D&D (2024) Martial vs Caster: Removing the "Magical Dependencies" of high level.

[James Gasik]

Okay, other than "because I say so" what logic dictates that?

For me, I'm looking at other effects. For example, submerging yourself in lava does 18d10 or 99 damage. Napalm is cooler than lava (by about 400 degrees F) so it would do less damage, and a high speed hollow metal shell to deliver it wouldn't have more impact force than a boulder. The highest boulder throw I can find is 4d12 or 26 damage. So even if we somehow made Napalm HOTTER than lava (which it isn't) and because of the speed gave it the impact force of a much more massive and dense object.... it STILL wouldn't reach the level of Meteor Swarm



"I'm going to dismiss your use of the rules by pretending they don't matter" Very convincing. So, what if the antimatter rifle was OVERpowered and should be weaker then? Wouldn't that make my case stronger?



No, I'm not. I don't have to break the laws of space-time to warp something. Altering the geo-politics of the planet for half a century IS reality warping power to have in the hands of a single person.



Yeah, you know humor doesn't translate well via text and unknown memes right? And humor can be mocking?

And if you wanted to be talking about martials, then it is rather pointless to bring up "well a cow kicking over an oil lamp once destroyed a city made of wood, so the ability to throw missile strikes with your mind can't be THAT powerful." because you are somehow trying to conflate "something devastating can happen" to "therefore it isn't powerful that one person can do it on command". Or talking about nuclear missiles and high-speed jetliners like those are things Martials characters in DnD just have in their back pocket.



Souls are real in DnD, so.... I am being consistent. Something not known to be possible and entirely theoritical in one world and absolute hard fact of reality in another. If you can say "but Boeing 747's are common in our world, so meteor swarm must be common in the fantasy world" and "but digitization of the human mind might be possible" then I can talk about souls in DnD.



Even if I was, that doesn't mean I'm wrong. And I'm not. Seriously, you just seem like you can't comprehend the difference between "a government spending tens of thousands of man hours and millions of dollars" and "some dude wiggled his fingers". That alone makes such a massive difference in every single example you have given.



And what if my whole group agrees we should change the rules of 5e? What then?

You keep trying to dismiss people's concerns by basically saying "But I fixed it in my game, so it can't possibly be a problem you are really having." But you keep missing the fact that it had to be FIXED. And even if you allow fighter's to triple backflip, pull out a nuke and surfboard it into the castle, another DM is going to say that jumping more than 10 ft up in heavy armor is impossible and rolling a nat 1 means they cut off their own head. And sure, maybe that player should find a better DM, but the problem with relying on the DM to allow you to do things by vague interpretations, is that you never know which it is until you are mid-session and try something.

Meanwhile, the rules at the very least allow for consistency. And that's important.



Right, you are missing the entire point of the example.

You want know one of my theories why they thought about? Because they used one of the torches early in either the same fight or the previous fight in a different room, with their catapult spell to deal fire damage (scribe wizard). They have a spell that takes items in the environment, and turns them into weapons. So they are already keyed to looking at the environment to find ammo. Because I remember thinking that's what they were doing, when I read the post.

Me? I may have "less to think about" but I don't have anything that interacts with the environment. Sure, I use some flavor text, but mechanically nothing I pick up off the ground is better than my weapon. To me, a torch is a -4 weapon (assuming I get to add my strength mod), and it would mean either dropping my real weapon or my shield. It is useless to me. So, I discount it. To her, a torch is a 3d8 fire damage piece of ammunition (more damage than I can deal on a turn) so she is looking for that stuff.

And it isn't a competition, sure, but I've spent four rounds standing in front of the enemy, hitting it, and taking hits. Because if I'm not doing that, party members will die. But after four rounds... I've run out of flavor text. I'm not doing anything dynamic. I'm just slugging it out. Same monster, same attack pattern, sure I could try and create space for our archer to get advantage but... then I'd have to take a free hit (which would probably kill me, since the healer is barely keeping me up) unless I used my action to disengage, and I don't have the spells to reaction defend and protect myself like the wizard did. Which means it would take me two turns to snuff a light. So even if I wanted to, tactically, it would be a stupid move. So my best move is to... be utterly bored just slugging away.

