all of those to the base Fighter class that issues happen. The base class is just beat you up with weapons and associated skills and abilities. It's not really capable of being all those other things, which is why prestige classes, paths/destinies, and subclasses were made.
You can give more to the baseline chassis though. See above. Particularly with the Deeds of Prowess, where you can give specific subclasses additional options to help thematically support that specific subclass's flavor with non-combat benefits.
I think if a group of players doing homebrew wanted to include something like that to their Fighter, they should just have the option/right to discuss it with their DM instead of making new official content to let the DM feel "oh, this is legal then."
My problem, as I've said in many similar conversations, is that despite the CLAIMED openness of 5e to such things, my practical experience (both direct and vicarious) has shown most DMs are really, really reluctant to allow homebrew or houseruling. Further, if it is the player suggesting these changes, rather than the DM, the skepticism increases tenfold. Unless you are lucky enough to have an extremely reliable friend group with whom you play 5e regularly, good luck getting a DM to approve rewriting the Fighter class! You'll need it, and maybe a miracle too.
Which is built in to a degree. Indomitable is based on that prowess. The Champion gets Remarkable Athlete and Survivor. There is room for more of it, but it's still not going to help much with the exploration and social pillars, and what there is will be mostly in exploration.
See above for why I disagree. Also Remarkable Athlete is laughable and Indomitable is a combat feature, not a non-combat one, on top of being hilariously infrequent if it's supposed to have any non-combat use. (Do you really roll saving throws in a purely social encounter all that often? Hell, do you roll them in a purely
exploration encounter all that often?)
I think the bolded is the better way to go. Any other fixes will also help the other classes as well, making them even better, so the disparity will remain constant.
How does the bolded NOT help everyone uniformly?
Anyone can roll 25, and ONLY casters have ready access to "I give myself advantage on all <pick a stat> checks!"
That's not a problem at all. Subclasses exists exactly for this purpose.
Minigiant covered this more succinctly than I ever could. Just noting my complete agreement with their response.
A Battlemaster though was designed to be able to fulfill the warlord concept.
FrogReaver, you are missing our point; we are telling you that it ABJECTLY FAILS to achieve this purpose in exactly the same way that the Eldritch Knight fails to be a Wizard. That's literally what we're telling you is going on. Given that it is the people who actually WANT to play this concept telling you this, you may wish to consider why we feel that way, rather than telling us that our feelings are wrong and we should have been perfectly satisfied with what we have, if maybe possibly subject to some tiny tweaks.
You could have the champion to be the basic fighteriest of fighters that gets all this stuff.
There are so many things you could do to help make the Champion not be so kinda-okayish-one-trick-pony without making it non-simple though. Yes, it will benefit from keeping things simple. But you can pursue simplicity without throwing up your hands and saying "welp, guess this subclass just won't have
anything meaningful to contribute when it's time to socialize!"
If a fighter wants to shine out of combat. Pay attention to the plot of an adventure. Know all the NPC’s by name. Learn what they all do and how they relate. You will be picking up clues that others making die rolls will completely miss.
Uh....except that the people rolling dice can...totally also do that? Like you make it sound as though the instant someone starts rolling dice their brain shuts off. Hate to break it to you, but it is entirely possible (indeed, HIGHLY desirable) for a spellcaster to remain very situationally aware. That's how you leverage your abilities best on EVERY class. (I recognize I'm a bit late on this but someone quoted it above and I had to respond.)
Well, I disagree. They mostly do pretty well. Sure, things always could be improved, but the current situation is infinitely preferable to class bloat.
For real? ONE extremely beloved, iconic class is "class bloat"? How nice for you that it just so happens that doing things so
efficiently gives you everything you ask for and leaves continuously and criminally under-served fans out in the cold yet again. That's just super swell.
Maybe a little
magnanimity would be a friendly gesture, instead of treating a pretty reasonable request as something that will
dirty the game?
