Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9363138" data-attributes="member: 6877472">3e had a lot of really cool ideas, sadly, they didn't feel like they were intended to coexist with one another- having played in a party with a Binder, a Psion, a Warmage, and a Totemist, I really felt like these concepts weren't very compatible.But maybe that was just me.The martial/caster divide is one of those things that's always been present in D&D, but how much it impacts the game, and where the pendulum is currently swinging changes a lot.In AD&D, for example, Fighters were kings.  They had a lot of survivability, they had advantages that were not only immediately useful, but remained useful for a large swatch of campaigns.  They had the capability to get very large bonuses in combat, which was a fairly important part of the game, and their tendency to be pretty strong came in handy for exploration.  The game didn't really penalize them in any real ways, outside of not being able to take full advantage of magic weapons that came along, since you were incentivized to specialize, but how painful that was was kind of campaign-dependent.Then given all the constraints on spellcasters, and it wasn't common to find a spellcaster completely dominating the game, and while they had a ton of narrative power from spells, the Fighter also had a reasonable fighting force at their disposal.3e was two steps forward, one step back for the Fighter.  They got a lot of new toys, but losing their fantastic saves, combined with many restrictions being taken off the spellcasters could really upset the balance of power.  If you played 3e the same way you did AD&D, you could not even notice the cracks, but quickly a new playstyle evolved and the design team seemed incapable of adjusting to it immediately, and by the time they did, the damage was done.4e brought with it better balance between the two poles, but suffered from the fact that, in D&D, magic can do anything, and the "Martial Power Source" was unfortunately defined as "can't do anything magic can".  So while Fighters, Rangers, and Rogues were perfectly cromulent character options, the could have stiff competition from variants that had access to other power sources, which were basically all magic, so they could do anything.  This was countered by the fact that the PHB classes got the most support, so while your Wardens and Swordmages could do some amazing things, they didn't have the same breadth of options as the Fighter (the Paladin got a lot of support, but they went about doing the Defender job differently than the Fighter, so it was hard to say if one was objectively better than the other).While magic was different in 4e, you no longer had access to every magic option under the sun at a given moment, and the big magic effects were either removed from the game or siloed into "rituals", which were time consuming, expensive, and technically available to everyone.5e is a strange beast.  In some respects, it almost gets us back to 2e levels.  The Fighter is once again perfectly cromulent at all levels of play since their thing, consistent damage over the course of an adventuring day is certainly important, but they haven't gotten their saving throws back, nor do the have massive combat bonuses or interesting combat options.  I've said that I think they are inferior to the 2e Fighter in most respects, and I stand by it.Meanwhile, the casters did get nerfs.  Less spell slots.  Concentration on many spells to prevent combos or stacking (though this does lead to a few unforeseen problems like, great, now we don't have to worry about casters buffing themselves all the time, but Fighters can't really get great buffs either), but this ends up being a wash because many of the powerful spells are back, and casters retained 4e-style at-will magic, the occasional "free" ritual spell, and of course, the fact that new books always come with way more caster options (spells) than anything else.  Casters are weaker than their 3e counterparts, but they aren't back to AD&D levels either (ignoring 2e Mythos Priests, which were so super gonzo that 3e is almost a downgrade, lol).And with the new PHB, we'll see the pendulum shift a little more.  Weapon Masteries will give weapon users more options, and hopefully Fighters will remain the king of this sort of thing.  Casters will probably stay the same, or improve a bit, but spells will get some rebalancing.  Though I can't predict if it will really change the dynamics between classes (and YMMV if they even need to).</blockquote>

Verification