I pointed this out because it covers a few of the bases in this "just improvise actions!" argument. 1) It shows that anyone can do it, not just martials. 2) It shows how a use of spells can still make casters better at improv (using the reaction to defend against the attacks, leaving the action free) 3) It highlights the feeling of the lack of choice, and how that narrows your scope. I'm not just NOT doing these things, I don't even see the options, because I have nothing to hook into. Everything I do other than attack must be improv'd and either hope the DM doesn't veto, or hope that I can get enough of an effect to make losing the damage worth it.

Not sure if it helps, but the Giant Ape's boulder throw is 7d6+4.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Hmmm. This sounds less like an argument that making mundane expertise work isn't feasible than like a couple of cautions to the GM or adventure designer:

1.) Make learning about monsters more interesting than just a die roll; and

2.) Make preparing countermeasures more than a matter of blind luck.

There's a well-known body of techniques for #1 because it's essentially just turning the monster into an instance of the "mystery" game structure: instead of being able to "roll Insight" to "detect the murderer" in the first scene, you need to follow leads to gather clues and consult experts and winesses until you have a answer. (Hopefully the correct one!)

Let's say you've got an adventure in which part of the scenario "requires" (for sake of Internet discussion I'll make this a bit railroadey but that's just to keep discussion simple) that the PCs neutralize the horrific mindwarper Dr. Horrible who holds the East Tower. If they either talk to the townsfolk who sell him orphaned children or interview the poor messenger boy whom Dr. Horrible uses to deliver his occasional ultimatum or take alive and interview some of the assassins whom Dr. Horrible will eventually send to test their mettle for his own amusement, they'll learn that Dr. Horrible eats brains using tentacles on his face, smells of death, and never sleeps. If they either resurrect Doctor Van Helsing from his remains in the cemetery, find Van Helsing's notes hidden in Musty Basement #3, or (forgive me if this is a poor example--I'm not saying this off-the-cuff example doesn't need workshopping) visit the wizard Merlin looking for advice, they'll learn that illithid liches eat brains from tentacles on their faces, smell like death, never sleep, and (like other mind flayers) flee in fear from the sound of a rooster crowing.

So now the players have a choice:

1.) Take a live rooster with them on their attempt to neutralize Dr. Horrible. Time their assault to happen around dawn, and/or have some way to make the rooster crow when it's not dawn (sunlight spells? Animal control spells?). Don't let monsters or traps kill the rooster before doing its job.

2.) Try to fake it with an illusionary rooster? Maybe test this out in advance first by seeking out a regular mind flayer and seeing if this works on it. Do the players have time to do this testing or will they just try it on Dr. Horrible and hope for the best?

3.) Brute force: kill Dr. Horrible and his minions using action surge/Sharpshooter/etc. as if the rooster information didn't exist. Or die trying.

If they bypass the "mystery" of seeking information and jump straight to #3, they may have a Deadly x10 fight on their hands, but they don't have to "get lucky" on an intelligence roll or in having access to a rooster. If they go the mystery route, they don't have to get lucky on an intelligence roll either. They may require some luck to keep their rooster alive if they go for #1, and it probably won't "[guarantee] a victory with few to no stakes" so much as it will change a Deadly x10 fight against Dr. Horrible + minions into a Hard or Deadly fight against minions only, but you were presenting a guaranteed victory as a bad thing anyway.

Right, but there is a detail you are missing here.

Dr. Horrible has to be a well-established boss fight. Dr. Horrible can't be the surprise reveal underneath the creepy crypt. The villain has to be aware of the PCs, and send minions after them to drop clues, or be established as the big bad they are after. And while this can work if you are dealing with a low level party fighting a single boos illithid, it becomes a bit ridiculous if it turns out #2 works, and then they just stroll into an illithid hive city with a major image of a rooster and trample over the entire place. Because unless Dr. Horrible is UNIQUE then the next time the party faces this foe, they either have or don't have the key to weakening them significantly.

