D&D General What does the mundane high level fighter look like? [+]

[Oofta]

One One Shoting:

Should a level 15 fighter be able to one shot a CR 2 ogre?

If yes, a 5e ogre has 59 HP.

Should a level 15 fighter deal 60 damage a turn or 60 damage per attack.

Because I think a level 15 fighter should be able to kill 2 ogres a turn.

Note: an ogre is CR 2.

They should be able to take out an ogre consistently in 1 round. That may require that they slice the belly open which means the ogre leaves their leg open to cut their hamstring so they stumble to the ground where the fighter can finally decapitate the beast. All in a flurry of blows almost too quick to follow as they're moving past that first victim to get to the second ogre 30 away to continue their attack.

But who says they should be able to 1-shot 2 ogres in the first place? That's a rather arbitrary declaration.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't understand anything anymore here.

How does 4e Minions feel like some novel form of D&D "cheating" or "artificial" when (a) the rules are right there in front of you (so the decision-tree you're interacting with is robust and entirely transparent such that tactical and strategic choice is preserved...where is the "cheating"?) and (b) we've had various brands of HD related "mook-gating rules" forever with AD&D 1e's Fighter, Paladin, Ranger vs less than 1 HD creatures and 2e's Heroic Fray rules (which both were derived from Chainmail) and the Sleep and Prismatic Spray spells and plenty of other things that don't just pop off the top of my head I'm sure.

What is even happening here? 4e was "artificial and video gamey (or whatever)" but chugging potions by the palette like Gauntlet or Diablo in 5e or Healing Wandomatics in 3.x are both totally legit and immersive?

I guess I'm just one of those "Usual Suspects," right? Yeah, the kind that (a) likes information worked off of to be somewhere approaching accurate/correct and with context (not misrepresented or improperly reduced) and (b) likes standards to be closer to organized around first principles than they are to being wholly arbitrary (while simultaneously tacitly representing that someone's feels are outgrowths of objective properties of something rather than idiosyncratic to the user and their particular cohort).

D&D mook-gating rules aren't novel because they've been there since the beginning, and they certainly aren't "cheating" in any of the various iterations I'm aware of them.

I said it felt like cheating, not that it was cheating. A lot of my problem with 4e was how it felt to me. And monsters designed with one hit point so you can mow through tons of them, and the idea that a specific creature has different statistics depending on how powerful its opponents are, felt very artificial to me, in a way that creatures that are just pretty weak don't. That's all. I'm not misrepresenting anything, and I never chugged potions by the palette outside of video games. Nor have I ever used healing wands. That is misrepresentation of me.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Oh no! I'll try to help, I think this is my fault!


Of course there is no actual "cheating", but the system is setting up easily killable stooges for me to slay so it will never feel particularly satisfying or earned.

Let's have an example. At early levels characters encounter a bunch of monsters of certain type. They have a tough fight, are badly beaten and barely manage to escape alive. Perhaps even one of the characters dies. Later in the campaign when the characters are higher level, they encounter the same monsters again. Oh no! But this time they defeat them with ease! The characters have become more powerful!

Now the fiction was system agnostic, but do you think the system being used would affect the players' perception of the situation?
Option 1) The monsters use the same statblocks both times.
Option 2) The monsters use statblocks with full hit points at the first time, but have only one hit point the second time.

Because to me it would matter, and I seriously doubt I'm remotely alone in this. With the option one it would actually feel we're beating the same monsters that were such a menace earlier and the victory would feel earned, with option two it wouldn't feel we're really fighting the same enemies and the GM is just giving us the win because they've decided this is the narrative they want to have here.



I don't want rules to be arbitrary. But to me the same (or similar) fictional entity being represented by completely different stablocks depending on GMs whims is hella arbitary. The first principle I want, is the rules to represent the fictional reality, and that requires consistency. Otherwise we have just arbitrary rules and numbers that do not really represent anything, and have no real connection to the fiction. I have no interest in that. YMMV and all that.

what's your opinion on when the 'minions' and the 'full' monsters are played side by side in battle though? as that's my interpretation of how they were intended to be used, as backup for the real centrepiece counterparts rather than 'here's the discount version to fight later in the story,'

you fight 5 wolves and a handful of extra minion wolves to pad out the pack because fighting a full pack would be way too much for the party, but those minions will provide extra targets for a few rounds, get off some high damage turnover early on but which is ramped down to a managable level as they're quickly taken care of and only the non minion wolves are left but the fight felt much grander for having those extra minions.

