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

[Pedantic]

The point of my post was to refute the contention that "variance of an assigned profile to a thing undermines the credibility or the realized objective nature/features of said thing."

Multiple, durable, respected & used, systems for grading routes and boulder problems within the climbing ecosystem. Yet the physical characteristics of any given climbing route/obstacle will endure despite that and the climbing ecosystem simultaneously thrives along with it.

There are legions of examples like this aforementioned Imperial vs Metric and from martial arts to ball sports like American Football (where there is significant variance in expression for the same underlying phenomenon, yet you have a durable, legitimate phenomenon in concert with a thriving ecosystem).

I also found this post confusing. The statistical description of a thing in an RPG meaningfully is the thing, it is the closest we can get to assigning it physical properties that players can go interact with. I cannot create a fictional rock climbing problem, but I can say the problem is a DC Y to climb. That's obviously reductive, (the most obvious place it falls apart is a player trying to climb the same thing repeatedly with the same level of ability and generating a stochastic spread of successes and failures), but it's generally good enough and about as well as we're going to do with dice and simple addition.

That the interaction may be different over time is part of the appeal of a system of progression, and the whole heroic omnicompetence that is part of the genre is well-modeled by progression being so chunkily tied to a small set of skills instead of more reasonable distributed across general skill and a variety of specific problems.

You seem to be arguing there is some other, underlying thing underneath the rules modeling. I think the opposite case is that it's incumbent on the rules to be as earnest and complete a model as possible, so that interaction with them will produce knowable and interesting results. Stat blocks aren't variable attempts at describing features of some other reality, they are imperfectly creating it.

 

[Gammadoodler]

Which they did when designing fighters. Rogues are one big hit class. Fighters spread out as much or more damage, making them more reliable and flexible.

If you change that paradigm you have to change it starting at level 5 and I think that makes the fighter worse, less flexible and less reliable. A different approach isn't inherently better.

I find the second paragraph confusing since I've not proposed any specific change to the paradigm thus far.

What I have proposed is that the monsters' hp and PC class damage should be considered in concert from the perspective of what the 'time to kill' should be for monsters at various CRs vs. PCs at various class levels.

The same question would apply to the rogue and the fighter without necessarily changing their damage distribution relative to each other.

So from that perspective, do you think that the max CR creature a fighter should be able to reliably one-shot at any level is CR 2?

Is your desired fantasy for the pinnacle of martial prowess a person who, using all their abilities, can take out two bar tables (or..a full minivan..or the first two rows of first class on an airplane..or an OJ's legal team) worth of basic skeletons in one turn?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

You'd need at least 3 enemies within the outer 8 squares of a 3 x 3 grid and be able to get to the center square to achieve any kind of payoff on the ability at that point.

It's part of why the existing Whirlwind attack for the ranger is not particularly well-regarded.

Might be fine if it's a core ability which other character features could add onto?

Yeah, it is pretty niche, but I indeed imagined it being "free" basic feature certain classes just get. And my point about reach weapons was the they if the reach affects this feature, it will make it so much better that reach weapons become basically mandatory.

 

[TwoSix]

I also found this post confusing. The statistical description of a thing in an RPG meaningfully is the thing, it is the closest we can get to assigning it physical properties that players can go interact with. I cannot create a fictional rock climbing problem, but I can say the problem is a DC Y to climb. That's obviously reductive, (the most obvious place it falls apart is a player trying to climb the same thing repeatedly with the same level of ability and generating a stochastic spread of successes and failures), but it's generally good enough and about as well as we're going to do with dice and simple addition.

That the interaction may be different over time is part of the appeal of a system of progression, and the whole heroic omnicompetence that is part of the genre is well-modeled by progression being so chunkily tied to a small set of skills instead of more reasonable distributed across general skill and a variety of specific problems.

You seem to be arguing there is some other, underlying thing underneath the rules modeling. I think the opposite case is that it's incumbent on the rules to be as earnest and complete a model as possible, so that interaction with them will produce knowable and interesting results. Stat blocks aren't variable attempts at describing features of some other reality, they are imperfectly creating it.

Yea, I feel it's just a fundamental disconnect in viewpoints. To my mind, the core object in the game is the imaginative conceit; the rules just do their best to imperfectly model it.

For example, let's say I wanted to add internet boyfriend du jour, BG3's Astarion, into my game as a NPC. I could be playing 5e, or 4e, or 3e, or OSE, or Fate, or a hundred other games. I could build the NPC as a pure monster block, or I could build it using PC stats. I could borrow the stats directly from the game, or I could tweak them, redo them entirely, or maybe just play in a system without stats. No matter how precise or imprecise my modeling is within the game rules, it's exactly the same character that my players are familiar with once I introduce them at the table.