Yes, you can treat a boss, set-piece encounter like this. But it doesn't work beyond that event. If the game establishes all illithid flee from roosters, and you just happen to encounter a group of them in the underdark while looking for some ancient ruins... then you either have an easy "We win!" button if the players know, or the monster fight doesn't care about the rooster, or the monsters have been designed that instead of "we win!" it is "we have a chance" and not having the rooster (illusory or not) makes the fight far more brutal. So this has to be used sparingly, and really only with set-piece Boss fights or long-term villains who the party is gathering resources to fight.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Not sure if it helps, but the Giant Ape's boulder throw is 7d6+4.

I took out the modifier, so that would be 7d6, which is just slightly lower than 4d12 (24.5 vs 26) But good catch. I was just looking at the Giants.

 

[MichaelSomething]

This thread looks like a job for Aquaman's Rousing Song of Heroism!!!!

 

[Emberashh]

I had a big response to everything but I got to this part and I think we need to clear the air on how you're communicating with me.

I pointed this out because it covers a few of the bases in this "just improvise actions!" argument. 1) It shows that anyone can do it, not just martials. 2) It shows how a use of spells can still make casters better at improv (using the reaction to defend against the attacks, leaving the action free) 3) It highlights the feeling of the lack of choice, and how that narrows your scope. I'm not just NOT doing these things, I don't even see the options, because I have nothing to hook into.

Im going to point out that the chain of comments here discussing Improvise Action was, at no point in time, EVER about Improvise Action being the end-all solution. That was never the point of my arguments and was never an argument that was expressed by me.

The action itself was brought up, by me, as a mention to contrast how easily DMs will improvise new effects for spells but will make martials beg for anything, despite the fact that the latter has an explicit rule while the former doesn't. This was in post #205.

It was brought up again, by me, in post #249 to make the point that Improvise Action is a valid option Martials have at all tables, even if the specific improvs a person may want might not be depending on their DMs, which I likened to the randomness of a loot table.

I never in either of these posts made the argument that Improvise Action was a fix-all solution for Martials. That was injected into that chain of thought in post #250 by another poster, and Ive been consistent since my response in post #260 that while it isn't an all-encompassing solution, it absolutely does temper how severe the problem is, and thus, what kinds of solutions we should be looking at; I brought up DCC's Mighty Deed more than once for a reason, and I even linked my own creations earlier on as well, which I'll add are all based on the same logic I use here about combat being shallow, abilities needing to be specific and non-generic, and the integration of improv; all done across 7 separate Martial designs. I argue the things I do because I look at these issues from the perspective of a game designer, and Im confident in them because Im literally watching them work with every playtest I run with these ideas.

Anyway, this apparent assumption and assertion that I think 5e is fine as is and there is no problem just because of Improvise Action is a load of garbage, as evidenced by not just my own words in this topic but also the very fact that I don't even play or run 5e anymore and have been writing my own RPG for better part of the year.

I don't know why or for what reason you and others so readily and aggressively jumped onto this assertion, but please, stop.

 

[Hussar]

Again, and honestly, I can't stress this enough, we lost this fight. We lost this fight years ago. Fighters are the most popularly played class in the game. Every bit of evidence we have says that people are very happy with the way fighters are in 5e. Why would WotC make any changes?

To make me happy? That would be great and all. And, I really would LOVE to see some lower magic games get some loving, but, let's be perfectly honest here, it's not going to happen. Full stop. At best we get some weapon mastery bennies for fighters. Not only for fighters, of course, but, at least it gives fighters a tiny bit extra to do.

But, in any case, there is zero chance that any of the complaints, no matter how valid, well thought out or otherwise, are going to make the slightest, tiniest dent in the fact that D&D is now, very firmly, planting its flag in the middle of high magic. Earlier people complained that WotC wasn't making a stand. I disagree. They've very, very clearly taken a stand and that stand is atop Mount Magic. Casters get new options in EVERY SINGLE supplement. New spells, new powers, new whatever. Non-casters? Have they even expanded the equipment list? Ten years and Battlement Fighters have not gotten a SINGLE new maneuver.

