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

[Vaalingrade]

No. Not like a Battle Master.

You know, just because BM was the only good fighter subclass for a while doesn't mean it was good and it certainly doesn't mean being able to extend your arm once every hour is a feat to be proud of or that requires a lot of skill.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Why do we live in a timeline with multiple football headed children in our popular culture.

When was this a thing? Did I miss a massive wave of very specific birth defects?

 

[Maxperson]

You know, just because BM was the only good fighter subclass for a while doesn't mean it was good and it certainly doesn't mean being able to extend your arm once every hour is a feat to be proud of or that requires a lot of skill.

What does that mean?

 

[Celebrim]

He shattered a dude's arm by squeezing one-handed.

Ok. And?

I'm not really seeing your problem. That's well within the capabilities of a mid-level D&D fighter. It seems you are impressed by style over substance. If that's the case, you are looking for your happiness in all the wrong places. A mid-level strength-based fighter can totally maim a 1st level character with his bare hands. 5e even provides for it explicitly. This is a matter of color of your attack, and not anything mechanical.

 

[Haplo781]

Why do we live in a timeline with multiple football headed children in our popular culture.

When was this a thing? Did I miss a massive wave of very specific birth defects?

I'm going to opt not to type up the very funny comment I'm thinking of right now.

 

[DND_Reborn]

How do you think "nerf the wizard" would go over with the player base at large?

Better or worse than "buff the fighter"?

Better. A LOT of people here on EnWorld (myself included!) have offered solutions over the years for nerfing the wizard and buffing the fighter to bring them closer together.

Most games in 5E don't go past levels 10-12 IME and if you listen to people anecdotally. So, those 6th-9th level spells that a lot of caster-"lovers" (for lack of a better term) don't want to "give up" are rarely ever actually used.

I've played and house-ruled many times spell progressions which stop at either 5th or 6th level spells, such as this for a current project:

So, the above class does get 1st and 2nd level spells at the normal progression, but 3rd are delayed one level, 4th are delayed three levels, and 5th are delayed six levels, while 6th and higher are never attained.

As for improving the Fighter a bit:

D&D 5E - Another Fighter: the "Heroic" Fighter

So, here is yet another attempt (or revision from prior attempts) at a "heroic" fighter class. By "heroic" I mean things that are feasible by real world standards, even if they really stretch the bounds of plausibility. While extreme potentially, they are not meant to be "super heroic", but can...

www.enworld.org

 

[DND_Reborn]

And yet the excuse of preventing D&D Martial classes from doing those same things... is realism.

Not really. Many of us have posted here numerous times about house-ruling things to PCs can not only match what is possible in real life, but even exceed them.

 

[Minigiant]

The core issue in the original Fighter of the Old School was a Christmas Tree.

Fighters, like most PC classs, capped onlinear power after some point. They didn't get to the 5e equal of Tier 3. Instead the magic item tables were tilted hard to them. So your level 15 had level 10 features but a magic armor, a magic shield, a magic belt, a magic cloak,a magic helm, magic boots, several rings, magic potions, a golfbag of magic weapon that they could only use and got everytime.

However D&D started to nudge to letting DMs control treasure to make low magic, no magic, or low fantasy settings. And fighter players wrote wishlists as these items were their class features. And when they didn't get them, the fighter players wanted the item aspects as class features.

That's the conflict.

1. You can't have the fighter's class features be items AND not have class favoritism
2. Only one of the DM, the Player, and the System can choose fighter items.
3. The System has to choose whether the fighter is a normal world person boosted by items or an exceptional person where items is a bonus on top or factored it.

The D&D community has be dodging the issues for 50 years.

AKA
Either the Fighter gets to pick the Gauntlets of Ogre Power, Belt of Giant's Strength, and Hammer of Thunderbolts everytime, the Fighter gets Thor's power and skill asbase features, or the Caster lose the ability to pick spells a level up.

 

[Art Waring]

1. You can't have the fighter's class features be items AND not have class favoritism
2. Only one of the DM, the Player, and the System can choose fighter items.
3. The System has to choose whether the fighter is a normal world person boosted by items or an exceptional person where items is a bonus on top or factored it.

This.

The game itself makes base assumptions about the fighter, which may not align with individual GMs preferences.

While folks mentioning the 3e christmas tree effect are surely right in some aspects about that problem, removing items entirely from the equation was IMHO a mistake.

Hopefully this might be addressed in the next edition.

 

[Minigiant]

This.

The game itself makes base assumptions about the fighter, which may not align with individual GMs preferences.

While folks mentioning the 3e christmas tree effect are surely right in some aspects about that problem, removing items entirely from the equation was IMHO a mistake.

Hopefully this might be addressed in the next edition.

Indeed.

5e created a base system where magic items were not needed mechanically by martial characters that were based on having magic items mechanically.

So you have a system where 1/2 the game is based on one assumption and 1/2 the game is based on another.

The choice (or lack of time to) not do full on nonmagical and high fantasy variant rules really skewed up 5e past level 8 or so.