 

[Micah Sweet]

what's your opinion on when the 'minions' and the 'full' monsters are played side by side in battle though? as that's my interpretation of how they were intended to be used, as backup for the real centrepiece counterparts rather than 'here's the discount version to fight later in the story,'

you fight 5 wolves and a handful of extra minion wolves to pad out the pack because fighting a full pack would be way too much for the party, but those minions will provide extra targets for a few rounds, get off some high damage turnover early on but which is ramped down to a managable level as they're quickly taken care of and only the non minion wolves are left but the fight felt much grander for having those extra minions.

I'm against it. If a full pack of wolves would be too much for the party, either don't fight that many wolves (retreat is always an option), or as the DM don't place that many (not always an option; see retreat).

 

[Oofta]

I'm against it. If a full pack of wolves would be too much for the party, either don't fight that many wolves (retreat is always an option), or as the DM don't place that many (not always an option; see retreat).

I will also mix monster levels myself. So some of those wolves are represented by the standard wolf stats, others are actually werewolves in wolf form or some homebrew enhanced wolf. More likely I'll just use different monsters altogether, that hill giant has orc allies or whatnot.

Personally if I want low-level antagonists to be a threat I'll just take a low level monster, give them advantage to hit or add to their attack bonus. There will likely be some story reason for it, that there's some new drug that temporarily buffs but is dangerous and highly addictive or that there's a cleric secretly buffing them as they head into battle. Other option is just to use mob attack rules and throw a lot of bad guys.

But I agree, the idea of minions was interesting but after a certain point I just didn't care for the implementation.

 

[Tonguez]

To the best of my recollection, D&D hasn't ever had official rules for warriors non-magically one-shotting anyone in any edition. Unless you count reducing the enemy to 0 HP via standard attacks, and then simply narrating the attack as such. It's always been relegated to magic (Vorpal sword, sword of sharpness, SoD spells, etc).

It certainly doesn't officially exist in 5e (outside of magic).

coup de grace

and nothing wrong with minion rules, minions are a pacing tool there to shore up the action economy. The goal of the encounter is to overcome the 'boss' threat, the minions are there as flavour

 

[Crimson Longinus]

what's your opinion on when the 'minions' and the 'full' monsters are played side by side in battle though? as that's my interpretation of how they were intended to be used, as backup for the real centrepiece counterparts rather than 'here's the discount version to fight later in the story,'

you fight 5 wolves and a handful of extra minion wolves to pad out the pack because fighting a full pack would be way too much for the party, but those minions will provide extra targets for a few rounds, get off some high damage turnover early on but which is ramped down to a managable level as they're quickly taken care of and only the non minion wolves are left but the fight felt much grander for having those extra minions.

Not a fan really. Just use as many proper wolves than is appropriate.

Only reason I see to use something like minions is mass combats where tracking HP of each participant gets too unwieldy. (Though a lot of people play with virtual tabletops these days which tracks HP for them, thus making it less of an issue.)

I actually had a situation like this in my campaign recently. Characters were part of big combat with a lot of allies against a large number of enemies. Whilst I handled more powerful people on both sides with full rules, low CR mooks were a bit simplified. They had 15 HP, but if they were not killed outright they just became “wounded” and any further damage would kill them. This was basically just a bookkeeping fudge and the end results were close enough of what would have happened with the full rules (i. e. These enemies were killed by either one or two hits, which is what would happen most of the time with 15 HP enemies anyway.)

 

[Vaalingrade]

Isn't one of the complaints about combat that it takes too long?

Then why extend combat unnecessarily by just adding normal wolves that aren't guarantied to die in one hit?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Isn't one of the complaints about combat that it takes too long?

No, that was the 4th edition. In my experience 5e combats are pretty fast and stuff not dying quick enough definitely isn’t a problem.

 

[GMMichael]

Is it possible that a high level mundane fighter in D&D would have a mix of preternatural combat prowess and magic items?

Madness.

Should a level 15 fighter be able to one shot a CR 2 ogre?

If yes, a 5e ogre has 59 HP.

Stop right there. The DM makes the calls, including the calls for rolls. If a strength check is all that's needed to drop a lowly ogre, there's no rule that says all combat rules must be followed in a fight, including the hit points rules.

But the main reason I'm here is to proffer my vision of a high-level mundane fighter: Mike Tyson.