Imagine what would happen if we went ten months without casters getting a new spell. The world would come to an end. But a new Battlemaster maneuver? A new thing to do with Sneak Attack? Heck, it took until Xanathar's before they even spent any time expanding tools and skills.

Welcome to High Magic D&D boys and girls. It's here to stay.

 

[DammitVictor]

People want high-level warriors to be as powerful (or as versatile) as high-level spellcasters.
People don't want high-level warriors to have "supernatural" powers.
People don't want to impose limitations on spellcasters' casting methods or spell selection.

Pick Two.

But people don't want to pick two, either.

Personally, I think high-level warriors should get better at "magic" (not spells) the same way that spellcasters automatically get better at hitting monsters with a stick.

 

[Minigiant]

Fine, whatever. Then why was THIS what you said?



You didn't say "depending on the technique and metaphysics of the world then the composition of the blade matters". You said "But isn't the explanation for knocking away a fireball their MAGIC axe?" "Can't they cut through reality with their MAGIC sword"

"Martials are the only ones skilled in swordsmanship to wield magic swords."

That isn't about absorbing a 9th level spell. That isn't about the metaphysics of iron. That is "because the weapon is magic, then they can do cool things" and the thing that was objected to, that you are now agreeing with was "why can't they do cool things ANYWAYS"

I don't care if magical weapons make fighters more powerful. I want fighters to be cool and doing ridiculous things WITHOUT magical weapons, not BECAUSE of magical weapons.

It's simple

Some cool epic things a fighter can do require a special item.
Some cool epic things a fighter can don't require a special item.

Same for casters. A necromancer can an limit of number of controlled undead unless they have a magic item o boost the number. No horde of zombies in D&D unless you have a magic staff of undeath or some nonsense.

Fans have also balked on the playtest Modify Spell and Create Spell spells as they don't cost enough. Make it a special wand and most people would not care.

 

[Minigiant]

Again, and honestly, I can't stress this enough, we lost this fight. We lost this fight years ago. Fighters are the most popularly played class in the game. Every bit of evidence we have says that people are very happy with the way fighters are in 5e. Why would WotC make any changes?

To make me happy? That would be great and all. And, I really would LOVE to see some lower magic games get some loving, but, let's be perfectly honest here, it's not going to happen. Full stop. At best we get some weapon mastery bennies for fighters. Not only for fighters, of course, but, at least it gives fighters a tiny bit extra to do.

But, in any case, there is zero chance that any of the complaints, no matter how valid, well thought out or otherwise, are going to make the slightest, tiniest dent in the fact that D&D is now, very firmly, planting its flag in the middle of high magic. Earlier people complained that WotC wasn't making a stand. I disagree. They've very, very clearly taken a stand and that stand is atop Mount Magic. Casters get new options in EVERY SINGLE supplement. New spells, new powers, new whatever. Non-casters? Have they even expanded the equipment list? Ten years and Battlement Fighters have not gotten a SINGLE new maneuver.

Imagine what would happen if we went ten months without casters getting a new spell. The world would come to an end. But a new Battlemaster maneuver? A new thing to do with Sneak Attack? Heck, it took until Xanathar's before they even spent any time expanding tools and skills.

Welcome to High Magic D&D boys and girls. It's here to stay.

Pretty much

D&D will never treat Martials the same as Caster until at the earliest 2034 or whenever 6e happens. When all the people who didn't grow up on 80s and 90s fantasy cartoons and anime run the genre.

Harsh truth is that D&D and most of the TTRPGverse is mostly helmed by older folk who prefer High magic casters and low power warriors of the pulp fantasy days. The people who grew up with Lion-o beating up Mumm-Ra with just a magic sword aren't designing the warriors for D&D.

So it's at least 15 years before "I cut his death spell in half" becomes a standard action in D&D.

 

[Hussar]

Heck it’s not even a case of wanting martials to be as powerful or versatile as casters. It’s more I’d just like fighters that didn’t spam the same one or two actions over and over again for twenty levels.

I mean is it too much to as to have five or six options in a given round by the time you hit double digit levels?