D&D 5E 2024 D&D is 2014 D&D with 4E sprinkled on top

[CreamCloud0]

We can just lock it to class, just like spells are. Martial characters know their gear and rely on it in a way that spellcasters simply do not understand. Testing out a shape, what if we had something like...

Legendary Gear

while i don't mind martial characters picking up the odd magic item here of there i really hate the idea of them being used to substitute for their entire progression, it's telling them 'no, you can't manage by yourself, you can't manage it with your own strengths, you need these handicaps given to you so you can stand on an equal footing to those magic guys'

and being told 'you can't manage it on your own strengths' undermines the premise alot of people come to DnD for, where you all play a group of highly competent, if quirky, adventurers who are managing to do the things other people can't do.

what if every spell and slot a caster knew beyond 2nd level had to come from a bit of magical gear they were wearing and had to keep wearing to keep having the spells/slots, they just couldn't retain any of that magical knowledge or power themselves, they'd feel like a pretty piss-poor spellcaster at that point wouldn't they? well that's what you're suggesting for the martials.

 

[Hussar]

while i don't mind martial characters picking up the odd magic item here of there i really hate the idea of them being used to substitute for their entire progression, it's telling them 'no, you can't manage by yourself, you can't manage it with your own strengths, you need these handicaps given to you so you can stand on an equal footing to those magic guys'

and being told 'you can't manage it on your own strengths' undermines the premise alot of people come to DnD for, where you all play a group of highly competent, if quirky, adventurers who are managing to do the things other people can't do.

what if every spell and slot a caster knew beyond 2nd level had to come from a bit of magical gear they were wearing and had to keep wearing to keep having the spells/slots, they just couldn't retain any of that magical knowledge or power themselves, they'd feel like a pretty piss-poor spellcaster at that point wouldn't they? well that's what you're suggesting for the martials.

I think you're missing something here though. This is the thin wedge needed to get things onto the table in the first place. The whole "supernatural fighter" will simply not fly. There is no way that WotC can get this past the gatekeepers. You only have to look at the reactions in this thread alone to see that it won't fly.

But, no one really complains about magic items. Magic items are cool. They are interesting. They come with backstories and flaws and quirks and so on. Everyone loves a cool magic gew gaw.

And, further down the road, once you've got people used to the idea of magic items being part of the class framework for specific classes, then you can introduce the idea of "doing it on your own". That's how 5e has worked for the past ten years.

 

[Aldarc]

I think this line, is so undefinable that...thats why we are missing eachother on this. If its beyond normal, and the Fighter, without magical items, fully mundane, is doing the fantastical, then....its not mundane. It just isnt. At that point call the source whatever you want, its NOT mundane, at which point the trope is lost.

The moment you have this wellspring of SOMETHING beyond will, that trope is lost.

I think that this sort of sense of "beyond normal" essentially makes everything magical in the context of a fantastic setting that is saturated with physics-defying magic. I don't particularly find that sense useful or meaningful for discussion. I don't think that your sense of the "mundane" is feasible at all for D&D. I don't even think that it's what is present in a game like Shadowdark.

And thats where its all just a bridge too far. The examples of Beowulf swimming for days in full plate, and holding his breath for hours after. That cannot be done by 'just will man, I'm just that hard'. It cannot. Therefore, its not mundane.

To call it mundane, because thats just how badass Beowulf is, is where we jump the shark.

Either way, I'm taking the rest of the night to work on my Shadowdark stuff. We can disagree here and thats ok.

Peace.

I think that part of the issue is that it's "mundane" in the relative context of a fantasy setting with larger than life characters. It may not be "mundane" in the context of our world, but it is for the characters who inhabit our fantasy settings and stories.

 

[AnotherGuy]

We lost this argument. We lost it years ago and you can keep shaking your fist at the darkness but at the end of the day, you will never get anywhere.

I do not think the argument is lost.
I believe the design space is there to accommodate both styles of play it just hasn't been officially explored in a satisfactory manner IMO. I thought that 4e's Tier-based play and 5e's Epic Boons were ideas in the right direction.
Besides satisfying the player-base, they also have to ensure they don't complicate matters with future content.

Right now we have levels, but once you delineate between Mundane and Supernatural characters you may complicate AP design.

 

[Hussar]

I do not think the argument is lost.

A few posts back, I posted a very, very truncated list of the bare minimum a caster could do over 18 levels. By about 7th level, the caster can do things that the non-casters can never, ever do. And that was with about a quarter of what a sorcerer can actually do.

This is very much a lost argument. And, like I said, there is no way we can get these ideas into the game directly. They'll have to be backdoored in through other systems until they get accepted, and then, maybe, we can actually have anything approaching class parity.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think you're missing something here though. This is the thin wedge needed to get things onto the table in the first place. The whole "supernatural fighter" will simply not fly. There is no way that WotC can get this past the gatekeepers. You only have to look at the reactions in this thread alone to see that it won't fly.

But, no one really complains about magic items. Magic items are cool. They are interesting. They come with backstories and flaws and quirks and so on. Everyone loves a cool magic gew gaw.

