D&D 5E Truly Understanding the Martials & Casters discussion (+)

[Mort]

So, I had dozens of pages to catch up on and I have one insight I'd like to share in case it hasn't come up:

Take John McClane and put him in a tier 4 adventure with fiends, adult (or older) dragons, and such, with wizards casting meteor swarm and shapechange, etc. All I can do is picture him saying:

Spoiler: Possibly offense content

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Jesus Christ, what the f#ck is THAT thing!?! Holy sh!t! Please, God, don't let me die!

Not so much the famed Yippee-ki-yay, mother fucker! line...

So, while I don't think the fighter needs to be a super-hero, I am firmly in the camp of something needs to be done.

There are SO MANY options. for ex: why not give the fighter a nice low level "find weakness" ability. After 1 round of encountering something with resistance, the fighter can overcome that resistance even without a magic weapon.

Stops the paladin and ranger from smirking at the fighter as they pull their magic shenanigans (and frankly takes a bit of pressure of the DM to "conveniently" place magic weapons etc.).

 

[HammerMan]

Personally, I'd go 4e fighter and 3e warmage.

breaking the wizard up into 2 or 4 classes is ALSO a great idea... a true necromancer, a warmage, a beguiler, and witch would rock

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

What is a mythic hero to you? To me it's Hercules who was literally a demi-god, but that's not really a class. Mythic heroes that can redirect rivers or chop down mountains? Not sure how you'd establish rules for something like that other than "the DM decides what miraculous thing the PC does" because I don't know how you'd establish boundaries.

If you just want supernatural warriors, we already have those. So what would a mythic hero be to you? What niche would it fill?

There are pages and pages exploring what this might look like as well as multiple other threads. Sorry to drag you back in. Auf wiedersehen.

 

[Zubatcarteira]

John McClane fought an F-35 fighter jet and won. He'd find a way to beat those dragons, I'm telling ya.

 

[Oofta]

John McClane fought an F-35 fighter jet and won. He'd find a way to beat those dragons, I'm telling ya.

Exactly. McClane obviously knows how to bend time and space. How else you have a fist fight that lasts for 5 minutes on the wing of passenger jet that's taking off!

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

breaking the wizard up into 2 or 4 classes is ALSO a great idea... a true necromancer, a warmage, a beguiler, and witch would rock

Yeah versatility IMO is an even greater differentiator than raw power. Magic classes can just cover too many roles.

Imagine if Wizard was middle of the road in combat and got ONE other area of spells -- movement, social, divination, illusion, etc.

It frees up the other classes to shine. Yeah, you have this blaster who can also fly and teleport, that doesn't help you at all in the king's court. Good thing we have the high CHA guy.

Yeah you have this blaster who can charm people but you have a long wilderness journey up ahead. Good thing you have the ranger.

etc

 

[Mecheon]

Just on an earlier post:

I wanted something a little better than "because I said so" or "because the rules say I can." Guess I asked too much.

I think its easy. "The laws of physics as we know are regularly broken by monsters due to non-magical reasons. Therefore, once you hit certain thresholds, you are also no longer bound by such and can pull of Beowulf-esque feats"

 

[Mort]

John McClane fought an F-35 fighter jet and won. He'd find a way to beat those dragons, I'm telling ya.

Movie action heroes have the extra special plot armor. This actually isn't all that hard to model, even in D&D - but it involves giving players a bit of narrative control (from minor to major) that then leads to a whole other type of battle.

Personally? I wouldn't mind giving fighters extra fate points etc. to model this. And expressly withholding the fate points from casters (or giving them less/less effective ones) because they have other ways of messing with reality.

 

[TwoSix]

breaking the wizard up into 2 or 4 classes is ALSO a great idea... a true necromancer, a warmage, a beguiler, and witch would rock

Integrating multiple thematic casters like beguiler and dread necromancer with Bo9S-style martials was exactly the path I hoped 4e would go.

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

Movie action heroes have the extra special plot armor. This actually isn't all that hard to model, even in D&D - but it involves giving players a bit of narrative control (from minor to major) that then leads to a whole other type of battle.

Personally? I wouldn't mind giving fighters extra fate points etc. to model this. And expressly withholding the fate points from casters (or giving them less/less effective ones) because they have other ways of messing with reality.

Yep, that is another tool. Plot armor is huge for more mundane heros. Lots of games do this with metacurrency and have a lot less problems putting Black Widow and Thor in the same adventure this way.

If they gave true narrative control then they would be a bit of departure from traditional D&D but I'd be game.

For instance, you could have an ability that gave the dimension door like effect without disappearing and reappearing. So you can basically guaruntee moving from point A to point B through normal action hero moves because the enviroment will narratively shape itself to allow you do that with the meta currency -- the vine rips off in just the right way, the dragon flies past and you just off it's back to another platform, etc etc