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

[Tony Vargas]

Wait, some people don’t? I assumed it was just there to make gauging how dangerous the attack is easier, not to actually directly use…

Fast combat, remember? Not rolling damage, just using the pre-calc'd average, speeds up combat.

...TBH, it's almost surprising champion fighters didn't get a special ability allowing them to inflict average damage on a hit, and maximum damage on a crit, instead of rolling...

 

[Vaalingrade]

It is not about number of words, it is about having to use this sort of feature that doesn’t represent anything that exists in the fictional world to patch the fact that your combat system doesn’t scale properly.

Like HP or attack and damage rolls.

I really dislike denying the game's ability to be a game

 

[MichaelSomething]

Can a fighter cleave a ship in half with a sword? No, because nothing even close to that is possible now.

Can we compromise and say a high level Fighter can destroy a ship if they're next to it/on it and it takes them a few/couple minutes?

 

[Oofta]

Right, I agree with what you're both saying here. My long example was showing the design challenge of how to take just one small thing that has come up repeatedly – high level mundane fighters should be able to jump higher – and illustrate the problems with tackling it in the way 5e handles jumping rules with hard numbers.

You can break away from any real life references, I get that, but then it's a question of degree – 30 feet high jumps? Are you the player still feeling grounded in the mundane fighter fantasy of "what a person can achieve with skill, wits, and blade alone"? 50 foot high jumps? 100 foot high jumps? Where is your line? Hard number design demands we establish an answer and some kind of reason for that answer.

Or you go in the direction @Oofta is describing, more narrative a la "Athletics checks to exceed jump distances", but then the rules are silent and you're getting closer to narrative mechanics waters. And inevitably that's going to start losing some 5e players as it's bucking the microtransactional trend of 5e's class/character design. Narrative mechanics design demands we consider both player tolerance (how far in a narrative non-numerical direction can we push this?) AND how the proposed rule plays with existing rules (or the lack thereof).

Basically, I'm using high jump as a microcosm of the big picture design challenge with a mundane high-level fighter. You can apply this line of questioning to almost any proposed change to the class, looking at tension between hard numbers vs. narrative design, whether the design change preserves the "mundane/grounded" fantasy or stretches it too much, whether the change is interesting/meaningful or too microscopic/microtransactional, etc.

At first glance it seems easy enough. Jump distances or carrying capacity is oversimplified but close enough. When you try to give PCs anything beyond that though it does get tricky. To me being able to leap a tall building in a single bound is obviously too much. But being able to match the world record while wearing plate armor? There are people who think that should be the minimum a high level fighter can achieve.

We'll never get consensus on how much is too much because it's going to vary based on what kind of game you envision and what personal tolerances are.

 

[Oofta]

Fast combat, remember? Not rolling damage, just using the pre-calc'd average, speeds up combat.

...TBH, it's almost surprising champion fighters didn't get a special ability allowing them to inflict average damage on a hit, and maximum damage on a crit, instead of rolling...

I've had players that were not able to do math easily in their head and I let them use average damage rounded up. We even made a quick spreadsheet for them so they rolled a D20 and looked it up on the spreadsheet that gave them damage by weapon.

When I DM I use averages because I have so much going on I don't want to think about it. It also speeds up combat, although I do roll for additional crit damage.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Fast combat, remember? Not rolling damage, just using the pre-calc'd average, speeds up combat.

...TBH, it's almost surprising champion fighters didn't get a special ability allowing them to inflict average damage on a hit, and maximum damage on a crit, instead of rolling...

if average damage was actually listed as an official alternate rule (and roll for damage wasn't ingrained in people's minds as being THE way to play from years of it already working that way) i wonder how many would pick average damage over rolling.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Can we compromise and say a high level Fighter can destroy a ship if they're next to it/on it and it takes them a few/couple minutes?

With the addendum of 'using the bodies of their opponents'.

 

[Pedantic]

Wait, some people don’t? I assumed it was just there to make gauging how dangerous the attack is easier, not to actually directly use…

I've found the best compromise to be working from tables of pre-rolled results. Bit of doublethink as a GM to ignore your knowledge of results when making decisions, but it's significantly faster and maintains the desired variability.

I use a simple spreadsheet template that parses enemy attacks and outputs 10ish rolls for each one. Also useful is pre-rolling initiatives for expected encounters.

 

[Minigiant]

Sure they do. A CR 1/2 has a +5 to hit. Most high level PCs still have ACs in the high teens. And magic armor is pretty rare in 5e. Sure, the fighter types might be OK, but most other classes can still be hit with relative frequency. Especially if you have a whole bunch of CR 1/2 mooks.

So a DM is expected to run 10 to 20 extra cr 1/2 mooks that will miss constantly and deal no damage and be no threat just to give the fighter one of their core fantasies?

Zikes.

 

[Quickleaf]

So a DM is expected to run 10 to 20 extra cr 1/2 mooks that will miss constantly and deal no damage and be no threat just to give the fighter one of their core fantasies?

Zikes.

I think the point behind your point is really essential to the overall conversation about what a mundane high-level fighter looks like. Because what you're really talking about are rules for large numbers of monsters. And if we're going to have that fantasy of wading through large numbers of monsters...well...we need rules that make that tenable and not exhausting for the GM and a drag on game play.

Implementing some of the ideas we're sharing means taking a look under the hood at the rules they interact with and saying "Hey, maybe there's a mismatch here that we need to address if we want to do proposed change X and Y..."

EDIT: Also, fun story time. I terrorized worn down 10th level PCs with a group of well-played (and lucky) goblins, getting the PCs to signal retreat. I also killed a 12th level PC with Skeletons gang-Shoving them into lava. There are niche ways to make mooks dangerous at high level, though I only use them sparingly.