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

[Micah Sweet]

So the fighter can’t have supernatural abailities becuse it doesn’t and it doesn't cause it can’t.
The line between what they can and can’t have is entirely made up.

No, it doesn't because there's no narrative allowing it. Add the narrative, and the problem disappears. I honestly don't see the problem with this.

 

[Chaosmancer]

No, it doesn't because there's no narrative allowing it. Add the narrative, and the problem disappears. I honestly don't see the problem with this.

Because we all accept that the lore is going to be rewritten, that it is literally just a word or two away from being fine because the world is explicitly magical and full or magical people...

And about every page or so your or someone else we ALREADY explained all this to and ALREADY gave examples of the narratives allowing it and ALREADY had this entire discussion with starts asking what the narrative justification is and why we won't give a narrative justification.

Because we can't just justify it once, or twice, but it must be every few pages that we re-justify the thing we are already justifying. That's the problem with your insistence on demanding that we justify it again.

 

[Yaarel]

No, it doesn't because there's no narrative allowing it. Add the narrative, and the problem disappears. I honestly don't see the problem with this.

The soul is a good solution.

The zen and ki and dao of East Asian mystic warriors, the power of faith and mind over matter of Western warriors, and so on, all relate to aspects of the soul.

The Fighter class doesnt need to detail how it accesses ones soul, it simply needs to offer the possibility to "permit" the Fighter to function at superhuman levels.

 

[Yaarel]

Accuracy doesn't imply 100%. A lot of hard scifi, from the classics on up to your modern stuff, hinges on the speculative and a lot of it you can't actially say "it can happen".

I mean, Jurassic Park (the novel) is hard scifi. Even when it was written, the idea that dinosaur DNA could survive to be used as it was was entirely fictional; it was an enabling device.

What made JP hard scifi is that what that device enabled was accurate; the dinosaurs were at the time the most accurate depiction put to screen or print.

Where you start to cross out of hard scifi is when not only accuracy has been handwaved, but logic and internal consistency, both of which are more important. Accuracy is flexible, but things have to follow logically and stay consistent. In JP, unintended until the sequel trilogy of films, its inaccuracies vis a vis dinosaurs can be attributed to the gaps in DNA filled by other animals, resulting in hybrid animals that aren't true to life but as close as possible.

Thats a plausible logical consequence of the enabling device thats consistent with the real concepts involved.

The opposite of this would just be straight technobabble ala Star Trek, where there might be actual jargon thrown around but its all practically gibberish, with little to no logic and no consistency with any of the real concepts invoked.

Jurassic Park is a good example of hard scifi. It is factually possible to clone ancient dinosaur DNA. (The trick is recovering enough material, such as from partially preserved bone marrow.) There probably are people who would make a safari theme park out of it. It really can happen.

 

[Tonguez]

The soul is a good solution.

The zen and ki and dao of East Asian mystic warriors, the power of faith and mind over matter of Western warriors, and so on, all relate to aspects of the soul.

The Fighter class doesnt need to detail how it accesses ones soul, it simply needs to offer the possibility to "permit" the Fighter to function at superhuman levels.

Elan
Anima
Vivre
Ego
Pneuma
Zest
Vitality
Fervor
Esprit
Vim
(all) Spark
Pzazz
Verve
Potency
Edge
Drive

so many terms without resorting to qi or mana or magic

 

[Emberashh]

Jurassic Park is a good example of hard scifi. It is factually possible to clone ancient dinosaur DNA. (The trick is recovering enough material, such as from partially preserved bone marrow.) There probably are people who would make a safari theme park out of it. It really can happen.

No we can't. DNA simply does not last for that long. What few potential examples we've found are not only highly suspect, but ultimately wouldn't be useable; itd be like finding a couple lugnuts and somehow reverse engineering an entire car.

We can (and will eventually) clone extinct animals like the Wooly Mammoth because they only died out very recently compared to dinosaurs; we coexisted with Mammoths for thousands of years; we're 65 million years removed from the last of the dead dinosaurs, and DNA degrades by half every 500ish years IIRC. Whats left to find of Dinosaur DNA frankly don't even qualify for the lugnut analogy anymore. More like the suggestion of a dream of a lugnut.

 

[Pedantic]

Because we all accept that the lore is going to be rewritten, that it is literally just a word or two away from being fine because the world is explicitly magical and full or magical people...

And about every page or so your or someone else we ALREADY explained all this to and ALREADY gave examples of the narratives allowing it and ALREADY had this entire discussion with starts asking what the narrative justification is and why we won't give a narrative justification.

Because we can't just justify it once, or twice, but it must be every few pages that we re-justify the thing we are already justifying. That's the problem with your insistence on demanding that we justify it again.

You're mixing up two different things here. There's any number of reasonably scaling martial archetypes that provide sufficient utility, literally hundreds of options. It isn't important what justification you provide for superhuman ability, but it's vitally important you pick one.

You can do some of that in the subclass, but most of it has to come in the main body if you want everybody to have the effects you need.

You just have to actually pick one and use it. It's not sufficient to say "any of those work." If you're going with "runs on legend" then you provide a series of effects based on maintaining extraordinary tales. If you do channeling ancient beast spirits or the secret souls of swords, you do different stuff. Literally any of those narratives works, the problem is that the core idea of "Fighter" can't stand on its own, because it isn't any of those things, so tell me what archetype you're doing and we can puzzle out reasonable effects that get you up to flight and existing in places made entirely of fire and so on.

It's a much harder route to try and redefine Fighter itself into something usable, and probably starts with a setting wide metaphysics that universalizes how PCs acquire power.

 

[Hussar]

Every place I've seen these, it has only been as a counterpoint for why PCs martials should not have mythic abilities without "appropriate narrative justification ".

Near as I can tell these have not been separate.

Gotta keep that slope well oiled.

 

[Gammadoodler]

Elan
Anima
Vivre
Ego
Pneuma
Zest
Vitality
Fervor
Esprit
Vim
(all) Spark
Pzazz
Verve
Potency
Edge
Drive

so many terms without resorting to qi or mana or magic

bUt THosE aREn'T maGIc!!

 

[Pedantic]

This whole sideshow about physics is frustrating, and circular. We don't need to figure out some underlying rules of fantasy reality here, just acknowledge that superhuman abilities require superhuman justifications, and that the whole way we navigate fantasy as a genre is to drag in our flawed sense of "normality" and then go looking for exceptions.

If the Fighter's (or Rogue's) shtick is being normal, then they're screwed out of all the effects we need them to have.