Now, one can quibble with how accurate the rules modeling job I do as a DM is, but I don't violate the concept just to maintain accuracy with my rules model. I'll adjust the model as needed to try and prevent any further conflict with the established concept.

 

[Gammadoodler]

Yeah, it is pretty niche, but I indeed imagined it being "free" basic feature certain classes just get. And my point about reach weapons was the they if the reach affects this feature, it will make it so much better that reach weapons become basically mandatory.

Yeah, the jump from threatening 8 squares to threatening 24 is massive.

There'd have to be value in other weapons' characteristics and/or other class abilities to offset.

Edit: orrr.. the AoE could be independent of the reach.of the weapons.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The point of my post was to refute the contention that "variance of an assigned profile to a thing undermines the credibility or the realized objective nature/features of said thing."

Multiple, durable, respected & used, systems for grading routes and boulder problems within the climbing ecosystem. Yet the physical characteristics of any given climbing route/obstacle will endure despite that and the climbing ecosystem simultaneously thrives along with it.

There are legions of examples like this aforementioned Imperial vs Metric and from martial arts to ball sports like American Football (where there is significant variance in expression for the same underlying phenomenon, yet you have a durable, legitimate phenomenon in concert with a thriving ecosystem).

This just isn't the same thing at all! What classification system you use to rank the cliff doesn't affect how hard it is to climb! Whether you minionise an enemy or not will affect how easy it is to defeat, which indeed is the whole point of system!

In any case, and this is more about your back and forth with @Pedantic but it is about the same point I tried to make earlier: it shouldn't be hard to get that to some people using an intentionally easily defeatable variant of the monster causes defeating them to not feel as satisfying as defeating "real" versions would. Like even if you wouldn't personally feel this way, I think it should be pretty obvious that it could cause this sort of a reaction.

 

[Vaalingrade]

This just isn't the same thing at all! What classification system you use to rank the cliff doesn't affect how hard it is to climb! Whether you minionise an enemy or not will affect how easy it is to defeat, which indeed is the whole point of system!

In any case, and this is more about your back and forth with @Pedantic but it is about the same point I tried to make earlier: it shouldn't be hard to get that to some people using an intentionally easily defeatable variant of the monster causes defeating them to not feel as satisfying as defeating "real" versions would. Like even if you wouldn't personally feel this way, I think it should be pretty obvious that it could cause this sort of a reaction.

Yeah, but defeating like five of them with a sword swing is deeply satisfying.

That's the point of them. Killing a bunch of them is satisfying and they enhance the guys that take work to put down.

This particular complaint about minions is like complaining that doing shots isn't the same feeling as doing a keg stand. Yes: because they're meant to be different feelings.

 

[Tony Vargas]

But yeah, a high level fighter or barbarian (and surely Conan is a barbarian?) can indeed defeat a big pile of pretty fearsome foes alone in D&D 5e.

Berserkergang was not an attribute of Conan in the Howard stories, so, not a barbarian in the WotC D&D sense of Rage as it's primary defining feature.

Someone may like the D&D fighter but it doesn't resemble anything in any media anymore.

Ok, so, technically, there wasn't a fighter as such in the D&D movie, which is weird, since the barbarian character didn't do much signature raging and might as easily have been a fighter.
Look past the abstractions of hp/AC/turns/etc and the fighter is still the dude wearing armor and hitting stuff with a sword, which is certainly a very common archetype in genre, including a common heroic archetype. It's just D&D, with multiple players, stripped the archetype of it's main-character-ness, and D&D, as a wargame, abstracted away a lot of the archeytpe's coolness or specific bits... leaving it a sorta meat-shield on its best day.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Yeah, but defeating like five of them with a sword swing is deeply satisfying.

That's the point of them. Killing a bunch of them is satisfying and they enhance the guys that take work to put down.

This particular complaint about minions is like complaining that doing shots isn't the same feeling as doing a keg stand. Yes: because they're meant to be different feelings.

Except in the fiction, they're supposed to be the same monsters, that's the problem. But they don't feel like the same monster. Being able to defeat a bunch of fully statted werewolves actually feels like you beat some tough monsters, beating balloon variants of them really doesn't feel like that.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Not every ogre is being attacked by a high level fighter.

You don't use minion ogres unless you want them to be mowed down. Maybe you like tracking 15 orcs individual hit points, I have better stuff to do.

However, even low level fighters took out ogres faster in 1/2E. A couple of hits and dead.