And, further down the road, once you've got people used to the idea of magic items being part of the class framework for specific classes, then you can introduce the idea of "doing it on your own". That's how 5e has worked for the past ten years.

I don't like it. But pragmatism and patience can be, at times, a terribly tempting thing.

 

[Remathilis]

It's a mix of both things.

At the lower-power end, especially if casters have even the slightest bit of influence over how often the party long-rests (which, IME, they have FAR more than "the slightest bit"!), spellcasters can spend just a few spells to generally keep pace with martials, or at least stay quite close (e..g within 80% of the Fighter's damage output) while still having rituals, cantrips, and (over time) more and more slots to play with for anything else they want to do. Meaning, the caster is functionally trading a 20% damage loss, for an ABSOLUTELY GINORMOUS gain in every other aspect of play. As a result, it would be highly beneficial to give Fighters et al. some tools that allow them to really, truly "rule the roost" when it comes to combat, just straight-up leaving spellcasters in the dust for damage output in many typical scenarios. If the spellcasters work really really hard and happen to luck out on great positioning (e.g. 6+ enemies and no allies within fireball range), that's fine, I'm wanting typical-average performance comparisons here, e.g. you use your AoE spells on 2-3 targets at minimum and at least one of those targets (on average) fails its save.

At the higher end, spellcasters ZOOM off to the moon--almost literally--while leaving the Fighter et al. colleagues behind in...basically every single area of the game that isn't "make a thing die." And even then, spellcasters have tools that can instantly disintegrate enemies, that can do a hundred damage or more in a single round, various other things. At that high end, yes, it would be a major improvement to provide the Fighter with an expansion to its utility in addition to its potential for bloody violence. I emphatically would not and do not expect a 1:1 answer for every possible utility spell, that would be stupid. But if Wizards are getting bloody wish at 17th level, yeah, I kinda think Fighters getting...uh...+1d10 to a skill roll a few times per short rest...at the cost of their self-healing...has maybe kinda-sorta possibly fallen just a smidge behind being able to literally will reality into a different shape.

The problem is that even if we decide the fighter is King of Combat, we haven't fixed the fundamental issue.

Remove every attack spell from the PHB, fire bolt to meteor swarm. Wizards cannot do a point of damage without pulling out a crossbow. We have made the fighter the best in combat. Has parity been achieved? Not really. The wizard sits on his hands every time initiative is rolled and the fighter shines, then combat ends and the fighter sits on his hands while the wizard shines. You give each a time to shine but never the same time. That leads to the "wake me when it's time to roll dice" downtime that kills enthusiasm.

So you end up with one of two scenarios. You have to nerf magic to such a degree that the wizard is second in combat, but also only slightly ahead in noncombat. Or you have to buff martials so that they can play with similar toys that the wizard gets. Flight. Instant movement. Divination. Etc. Essentially, the wizard needs to be dragged several levels worth of power down to be closer to mundane OR the fighter needs to be able to break reality like a wizard. And all the grit and training in the world isn't going to help when the demon lord causes a cave in and the wizard teleports and the fighter can't.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So. Just so we're clear.

Conan is a supernatural character.

If he goes beyond action movie physics in his activities...to my mind, yes. I've only seen the Arnold movie and read some of the old Marvel comics, so I'm.not familiar with all his exploits.

 

[TwoSix]

Dude. I am so jealous. The only way I got a pc group that looked like that was outright banning full casters.

The group before was 5 pcs, 4 full casters and one half caster. Every group I’ve played in or DM’d has had at least 3 of the 5 characters be full casters.

Heck we just started a new campaign in my evening group that I play in. Warlock, sorcerer, Druid, and my monk.

To say I’m very, very tired of casters in DnD is a bloody understatement.

In my experience, as players get more experience with the system, the ratio of "casters" to "all characters" trends towards 1.

Casuals stick towards martials, or maybe one particular caster class they're familiar with. (I've noticed this with warlocks and cleric, specifically. Not sure why.)

More serious but still learning players often start off with a martial for their first character, but almost inevitably start playing casters after that. Only the most dedicated and jaded gamers (raises hand) will sometimes go back to martial just to shock the system a little bit.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think that this sort of sense of "beyond normal" essentially makes everything magical in the context of a fantastic setting that is saturated with physics-defying magic. I don't particularly find that sense useful or meaningful for discussion. I don't think that your sense of the "mundane" is feasible at all for D&D. I don't even think that it's what is present in a game like Shadowdark.


I think that part of the issue is that it's "mundane" in the relative context of a fantasy setting with larger than life characters. It may not be "mundane" in the context of our world, but it is for the characters who inhabit our fantasy settings and stories.

My view is that the context on what is mundane IMO is always going to be our world, since that's the one we live in and what we understand. A given setting might see Beowulf as mundane (though I really don't see how unless the world is pretty unrecognizable), but as a person living in a world where his actions are well beyond impossible, I really can't. The people in Beowulf's world (and much of our history) believed the supernatural permeated everything around them, but that doesn't mean they saw a legendary hero like Beowulf as a mundane figure whose feats anyone could duplicate under the right circumstances. It's still supernatural. And I really don't understand why that isn't ok for some folks.