D&D 5E Being strong and skilled is a magic of its own or, how I learned to stop worrying and love anime fightin' magic

[GMforPowergamers]

Take away cantrips and cut back spell slots to the point where a level 1 wizard gets a single magic missile per day and then has to start chucking darts.

I think I played that game once or twice...

 

[Haplo781]

The issue is people who aesthetically love the idea of the everyman hero who succeeds in the face of everything despite no supernatural power and so don't want a martial class to ever have any ability that isn't within the range of peak human athletic ability. Their aesthetics get ruined if by 12th level, a fighter can jump over a haycart and chase down a man on a horse. They then say, "But that would require magic!"

But then again, so does reliably surviving a fall from a 10 story building. It's selective blindness in my opinion.

Again, a character with 20 strength is mechanically as powerful as an adult rhino and should be able to flip a Suburban as casually as you or I turns over a dining room chair.


And that's not accounting for skill proficiency.

At a bare minimum, an average fighter reaches 20 strength by level 6 without any magic items. So by the game's own internal logic, Greg the Blacksmith should be able to flip over an SUV by level 6, and probably without even rolling.

 

[Celebrim]

Except that the media you're referencing also has a guy who can create a shockwave by clapping his hands, demolish a building with a headbutt, and leap hundreds of feet into the air from a standing start. And a guy who can stick to walls and precognitively sense danger. And a guy who can outrun bullets.

I am saying, give me a fighter and a rogue with comparable abilities. And let them do it without drawing on arcane, divine, or primal magic.

Even if we could do that, and get the flavor right, it still wouldn't be as much narrative force as Wanda. The writer can always use Wanda as a plot device without suspending disbelief. The examples you cite are just schticks, like hitting something with a hammer. See Thor's interaction with Dr. Strange to see what I mean.

I chose Steve for my example because he gets that flavor of being a Fighter right, where as Spidey to me feels more like a sorcerer whose spells all have a spider theme (especially in versions when his webs are not tech).

 

[Willie the Duck]

While I don't know anyone who wants to keep martials down to "feel special", I absolutely do know people who think that casters should be better at higher levels simply because "magic is supposed to be stronger". More of a verisimilitude issue for them, it seems to me.

It would be interesting to hear what their position on addressing the martial-caster disparity at high levels is. If it's something like 'give the martials spells,' or, 'they should get cool magic items,' or AD&D-like 'fighters rule at low level, well then I can understand, if not completely agree with, the positions.

I certainly don't want to overstate my point. I certainly know people who do not know how to square the circle of wanting martials to be strictly non-magical and high-level magic. However, I don't really know any regularly-caster-playing gamers who think that other players who are playing martials ought to just plain not have as much impact on the game -- they just (in my experience) don't know how to achieve that without violating another preference (such as perfectly mundane martials, hi-powered mages being in-world big deals, and no Tim's not going back to spell-fizzle and 10 minute/spell level re-memorization because Joe over there refuses to let his martial be even remotely magical).

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

The issue is people who aesthetically love the idea of the everyman hero who succeeds in the face of everything despite no supernatural power and so don't want a martial class to ever have any ability that isn't within the range of peak human athletic ability. Their aesthetics get ruined if by 12th level, a fighter can jump over a haycart and chase down a man on a horse. They then say, "But that would require magic!"

But then again, so does reliably surviving a fall from a 10 story building. It's selective blindness in my opinion.

No one forces them to play the new hypothetical class. We're not taking away their town guard +1. The fighter can still chump around.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Although I'd probably use different wording than that, in a nutshell this is the problem. Designers have insisted on at minimum parity of all classes in combat while carrying nothing about balance out of combat. The result is that at best spellcasters are never out shown in anything by non-casters, and often in the worst case have better solutions to all problems than non-casters.

yup... if the fighter is only meant for combat, he needs to dominate combat.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Like the paladin? Explicitly granted by some god or wibbly-wobbly divine energy derived from an oath.

Look, you can keep insisting these abilities aren't spells, but they absolutely do not drive from martial prowess, which is my metric.

Fine, even by your limited metric...

Ranger:
Natural Explorer - you can't become lost except by magic. That is pretty good, most people I know can, in fact, become lost by mundane means.

Hide in Plain Sight grants +10 to Hide (just like pass without trace) because of the Ranger's skill.

Feral Senses awareness of invisible creatures (akin to see invisible) due to preternatural senses.

Multiattack allows you to attack up to 26 targets as an action (Volley, but just 8 for Whirlwind Attack).

You might not think such features are "enough" for you, but there are there.

Take away cantrips and cut back spell slots to the point where a level 1 wizard gets a single magic missile per day and then has to start chucking darts.

FWIW, I'm all in favor of that.

Oh, those type of abilities definitely exist, but they're better demonstrated in subclasses like Echo Knight Fighter and Phantom Rogue.

I'm not familiar with those.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

No one forces them to play the new hypothetical class. We're not taking away their town guard +1. The fighter can still chump around.

exactly Break up the FIghter

 

[CreamCloud0]

Much as it is clear to me that deleting the wizard at the top of the edition change would solve many problems, I don't actually want the get 'revenge' on caster players by taking away their fun and making their classes more boring.

I just want the classes I want to play to be less boring without having to become a caster or the vessel for a magic weapon.

My solution, on the Wizard end of things at least, is the pure utility wizard, it’ll be controversial but wizard looses 95% of their non-cantrip straight damage spells(a few like disintegrate might get a pass by having utility purposes) and that’s it, no other changes, but the idea that wizard has a purpose as an offensive force is gone, warlock and sorcerer get to pick up the arcane offensive slack.

 

[TwoSix]

I'm not familiar with those.

Wildemount and Tasha's, respectively.